I like how the loathsome “finance culture” of 1912 involved sitting quietly with a tabby cat on your lap.

1:50 pm  •  12 March 2012  •  12 notes

There were two women for one man: each woman blonde, bored, and not eating. They sat on either side of an alert-eyed figure in a blue paisley suit (I wish I were inventing that detail, but I wouldn’t dare.) He was forty-five-ish; his dates nineteen or twenty years old.

One of the women was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that allowed her to wear a lumpy gray sweater and a frown and still earn all sorts of stares in a room filled with people who try not to stare. The other date was not beautiful but had long platinum hair and youth, which can fill the same purpose on a short term basis. None of the three spoke, and I wondered why the man had paid for two dates if he couldn’t generate enough conversation for one. But then, maybe that was the point: three silent people are noisier than two silent people.

They sat a few hours, and as the younger woman sipped her wine she warmed up to the man at her side. She touched his hand and whispered in his ear. He looked at her, then around the room, then at the silent date, and then the cycle repeated.

It was important that this ritual unfold in public. If you hire people to be your evening companions, there’s no uncertainty about how the night will end. And because certainty is not arousing, you have to find your stimulus elsewhere while you wait: in fussy food or in a succession of wines or in what you imagine other people are thinking about you.

The feeling isn’t specific to dates with escorts; in fact, half of the married couples in the room were probably enacting a similar routine. (Alleviating boredom with complicated food items.) It’s the way things tend to go for everyone eventually, unless you manage to find a person who consistently surprises you.

As dinner progressed, the beautiful date continued to sit mute and shiny-haired with her arms pinned to her sides. She didn’t smile, laugh, or even pick up her fork. It was like watching an animal conserve energy for vital tasks in winter: no unnecessary movements. At one point she got up, crossed the dining room, looked out a window for a minute and then returned without explanation. Other than that, her boredom was focused entirely on the table in front of her and on the two strangers sharing it.

2:17 pm  •  10 March 2012  •  21 notes

4:50 pm  •  7 March 2012  •  111 notes

Do you have a weak spot on your body? I think most people do.

By “weak spot” I mean a place that is constantly injured or harmed in some way. Maybe it is your thumb, for example, and you tend to burn it while cooking or slam it in car doors. Maybe it’s your feet, and you have ingrown toenails or bunions the size of a baby’s fist. In my case, teeth are the problem.

Here’s a list of what’s wrong with my teeth:

• Cavity-prone (average: four / year)
• Recessive gums
• Gaps
• Weak

“Weak” means that they chip often and on unexpected foods, like bread and bananas. It no longer makes sense to get the chips filled in, because inevitably the filling comes off and takes a larger piece of tooth with it. (Also: no dental insurance.)

Why is this disturbing? Because when your body sheds matter without your mind’s consent, it feels as though it is preparing itself to die. It feels death-oriented. I imagine that men who are losing their hair feel occasional seizures of a similar panic; but maybe not. Baldness is socially acceptable, but having no teeth carries a stigma.

Sometimes I worry that a tooth will chip and leave a hole, allowing my brain to leak out.

Many people have dreams that involve teeth falling out, and I am no exception. The motif works itself into many dream scenarios—even ones that would seem to be heading in a different direction. For instance, I had a dream where I was trying to seduce Rupert Murdoch and then my teeth fell out.

He did not respond to my advances.

9:51 pm  •  5 March 2012  •  12 notes

1:46 pm  •  29 February 2012  •  10 notes

I got to work early to work on a few things. The only other person was the VP of Technology, with whom I intersected at the Keurig machine. I asked if he often got to work early, and he said that he liked to but it was difficult, having a young child and all.

“How old?” I asked. I’m always surprised when people in their early thirties have children, even though it’s a standard accomplishment. A similar surprise comes into play when I meet a twenty-something who owns a sofa.

“She just turned one,” he said. “Want to see a picture?”

We went over to his computer and looked at a variety of pictures. In most of the pictures the little girl was exploring, smiling, or both. I wanted to give the father a reward for doing such a good job but it was not my place to do so.

The next thing he showed me was a 4D sonogram of the baby at 21 weeks. It looked like the CGI Angelina Jolie in Beowulf—all liquidy and caramel-colored. Then the angle switched, and it was a jellybean twisting in space.

Other people started arriving at the office and I went back to my station to Google “4D sonogram” and find out what the fourth dimension was. The answer, which will be obvious to most of you, is that the sonogram happens in real time.

3:28 pm  •  27 February 2012  •  79 notes

I thought it would be fun to keep a running tally of pieces that I’ve read recently and enjoyed—some new, some from ye archives.

Here it is, if you’re interested!

5:03 pm  •  22 February 2012  •  6 notes

4:02 pm  •  21 February 2012  •  7 notes

Want something to read? Try Michael Korda’s 1993 profile of Swifty Lazar from The New Yorker. Don’t worry, it’s not behind the paywall.

Too much Michael Korda is never enough!

2:24 pm  •  21 February 2012

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen’s essay on Edith Wharton, because I’m glad whenever anyone pays homage to the most heartbreaking novelist of all time. But I question the premise of the piece, which is that modern perceptions of Wharton’s character unfairly obstruct the enjoyment of her work.

First, unlike Franzen, I have never found Wharton to be an unsympathetic character in any way, even after touring The Mount and observing that she built Henry James a guest bathroom without a toilet.* Wealth is easy enough to resent, but an unattractive woman born to any caste in 1862 strikes me as pretty damn hard to despise on the basis of envy.

So that is the first thing.

Franzen goes on to note that the absence of beauty “tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do”. This is statistically true when it comes to daily, lived experience—Daniel Hamermesh wrote a whole book about how the homely are economically disadvantaged—but I don’t think it is true in theory; that is, I don’t think it’s true when a reader’s only conception of Wharton’s unattractiveness comes from a two-inch author photo on the book’s back fold.

Also, I think that most of us tend to evaluate portraits predating, say, 1930, less as indices of hotness than as interesting old-tymey artifacts. But that’s another subject.

The point is, Franzen’s idea that “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if…she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy” strikes me as bizarre and invidious. If he’d had the courage to replace “us” with “me”, the sentence would strike me as simply bizarre. I don’t object to the airing of quirky personal prejudices as part of a larger tribute, but it is arrogant and irresponsible to attribute these things to the entire reading world.

Wharton deserves better!

*This was possibly (probably?) a concession to some freaky request from James. You never know.

12:36 pm  •  21 February 2012  •  20 notes