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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Post-Prandial, Schmost-Prandial--Don't Type on an Empty Stomach

Posted Thursday, March 16, 2000, at 2:22 PM ET

Hi Jen and Er,

Whew. Just back from lunch and feeling lots zippier than before. I was feeling so blah this morning, at least partly because I stood at the Princeton Junction platform for an hour and a quarter late last night waiting for the 10.44 to Trenton to arrive--an event that the printed schedule, at any rate, would have led one to believe would actually happen, but then New Jersey Transit has never been so bourgeois and conventional as to be bound by timetables. So after getting to the station at 10.35 in order to catch the (nonexistent) 10.44, I had to wait for the 11.44, since at that hour trains run just every hour, the idea being that nobody willingly goes to Trenton after dinnertime, which for all I know is true. But still. (I feel I ought to mention, in this context, that New Jersey Transit has apparently been repeatedly named "Best Commuter Railroad in the Country" or something like that [by whom? the CEO's mother?], which I must say is a total mystery to me since in the 15 years I have been commuting between NYC and Princeton on it, I think I've arrived on time maybe twice. Yesterday's delay was apparently due to an "injury on the tracks," which though a tad evasive had a nice Tolstoyesque ring to it. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that by the time I got home, I was a frozen wreck. And then only a few hours sleep until this morning. Argh.

And yet amazingly, I look totally fresh and stunning. How on earth do I do it??

I realize today, as I sit here composing this mail to you guys, what I've always suspected, which is that I can't write in an office--or, for that matter, fully clothed, or even sitting upright. Although I know my agent is reading this, I see no reason not to admit publicly that I do most of my writing in bed, in my "underwears" (as a U. Va. fraternity president I once knew used to say, but that's a whole 'nother story); and I'm so used to it by now that sitting at a desk fully clothed and trying to write feels downright odd to me. One of the two advantages of living la vida freelance is that you don't have to dress to work. (I'll try to remember what the other one is, and get back to you.)

So what are you guys up to?

I might add that I just noticed, re-reading Jen's posting from the morning, that thing about Susan Lucci not being nominated for a Daytime Emmy award. Infidels! I have loved her for 20 years. At U. Va. (see above under "fraternity undergarments"), we actually scheduled our classes around All My Children. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I remember that during my third year I had a Medieval Latin class (god, how nerdy) that ended at 12:50, and I would careen across the grounds trying to make it back to my apartment to watch Erica do something horrible. God, those were the days. Which reminds me: Did I ever tell you the story of how, right after I moved to New York in 1982, I was riding down an elevator in the RCA building--it was just me and a quite attractive, familiar-looking petite brunette. I was still close enough to high school and new enough to New York that anyone who looked familiar to me was, I assumed, someone who'd gone to our high school with us (or perhaps with Andrew, our older, richer brother). So I turned to this woman and said, grandly and quite self-congratulatorily for thinking I'd identified a fellow JFK grad, "Excuse me, but you didn't by any chance go to John F. Kennedy Senior High School in Plainview, Long Island, did you?" I smiled smugly. There was, for a moment, a tiny, devastating pause before she turned to me, an expression that hovered between disbelief and abject pity on her face, and said, "Uh, no. But I am Susan Lucci." I lay on the floor and begged her to stab me to death with the heels of her Manolo Blahniks, but she just walked out.

talk to you later guys.

xo Dan

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Post-Prandial, Schmost-Prandial--Don't Type on an Empty Stomach

Posted Thursday, March 16, 2000, at 2:22 PM ET
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Eric Mendelsohn is the writer/director of the film Judy Berlin, currently in theaters and starring Madeline Kahn, Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Mendelsohn is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer, a lecturer in classics at Princeton University, and the author of The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (click here to buy it). Jennifer Mendelsohn is Slate's Washington, D.C.-based "Keeping Tabs" columnist.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Don't the Mendelsohns remind you of J.D.Salinger's Glass family of precocious children?

--Patti

(To reply, click here.)

[Eagle80 was of the opinion that the Mendelsohns were in fact The Sopranos of the literati. Stacy Grover asked How did so much cleverness end up in one family? and this brought the Missing Mendelsohn brothers to The Fray: Andrew said I often wonder that myself. And you haven't even heard from the rest of us yet!
And Matthew responded:]
I have to agree with my brother Andrew. I've been feeling like Zeppo Marx all week. I think Slate should host a Breakfast Table with the forgotten Mendelsohn brothers. Jennifer, Eric and Daniel can host a discussion about gay culture while Andrew and myself discuss biotech stocks. You'll learn more with them but you'll make more with us.

(To reply--or to follow the thread in more detail--click here.)


Thursday's entry: As for Jennifer and marriage, I believe she is the star of an upcoming Fox special called, Who wants to Marry A Mendelsohn? Should be good.

--Bill Watrous

(To reply, click here.)

[If you want to read the marriage proposal for Jennifer (and her response) click here. Yet another member of the Mendelsohn family, Jay, entered The Fray here. Marriage proposal for Dan is here. Sorry, Eric, no proposal, but lots of Fraygrants did like your film and one of them liked your photo.

But there were also Fray readers who wanted to discuss serious issues, or at least give a short, thrilling history of religion down the ages:]

Typical drivel from the pseudo-intellectual phenoms. Here's some of my drivel. Let's see: there were 12 tribes waiting for the Messiah, He comes, they kill kill him because he wanted to give Caesar what was Caesar's, they wanted power, all he wanted was your faith and devotion to a Greater Good. The various churches spring up, (no-one mentions the Orthodox Churches and the atrocities they committed), Popes are killed, moved to France, etc., they offer forgiveness of sins for money, and kill, all for power using the popular religion of the time. Then we have Protestantism, (no one mentions the 2.5 million Catholics Cromwell killed and the killing that has gone on since then in Ireland) Let's leave for the New World, Puritan brothers, so that we the church leaders can have the power over every bit of your life (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Pat Buchanan, et al) Oh yeah, you're a witch, die! (You also had a piece of land I wanted...)I am going to skip a century or two now... lets see Joseph Smith, ex-con, sees an angel called Baloney, no Maloney, no, Moroni... yeah that's the one. Yeah, Yeah, that's my wife...Morgan Fairchild...all 11 of them...God told me I could, I swear!

Well enough of this. People are the problem, not God, not Jesus, no matter what religion, faith, creed.

--St Pat

(To reply, click here.)


Is it possible that the pope's "doctrinal rigidity" and "gestures of expansive humanity" [Monday's entry] are of a piece? As I understand John Paul II's thinking, the humanity Mendelsohn admires arises almost entirely from the pope's dogmatic beliefs about God, man's nature, and the consequent requirements for living a good life. Liberals (and I don't intend that as a lazy epithet) should consider the possibility that the "humanity" they praise must rest either on certain irreducible truths or on a collection of insubstantial, albeit attractive, sentiments.

--Michael Pollard

(To reply, click here.)


Many have decried the pope's apology as a political ploy. I doubt it, if only for the reason that if it were, he would have vaguely referred to the Crusades and Inquisition as "youthful indiscretions" of a church that is now much more mature and therefore knows better as a result of the important lessons it has learned.

G Wiz

(To reply, click here.)


1. Gays (yawn). How over. How '90s.
2. Catholics. "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."

--P.J.O'Connell

(To reply, click here.)


To P.J.O'Connell: Let's jump back in time to 1960...
Negros (yawn). How over. How 50's.
2. Jews. "Just ignore them and they'll go away."
It ain't over by a long shot!

--Dave

(To reply, click here.)


I'm glad Eric Mendelsohn cleared up the confusion over Beauty and the Beast. But I'm still not sure which Psycho he had in mind. Perkins or Vaughn? Or Christian Bale? I hope he clears this up before the Breakfast Table is wiped clear of bagel crumbs, the dishes go in the dishwasher, and he goes off to film The Magnificent Mendelsohns.

And, by the way, the poet Catullus [see Wednesday's entry] was really the Matt Drudge --or maybe Fray contributor--of his times. How low can you get?

--Eagle80

(To reply, click here.)

[The Catulluses of the modern age also discussed dogs, names, the Oscars, The Sopranos and many other Breakfast Table topics in The Fray this week.]

(3/17)

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