I have to agree with them: Hughes was disengaged from Hollywood, which made him a recluse in the film industry’s eyes, but he otherwised lived a normal, out-and-about life in his later years, going to restaurants and hockey games in the Chicago area, opening his home to his and his kids’ friends, and inveterately schmoozing waitresses, garage attendants, and cab drivers when he traveled to New York and London. His was the quiet life of a successful man uninterested in fame, not the misanthropic world of a crank like J.D. Salinger—or the perpetual twilight of the drug- and paranoia-addled Sly.

I’m especially pleased that, as a sidebar to the main piece, we (V.F. and me) are able to present for the first time some short, light fiction that Hughes wrote for fun in his later years, under the pseudonym JL Hudson. One story, “The Things That Bother Jeanne Marie on Friday, January 16, 2006, 4:04 p.m.,” seems to directly acknowledge (and mock) the idea of withdrawn, self-involved crankiness.

I’m not ready to offer such a sweeping assessment myself, but, back at the decade’s midpoint, in late 2005, I stopped to contemplate the half-decade that had just passed and thought: This has been an ugly stretch. So ugly, in fact, that there was no way that VH1 and its stable of “fundits” could pull off one of those “I Love the Eighties”-type shows where they could rat-a-tat glib quips about all the horror that had unfolded.

Or could they?

(Courtesy of the archive of my semi-defunct site Snobsite.)

I was initially wary of the Kindle, because I like real books and independent bookstores. But now that I have one, I find it complements rather than replaces my actual-book-reading. The Kindle is great for loading up on ripping yarns in the crime and thriller genres, which are a godsend during flight delays and long waits at the DMV. Actual books are great for the visual and tactile stuff that the Kindle can’t deliver on. I think Arugula makes for a good Kindle read—it’s not a visual book, and it fits the bill for anyone who needs a fun, absorbing read to get lost in during winter vacation (hint, hint). Besides, I’m eager to reach a new audience of readers in a new way. And the telepathy thing wasn’t working.

Beth and Amy were recently featured on LXTV 1st Look NY, which supplies content for those little TVs in New York taxicabs. In case you haven’t been cabbing, here’s the clip:

I now hereby present “Bruce Weber and the Photogenic Vampires of the Adirondacks, A Young-Adult Novel in 24 Tweets”:

BWATPVOTA, Pt 1: Kendra was discovered while rowing at the Schuylkill Navy Regatta. Her ponytail was like a sheaf of golden Champlain wheat.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 2: Porter was discovered while splitting rails on his grandpa’s ranch in Moab, UT. He had cheekbones you could gut trout with.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 3: Kendra and Porter met on a shoot at Splintery Posts, an old camp Bruce Weber owned in the Adirondacks.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 4: Fourteen youths had been booked for the shoot, all with abdomens as tight as drumheads. Only two, however, were vampires.

BWATPVOTA, Pt. 5: Porter first spotted Kendra draped across an old Packard coupe that had been converted into a planter. Weber snapped away.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 6: She wore a madras bandeau and a sarong made from the flag of Burma. Porter caught her eye—the most cerulean eye ever.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 7: The pheromones sizzled off their skin like summer raindrops on an overheated vintage Buick.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 8: They knew then that they desired one another. They did not yet know that they shared a desire to eat the photographer.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 9: The models’ hospitality tent was loaded with carnage: blood-rare steaks, huge haunches of lamb, joints of local elk.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 10: Weber was vividly aware that the teen metabolism knew no limits.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 11: Yet Porter ignored the buffet; he “dined” only when night fell. “Dude,” said a towhead named Andy, “aren’t you hungry?”

BWATPVOTA, Pt 12: “Andy, it’s just that I’m a v—” Porter caught himself. “...a, er, VEGAN.” Kendra had overheard it all. And now she KNEW.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 13: Weber was not ignorant of the fact that the young and beautiful were often shape-shifting beasts.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 14: Two of his favorite subjects from the early 1980s, Darren and Michael, had been werewolf lovers. They’d been all over GQ.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 15: Weber approached Kendra and Porter as they nuzzled. “This afternoon,” he said, “it’s just you two for me.”

BWATPVOTA, Pt 16: “We shall hike up to Crystalline Pond,” Weber said. “The light there is especially gorgeous... at dusk.”

BWATPVOTA, Pt 17: Dusk fell at the pond. Weber arranged things just so. Porter wore nothing but an ounce of Lycra. Kendra, only a canoe.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 18: A rivulet of sweat trickled down Porter’s sternum. Kendra moved quickly to swab it with a finger. “Wonderful!” Weber said.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 19: But as it got darker, they grew hungrier. A little past six, Porter really did gut a trout with his cheekbones.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 20: Porter used the slurry of fish blood and innards to write on Kendra’s thigh, BATS 4 U. Weber got it all on film.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 21: The light grew ever fainter, the areolae more puckered, but Weber loved the strange energy his subjects were giving him.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 22: It was when Weber turned his back to reload his Pentax that the sun disappeared, and Kendra shot Porter a knowing look.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 23: The following morning, the police dogs finally picked up Weber’s scent at the mouth of a cave near Crystalline Pond.

BWATPVOTA, Pt 24: But all the police ever found was a do-rag, a Pentax 67, and the most softly worn chambray shirt that had ever existed.

In an audaciously small-time attempt at brand extension, I have collaborated with the talented young artisans at New York City’s Greenwich Letterpress on a series of place cards based on The Food Snob’s Dictionary. I must say that they turned out fantastically, and that they are, at $14 a packet, a perfect hostess gift (or hostile gesture) for the upcoming holidays. The cards come eight to a packet (two samples are shown above) and are printed on heavy stock. You may purchase them at Greenwich Letterpress’s lovely, endlessly browsable shop at 39 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC, or order them online here.

I wrote about Dad Lit.

I learned that Rockwell actually rocked well.

I delighted in discovering that my lighter work is ideal for convalescents.

But late in the regular season, after the Yankees had clinched the division, I attended a game where they were starting a bunch of backups (who still demolished the hapless Kansas City Royals), among them the 30-year-old Shelley Duncan, whose impressive slugging in Triple A never quite seems to translate to the big leagues. But what an entrance-music choice! He strode to the plate to the White Stripes’s “Icky Thump.” Heavens, could there be a bona fide Rock Snob in the Yankees organization?

This naturally got me thinking what song I would choose if I were a Yankee position player. My first impulse was to make a joke of it and choose the gayest, most antithetical-to-jockdom song I could think of, something like Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” or Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.” (I am, after all, from a small town.) But I soon realized that nothing could top the cognitive dissonance of the Yankee Stadium grounds crew’s ritual fifth-inning pantomiming of “YMCA,” a song conceived by Village People svengali Jacques Morali as an homage to cruising.

I then thought that something vaguely alt-rocky and Shelley Duncan-ish would be good, but what? Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” is one of the best pop singles ever recorded, and it has the right energy for a stadium, but the title phrase has become too cliché, not to mention redolent of steroid abuse. Big Audio Dynamite’s “C’mon Every Beatbox” is inspiring and dynamic but too English for the Bronx. The Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot” has sports-appropriate lyrics and the right geographical pedigree, but it could almost qualify as jock rock.

So for the moment I’ve settled upon Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” because A) Reed is so New York; B) it’s a good, rollicking song to step up to the plate to; and C) there’s something subversive and enigmatic, especially in a baseball stadium, about the lyric “I hit you with a flower.”

But now, the drumbeat begins. My dog, a shiba inu named Trixie, has made two recent appearances in “the media”: first, as part of my photo portfolio in Time Out New York...

...and now, as the faithful companion animal and seeming collaborator in Ross MacDonald’s new contributor’s illustration of me in Vanity Fair:

The occasion for this new round of Trix-sploitation is my article about Norman Rockwell in the November issue of Vanity Fair. Rockwell was keen on including dogs in his portraits of work and family life, so having Trixie pose with me seemed apposite. (Though it borders on heresy to have a purebred in the picture; Rockwell’s dogs were invariably mutts.)

If you’re looking for a more immediate experience than my longish article on Rockwell, Ross and I did a slide show with audio voice-over for Vanity Fair’s Web site.

My dog, incidentally, is repped by Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Walsh at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

Let the record show that Hornby’s protagonist is a loser male Rock Snob obsessed with a reclusive musician named Tucker Crowe. But the person who actually gets to meet Crowe in Juliet, Naked—the way I actually got to meet Sly Stone—is the male loser’s pretty and more sensible girlfriend. Can we say that I fall somewhere in between the two characters?

So I set out to explain—first to myself and then to Vanity Fair readers—why this particular round of deaths seemed to hit us with more force than others have. The result is an essay you can read on V.F.’s Web site called “Twentieth-Century Nostalgia, or the ‘Summer of Death’ Explained.”

Though Leger is no longer a Giant, I wish him well with the Rams, and we in the Leger Douzable Fan Club share his mom’s hope that he indeed enjoys longevity and prosperity in the NFL.

Now I have to get serious about those fan-club t-shirts...

I don’t feel like a “David,” more like a “Ben” or a “Sam.”

I am overtaken by an urge to festoon my home with taxidermy.

I’ve been lost in reveries of reclaimed wood from old maritime chantries in rough parishes.

I’m keen to relocate to Sullivan County.

Lots of drainpipe trousers all of a sudden.

Lots of waistcoats, too. In tattersall and plaid.

No more Tanqueray or Maker’s Mark; now my cocktails are concocted with things like sloe gin and jenever.

I am compelled to make my own artisanal chocolate.