Before I get into the serious, depressing stuff, baby let me light your fire. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, one of my favorite singers, Mary Cleere Haran, is staging a glorious musical tribute to one of her favorite singers (and mine), the one and only Doris von Kappelhoff. Miss it only at the risk of being a little less sophisticated in life. Of course, if you don’t already know that Doris von Kappelhoff is Doris Day, then you already are. Catch up. Her melodious songs and sunny disposish have never been more desperately welcome than they are today, and Mary is the perfect lady of taste, imagination and charm to do them justice. Resurfacing from the cocoon of a cabaret hiatus that has kept her off the bandstand too long for my taste, she has turned, once again, into a moonlight butterfly nourished by a pink gel. Nothing could be finer for us all.

Before Oscar Levant called her a professional virgin, before four husbands and Mary Baker Eddy took their toll on her peace of mind, before rock ’n’ roll wiped out the Great American Songbook she loved to sing, and before she retired from her unique career as the No. 1 female box office movie star in the universe, Doris Day sounded like what I expect to hear if I ever get to heaven. A series of forgettable sex comedies produced by her third husband finally reduced that career to a Tinseltown footnote that doesn’t begin to honor her greatness. Fortunately, the memory is still alive and swinging on DVDs of Day’s early Warner Brothers musicals with scores by geniuses like Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, Harry Warren, Ralph Blane and others; countless albums that have become collector’s items; cabaret acts like Mary Cleere Haran’s; and CD’s like Sue Raney’s distinguished new tribute to Doris that is one of the best recordings of 2007. At Feinstein’s, you get a tasty Reader’s Digest condensed version of why this is important.

Today, at 83, the reclusive Doris spends a lot of time in her house by the sea in Carmel, Calif., in bed, sipping green tea and reading books on Christian Science, divorced from everything that doesn’t bark. She doesn’t listen to music or watch movies, especially her own. Every attempt to honor her at film festival events or concert-hall tributes is met with a firm no. So let’s be thankful to Ms. Haran for keeping her memory alive. She couldn’t possibly sing everything in the vast Doris Day catalog (she’s only got an hour!), but she makes every minute count. Material from movies (“I’ll Never Stop Loving You” from Love Me or Leave Me, “Put ’Em in a Box, Tie ’Em with a Ribbon” from her first film, Romance on the High Seas) and hit records (the novelty ditty “Shanghai”) is cleverly blended with sad biographical information that formed a dramatic counterpoint to her fresh, vitamin C appeal on the screen. The personal hardships (parental divorce, the train crash that shattered her dreams of a dance career, learning to sing along with Ella Fitzgerald records on the radio while her broken bones healed, four miserable marriages, the death of her only son from skin cancer) often seem to outweigh the high points (the segue from Les Brown’s band vocalist to world adulation) of a life spent in tears. Distilling the essence of a spirited muse who was her own worst enemy, Ms. Haran is witty enough to eschew sentimentality, even when she appears on the verge of tears herself. As with all of her shows, she works in parallels to her own life, but this time wisely keeps them to a minimum. Best of all, she keeps the music coming with the aid of pianist Don Rebic, ace bass player Chip Jackson, and the sensitive guitar clusters of Jim Hirschman. Two Rodgers and Hart masterpieces from Jumbo, “Little Girl Blue” and “Why Can’t I?” (sung in the film as a touching duet with Martha Raye), are the evening’s highlights. “Sentimental Journey” should satisfy the most demanding Doris Day fanatics. Even the calcified corn of “Que Sera, Sera” is tolerable, although I would have preferred “It’s Magic” or a few underrated gems like “Blame My Absent-Minded Heart,” “It’s You or No One” and “I’ll String Along with You.” But why carp? This is choice stuff, and a bountiful harvest of music worth hearing again. Doris sang just about every important song written during the 40’s and 50’s, so you have to draw the line somewhere. I could never draw a line around Mary Cleere Haran. Singing Doris Day finds her at the top of her game, but no matter what she does, she always reminds me of the old days when preview audiences filled in cards and dropped them into lobby boxes in movie palaces like Grauman’s Chinese—cards that read “Super-duper!” and “Give us more like this!” When I am fortunate enough to share some quality time with her vocal stylings in the candlelight of an intimate cabaret, I feel the same way.

Doris Day was one of the truly perfect women ever to grace the screen. She was smart, funny, warm, beautiful in a sunny, wholesome way and surprisingly, unfailingly sexy. She was such a natural and charismatic force that without a single acting lesson, she seized the screen from her very first appearance (in the 1948 musical Romance on the High Seas) and remained a superstar for 20 years, and she was-and still is-one of the really flawless singers of all time. Whatever unfair double life he led, Rock Hudson was, on the screen, the kind of scrubbed and dashing leading man that all the women wanted-and most of the men wanted to be. These two all-American icons made only three films together, but their place in the Hollywood Boulevard cement is forever stamped. There has been no team like them, then or since. Everyone connected with Down with Love is clueless about the wit, warmth and special glamour they brought to their films. Director Peyton Reed has tried to do for the Doris Day–Rock Hudson comedies what Todd Haynes did for the Douglas Sirk melodramas in Far From Heaven, but he's not even in the same ballpark as that brilliant and innovative, award-winning triumph. Down with Love is so contrived and scattered that the result is more like Bifocals Barbie Meets Wrinkle-Free Ken in a movie exploding with too much sparkle spackle. Ms. Zellweger was better suited as a bruised éclair like Roxie Hart, but as a pink and fluffy fashion victim with feminist roots that change from frame to frame, she looks like years of disco-dancing in stiletto heels are taking their toll on her dainty, arched feet. Mr. McGregor has played so many heroin addicts, poster boys for nudity camps and general scuzzballs that it comes as a shock to see him freshly shaved, with short hair plastered down with slickum, dressed for a Seagram's ad. Obviously he wants a new image, but he was pretty awful in Moulin Rouge, and as a hunky babe magnet in Down with Love, the miscasting overwhelms. Scrawny and pasty-faced, he's no Rock, or even Tab. The effect of too many parties is self-evident. He may not be ready to exchange dance steps for 12 steps, but a copy of the Big Book and a six-pack of Diet Coke can't be far behind.

An anemic yet overworked plot brings small-town librarian Barbara Novak (Ms. Zellweger) to New York from Maine, where she spent the winter writing a nonfiction book called Down with Love, dedicated to the unctuous theory that the key to happiness for women is casual sex without love, which will lead to equality and eventual empowerment in the bed and workplace. One appearance on the Ed Sullivan show and she's pushing John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage off the best-seller list-but to plug the book and stay on top, she gets nailed into about 100 fashion knockoffs from the 1960's (costume designer Daniel Orlandi is no Edith Head) and is forced to submit to a vicious profile by star journalist Catcher Block (McGregor) for a magazine called Know. Catcher is a lady-killer who sets out to prove that all women want the same things-love, marriage and the lollipop in his underwear-by getting the prim librarian into bed while pretending to be an astronaut with a ludicrous Southern accent. Nobody understands what made the Doris Day–Rock Hudson movies so popular and appealing in the first place, so in a desperate attempt to turn Down with Love into something their generation understands (which is cartoon imitations and technology), the filmmakers sand-blast the movie with filthy, stupid and really insulting jokes aimed at homosexuals and women, dated talk about chastity, split-screen bathtub sex like Pillow Talk that is flatter than Formica, two-pieced pink Jackie Kennedy windowpane plaid suits, a beatnik bongo party, polka dots that multiply and fuchsia sets the color of tutti-frutti malteds. It's a true indication of what's wrong with today's young filmmakers that a movie with this many visual distractions can also be so boring. In mincing support, David Hyde Pierce, as Mr. McGregor's boss, does the simpering Tony Randall role (mercifully, the real Tony Randall makes a welcome cameo appearance for no apparent reason), and the second-banana Eve Arden part goes to lisping Sarah Paulson, who is either a terrible actress or suffering from a serious speech impediment.

Down with Love is the kind of retro date movie where you overhear women gushing "I loved her turbans!" and guys groaning "He had a cool fireplace." But what kind of movie sends you away humming the lampshades? This one has the artificial color and creepy camp of vintage B movies and the smirking vulgarity of gender-bending lingerie ads. What it lacks in fatal doses is what Doris Day had plenty of-the kind of style that left her fully defined and the rest of us clamoring for more.

Two Left Feet

It had to happen. Encores!, the popular, usually exciting and always professional series of staged concert versions of old Broadway musicals at the City Center, finally came a cropper. Richard Rodgers' 1962 solo effort No Strings, the final Encores! show of the season, wasn't just disappointing: It was a head-on collision with a cement wall. One of the functions of these revivals is to interest audiences in what went wrong with these old shows as much as what went right. So the fact that No Strings is a naïve, dated and second-rate effort by one of the great legends of the American musical theater is practically an expectation, not a surprise. The sad and inexcusable part was the truly deadly direction and club-footed choreography by Ann Reinking. How else can you explain the torturous and repetitive dance steps that were embarrassing enough to be laughable? James Naughton, the star of the evening and a performer I admire enormously, is many things-actor, writer, director, singer, guitarist, cabaret artist-but Baryshnikov, he ain't. More than once, Ms. Reinking forced him to lift, turn, soar, clutch women to his chest who were twice his size, and hurl them spread-eagle across the proscenium. He looked like he was having a panic attack. Perfectly understandable, since the audience was having one for him. Everyone, that is, but Ben Brantley, whose rave review left everyone I know who saw this appalling production slack-jawed. So much for critical perception and the good old gray reliability of The New York Times.

No Strings is a show about a writer from Maine who, in the six years since winning a Pulitzer Prize, has lost track of both his talent and his reputation and settled for coasting through the party circuit in Paris. In a photographer's studio, he meets a black American model who is the daughter of a Madison Avenue bus driver, and they fall in love. She tries to rehabilitate him. He discovers that she is being lavishly "kept" by a wealthy old "mentor," even though the word "sex" has never been mentioned. They break up in a song. They make up in a song. In the end, he's headed back to Maine to write and she packs to go with him, then realizes she might be exchanging a privileged life of luxury and glamour for nasty old American bigotry and prejudice, even though the race card has never been played. They promise to write, but it's obvious they will never see each other again. What the heck. It was a fun time, full of cocktails and beach parties in St. Tropez and endless fashion shows, not to mention all those endless Richard Rodgers songs! Totally superficial, of course, but in 1962 the stars were Richard Kiley and the stylish and beautiful Diahann Carroll, and what else mattered? If nothing else, they had elegance and charisma. Mr. Naughton looked natty and virile, but he seemed to be suffering from an attack of Dutch elm's disease. I've seen him great; I've never seen him wooden. His co-star, Maya Days, from the pop world of Aïda and Rent, was sadly mismatched. Possessing neither Ms. Carroll's beauty nor her liquid way with a song, Ms. Days had a big voice, a small acting talent, and practically no idea what to do with her hands and feet. In their love scenes, it looked doubtful that they had even been introduced. Wandering around them in disjointed confusion was an impressive array of talents, all of whom appeared to missing the guiding hand of a badly needed director. Penny Fuller played a fashion editor from Vogue; Len Cariou was the old French millionaire with an accent he must have acquired at Le Drugstore; the wonderful Emily Skinner was a crude Oklahoma heiress named Comfort O'Connell; and Marc Kudisch was her flavor of the summer, who looked good in Bain de Soleil. The design was cool, the musicians were seated on platforms, the stage was lit by steel girders of blue lights, and the jazzy orchestrations were in keeping with Ralph Burns' original charts, featuring nothing but brass (i.e., "no strings" of any kind). But small pleasures could not camouflage the irrelevance of Samuel Taylor's dumb, dismal book, or the fact that this was Richard Rodgers' first show after the death of Oscar Hammerstein, and it shows in one forgettable, perfunctory song after the next. Most of all, nothing could save those cellophane characters from their own dead ends, onstage or in life. For all of its hidden passion and innuendo, No Strings was Sunday soup in a Brighton Beach heat wave, with all of the romance and allure of a collision of matzo balls.

Short List

As veteran New Yorkers grow older, the goals on our wish lists diminish. We compromise on things we used to crave-a new convertible every summer, a house in Nantucket, a meaningful relationship that lasts, a charge account at Le Cirque-and settle for Bobby Short. I don't think this Cole Porter icon, now in his 35th straight season at the Café Carlyle, knows how lucky he is. While everything else goes to the dogs, Bobby Short always stays the same. Almost everyone from his age group and musical persuasion is gone. He carries the torch where Mabel Mercer and Sylvia Syms left off. He illuminates it with his own special radiance and gusto. But don't take my word for it; experience this aging Wunderkind for yourself.

The Carlyle isn't the same, either. Chicken hash was the only thing on the insulting opening-night menu-a cheap, no-class ploy by the new management, and a dish that Mabel Mercer would have compared to hospital-cafeteria fodder. But brave the hash, anyway. It's worth it to see Mr. Short at the piano in such fine fettle, accompanied by eight excellent musicians who turn an ordinary cabaret evening into a concert revue. Whether he's singing the little-known verse to Harold Arlen's "I've Got the World on a String," or gliding on gossamer wings through familiar Cole Porter standards like "Looking at You" and "Just One of Those Things," Mr. Short takes each song and applies a lifetime of experience and musical savvy until he literally turns it inside out. He's the perfect person to peruse all the metaphors in "At Long Last Love"-after all, he truly knows the difference between Granada and Asbury Park, or a new Rolls and a used Chevrolet. As always, he surprises and thrills with material that is off the beaten track. "Love Like This Can't Last" by Billy ("Lush Life") Strayhorn is an electrifying ballad; a great Allan Jones song called "Tomorrow Is Another Day" (from the Marx Brothers comedy A Day at the Races) rocks the joint; and the raunchy "Empty Bed Blues" will turn a few faces bright red. With Basie licks, Tatum kicks, a voiceless Gravel Gertie, more matinee idol than usual, and his trademark drollery and spruce, Bobby Short is back for a couple of months. I don't know why he doesn't cut out all this nonsense and just move in forever. With Bobby in residence full-time, the Carlyle chef might even graduate to lobster.

It was a Sunday afternoon in May, and Ms. McKay, who is 19, strawberry-blond, button-nosed, dewdrop-lipped, and a startlingly precocious singer-songwriter you should hear from soon, was walking along the bridle path in Central Park. She wore a crisp pink overcoat, shiny black shoes and a red bow in the back of her hair, and she was talking exuberantly of Making It Big, in the way talented young people used to talk about Making It Big before, somewhere along the way, it became sadly uncool to do so.

"I used to run for office in high school just so I could see my name on the wall," she said. "It's wonderful to be noticed and have people like you, have people like you without even knowing you. I love that. You look at Don't Look Back and Dylan seems bored by it, but I-well, it's only been a few months. I love it, I love it, I love it."

It really has been only a few months. Singer-songwriters often spend years trekking around before anyone bothers to notice, but Ms. McKay (it's pronounced "Mi-KAI") appears to have plopped down from the clouds. Six months ago, nobody knew much of anything about her. But after a string of performances at places like the Sidewalk Café, an out-of-nowhere win at a songwriting competition, a hastily produced CD and a flattering write-up in Time Out New York , the chattering began. The other night, she played Joe's Pub, and though Ms. McKay was merely the opening act-taking the stage at the early-bird buffet hour of 7 p.m.-the room was as electric as a Saturday at midnight. Her mom, Robin Pappas, was there; her manager, Lach, was there; her growing coterie of fans was there; and the record-label suits were there, too-they, like everybody else, had been told about this girl they had, had, had to see, who looked like a 1940's movie star, banged the piano like a whirlybird, sang like Doris Day and penned couplets as divine as Cole Porter's.

And, that night, Ms. McKay wore a red dress like you're supposed to wear a red dress, and she was just-exciting. It's awfully easy to be cynical about the New York music scene these days, with its multiple pretenders and poseurs and the shaggy-haired rock crits jerkin' their Gherkins to the latest Stooges imitation, but Ms. McKay was not at all like that or them. She'd stepped out of a different orbit-she'd hardly listened to records made after Some Like It Hot was released-and yet she was no nostalgia act; she was as contemporary and connected as anyone, singing about the war and 'N Sync, for goodness' sake, and she was just ridiculously young. She was younger than Britney and Christina, and she wrote preternatural songs with titles like "I Wanna Get Married," with lyrics like:

I want to get married

I need to cook meals

I want to pack cute little lunches

For my Brady Bunches

Then read Danielle Steele

I want to partake

In bake sales for the classroom

I want to hear the sweet tune

Of Sally's little vroom-vroom

As she zooms around my broom

As I exhume the gloom

Of my shallow life.

"Oops, I Did it Again" it wasn't. She'd sung that song late last year at the Sidewalk, and you could have heard a sugar grain plunk into a cappuccino.

"I was just like, 'Come on!'" said Lach, who books the room. "That rhyme scheme-' zooms around my broom as I exhume the gloom ' and ending with ' my shallow life '-that's up there with McCartney and Costello as far as melodic lines. Or the Gershwins. And I'm like, 'Is she putting me on? Is she a 40-year-old midget?' No one's got this much. It's like she's out of the 40's or something. It's like Myrna Loy walked in."

Not long after, Lach signed on as Ms. McKay's manager, and he'd set about trying to make as many people as possible know who she was. The Joe's Pub show, on April 30, was her biggest yet, and the usually unflappable Ms. McKay confessed that she was nervous, even terrified, beforehand. "I couldn't talk to anybody," she said. "I went to the Starbucks and I almost missed my time to go on. And I'm a girl, so half of me was thinking about my hair."

The show-and the hair-went splendidly, however, and now the labels were calling all the time, offering money, studios, producers and the promise of the only thing Ms. McKay was really after: fame. Born in London to an actress and a director who split soon after-"England was too small for the both of them," she said-young Nellie moved to America with her mother and undertook an artist's daughter odyssey that began in Harlem ("I was a very weird kid"), crossed the country in a crowded VW Beetle bus ("We had nine cats and a dog") to Olympia, Wash. ("Wasn't very artsy") before finally returning East-to the Poconos, of all places. She rebelled against her mother's Dylan and Leadbelly records by listening to Eydie Gorme and Doris Day and the "whitest of white singers." But Mama, who'd graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and played parts in Chariots of Fire and Superman II , encouraged Nellie, made sure she had a piano to play, kept her surrounded by musicians and artists and influencers-in Harlem, she rented a room to everyone from a "gay opera singer from El Paso" to a "folk singer who was a closet Republican," she said-and, even early on, the kid wanted to be a star.

"Nellie is 10 times more talented than I ever was-and very smart," Robin Pappas said. "She knows what's got to be done to get ahead in this business. She's not afraid to dye her hair or wear red. Without being bogus, she pulls it off."

Still, as much as young Nellie wanted to be famous, she wasn't so sure how she'd get there. She'd gone to the Manhattan School of Music and studied jazz voice for a couple of years, then dropped out. ("I didn't feel like eating Chinese food and talking the shit all day. I always wanted to go out and be auditioning for something and making it," she said.) She'd gone out for acting roles and even dabbled in stand-up comedy. But she kept returning to music. It was probably inevitable; it was what she did best.

"When I was in sixth grade, instead of doing 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On', I did 'Whole Lot of Learnin' Goin' On'-I was like, ' This school's burnin'! Whole lotta learnin' goin' on! '-and I'd be kicking the piano, playing, playing, playing, and everyone would be there, smacking their gum-this was in Olympia-and I was like, 'Don't you guys get it? I'm a star !'" Ms. McKay said. "But I wasn't; I was just this geeky little four-eyes."

But now she's on the verge. There's a documentary film crew following Ms. McKay around; they want to make a Star Is Born kind of thing. She and Lach are trying to figure out which label to sign with. She gets compared to the obvious people-Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Diana Krall, Vanessa Carlton ("The chicks with pianos," she said)-but she is trying to cut her own path. She wants to be a pop star-even if, as she admits, the pop songs she writes "come out like something from 1937." She's undoubtedly capable of achieving niche fame, but she wants the whole deal: the cover-of-magazine fame, the buy-Mama-a-house fame. "A house?" Robin Pappas said. "It was a pink castle a couple of weeks ago."

And she's such a talent and so sure of herself that you won't bet against her. Ms. McKay's certainty isn't arrogance-at least it's not the unattractive kind of arrogance. It's the winning, old-time confidence you're supposed to have if you want to be a star, and you're 19 years old and wanted by everyone, and strangers who walk past you in Central Park stop and stare like they know you, even if they don't. Yet.

"I think it's such a shame when people are taken by surprise by fame," Nellie McKay said. "I just think they should quit then, and leave the playing field open for me. Because I really want it."

-Jason Gay

1. Stop pretending to adore The Osbournes . Yes, there is still a chuckle or two to be had, but after Sharon Osbourne admitted to Barbara Walters that she had mailed boxes of her own excrement to her adversaries, the show somehow lost its freshness. P.S.: Didn't you think Barbara, in her breathless attempt to be groovy and Osbourne-positive, was less than appropriately horrified by Sharon's poo-parcel admissions?

2. Join the Doris Day lobby. Liz Smith ( New York Post , Nov. 22) was 100 percent on the argent when she exhorted us all to make nuisances of ourselves until the Academy of Motion Pictures ponies up an honorary Oscar for multitalented, fresh-faced Doris. So much more than just another perky blonde, D.D. achieved the kind of multimedia cultural penetration that Madonna and J. Lo can only dream about-and had a great pair of gams, to boot! If you are about to dismiss this resolution as the drivelings of just another tired old AMC queen, then you are obviously overdue for a screening of Teacher's Pet , Calamity Jane , Pillow Talk , Move Over Darling , That Touch of Mink , Julie , The Pajama Game or any other of her chicly fresh blockbusters. Send excrement-free Doris petitions to 8949 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Calif., 90211.

3. Stop pretending you don't find President George W. Bush kinda hot. No matter what your persuasion, you have to admit that Dubya's earnest Texan big-daddy assertiveness and well-toned bod has a certain je ne sais fresh.

4. Stop picking holes in Michael Jackson! 2002 has been open season on the artist formerly known as the Gloved One. The poor thing gets all the accumulated flak that the press can't fling at other celebs because they're too scared of losing their access. So leave the freak alone-it's no skin off your nose!

5. Stop dressing like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver ! That goes for you and you and you. Previous exhortations in this column to reduce the slut quotient in your personal style have been met with rebellious indifference. I'm giving you one more chance to refresh your look: Rent the Scorsese classic, take a long, hard look at Jodie's hot pants and decide if you think they're wartime-appropriate. And while you're at it, stop pretending to be an expert on Middle Eastern affairs and support the country that gives you the freedom to flaunt yourself à la Jodie in Taxi Driver . Cancel any planned European vacations until they-France and Germany in particular-adopt a more U.S.-friendly tone.

7. Refresh your mind. Reread the books you read when you were young and stupid and didn't really understand what you were reading, but pretended to. I'm rereading the fetid and fabulous Nana by Emile Zola, and realizing how many of the unsavory nuances were lost on me in my youth.

8. Stop going to trendy yoga classes. That competitive über -trendy New York lunacy-not to mention New York Times honcho Howell Raines' apparent fascination with the practice-has taken the granola out of yoga. The frantic hoopla to get into ultra-hip yoga classes has me longing for a wildly unspiritual, shrill, you're-in-my-space-bitch, high-voltage Jane Fonda aerobics session (try the Lucille Roberts at 80 Fifth Avenue at 14th Street, 255-3999).

9. Get TiVo. If you are seeking genuine spiritual calm, you can only really find it with TiVo. This life-changing digital system, which costs a measly $12.95 per month, offers you a chakra-opening, commercial-free television reality devoid of the worldly cares which come from worrying about missing favorite shows. Jerry Springer , Dynasty reruns-all can be waiting alluringly for you when you return home after a tough day. Call 877-BUY-TIVO and discover the real meaning of Zen.

10. Monogram your life. Forget about L.V. and Y.S.L. and C.D.-this year it's all about you, so go ahead and refresh your garments and other artifacts with your initials. Muffy and Buffy gentiles should hit the Monogram Shop (various locations and www.themonogramshops.com), while Jews and homosexuals must take the chicer, less uptight, iron-on summer-camp name-tag route at NameLabels.com.

11. Why not refresh your stale-smelling apartment with a jasmine-honeysuckle-gardenia olfactory orgasm for the New Year? Wait until the steam heat is blasting, and then spray your radiators liberally with Kate Spade's new eau de parfum ($58 for 1.7 oz.). Inhale deeply.

12. Re gender refreshment: Feb. 25 is the Doris Day Animal Foundation Spay Day. Happy New Year!

Still, Mr. Updike sometimes writes about golf. He wrote the essay he calls "Golf in the Land of the Free" for the United States Golf Association's 1994 photographic compendium Golf: The Greatest Game , and he included it in More Matter , his 50th book, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on Sept. 28. It is his fifth nonfiction collection and it includes all manner of snippet, remark, introduction, speech, review and rumination from the past eight years. It includes several pieces written for in-flight airline magazines.

"I put in everything," said Mr. Updike.

"I get more requests to draw up lists of the best L.P.'s of the millennium," he said. "All these people with no sense of history don't seem to know that the millennium goes back to the year 1000 when there was no electricity, no L.P.'s, not even a movie theater. I think it's a great deal of calendar hype. I'll be glad when it's over and we're in the year 2000."

Mr. Updike is 67, and even though it's easy to place him as a public man in 1957, 1969 or 1975, here he is in 1999. And as a popular phenomenon, he said he feels a little out of place.

"I've gone from being a guy who used to see his books in drugstore racks and in airport racks and I don't see them there anymore," said the creator of onetime high school basketball starter Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom.

"In fact, they don't fit anymore in the airport racks because the so-called mass market size, I'm out of it. I'm in the quality paperback size, which is a bigger size. I never aspired to be a James Michener or a Stephen King, but I think it is a loss when you think you have almost no living contact with the mass of American readership, when you're read a little bit the way poets are read, by people in the trade, by rival poets. I see what people near me in airplanes read. Businessmen seem to have a firm grip on the latest Tom Clancy."

Mr. Updike pronounced "businessmen" as if it were two words, the way the word "basket-ball" used to appear. "The big bulky thrillers appeal to these deal-making men, power-wielding men."

He then explained how he wound up writing two articles for Lufthansa's in-flight magazine Bordbuch .

"Well, it was a very impressive magazine in fact, very sumptuous, the Vogue of in-flight magazines. Also, I find it hard to say No to Germans, no matter what they ask me. I feel we should all be nice to the Germans." It was hard to tell if that was Mr. Updike's offhand tribute to Bertelsmann A.G., the German media conglomerate that bought Mr. Updike's publisher, Random House."They tend to be nice to me," he said. "Germans pay well, and there's always a shadow of intellectual interest. And there is the slight comfort of writing words that will be translated, so it's like hiding or having a mask on in a funny way." Besides which, added Mr. Updike, "They read still. I believe they have the highest literacy rate-at any rate, proportionally to their size."

Mr. Updike said the novel in general "is hanging in by its fingernails. I'm a great believer in the novel as a mixture of a poem and a treatise, that is, it has some of the density and surprisingness of a poem, and some of the informational content of a treatise, and in my limited writing experience, there's nothing quite as deep down exciting as being in the middle of a novel."

Maybe being in bed once ran a close second. Does he think about life under the covers as much as he used to? "I think it's safe to say No," he said. "I think my interest did maybe peak some decades ago." He paused. "You know, in high school, Swinton High, there was this odd game where any sentence if you added the phrase 'between the sheets,' it became enormously funny." He chuckled. "Like, 'We're having an interview between the sheets,' or, 'I was playing golf today between the sheets.'

"The Spaniards have a saying that nothing is interesting except your own death, but I think Freud would insist that sex is interesting. Sex makes us do most of the things we do, makes us buy magazines, makes us play golf probably-it's all an attempt to make ourselves viable on the sexual market. Most of our enterprise, most of our education, getting a driver's license, getting a stockbroker's license-all that relates to sex."

Speaking of that, it seemed pertinent to bring up Doris Day, for whom he has expressed admiration in print. "I've been a great admirer of Doris Day ever since I was an adolescent and listened to her singing 'Sentimental Journey' on the local jukebox in I guess '45," he said. "And then when she was in the movies, those early musical comedies with Gordon MacRae, my affection deepened, and she's never done anything to lessen my affection."

Did he ever make contact with the movie star? "I think we had a brief correspondence," said Mr. Updike. "I once reviewed her alleged autobiography. I was so much a Doris Day booster that I called her agent a swindler and then he sued me, so in the course of the lawsuit-or maybe even afterwards-I did get a letter signed 'Susie Creamcheese' from Carmel, Calif., in a round confident handwriting that I took to be the real thing, the real Doris Day handwriting."

Hey! Had Mr. Updike, who worked with Tina Brown at The New Yorker , read her new monthly general interest magazine, Talk ?

"I haven't seen it yet," he said. Then his cadence brightened. "It physically exists, it's not just a piece of buzz in the air? There really is some paper with Talk on it? I don't think it's hit the local newsstands up here. I'll make an effort to see it. Although it sounds like it's very celebrity-focused, as if there isn't enough celebrity focus already."

These days, an observer expects certain tics from New York's up-and-coming fictionalizers. For instance, they tend to sing with one choir or another-the writing workshop circuit, the magazine-freelancer's ghetto, the artist's-colony brigade. They speak nonchalantly of publicity budgets, sales conference presentations, dust jacket photographs. And in the real dark night of the soul, they might be found at a keyboard, tapping out a story … "W-W-W-.-A-M-A-Z-O-N-.-C-O-M." (The marketing site's sales rankings are updated hourly.)

Brooks Hansen, though, does not participate in these activities. He cares about words. Sitting on a wooden bench in midtown Manhattan recently, his demeanor was that of a gentleman crossed with a precocious child. He went easy on the hand gestures. A copy of Perlman's Ordeal , his fourth book, was close at hand.

"I kind of regard the words as my enemies," he said. "Words and sentences are a little like dealing with grocery store carts-they always want to whiz off in their own direction and you have to maintain a firm hold on them to keep them going straight. That's how I feel about language."

He switched metaphors. "I prefer to treat words like they're made of wood. They should be used simply and firmly, and not a lot of stress should be put on them."

Known as a novelist of ideas, Mr. Hansen bristled at the notion that he is a "literary" writer. "I think that's flatly and demonstrably untrue. It's only on the basis of my content that you could think I was all that literary-because classical music, because esoteric ideas come up."

Perlman's Ordeal , published in early August by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is set in London in 1906. The novel concerns August Perlman, a specialist in "suggestive therapy"-hypnotism-whose entire belief system is threatened by the arrival in his clinic of a severely dehydrated schizophrenic teenage girl who's familiar with the lost city of Atlantis. That's the main thrust, although classical music, spiritualism, and opium figure in heavily.

Atlantis is not so exotic a journey for the 34-year-old author. His second novel, The Chess Garden , plies Swedenborgian philosophy and conjures the imaginary land of the Antipodes. When it was published by Farrar in 1995, some compared Mr. Hansen to Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, who happen to be his favorite writers. Riverhead Books published The Chess Garden in paperback, and it continues to be a hardy perennial, which is all authors and publishers really want.

Most "literary" writers, Mr. Hansen said, aren't telling stories so much as writing. "They enjoy words," he said. "They're describing. They belong to a tradition that probably rightly understands the novel to be a large elastic form that's there to catch not just the story they need to tell but everything their character happens to be thinking." David Foster Wallace, whose best-selling tome Infinite Jest fluttered in at 1,088 pages, is one of the elasticists.

"I think that page for page and in style, I have a lot more in common with Stephen Kingor Michael Crichton," said Mr. Hansen, "and I have a great deal more admiration for what those popular novelists are able to do than for other so-called literary writers."

"It seems to be the aim of the reader is to penetrate the psychology and the biography of the author, as if that's what fiction is, a document to be analyzed psychologically …," he said. Then he paused. "I have no biography."

Actually, he has. Thirty-four years old, Mr. Hansen grew up on East 79th Street, then went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, where he majored in philosophy and English and wrote a senior thesis called "The Thing About Heidegger." Now, the philosophy books have been pushed aside for sheet music. Mr. Hansen spends quite a bit of time at a Steinway upright piano playing Prokofiev, Schubert, Bach and Scarlatti. He is also a Mets fan.

His next novel takes place on the island of St. Helena, circa 1830. The premise? "Napoleon as houseguest," he said. "The value of setting stories in remote times and places is that it forces you to rely upon the most basic aspects of humanity-jealousy, lust. The story is all you have. If the story were set here, it may be swamped by irrelevant observations."

But now he's on to St. Helena. "I've got this particular idea which I am extremely passionate about. If someone were to ask me 'What do you do?' I'd much more happily say 'I write the Napoleon' than say 'I'm a writer.'"

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

After that, the song gets ridiculously gaudy. Mr. Petty goes on and on about this room at the top of the world while a bass starts thumping loud (bum-bum-bum ), and an electric guitar blares single chords like some old Queen song. Then Mike Campbell, one of Mr. Petty's longstanding sidemen in the Heartbreakers, plays a quick, sloppy guitar solo imitating (or mocking) a Richard Thompson Celtic Strat solo.

The music is both dumb and jubilant because of the wholehearted pathos in Mr. Petty's lyrics. Once you realize how many regrets you're carrying around, Mr. Petty's insistence that he "ain't comin' down" is touching. Most of us are smart enough to know that no one, save maybe Donald Trump, stays in the room at the top of the world for even the duration of a single night. Bless Mr. Petty for being dumb enough to think that he'll be up there forever.

Most of the songs on Echo (Warner Brothers), his latest album, concern the triumphs of losers. But listening, you feel neither equal nor superior to his characters, like the chick in trouble with the law who calls her mother-in-law for dough ("Swingin'"). Or even Mr. Petty himself, who goes "down hard like Billy the Kid" but gets up again. What you do feel is pleased that at least a handful of good-natured dumb clucks realize "you need rhino skin to pretend you're not hurt by this world" ("Rhino Skin"). Mr. Petty rips through 14 songs about losers without betraying bitterness, and only slips on the 15th song, "One More Day, One More Night." In that one he whines, "No one taught me how to be on my own." It's the only moment when Mr. Petty is a crybaby. On the rest of Echo , he is a man humbled by bad luck, bad decisions and bad karma, and still dumb, or brave, enough to stay in the ring.

It's not necessarily an insult to call Tom Petty a dumb blond. He was born in Gainesville, Fla., in 1952 and considers himself a Southerner, once singing, "There's a Southern accent where I come from … the Yankees call it dumb." He followed his inspiration to become a rock star after seeing Elvis Presley filming Follow That Dream in 1961, and since 1976 has recorded pretty good shopping-mall rock with his pretty good band the Heartbreakers, writing pretty good songs like "American Girl" and "Don't Do Me Like That." But Mr. Petty has reached a plateau with his new, very good album. He has the dumb courage to realize what sophisticated singers would never be caught admitting: "The mistakes I've made will follow me into the grave" ("This One's for Me").

To now compare Tom Petty to Doris Day will seem a stretch. What do they have in common other then blond hair? Dumbness.

Doris Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1924. Her music was dumb in the 40's and 50's, and sounds even dumber in 1999. But to call Ms. Day a dumb blonde is problematic; the phrase implies she was sexually available and naïve, and Ms. Day was (and is) anything but. Columbia is about to release a 48-track celebration of her music, Golden Girl (The Columbia Recordings 1944-1966) , and even a cursory listen will reveal Ms. Day as the most virginal female singer ever recorded. Well, not "virginal"–innocent. Basically, Ms. Day served the national duty of being the Pied Piper, leading post-World War II maidens into marriage while revealing not a clue about what to expect on or in or under the marriage bed.

When Ms. Day goes to bed, she sleeps alone, telling her pillow how much she wants to get married ("Pillow Talk"). In "A Guy Is a Guy," Ms. Day tells how a guy is following her up the stairs, which has a sinister 90's slasher-flick vibe. Don't worry, all he wants is a good-night kiss. But if the guy is a guy , he wants more, right? Of course not! After they peck, Ms. Day goes to her ma, who goes to her pa, and the next thing we know the guy is following the singer down the aisle as if a good-night kiss is grounds for a shotgun wedding.

All these songs are dumb–but dumb in a good way, like Mr. Petty's Echo . Before I tell you why, hear Ms. Day's first big hit–"Sentimental Journey," released in January 1945–in historical terms. This lovely song is not about marriage; it's about taking a sentimental journey back home. Now what does a 19-year-old girl (Ms. Day's age when she sang it) know about sentimentality? The song is just a pretty piece of blankness unless you consider the month it came out. The Allies were winning in Europe and had Tojo on the run in the Pacific. Hope was in the air. American boys would soon be taking a "sentimental journey" home.

There's no way for us "postmoderns" to imagine how sincere the now-dopey-sounding naïveté of those days was. Certainly when the grunts returned from Vietnam no one sang about a "sentimental journey." And in the 30-odd years since the end of Oliver Stone's war, naïveté and innocence have ceased to exist in America's cosmology. Only dumbness remains. Not even children are innocent–i.e., school shootings, Internet porn, "homosexual" brainwashing by Teletubbies (or so says Jerry Falwell). Listening to dumb Doris Day becomes a necessary postmodern delight. On Golden Girl , Ms. Day sings "Ain't We Got Fun?," a great dumb song with a corny choir in the background. The answer back in 1953 is Yes! The answer in 1999 is a resounding No.

The one Day song that everyone knows is "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)." You know how it goes. The narrator remembers asking Mom, "What will I be when I grow up?" Rich? Poor? A Jedi knight? And Mom answers, "The future's not ours to see. Que sera, sera …"

Now, a mom can give that kind of la- di-da spin to her kid, but it's just a cop-out, because as another dumb guy once sang, the future's uncertain and the end is always near. Not that you can bear Doris Day any ill will for one false song. She was pre-Tet offensive, pre-Watergate, pre-AIDS, pre-trench coat mafia. Her music gives us the archeological experience of innocence, while Tom Petty sits in his room at the top of the world and forgives us for all the dumb things that went wrong in our lives. It's dumb, but it feels good.