Tonight The Wife and I ring in 2009 as we celebrated much of 2008, in the company of each other and great food. The menu, chez Martin:

Scallops, brussels sprouts, bacon, preserved lemon crème fraîche

Pappardelle, black Oregon truffles, five-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano

Galettes de sarrasin, apple compote, salted caramel, almonds, Roquefort-honey ice cream

Bon appetit to you and yours, and may your 2009 be filled with great health, great food, great novels, and someone with whom to share life’s rich pageant.

I’ll take you yanquis seriously about your precious doctrine of separation of church and state when you as a nation demand all federal, state, county, and local government facilities remain open for business on 25 December, just like any other day.

So long as government offices remain closed on 25 December, however, you’re simply continuing the tradition of bowing to tragically misguided church authority, from the Catholic Church on down through its Protestant spawn.

And, in turn, you are bowing to pagan idolatry:

Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. . . . But they are altogether brutish and foolish; the stock [tree] is a doctrine of vanities. Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman, and of the hands of the founder: blue and purple is their clothing: they [the trees] are all the work of cunning men.

Granted, Jeremiah is telling only the Israelites not to follow pagan customs (such as seasonal feasts of the Solstice or Equinox), but I still don’t understand why any Christian today would want to (especially given Paul’s dismissal, “we know that an idol is nothing in the world,” and then his admonition to the wise nevertheless to “flee from idolatry”).

It always makes me cringe when people demand that Christ be put back in Christmas; He was never in Christmas in the first place.

If you want to bow to mediæval church authority and idolatrous pagan customs, feel free to celebrate Christmas. And while you’re at it, why not celebrate the Hajj, too? It’s as Christian as Christmas is.

For those who feel the need to celebrate Christ’s birth, do so on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

You are, of course, bound to no celebrations. Which is the way I like to celebrate just another day.

Presaging McMansions? From Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years:

There were villas trying to look like Scottish castles, Bavarian chalets, Turkish pavilions, or Gothic piles; they looked like toys for overgrown children whose imaginations were waging a losing battle against extinction.

That’s simply marvelous and marvelously spot-on.

Tough retrospect, “Twenty years on”:

The lesson of the Rushdie Affair that has never been learnt is that liberals have made their own monsters. It is the liberal fear of giving offence that has helped create a culture in which people take offence so easily. There’s a scene in The Satanic Verses in which one of the characters, Saladin Chamcha, finds himself in an immigration detention centre. All the inmates have been turned into monsters—manticores and water buffalos. ‘How could they do it?’ Saladin wants to know. ‘They describe us’, comes the reply, ‘that’s all. They have the power of description and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’

Rushdie was writing about the impact of racism. But he might as well have been writing about the response to the Rushdie Affair. By accepting the fiction that hostility to The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel and that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free, liberals have helped create a culture of grievance in which being offended has become a badge of identity. The myths about the Rushdie affair have created many of the post-Rushdie monsters. If we want to slay those monsters, we also have to get rid of those myths.

AB Yehoshua’s magnificent novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, proves simplicity of language doesn’t equal simplicity of thought.

Nevertheless, at a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets, troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places.

A perfect novel for beginning writers to study the dictum “less is more.”

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2008, on writers:

Solitude will be his lot in life. It always has been. As a child, he was a fragile, anxious, excessively receptive boy, or the girl described by Colette, who cannot help but watch as her parents tear each other apart, her big black eyes enlarged with a sort of painful attentiveness. Solitude is affectionate to writers, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence of happiness. It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, an illusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting little tune. The writer, better than anyone, knows how to cultivate the vital, poisonous plant, the one that grows only in the soil of his own powerlessness. The writer wanted to speak for everyone, and for every era: there he is, there she is, each alone in a room, facing the too-white mirror of the blank page, beneath the lampshade distilling its secret light. Or sitting at the too-bright screen of the computer, listening to the sound of one’s fingers clicking over the keys. This, then, is the writer’s forest. And each writer knows every path in that forest all too well. If, now and again, something escapes, like a bird flushed by a dog at dawn, then the writer looks on, amazed—this happened merely by chance, in spite of oneself.

James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the great American novel of the suburbs:

“Revolutionary Road” is a brilliant rewriting of “Madame Bovary,” with one signal difference—at the end of Flaubert’s novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates’s savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge.

If I’d never read Revolutionary Road, chances are I’d’ve enjoyed AMC’s Mad Men rather than viewing it as a watered-down version of Yates’ “indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties.”