Tonight is the season two finale of Project Runway All Stars, when the winning designer will be bronzed and installed as a living statue in what's left of the Garment District, the holy site of field trips for aspiring students from F.I.T., Parsons, and fashionistas from foreign lands dressed as ladybugs. Since I am without TV, I won't be able to watch Project Runway All Stars until tomorrow via iTunes, so don't go blabbing the winner tonight on Twitter and spoiling the surprise; show a little consideration for those of us marooned in a little bungalow on the edge of the Baltic sea known as Delaware Bay. Anthony Ryan, Uli, and Emilio are all worthy contenders, I don't favor one over the others, and thus have not wagered any "big money" on the outcome. Which is for the best, considering the gambling fever that runs through me like a prairie fire and nearly cost me everything in the 1980s, including my SOUL. This will be the subject of a forthcoming memoir, once I scrape up enough shamelessness.

Season two of Project Runway All Stars--if I may return to the ostensible subject of this post--has been a bracing success, not only better than its debut season was but better than its parent show, apart from the absence of Tim Gunn (though Joanna Coles is awfully good, too--she just doesn't have Tim's ministerial aplomb). Carolyn Murphy is an excellent, eyepoppingly dressed host--I find her over-enunciation charming, as if she were addressing a stable of horses--and the show's panel of judges is itself an all-star lineup: Murphy, Isaac Mizrahi, Georgina Chapman, and A-list guest judges that have included Katie Holmes, Kylie Minogue, Gretchen Mol, Cynthia Rowley, and Elie Tahari. (The Elie Tahari episode was particularly standout.) The quality of analysis and criticism from the All Stars judges for exceeds that of the original show, which has sunk into depth-charge explosions of negative hyperbole, where the slightest error in taste or execution is execrated as a "disaster" or a "catastrophe." You can actually learn something from the judges' commentary on All Stars--they aren't just dishing up one-liners for the highlight reel.

So here's to a season three, and a happy reunion of everyone involved in season two.

Here's my list of favorite shows for the first month of 2013:

Coronation Street on Hulu. The long-running British soap opera, now available for US audiences, and my new addiction, almost as potent and virulent as the gambling bug that nearly--oh, forget it.

Project Runway All Stars.

Elementary (CBS). Gets better and better and I'm baffled that more people don't recognize how funny Jonny Lee Miller often is as Sherlock, his straightjacketed intensity shooting off comic sparks of neurological lightning.

Justified (FX). Now that Ron Eldard has come aboard as a baddie and Patton Oswald is playing a constable who looks as if he's made too many donut runs, Justified retains its crown as the most cool-headed, well-cast crime series since James Garner emerged from Rockford's trailer.

Downton Abbey (PBS). A disappointment so far this season, but it was always B-squad Brideshead Revisited in need of constant plot-pumping and no doubt it'll pick up as we go along and the flapper fringe starts to swing.

To preserve my priestly chastity, I'm avoiding Girls (HBO) so far this sophomore season. Every aspect of every episode of the show and every quiver from its creator are so over-masticated in the media that watching the show is practically redundant anyway; we're being force-fed it every time we flick open the Times or a web page, and no matter how much sedulous weeding I do of my Twitter timeline, there it spreads. 

I am looking forward to season two of Smash (NBC), not only because they've made major decluttering moves with the cast and subplots and added Jennifer Hudson (a definite plus), but because I've been so long away from Broadway that I find myself missing it, despite the pedestrian-mall, Elmo-infested moron traffic jam Times Square has become under Mayor Bloomberg.

So as night buried itself into the bed of dawn, I had a dream in which I was taking part in a sketch on Saturday Night Live. I was sitting in a barber's chair, a white towel tied behind my neck, and along the perimeter I could see television cameras, cables, crew members, a hint of audience members in the bleachers. The sketch took place at a barber's school and suddenly Elizabeth Wurtzel appeared. She was a barber-school student and I was her first customer. Her hair was long and gold, and her age was not the age she is now but the age when I probably saw her last, when she was 28 or so. "So you wanted a shave to start," she said, and I could hear audience titters, perhaps at the prospect of my throat sprouting a fake geyser of blood, a Saturday Night specialty that goes back to Dan Aykroyd's Julie Child skit, though I much prefer Uncle Floyd's recurring Julia Stepchild bit, but that's neither here nor there.

Elizabeth nozzled out two balls of shaving cream, one in each palm, and then plopped them onto my forehead, plop plop.

"Oops, wrong spot," she said with a Lindsay Lohan giggle, as the glistening globs of cream sat on my brow, an image open to reductive Freudian interpretation.

After a blurry transition in the recesses of my subconscious, the sketch ended with Elizabeth announcing, "I think those nose hairs need trimming" and reaching for something that looked like one of Dr. Mengele's old tools, at which point I pretend-screamed, blackout, applause, the cameras wheeling to their next position in the studio. 

Elizabeth and I hugged like old friends and she said, "I'd love to talk but I have to change for the next sketch."

"You're in the next sketch too?" I said.

"Oh, I'm in all of them," she said, kissed my cheek, and then skeddadled off, at which point I awoke.

Well, she would be, wouldn't she?

I suppose I should find it disconcerting that I played a supporting part in my own dream: that even in dreamland, it's Wurtzel's world, the rest of us are just extras. But she was so cheerful on the set and gave me such a fond greeting that I'll be damned if I'll let my waking self begrudge what my dreaming self dabbled up.

I have a hazy shade of winter between my ears, and perhaps you do too. But I wouldn't know, for I am alone on the back porch, with only the nearby distant barking of a dog cutting across the muffled tick-tock of time. I haven't blogged for a bit because, first, I became submersed in microfilm clips of my work for a collection that will be coming out later this year, getting lost in a monochromatic forest of half-forgotten reviews and essays (though of course there were some Proustian bouquets too, reviving sense memories redolent of--oh, never mind, I'll just save such reveries for the introduction, which I better get cracking on), and, second, there were some technical issues with the blog platform that involve cookies or cooties or something, and I found myself staring at a blank screen, a complete blizzard whiteout. So vexing, like picking up the phone and not hearing a dial tone, only the hollow mockery of death, though perhaps that simile is a trifle extreme. I'm a bit out of practice with my similes and haven't baited the hook for any juicy metaphors lately either.

So do you think Chuck Hagel will be confirmed? Did you like the Downton Abbey season premiere? Do you think the Redskins coach left the QB in too long? Zero Dark Thirty--pro torture or not? Does Django Unchained go "too far"? And how far is "too far"?

I ask these questions because I have no answers. Only fortune cookies in which the fortune has been removed, leaving a cleft enigma.

I may take this blog into a more diaristic realm, because with the election over politics has lost some of its spike, everybody's recapping TV as if we're incapable of seeing anything without scrolls of commentary trailing like distended captions (Tom Wolfe's "Painted Word" applied to the screen), and I want to be more first-personal once I get back to New York, which won't be that much longer, praise Tara. It pains me that I'm going to miss Vanity Fair's holiday party this week, breaking my string of attendance--so many people I'm eager to see, so many ghosts to pay honor to.

Not to get all judgey, but it occured to me this afternoon that if Elizabeth Wurtzel had studied Clare Boothe Luce's playbook, she might not be in the predicament she is today.

Clare Boothe Luce has loomed up in fascination for me these last few weeks, and I don't know why, but there must be a reason, because the subconscious is never wrong, despite the gurgling sounds it makes in the deep of night.

I wasn't aware until yesterday that the late Clare Boothe Luce edited an anthology in which she asked writers--among them Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Merton--to do short biographies of their favorite saints. As you probably are aware, I'm a serious devotee of mystic nuns and mystic-nun movies (my most recent favorite: Margarethe von Trotta's Vision), so this book is right up my cobbled alley.

One of our new neighbors once we return to New York will be Dominique Browning, former editor of House & Garden, impassioned blogger, and, in some ways, a borderline mystic nun herself. And that's not a compliment I toss around lightly. 

Happy New Year, even if it is a week late. There are plenty of Christmas lights still hung where I am, and who knows when they'll be taken down.

Christmas day on the Delaware Bay--it rhymes, and if I were a poet, I could string out some pretty couplets to capture the occasion, but alas I but a dough-kneader of simple prose, trying to make a decent pizza.

That's probably not how John Cheever thought of his craft, he probably thought he was "painting with light" or somesuch, but we all have our different ways of working.

Didn't expect to still be down here for Christmas--"down here" being the southern tip of the Jersey shore, peering out the back porch with a portable heater pointed at me--but being away from New York for the holidays makes for a clarifying break. Clarifying, that is, in delineating what I miss about New York and what I dun't,* and what I miss are The Frick, the M5 winding down Riverside Drive with sunlight shooting through the bare trees, the highbacked chairs at the Algonquin, the booths at Shun Lee, the winter seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, the prospect of taking in a Broadway show (even if I don't actually go), actual bookstores, glimpses of second story windows with yoga classes in progress, hands held in prayer pose. What I don't miss about New York--since it's Christmas I'll just keep those complaints stashed in the drawer for now.

First Broadway play I saw when I came to New York was That Championship Season, 1972. The coach was played by Charles Durning, who died Monday at the age of 89. (Read his staggering, American-saga obituary here.) Always liked Durning as an actor-performer because he was one of those ballast presences--like Oliver Hardy, Stubby Kaye, Jackie Gleason--whose oval solidity was graced with a nimble, light-fingered, fleet-footed debonair theatricality that hung a picture frame around itself. In his autobiography Burt Reynolds says it was his idea (and there's no reason not to believe him) to have Durning cast in the movie version of the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, telling director Colin Higgins: "[N]ow you take a fellow like Charles Durning, no one in the industry knows what a great song and dance man he is. You know he taught dancing for years. And who do you think will get all the credit for that brilliant, offbeat casting? You!" Durning was a delight in the role, one of the grace notes in that otherwise overblown, overgrinning production (Colin Higgins was no Vincente Minnelli). He and Burt worked well together on screen, especially in Starting Over, where both of them underplay beautifully, the humor emerging out of their crafty rapport. Durning was always instantly believable playing salt of the earth priest-cop-bartender characters, but his sly timing, his genius for the pregnant pause, the fugitive smile, turned the best bits into deadpan performance pieces, as witness his recurring part as the priest on Everybody Loves Raymond--those scenes play like Second City sketches.

Charles Durning will be missed but he left so much good work behind, which may be the most of any of us can hope for.

It may be considered gauche or tacky or even tawdry to "plug" one's own magazine, but the comedy issue of Vanity Fair really is a hummer, no innuendo intended, unless you'd like a little innuendo with your fries. Guest editor Judd Apatow and I worked closely together to ensure that I had absolutely nothing to do with this cavalcade, apart from my column.

One of the issue's coups is the first major reunion interview with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whom I first saw perform on Jack Paar and have never forgotten. And believe me I've forgotten a lot.

The Nichols-May piece--by Sam Kashner, which should be read in its entirely in the print edition (great photo illos)--arrived synchronistically just as I was re-reading Edmund Wilson's Sixties Journals, one of those volumes that's a strange pick-me-up even as its author runs down, a majestic hulk of age and infirmity.

Despite his advanced years, portly bulk, poor hearing, curmudgeonly attitude, and survivor's weariness (one by one his friends and literary colleagues and dropped off the ledge, Wilson really gets around in The Sixties journals, refusing to be an indoor owl despite his prodigious drinking, reading, and writing. He was open to new things, an unusual trait in an old-fashioned man of letters, and he became infatuated with the talent of Nichols and May after hearing their records, then infatuated with their persons. They were so young then and the dazzling success of their albums and then their Broadway show An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May seemed to have dropped from the rafters, leaving them a bit dazed, in a kind of anxious exhilaration.

There are numerous passages to devoted to Nichols and May in the Journals but I'll quote only from the first meeting.

The year, 1961. The scene: The Oak Room of the Plaza. Nichols is already seated with his girlfriend, Joanna Brown, the former wife of writer and future legend Harold Brodkey.

Elaine then arrived, looking beautiful in a plain black dress with shoulder straps, and from the moment of her appearance all attention was concentrated on her. I had to make an effort at one point to transfer my attention to [the "very good looking"] Joanna. Elaine told about an incident that had happened that afternoon when she went to the Bronx. In some very public place, she had seen a woman lying in the street moaning, with a small child standing beside her. Nobody was paying any attention to her--she had evidently been knocked down. Elaine tried to find out what was the matter with her, made her wiggle her fingers and toes. 'It's easy,' she said, 'to take command in a situation like that. Nobody knows what to do, and I didn't really know myself.' But she got the police and an ambulance, and the woman was taken to I forget what hospital--'where they'll probably kill her,' said Elaine, 'the way they did with me when I was there with my arm.'"

To you this may be an anecdote; to me, it is a koan.

Wilson and May share a cab ride later that night. Afterwards he reflects, "It is a good thing I am too old to fall in love with her. I've always been such easy game for beautiful, gifted women and she is the most so I've seen since Mary McCarthy in the thirties. I imagine that she, too, would be rough going."

Cultural history might have been so different had Elaine May become Mrs. Edmund Wilson, or his tempestuous mistress. But I guess some things were just never meant to be.

Plunked like a space rock on the picnic table that is my back-porch desk Down Here on the Jersey Shore is the latest issue of The Mailer Review, an annual journal published by The Norman Mailer Society devoted to the life and works and celebrated carousings of its namesake. The theme of this issue is "Why Mailer Matters," which seems to have brought out the best in its contributors. No dry academic exercise in critical analysis and placement, The Mailer Journal is rich in its variety of styles and approaches, very few journals inclined to run an article that begins:

"Other than fucking, my other great physical passion was boxing."

Now there's an arresting opening sentence! You kids in J-school, pay attention.

It's from a memoir with the equally beguiling title "The Norman Mailer/Jose Torres Saturday Morning Boxing Club and My War With Ryan O'Neal," written by Jeffrey Michelson, Mailer's former houseboy and sparring partner (a covetable position) whose reflections on fighting and fucking are like a bolt of bourbon. It's part of a larger memoir called Laura Meets Jeffrey, a careening chronicle of orgies, S & M, hanging and banging with the stars, and related calisthenics. It would appear that I missed out on a few things while I was living the life I recounted in Lucking Out, my orgy invitations somehow going astray in the mail.

But what was undone is done, and perhaps me and those sticky floor mats at Plato's Retreat were never intended to meet.

The most affecting "lion in winter" portion of The Mailer Review concerns two literary lions, actually, Mailer and his longtime nemesis Gore Vidal. They had been bitterly feuding for decades--the famous contretemps on The Dick Cavett Show entering round two years later at a cocktail party hosted by Lally Weymouth at which Mailer banged a glass off of Vidal's head to the horror delight of the glitterati in attendance, including Jacqueline Onassis--but had forged a wary truce when--I quote from J. Michael Lennon, the author of the piece and Mailer's archivist and official biographer--"Mailer needed Vidal's help raising money to underwrite a meeting in New York of P.E.N., the international writers' organization." [Mailer was then the president of P.E.N.] "Vidal graciously accepted, and shared the stage with Mailer."

Then, in 2002, Mailer, acting as producer impresario again, invited Vidal to take part in a staged reading of George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" to benefit the Provincetown Repertory Theater. They had teamed in an earlier reading, along with Gay Talese and Susan Sontag, and Vidal would again play the devil, with Mailer making his debut as Don Juan.

Up in Provincetown, they rehearsed, verbally sparred, and drank. How they drank. Mailer was known as a prodigious drinker but Vidal outdid him, with aplomb. Lennon: "I recall dropping Gore off at the guest house late one night, watching him pour himself a Scotch nightcap, and then returning in the morning to find him lying fully dressed on his bed with the glass still in his hand. The 77-year-old Vidal popped up and went right back to work."

The great night came.

"Don Juan in Hell" is a 90-minute dream sequence in the third act of Shaw's Man and Superman. It is often cut from productions of the play, one of Shaw's finest dramas, and performed separately. Mailer trimmed "Don Juan" to 60 minutes, and made further refinements during rehearsals. Vidal knew his part by heart, and while he listened politely to Mailer's suggestions, he played the role his own way. On the night of the performance, Vidal, wearing a jacket with a scarlet lining, told Mailer. "Norman, when I walk on that stage, you are going to hear a roar of applause the likes of which you have never hears." The applause was indeed thunderous and the Devil stole the show. Vidal had a strong, resonant voice and he played the role with wicked wit and flair...

Vidal got another ovation from the 100-plus people at the Mailer home when he arrived after the show. He bowed, and said, "Where's the booze?"

It was at the wind-down of this party that Vidal told Mailer's beautiful wife, the novelist Norris Church, that he would outlive Norman, due to his superior family genes, and "When that unhappy event occurs, I will marry you and take care of you." Vidal proved to be right, he did outlive Norman, and, sadly, Norris too. She died shortly after the publication of the memoir of her marriage to Mailer, A Ticket to the Circus.

Lennon's last memory of Vidal was when he came to the house to say goodbye. Gore had just had a knee replacement and Mailer had had bum knees for years, so both were reliant on canes.

"Standing on the deck overlooking the long curve of Provincetown Harbor, the two old troupers smiled and swing their canes about for Norris's camera just before Gore departed. It was their last meeting."

I must get a copy of this photo, to prop up the spirit whenever it swings low.

[related: my Kindle Single: The Gore Supremacy]

Why would anyone buy a digital camera on its maiden launch? Total sucker move. It's like taking hundreds of dollars and hurling them up in the air, where they vanish in a poof of magic smoke. The other day I received a discount alert from B & H that the Nikon V1 w/ kit lens was being cleared from inventory at $299. Now it's true that Nikon is releasing the V1's successor, the V2, a name with unfortunate WWII associations and with a newly designed body that makes sensitive tastes go eek! But the V2 does offer technical improvements--more pixels, a proper grip and control dial, etc--and it's not as if the original V1 was a beloved pet. It had its admirers and advocates, such as Kirk Tuck, who marveled at is amazing focusing speed and superb metering, but a majority of reviewers, bloggers, and camera forum posters crabbed about its smallish sensor, lack of override controls, absence of touch screen, lack of digital filters and scene modes (toy, bleach bypass, etc), and drab minimalist aesthetic. It also suffered from comparison with the Sony RX100, this year's sleek black beauty.

Still, it was a speed demon, Nikon's entry into the mirrorless camera field, and was retail priced at $899. The unanimous opinion was that it was overpriced, unanimous opinion was right, and it was considered notable when the price dropped into the mid-$500 range, but now, at $299, it's an unimpeachable bargain, cheaper than the newest prestige point and shoots from Samsung, Panasonic, and Canon, with a bigger sensor and lightning reflexes.

Or take the Pentax K-01, another unloved virgin, released only this February. Designed by Marc Newson, whose signature logo adorns the camera, the K-01 was a mirrorless model with a sweet APS-C sensor and packaged as a kit with a terrific pancake lens. (Pentax lenses have never gotten the hey-nonny-nonny of Leica or Zeiss glass but Pentax makes some dazzlers.) If the V1 was underdesigned and specc'd, the K-O1 was overbaked: a weighty, bulky camera with no EVF, not even an attachable one, and whose dials and choice of colors suggested a Tonka Toy with a lens. Personally, I found the blocky retro design intriguing, in part because of its almost lovable clunky chunky dorkiness and rejection of Apple-era snob cred, but a heavy camera hangs hard on the neck and that was a lot of money to pony up for a camera that might be a one-off, a corporate experiment that didn't pay off. As is apparently the case. No K-02 has been announced and the price of the original has plunged into the lower $400 range.

Which makes it attractive, considering that it takes the full range of Pentax K mount lenses and may be considered a collectible some day. I kind of want one, even though I can't justify it, but, really, what digital camera purchases can be justified?

Unlike Martin Amis's latest novel Lionel Asbo, with its raids on reality TV's bag of ticky-tack, John Lanchester’s novel Capital doesn’t need to compete with the cable box and its mind-grips. It already is TV, a blockbuster miniseries waiting to be made, with a whodunit hook of a plotline, a rich opportunity for multiracial casting, and the perfect sunset part for Maggie Smith as a dottering old dame named Petunia on whom death is about to lower the blinds. As newsy as Lionel Asbo but casting a wider dragnet, Capital incorporates the real-estate boom, the 2008 financial bust (which Lanchester explored earlier in his bestselling tutorial I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay), the graffiti exploits of street artist Banksy, and the Occupy movement into a perfect fireside reading that captures the Trollopean “way we live now” without putting on grand airs. Set mostly on mythical Pepys Road in south London, which survived the Nazi V2 rockets and slumbered for decades until reanimated by the post-millennium spike in housing prices (“As the houses had got more expensive, it was as if they had come alive, and had wishes and needs of their own”), Capital is a site-specific, cross-sectional ensemble piece akin to Jimmy McGovern’s British drama series The Street, the long-running soap Coronation Street, Ruth Rendall’s Portobello, and Zadie Smith’s NW; here, the avenue view takes on the precise, miniaturist clarity of a fabled toy village. The fuse sizzling through each chapter is lit by a series of anonymous postcards delivered at Pepys Road addresses bearing the warning threat “We Want What You Have,” accompanied by a photograph of the house. It’s at first shrugged off a a prank, a nuisance, perhaps some punk political gesture, but then the hostilities escalate from postcards to DVDs delivered in jiffy bags to online vilification to hate graffiti to property damage to possible terrorism.

A shadowy presence leaving voodoo messages that sow fear and suspicion among strangers and neighbors alike is a staple device (i.e., a venerable gimmick) of suspense procedurals from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night to Fred Vargas’s The Chalk Circle Man, but Lanchester uses the mystery of the scare campaign as a MacGuffin to set his multiple character studies into conflicting motion. The aforementioned Petunia, a Polish laborer, a soccer star imported from Senegal, a Muslim shopkeeper and his family, a traffic warden originally from Zimbabwe whose martinet ticketing makes her the most loathed figure on Pepys Road, a prosperous banker whose wife spends money like Marie Antoinette’s personal shopper, the detective inspector assigned to find out who or what’s behind the Pepys Road bollocking--it’s a multinational unit of individualized characters whose crisscrossing maneuvers and ricochet encounters are conducted by Lanchester with a minimum of fuss and Dickensian string-pulling. Beneath the various plot shifts, scene changes, and slow-buildup set-pieces (comic highlight: the banker realizing with stunned incredulity that he’s not receiving the million-pound bonus he was expecting, feeling if he’s been struck by an iceberg), Lanchester maintains a cantering tempo in the prose that grounds the complications with a pulse beat of steady-as-she-goes. Such assurance is reassuring. You never worry that the novel is going to fumble before it reaches the end zone and incomplete its mission. So neatly assembled a BBC-ish drama entertainment is Capital that its underdog sympathies, its liberal humanism, are easy to overlook. On this merry-go-round it’s the minority characters, the refugees and recent arrivals, that get the raw jab of the stick, which they endure stoically, in part because they have no other choice. It’s either that or crumble inside. While Roger the now-broke banker tools off to begin his new downsized life (“hard times were moving in like a band of rain”), nursing hopes of a turnaround, Quentina, the loathed traffic warden of Pepys Road, finds herself limboed in indefinite internment, “a non-person in a non-place waiting her way through non-time.” For its soft, white natives, Britain remains forever home, no matter how badly they muck up; those of color are one misstep away from the recycle bin, always made excruciatingly aware of how replaceable they are.  

In my New Republic review of Martin Amis's novel Lionel Asbo, I presumptuously advised A-Mart to consider giving up fiction writing and devote himself to granting interviews, which tend to be so much more interesting and expansive than the novels he's promoting with a cigarette in one hand and no song in his heart. Kissing off fiction would lighten his workload and allow us to give up the pretense of caring about his latest excursion into the salt mines, whatever it might be. We'd all be happier, and have more time for dance lessons.

Little did I expect that it would be Philip Roth, not Amis, who would heed my counsel and decide to pack it in. He made the shock announcement first in a French magazine called Les InRocks, which sounds like the name of a really bad disco, and dilated upon his decision to Charles McGrath of The New York Times in an interview that everybody has been tweeting about to the point of being annoying.

On the computer in Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment these days is a Post-it note that reads, “The struggle with writing is over.” It’s a reminder to himself that Mr. Roth, who will be 80 in March and who has enjoyed one of the longest and most celebrated careers in American letters, has retired from writing fiction — 31 books since he started in 1959. “I look at that note every morning,” he said the other day, “and it gives me such strength.”

To his friends the notion of Mr. Roth not writing is like Mr. Roth not breathing. It sometimes seemed as if writing were all he did. He worked alone for weeks at a time at his house in Connecticut, reporting every morning to a nearby studio where he wrote standing up, and often going back there in the evening. At an age when most novelists slow down, he got a second wind and wrote some of his best books: “Sabbath’s Theater,” “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America.” Well into his 70s, the books, though shorter, came uninterruptedly, practically one a year.

Now he is in the posterity-management phase of his distinguished career, collaborating with his biographer Blake Bailey. "'The notes Mr. Roth has been preparing fill boxes,' Mr. Bailey said.  'They’re eloquent and comprehensive,' he added, 'but there are so many I won’t get to read some of them for years.'"

It's a shame Albert Goldman is no longer alive, because his comments on ol' Phil, as he called him, were always illuminating, if you catch my drift.*

Roth hasn't entirely given up word-pecking, howevs.

"He is collaborating on a novella, via e-mail, with the 8-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend," according to the article.

And to think that Martin Amis once said that he would only write a children's novel if he had a "severe brain injury," while here is the author of The Human Stain and Sabbath's Theater, a man of perhaps even greater pride, a literary exemplar with eagled eyebrows and Kafkaesque imagination, working on a novella with an 8 year old and not being all stuffy about it. I hope you feel suitably chastened, Mr. Martin Amis, basking at the Miami Book Fair poolside with a little umbrella drink.

Anyway, if Philip Roth truly feels he's run out of gas, he's doing the right thing by packing it in instead of banging his head against the steering wheel. It's not like he has anything left to prove. If anything, he may regret that he didn't stop sooner. Not because the quality of his writing tailed off but because the pain-reward ration of Nemesis, Indignation, The Humbling wasn't worth it.

*I have no idea what I'm insinuating here.

I try to avoid Politico to spare myself psoriasis of the brain but so many journalists cite it that I'm forced to be aware of it no matter how big a moat I build. Just as I try to tune out the irksome tweets of Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, to no avail, because so many m.f.s keep retweeting them and clogging up my feed.

Yes, I know there are bigger problems in the world, but that doesn't mean we should give needless irritations a pass.

So, today, my attention is drawn to a Politico think piece--ironic quote marks should be assumed--by Jonathan Martin called The GOP's media cocoon, illustrated not with a collage featuring Fox News hosts and guests, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt--you know, the actual guilty parties--but a photograph of film critic Pauline Kael taken around the time of her first book, I Lost It at the Movies.

O cripes, I thought (I think in PG language), not this shit again (oops)?

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the party’s problem is even more fundamental.

Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard M. Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she knew only one person who voted for Nixon.

This is the most egregious misuse yet of what I call the Kael Canard (see my earlier blog post, "The Fraudulent Factoid That Refuses to Die"), compounded by Politico's wide reach into the wading pools of culturally backward political savants, who can now use a great critic's name as a diagnostic label because it gives them a lazy out.

"Pauline Kaelism" isn't what ails the Republican Party. It dwells inside an echo chamber but it's what's reverberating inside that echo chamber that constitutes its its true, corrosive pathology. That, and the appetities it feeds.

Or as Driftglass puts it:

In the end, the problem with Conservatism is not its packaging or messaging or outreach...

The problem with Conservatism is Conservatives.