John Leonard. (Photo by Rodney Brooks)

John Leonard estimated that he read 13,000 books and published more than five million words in his lifetime. For 50 years, before his death of lung cancer in 2008, he was the most relentless and generous of critics. He started out, before he dropped out of Harvard, in the pages of the Crimson, parodying the Cambridge coffeehouse scene and panning Monocle, a humor magazine run out of Yale by Victor Navasky, who invited him to write for Monocle, where he parodied National Review, which got William Buckley to give him a job there, at a time when the contents page—featuring Joan Didion, Garry Wills and Renata Adler—read like a preview of the New York Review of Books. At National Review he could throw acid on Greenwich Village, which was apparently spoiled before Bob Dylan got there, and declare the death of the Beat Generation, but he had to move to Pacifica Radio in Berkeley to hate on Nixon with impunity and put Pauline Kael on the air.

Leonard wrote four novels by the time he was 34, but had to follow the money, which for him was in criticism. It was at The New York Times that he became a force, joining as an editor in his late 20s, becoming the paper’s daily book reviewer, then ushering in the “golden era” of the Times Book Review, at age 31 in 1970. All the while he was an active and public member of the left; you don’t see many big-time editors these days signing on to high-profile tax protests against foreign wars. In 1975 he became the paper’s culture critic, and from 1978 to 1980 wrote a column, called “Private Lives,” about his family and work life. He left the paper in 1980 to go freelance. He wrote about television, for Life and New York, and edited the back of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard. He took over the New Books column at Harper’s when Guy Davenport died in 2003, served as a critic on CBS, NPR and public television, and freelanced just about everywhere else, except The New Yorker, which he once called “the preferred periodical of an educated American middle class that wanted regular reminding of its cozy status and an early radar warning against sneak attacks by the avant-garde.”

The new collection Reading for My Life: Writings 1958-2008 (Penguin, 381 pp., $35) includes a few short takes on classics (Nabokov’s Ada, Said’s Orientalism, DeLillo’s Libra) and short, medium and long looks at minor works by grandees (Phillip Roth’s Patrimony, Pynchon’s Vineland, Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost). When old reviews are packed into an anthology, they’re no longer about the books under consideration; they’re about the critic. Every Leonard piece was a performance, but he always made sure it was also the Lessing show or the Didion show or the Kundera show or the Chabon show. He never used a review as an occasion to advance a theory about feminism (though he was a feminist), multiculturalism (though his tastes were culturally promiscuous) or realism (he had nothing against it, but knew it wasn’t the only style in town).

So what, besides providing a portrait of the reviewer, is the use of a book of old book reviews? For one thing, you get a telescoped history of recent literature—first-reaction reports on One Hundred Years of Solitude (positive) and Thy Neighbor’s Wife (negative)—and glimpses of history in progress (the Kitchen Debate; Chicago in ’68, remembered in 1988; AIDS; Clinton; 9/11). For the uninitiated the authors under scrutiny here form a useful canon. Not that there aren’t big omissions. We get Leonard on Mailer and Roth but not Updike; Said but not Sontag or Foucault; Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and Richard Powers but not Jonathan Franzen or Donald Antrim or Colson Whitehead or David Foster Wallace; DeLillo and Pynchon but not Barthelme or Barth. Grace Paley and Joan Didion but not Marilynne Robinson; Garcia Marquez and Eduardo Galleano but not Bolano; and writers from just about everywhere else except Ireland or Great Britain, unless you count Salman Rushdie. Not that Leonard’s to blame: you can’t fit five million words into 400 pages. (The volume was edited by Sue Leonard.) He doesn’t seem to have ignored much, although besides a passing mention of Kathy Acker you get the feeling that avant-garde poetry ended for him with the Beats.

Books like these are where young reviewers go to learn the trade. Leonard is a perilous writer to try to imitate. You start making lists, alliterating, punning, assuming a casual tone toward your betters, and reaching for a range of connections you haven’t yet earned. Not that it isn’t fun to try. You have to read Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fiedler, William Empson, Cyril Connolly, Stanley Edgar Hyman, V.S. Pritchett, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, Elizabeth Hardwick, Anatole Broyard, George Steiner, Frank Kermode, Michael Wood, James Wood, James Wolcott, Lee Siegel, Wyatt Mason, Daniel Mendelsohn and Dale Peck, too. Did I just make a list? I must be under Leonard’s spell.

When he wasn’t reading books (at least five a week), he liked to point out, he was watching television. Writing about writing, he always trained his attention on the single intelligence that had brought the book into being. Television, on the other hand, was collaborative and corporate; what came on the tube was a symptom of the culture:

Sitcoms hardly daring to do more than suggest coping mechanisms for such routine domestic crises as incompetence and mischief were not about to explore the mysteries of intimacy, much less promote a secret social agenda in favor of working women, class war, teen sex, racial justice, secular humanism, gay rights, and spotted owls ... [G]ag writers were trying to sell a fail-safe concept to network programmers, who were selling audiences in the tens of millions to ad agency account executives who were selling floor wax and reek to a benumbed republic and themselves to greedy clients. Then as now these gag writers read the same magazines and newspapers, saw the same movies, listened to the same music and skimmed the same reviews of the same best-selling books as everyone else. They also stole from each other. Yes, if a concept survived pilot-testing, and the public liked the actors, and the series lasted a couple of seasons, and the nation in its living room was ready to tolerate a NutraSweet version of the ideological fevers that already raged on the streets outside, then and only then, and even then only maybe, would the private pain, politics, and passion of the writer surface in a pointed wisecrack, a problematic new character, or a surprising ambiguity. And always after the culture already knew that it had major trouble on the event horizon, after the zeitgeist had already sneezed that sneeze.

Note the dig at book reviewing, the sympathetic imagining of the TV writer’s predicament, the ennobling but pessimistic “benumbed republic” and the slapstick conception of history as a series of sneezes. That’s from “Family Values, Like the House of Atreus,” a history of televisual repression culminating in an account of a hysterical Movie of the Week about child abuse in the early 1990s. It wasn’t all bad, though. The other big TV essay here, “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins” revels in the tube’s early glories, particularly its benevolent effect as a unifying cultural force, before there were hundreds of channels and multiple sets in every household. Even if you’re not one for cultural unity, John Leonard himself was about as benevolent as such forces get.

editorial@observer.com

"1Q84" by Haruki Murakami. (Courtesy Knopf)

The pleasures of reading Haruki Murakami could easily be mistaken for a list of his vices. His heroes are lonesome, underemployed everymen with casually refined tastes and plenty of time on their hands to be drawn into precarious intrigues or dispatched on romantic quests. But a friendless bachelor who likes nothing better than to crack open a can of beer while stirring a pot of spaghetti and listening to classical music in his Tokyo apartment you might also call a nonentity. That is, until the phone rings and on the other end is some mischievous operator or femme fatale. (Mr. Murakami’s female characters are hard to distinguish from common male fantasies.) These tend to get Mr. Murakami’s plots moving, to the extent that his one-thing-after-another books relay the impression of being plotted; indeed, they are often better when they don’t.

1Q84 (Knopf, 932 pages, $30) is a jumbo-size showcase of these double-edge qualities. It’s a thriller with cults, assassinations and a fair amount of sex at various levels of perversity; a fantasy novel with supernatural beings, an exploding dog, mystical paralyses and an immaculate conception. It’s a work of meta-fiction with texts within the texts, publishing intrigues and plenty of cultural morsels—Chekhov, Proust, Orwell, Janacek, lots of jazz—stewing (often inertly, especially in the case of Orwell, who lends the book its tinkered title and little else) amid the action. Structurally, it’s a love story, and a fairly corny one, about “a lonely boy and a lonely girl” separated at the age of 10, when they meaningfully held hands; each of them tries to find the other 20 years later, both utterly convinced that their reunion is their only chance at true love. Ten is an age to which Mr. Murakami’s novel attaches great significance. Besides the severed couple, who seem, like other characters in the book, to have forged their identities at that age, there is emphasis placed on 10-year age gaps between characters and a trio of 10-year-old girls who function as virgin sex priestesses for the Leader of the cult. Not everything here is as wholesome as holding hands.

The paradox of reading 1Q84 is that it’s a “page-turner” that is very easy to put down. We acquired our copy in July and put it down for weeks at a time. It is easy to pick back up again because of Mr. Murakami’s constant repetition of the various aspects of his premise and the slow progression of the novel’s events. This is somewhat due to the novel’s publication history. It is properly a trilogy and was released as three separate volumes in Japan, the first two on one day in 2009, the third a year later. The American edition feels bloated, and one way around that is to put weeks, months or years between your reading of the three parts.

Book 1 sets things up in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the now-30-ish grade-schoolers separated in 1964, Tengo and Aomame. Tengo is an aspiring writer who earns a living as a math teacher at a test-prep school. An editor draws him into a conspiracy to rewrite the amateurish manuscript of a fantasy novella written by a 17-year-old girl called Fuka-Eri, certain that if the story can be properly stylized the book will win a prize and become a best-seller, which it does. Yet as Tengo grows closer to Fuka-Eri and learns about her life from her guardian, Professor Ebisuno, it becomes clear that the book may actually be a literal account of her life within the radical anticapitalist cult Sakigake, started by her parents in the late 1960s. Fuka-Eri herself insists that the malevolent supernatural Little People in her story are real, but Mr. Murakami withholds the details of her story.

Meanwhile, Aomame is a full-time martial arts instructor and a freelance assassin of perpetrators of domestic violence, whom she ‘dispatches to another world’ with an ice pick-like needle applied to a point on the back of the neck, leaving her targets looking like they had suffered a heart attack. Her employer in the latter pursuit (perhaps the most politically correct form of vigilante justice a fiction writer could invent if not, after Stieg Larssen, the most original) is a dowager who runs a safe house for battered wives. A prepubescent girl arrives at the safe house, her uterus destroyed by intercourse with Sakigake’s Leader, the father of Fuka-Eri and Aomame’s next target. Before the end of the Book, the Little People crawl out of the girl’s mouth and cause a German shepherd to explode.

There is a lot of sex in Book 1. Tengo has it every Friday afternoon with a married woman 10 years his senior. Aomame has it with 40-something balding men she picks up in hotel bars, sometimes in the company of a female cop named Ayumi: “Aomame and Ayumi were the perfect pair to host intimate but fully erotic all-night sex feasts.” “It was,” Ayumi says of one night that Aomame was too drunk to remember, “like a porno movie.” Though she spends the night at his house, Fuka-Eri does not have sex with Tengo. “You,” she tells him, “just like the shape of my chest,” which is repeatedly said to be perfect, unlike Aomame’s, which is repeatedly said to be small and lopsided. In a less erotic but more romantic development, Aomame starts to see two moons in the sky and to believe she’s left the real 1984 and entered a zone she refers to as 1Q84.

In the manner of most trilogies, Book 2 is the best because it is the darkest. The villains show their faces. Tengo is menaced by an ugly man called Ushikawa (a name familiar to readers of Mr. Murakami’s 1997 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) who may be trying to buy him off under the auspices of a grant. (Beware the Guggenheim Foundation.) Aomame has her encounter with Sakigake’s Leader, who may be less evil than the dowager led her to believe. His intercourse with prepubescent girls occurs only while the Little People have paralyzed him, and the 10-year-olds may be not so much girls as “concepts.” Indeed, he is not even a charlatan; he can levitate an alarm clock. At the same time she kills him, Tengo experiences a similar paralysis and is mounted by Fuka-Eri. The sex in the second part is strictly spooky.

Book 3, not to spoil it entirely, is, like the last part of many trilogies, mostly ponderous. Aomame—apparently impregnated by Tengo during his sex with Fuka-Eri, a knocking-up knocked around by the Little People—spends most of it locked in an apartment waiting for Tengo to appear. Tengo spends most of it at his father’s death bed. Aomame dreams of Tengo; he sees her in a hallucination induced by hashish he smokes with a nurse. Mr. Murakami attempts to enliven the tedium—or heighten the suspense—by adding in alternating chapters from Ushikawa’s point of view. Hired by Sakigake thugs to find Aomame, he rehashes the events of the first two books in the manner of a detective story. His crucial discovery is that Aomame and Tengo went to grade school together and somehow must be connected. It would be a startling inference if the reader hadn’t been aware of it for 800 pages.

John Updike once linked the supernatural elements in Mr. Murakami’s writing to the influence of Shintoism, admitting “the Western reader may feel, a bit queasily, at sea.” That much is true, but the supernatural has seemed to have had a side effect in Mr. Murakami’s recent books, especially 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore: sub-melodramatic sentimentality. It’s also rendered sex grotesque: either ideally romantic, emptily casual, brutally violent or so mystical as to not really be sex at all. There’s little in the way of mixed feelings, which are to many of us the stuff of life. In this way, 1Q84, a novel that strives to contain everything, delivers very little besides an occasionally fun adventure. It may have something to do with the fact that every single character in the book comes from a broken family. Late in the novel Tengo thinks with scorn of an “ordinary” family, a wife cooking rice for her husband and children. How does he imagine his life after reuniting with Aomame? Perhaps Mr. Murakami is at work on a sequel, 1Q94, in which Aomame is still driving her needle into deviants’ backs, Tengo is turning out Austeresque best-sellers, their offspring starts a magical Nirvana cover band and a fugitive wood sprite is on hand to cook the rice.

editorial@observer.com

"Blue Nights."

On March 3, 1966, Joan Didion and her husband and screenwriting partner, John Gregory Dunne, adopted an infant girl born that morning at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. The idea to adopt had come from the former child star Diana Lynn, herself adopted, and the girl’s name, Quintana Roo, from a map of Mexico, where the couple had recently vacationed. “The baby with the fierce dark hair,” Ms. Didion writes, “stayed that night and the next two in the nursery at St. John’s and at some point during each of those nights I woke … to the same chill … dreaming that I had forgotten her, left her asleep in a drawer.” The chill is the anxious tingle of several what-if scenarios about parenthood: “What if I fail to take care of this baby? … What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? … And worse … what if I fail to love this baby?” [emphasis Ms. Didion’s].

Blue Nights (Knopf, 208 pages, $25) is in part and not always directly a defense of Ms. Didion against the charge—a charge that seems to be coming from Ms. Didion herself—of being a failure as a parent. That would explain the presence of certain details, such as this one, from Dunne’s wedding toast for Quintana about her school days:

“Joan was trying to finish a book that year, and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed. She always made Q’s lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox. You should have seen those lunches: they weren’t your basic peanut butter and jelly schoolbox lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces, kept fresh with Saran Wrap. Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries with sour cream and brown sugar.”

The image is that of a world-famous author putting aside a manuscript (probably her 1977 novel A Book of Common Prayer) and preparing a lunch for her daughter whose artistry might measure up to that of her own sentences. One wonders whether the salt and pepper shakers were disposable or if they came home in the afternoon in the little blue lunchbox to be refilled. Did the grade schooler share her homemade fried chicken with her “basic peanut butter and jelly” classmates in Malibu, or was mama’s gourmet simply the rule there in the mid-1970s?

I don’t mean to sound churlish. This is the sort of scrutiny Ms. Didion, not a name the reading public instantly associates with the words “maternal” or “nurturing,” both invites and applies to herself. By the time they became parents, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne were globetrotting journalists, novelists and screenwriters. Both had to cancel assignments to Saigon when they brought the infant home. Ms. Didion worries that memories she recounts of Quintana “before the age of six or seven” staying in hotels (“On the face of it she had no business being in these hotels”) “encourage a view of her as ‘privileged,’ somehow deprived of a ‘normal’ childhood.” There are other, better things to be than “normal,” and there are worse places to stay than the St. Regis, the Dorchester and the Royal Hawaiian. The baby Quintana received 60 dresses from friends and relatives, and Ms. Didion employed a Spanish-speaking maid named Arcelia. “‘Ordinary’ childhoods in Los Angeles often involve someone speaking Spanish,” Ms. Didion writes, “but I will not make that argument.”

It’s not so much an argument she makes as a sort of refusal: “‘Privilege’ is an accusation. ‘Privilege’ remains an area to which—when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily cop.” What came later was a case of the flu, which turned into pneumonia, which sent Quintana at age 37 to the hospital and into an induced coma on Christmas night 2003. Five days later, as we know from Ms. Didion’s previous memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Dunne died of a heart attack suffered over a Scotch on the rocks at the dinner table, and 20 months after that Quintana was dead. Success and wealth and privilege can insulate those who have them from only so much. Heartbreak, mental illness and mortality can’t be bought off.

So it is strange to read Ms. Didion’s worries about accusations of privilege. Quintana grew up in nice houses, eating nice lunches, attending the Westlake School for Girls, learning how to meet boys in Saint-Tropez as an eighth grader from a 17-year-old Natasha Richardson, going to Barnard and working in Manhattan as a photo editor for magazines. She was a precocious child, who once called a mental institution in Camarillo, Calif., “to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy”; once called Twentieth Century Fox “to find out what she needed to do to be a star”; and once wrote a novel “just to show” her novelist parents.

Ms. Didion’s readings of that novel as well as Quintana’s school-age poems, fragments and photographs are heartbreaking. Her cool passage on her daughter’s “depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes” in early adulthood recall her own self-reckoning in The White Album: “She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed, and because she was anxious, she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression, but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straightforward dynamic, yet, once medicalized—once the depths and shallows and quicksilver changes had been assigned names—it appeared not to be.” We hear in this the mother who spent a decade going from manuscript to boxed lunch preparation to nightcap and W.B. Yeats before bed.

“Bodily decrepitude is wisdom,” Yeats wrote, and the lesson of Blue Nights, intended or not, is that a poetic vocabulary is of more use than the language of modern medicine in coming to grips with despair and death. There is a lot in the book about Ms. Didion’s own advancing age and failing health. She falls, she’s hospitalized, she’s comically misdiagnosed, she comes to fear standing up from a chair, she sees “lace curtains” in her vision that are really blood. Most frightening, she relates her failing confidence in her writing methods. After an otherwise pointless anecdote about a cab driver who believed Michael Crichton had stolen one of his ideas, she writes: “I tell you this true story just to prove that I can.” She used to say we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Now she tells them in order to stay alive.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Amis is that rare literary scion who may have outstripped his laurelled father--Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky Jim. Arriving in 1974 with The Rachel Papers, a roman à clef about love in late adolescence, Mr. Amis was the enfant terrible of the erstwhile Angry Young Man. He toiled at the Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman, where he met his friend and rival Christopher Hitchens, before achieving escape velocity from day jobs. After the triumphs of Money, London Fields and The Information, the British press shuddered that the son, who had inherited his father's satiric gifts but wrote novels with a wider thematic scope, was now more famous than the father. The reception of Mr. Amis' books in the past decade has been mixed, but his every utterance tends for better or worse to constitute an international event, often on a weekly basis.

He was almost as precocious and soon just about as famous as Norman Mailer, and his love life was nearly as storied as Mailer's, if never so violent. There was the dedicatee of The Rachel Papers, Gully Wells, now an editor at Condé Nast Traveler. There was Tina Brown: "The love affair with Tina Brown was a love affair ..." Mr. Amis wrote in his 2000 memoir Experience, "but it was over too soon, as if something much longer had been compressed into six or seven months." We know what became of her. There was his lost daughter Delilah Jeary, who only learned Mr. Amis was her father at age 18. There have been two marriages, and four more children.

And so Mr. Amis and his wife, the author Isabel Fonseca, are coming to Cobble Hill. And what's it like being a writer in Brooklyn? "I expect it's like writing in Manhattan," Colson Whitehead once wrote in The New York Times, "but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee." More likely, there are other writers walking in front of you. It's a zone of infestation. Not only of novelists but reporters, pundits, poets and those often closeted scribblers who call themselves editors and agents. Not to mention bloggers, or whatever counts for being an online writer these days.

They all compete for the same advances, freelance fees and salaries. They enable each others' drinking habits and wreck each others' marriages. And you're always liable to bump into one of them when you're out to buy a pomegranate or a pack of cigarettes. Throw a dart across the barroom and you might poke one. They're like bedbugs with bylines, and there'll soon be a new bug in town, who might just be the biggest bug of all.

"To some degree I have emulated him," said Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize. "I find his sense of humor so fantastic and extreme. It's something I've made a bit of a study of."

Ms. Egan belongs to the slice of the Brooklyn literati that has just entered its prime. The book contracts are steady and robust. The glossy assignments come so easily they can be comfortably turned down. Some of these writers can even afford sports cars.

Of Mr. Amis' move to Brooklyn, Ms. Egan, who lives in Fort Greene, told The Observer, "It seems like good karma."

"When I moved to Brooklyn 21 years ago I knew one person and it was a strange, stigmatized thing for me to have done," said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and radio host who, no matter what he's up to, will always be able to say that he founded SPY (now available in its entirety free on Google Books). "I'm happy it's lost its stigma." Mr. Amis, he said is "icing on the cake of the cool kids moving to Brooklyn.

"If anything, to the degree that Brooklyn has become known as a place where there's a writer every 50 feet, this is just a further certification of that."

Certification is not something of much value in the writing trade. An M.F.A. doesn't get you anywhere if you can't write well or finish a book. For those still starving while striving for that first book advance or magazine contract, Mr. Amis could stand as a towering example.

"Martin Amis is exactly who we've all been waiting for," said Starlee Kine, a journalist and prominent radio personality at work on her first book in Williamsburg, where she lives next door to Henry Miller's childhood home. "And if there was ever a neighborhood that could use someone like Martin Amis, it's Cobble Hill."

"But oh God," she said, "what I am not looking forward to are the articles--not this one--but, you know, the Times Modern Love column where some Cobble Hill person befriends him at the gardening store. That's going to be a nightmare. But I like to think that he will take it all in stride, and then in three years a book will come out that will be a perfect send-up of the neighborhood and it will capture it in a way that no American novel could, and then there will be a q-and-a between him and Jonathan Franzen where they will have to compare their critiques of gentrified American neighborhoods."

While Ms. Egan, Mr. Andersen and Ms. Kine were not alone in their enthusiasm for Mr. Amis' imminent relocation, some writers who call the borough home, concerned that the short man might cast too long a shadow, were less than welcoming.

"It will cause Brooklyn writers anxiety," said David Gargill, a journalist who recently decamped from Henry Street for Hudson, N.Y. "they believe that his oeuvre has taken literary possession of London and they'll doubtlessly consider his arrival on the shores of Kings County an invasion of their terrain, both real and imagined."

"We've got, like, three Jonathans here," the journalist Daniel Radosh wrote The Observer. "We don't need any fucking Martins."

Attempts by The Observer to contact novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and the novelist Jonathan Ames went unanswered. Jonathan Lethem, the author of Motherless Brooklyn who now lives in Southern California and teaches at Pomona, declined to comment.

Paul Auster was in transit to Europe.

I was, however, able to reach Mr. Amis. Speaking by telephone from London, he confirmed that he and his family will be moving to Cobble Hill.

"We'll be keeping a flat in London," said Mr. Amis, "but we'll be based there and our daughters will be going to school there."

I was unclear, especially given the vividness of Money, how much time Mr. Amis had spent living Stateside.

"I lived in Princeton for a year when I was 9, 10 years old, and I've spent chunks of time in New York, but not longer than a few months here and there."

And what attracted him to Cobble Hill?

"I've only been there a few times," he said, "and it's my wife who makes these decisions. But it looks Arcadian. Much quieter and calmer than where we live in London and of course much calmer and quieter than Manhattan."

I asked how familiar he was with Brooklyn's literary culture.

"I hear there are lots of novelists called Jonathan who live in Brooklyn," he said. "And Paul Auster is a friend of ours and Siri [Hustvedt, Mr. Auster's wife]. So we already know two." Mr. Amis said there were "several" novelists he'd never met whose books he admired. "I don't want to name names. That's invidious."

I mentioned a talk I'd been pointed to by Mr. Hitchens in which Mr. Amis spoke of his project of becoming an American writer. Was this move part of that project?

"It wasn't a wholly serious remark. I've always felt I was a kind of Mid-Atlantic novelist. You know when I started out, the English novel was about the ups and downs of the middle classes. It was before the great infusion from India--when the empire struck back so rewardingly for the English novel, the British novel. So I've always had more of an eye on the American way of going at a novel, with quite a lot of size and space and trying to write about the highs and lows of society rather than just the middle strata."

The next subject was tricky. An interview recently appeared in the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and made headlines when it was reported on by the London press. The Guardian declared, "Martin Amis bemoans England's 'moral decrepitude': Novelist despairs of country with 'philistine' royal family where 'celebrity is the new religion' and 'all is rotten inside.'" Further, the paper reported, "The novel Amis is currently working on, State of England, will, he believes, 'be considered as the final insult' to his country."

"I started it long before we decided to move to New York," Mr. Amis told me, "and it was just, you know, my next novel. There's no particular timing about that. It's satirical, as most of my novels are. That interview with the French papers being horribly garbled and translated into French and then out again with all sorts of misrepresentations--it says I wish I weren't English. What a fatuous remark that would be for anyone to make anywhere all over the world, to say I wish I weren't what you are.

"And of course I'm English, and although it's not quite right to be proud of an accident of birth, I think any consideration of British history and British literature would put it very high on any list of homelands. I love the English people. I think they're wonderfully tolerant and ironic and cheerful, despite what is said about them. I've lived in England for 50 years. I haven't just come and looked at the place and not liked it. I am English, inescapably and happily English."

But there's no contradiction between being English, or Kansan for that matter, and becoming a New Yorker.

"I don't know if I ever will become a New Yorker in that sense," Mr. Amis said. "I'm very much looking forward to a change in scene."

With that Mr. Amis was out of time.

Many Brooklyn writers had time to offer Mr. Amis their thoughts and advice on his change in scene.

"Brooklyn?" said the philosopher Simon Critchley. "Just like London, except fewer wankers, better Yemeni food and even a Barneys Co-op. Who knows, maybe they'll have things in Martin's size. Cobble Hill? I used to stalk Gabriel Byrne, when he lived on our block. Now I'll be stalking Martin Amis."

It's rare for literary authors to attract stalkers, about as rare as the author who can elicit universal raves at a film premiere.

"I'm a huge Martin Amis fan," said Simon Rich, a novelist and writer for Saturday Night Live who recently purchased a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, "but I'm a little bit concerned for him. If he wants to be taken seriously as a Brooklyn artist, he'll need a mustache, and last time I checked he was clean-shaven. It doesn't matter how good Money was. He needs to grow at least a Fu Manchu or he'll be laughed off the L train."

Informed that Mr. Amis would be living by the F train, Mr. Rich said, "The F's not as strict but he'll probably still need some basic muttonchops."

Photographs of Mr. Amis from the 1970s, when Clive James dubbed him a "stubby Jagger," show that he did at times sport a mild set of sideburns, and his mullet haircut wouldn't look out of place on the streets of Greenpoint today.

"It wasn't just the way he looked," writes Ms. Wells, Mr. Amis' then girlfriend, of him at the time, "the skintight black velvet pants, the snakeskin boots, the gossamer shirts covered in swirling jungle flowers, with huge rounded collars and cuffs so long they must have had six buttons--it was everything about him."

Whether he is game for behavior along the lines of the debauched weekend chronicled in his 1975 novel Dead Babies is an open question.

"If Martin Amis is interested in drugs, he can email me," said Tao Lin, a Williamsburg resident and the author of the novel Richard Yates. "I'll gladly help him."

If Mr. Amis is moving to a zone of Brooklyn known better for its vegan cuisine and its proliferation of strollers than for its ease of scoring cocaine, that may be appropriate for a 62-year-old husband and father of two high-school-age children.

"I tend to hang out with other writers whose kids are connected to my kids," said Ms. Egan. "I think everyone is softened by the life that their kids live. That's the great equalizer: Everyone has to go to the playground no matter how angry they are. But he's going to be Martin Amis no matter where he is."

"I think probably his best plan of action," said Ms. Kine, "would be to throw a block party as soon as he gets to town--just be proactive and take the upper hand. I see him manning the grill."

On Friday night I visited the office of n+1 in Dumbo, where editor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel, who currently lives in Buenos Aires but set scenes in his novel Indecision not far from Mr. Amis' new home, had just delivered a talk on the state of the South American left.

"There are many short writers in Brooklyn," said n+1 editor Keith Gessen, author of the largely Brooklyn-set All the Sad Young Literary Men. "And we welcome him to our ranks. If he's buying a large home, we'd all like to live with him."

Mr. Amis' new house is 5,300 square feet, four floors, 22 feet wide by 60 feet deep and at the time of purchase was configured as three separate apartments, with a minimum of eight total bedrooms.

"Does he garden?" asked the green-thumbed journalist Matthew Power, who lives in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. If Mr. Amis practices horticulture, he now owns a garden to tend.

Contrary to Mr. Lin, who asserted that the best place to write is "at home," Mr. Gessen advised Mr. Amis to work at the Starbucks on Court Street.

"It has a basement that's very quiet," he said. "Tell Martin. You can just buy one coffee and just go downstairs and spend eight hours there and there's nobody who will bother you. It's better than the Park Slope Starbucks. There's fewer homeless people. There's no visual distractions. It's very nice there."

Some n+1 interns and their friends, all Columbia undergraduates, were in attendance for Mr. Kunkel's talk. I was curious if the youth still read Mr. Amis' novels, so I cornered three of them.

"None," said the first.

"None," said the second.

"Two," said the third. "The Rachel Papers and Money. Money is better than The Rachel Papers. The Rachel Papers hit closer to home because the protagonist was more like me. I was anxious about how I was being portrayed, about how I compared to the character, whereas Money was just mind-blowing."

On Saturday night, I had dinner with my long-lost college girlfriend. "That was definitely your Martin Amis phase," she said of our relationship.

Somehow during this phase--which followed a Nabokov phase, a Burroughs phase and a DeLillo phase, then yielded to a Roth phase, a Pynchon phase and a Moravia phase--I never read Money, but I read six novels, two story collections, the memoir and two books of journalism. With the exception of London Fields, which I reread last spring, I hadn't been back to any of them in about a decade.

The seedy circa-1980 New York of Money is barely recognizable now. "In a way that's a New York I don't even know," Ms. Egan, who moved to the city in 1987, told The Observer. "That was a really long time ago."

"I hit a topless bar on Forty-Fourth," says John Self, in one of Money's early scenes. "Ever check out one of these joints?" I never have, though one still persists, around the corner from my office, and whenever I pass by after 3 a.m. a prostitute asks first if she can buy a cigarette, then if I 'wanna hang out, sweetie?'"

In a decade of living in Brooklyn, that happened to me on Seventh Avenue all of once. Mostly after dark you hear the voices of 40-something divorcees sitting on park benches, somehow flirting by talking about how much they miss their kids. You couldn't write Money here today. The only possible reference to Brooklyn I found in the novel was a mention of a short film by John Self, titled Dean Street.

"Having been here for close to 20 years," the English-born journalist Lawrence Osborne wrote The Observer in an email, "I'd say the arrival of Martin Amis is more baffling than game changing. Will it add to the already insufferable levels of comatose smugness and dullness? I can only pine for the days of anxiety and excitement. But writers, like drug addicts, have to live somewhere, I suppose.

"This is part of the neurotic exchange between New York and London, where London now feels like the horrible, bawdy, rasping New York of the 1980s, and New York feels like the genteel, provincial, slightly dopey Disneyland London of the same period. Having just come back from five months in London, I feel this. Brooklyn compared to Hoxton is kind of boringly sane--the bad food, the dead streets at night, the whispering beards."

Around the time Mr. Amis purchased his brownstone in December, I was pondering, not for the first time since I moved here in 2000, leaving Brooklyn. "Money worries aren't like other worries," says John Self, "If you're $10,000 in debt, it's twice as worrying as being $5,000 in debt but only half as worrying as being $20,000 in debt. Being $10,000 in debt is three-sevenths as worrying as being $23,333 in debt. ...  As of now, I don't have any money. And this is really worrying." Now this was my New York. But no longer. Next month I'm joining the neurotic exchange and moving to London, a city I mostly know through Mr. Amis' books.

Brooklyn, of ample hills, is now his.

clorentzen@observer.com

Emily Witt contributed reporting.

Lists. Lists of lists. Lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the most powerful lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the lists that shook the lists that shaped the lists that changed the world forever. I should make a list of these lists. Or someone should make it for me. I wonder if I could get an OmniList iPhone app for my BlackBerry?

Photography. Pictures. The image. It just has to pop. I said it before when I started Talk, and I'll say it again now, no one so uniquely embodies our present moment of revolutionary transformation--a moment like no other--as Hillary Clinton. She is the very metabolism of the now.

Paper. Ink. Pages. My favorite page in our new issue is the "NewsBeast/DataBeast" page. Isn't it beastly? Pages, in my experience, become more powerful and relevant the more slugs you stick on them. You've got to tell the reader what they're looking at, and avoid alienating them by making them feel beholden to read the text. The genius of the concept of multiple points of entry is to make the reader feel they've done the work of reading several articles merely by looking at a layout of headlines and doodads while reading precisely nothing. That is the philosophy underlying our entire "NewsBeast" section, and nowhere is it better realized than on the "DataBeast" page. Plus, I just wanted a page that said "Beast" twice, and so far there has been resistance from my staff to the idea of installing a regular feature on pets and wild animals called BeastBeast. Oh my! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Crackling!

Hiring. Staff. People. Sometimes I sit up at night wondering, Who is the most brilliant hire I've made so far? Michelle Cottle? I love her Southern drawl! Whenever she drops into my office, it's like we have William Faulkner or Huey Long on staff. Andrew Sullivan? BeastDish! DishBeast! Dieasht! Peter Boyer? Since I hired him, I've received so many odd "Thank You" notes from New Yorker subscribers begging me to hire Malcolm Gladwell as well. I should do it. Malcolm is the one writer in English language who perfectly embodies my theories of multiple points of entry in his prose--you never have to look past the subhead to know what he'll say. Soon I'll have him. But what of my other electrifying hires? When you narrow it down, the going really gets tough! Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? In Howie you have a genius of interviewing who knows how to make an interviewee say exactly what you know he's thinking even if he has no idea whom he's talking to. And Joanne created the brilliant, crackling, zeitgeisty, buzz juggernaut we remember as Condé Nast Portfolio, a masterpiece multiplicity of a 1,000 entry points of light. The only title you can talk about in the same breath is Talk.

Party time! I must be off! Somewhere on the Upper West Side there's an opening for a tin of sardines!

"Yes, she definitely noticed," The Observer replied.

The Observer had just had a close call on the floor of the Armory Show. Looking at two large photographs by Candida Hofer, he had been accosted by an ex-girlfriend.

"Hey," The Observer had whispered. "It's good to see you, but I can't talk. These people with me don't know who I really am."

The ex-girlfriend fled the scene, and The Observer returned to the company of his entourage.

"It's good that she saw you with us," said Bobby. "She'll know you're not alone."

Last week, The Observer was forwarded an email advertising the services of Entourage at the Armory. Attached was a photograph of seven artsy-seeming but not dirty young people posing before the white walls of a gallery space.

The text of the email read, "Entourage is a group of young professionals who are available to personally accompany you during your visit to the Armory Show. We are available during any of the Armory Show opening hours ... for any duration of time. We hope to make your company :)"

The Observer forwarded it to a friend, commenting, "Look at these assholes." Then he decided to make an appointment. He was advised to meet Diana at Pier 92 at the west end of 55th Street. "Please remember to bring $30 for her admission. See you there :)"

"Would it be possible even at this late hour," asked The Observer 135 minutes before his scheduled appointment, "to secure two more Entourage people, so that it seems more like an entourage than, you know, an escort?"

"Yes, it is possible," came the reply. "Diana, Carlos, and Bobby will meet you at 3PM."

The word "entourage" entered the English language in 1832, when the proto-junkie Thomas DeQuincey imported it from the French to describe the changes in "external character and entourage of the imperial office" after Diocletian's return to Rome from warring in decadent Persia. "A majestic plainness of manners" gave way to a court where guests found the emperor "surrounded by eunuchs, and were expected to make their approaches by genuflexions, by servile 'adorations,' and by real acts of worship to a visible god."

Would this be the sort of treatment, The Observer wondered, he would receive from Diana, Carlos and Bobby?

As it turned out, they were late. And instead of Carlos, there was a tall, swarthy architecture student named Alejandro.

Diana found The Observer first, under the flagpole, then corralled the rest of the entourage. She asked The Observer what he did.

"I'm an independent scholar. I study ancient texts. Right now I'm working on Xenophon," he said.

"Who was he?" she asked.

"An Athenian writer from around the same time as Plato."

The Observer asked Diana why her cohort had started Entourage.

"It was a response to a generally felt feeling," she said, "that people don't want to come to this alone. Why did you want to come to the Armory show?"

"My best friend, who lives in London, collects photography," said The Observer.

"Alejandro's from London," said Bobby.

"I follow him around to galleries when he comes to New York," said The Observer. "I want to start my own collection."

"We'll ask how much things cost for you," said Diana.

"That'll be fun," said Bobby. "You usually can't do that in galleries, but here it's fine. People look down on this show. It's, like, not even curated."

"The Independent is better," said Diana.

"Where are you from?" asked Bobby.

"Boston," The Observer said.

"Do you want us to walk in front of you, around you, or behind you?" asked Diana.

"Just be natural," said The Observer.

Diana, a petite, brunette 22-year-old artist, would prove a doting entourage member. When The Observer fumbled in putting on his wrist band, she offered to help. When the aloof Alejandro drifted away in the crowd, she called him on his cell phone to impose entourage discipline.

"Diana's a party girl," said Bobby, upon the revelation that she'd been out until 2 a.m. "She's a total socialite."

Although chatty--especially on the topic of how he was "always broke"--Bobby, a short, slim 22-year-old artist sporting a light scruff, seemed at first indifferent to the duties of entourage membership. But when The Observer purchased his entourage a bottle of Champagne, it was Bobby who eagerly volunteered to carry the bottle around the fair.

Alejandro was a quiet fellow and paid a lot of attention to whatever was going on on his phone. A genial smoking companion, he told The Observer he'd recently started a zine about ecology. "It's the Playboy of ecology," he said.

Diana explained various trends in contemporary art to The Observer with care: Use of Photoshop was no longer taboo; spongy foam sculptures were kind of a 2002 thing, but they were still big in art schools; certain photographers were in the business of producing "a photo-photo-photo kind of photo"; the social realism of, say, Nan Goldin "had its use." She made recommendations for his collection, and The Observer noted the artists' names in his notebook, promising to Google them when he got home. It wasn't his style to make purchases on the spot. "I need to study," he said.

When Diana encountered an acquaintance, she introduced The Observer as a classical scholar with discernible pride of association. Or at least she was good at trying to make a lonely scholar feel better about himself.

On the way from a booth with a large John Currin canvas to the upstairs Modernism wing, the entourage, now depleted of Champagne, acquired two new members, friends of the hired trio from Berlin.

"I love Modernism," said Alejandro.

Modernism, however, would be the end of the line. Diana invited The Observer to an opening afterward at Gavin Brown's Enterprise downtown, but, she reminded him, "the social contract of Entourage expires when we leave this building."

The Observer offered to pay for a cab. On the way downtown, he revealed his true identity.

"Were you lying about everything?" asked Bobby. "Are you really from Boston?"

"Only the Xenophon thing was a lie. I'm really from Boston."

"Cool. At the end of all this, the whole Entourage group is going to get our picture in The New York Times' style magazine. I think we could really make it into a business. Entourages to go anywhere."

"I don't think it will go on," said Diana, "after this weekend."

At the opening, where guests were eating a roasted pig, The Observer thanked his entourage and bid them goodbye. He grabbed a beer, stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. It was good to be alone.

 clorentzen@observer.com

"These things are not institutions," said founder and co-editor Thomas Beller. "They're always razor's edge things."

Ms. Yas and Mr. Beller decided to shut down the journal after multiple sources of funding pulled out. They hadn't expected issue 30 to be the swansong.

"The vibe of the last party," said Mr. Beller, "showed me that the magazine has had a lot of action around it. It's ending on a really good note."

"The Open City people were from an earlier time--the mid-'90s," said the novelist Sam Lipsyte, "the last time you really felt an understanding that the man was inherently bad. A distrust of the official discourse was what bound people together--and a distrust of hippies."

Mr. Lipsyte's first story in the magazine, "Shed," was an account of sodomy conducted with a hoe handle. It was commissioned by the late Robert Bingham, who joined Mr. Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck, Open City's co-founder, shortly after the journal's launch.

"I remember Bingham called me up and said, 'Don't sell out to the majors.'"

Mr. Lipsyte is one of a pair of writers most identified with the magazine. The other is the poet Dave Berman, leader of the indie rock band Silver Jews.

"We get two piles of imitators in slush," Ms. Yas said, "the Lipsytians and the Bermanites."

"I didn't expect that Open City would continue at all after Rob Bingham's death," said Mr. Berman. Bingham died in 1999 of a heroin overdose. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Pinchbeck decamped, and Ms. Yas, then the managing editor, joined Mr. Beller as co-editor.

"I feel a tremendous amount of admiration for Joanna for squeezing an extra decade out the magazine," Mr. Berman said.

For now, Ms. Yas is at work on an anthology of stories from the magazine. She and Mr. Beller will continue to publish Open City Books. (Their next title is The Smell of Pine, a novel by Lara Vapnyar.)

Novelist Jonathan Ames emailed to say that Open City was "the new Paris Review" for his generation of writers, "while also being McSweeney's before there was McSweeney's. It was and is a beautiful magazine."

"Open City has offered me shelter and encouragement, and I needed it!" Diane Williams, a contributor since the inaugural issue in 1991, wrote The Observer in an email. "They didn't let me down!

"Oh, this is very sad news!"

--Christian Lorentzen

I will need an apartment. I have heard that the co-op boards in New York City are more of a pain in the ass than the prosecutors at the Hague. I do not need to be browbeaten about so-called human-rights violations, supposedly bombed airplanes, or the Munich Olympics by some imperious charity-lunch-going lawyer's wife who happens to have a sinecure as co-op president. People have told me it's best to buy a residence at the Plaza, preferably one with a private lobby. These start at $2.5 million, which for me is like eating a Happy Meal, or ordering up a squadron of Cuban mercenaries. I looked into it and found out that the Plaza itself can be had for $400 million. Fine--$59.6 billion left.

It would be my preference to decorate it with the work of a truly revolutionary artist; I'm told a blue period Picasso goes for $100 million. I will take 10. I will need to be amused in the city by games of sport, so I will budget $858 million--Fred Wilpon called me to borrow the sum when he was first interested. I like to have an emporium at my disposal, so I will take Macy's for $10 billion. About $38.6 billion to go.

Propaganda has always been crucial to me, and I find newspapers more effective than this thing called the Web. What better than The New York Times for $2 billion. First thing I do is fire David Brooks, then Sam Tannenhaus, then Maureen Dowd, and I hire a bunch of pliant Nation interns to run the op-ed page. A year's worth of one digital display in Times Square costs $87 million. I will take two dozen. That leaves $34.6 billion

My living quarters should be sufficient, but I like to have a place to camp out in my tent with my family and about a hundred nurses. I have priced Central Park at $528,783,552,000. That is too much, by a factor of 10. But I am told the Tavern on the Green can be had for a mere $20 million. That should fit my family. As for my loyalists and my garrison, I have secured them Stuyvesant Town for $6.3 billion and the Intrepid aircraft carrier for $4.5 billion. Your Mayor Bloomberg is worth $18 billion. I am three and a half Bloombergs. I will buy five of your elections for a mere half-billion dollars. After all this I have $23.5 billion left. Seven billion dollars should be enough for ground zero, and with the rest I can construct the world's fanciest mosque.

"When Kai Ryssdal talks about money--oh, Jesus!" said the blonde, of the host of Marketplace. She mimed a swoon.

"Kai's gotten me through a lot," said the brunette. "I work in the fashion industry, I spend all day with women, and at 6:30 when I get home, I need to hear a man's voice, and I want to hear Kai Ryssdal."

"I like Terry Gross," said a dapper, fortyish, graying gentleman sidling up to the bar, of the host of Fresh Air. "Her voice is so sultry."

It was last call at the sold-out Meet @ WNYC: Speed-Dating Party, at Hudson Terrace in Hell's Kitchen. Two reporters--hereafter referred to as the gentleman Observer (G.O.) and the lady Observer (L.O.)--had come out not so much "looking for love," in the parlance of the station's frequently aired promos, as to "meet other fans of public radio."

By closing time, the L.O., two years younger than the prescribed minimum female age of 32, had fled, citing her desire to escape the repeated advances of "predatory middle-aged men." The G.O. was still at the bar, trying to keep the brunette Marketplace girl from stealing his notebook and crossing out her quotes.

"I think she likes you," said the blonde. "You're like kids in a schoolyard."

The pair left him at the bar without disclosing their last names.

"I can't stand Brian Lehrer," said a man the G.O. encountered outside, where the air was fresh, during a cigarette break, "and I hate that guy who comes after him, with the beard [Leonard Lopate]. Too erudite. But that's just me. I'm a management consultant, and probably the only one here."

Indeed, neither the G.O. nor the L.O. encountered any management consultants during their speed-dating. Organized by the firm NY EasyDates, the night entailed 20 dates lasting four minutes each, all in a span not quite as long as an episode of A Prairie Home Companion. There were about 60 participants of each gender, so it was mandatory for any single WNYC listener to meet one-third of the listeners of the opposite gender and ponder loving them.

Among the G.O.'s dates were a recruiter; a publicist; an architect ("Philip Johnson is an asshole"); a former journalist turned banker ("I'm a sellout"); a medical editor ("I work at home all day, so the radio is important to me"); three lawyers (environmental, immigration, employment); a film editor; a U.N. staffer; a retail entrepreneur; a radio producer; an art historian specializing in insurance; the founder of an education nonprofit; a psychiatrist; a Web infrastructure specialist; and a graphic designer. Most seemed to him more affluent than he was, and several lived in tony neighborhoods uptown. Tickets for women, the promos declared, had sold out months in advance.

The L.O., meanwhile, found herself sitting across from someone who worked in telecommunications ("good benefits"); a medical researcher; a writer-poet "with a day job" at work on "an erotic novel about an interracial love triangle ... set in Vancouver"; a trumpeter; a glassblower; a geologist; a couples therapist; a man who implied he did something for the F.B.I.; two accountants; a teacher; and a financier. A high percentage seemed to have made the trek from New Jersey on the PATH.

At the start, the L.O. reported to her assigned wicker chair, clutching a glass of white wine. She found herself energized for the actual meet-and-greet. Other women, perched on the edge of their seats, seemed alternately excited or long-suffering.

"It's fun," said one, "and WNYC usually brings out good people."

"I really think we all should have just donated to the station, considering," said another.

Then, the buzzer. A crowd that favored soothing voices and world music erupted like a racetrack on a Saturday afternoon.

It was time to be on point. Either the takeaway would be bliss or, all things considered, pretty banal: Where are you from? What do you do for a living? And who's your favorite personality on WNYC?

The G.O.'s first date indicated that hers was Soterius Johnson (known, we hear, as "SoJo" among his colleagues). Wearing a pantsuit unironically--a sign that she was not the G.O.'s type (he would meet nonesuch, except maybe the Marketplace brunette)--she said a close second was Mr. Lehrer, though "if he comes on [at 10 a.m.], I know I'm late for work." The G.O.'s second date surprised him by saying that she did not much listen to WNYC but preferred in the car to tune into WOR, 710 on the AM dial, "for the holistic health tips." His third date reminded him of one of his college roommates' ex-girlfriends. His 13th date was in fact one of his college roommates' ex-girlfriends; she sheepishly said she was attending only after her friends had staged an intervention in her love life. She was dating too many assholes; maybe WNYC would filter those out.

The L.O. was in the meantime experiencing a rush such as she had not known since her heady undergrad days. She quickly found that she had perhaps the worst possible personality profile for speed-dating. Unwilling to hurt any prospective dates and eager to ensure a good time, she found herself ending each encounter with a "Darn! The interesting ones go so fast!" or "You never get to talk enough to the people you really like!"

Enthusiasm for the hosts ranged from the oddly zealous ("I'll go anywhere WNYC tells me to!") to the mild ("I've never even pledged! Not once!"). Unfortunately, voices tired as comfort grew, so that by the hour's end, encounters consisted of hoarse shouting matches from which only strangled phrases like "Leonard Lopate," "C train" and "Pan-Asian" could be gleaned. Nevertheless, the L.O. was assured by several gentlemen that they would be choosing "yes" when the time came to contact prospective partners.

The G.O. began thinking that his dates were not going well. The art historian accused him of "sitting like a journalist," as if he were interviewing her rather than dating her. He was asking his dates too much about WNYC and not enough about themselves. He was hearing a lot about how Ira Glass is still great even if This American Life "has become way too much about money." Plus, the G.O. was balding, and there was an unsightly growth on his forehead he really should have removed.

He never intended to see any of these women again ("it's complicated"), but the G.O. still liked winning. The thought of the man ahead of him--always late in breaking off each four-minute romance and thus cutting into the G.O.'s time with each lass--racking up more second dates the next morning galled the G.O. So he resolved to revert to the only technique that had ever worked for him in real life: "He just," an ex-girlfriend once said, "hits on you a lot."

So the G.O. started paying compliments. That maroon dress made the U.N. staffer look "angelic"; had she ever met Ban Ki Moon? ("No.") The education nonprofit founder had "beautiful eyes"; what did she think of Geoffrey Canada? ("A saint! I love him!") Or Diane Ravitch? ("Her argument is full of holes. She's old and cranky.") Red hair and a blue dress are an irresistible combination, he told the woman whose favorite voice on WNYC belonged to "the lady from the BBC News who sounds like Emma Thompson," Claire Bolderson. The pretty girl from Amherst, who told him, "You're not going to believe this, but my favorite is Jonathan Schwartz," he tried to amuse by launching into an impression of the DJ that he'd been working on for years.

At last the dating ended, and he repaired straight to the bar; his martini had run out around date five.

(In the morning, the G.O. checked YES for all 20 second dates. He received only one match--from the journalist turned banker who had guessed he was writing about the night and promised to help.)

The L.O. began scanning the crowd wildly for the G.O., who in this parallel universe represented a safe haven.

"Has anyone ever told you ... that you're sexy?" said a gentleman who seemed to be pushing the age limit (47) by a few years.

She ran into one of her four-minute dates. In a fit of honesty, she admitted to him that she was not at present single, and asked if she could set him up with a friend.

"That's bullshit," he said. "Honestly, I expected more from a WNYC listener."

clorentzen@observer.com

My crotch is a zone of mystery. It is at once a locus of force and a void. It is the site of the eighth type of ambiguity, one William Empson could never have dreamed up. My crotch is not a metaphor; you can't say that it's like anything else. It is not a place where meanings are resolved or a context that connects two ideas for which there is one word, like box, which can mean container or punch. My crotch will never make clear your complicated state of mind. You'll always be as confused as the writers who write about me, like Camille Paglia, who called me the end of sex, when I am merely its continuation, or at least my crotch is. Or is it? My crotch is silent on the matter, and no idea you invent will help you. My crotch and I are united, and the ambiguity is endless.

I am the vanishing mediator, but the lady never vanishes. My vulgarity is polished enough to abolish class. My ass manifests itself in stages of subjection, alienation, paranoia, narcissism and revolution. Its functional value is scatological, its exchange value colossal, its symbolic value conjugal, its sign value nonsensical.

Some have called me a crypto-normativist, clutching tight to the very Enlightenment I claim to be tearing to shreds. The truth, or should I say, the Real, is otherwise. What little is left of the so-called Enlightenment lies prostrate at the mercy of me.

Either all that, or I'm just a nice Catholic girl who went to Sacred Heart.