Famous men, yes. First, A. — Let’s have a nice round of applause for the new GM of Gidgets and Gadgets. (Note: made-up name, don’t send the flowers there). That’s right, GM. Vice President and General Manager to be exact. Hear, hear! (Sound of two hands clapping.)

Then Gore Vidal, why not? He’s 80, he’s written a trillion words (if I had a dollar for every one I could buy a war!) and he has a crusty new memoir out. You’re more than welcome to buy it for me for Christmas. Really. Buy it now. Hey, buy me Palimpset, too; save on shipping!

Anyway, the new one is Point to Point Navigation, and it covers the past 40 years. 40 years … that’s a fun stroll isn’t it? … Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles … Fellini, Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt; they’re all here. Yes, fun. One review notes Gore favors the performers over fellow writers (big surprise).

“Writers just talk about themselves. Their selves are not terribly interesting and they’ve already written about themselves. Actors, although they’re supposed to be vain and self-centered, remember to entertain.” Yes, entertain.

Take heed this season, kids. Go to your corporate Christmas gigs, your school plays, the neighbors’ open houses, throw back a neat scotch and then for crying out loud entertain! We’ll all be better for it. While I tell you all about me.

Cheers.

That’s what A. says when I call and there are people around.  “Whaddya got goin’”  I wonder if that’s what Frankie G. said when they busted him this month on Long Island – whaddya got goin’. 

Elsewhere:  Mating in captivity; don’t do it.  Mate in the wild, for God’s sake, without shoes. 

Still on drugs; no better …
Snow and cold and showing house
Cleaning, A. did most.

* Click here for your very individually personalized haiku from me the master – $5. Send as gifts!

I’m sick … what a baby I am. First morning in new house we spent at the hospital. I made A. take me there, to check it out, get drugs for pneumonia.

We left a 10-year-old house for a geezer — 100 years old. So there are drafts and odd closets and nooks and crannies and all that, it’s great. I christened it, on my sickbed, by finishing off Claire Messud’s fabulous, fabulous book, The Emperor’s Children … tremendous, stunning; I think the Times called it “near perfect” or maybe “perfect”. It was. Unbelievable. (Oh, here I found it; “near-miraculous perfection,” and Meghan O’Rourke was quoting another source but who cares.)

No TV, no phone, no net until Friday. So far no big deal. Though there was snow today and we couldn’t get the school closures. Otherwise, nice. I don’t know what’s happened in the world, except that Chad is being stormed by rebels and they’re saying they’re not. How that slipped into my life, and not the details of TomKat’s wedding romp, I do not know.

More to come. Happy antibiotics!

So I was going to check out for the day, but saw people calling for Kurt Vonnegut stories and I have one, I have one!  Not grand enough for his biography, but maybe for mine.  And not really my story, I guess, as much as my mother’s. Still. 

We attended the same book party last September, Kurt and I; a swanky oak-paneled thing at the Council of Foreign Relations, hosted by Pete Peterson, Joan Ganz Cooney, her, him, him and then some. 

There in a corner was my mother, in town for the week from La Grande, Oregon (pop. 12,001, just left of Nowhere).  She was chatting up Bill Whitworth, and then Kurt and Jill Krementz walked by.  They’re the sort of unmistakeable New York couple who don’t walk into an oak-paneled room so much as they part it.  So when they parted the room, I gaped a bit and A. said, “Hey, that’s the guy from Back to School!”  And Bill called out “Kurt” and gestured Kurt and Jill over to where he was standing next to my mother, who smiled sweetly and took a sip of champagne, and listened to the Gods talk about who knows what … parking, the rain, dinner. 

Then Sarah Jessica Parker walked in and we all ran to look at her.  Not really, but the moment passed, and my mother didn’t score Kurt’s number.  When they come asking to write my bio, I’ll have her sleeping with him and me very publicly throwing water in his face for the tragic breakup of my parents’ marriage. 

Now I’m checked out.  Happy Days.

… well, not quite. More wet than bright, and I’m taking off for a day or two. Because I’m sick, packing the house up, and less clever by the minute. I just applied a fancy new spam filter to my email, btw. If it rejects you, it’s not you it’s me! Call me. I’ll be in Mac.

Meanwhile, Zachary Leader on being a biographer of Kingsley Amis:

“Among the mysteries in the … archive are several posed by Amis’ pocket diaries, some of which contain coded symbols, abbreviations and numerals. In the diary begun the day after his 50th birthday, on 17 April 1972, a time of deteriorating relations with Elizabeth Howard, increased drinking, and a related loss of libido, each entry is followed by a number, never less than 3, never more than 8.

These numbers could signify drinks, presumably spirits, with wine and beer not counted, but they might also stand for pages written or marks out of 10 for the day, though an entry like — ‘F: too hung to do anything exc abt 2 letters. 7,’ — would seem to rule out all three possibilites given the hangover.

The entry contains one other mysterious feature: ‘F’, which appears very infrequently in the diary. If it stands for what one thinks it does, what is it doing on a hangover day unless it took place in the early hours of the morning, while drunk? I spent many an afternoon in California pondering such puzzles.”

And I spent many a half hour beginning at 7:00 (PM) kicking estremita and taking names at Celebrity Jeopardy this week. Heh, heh. Bring it on Scott Turow, bring it on!

Oh, Jane Austen finally came out.

Give thanks. Thanks.

(*post head is altered first line of Orwell, 1984)

Hang in there, A.

I googled “funny pictures” to find something to make A. laugh. Mostly what comes up are drunk animals and people sitting on toilets in various settings. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. I get it! Ha ha … oh, my sides, oh no, stop it now. Anyway, here’s a joke instead.

A Jewish man walks into a bar and sits down. He has a few drinks, then he sees a Chinese man and punches him in the face. “Ouch!” says the Chinese man. “What was that for?” “That was for Pearl Harbor,” the Jewish man says. “But I’m Chinese!” “Chinese, Japanese, what’s the difference?” And the Jewish man sits back down.

Then, the Chinese man walks up to the Jewish man and punches him in the face. “Ouch!” the Jewish man says. “What was that for?” “That was for the Titanic” the Chinese man says. “But that was an iceberg!” “Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”

Hey Geminis — exercise, get outdoors, plan a vacation or trip. Good health and optimism are your gifts. A domani.

Lisa Austin doesn’t like to cook turkey.

… also because the pneumonia has overtaken me. I have 37 hours to live and no strength, the hallucinations have set in; they’re about popcorn. Because of all this I’m going to just copy from the Diary of Anais today, Vol VII (1966-1974). She has just begun radiation at Presbyterian Hospital in New York for the cancer that eventually ends her life, and she is sitting in the little room listening to the whir and hum of machines. She imagines they are a film projector, then imagines up vivid scenes for herself to avoid being present. Only Miss Nin could make radiotherapy so pretty:

As I lay there in the bright yellow room, under the huge yellow machine, and it started the loud noise I had been warned about, I closed my eyes and began seeing scenes of beautiful, happy, joyous moments of pleasure. The noise became the exaggerated whirring of a projector.

Scene One:
My phantom lover takes me in his Ford Model A up along Riverside to look at a silver birch tree. He is thin, agile, intensely alive.
My lover and I are driving through the canyons, stop by the Colorado River — and plant a small tree by its shore. We make love on its sand. We make love on the desert.
My lover lands in Acapulco, the early Acapulco. The planes land on the beach. There is no airport. We live in a small house on top of a rock where grand hotels are built now, with a dazzling view.
We drive through the jungles of Mexico.
We visit Chichen-Itza.
We swim.
We build a house.
The six minutes are up.

Tuesday, I am in Cambodia, in the courtyard of the hotel, having coffee, when the elephants walk in. I walk through Angkor Wat. The green of the moss, the white of mildew, the bone-gray roots, the wet and damp stone, the brittle dry stones, the dancers at night, the shower at the end of the show, the dancers in the bus, laughing. The smell of ripe fruit, of stagnant water, jungle — the quietness.
Not one image to discard–all of Cambodia–all of Japan except Tokyo.
The six minutes are up. I was hoping I would not run out of images. Every day, six minutes, for three weeks.

Today: Tahiti–all of Tahiti except one moment–when my lover forced me into an outrigger canoe, and we spilled, and I had to walk to shore on sharp coral.

Cut–return to fiestas–Tahitian fiestas–Mexican fiestas–Moroccan fiestas. Save Morocco for tomorrow!

A. left a message he was having a heart attack; to take care of the kids, he loves us, etc. The dumb houses. Paperwork not done yet for new one. Buyer not rounded up yet for old one. Wait, wait, wait, and with his heart attack now, I’ll be busy. Back to work everyone, nothing to see here. And I want that vodka, Lisa, yes! Right after I’m done with pneumonia.

  … Michiko Kakutani, the baddest, meanest one-eyed gun-slinging book critic in the land, got a hold of Thomas Pynchon today.  Ouch.  Got him good.

“Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Against The Day reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.  It is a humongous, bloated, jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.”

And that’s just the beginning.  I intend to avoid this fate by writing lesser profile books that simply won’t merit the honor of Michiko’s critical glare.