We love Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher and was thrilled to be nominated for the Beard's MFKF award last year. Every day on the overcrowded LIRR we escape into "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine" where every word is evocative... olive, wine, bread gets the reader off to a great start.

Symposia endeavors to really care about paintings, sculpture, visual things and the like, but ultimately it seems they are just items imbued with value by collectors of no particular refinement or education.( We don't mean della Francesca or Vermeer but basically anything post-Duchamp.)

On the suggestion of a Symposium reader, a Mr. Howard, we dipped into Flaubert over the weekend. Salammbo must be one of the more bejwelled pieces of literature in Western civilization forged in a mental hothouse as rarified as Walter Pater's in Marius the Epicurean. These coddled haute bourgeois writers had staggering imaginations and a way with words we have surely lost.

"Living in a house is one of the sad features of civilization. I believe that we were made to sleep on our backs looking up at stars." 1858

With all good faith, yes even a leap of faith, we went to the Whitney yesterday for the annual Biennial. Not many offerings were life-enhancing, Berenson's handy term for what makes art worth seeing. We liked the Roni Horn walk in photographic installation and Catherine Opie's chromographic prints of California. Sadly though 90% of the show was amateurish and irritatingly so.

The gullible girls with their babies in strollers and high school pupils in black ... the distracting Nightmare Crowd Aspect of New York and the Trendy Media Hype (70s cliches still usable) of Gotham.

Calvin Tompkins has a good piece on the peculiar Christos in the N.Yorker, readable because it is expository and does not wade in unknown quasi-aesthetic waters that way the "criticism" of Kimmelman or Peter Schejldahl (spelling?) does.

Good old New York where you can never get a tennis court or a seat at a lecture at the Frick. Last night even John Russell and Rosamond Bernier, his wife, were turned away along with Ann Nitze and a long line of art lovers who wanted to hear an obscure person lecture on Roger Fry and the Divine Piero. The lecturer had reserved most of the seats in the tiny room for her friends.

Many years ago we attended the long lecture on Proust by Ms. Bernier at the Arts Club in Chicago where the Mies staircase was a popular celebrity.

David Columbia puts out an online daily photo journal - new york social diary dot com--which we read. Now he thinks Taki has the wisdom of the ages; he's drinking too much champagne.

For many many years we drank Veuve and Taittinger several times a week covering the social mores of the not rich and not famous in Chicago; it became cosmically tedious seeing the same faces, listening to the same bavardage.

Trump is telling people how to get rich ... without his father's solid financial rock he might have been a commercial real estate broker but certainly no major developer. These sorts of offerings to the public create pure obfuscation and mask the truth.

What someone forgot to tell many talented people who were not a huge success. From Ralph Lauren .... success is based on "an inner sense of self and believing you have something to say in your own consistent way." How do you order that? His overpriced shmatte has had mountains to say about the aspirations of Bronx and Queens kids, though all the overpriced shmatte never gets them into the country clubs of their dreams.

Vanity Fair's recent issue has a photo article about Eleanor Lambert who was an early PR rep for the New York fashion industry. One of the more delightful aspects of today's cultural mores is the indifference to high fashion; young people know that dressing up is for 'suits' ,secretaries, the harem women of 'society', and the children on the Red Carpet. One remembers meeting hip, candid Audrey Hepburn at a party for Givenchy who looked bored to death in Chicago; she wore a green jewelled dress and when complimented smirked and said, "Hell I'd never wear or be able to afford this; just wearing it for Hubert."

It is not difficult to discover several Infelicities Du Jour by simply glancing at the morning newspapers. The Met has gone mad. Soprano Karita Mattila in a pose suitable for an orgiastic scene in an Eszterhas movie. Oh well at least Symposia knew it in its grand and decorous days when voices were more important than......cannot even bring oneself to write the ubiquitous three letter word........with the non-buffoonish Robert Merrill, Risa Stevens, Renata Tibaldi and the dusty old props.

The Advanced Institute's Freeman Dyson in a tepid exploration of the paranormal in NYR of Books. Sir Roger Penrose is the greatest mathematical physicist of our time and Symposia recommends his bolder observations on the subject.

Contact: l.g.adams@worldnet.att.net

One notes there is a large English population from Bird's Custard Island (a favorite Edwardian endearment) in New York and they all seem to be Mountbatten-y. Or pretend to be.

See Quentin Bell's daughter has written a book........he was so much after the fact and now this is after after the fact..and guess it will go on forever. Symposia was the first person to take him and his wife Anne to visit the Lake District. They had never been to the far northwest and we showed him Brantwood, Ruskin's last home where he ran into a cousin (tout le monde is interrelated there).

If anyone reads this and comes across a book on Tintoretto with a Ruskin/Brantwood bookplate and copious notes from the author please let us know. We bought it in Kendal and it was stolen in Chicago.

contact: l.g.adams@worldnet.att.net

Martha's interview with Oprah two years ago and the 'fact' she could do anything she wanted if she put her mind to it. The frightening aspect of the Can Do Society and its 19th century Wagnerian roots. Time to read some Eric Erickson for some perspective on La Condition Humaine; he revealed how many societies do not even have a word for "I".

Hard to believe she prevented her daughter from having a rapport with her father, the most defining relationship a girl can have. We all came from homes of divorce but some of our mothers had glad hearts.

contact: l.g.adams@worldnet.att.net

Mon Dieu.Now Taki claims to have met Graham Greene...whom he said was impressed by his obviously "privileged background". Will these people never stop fantasizing about some make-believe Cote D'Azure of the Mind? I have recently tried once again to read dense, impenetrable Greene without luck.......the books make better movies.

contact: l.g.adams@worldnet.att.net

Saw a video of the dated, slow moving Chariots of Fire and see why the Fayeds financed much of it. Though the old man probably has a good point about the car crash you rarely read these days that Diana was a psychotic who attempted to murder her unborn child by throwing herself down the stairs. I remember what a relief it was not to have to see her absurd posturing in the papers every day.

I must take two trains daily into and out of Penn Station; we look furtively for back packs and Arabic looking men and women. A mental mantra of The Crusades, The Crusades.....

Invited to Le Cirque for an artist's reception, an "artist" in name only. Some of the Manhattan media set like bashful Morley Safer there no doubt he was an old friend and had painted their faces on the wall. In Chicago they placed our faces on the walls--in decals for easy removal--staring down at the steaks and potatoes at The Palm.

Where else but New York (in the USA) could you decide you must read Roger Fry's 1891 book on Bellini and be able to buy a copy within an hour? For all the brutal ugliness of the physical environment (as Muschamp said Use Your Eyes!) and all the jostling elbows with the furious masses there are some compensations.

No wonder clean, well-dressed people do not read blogs. The political opinionating is so muddy and encourages one to hit the road to Anywhere But Here. It is all so predictable and enforces the sanctity of the two party system...left-right-Democrat-Republican. No original thinking here, thank you very much.

Despite Symposia's indifference to politics she was inclined to like Kerry, but he has turned ugly very early on in the campaign. He, like Dean, now appears to LUST after the number one job. The only thing one can say about monarchy is that there is no blatant behaviour like this. Oh yes, as predicted here women's magazines are circling around Mrs. Kerry and she will have to capitulate and "pose."

As the seasons change and Spring is on the cold horizon of the Hamptons many will think of George Plimpton. We remember him from his many trips to the Metropolis in the Cornfields, especially the polo weekends when Michael Butler was king of the blue and white striped tents and the Friends of Conservation trotted out all those wonderful wild animals. There were also the book promotions, the Harvard Club parties...and so on.

If you want to read truly one of a kind original opinions, not the standard left and right and standardized journalistic views about just about everything on the planet then One Man's Chorus by Anthony Burgess will be satisfying. The author of A Clockwork Orange which we deplored was a civilized Lancashireman with all the truculence and individualism we experienced first hand there. In 1983 he noted that the conformity of culture was "rendering travel to foreign parts a waste of time". Alors! No wonder we have to go to Mars!

Why is it so satisfying that Martha Stewart was found guilty? What really strikes Symposia is how socially marginal she is. Her friends are au pairs (ex of course), "walkers" (ahem), disgraced academics (Waksal) and other fringe people. With her national status you think she could have found more appropriate people to fraternize with; these are obviously those whom the Nutley girl feels comfortable with. My dear!

Unless one is very rich or very poor the outcome of the presidential race is really of little financial importance , so unless one is awash in altruism (and heaven knows society needs these types)or bored nosiness why bother to squander a synapsis on the matter?

Hilton Kramer has gone over the preciosity precipice. From yesterday's NYO: "Almost nothing could be better calculated to excite the interest of modern connoisseurs of sculpture than an exhibition of 18th- and 19th-century European terra-cotta models."

Symposia notes that Alistair Cooke is extant at 95. When we were at Cambridge (King's) many years ago word was still circulating that he was a true gentleman, having left small piles of debts when departing Jesus. From his urbane memoirs we recall his horror at the Americans' passion for early morning breakfast meetings.

Attended a wine tasting in Queens last night, Sacre Bleu; the East River is the moat protecting what remains of civilization.

"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others." Darling Cyril Connelly knew that a broad smile and eager conversational gambits at dinner parties are so obsequious.

Watched the entire Academy Awards last night though we had not seen any of the movies. Symposia does love vernacular culture de temps en temps and this was a true (lackluster) reflection. Such childlike, uncharismatic thespians (use the word lightly) -- though it was satisfying to see Harvey Weinstein acknowledged.

Myrna Loy as Nora Charles was the same age as Julia Roberts but she was infinitely more sophisticated, and intelligent . It's all about social class and not age. Because Marx made class differences so boring and confrontational we rarely discuss this ultimate reality.