and eggs at Barney Greengrass, I told my father I wanted to write an article

about how intimacy can be deceptive.

 "I've got a such a

good story for you," he said, laughing. "When Mom and I started dating, she had

a bust out to here"- he straightened

his arms away from his chest-"and then a couple of months later, we were at her

apartment and I saw these big socks on the floor and I realized she wore

falsies!"

He offered a bagel half. "Is that what you mean by

deceptive?"

"Not exactly," I said. "It's more like you think you're

getting close to someone, but then you realize you're not as close as you think

you are-."

"Amy, you gotta weed out the guys who just wanna get in your

pants."

"I'm not necessarily talking about sex," I said. "Yes,

people have sex quickly-" I caught a look of despair across the table. "Not

me," I reassured him. "I'm thinking more about people acting intimate but not

feeling it, or thinking they feel it

but later realizing they were just playing at being intimate. Like

'insta-macy,' where people act like they've been together three years after

three dates. Or when people talk about things that seem intimate and special,

but then you realize it doesn't mean you're actually any closer. Does that make

any sense?"

He thought for a moment. "You don't tell this to men on

dates, do you?"

I had better luck with a friend who recognized what I meant

from his own dating experiences. "Oh yeah, pseudo-intimacy," he said. "What

passes as intimacy but isn't."

What made me want to investigate intimacy was hearing so

many people say they felt fooled by relationships that they thought were

serious, or getting serious, but turned out not to be. A lot of it boiled down

to how to interpret certain behavior nowadays. As one woman said, "Once upon a

time you could meet someone's parents and it was a pretty sure thing you were

going to marry them. Now you can vacation with someone's parents and it doesn't

mean anything."

Take the tendency to reveal intimate details early in a

relationship. When I tell people all about myself, I think, "Oh, well, that's

just because I'm a writer and I'm very open." But when a man tells me similar

things, I think, "He's really opening up. That must mean something." And what

I've realized is: not necessarily.

"In your 30's, you have a biography. The first few dates you

offer up a few chapters to intrigue someone, even if it includes suffering,"

said a yoga teacher with chronic back pain. "Suffering can be seductive. People

seduce you by making you feel, 'I'm giving this to you and no one else.' But

the truth is, they're giving it to everyone."

"Things that were once incredibly difficult to

discuss-things that made me cry when I told my girlfriend in high school-become

a ready-made narrative that's like an anecdote," said a man whose cats fought

loudly in the background. "Your feelings and life become a thing, because you've told it many times in a similar way."

Several women said they felt misled by men who confided

their deepest secrets.

"It doesn't lead to what you would think it would lead to,"

said the yoga teacher. "It doesn't lead to marriage or commitment."

"Men use openness as a tool," said a woman who called

herself "a former divulger." "They've heard that women like it when men are

honest and seem vulnerable."

A bubbly travel agent told me how her Harvard Business

School boyfriend confessed all his secrets early in the relationship. "I

thought he was telling me to share with me. He would tell me things and I would

be like, 'We've all been there ….' And at the end of the relationship, I

realized he was telling me all that because, subconsciously, he knew he was

incapable. He was telling me all that in case he wanted an out. He was

'Mirandizing' me-he gave me my rights so later he could say, 'You can't get mad

at me, because I told you all about me .'"

Then there's "insta-macy": In a blindingly short time, you

go from, "Hi, nice to meet you" to, "Can you make some room in your underwear

drawer?"

When a small man who favors leather hats heard the term

"insta-macy," he identified it with a tendency to domesticate

prematurely-which, he added, "is one of my issues."

"Suddenly you find yourself helping her choose some new

towels at Bed Bath & Beyond after brunch on Sunday," he said. "That seeps into spending Sunday night

together. The first Sunday you spend with someone is the first big sign of

insta-macy. And the fact is, you're not spending Sunday night together out of

love, but because it's raining and you don't feel like refilling your

MetroCard."

Other people suggested insta-macy was a way to avoid the

awkwardness of actually dating. An actor, who said he's hoping to write, direct

and star in a movie about a guy who can't find love, said, "It's creating a

false sense of five months down the line, when you really start revealing stuff

about yourself. So people think, 'Cool, I've skipped the hard stuff. I'm

there.'"

A record executive said: "With women I really like, we meet

on Friday, Saturday we go to brunch, Saturday night we go to a movie, Sunday we

go to brunch again, Sunday night we sleep together and Monday she's my

girlfriend."

A woman who is taking catechism classes said that, because

so many people have had several relationships that failed, they use expedited

intimacy as a way to know quickly if a person is right or wrong for them.

"To me it's all about 'lite.' It's not fake, but it's not real,"

she said. "It's the low-fat version of real intimacy. Because it's lite, you

can consume much more of it and it won't add any weight. Plus, if it goes away,

it's not a terrible loss." Or, as another woman put it, "People desperately

want love and commitment, so they will interpret an appetizer as an entrée."

Taking into consideration the present confusion about what

means what, I think people need to be more straightforward from the get-go.

Instead of using the term "open" to describe how you reveal yourself, you might

substitute "faux-pen." As in, "I'm not really being open yet-just faux-pen." Or

you could admit opening up to someone else is difficult and that it feels more

like "grope-penness." Perhaps we need categories of intimacy such as, "I'm not

ready to give you my bank-card P.I.N.-timacy." Or, if you're waffling about how

you feel about the other person, you could say, "Later you might call and I may

not be in-timacy."

A few fun phrases won't necessarily ease the minds of so

many single people who are looking for sure signs of real commitment and love,

who want to believe that there is order in the universe and that, when you

think something is real, it is. I understand. I really do. In the meantime, as

we all keep dating and struggling with relationships, might I suggest taking an

aspirin-timacy.

After thousands, who knows, perhaps millions of money shots, Mr. Jeremy, hairy back, mustache and 9 3/4-inch penis are trying to make it in the world of legitimate films under his given name, Ron Hyatt. The crossover hasn't been easy, exactly. He had a role in the new John Frankenheimer picture, Reindeer Games , but, alas, it got cut. He still gets parts in the raunchy stuff, like last year's Still Insatiable and Black Cherry Coeds 3 , but it's getting harder and harder to land the good roles he owned during his prime, when he could pull down $800 for just a few hours' work.

"I'm heavy but I'm still very graceful, and I can still outrun, outjump, outkick, outswim kids half my age," Mr. Jeremy said in the car. "People think I'm just talking. Just to prove it to you, go ahead, there, go ahead." He removed his denim jacket and made a muscle. "Anyone can say, 'Oh, yeah, I have lot of muscle,' and you're like, 'Oh, yeah, right, look at this fat fuck.' Here." Mr. Jeremy, who is 46, rolled up his bluejeans a few inches and displayed a bulging calf muscle. "I have a lot of muscle. It's just covered by a lot of fat. I got careless with my weight. I was in Playgirl four times, but I got careless with the weight. I still get layouts in Cheri a lot, and Hustler uses me a lot because of the novelty–because I still have a big penis even though I am heavy, too heavy to be modeling, that's for sure."

Mr. Jeremy's efforts to go legit haven't been completely for naught. He was a male strip club emcee in the recent Detroit Rock City , the Kiss nostalgia film, and a gangster in The Boondock Saints , a Willem Dafoe ultra-violence flick. He was a concierge who gets shot in Killing Zoe and, in Sylvester Stallone's Cobra , a masked bad guy. He played a cameraman in the Charlie Sheen film The Chase , a peeping Tom for one episode in the CBS show Nash Bridges and a monster in an ABC kids' show, Bone Chillers .

Mr. Jeremy arrived at Barney Greengrass and took a seat at the back of the dining room. He was wearing a denim jacket, a blue T-shirt and white sneakers. He was unshaven and had forgotten to wear a belt. In the adjoining room, Moe Greengrass, the son of Barney Greengrass, was napping at a wooden table.

A waiter arrived. Mr. Jeremy ordered a sturgeon platter, chopped chicken liver and a cream soda. He instructed the waiter to announce to Mr. Greengrass that a relation had arrived at the restaurant.

The waiter returned a few minutes later.

"Did you tell him?" Mr. Jeremy said.

"He's a little cranky now. He just woke up."

"Tell him about Rose Greengrass, she's my grandmother. Tell him that," Mr. Jeremy said.

The waiter left. When he got back, he reported that Mr. Greengrass wasn't sure he knew a Rose Greengrass.

"Ask him if he knows the gangster Ben Greengrass. That's my great-uncle. Ask him about Gangster Ben. Just tell him that. That'll be enough."

The waiter left again and soon returned to say there had been some breakthrough with Mr. Greengrass.

"Ask him if he knows this. This will knock his socks off. Ask him if he remembers how we lost a great relative, Elliot Siegel. Ask him if he knows about how Elliot died in the war. He's going to shit in his pants!"

While he waited for the waiter's return, Mr. Jeremy plowed into his sturgeon platter and recounted the story of his life.

He was born and raised in Bayside, Queens, the son of an Army engineer father and a cryptographer mother. He first understood his own extraordinary endowment one day at summer camp: While bending over to tie his shoes, he found he was able to fellate himself. The gift remained sealed throughout his time at Benjamin Cardozo High School, where he appeared in a production of Oklahoma! and was known more as thespian than as a lover. Then came Queens College, where he studied theater and education.

After college, Mr. Jeremy tried to make it in New York as an actor. During the week, he taught at a high school in Queens. On weekends, he waited tables at Catskills resorts. He studied with the Dramatis Personis and La MaMa theater troupes and appeared in Oscar Wilde's Salome (as King Herod) and Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (in the role of Osip). But, still, Mr. Jeremy couldn't catch his big break, and he was low on money.

Then, it happened: Mr. Jeremy's girlfriend sent his nude picture to Playgirl . The picture appeared in the October 1978 issue, and the offers started coming in, including the one for his first movie role in Tigresses and Other Man-Eaters .

Word spread quickly among filmmakers of the man with the prodigious member and unfailing ability to deliver the money shot on cue. Mr. Jeremy's career soared. He received back-to-back Best Supporting Actor awards in 1983 and 1984 from the Adult Film Association of America for his work in Suzie Superstar and All the Way In .

Back at Barney Greengrass, Mr. Jeremy asked the waiter for some waxed paper to wrap up the remainder of his chopped chicken liver.

"What most actors do and what I do is I read a script over and over and over again, and I understand exactly where I fit in," Mr. Jeremy said. "Then, once it's ingrained into my head, I try to make the characters as exciting as I can. It's the Stanislavsky technique, being inside your character and looking out. You bring characteristics and traits of your own personality within the framework of the character you're playing. Because it's like this … Inside all of us are many types of people. This is the basis of acting. You don't take on a role and try to mug and try to make believe you're something you're not. You become it. I use the same technique in my adult work. In fact, I like to think that's one of the reasons I got well known in adult films, was that I took my characters all the way. I try to play a role and continue that role right into the sex scenes. If I play a nerd, I want to fuck like a nerd. Too many actors in porn, when it comes time for the sex, they pop a Viagra and they fuck like themselves. If I'm playing some nerd I'll say, 'I am hurting you? Is this O.K.? How are you feeling? Can I bite your neck?' You know, I'll be like a putz. But if I'm playing a really confident guy, a tough guy, then I'll fuck like a confident guy, like, 'You like that, huh, baby. Feel good? You like that, don't you? Oh, I know you'll like this. Let me just do this. Why don't you do this to me now.' You see, it's a whole different attitude, a whole different voice."

Mr. Jeremy had finished wrapping his chopped liver. He gathered his bags together, stood up and hitched up his pants. "Let's see what happens when I talk to this guy," he said.

It was time to approach Mr. Greengrass.

"Hi, how ya doing?" Mr. Jeremy said, going over to him in the next room. Then he launched into the story about how Elliot Siegel was killed in the war. Maybe Mr. Greengrass was still sleepy, but Mr. Jeremy's story didn't seem to make much of an impression.

He tried a few more stories. Mr. Greengrass looked up blankly at the porn star, nodding his head occasionally. He recalled that Ben Green grass, the gangster, was strong enough to lift a car.

"Well, all right then," Mr. Jeremy said finally. "It was nice to meet ya. I've never been here. I always thought I would someday."

Mr. Jeremy shuffled out of Barney Greengrass onto Amsterdam Avenue and hitched up his pants again.

"Well, he didn't give much of a fuck," he said. "Basically, he didn't give much of a fuck."

Mr. Jeremy caught a cab and headed across Central Park to meet a lady named Venice, whom he described as "his best friend in the world."

On Fifth Avenue, the cab got caught in traffic.

"Oh, this is the story of my life," he said. "You know, I try to meet up with people, and I'm never on time." Mr. Jeremy looked himself over. "I should have shaved to go to Greengrass. I just never have enough time, you know? I must have bags under my eyes. It's my own fucked-up schedule … Well, I can't blame anyone but myself. I never have time for anything, and it takes so long to get around. Oh, man. I'm trapped here."

The traffic still wasn't moving. Mr. Jeremy stared outside glumly and tapped the window with his fingers.

"I don't know why I'm going where I'm going at this point. I blew it. This is a joke. That's why you can't make plans in this town. I hate to think I'm trapped here. That's what makes me so sick. I'm literally trapped in the city now, and now I'm going to have to fight rush hour to get out of it. This is a nightmare. I should have stayed in Queens. I thought it would be a nice thing to go to Greengrass. It was a mistake."

O.K. I have a theory (surprise!). I think it has to do with the true nature of our "inner child." Not the simpering little innocent homunculus within us all envisioned by the self-help, recovery movement books. Not the little Bambi-eyed fawn-in-the-forest tyke who supposedly represents the true childlike self we've all tragically lost access to due to the abuse we've suffered from dysfunctional families and a cruel and exploitive society that has cut us off from our kinder gentler essence. Not the prelapsarian Edenic Adam curled into the fetal position within us–that Redemptive Child who, if we could only get back in touch with, would bring us out of our shame spiral and make us all better people.

No. I don't think so. I think we all know what our inner child really looks like: a lot more like Mini-Me than Bambi. Not as malign as Chucky, say, the evil child-doll in Child's Play and Bride of Chuck y–a series that was accused of inspiring the notorious Bulger child murders in England. More like Poe's "Imp of the Perverse," say.

I suspect that the way we as a nation have welcomed Mini-Me into our hearts can be seen as a vast collective sigh of relief that we no longer have to pretend that we have Bambi inside us, a vast collective repudiation of all the bogus Inner Child sentimental psychologizing over human nature. And a more realistic willingness to come to terms with the imp of the perverse within, the real day-to-day shape human malignity shows up as: not Satan, not Hitler, not a serial killer, not Evil incarnate but a dwarf clone of evil, the kind one nonetheless has to keep an eye on, because if not restrained it will go around, like Mini-Me does at one point, biting people in the crotch. Mini-Me gives us a chance to get down–in a good way–with our Bad Self. And he may well have finally given us the name for the 90's we've been seeking but not finding for 10 years. Not the "Me Decade," but the Mini-Me Decade.

In homage to Mini-Me, the column this week will take the form of several more Mini items. Beginning with:

2: The Sable at Barney Greengrass. Yes, I know: After writing several combative columns celebrating the chopped liver at Barney Greengrass as one of the supreme achievements of Jewish-American civilization, after having my assertion triumphantly vindicated over the choice of carpers like Gael Greene and Daphne Merkin in a blind taste test conducted by that repository of the values of Jewish American civilization, The Forward (Isaac Bashevis Singer's newspaper!), you would think that I would be wedded to their chopped liver forever. Or, at least that I would order it every time I go there. But, in fact, I am compelled to report I have switched. No, not to another place's chopped liver. Barney G.'s is still the best. But to another delicacy at Barney Greengrass. To the sable. I've come late to the smoked fish thing, I know, perhaps because sturgeon leaves me cold and nova is kind of a taste cliché, however good it gets. And I didn't even know what sable really was until recently when I got a brief tutorial from Gary Greengrass. As it turns out, Sable is the name given to smoked black cod, a name that was considered more fancy-sounding (I guess because of the fur coat association) than the plebeian "cod"–although black cod is considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine.

I'm not going to make an effort to summon up the verbal equivalents to the taste of the sable at Barney Greengrass. It's less a taste than a pure, empyrean high, a transformative total body experience. It's that good. Order it very plain without all the pickles and olives and accessories they tend to clutter the plate with at Barney G.'s. Order it very plain and place the slices on a lightly toasted bagel and experience the way the essence of ocean is compressed and expressed in the pearly translucence of the black cod flesh. The pounding waves, the vast sunless depths of the sea, the creatures stirring on the ocean floor, the treasures spilling out of the shipwrecks, the pearls in the eyes of the drowned sailor in the "full fathom five" song in The Tempest . Sable is Mini- Sea .

3: The Truth About Cats and Dogs . Even more satisfying than the vindication afforded by The Forward 's blind taste test was the recent scientific vindication of my position in one of my most controversial columns ever: "Stumpy Versus Lucille: The Great Pet Debate" [Aug. 10, 1998]. It was a column in which I tried gently and compassionately to disillusion the fine writer Caroline Knapp, who (in her book, Pack of Two ) showed herself to have been utterly conned by her canine companion Lucille into thinking that she, Ms. Knapp, had won the sincere love of her dog and that her dog's love somehow validated her self-esteem. Her dog had become her inner child when it was really her inner con artist.

What I tried to explain to her and to all dog lovers, as a onetime dog owner and dog lover myself, as someone who grew up with dogs, but who had never truly known anything about the profound nature of the bond with an animal until I adopted a stray cat I called Stumpy (my true Mini-Me)–was that the love of dogs is false and deceitful, that dogs are shameless flatterers who will lick and slaver and make goo-goo eyes and waggy tail at anyone who gives them food and security. But that this "love" has nothing to do with your deserving character and shouldn't be seized upon (as Caroline Knapp sadly does) as some index of her self-esteem. Rather, the love a dog displays is just the commodified currency of the canine con game, bestowed as eagerly and fervently on serial killers as it is on saints. But never bestowed "sincerely." The sincerity of dog love is a delusion of self-congratulatory owners with a need to believe they deserve unconditional love.

Shakespeare knew this. In her famous study of Shakespeare's Imagery , the British scholar Caroline Spurgeon called attention to the recurrent cluster of images that are linked to the word dog in Shakespeare's works: "images of licking and fawning … called up inevitably by the thought of false friends or flatterers." In her 400-page study of such image clusters, Ms. Spurgeon called this, the dog-licking-and-fawning-and-flattery cluster, "the clearest and most striking I have met with" in all Shakespeare's work.

Still, many were skeptical about my argument, many thought it was just a matter of taste, some personal preference for cats being expressed although those (particularly, discerning women) who had met Stumpy completely understood my point of view.

And now comes Science, in the form of a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly , titled "Why Your Dog Pretends to Like You." A story (by Stephen Budiansky) that demonstrates how the study of evolutionary genetics confirms just about everything I was saying about dogs as false flatterers. Dogs are Darwinian con artists trained by centuries of evolution to fake orgasms of affection: "Just as we are genetically programmed to seek signs of love and loyalty, dogs are genetically programmed to exploit this foible of ours." That's the difference between dogs and cats, if you ask me. We're programmed, dogs are programmed, but cats see through the whole game. At least Stumpy does.

4: The Overratedness of 2001: Isn't it about time someone said it? This photographer I know, let's call her "Nicole"–called me one night from the darkroom with a question. She'd been up developing some work and she'd had the television on in another part of her loft and there was this weird sci-fi movie on she'd caught a glimpse of. From what she could tell, she said it was "just a bunch of apes gibbering at each other with all this pretentious cinematography and no voice over." Did I have any idea what the film was?

I looked up the time slot in my TV guide and guess what was playing? 2001 , the alleged Kubrick masterpiece we're all supposed to be even more reverent about now with the passing of the Master. Don't get me wrong. I think some of Kubrick's work justified some of the adulation he enjoyed. Dr. Strangelove certainly, and maybe The Shining . But after watching 2001 again on tape, I have to believe that Nicole was not far off in describing it as "a bunch of apes gibbering with some pretentious cinematography." It is gibberish: 2001 may be the single most overrated work of art in the cinema if not in the culture.

Of course, it might be that I never saw it at the right time with the right substances. I never saw it when it first came out. In part because everyone who saw it then said it had to be seen tripping and I never found myself in possession of an elixir worthy of this peak visionary experience. So it was years before I saw it at all, saw it straight, and it was such an Emperor's New Cinema moment. The gibbering of the apes in the first part, the tedium of the astronauts in the second part, the incoherence of the antiquated light show at the end, the anticlimax of the "star child" payoff. (Was the star-child fetus Kubrick's Mini-Me?)

When I watched it once again after the call from Nicole, after Kubrick's death, it only seemed to get less impressive–although I do see now where the dancing-dwarf dream sequences in Twin Peaks (featuring David Lynch's own Mini-Me) came from now.

I know there are people who are still into it. Who still watch 2001 over and over again. I asked one of these people to explain the relationship between the David Lynch-style dream sequence part (which follows the light show) and the birth of the starchild. But he couldn't. He got all twisted up in talking about "wormholes" and parallel universes and who the Advanced Race that implanted the monolith to stimulate our cosmic evolution was in relation to the Starchild. But there is no answer, because it's an incoherent work of art. And not in a good way. And beyond that, 2001, even when it is coherent suggests a really juvenile view of cosmic causation and human evolution: that all human endeavor, all human progress, imagination, comedy, tragedy, art and love is really incidental–all subsumed to the eugenics project of some Big Daddy-type galactic paternalists who are programming us to develop in their image. The human race is their Mini-Me. It's a childish Master Race fantasy. Let's face it, this bad, pretentious, incoherent master-race-worshipping film is the stunted Mini-Me, the dwarf runt of Stanley Kubrick's otherwise impressive body of work.

5: Loiterature and Out of Sheer Rage. I felt sheer rage in trying to read Loiterature. It's a wonderful title for a wonderful project: examining the literature of digression, of loitering, of digressive and discursive paths through the world and the word. I love some of the literature Ross Chambers (the "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan"–even his title is a long and winding road) examines in Loiterature (University of Nebraska Press). I love Tristram Shandy , I love Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog (Bulgakov perfectly captured the slinking, conniving, petty criminal, canine character in his brillant comic fable), although Professor Chambers leaves out the great classic of eddying, loitering, idleness: Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov . Still, I liked–at first, anyway–the fact that Professor Chambers opens a section of Loiterature called "Learning From Dogs" with what seems at first like a hilarious parody of an academic deconstructing Barbara Bush's Millie's Book –the work she supposedly co-wrote with her spaniel. "One's doubts about Millie's 'authorship' grow more strongly when one looks more closely at the front matter," Professor Chambers (parodically? solemnly?) informs us before concluding (I believe in all seriousness) that Millie's Book is evidence of the imperialist thought-control project of the hegemony. Teaching people to read (the profits from Millie's Book go to the Foundation for Family Literacy) is a way of inculcating "a suitable sense of one's inadequacy with respect to the hegemonic model."

Here is where the sheer rage comes in. At the fact that this "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan" (no trace of the hegemony in the way he presents himself, huh?) seems to take this sentiment so seriously that he can actually proceed to somehow link the depiction of Millie the poodle to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei." "It's a bit hard," the Marvin Felheim Distinguished etc. tells us, hard "on Barbara Bush and the Foundation of Family Literacy, I know, to draw a parallel between Millie's Book and the gates of Auschwitz …"

No, it's not merely hard ; it's ridiculous if not meant as self-parody. If it's meant seriously, it makes the Distinguished etc., into just what he, in his habitual overkill, calls poor Millie "a complete, unmitigated, totally uncritical dope."

But I am grateful to Loiterature for the title, for the conception of a literature of loitering–and for the sheer rage its silly, jargon-clotted execution inspires. It gives me the excuse, and the method for making a loitering, digressive transition to what I believe is a new classic of true loiterature, a book called Out of Sheer Rage , by Geoff Dyer (North Point Press), the smartest, funniest memoir of a writer I can recall ever reading. A memoir of Mr. Dyer's agonizing and comic attempt to write–or to avoid writing–a study of D.H. Lawrence.

Please put aside your prejudices against Lawrence because I had to when two writers I'd met recently–Justin Kaplan and his wife, Anne Bernays– and my wise and knowing former editor at The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker , Robert Vare (who knows my sometimes dilatory writing tendencies all too well), spent almost an entire dinner insisting I read this book. Believe me, I never liked Lawrence, his leaden, overwrought, overblown prose, his German metaphysics–never liked anything he wrote except the dirty parts of Lady Chatterley's Lover , if you want to know the truth. But they, Mr. Kaplan, Ms. Bernays and Mr. Vare, were right! Out of Sheer Rage has little to do with Lawrence and everything to do with the dark comedy of the writing life.

I'm fairly sparing in my absolute uncritical recommendations to my readers. Even my enthusiasms are frequently tinged with edginess. But when I'm right, I'm right, as people who have recently been reading The Dog of the South , the Charles Portis novel that I've gotten back into print, have told me. You'll have to trust me on Out of Sheer Rage : Geoff Dyer is our Oblomov, the comic genius Portis of literary nonfiction.

In a front-page piece on what The New York Times first dubbed "the chopped liver war," Forward food maven Matthew Goodman made the point that "New Yorkers are as proprietary about their chopped liver as Parisians are about their croissants. A New Yorker who really knows the best chopped liver in the city possesses the unshakable self-confidence of one who has, say, finally solved the longtime problem of who among Mantle, Mays and Snider was the best centerfielder."

In other words, this is a war not just over chopped chicken liver, but over taste discernment, sensual attunement and judgment, mysteries deeper than mere schmaltz.

And just who would that person be, that "New Yorker who really knows the best chopped liver in the city," who's unlocked a mystery akin to the riddle of the sphinx, or the question of what God was doing before the Creation? To determine the answer, Mr. Goodman arranged a carefully objective blind tasting of chopped liver from Barney Greengrass, from the five places Gael Greene claimed had better chopped liver (Katz's Deli, the Second Avenue Deli, the Stage Deli, Zabar's and the Carnegie Deli) as well as chopped liver from Fischer Brothers & Leslie, the kosher butcher Daphne Merkin promoted in a recent Talk of the Town piece, and an entry from Murray's Sturgeon Shop, a rival smoked fish emporium to Barney Greengrass.

Do I need to tell you who won? Let me quote the Forward Food Maven's blind taste test judgment upon Barney Greengrass in full:

"A blind taste test confirms it: This is the best chopped liver in the city. The key to this chopped liver's success is balance: The consistency is rough-chopped and the texture faintly oily, yet it retains an admirable lightness; the taste is strong and well defined, yet also surprisingly sweet, without leaving much of an aftertaste. But what put this one over the top was the remarkably large, high-quality chunks of liver throughout. Only the too-many pieces of egg keeps this from being the perfect chopped liver."

Jeez, enough with the egg already. Get over it. My other slight quarrel with the Forward Food Maven is that he doesn't seem to get the tone-tongue-in-cheek hyperbole-of my remark that Barney Greengrass chopped liver is "a supreme achievement of Jewish American civilization." But that faint objection scarcely mars an appraisal which completely vindicates my judgment and leaves the other choices in the dust. I think we can safely say the chopped liver war is over, the victory is total. Only Katz's Deli, of the other seven contenders for the throne, is given any real praise. And listen to the descriptions of some of Gael Greene's favorites from the Forward Food Maven's blind tasting: "disconcertingly rubbery" (the Second Avenue Deli); "the first bite tastes frankly more like egg salad than chopped liver" (Stage Deli); "the taste is very livery, but that's the main problem: The heavy liverishness is not adequately balanced … it's like eating a piece of liver on a plate" (Zabar's); "by far the worst chopped liver of the bunch, it was also by far the most expensive. This is chopped liver for tourists, or for anyone else who doesn't know from chopped liver. Feh" (Carnegie Deli).

In other words, chopped liver for Gael Greene, four out of five of whose choices were greeted with one eloquent variation of "Feh" after another in the blind taste test.

And finally we come to Fischer Brothers & Leslie, the chopped liver celebrated by Daphne Merkin in a Talk of the Town piece: "The problem, quite simply, is the taste" said the Forward 's Food Maven of Ms. Merkin's choice. You could say, with apologies to Ms. Merkin (author of an essay about the erotic appeal of spanking), the Forward gave her chopped liver choice a good spanking: "It's way too salty, which makes the liver sour and leaves a strong aftertaste."

Fascinating! That description of Ms. Merkin's favored chopped liver could easily apply to her little Talk of the Town disquisition on the chopped liver wars: sour and leaves an aftertaste.

The Forward shrewdly busted Ms. Merkin on her condescension to the chopped liver contention, her assertion that the whole fuss over chopped liver was a bit beneath her, a bit too distastefully "borscht belt" for a serious littérateur like herself. It was, she said, "an acute case of ethnic nostalgia": one not suffered by "observant Jews"-or (as The Forward put it), "one can't help but feel she means 'genuine' Jews." Exactly. She goes on to read the minds, explain the motives of the partisans in the chopped liver wars with the insulting aperçu that "It seems that the further you've moved from your origins, the more you look back in hunger."

In other words, for someone like her whose relation to her Jewishness is oh-so-much-more genuine this fuss over chopped liver reflects the deracination of Jews less authentic than her, seeking a simulacrum of that which she already possesses.

But since she feels she's psychic enough to read the minds and motives of other writers she hasn't met, to insult them in this fashion, let's look a little more closely at her motivations, what we know of them, and see whether there might be some agenda she didn't disclose to her readers (and I suspect her editors) which might explain her sneer-what some might call the sour grapes beneath her sour liver. Just speculating, of course, the way she speculates in her piece, but with a little bit more inside information.

It's really a story about a New York literary friendship that might have been but never was. In a way, it reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer's comic tales of rival scribes in the Warsaw writers club in the prewar period before Hitler destroyed the golden tradition of Yiddish writing. And Hitler, alas, may play a role here, too.

Both Ms. Merkin and I had books with Hitler in the title published last year. The title essay of her book, "Dreaming of Hitler: A Memoir of Self-Hatred," begins with an account of her recurring dreams as an adolescent of romantic encounters with Hitler. With a Harlequin romance-type Hitler: "His eyes were a piercing light-blue with tiny pupils, and he sported a perky, abridged mustache" (excellent adjective choice: "perky"). In Ms. Merkin's romantic dream encounters, after "a lot of gentle argument, of the sort two lovers might engage in," after Hitler strokes her hair affectionately, Ms. Merkin succeeds in convincing Hitler that he really shouldn't hate the Jews, or that he hated the Jews for the wrong reason-"and 6 million lives were about to be spared!"

I will forbear making any judgments about her dream, or the essay that follows in which she comes to reconnect with her Jewish roots after she takes time off from attending the Frankfurt Book Fair to make a brief, unsuccessful search for an ancestor's grave in the Jewish cemetery of Frankfurt.

But I would quarrel with what she presents as her explanation for Hitler's hatred of the Jews, since that is my expertise: Hitler explanations and the agendas behind them. She tells us that her explanation had "little to do with what I considered to be the pompous male line of thinking about the world, with theories of a humiliated post-World-War-I Germany or of an entrenched national anti-Semitism." I wonder if she includes in her condemnation of such "pompous" thinking the powerful thesis articulated by the late Lucy S. Dawidowicz in her landmark book The War Against the Jews . I guess Ms. Merkin probably would condemn it, so quaintly is it concerned with an exacting examination of the historical origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism. It seems that Daphne Merkin knows better than Lucy Dawidowicz, with her drearily rigorous historical concerns. Daphne Merkin thinks it's all about Hitler's daddy: "Having been fascinated by Hitler for years, I had read enough about his background to know that the real object of his fury was his father, Alois, who had beaten him with Teutonic conviction," she tells us. (In other words, Hitler's daddy spanked him too hard. Hmmmm … Let's not go there.) In fact, this is the widely discredited theory advanced by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good , her tract against corporal punishment, a theory whose shaky historical foundations, whose naïve and reductive theoretical logic I criticized first in a 1995 New Yorker article and then in my book.

Curiously, in the revised hard-bound version of Dreaming of Hitler , Ms. Merkin appends to her Hitler's-daddy explanation an abrupt parenthetical retreat from that claim: "Although I am not one of those who believe, as the analyst Alice Miller argued, that Hitler's genocidal impulse can be attributed to a single cause, such as child abuse." In fact, that's exactly what she does argue in the previous sentence: " I had read enough to know … that the real object of his fury was his father Alois, who had beaten him …"

A possible explanation for this contradictory insertion: She added this awkward parenthetical retraction after she read my critique of Alice Miller's naïve single-causation theory in The New Yorker in 1995. (The parenthesis does not appear in the original 1989 version of her story, published in Esquire.) By adding the parenthesis, she apparently hoped not to appear naïve historically while still somehow preserving her bad daddy thesis, but it doesn't quite add up.

But let's set aside this confusion and return to the Warsaw writers club-type comedy of literary manners. One evening last year, not long after Ms. Merkin's book Dreaming of Hitler had been published, and not long before my book Explaining Hitler was to be published, I got a call from my sometime phone-friend Jonathan Schwartz, the gifted radio man. Jonathan told me he was having dinner with his friend Daphne Merkin, and he decided he had to call me right there and then to suggest we get together. After all, he said, in so many words, Daphne and I had Hitler in common.

Charming as he is, I think Jonathan's well-intended enthusiasm made both Ms. Merkin and me slightly uncomfortable. There followed a period of phone-tag attempts at arranging a get-together, a series of rescheduling near-misses that then trailed off into the busy-ness of New York life, although I think the ball was last in my court, where I let it lie.

So there the matter rested until January, when her disdainful piece disparaging the chopped liver wars as "borscht belt" stuff appeared. One hears in that condescending "borscht belt" sneer the old German Jewish disdain for the vulgarity of more recent Russian Jewish immigrants and their delight in American popular culture. I guess to Ms. Merkin, Groucho Marx is a less authentic Jew than her kind, although in some respects I'd argue that even borscht belt fixture Shecky Greene is more authentically Jewish than someone who looks down her nose at Jewish popular culture as evidence of "ethnic nostalgia."

But there is one other Warsaw writers club-type moment I should mention here. One that took place while we were still playing phone tag. A report I got about Ms. Merkin's reaction to a review of my book in The New York Times . The report, from a pretty good source, said that the day the review came out, someone asked Ms. Merkin, "Did you read the rave review Ron's Hitler book got in The Times ?" According to my source, her reply was not exactly the warm surge of delight for a fellow writer who spent an arduous 10 years of his life wrestling with a difficult book. It was more along the lines of, No, I haven't read it (the review), and I'm not going to.

Hey, that's understandable. I've been there. I've felt Glückschmerz (the opposite of Schadenfreude : not joy at another's sorrow, but sadness at another's good fortune; Glückschmerz is a coinage of "Wanda Tinasky," the pen name of a now silent columnist for a Californian newspaper, The Anderson Valley Advertiser , in the 80's, a writer some have identified as Thomas Pynchon). Glückschmerz is a major writerly emotion, let's face it. I'm not condemning it, I'm just wondering whether a little more stringent and honest self-examination on Ms. Merkin's part might have revealed to the author of Dreaming of Hitler (the paperback edition of which did not appear to offer any quotes from a Times review) that her disdainful disparagement of the motives of the author of Explaining Hitler , might seem , at least to some, to derive from a case of displaced Glückschmerz . Or should we call it "Hitler envy"?