Sophie Auster, Hudson Square dweller, emerging musician (Patrick McMullen)

Most 24-year-old New Yorkers are putting up with the indignity of shared bathrooms and subdivided living spaces converted into pseudo-bedrooms with pressurized walls.

But not Sophie Auster, whose lit-star dad Paul bought her a one-bedroom condo when she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence.

During an extended tour of Ms. Auster' amazing condo, the budding chanteuse reveals to the Post that daddy dearest, who lives in a regal Park Slope brownstone, had considered purchasing a Paris pied-a-terre. But when the economy began to hiccup in 2008, Mr. Auster dropped the idea of a pad in the city that fostered his early literary life, opting instead to buy his daughter a place in Hudson Square.

"They thought, well, if we’re going to invest money in some place, we might as well invest it in a place for our child to live while she is trying to do what she wants to do,” Ms. Auster told the Post.

Not that she was initially all that grateful for the $975,000 gift, even if it did come with Brazilian Wenge wood floors and a kitchen with custom concrete counters. During her senior year, it was a huge pain to commute to Bronxville to finish her remaining college requirements.

"I had a 9 a.m. art class 'cause you need a visual arts to graduate, and I needed some credits, and I hadn't taken one. So I had this 9 a.m. painting class and I had to wake up at like 6 a.m. twice a week just to make the train and get there on time," Ms. Auster moaned to the Post, making our hearts twinge with empathy. After all, do we not all carry burdens bequeathed to us by our parents, and are we not somewhat crippled and warped by these burdens, even as we try to forge new, adult lives? Or in Ms. Auster's case, as our parents finance and foster our new, adult lives so that we may become our greatest and most creative selves?

These days, Ms. Auster—a musician who names her influences as, among others, Tom Waits, the Beatles, Radiohead, Fiona Apple, Emily Dickinson and her father—loves her Zinc Building pad, especially the 11-foot ceilings. Great acoustics!

“I like how high the ceilings are because if they weren’t, I think it’d feel kind of cramped,” she told the Post. She also doesn't have to worry about keeping roommates up, if she gets the itch to practice—or indulge other desires—in the middle of the night. "Living with a roommate was a good experience, but I really wanted to live alone after that,” Ms. Auster admits of her post-collegiate self.

The chapel.

The married Brooklyn authors Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt have ensured they will remain in Brooklyn together in perpetuity. Vanishing New York reports on their recent purchase of twin plots in Green-Wood Cemetery, where Mr. Auster gave a reading in the cemetery chapel to coincide with the announcement of their purchase.

Green-Wood, which was named a National Historic Landmark in 2006, was prime real estate for New Yorkers in the second half of the nineteenth century and Mr. Auster and Ms. Hustvedt will join such notable New Yorkers as Leonard Bernstein and Horace Greeley. But hopefully not for a very long time!

Palliser and Rampling.

Always intriguing and never less than polished or self-assured, Charlotte Rampling is an actress of great dignity and sloe-eyed reserve worthy of her own documentary, and as she ages gracefully, she just ages gracefully and keeps getting better. Those almond-shape, sea green eyes reflect the chlorophyll of life as she sees it. But they can turn gray as dirty rain when her animal instinct and querulous intelligence sense there’s something rotten in Denmark. Her photos are rarely air-brushed, her skin is almost never cosmetically enhanced. At 65, she’s aging like Jeanne Moreau—lines and dewlaps intact, her mouth a slash of pale sensuality untouched by lipstick. No wonder the British-born, multilingual star of so many varied and controversial film classics is often labeled provocative and sexual. I used to see her every year in Cannes, promoting everything from dark, disturbing dramas (Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter) to randy comedies such as The Knack and Georgy Girl. I found her friendly and intense, but difficult to access. She’s never been a touchy-feely cream puff. Now, after seeing the personal but emotionally chilly documentary Charlotte Rampling: The Look, I know why.

Good documentaries investigate the subject of their inquiry and make you feel like you know them better. Ms. Rampling talks a blue streak, but you feel like you’ve only been formally introduced. She talks about the emotional nightmare of acting, doing over and over again until you get it right. But she also shrugs off her profession with “I never spend any time at all looking at my films … if you believe you are that person, then you are that person.” Occasionally a ray of rare vulnerability breaks through that she’s keenly adept at hiding, like how she felt when she was attacked and savaged in print by Pauline Kael. But mostly she’s fencing with words, always poised and on guard. I have no idea what she’s thinking, and sometimes I don’t even know what she’s talking about. Like most actors, she’s much more interesting onscreen than as herself.

La Piscine, The Verdict, The Damned and Le Sud relieve the tedium. Still, the film consists almost entirely of one voice—hers—rambling about the aesthetics of acting, the strategy of surviving the spotlight, and performing as a fantastic way of communicating—a skill she’s not very good at without a script. “I just put myself into a space like a space you get into when you’re meditating, which is like an empty space, which is devoid of anything in particular.” Say what? This is a perfect example of what Brando meant when he said, “Actors who talk about themselves and try to explain the mysteries of their craft end up with fools for an audience.”

About her own audience: “I say it doesn’t really matter if they don’t like me as a person, but it always does a bit because we’re not that confident enough as human beings to think we can go through life not being liked. We do not want people to think we’re monsters but I’ve had a lot of people think I’m a monster anyway so I probably am a bit. The first thing everybody says about somebody well known is, ‘Are they nice?’ So quite often I think it’s just better to be a monster.” It’s not exactly riveting to listen to her philosophize about the aging process that differentiates sensuality from sexuality, but I admit it is unusual to meet an aging actress who also claims to be grounded and unafraid face reality. Then she says she believes in an afterlife but is distressed that she has no proof that it exists, and changes the subject to the vicissitudes of suicide. Love, fear, withdrawal, solitude, female freedom, independence, death—the subjects float by like changing parasols. She talks about them superficially, revealing nothing about her personal life. I especially like this one about pain: “The best remedy for any form of pain is to just let it happen to you. It’s the resistance that is the most painful pain, both physical and psychological.” She’s been reading a lot of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Krafft-Ebing. On acting: “I don’t know what’s going to happen at all before I start to play a character—and I don’t want to know.” Acting students can learn a lot from that one.

As agreeable as she is to watch, the disappointing thing I feel is that she plays everything the same way. For a film about one person that reveals so little about the subject, 94 minutes is longer than it sounds. My advice is to wait for the DVD. This is definitely a movie to watch with a remote control.

rreed@observer.com

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK

Running time 90 minutes

Written by Angelina Maccarone

Directed by Angelina Maccarone

Starring Charlotte Rampling, Peter Lindbergh and Paul Auster

2/4

Talese: no more summers in Jersey.

While you were at the beach this weekend, Gay and Nan Talese moved out of their summer house in Ocean City, New Jersey to join Graydon Carter in Roxbury, Connecticut.

More from Publisher's Weekly on Robert Weil's new imprint at Norton, Liveright & Company (see our article from last week, too.)

The first of what will likely be many, many Casey Anthony books is announced: Inside the Mind of Casey Anthony, by the forensic psychiatrist and FOX news pundit Keith Ablow, to be published by St. Martin's Press.

MobyLives writes about the discovery of a memorial book for Byron, where more than 800 friends and family penned remembrances and poetic tributes after his funeral. The book was purchased at a church sale in Savannah, Georgia for $35.

Paul Auster on why Philip Roth is wrong to avoid fiction. [Video via BookForum.]

For a moment, Mr. Auster looked at the questioner blankly. “But it’s not a children’s book,” he said. Perhaps she had gotten confused, because the story is told from the perspective of a dog named Mr. Bones?

The woman insisted that she knew what she was talking about—that the book she was referring to was an adaptation, published with full illustrations and packaged as a kids’ book. Mr. Auster said it was the first he'd ever heard of such a thing.

Sherman Alexie, who was also on the panel, asked Mr. Auster if that’s what happens when you write 40 books. Smiling tentatively, Mr. Auster deferred to his literary agent, Carol Mann, who was seated a few rows away from the woman who’d brought the matter up. Ms. Mann indicated she was not aware of a Timbuktu for kids either, and promised to look into it. 

At that point, Picador publicist James Meader, who works on Mr. Auster's paperbacks, submitted in a somewhat sheepish tone that he had a copy of the book in his office, and would send one to him directly. Soon someone in the audience had Googled the book on her iPhone, and raised her hand to share her findings. "It has a gray fluffy dog on the cover looking over its shoulder," she reported.

Had Picador published a Paul Auster book without telling him or paying for the privilege? That’s kind of what it seemed like!

Asked for her reaction after the panel, Ms. Mann said only that she was astonished, and was looking forward to sorting it out.

But no. As Mr. Meader later explained to The Observer,  Picador had had nothing to do with the mysterious book, which had in fact been published by a small German company called Minedition. "It’s kind of a macabre idea for a children’s book," Mr. Meader said, "Because as you may know, the dog does commit suicide at the end."

In an interview today, Ms. Mann said she had gotten in touch with Minedition and that contracts and copies of the book—which is distributed by Penguin in the USA—are on their way to Ms. Mann’s office. Turns out a computer crash was to blame!

"It’s not really a big deal if that’s what you’re thinking," Ms. Mann said. "It was a labor of love by a German packager-publisher, and they came to us with illustrations and an abridgement and then they disappeared. We had looked at it—Paul completely forgot about it but he had seen it, we both had. Apparently this little company’s computer server went down and the computer crashed so all of our back and forth was lost."

"There’s absolutely no duplicity!" she clarified.

Oh, well.

“I think this year is just a freak year,” said the writer Salman Rushdie, during a wine-and-cheese reception at the Instituto Cervantes on Wednesday, March 25, to announce the lineup for next month’s fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival, “when just to be able to do it at all is an achievement—and especially to do it on this scale.”

Mr. Rushdie, who chairs the literary festival, which opens on April 27, said organizers had to cancel about 10 events this year. Still, the lineup includes some 160 writers in more than 60 events, with a whole batting order of household names: Paul Auster, Paul Krugman, Laurie Anderson, Rick Moody, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje, George Soros, even Lou Reed.

“We really are having a party, and it’s more than a party, we’re saying books still matter to people and reading still matters to people, and this is how you find out about the world,” said Caro Llewellyn, the festival’s director.

And for all those hermitlike writer types—certainly not you, Salman!—it’s especially nice to bump into one another. “Part of any festival is that it’s fun to hang out with your friends, you know, because writers are all over the place and they gather in these types of things,” said Mr. Rushdie.

Irish novelist Colum McCann put it more like, well, an Irish novelist. “I think it’s the whole idea of the international mongrels of the world, like everyone from somewhere else—no motherland, no fatherland—and we all like land in New York and here we are yelping at each other,” said Mr. McCann, who also teaches at Hunter College and is participating in this year’s festival. 

“All those late-night parties at the hotels, where everyone’s hanging out,” Mr. McCann continued.  “Why not?  It’s a bit of crack…”

Come again?

“C-R-A-I-C.  That’s an Irish term, it’s a bit of fun,” Mr. McCann clarified.

Mr. Rushdie let slip one of his own new addictions: the Kindle. “It’s kind of exciting,” he said of the ability to download a book almost instantly. He said he read Dave Eggers’ What Is The What on his Kindle (Mr. Rushdie “liked it a lot”), but insisted he only uses it when traveling. He compared digital books to the early days of audio books. “People were buying books on tape or CD, not instead of buying books, but just other extra people were buying books to hear them in the car or whatever,” Mr. Rushdie said. “I think it may be like that.”

Mr. Rushdie even tried to make the e-book appealing to the gaggle of young reporters: “You can read The New York Times on it, or you can read, I don’t know, Gawker.com, if that’s your taste.”

Wait, does the author of Satanic Verses really read Gawker?

“No, I do not,” Mr. Rushdie replied. “But there was a time when someone told me I should, so there was a point where I actually downloaded it, but I said, ‘I can’t read this,’ so I canceled it.”

Mr. Rushdie may not love Gawker, but he does think blogs testify to the young appeal of PEN World Voices. “If you look at the blogs, it’s incredible, the coverage of this festival in the blogosphere, it’s colossal and very, very positive,” Mr. Rushdie said.  “And you know, the blogs are all kids. I don’t write a blog.”

Mr. Rushdie said he loved the film. “I just think it’s so unusual now to have a real story that somebody really wrote,” he said. “Films seem to have simpler and simpler and simpler narratives.”

Which Democratic candidate is playing better political jujitsu?

“It’s been quite a bout. You started off thinking Obama’s a lightweight, Hillary’s a heavyweight, then it all turns the other way around, and now it’s turned back a little bit.”

Next, Mr. Martin, whom we’d last seen in 1985 outside a movie theater in East Hampton, with Paul Simon and Chevy Chase, when he’d given us the same skeptical squint we were getting now. Is there a line from Redbelt that encapsulates the Mamet code?

“There’s always a line that’s either this line or similar to it in a Mamet movie that says, ‘You didn’t ask for the money? You didn’t ask for the money!’” he said. “All right.”

The “all right” meant the sound bite had been granted and the conversation was over.

We made our way over to Mr. Mamet, who has a purple belt in jujitsu. Our last conversation, in 1996 at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble, had not ended on a positive note. We apologized for the incident, which he didn’t recall, and told him how much we dug the movie.

“That’s great!” he said. “Well, it’s about a guy who goes on the journey that every hero goes through—he goes from a safe place into a dark place and has to suffer to achieve some sort of enlightenment.”

On the fringes of the table was a lit’ry contingent: Mr. Martin’s Kirsten Davis-resembling wife, writer and former New Yorker staff member Anne Stringfield, and the novelist Paul Auster. Mr. Auster expressed no interest in having a chat.

It appears in an essay by the art historian William Hood. Mr. Hood likens Tintoretto's eyes to that of "a predator … ready to pounce": "Eyes burrowed in the dark caverns of … heavy brows." On the next page, reproductions of two Tintoretto self-portraits confirm that the description is in fact accurate, even taking into account that a painter-particularly one as "disgracefully ambitious" as Tintoretto-might be prone to exaggeration.

But forget about the size of the eyes. Think, instead, of their enormous acuity-that's what counts in Tintoretto's Deposition from the Cross (circa 1560-64), one of the rediscovered masterpieces on display. The painting is a brilliant orchestration of space and gesture: Look, particularly, at how Tintoretto centers a turbulent composition by setting a solid diagonal of light between the dead Christ and his grieving mother. Yet the painting's soul, as it were, lies in its telling, dramatic details-not least of which are the fine pats of oil bringing structure to the Virgin's face, dabs of paint so swift and tender it's as if they'd been applied by the painter breathing them on to the surface.

The spiritual and pictorial locus of Deposition from the Cross is Tintoretto's depiction of the left arm of Christ. Falling to the ground, outside of the shroud in which he is being carried, Christ's arm retains a sense of thriving musculature-indeed, of purpose-even as the dulled, silvery light describing it confirms his lifelessness. The slow, almost balletic drag of Christ's knuckles in the dirt is among the most moving moments in Western painting that I've encountered.

Credit the enormity of Tintoretto's vision with the hushed and roiling majesty of Deposition from the Cross. Then pity poor Domenico di Michelino, whose Triumph of Fame, Time and Eternity (circa 1440-1445) shares gallery space with it. Michelino's crystalline primitivism, which is no mean thing, can't compete with Tintoretto's stormy gravitas. Maybe the folks at Salander-O'Reilly could find a more amenable spot for this intensely wrought painting.

Up the stairs, the art historian Andrew Butterfield has, for the fifth year running, organized a selection of Italian Renaissance sculpture. There you'll find works in marble, polychrome wood, bronze, terracotta and stone devoted largely to devotional subjects, with a smattering of mythological figures thrown in for good measure. The finest pieces are resolutely earthbound: Benedetto de Maiano's Head of a Man (Giovanni Serristori) (circa 1475) and Johan Tobias Sergel's Portrait of Court Embroiderer Christofer Sergell, the Artist's Father (1759), portrait busts that take inspiration from antiquity but bring it to radically different ends.

Maiano was relentless in his attention to the (at times unflattering) specifics of physiognomy; Sergel stylized observed form in a conscious attempt to reclaim classical archetypes. In their own divergent manners, both sculptors give us the measure of their subjects' character, thereby providing a compellingly humane core to a superlative exhibition.

Two Rediscovered Masterpieces of Italian Renaissance Art: Domenico di Michelino and Tintoretto (until Nov. 27) and Italian Renaissance Sculpture (until Jan. 8, 2005) are at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 20 East 79th Street.

Eccentric Intricacy

For a couple of weeks now, I've been struggling in the attempt to write about the mixed-media paintings of Josh Dorman, the subject of an exhibition curated by the novelist Paul Auster for the CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea. The pictures-crazy-quilt amalgamations of topographical maps, invented landscapes, apocalyptic scenarios and diaristic doodles-don't lend themselves to a writerly peg. Mr. Auster concurs: Mr. Dorman's pieces "are difficult to describe, almost impossible to pin down in words," he writes in the catalog.

Try following the stream of images in any one picture-you'll be led astray. Watch as a collaged map of the Mississippi River evolves in to a painted rush of water that, in turn, settles into a descending array of looping lines. At that point, you notice the huge snail and a subterranean cavern filled with-of the things I can name-a ladder, a billiard table and what my notes describe as a "doily alien." Mr. Dorman's "flattened lands" are constantly turning back in on themselves, forever unwilling to give in to the logic of a single vantage point. They're unwilling, as well, to clarify their myriad secrets.

Yet it's not so much the wordlessness of Mr. Dorman's art or its eccentric intricacy that's made it difficult to write about; it's the aesthetic purview. The realization comes courtesy of Manny Farber, whose retrospective of paintings at P.S. 1 has obliged me to reread his essay on "termite art." That's Mr. Dorman's specialty: Art that is "ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved [and] go-for-broke." In his moody pastiches of Cubist structure, Surrealist whimsy and folk-art haplessness, Mr. Dorman has created a cosmos so small and dear it's a wonder he can stand to share it with anyone else.

Only once does Mr. Dorman open the door to the rest of us: in Fledgling Lament (2004), wherein a tracery of white lines, breaking free of a smoky ground of antique ledger pages, undulates like some kind of free-floating collective memory. It's a haunting and elegiac piece, as rich and as spare as a Chinese landscape painting or a still life by Morandi. It's worthy of Braque's dictum, as quoted by Mr. Auster in the catalog: "There is only one thing in art of any value-that which cannot be explained."

Josh Dorman is at the CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, until Nov. 27.

Oracle Night , by Paul Auster. Henry Holt, 243 pages, $23.

Remember the moment early on in The Great Gatsby when Daisy tells Nick how cynical she's become? "Sophisticated," she says, "God, I'm sophisticated!" Nick doesn't buy it: "The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me."

I feel the same way about Oracle Night , Paul Auster's new novel. Though I was at times happily carried along by various storylines (it's all about narrative nestled in narrative, like a Russian doll), whenever I put the book down, even for an instant, I had the disagreeable sense that I was being tricked. The novel seems to me basically insincere.

Can a novel be insincere? Does it make any sense to talk about the sincerity of fiction? Isn't it always a trick devised to compel attention and belief? Isn't Emma Bovary just Gustave Flaubert in drag? These are the kinds of questions Paul Auster, like any good champion of the postmodern novel, prompts us to ask; and if our ambition is to become sophisticated novel readers, we'd better come up with some answers. (Let's leave aside the question of whether we should in fact aspire to sophistication.)

Oracle Night is the story of Sidney Orr, a Brooklyn novelist who, having slowly recovered from a serious injury, begins to write in a new blue notebook. Over the course of the next few weeks, his marriage threatens to fall apart, death claims one man, violent death another, and a woman is brutally beaten. What do these awful events have to do with a blue notebook manufactured in Portugal and bought in a curious Cobble Hill stationery store? Spooky parallels between what Sidney writes and what happens in his life suggest that the book exerts a kind of "black magic"; it begins to seem possible that whatever Sidney sets down in the book becomes oracular.

Sidney suffers from a variety of bizarre symptoms-including spontaneous, copious nosebleeds, dizziness and disorientation-which sound like physical manifestations of existential malaise. "I drifted along like a spectator in someone else's dream," he tells us. He's been sick, but we don't know why. He's vaguely sad, but we don't know why. The blue notebook, which reawakens his urge to write, offers him a glimmer of hope.

The idea behind the novel Sidney begins to write in the pages of his new notebook is borrowed from Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon , from an anecdote Sam Spade tells about a man Flitcraft who's nearly killed by a falling beam. Spared by blind luck-he was inches from death-Flitcraft decides on the spot that the world is random and absurd, that his sane, orderly existence is a sham. So he skips out on his wife and children, utterly abandons the life he's been living.

Sidney's nascent novel is about Nick Bowen, an editor at a New York publishing house. Out for a late-night walk, troubled by the strains in his marriage, Nick is nearly killed by the head of a limestone gargoyle that falls from a building's 11th story, grazes Nick's arm and smashes to the sidewalk. Nick feels he should by all rights be dead; like Flitcraft, he realizes at once that his old life is finished and that he must begin a new one. Nick hops a cab to LaGuardia, catches the next flight to Kansas City, a random destination.

Sidney's novel could be a good one, I suppose, but as it stands it's just the sketch of a premise-and a multipurpose literary device. It tells us in an oblique way about Sidney's predicament, and it reminds us, insistently, that there's another writer at work here: Paul Auster sits in a room writing about Sidney Orr sitting in a room writing about Nick Bowen-who ends up locked in a vault in an underground bunker filled with thousands of old telephone books, reading an unpublished novel he was meant to edit in his old life. Yes, it's a bit airless, claustrophobic even, when you're trapped inside a writer's imagination.

As George Eliot would say, "These things are a parable."

But something in a novel has to be real and true, verifiable on a gut level, even if that something is only the writer's ambition to make the book come alive. In Oracle Night , the touchstone should be Sidney's love for his wife Grace. (The first time he saw her, he tells us, "the blow to the brain left me paralyzed, unable to draw my next breath.") I don't believe in Sidney Orr, and I don't believe in his marriage. I don't care about him, and I don't believe that Mr. Auster cares about him. The author is just playing with words, toying with character, plot and setting.

Here the promoter of the postmodern is likely to ask how an author can possibly care about a character, a fictional construct delineated by a sequence of marks on a page. And the same exculpatory logic can be usefully applied to any aspect of the text. For instance, a snippet of inane, wooden dialogue can be excused on the grounds that it subverts the artificial (wooden, inane) convention of "dialogue" between "characters." In Oracle Night , a young wife announces to her husband that she's pregnant and then says, "We've always talked about having kids but this seems like the worst possible moment." Who speaks like that? Sounds like Al Gore faking intimacy.

Sidney remembers a conversation he once had with a friend-a fellow novelist, in fact-about the predictive power of fiction. The friend said he believed that written words could "alter reality," and that "sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past but making things happen in the future."

Ideally, yes. But a novel is unlikely to make things happen, to have impact on a reader's life, if the characters are just phony stick figures deployed to illustrate literary and philosophical concepts.

There aren't many really good novels about writing novels, but there is a recent one that's strong in precisely the ways that Oracle Night is weak: Ian McEwan's Atonement (2002) plunges the reader into a succession of eerily convincing worlds-an English country house in 1935, the British retreat to Dunkirk in 1940, and a London hospital coping with the casualties of Dunkirk evacuation. Though we eventually learn that the story we're reading is fiction within the fiction-a novel written by one of the characters as an act of atonement-the storytelling is so completely successful that the reader experiences a metaphysical shock upon discovering that the story told in the novel is "untrue."

Mr. Auster has lately become addicted to gimmicks: a boy who can fly in Mr. Vertigo (1994), a dog who can narrate in Timbuktu (1999) and now a sinister magic notebook. But the only gimmick a good novelist needs is the trick of telling a story so that it compels our attention and our belief. The rest is just sophistication.

Adam Begley is books editor of The Observer .

Bendel up, kids! Is it just us, or does increasingly waxen Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his league of Bunny friends have a "retrospective," oh, about every four minutes? Henri Bendel , a swish department store in midtown that we can't afford, thank you very much ( where is our Christmas bonus? ), has a new "Bunny Boutique" selling clothing, "sexcessories," the whole nine yards-and if you buy something, anything there today, Hef will sign a copy of his magazine's new book, Playboy's 50 Years: The Photographs . There will be lots of Playmates on hand, and don't confuse them with the Bunnies or both sets of ladies will get very cross and stamp their feet …. If you can't crash that party (strategy: blind 'em with implants!), our good friends at Budget Living magazine are throwing a soirée to celebrate their first anniversary, and a publicist is promising "goodie-filled gift bags" galore , which sure sounds super-exciting. Bonus budget-living tip: Get a vodka, like Skyy, to sponsor your party ( hic )! Meanwhile, a former social worker named Charles Cook discusses the finer points of cross-country skiing from the wild and woolly Upper West Side. We found Mr. Cook, a spry 58, munching on popcorn in his bucolic Rockland County home. "People don't realize there are designated ski trails as close as 10 miles to Manhattan," he said. "Cross-country [ chomp , chomp , chomp ] skiing doesn't get a lot of publicity, even though it's 5,000 to 6,000 years old. With downhill, you get a ride down and it's over pretty quickly, then you spend your time waiting in line to get back up the mountain. With cross-country, the skis grip the snow so you can actually go uphill." Easy, sir, we can feel our heart rate increasing already ….

[Hugh Hefner, Henri Bendel, 712 Fifth Avenue, 6 to 7 p.m., 212-247-1100; Budget Living party, Deep, 16 West 22nd Street, 6 to 9 p.m., 212-255-8455, ext. 28; An Introduction to Cross-Country Skiing and Winter Hiking, 7 p.m., call 845-354-3717 for address.]

Thursday 4th

Wynter, meet Summer! Turns out that Playboy thing yesterday was just a tune-up for tonight's main event, a bouncy bash celebrating the mag's golden anniversary, hosted by the new, darkly handsome editor , Jim Kaminski , whom we understand some staff wags are already secretly calling "Jimichanga." Confirmed attendees include Jason Patric (career suffered "I dated Julia Roberts" curse, now rebounding nicely on Broadway); Sarah Wynter from TV's 24 ; Casey Affleck (kind of the Scrappy Doo to brother Ben's Scooby-and by the by, where is brother Ben these days?); young Affleck's gal, Summer Phoenix ; and the usual smattering of Playmates … er, Bunnies … er, Playmates?

[ Playboy 's 50th-anniversary party, Armory, Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, 8 p.m., by invitation only.]

Friday 5th

Tse it loud, say it proud! December is sample-sale season- which, when you get right down to it, is kind of like fantasy football for females , with women obsessively keeping track of listings, picking out shoes, making trades …. And speaking of football, were we the only ones who almost put our foot through the television set over Thanksgiving when the Horns nearly dropped the ball against A&M? But back to the girlie stuff: Posh boutique Tse has deeply marked down its cushy cashmere, including zip-front hoodies reduced to $300 and hand-knit scarves for $180. Co -zy! Among Catherine Malandrino's frilly offerings, you'll find mini-shorts, pleated mini-skirts guaranteed to make your paunchy editor's pulse race, and the ever-practical corset dress priced between $49 and $399. And for all you Cinderellas out there, it's "the more you buy, the more you save" at Stuart Weitzman, home of those so-bad-they're-good Lucite pumps: 30 percent off first pair, 40 percent off second, 50 percent off third, etceterblah, etceterblah ….

[Tse fall sample sale, 418 West 15th Street, 212-472-7790; Catherine Malandrino, 275 West 39th Street, third floor, 212-925-6765; Stuart Weitzman, 625 Madison Avenue, 212-750-2555.]

Saturday 6th

Auster blitz! Comely author Paul Auster chugs in from the outer boroughs to read from his new 243-page novel, Oracle Night … in its entirety … by himself . That's right. Plot of Oracle Night: A novelist wanders into a stationery shop in Cobble Hill (much-explored terrain of "hot" Brooklyn authors like Jonathan Lethem) and buys a mysterious blue notebook that threatens his marriage … sounds kind of NicholasSparks–y,actually!Mr. Auster was brooding about something or other and refused to get on the phone with us, but publicist Julie Baranes explained: "No guest readers. He will just continue until it's finished. He didn't want to read in a lot of different places." How persnickety! Will there be refreshments? A bar? "No, no, no . Nothing like that." Click!

[Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 3 to 7 p.m., 212-255-4022.]

Sunday 7th

Beatles in Billyburg: All you suckers stream out of the second half of the Paul Auster reading and head to Williamsburg, where record producer/composer Roger Greenawalt is performing 211-count 'em, 211 - Beatles songs all in one day, on the ukulele. What is it about the holidays that brings out the "marathon madness" in men? And why the Beatles? "George Harrison became a ukulele nut at the end of his life," said Mr. Greenawalt, 42, from a place called Shabby Road Studios. "Everyone who went to George's house left with a ukulele …. The proceeds go to Paul McCartney, because I would just spend it on food, rent and pot, but Paul McCartney is a really good person. He married a philanthropist. If we give it to him, we know he's going to do something good with it. I betcha he gives it to the land-mine thing." Ummm …. "Also, Dec. 8 is Dead Lennon Day, and I always feel lousy, so I thought this would make a nice tribute. It's better than sitting around doing Ecstasy in Strawberry Fields." Don't give us any funny ideas. So why the uke? "I picked it up and I couldn't live without it! It's disreputable, hackneyed and kitschy, so I thought, 'Great-I want to be the champion of the ridiculous!' It's impossible to be sad while playing the ukulele. It's better than Paxil and better than Prozac." Back in the 'hattan, the James Beard House-a clearing house for singles with love handles- is throwing a gingerbread-house-decorating party: champagne and carolers from the Calhoun School, which is where all the famous musicians' kids go and smoke weed with their teachers ….

[Paul Auster, 3 to 7 p.m., see yesterday; the Beatles Complete, Slam, 51 North First Street between Wythe and Kent, Williamsburg, noon to midnight, 718-599-9436; Gingerbread House Decorating Extravaganza, the James Beard House, 167 West 12th Street, 5 to 8 p.m., 212-627-2308.]

Monday 8th

All hail his Diddy-ness! The-oh, why not?-irrepressible P. Diddy pulls over his fleet of black S.U.V.'s ( screeeech! ) to host CareRockSkate, one of those complicated, high-concept benefits where no one really understands what's going on or who's paying for what : Kids will skate, the Boys' Choir of Harlem sings, Diddy's Sean John Boys line will sponsor, and somehow Safe Horizon-a domestic-violence charity-will benefit …. Who you might catch attempting an axel: SpongeBob Squarepants (seriously) and actor Nick Cannon , whom we've never heard of, but who apparently stars in the film Love Don't Co$t a Thing , a remake of the 1980's Patrick Dempsey flick, Can't Buy Me Love …. Meanwhile, power-hostess duo Cynthia Rowley (designs party frocks) and Ilene Rosenweig (writer-editor married to former New York Times Styles section writer and self-proclaimed "cad" Rick Marin, who likes the word "panties") will share snacks and holiday tips from one of their style manuals, Swell Holiday , at Borders. When will these gals just give up and go home?

[CareRockSkate, Rockefeller Center Café, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 7 to 11 p.m., 212-206-9121; Swell Holiday , Borders, Park Avenue and 57th Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-980-6785.]

Tuesday 9th

A man, a plan, Karan: Well, we swore to ourselves that we'd lay off the tasting events, but the swank holiday-party invitations aren't exactly rolling in (hel- lo ), so …. There's a shopping/eating fusion event at Donna Karan's studio benefiting City Harvest, which takes leftover food from schmancy city bashes and distributes it to the needy. You can eat all you want and then buy the new wardrobe you'll need after eating all you want; luckily, Donna is ver -ry generous with the sizing (that is, her size 4 is like everybody else's 8). Treats teem forth from Aquavit, Guastavino's, Judson Grill, Esca and Strip House -a steak joint, not the new downtown branch of Scores. Bring Pepto-pink is the new black!

[DKNY, 655 Madison Avenue, 6 to 8 p.m., 212-768-6241.]

Wednesday 10th

All about Eartha: It's Human Rights Day. We celebrate by letting the lone (male) intern out of the basement for a few hours …. Elsewhere, zippy blond talk-show tootsie Caroline Rhea pops up to host the Muse Awards, during which trophies of some sort will be issued to ethereal actress Emma Thompson -don't forget to catch her flailing but brilliant performance in the HBO version of Angels in America -and unfunny "comedian" Whoopi Goldberg, among others. And in the Little Disneyland thatisTimes Square, actor JohnLithgow (Harvardgrad and Fulbright scholar-who knew?) and legendary songbird Eartha Kitt fight to flip the switch on a Christmas tree. Our money's on Ms. Kitt, whom we caught tucking into a breakfast of eggs and spinach at home in Westin, Conn. "Eating well is important, and by 'well' I don't mean gourmet," she said. "You need lots of fruit, vegetables and protein. I don't believe in diets, though-I believe in staying away from junk food. Junk food breeds a junk mind!" The 76-year-old climbs into a sexy black teddy each night for her role in Nine , which she took over from Chita Rivera. "That's why I'm on my way to the gym after this. It's never too late to burn your buns!" Will she be performing tonight? "I don't think so, but I will if they ask! I'll sing ' Santa Baby, so hurry down the chimney tonii-iiight ….' " We does she think of Madonna's bastardized version? "I'm not talking about Madonna. Madonna is Madonna, Eartha Kitt is Eartha Kitt, and never the twain shall meet!" Amen, sister ….

[Muse Awards for Outstanding Vision and Achievement, New York Hilton, 1335 Sixth Avenue, 11:30 a.m., 212-838-6033; Broadway tree lighting, Duffy Square, Broadway and 46th Street, 5:15 p.m., 212-768-1560.]