Parker's place and the offending highrise next door (Photo from DNAinfo)

Although Harold Ross' home may soon find a new loving owner, it seems that a residence belonging to his friend and colleague Dorothy Parker will meet a more tragic fate. An Upper West Side home, located at 214 West 72 Street, where the author and literary critic lived as a child, may soon be demolished, DNAinfo reports. The home suffered heavy damage during the construction of The Corner, a massive highrise recently erected next door.

Apparently amidst The Corner's construction, a wall of Parker's former home was punctured, this adding to cracking plaster and a flood-prone basement. The landlord is using this as the perfect opportunity to replace the four-story rowhouse with a 12-story apartment building. Was New York so crazy during Parker's time?

While some Parker enthusiasts and literary aficionados lament the plan, others say that the home is of little historical import. The author lived in several New York homes throughout her life, many of which have been better preserved. Parker lived in the building on West 72nd Street only for a few years as a child, and apparently had very unhappy memories of the place. Marion Meade, an Upper West Sider who penned a biography of Parker explained the context to DNAinfo:

The writer's mother died while she was living in the West 72nd Street house, and Parker, who later attempted suicide and struggled with alcoholism, spent her entire life trying to overcome the trauma, Meade said.

The Parkers moved out of 214 W. 72nd Street because it carried too many bad memories, according to Meade.

Nonetheless, Dorothy Parker was one of the most significant characters in New York's Jazz age literary scene, and historians will likely put up a fight over the building. In any case, the conflict gives us just one more reason to hate the neighborhood-consuming highrise that is The Corner.

eknutsen@observer.com

Algonquin Round Table Walking Tour, Sunday, May 13, Algonquin Hotel lobby, 59 West 44th Street, 11:45 a.m.

As Dorothy Parker famously remarked, "One more drink and I'll be under the host."

But there's also food, an even bigger draw. Mr. Flay traveled around the country for over a year, researching regional American cooking for a television series. Now he's serving his version of these dishes at Bar Americain, using only homegrown ingredients.

It's been 14 years since Mr. Flay introduced New Yorkers to his dazzling take on Southwestern food when he opened Mesa Grill downtown. He followed this success with Spanish cuisine at Bolo in the Flatiron district, and last year he opened a branch of Mesa Grill at Caesar's Palace. (Is there a celebrity chef left who hasn't yet notched his belt with a restaurant in Las Vegas?)

Bar Americain's 200-seat dining room, designed by David Rockwell in the premises that used to be Judson Grill, is airy and open. It has a curved bronze ceiling like an airplane hangar, and a raw bar in front of an open kitchen where you can see Mr. Flay himself directing the action. Light fixtures six feet in diameter hang like giant drums above 30's-style round banquettes upholstered in rust-brown leather. The floor is covered with diamond-patterned tiles-white, gold, orange and charcoal-that wrap up to become the front of the bar.

Tables for two, set along the walls, are narrow so more can be fit in, but they get extra space on the length. This isn't a success: You're so far from the person sitting across from you that it's hard to hold a conversation without shouting. The tables in the back near the kitchen are quite claustrophobic; people sitting on the outside get to stare at a blank wall, those on the inside get only a partial view of the dining room, obscured by wooden separators placed along the banquettes.

One day at lunch, the restaurant was packed solid. Two businessmen sitting at the next-door table in the back of the dining room were getting impatient. One of them finally became irate and called over one of the managers. "Just give us the bill and we'll go," he said. "We've been waiting for our food for 50 minutes."

"Forty minutes," corrected the manager.

The ensuing argument over exactly how many minutes the men had been waiting after their order was punched in was interrupted by the arrival of their lunch. Grudgingly, they decided to stay.

I imagine it would be hard to remain angry for long after you tasted the food Mr. Flay is serving at Bar Americain. (I didn't have to wait for mine; I was recognized-but nevertheless, I never received a breadbasket.) His dishes are executed not only with flair and wit, but also with a flawless hand for seasoning and combining ingredients, beginning with the wonderful shellfish cocktails. I chose a tasting of all three ($19). They're served in glasses lined up on a plate: lobster in a creamy dressing tossed with chunks of avocado, two shrimp with a sharp tomatillo sauce, and crabmeat and coconut with diced mango.

I nearly didn't order the tuna tartare, because it's been worked to death in so many restaurants. I was glad I changed my mind. The tuna is cut in chunks, subtly spiced and shaped in a patty garnished like a traditional steak tartare with capers, finely chopped onion and hard-boiled egg, served with grilled country bread. It's outstanding. At lunch, red snapper comes with soft tortillas and a trio of salsas; you place a filet on a tortilla, top it with a lemony coleslaw and some salsa, and roll it up. Delicious.

A tasting of Kentucky ham is a witty concept, too, showcasing the ham in three different ways. It comes on a long plate divided into sections: Slices are served with pear chutney and micro greens, layered with mozzarella, and tucked inside a small biscuit spread with honey mustard.

Mr. Flay presents American ingredients at their best and spices them in ways that bring out rather than mask their flavor. Smoked trout from Carolina comes with a tart vinaigrette made with meyer lemons; a griddle cake is made with crawfish and Dungeness crab, with basil and a red-pepper relish. Wild salmon, on a bed of cracked wheat and hazelnuts, is complemented by a glossy pinot noir sauce. Skate is served with smoked chili butter instead of the usual beurre noisette, with capers, tarragons and crisp hominy grits.

Duck cooked two ways-a crispy leg and rare breast-is also very good, with dirty wild rice (a bit gummy) and a dark, sweetish bourbon sauce.

There's a choice of four steaks on the menu (under the heading "The Steaks"). To go with them are side dishes such as creamed corn with green chilies, a cauliflower gratin made with goat cheese instead of Kraft cheddar, and hot potato chips with blue cheese.

Pastry chef Vicki Wells' desserts include a sublime peach tart on a thin, buttery crust topped with peach sorbet and delicate strawberry-rhubarb crêpes. The blackberry soufflé is a triumph.

Bar Americain provides a fine context for Mr. Flay's clever ideas and interesting food. It's also a nice place, to paraphrase Robert Benchley, to take off your raincoat and slip into a dry martini.

Wednesday 7th

Cars and gals: Volvo , which was the car of choice for socially conscious New Yorkers before they all said "screw it" and put down for the S.U.V. , hosts awards today for unsung heroes -people nominated by their local communities for making a difference, with the winner getting $50,000 donated to the charity of her choice. It all goes down in Times Square , the city's great big tourist bug-zapper. Jim Belushi emerges from hiding to host; your panel of judges includes Paul Newman (great actor!), Maya Lin (great architect!), Eunice Kennedy Shriver (great gams!), Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (great advocate for N.Y.C. schools!) and Bill Bradley (he was available). Meanwhile , designer Kate Spade packs husband/designer Andy Spade into one of her pert purses and strikes a dainty pose at the National Arts Club, where InStyle (Time Inc.'s big mooing cash cow) hosts a fête launching Ms. Spade's happy three-book series: Style , Manners (neither of which we have) and Occasions (which we also don't have, because we lack the first two). Meanwhile, Soprano Jamie-Lynn DiScala , who has the Heidi Fleiss grimace down in that new TV movie, Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss , hops off the cover of this month's FHM to helm a party celebrating 40 years of Ford Mustang . She co-hosts with Anne Heche, whose career was hotter when she was a lesbian , before she became a Smuggie ….

[The Volvo for Life Awards, Times Square Studios, 44th Street and Broadway, 7 to 11 p.m., 612-338-3900; Kate Spade book party, National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.,

212-522-8349, by invitation only; Ford Mustang's 40th-anniversary party,

Manhattan Automobile Company, 787 11th Avenue, 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.,

212-843-8040, by invitation only.]

Thursday 8th

Eric Stoltz's voice mail says, "You have reached the voice-mail box of Eleanor Roosevelt! Please leave a message!", so we asked him why. "I just always loved Eleanor. I adore all the Roosevelts, but Eleanor especially," he said. Tonight he's part of an annual reading of Dante's Inferno at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. "We're reading the Inferno on Maundy Thursday, which is actually the day that the book took place on, for all your perverse Dante fans who think that's important," said Mr. Stoltz. "I love doing spoken-word things and listening to spoken word and reading things-I'm a big fan of words in general." Look at Mr. Smartypants ! He's also in Sly Fox , co-starring Richard Dreyfuss , Bronson Pinchot and Elizabeth Berkley . "It's a big ole Broadway cast, and it's not a musical-very rare these days," he said. We heard that Cameron Crowe promised him a role in every film he makes. "It's true! I guess it all started since I worked with him on his first movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High . I just had this instinct that he would make a really wonderful director, and I kept nudging him toward that. And, out of obligation or duty or appreciation, that came about." Meanwhile, several blocks west, the Friends of Harlem Dowling are benefiting from its All-Star Gala as Patti LaBelle belts, the president of the N.B.A. Players Association, William Hunter , avoids Kobe questions, and the incredible shrinking Al Roker (is it just us, or is getting your daily weather report like watching Stephen King's Thinner ? ) reminds you to wear your gaily-printed Easter-season galoshes tomorrow.

[Dante's Inferno Marathon, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, 9 p.m. to midnight,

212-316-7540; Friends of Harlem Dowling All-Star Gala, Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street, 7 p.m., 212-531-5305; Sly Fox opens tomorrow, Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, 8 p.m., 212-239-6200.]

Friday 9th

If you've seen Secret Window , you know that the secret is that it sucks . So after your nooner with the girl from marketing (highlights, French-manicured toes) , scurry to Yorkville Library for a screening of High Noon and a feast of Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly . For those Nerve gals who still think men in 2004 want sluts for girlfriends, there's a Great American Amateur Striptease Contest at Webster Hall. (Note to the ladies : This trend of taking striptease classes in an effort to turn on your boyfriends? Honey, the whole appeal behind the striptease is that someone else is doing them, a'ight? He already knows what you look like naked.) That said, leave your boyfriend at home tonight unless you're prepared to see him reach "high noon."

[ High Noon , Yorkville Library, 222 East 79th Street, 3 p.m., 212-744-5824; Amateur Burlesque, Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, 10 p.m., 212-353-1600.]

Saturday 10th

Dueling street festivals! The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center , whose name takes too long to say, sponsors the annual Greenwich Avenue Summer(?!) Festival. Watch everyone bust out the Birks and flip-flops too early and pad amongst the antiques, pottery, chunky jewelry, food stalls ( burp !) and "ephemera" (which is how we refer to ex-boyfriends). Ten blocks or so north , there's the higher-strung 23rd Street Spring Festival -or Stress-tival, more like, with the continuous entertainment, Smuggie moms with double-wide strollers and inevitable people offering back rubs to those who find it relaxing to straddle an apparatus for 10 minutes in public while a total stranger digs her elbows into your vertebral column and asks every 30 seconds, "You like?"

[LGBT Greenwich Avenue Summer Festival, Greenwich Avenue between Sixth Avenue and West 12th Street, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., 212-620-7310; 212-764-6330; 23rd Street Spring Festival, 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues.]

Sunday 11th

Easter Sunday, and New Yorkers of the Christian faith gather in churches while some spill out into Central Park for Tavern on the Green's Easter Eggstravaganza . There's an egg hunt -or as the French like to call it, " une chasse des oeufs " -where Brearley-, Trinity-, Chapin- and Spence-bound tots elbow and clothesline each other as characters from Alice in Wonderland entertain with magic tricks, face-painting and balloon-sculpting (Alice will occasionally steal behind a large boulder to smoke). The Mad Hatter's Easter Bonnet Contest has four new categories: "Loveliest Little Lady Hat," "Best Boy Bonnet," "Cutest Canine Cap" and "Kitschiest Kitty Bonnet." "We started that last year, and it was a hoot!" hooted Shelley Clark , the spokeswoman. "Last year, there was this wonderful little pug that came with a bonnet with a veil and pearls …. People take this really seriously! The person that got the grand prize of a thousand dollars last year was not the crowd favorite, and she-I think it was a teenage girl-and the person everyone wanted to win almost came to fisticuffs!" Make that mimosa a double ….

[Tavern on the Green's Easter Eggstravaganza, Central Park West and 67th Street, 12:30 to 4 p.m., 212-873-3200.]

Monday 12th

April's always the cruelest month if you're a poet , and today the Authors' Guild toasts The New Yorker 's poetry editor, Alice Quinn , who's held that title for 17 years and thus has the right to refer to "Mr. Shawn." Also getting a glass raised in his direction is former poet laureate Robert Pinsky . (He's translated Dante-what the heck have you done lately?) For those who don't scan, Alicia Keys, Missy Elliot and Beyoncé perform at Madison Square Garden.

[Authors' Guild Foundation 12th Annual Benefit Dinner, the Metropolitan Club, 1 East 60th Street, 6.30 p.m., 212-594-7931; Verizon Ladies First Tour 2004, Madison Square Garden, 7 p.m., 212-307-7171.]

Tuesday 13th

The round table is empty and the cigars have gone cold, but Dorothy Parker -the Eve Ensler of the Jazz Age-is brought to life by prime-time moms Edie Falco , Cynthia Nixon and others at a benefit in a Tribeca loft. Isaac Mizrahi, who will be at the reading, told us that along with Shakespeare's sonnets, Miss Parker is his favorite bedside reading, but that he was disappointed that "she was a reluctant slapper -only 90 percent of what could have been. I suppose that's what upsets me about myself: that I can't fully bring myself to be the sinning bitch I'd like to be." Or you can steal off to Brooklyn to catch Bill Murray -he wuz robbed on Oscar night, we tell ya!-being chatted up by the dreadlocked New York Times movie critic, Elvis Mitchell .

[What Fresh Hell Is This?: Performing Dorothy Parker to Benefit the Drama Department, Tribeca Rooftop, 2 Desbrosses Street, 7 p.m., 212-633-9108; An Evening with Bill Murray, B.A.M., 30 Lafayette Avenue, 9:30 p.m., 718-636-4100.]

Wednesday 14th

Benefits in bloom! First up, a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at Asprey. On your way downtown, buy some crimson lippy or simply hop into several fountains, because the theme for the TriBeCa Ball will be La Dolce Vita . Prince Charles is the committee's Royal Patron, but since black tie is optional , it's clear that he and the coltish offspring will be tending to more important matters across the pond. The usual suspects abound , stumbling across Gotham Hall's dance floor, and the other half will be found at the New Yorker for New York Awards at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Walter Cronkite will be honored, among others. Have you had enough? Slip out of your wet frock and check out the first performance of Neil LaBute's The Distance from Here . Wannabe siren Anna Paquin stars.

[The Committee for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Bill Bernback Memorial Dinner, Asprey, 725 Fifth Avenue, 6.30 p.m. by invitation only; TriBeCa Ball, Gotham Hall, 1356 Broadway, 7 p.m., by invitation only; New Yorker for New York Awards, Waldorf-Astoria, 7 p.m., by invitation only; The Distance from Here , the Duke, 229 West 42nd Street, 8 p.m., www.MCCTheater.org.]

The Algonquin, of course, is the dowager queen of West 44th Street, more storied than any other theater-district hotel. But if the new owners are to succeed where its other eager buyers have failed in making the Algonquin a player in the luxury-hotel market, they've got to resolve the same dilemma that has proved insoluble to its previous modern-day owners: how to give the old hotel a new profile without alienating the old guard of returning guests entranced by the Algonquin's place in the intellectual history of the city?

Doing so is not simply a matter of preservation, either. Again and again, each of the buyers who've taken over the Algonquin since 1987-the Aoki Corporation in 1987, Olympus Real Estate of Dallas, and now Miller Global Properties of Denver-have painted, restored, plaqued, put up the Round Table drawings, cleaned the carpet, pointed out the cat, reminded guests where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and Harpo Marx once sat, booked the kind of cabaret that couldn't be beat, tried to improve the menu, cleaned up the rooms and added new lighting.

But a certain split always existed at the Algonquin, located near the Paramount and across from the Royalton. The hotel was cleaned up and tarted up, the Oak Room was remade, the Rose Room derosed, the Blue Bar was moved. And 40 percent of the hotel's revenue was still coming from returning guests who wanted to come to the Algonquin-Eudora Welty's Algonquin, the hotel where William Shawn dined on Cheerios and Preston Sturges died in his room. And the new onslaught of New York tourists were a little … bewildered, maybe even weirded out by the place. Was it a museum or a hotel?

When Miller Global Properties, an investment partnership that runs five real-estate funds, bought the Algonquin (for $40 million, according to a source close to the deal) in June, they clearly believed that it would be the latter, and a good business. That may be possible, but the old management at the hotel-which believes it has seen it all-have begun to leave. The whiff of change in the air at the Algonquin has already alienated six senior managers, who have been gone since June.

"There is definitely a cultural difference as to how they are going to operate the hotel," said Mr. Mills. "You've got a company that's coming into New York for the first time, and although they say they're looking to embrace the historical aspects of the hotel, they want to show off their value."

Although employment offers were made to the entire Algonquin staff-a stipulation that was written into the seller's contract-Geoffrey Mills, along with five other members of top management, declined. "The offer wasn't commensurate with the type of package that was there prior to the transition," Mr. Mills said. "There was no job security."

The new owners say they'd like to keep as much of the staff as possible. Many of the Algonquin staff have been around for generations and have warm relationships with returning guests, who represent a source of revenue that will have to be maintained even as change knocks on the Algonquin's door.

Bell captain Mike Lyons, for instance, knows a lot about various guests' particular quirks and requests. There is the gentleman who has to have room No. 701 every year. "It's the smallest room in the hotel," Mr. Lyons said, standing at his post in the Algonquin lobby. "If I gave him a suite, he'd refuse it."

Mr. Lyons-who started, at age 18, as a back elevator operator-also remembered other guests who won't be providing future revenue, but who comprise the cultural repository that is the Algonquin. For instance, he remembered Ella Fitzgerald, who often brought back Chinese food for the staff after a gig. "Then on Sunday morning she'd call down and say, 'Mike, bring me up some ice cream,'" Mr. Lyons said. "We'd bring her nine scoops, because that's how many flavors we had then. She'd eat it while she watched TV.

"James Thurber was blind when he started coming here. He was a real nice man. E.B. White was … I guess he was O.K.," Mr. Lyons said, loading luggage into a tour bus in the 90-degree heat.

Thornton Wilder "never walked, he ran. Once, we got him a checkered cab and put all his luggage in it. When he came down, he ran in and then went right outside the other door. He forgot that he had his car parked in the garage."

Mr. Lyons and the other Algonquin employees will be targeted in the focus groups, their verbal histories converted into product knowledge for the distant owners of the new Algonquin.

While the move to balance business clients with returning regulars is being aggressively renewed, the tactics are not entirely new. Under the last three owners at least, the Algonquin's competitive strategy has inevitably boiled down to two tactics: renovating infrastructure and services-dependable elevators were installed in 1991; a new telephone system was put in last year-and highlighting the Algonquin's past.

Miller Global Properties, on the other hand, has American hotel holdings that don't extend beyond a Marriott Residence Inn in Alexandria, Va. It has hired Destination Hotels & Resorts, the Denver-based management company that runs 24 high-profile resort properties all over the country, including Jack Nicklaus' favored Palm Coast Golf Resort, the Gant ski resort in Aspen, Colo., and the Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston, S.C. They're used to handling business clients and wealthy families on ski and golf trips-but what about the crew in from Palm Beach for a week of Broadway plays that wants to remember, reminisce and spend some late nights in the Blue Bar?

While Miller Global Properties Fund intends to fashion a 21st-century hotel-from the interiors to Internet access-and make it more appealing to business travelers (the hotel industry's most demanding and free-spending clients), the company has said it won't leave the veterans behind. "The Algonquin has typically attracted the leisure traveler, who tends to come for weekends and special events," said Allen Goodman, regional vice president of sales and marketing for Destination Hotels & Resorts.

In hotel math, business travelers are the foundation of occupancy rates, which only recently have returned to pre-9/11 levels. Room rates, however, are still down in the city, according to John Fox, a hotel industry analyst for PKF Consulting. "The tourists have come back, but the business travelers haven't," Mr. Fox said. But it is the tourists who are still lured by the hotel's literary ghosts: Mrs. Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert E. Sherwood, Herbert Bayard Swope, the playwrights who managed to self-promote their wit into the newspapers, the New Yorker crew, William Faulkner. Even the hotel's owner, Frank Case, became a celebrity.

Over the last few years, the Algonquin has seen more pressure to leave these ghosts behind-along with its generation of fat, legendary cats who roamed the lobby as if they owned it (because they did: Matilda, the current lobby cat, apparently is hanging on through the new ownership and, emblematic of the recent shift, even got her own e-mail account last week)-as the block between Fifth and Sixth avenues was transformed into a new bastion of luxury hotels complete with 24-hour fitness centers, such as the Sofitel, and European-style boutiques that boast "300-count linens" and Frette bathrobes.

But few other hotels are as dependent on their own historic weight as the Algonquin, which felt like a Peter Arno cartoon, particularly after a couple of highballs. Hence the New Yorker cartoon wallpaper; the framed Al Hirschfeld illustrations in the Blue Bar; the Parker and Thurber suites; the purchase of a new "Round Table" (no one knows where the original one went). And the hotel continues to draw patrons and matrons with some weight: There have been Hillary sightings at the Blue Bar, Mario Cuomo likes to come by, and Rudolph Giuliani often ate breakfast in the dining room while he was Mayor-although one morning last December, the Mayor walked in on Michael Bloomberg and former Mayor David Dinkins, took one look and swiveled out.

It's the returning guests who can make any even minor change appear monumental-and force owners to tread lightly. When even the most basic updates were attempted in the past, the owners were deluged with letters, postcards, telephone calls and e-mails. One guest once wondered if offering 24-hour room service-a pretty standard accommodation in any first-rate hotel-and putting bars in the guest rooms (as opposed to the suites) was "historically correct," Mr. Mills said. The guest was "afraid because the Algonquin had never made a point of pushing room service, because the idea was to always have guests in the lobby."

Cuisine has been another sensitive issue. "We tried to have an American Continental menu, but sometimes the chef would get creative and come up with something like Thai-infused chicken with coconut milk," Mr. Mills said. "People would say, 'That's not what the Algonquin would have served 30 years ago.' My reply was that we can't do everything for history's sake."

As for the Blue Bar, the drink list became accompanied by helpful who's-who descriptions for those needing to brush up on their Algonquin trivia. Someone ordering a Woollcott, for example, will be reminded that the Round Table member also had a day job as the Times drama critic.

A year after Frank Case's death in 1945 the Algonquin appeared to be finished, but the hotel was sold to Ben Bodne in 1946. Bodne was a Southern oil magnate who bought the hotel as a gift for his wife, who said that it reminded her of her hometown, Charleston, S.C., and his family held onto it until 1987, when it finally yielded to the exploding New York economy. First, the Japanese Aoki Corporation bought it. Then, in 1997, Olympus Real Estate of Dallas bought it; management was left to the Atlanta-based Camberley Hotel Company. In June, Miller Global purchased the Algonquin despite the languishing economy. (According to Mr. Mills, the hotel was performing "at or better than market.") As usual, P.R. sheets reveling in the hotel's history were sent to the newspapers after each purchase, insisting that the new owners-or at least the copywriters for the P.R. firms-understood the tradition they had bought into.

Rotating absentee owners aren't anything new at 59 West 44th Street, and it's impossible to know whether Miller Global will have a similar abbreviated tenure. "We need to get to know the hotel before we can design a program," said Destination president Charles Peck, sounding a little like the conquering capitalist forces in a Kaufman and Hart comedy, speaking over the telephone from Sun Valley, Idaho. "You can't make educated guesses until you've really spent some time in the place." Mr. Peck said that over the next several months, his management team would organize "focus groups" with guests and the Algonquin staff in order to develop an improvement plan that would probably "run several million dollars in the short term …. We'll have a very proactive program to ask guests what they like and don't like through questionnaires and informal contact, things of that nature."

There's definitely a long-running play in this somewhere.

Ken Widmaier, a vice president at Destination who will be interim general manager at the Algonquin, said the focus groups (95 percent of which will be held at the hotel itself) will focus on ways to market the hotel to meeting planners and regular business travelers, but also on "customers not staying at the property"-that is, patrons of the Blue Bar.

"Every function will have a boardroom-type setting, with hors d'oeuvres, wine and non-alcoholic beverages," Mr. Widmaier said. "We'll incorporate the input from the focus groups into a capital plan."

Destination has also hired a marketing director, who begins work later this month, and a P.R. firm has been tapped to advertise for the Algonquin through direct mailings and brochures with a "fresh new look," according to Mr. Goodman.

Previously, P.R.-such as there was-was handled in-house by Barbara McGurn, who first visited the hotel in 1942 and describes her job at the Algonquin as "wearing many hats." She books music for the Oak Room and hosts the Tea and Tour program. In October, Ms. McGurn will organize a poetry event in honor of the Algonquin's and The Times [of London] Literary Supplement 's joint centennial. "I think it would be wonderful to have an American read Sylvia Plath and a Brit read Ted Hughes," she said. "But maybe that's too controversial."

She'll have to ask the boys over at Miller Global Funds what they think about it.

-with additional reporting by Noelle Hancock

But it turns out that it isn't so easy to get a permit for a fire from the town authorities. It turns out that some of my party are unwilling to defy the law or test the local patrolmen. Aren't the police at their own celebrations? Shouldn't the authorities be nail-biting over Y2K and running drunks to the hospital rather than plaguing innocent citizens who simply want a fire to warm the hands and send a timid signal to the Deity? Some of my party remind me that it will be bone-breaking cold outside. Some of my party prefer to celebrate in warmth. "You can have a fire in the fireplace," one tried to soothe me. Some, and I really sympathize with their point, find the gesture of freezing on the beach romantic in the worst sense of the word. "I wouldn't be caught dead in the middle of the night waving a candle at the universe." "It's rather like," one member of my family said, "a child's message sent in a bottle out on the ocean's waves. Cute, but in this age of e-mail, very retro."

And I suppose it is. Furthermore, my crowd won't be won over by simple girl's camp gestures: No marshmallows and guitar music for them. So I may have no choice but to be sophisticated on this, my only millennium. I will try to look like Myrna Loy with a champagne glass in hand. I will try to be witty like Dorothy Parker and drunk like both of them, but not passed out. I will toast politely and tinkle my glass and attempt to be brave about the fears that jump up in my heart and twirl in my brain, reproducing, swarming.

I am afraid of a world without trees. I am afraid of the end of mankind, water rising from global warming, fish gasping their last in the garden. I am afraid of viruses emerging from the violated rain forests, bleedings from the nose and the skin and piles of bodies left exposed to flies and insects. I am afraid of the devout. What will they do to the rest of us? A small bomb, a release of anthrax or nerve gas in the subway? I am afraid of the vile human heart, machetes chopping off arms and legs, Uzis turned against classmates, politicians, the I.R.S., the F.B.I., local pizza delivery boys. I am afraid we aren't up to it, the task of sharing, even as the diminished resources of our planet demand we cooperate or strangle.

If I weren't afraid, I would be a fool. But the truth is, these public anxieties, these common fears, are easily put aside. Something will work out, I think. It's not over yet. Those lunatics who walk around with signs, "The End Is Nigh," what are they but those who wish us ill, whose hallucinations are of the ungentle type. Other things, more private things are harder to dismiss.

I worry about book reviewers, do they hate me or mine? I worry about publishers, will any of them survive the great conglomerate swallowings and still let a stray, difficult, offbeat printed word survive. I worry about doctors. They know so much that their wires may

be overloaded. Will health care become like education–a slogan on the campaign trail, a vanishing reality? I worry why so many otherwise nice people seem to hate Hillary Clinton. I worry that my enemies will flourish and my friends be bowed down. What if all the people who blame everything on the Jews clump together and become a critical mass? Will someone remember to keep my grandchildren's passports in order?

I worry that my children will not love well, too little, too much. Their lives seem like novels in which the plots twist and turn. I want happy endings and have stopped believing in them. I worry that if they do have more children something will go wrong, so many chromosomes must behave themselves, so many chemical reactions must go as planned. I worry that sickness will be cruel to us, that our deaths will be hard. I worry that those I love cannot be protected by my love. I worry that I might have done better; what chances were missed? I worry that there is no excuse for the muddles I have made and will make. I worry that there is an excuse, but it's weak and lacks dignity. New Year's Day is a time for resolutions, but the millennium seems to require more than just a list, it needs an overhaul, a washing of sins in the rivers of truth, which won't happen, not on Long Island, anyway.

Which brings me back to my bonfire that probably will not be. The focus on Y2K is just a convenient and concrete way of expressing the vague anxiety most all of us feel as the planet takes us over a hump. It is a way of making technological noises at a phenomenon that is at least as much in our minds as in our machines. We are helpless before time and fate, not entirely helpless but not in charge, not at all. We drink, we shake our collective fist, we drop crystal balls from great heights, we scream and blow noisemakers, but inside we tremble, as well we might.

If I could have my fire, at least I would feel that I made a mark in the sand, a mark by the sea. If I could have had my fire, I would have known that human consciousness is puny, paltry, forgotten but not entirely without grace. That's what I wanted to say on the beach.

I was 18,506 this morning. To be more precise, the paperback

edition of my recent novel Two Guys From

Verona was ranked at that number on Amazon.com, the on-line bookseller.

Since Amazon currently claims to have 4.7 million titles in stock, I felt

delighted, braced, a little puffed up, even, to be way up there in the

18,000's-despite the fact that, to tell the truth, I have absolutely no idea

what that number means in terms of raw sales. And I suspect: not much.  

There have been recorded instances, after all, of

mischief-minded authors getting their book's low rankings to soar by ordering

three or four copies. (I, of course, would never stoop to such a thing.) What

does this tell us? Besides the fact that authors are lonely and desperate

people? That while Amazon may be highly visible, the nation's bookstore it is

not. In fact, the site seems as good a piece of evidence as any that we are no

longer really a single nation at all but rather a whole bunch of nations, or

maybe just a great shambling affiliation of tribes. There is, to begin with,

the nation that uses computers and the one that does not. And then, even among

computer-users, there certainly remain people who do their shopping, even their

book shopping, off line. Still, authors love rankings. And while I know Two Guys ' number is not nearly as good

as, say, that of Frank McCourt's new book, 'Tis

(2), I know it's not nearly as bad as that of my long-out-of-print first novel,

Pearl's Progress (491,233)-which, to

tell the truth, is pretty close to the lowest number I've seen on Amazon. I'd

feel considerably consoled on that score if I could find a really obscure,

really out-of-print book-oh, I don't know, maybe Fundamentals of Printed-Circuit Manufacture, Vol. IX -that was

actually rock bottom, the ice-cold basement floor, No. 4.7 million itself.

Or maybe it's just that fiction doesn't go that low. Perhaps

every story, no matter how out-of-the-way, no matter how lamely told (not that

my first novel is either!), has a sympathetic ear somewhere. I like to think

so. On my new book's Amazon page is a section called "Customers who bought this

book also bought," listing five other fiction titles, with hyperlinks so you

can check them out. My current Amazon affinity group-itself a kind of

mini-tribe-consists of Joshua Miller ( The

Mao Game: A Novel ), Tom Perrotta ( The

Wishbones ), John Casey ( The Half-Life

of Happiness ) and David Gates ( Preston

Falls ).

Turn the cursor arrow into that little pointing white hand,

click on the hyperlinks, and a competitive, self-doubting author (sorry; double

redundancy) can not only avoid getting to work for a few more minutes, but

feign sympathy for one tribe-mate's 177,054, and grit his teeth in envy at

another's 3,802.

What does it all mean? Nothing and something at the same

time. Hoaxers aside, I have friends, fellow authors, who have ascended to the

airy realms of Amazon double digits: a concrete reflection of the fact that,

out in the real-bookstore world, their books reached the lower rungs of the

best-seller lists. I can claim a three-digit experience myself. For one

nostril-clearing moment last spring, the morning after a certain newspaper of

record listed my novel as a new and noteworthy paperback, it actually hit 652.

The royalty check still hasn't arrived. Just for fun, I skipped around the

site, checking out such illustrious fellow-sufferers as Jane Austen ( Mansfield Park in the Bantam Classic

edition, ranked 180,726); Vladimir Nabokov ( Pnin ,

Vintage International edition, 35,319); Scott Fitzgerald ( The Beautiful and Damned , Washington Square paperback, 46,163);

Anton Chekhov ( Short Stories , W. W.

Norton paperback, 29,510); Herman Melville ( Typee ,

Everyman Paperback Classics, 77,380); and John Cheever ( Bullet Park , out of print-whoa!-668,393).

Surely Dorothy Parker ( Complete

Poems , Penguin 20th-Century Classics, 43,968), had she lived into her

hundreds, could have cranked out a wistful little quatrain about the

strangeness of this place in time: "Yada-dada-Amazon/ I wonder who the scam is

on." Under "Customers who bought titles by Dorothy Parker also bought titles by

these authors" are listed not only the expected Cynthia Heimel, Fran Lebowitz

and David Sedaris, but J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame! One imagines cynical, world-weary 11-year-olds,

sitting at middle-school-cafeteria round tables, zinging off deathless bons mots . There is also, for each and

every title, the wonderful hyperlink called "I am the author, and I want to

comment on my book." To most authors, this must feel like being given the

chance to make a speech before facing a firing squad: There's simply too much

to say. (Especially when what's foremost in your heart-"Buy my goddamn book,

you dumb bastards"-won't quite do.) And has Amazon considered the delicious

prank possibilities here? The Internet, remember, is where you can be anybody

at all. Why, a less ethical person than I could click on as Leo Tolstoy, and in

a second he'd be answering the Amazon Author Questionnaire as the great man

himself, fielding such perky questions as, "Could you describe the mundane

details of writing … What do you do to avoid-or seek!-distractions?" (L.T.:

"Six words-peasant girls! Peasant girls! Peasant girls!") Or, "When and how did

you get started on the Net … Do you use the Net for research or is it just

another time sink?" (L.T.: "Time sink, definitely.")

To my mind, the

important thing about being listed on the foremost on-line bookseller is not

the funny-money rankings or the relentless, nutty uplift, but the company. I

have a comradely, arms-around-the-shoulders feeling about my tribe-mates (only

one of whom I've ever encountered in non-cyber space), a sense that those

"customers who also bought" are buoying us all up. The Internet, which was

supposed to bring humans together but has really mostly driven us apart, really

has brought some of us together in unexpected ways.

What a strange thing it is, after all, to be what is known

as a midlist (non-best-selling) author of literary fiction in America today!

One is a mere minor content provider, well below the angels, far inferior to

almost any show on cable TV in terms of audience and influence. One enters

actual, non-virtual bookstores with sweaty palms and sinking hopes: Either

(highly likely) one's precious product isn't present at all, or it has moved

ineluctably from the band-blare of the new-fiction table (if it was ever there

in the first place) to the back of the store, by the road maps and cappuccino

bar. Where the odd people linger. There it is: two copies, spine out.

On Amazon, you can at

least pretend that you're always front and center and selling, and that you're

never alone. Clicking from me to John Casey (good company! Hi, John!) can lead

you to Douglas Hobbie's This Time Last

Year , which can take you in turn to Abigail Thomas's Herb's Pajamas , which can lead to David Gilbert's Remote Feed , and on to titles by Ken

Kalfus, Rick Moody, Denis Johnson. And on and on and on. I've never met any of

these tribe-mates and cousins, but I wish them all well. In the real world, we

may be scattered and feckless, like shades in Dante's Purgatory -Allen Mandelbaum's translation; ranking No. 5,767

(not bad!). But on line we're all together, vivid and alive, in the bright

glade of Amazon.

Satyricon USA , by Eurydice. Scribner, 256 pages, $22.

Dorothy Parker, in her New Yorker review of The Technique of the Love Affair , a 1928 how-to manual by "A Gentlewoman," was typically wicked and plaintive: "You know how you ought to be with men? You should always be aloof, you should never let them know you like them, you must on no account let them feel that they are of any importance to you … you must be, in short, a regular stuffed chemise. And if you could see what I've been doing! The Technique of the Love Affair makes, I am bitterly afraid, considerable sense. If only it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful instead of just successive."

I must say I felt something similar while reading the likewise pseudonymous Eurydice's Satyricon USA , a chatty, bizarrely erudite and frequently astute "road tour" of the far frontier of state-of-the-art American sexuality. All those afternoons my high school girlfriends and I wasted discussing the mysteries of testosterone when we could have just gone down to the local gay bar and cut each other and drunk each other's blood while our sisters watched and cheered! All that time lost hoping some boy liked me when what I should have been praying for was U.F.O. abduction and a weekend fling with almond-eyed aliens! All those years spent foolishly thinking that sex required a living, breathing body when I could have hurried over to the local funeral home for what one woman, a Los Angeles devotee of "necroplay," seems to regard as the ultimate mercy fuck: "The dead are so lonely. The farewell touch from the living is the most important ritual for the dead. It's honoring the life they had.… Necrophilia isn't confusing. There are no mind games, no rejection, no funny looks, no long-term financial and emotional investment. It's like taking Communion."

Oh, dear, what would "A Gentlewoman" have had to say about that? Just be careful not to let the corpse know that you like it! Reissued in a version annotated and sprinkled with pleasant, vapid mini-essays ("On the Love Letter," "Flapper Fashions") by Norrie Epstein, The Technique of the Love Affair is a lighthearted, brittle entertainment–imagine having a conversation, over martinis, with the flapper love-child of Machiavelli and Helen Gurley Brown. The book is structured as a pedagogical dialogue between two female allies in the gender war.

One of them is Cypria, a woman of the world who doesn't bother hiding what she thinks, nor does she hesitate to draw up the terms of the black-widow-spider death struggle often mistaken for true romance: "Women are more guileful than men, but men have the advantage of being more necessary to us than we are to them. That is the keynote of the whole position between the sexes." The jaded, experienced Cypria has been there and done that; presumably successful and successive, she can choose each week a new fabulously rich, handsome man with whom to play mind games.

After 50 pages in Cypria's company, that corpse in Los Angeles starts looking pretty attractive. The real-life dominatrix whom Eurydice interviews, Mistress Leah, is at least a consummate professional. ("All my clients are grateful and respectful … I'm not mass-marketed: I've no 900 line, no Web page, no video. I don't do phone sessions … Be quiet or I'll tear your tongue out," and her business seems healthier and more straightforward than the exquisite psycho-dominatrix technique in which Cypria tutors Saccharissa, her fascinated ingénue pupil. Saccharissa functions in the book to keep Cypria fired up and responding to nonsensically innocent questions and avowals such as: "I should never seek to inveigle any other woman's cavalier away from her."

The Technique of the Love Affair , which achieved some notoriety in its day, is an ironic performance by Doris Langley Moore, herself an interesting character, a great beauty, a translator from the Greek, a collector of vintage costumes and an expert on the history of fashion, the author of novels, biographies and a play, the designer of Katharine Hepburn's white dress in John Huston's The African Queen . But despite the airy, offhand tone she affects in these pages, you keep imagining the book being read seriously or semi-seriously by slightly older, better-educated versions of those young women seeking relationship advice in Mademoiselle and Glamour . And why should they follow Cypria's? For all her prattling about smart flapper girls getting what they want, it's often hard to tell what she wants, exactly. Not a lover, certainly. Not money, precisely. Power and excitement come closest.

Power and excitement are also the currencies traded in the sexual communities (now there's an eerie concept) that Eurydice visits in the series of essays, articles originally written for Spin magazine, comprised by Satyricon USA . "I met lawyers who paid to be electroshocked during their lunch hour, bankers who dressed as cheerleaders … politicians who liked to be hung on a cross, bagpipers (armpit sex), genuphallators (knee sex), furtlers (sex with pictures of celebrities), pygmalionists (sex with mannequins)." Nothing quite matches the shivery thrill of slipping into women's clothes for the cross-dressers whom Eurydice meets visiting Provincetown's annual Fantasia Fair. (She meets the wives, too, who are having mixed success accepting that this is how the men of their dreams get off.) In successive chapters, Eurydice turns up the heat. She finds furtive groping in the communities where it's most covert and explosive: in the uncomfortably co-ed military and … yup … in the Vatican. She talks to cutters and body-piercers, bloodletters, e-mail sex addicts, and vampire sex-show performers.

It makes for weird stereo, reading about all this full-throttle libertinage with the television droning on in the next room, transmitting the maddening rhythms of our nation's highest elected officials debating whether or not our President got a little blowjob in the Oval Office. The characters in Satyricon USA and those in the Senate seem equally sex-obsessed, though, needless to say, with a different spin. Any sensible person would prefer Eurydice's "necroplayers" and lap-dancers ("Strippers are their own voyeurs. We have male minds. We get the male stereotypes") to Henry Hyde, any old day. And Eurydice's "happily married 40-year-old surgeon who has been secretly bedding an average of 10 women a month for the past 10 years" makes Bill Clinton look like a callow neophyte and a model of fidelity. However sad or admirable, scary or peculiar, Eurydice's subjects are also–unlike the evening news–almost never boring.

By contrast, The Technique of the Love Affair rapidly begins to seem like a long leisurely shopping trip with Monica Lewinsky and her mother. All that strategy, posturing and scheming, that blither about something neither especially thoughtful nor particularly true–it's just not much fun, or funny, and definitely not lunch with Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Round Table.

Finally, neither book is about sex, exactly, and certainly not about romance. They're both about expending huge amounts of energy and effort to get and have sex. (Love is just plain wasted effort.) Cypria gives Saccharissa endless, impossible technical instructions for deforming her personality in order to snag and control Mr. Right. The various obsessives in Satyricon USA have what amount to demanding second jobs; the successful, busy S-M club client must presumably spend a certain part of his overcommitted day figuring out that what he really wants to do tonight is get covered with hamburger meat and ketchup, and have a "model-pretty dominatrix … grinding the meat into his own with her stiletto-heeled, open-toed boots until he looks like a hideous traffic accident."

If reading these two books in tandem tells us anything, it's that we are a nation whose special kink is to work overtime for pleasure.