Chris left today to go to PR

Chris left today to go to Puerto Rico for five days of "wild cavorting" with her girlfriend Gloria, who lives in San Juan. It's the perfect time of the year - in the 80's and sunny!

Driven by guilt for abandoning me, Chris has tried to plan for every eventuality. She has filled the refrigerator with cut-up salads and "healthy" sandwich makings. Friends have joined in with invitations for dinner and movies so I won't get too lonely. What they don't realize is I already have plans for the time; plans to carouse as only a temporary bachelor can. These plans have been honed over many years of experience. I look forward to these all too brief interludes on my own to catch up with things I haven't been able to do while on the daily treadmill.

Day 1

• Read newspaper; do crossword
  
• don't exercise;
  
• eat a single English Muffin for breakfast;
  
• watch stock market (not fun!);
  
• read book ;
  
• buy a toy (I deserve it);
  
• have pizza for lunch;
  
• have lots of Chicken wings for supper;
  
• watch TV

Day 2

• Read newspaper do crossword;
  
• exercise (make sure there's a witness);
  
• go out for breakfast,
  
• watch stock market (still not much fun);
  
• read book;
  
• have a cheeseburger and fries for Lunch;
  
• buy another toy;
  
• have Chinese food delivered for dinner (spare ribs!);
  
• play cards

Day 3

• Sleep late;
  
• read newspaper; do WSJ crossword puzzle (Times is too tough on Friday
  
• don't exercise (too tired after card game);
  
• eat an english muffin for breakfast (restraint is good, don't want to overdo it!);
  
• watch stock market (still not much fun);
  
• read a good book (no more mysteries);
  
• have a sandwich for lunch;
  
• buy a toy;
  
• have pizza for dinner;
  
• watch TV

Day 4

This is the most problematic day because the cleaning woman is here so I have to make sure I'm out of the house for most of the day.

• Read newspaper at diner with breakfast
  
• do Sunday Times Crossword
  
• don't exercise (it's the Jewish sabbath!).
  
• go to Barnes & Noble to buy books
  
• have a sandwich for lunch at Starbucks
  
• go home to read a book
  
• send out for chicken for dinner
  
• watch TV

Day 5

• Read newspaper
  
• Eat an english muffin for breakfast
  
• don't exercise (it's the Christian sabbath)
  
• Watch Sunday news shows
  
• Don't pick up Chris at the airport - too busy!

Day 6 (Chris is home)

• Read newspaper
  
• Exercise
  
• Eat cereal for breakfast
  
• see new exhibit at Metropolitan Museum
  
• share a 1/2 a sandwich for lunch
  
• Meet people to set up My Own Book Fund school visit
  
• go shopping to refill refrigerator with healthy food
  
• Salad for dinner at home before theater.
  
• Roundabout Theater
  
• Cocktails at the Algonquin

As you can see, I need these all to brief interludes of "bachelorhood" to put some excitement in my life. I love Chris dearly but she never wants to do anything!

Two new restaurants

It's been two weeks since we returned from Florida. In that time we've tried two new restaurants. One, Insieme, was quite good. The other, Persophone, was a good neighbourhood find. It was such a pleasure to be back in NY. It might be cold outside, but we're happy eating out. The restaurants around Palm Beach are large and glitzy (and expensive) but the food is institutional, lacking in flair and finesse. It reminded me of a cruise ship, where food is quite respectable, but not special. One example, we went to La Sirena, the highest rated restaurants in the Palm Beach area (Zagats gave it 27 for Food). The restaurant was small and comfortable with attentive service. But the food was right out of the 1960's - pastas with heavy red sauce and veal cutlet a million ways. It highlighted the problem that Zagats ratings outside of NY are inflated by the smaller number of raters "voting" for their favorite restaurants.

Insieme is the latest restaurant of Marco Canora of Hearth in the East Village. The menu is eclectic Tuscan with both classic dishes and contemporary. The only negative is the physical restaurant. We tend towards small and cozy. This is small and austere - very austere - with several larger tables in the middle and small tables and booths along the walls. We sat at the booth which was comfortable, spacious and cozy.

We went with our neighbor, Jane Parver, after it appeared on a list of the 10 Best New Restaurants in the Times. We agree with the designation. We tried a wide variety of dishes, all were good, some excellent. The wine list is extensive with some good values.

Insieme

777 Seventh Avenue - Hotel Michelangelo

212-582-1310

Perspohone was recommended by our neighbors, the Dells. It's really new, open only a few months. The menu is classic Greek with a focus on fresh fish. Everything was well prepared, but maybe a little ambitoious in the presentation. We will certainly go back when it's open a bit longer. Service was friendly and attentive, but they need to ditch the dead flowers.

Persophone

115 East 60th Street

212-339-8363

Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an AntiSemite

Book Description
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities his era.

Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.

Richard Thompson - How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

Book description -

“Rich Ford brings together here his deep knowledge of the law, his intense sensitivity as a reader of contemporary culture, his deep seriousness, and his wonderful sense of humor—and harnesses them all to an immensely important question: now that our civil rights regime is more than 50 years old, can we change it to deliver on our promise of racial justice? His answer is yes, but only if we’re willing to kill cows that have become sacred to the left as well as to the right. This profound book should change the terms of the debate—and change what we actually do. If you’re ready to question some of what you think you know about race and equality in America—read this book.”

Arnold Weinstein - Revcovering Your Story

Comment
A really fine book that introduces Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf and Morrison. After reading his comments about Joyce and Woolf I couldn't wait to pick up the books. He really loves Joyce but I still found Ulysses unreadable (or only partly readable). I'm working on Woolf's Mrs Dalloway now and having better luck. Faulkner is next.

Book description
Weinstein, a professor of comparative literature at Brown, sets out to open up some of the great works of 20th-century fiction to the general reader. His decades in academia show: this is a teacherly account of the authors covered, and although the prose is mostly accessible and shies away from academic jargon, a reader must come to the book with some knowledge of concepts not usually discussed in general conversation: epistemology, jouissance and the Southern Code, to name a few. At first blush, the thesis of the book seems both restricting and reductive: that these novels help us discover "our story, our consciousness of things," as if the only reason to read were a narcissistic project of self-betterment. In fact, though, Weinstein's vision is far more generous. His claim, with other lovers of literature, is that fiction teaches nothing less than "how the heart lives, and how it dies. That is why we have art." At the heart of the project lies a very personal essay on the works of Virginia Woolf that both illuminates the methods and meanings of her novels while at the same time illustrating how they can speak to an individual reader's soul.

Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway

Book Description

As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.

As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.

Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands

Barbara Cleverly - The Bee's Kiss

Book description

London. 1926. One war is over, another is beginning, and murder is sealed with a kiss....

At midnight she was ravishing: a tall redhead wearing emeralds and a low-cut dress. An hour later, in her room at the Ritz, she was dead, the jewels torn from her bludgeoned body. Thus begins Barbara Cleverly’s ingenious novel, another masterpiece of suspense from the CWA Golden Dagger Award—winning author.

With the help of a former comrade-at-arms and a society girl turned constable, Scotland Yard Inspector Joe Sandilands enters into the private world of Dame Beatrice Jagow-Joliffe–a hive of state secrets and sexual extravagance.

But as The Dame’s affairs are exposed, the case takes a sudden, strange turn. Because what Sandilands is about to discover are deceptions that go far beyond salacious scandal to betrayals that strike at the heart of a nation . . . and the ruthless heart of a killer.

Minette Walters - The Sculptress

Probably her best book. Edgar Award winner. Really well done exploration of how people are damaged why they confess. Also, how certain personality types can manipulate others.

Book description

Convicted of the brutal ax murders of her mother and sister, Olive Martin spends her days in prison carving tiny human figures out of wax. Rosalind Leigh is a best-selling author whose publisher jolts her out of writer's block by telling her to research a book about Olive and the murders, or else. Though repelled by the idea at first, Rosalind soon becomes intrigued by her subject and begins to believe she may be innocent. She soon uncovers plenty of reasons to doubt the official police version of the killings and with Olive's help, untangles a sinister cover-up.

Minette Walters - The Scold's Bridle

I really enjoy Walter's books. There is no series character but they all share a focus on the psychological impacts of disfunctional families over time. Well constructed.


Book description


Britain's Walters, whose The Sculptress won the 1993 Edgar for best novel, excels at depicting monstrously dysfunctional families and the murder and mayhem they wreak; and old Mathilda Gillespie's clan is a humdinger. The daughter of this bitter, snobbish, nasty-minded recluse is a prostitute on dope; the granddaughter's a schoolgirl being blackmailed into theft by a rapist lover. Gillespie's own past contains its share of feeblemindedness, violence, booze, abortion and incest. When the old woman is found dead in her bathtub, a peculiar medieval device over her head (the "scold's bridle" of the title), there is no shortage of suspects in her Dorset village. Both the local woman doctor, one of the few people who could tolerate the dead woman, and the cynical artist husband from whom she is separating spar with empathetic Detective Sgt. Cooper as they search for a killer. The fact that it takes these very bright people longer to figure out the perpetrator than it does a not-especially-smart reader is the chief strike against this otherwise intelligent and enjoyable-if slightly overplotted-mystery, which is essentially an English cozy with distinctly quirky overtones.

Anne Harrington - The Cure Within

Book Description

Lays bare the history behind mind-body healing.

People suffering from serious illnesses improve their survival chances by adopting a positive attitude and refusing to believe in the worst. Stress is the great killer of modern life. Ancient Eastern mind-body techniques can bring us balance and healing. We've all heard claims like these, and many find them plausible. When it comes to disease and healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.

But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant history describes our commitments to mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories that have allowed people to make new sense of their suffering, express discontent with existing care, and rationalize new treatments and lifestyles. These stories are sometimes supported by science, sometimes quarrel with science, but are all ultimately about much more than just science.

Tom Brokaw - Boom - Voices of the Sixties

Book Description

In The Greatest Generation, his landmark bestseller, Tom Brokaw eloquently evoked for America what it meant to come of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now, in Boom!, one of America’s premier journalists gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America as he brings to life the tumultuous Sixties, a fault line in American history. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together as Brokaw takes us on a memorable journey through a remarkable time, exploring how individual lives and the national mindset were affected by a controversial era and showing how the aftershocks of the Sixties continue to resound in our lives today. In the reflections of a generation, Brokaw also discovers lessons that might guide us in the years ahead.

Boom! One minute it was Ike and the man in the grey flannel suit, and the next minute it was time to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” While Americans were walking on the moon, Americans were dying in Vietnam. Nothing was beyond question, and there were far fewer answers than before.

Published as the fortieth anniversary of 1968 approaches, Boom! gives us what Brokaw sees as a virtual reunion of some members of “the class of ’68,” offering wise and moving reflections and frank personal remembrances about people’s lives during a time of high ideals and profound social, political, and individual change. What were the gains, what were the losses? Who were the winners, who were the losers? As they look back decades later, what do members of the Sixties generation think really mattered in that tumultuous time, and what will have meaning going forward?

Race, war, politics, feminism, popular culture, and music are all explored here, and we learn from a wide range of people about their lives. Tom Brokaw explores how members of this generation have gone on to bring activism and a Sixties mindset into individual entrepreneurship today. We hear stories of how this formative decade has led to a recalibrated perspective–on business, the environment, politics, family, our national existence.

Remarkable in its insights, profoundly moving, wonderfully written and reported, this revealing portrait of a generation and of an era, and of the impact of the 1960s on our lives today, lets us be present at this reunion ourselves, and join in these frank conversations about America then, now, and tomorrow.

Amos Oz - A Tale of Love and Darkness

Book Description

This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history.

Robert Littell - Vicious Circle

Book Description

Veteran espionage writer Littell, whose 1973 debut, The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, prompted critics to compare him to such British masters as Eric Ambler and John le Carré, stumbles a bit with his take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, set in a near, post–George W. Bush future. An unnamed woman, who will remind many of Hillary Clinton, is president of the U.S., while, less plausibly, the Palestinian Authority is led by Arafat's successor, who's also nameless. Given Hamas's electoral victory in early 2006, the plot, which centers on yet another U.S.-brokered effort to create a lasting Middle East peace, has already been overtaken by events. The relationship between a terrorist leader and his hostage, a right-wing rabbi and agitator, may intrigue those who can overlook the dated scenario.