Wieseltier vs Basman: Boston Bombing: Don't Move On

Wieseltier TNR, 4, 24, 13

...Almost as soon as the bombs exploded on Boylston Street the calls were heard to move on. “Repair the sidewalk immediately,” exhorted one commentator, “fix the windows, fill the holes, and leave no trace—no shrines, no flowers, no statues, no plaques—and return life to normal there as fast as possible.” Anything less would be a victory for the terrorists, who should not be allowed, as if it is within our power to disallow it, to leave “even the smallest scar” on our cities and our psyches. “The best response to a tragedy such as the one in Boston,” declared another commentator, “is to go on with your life, eyes open.” 

The advice was perfectly anodyne—but who, except the victims of the atrocity, was preparing to do anything else? A security expert pronounced that “this is a singular event, and not something that should drive policy.” His certainty that there was nothing to be learned from the attack was expressed long before we learned very much about the attack. There was a lot of uplift, too, in the discussion of the horror, which was understandable, since there is nothing as comforting as cliché; but it seemed similarly panicked by the prospect of a rupture in quotidian American existence, of a disruption in the inertia of a good life. Some of this silly balm consisted in local chauvinism: suddenly everybody was singing the Standells. “They picked the wrong city,” 

President Obama said, along with many others. Which city would have been the right city? He also proclaimed proudly that “Americans refuse to be terrorized.” But Americans were terrorized, on the day of the bombing and on the day of the manhunt; and they were right to be terrorized, because what they had in their midst was terrorism.

Moving on is of course one of the quintessential expressions of the American spirit, and of the American shallowness. Our religion is the religion of movement; stillness offends our sense of possibility. We dodge the darker emotions by making ourselves into a moving target for them. We feel, but swiftly. This emotional efficiency, this cost-benefit calculus of the heart, is at once a strength and a weakness: you cannot be damaged by what cannot sink in. And so we acquire resilience through transience, and stoicism through speed. We cling desperately to the illusion of our immunity, even after it has just been disproved by experience, and to the fiction of the pastness of the past: we call it “closure,” which is just a decision not to care anymore, and not to let experience intrude any further. 

We need desperately to know that our insulation is intact. Hence the haste to get the marathon massacre behind us, to hold the memorial service and plan the next marathon. We are sometimes so anxious not to overreact that we underreact. Perhaps some people worried, in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, that if we lingered too long over the outrageous fact of what had been done to us, if we were patient with fear and tolerant with anger, then we, I mean our government, might be tempted to do something, and some airborne division might be dispatched for some more shock and awe. After all, if any past is not past, it is 2003. (The worry is plainly ridiculous, as our government prefers highly analytical inaction.) In any event, we decided that every detail of our lives before the bombings was now sacred. Americans do not like to be inconvenienced by history. 

We sometimes comport ourselves as if history is itself an inconvenience.

I remember reading these vicious lines by Frank Bidart, in 2002 in The Threepenny Review, in a poem called “Curse” about the terrorists of September 11: 

May what you have made descend upon you.
May the listening ears of your victims     their eyes     their

breath

enter you, and eat like acid
the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath.

I greatly admired their wrath. 

Sometimes anger is apposite, a sign that you have accurately understood what has befallen you; and the absence of anger a sign of intellectual or moral confusion. Most of the curses I heard during the week of Boston’s ordeal were directed at the allegedly heavy hand of law enforcement! The same with fear: it may have a basis in reality, and when it does it should be respected. Sometimes it is fearlessness that is unintelligent, and its consequences are not always laudable.

 

Only a stupid society would come away from the events in Boston with its sense of its security unshaken. Only a stupid society would refuse to acknowledge that its safety, and its peace of mind, may be affected by resentments and metaphysics that come from far away—from what Fouad Ajami recently described, in connection with the Tsarnaev brothers, as “the seam between countries and cultures.” Even though we must harbor no fantasy of invulnerability, we must not be glib about our vulnerabilities. Keep calm and carry on, sure—but also think strategically, and make adjustments, and learn lessons. 

Are there really no policy conclusions to be drawn from Boston? I do not believe it. The professors of risk, who peddle reassuring probabilities and are more anguished about whether cigarettes should be seen in the stores that sell them, measure evils only quantitatively, which has a certain consciousness-lowering effect.

Vigilance, increased and intense, is not a victory for the terrorists. Mourning, and the time it takes, is not a victory for the terrorists. 

Reflection on all the meanings and the implications—on the fragility of our lives—on terrorism and theodicy—is not a victory for the terrorists. A less than wholly sunny and pragmatic view of the world is not a victory for the terrorists. What happened on Boylston Street was not a common event, but it was not a singular event. There is a scar. Taking terrorism seriously is not a victory for terrorism.

Me:

...I didn’t like it much better second time round. “Why?” nobody asks.

For one, the premise isn’t earned: the anecdotal “Let’s move on” exhorted by a few commentators is hardly a firm for the premise of a deeply engrained American impulse here to get past it, forget it, assume again delusions of relative imperviousness, get closure, and make the passed past, in a word or two “Move on.” How does Wieseltier propose to demonstrate, provide the metrics by which to gauge, the accurate, singularity of American sensibility here.

For two, why the condescension towards what would be a universal desire to get some purchase on some relative sense of normalcy, to get back to daily life, to a “good life” or the best life lone can manage?

For three, consider the logical fallacy of the excluded middle between the binaries of moving on or dwelling with, absorbing, internalizing this latest terrorism on American soil. How does the desire for such normalcy in the wake of it entail just moving on without dwelling on it, considering it, absorbing it, internalizing it? Why can’t the desire for some daily normalcy coexist with dealing with the terror?

For four, why the snotty condescension to Americans, Bostonians, and the President wanting to vaunt the muscularity of Boston in the face of the attack? Isn’t that standing strong and municipally proud a good symbolic fist in the face of would be terrorists and their enablers, however ineffectual? And why the snotty condescension in the phrase “the silly balm of local chauvinism? Why “silly?” As just briefly explained, it’s understandable, all to the good, and it’s people seeking meaning and healing via civic pride and via certain touchstones of iconic local popular culture. /// For four, what’s with the pedantic mincing, chop logic and slicing of the meanings of words and phrases? Is this man so indwelling in his own convoluted head that he cannot recognize the attempt at invigorating sentiment in “They picked the wrong city?” Does he want to suggest Obama was in some way implying that there might have been “a right city? Does he want to suggest that Obama is saying Bostonians and Americans were not terrorized when he said “Americans refuse to be terrorized.” Is he buried so deep inside his own convolution and presumed superior sense of things that he fails to understand Obama’s words as a call to strength, as encouraging the refusal of the public to be cowed by these acts? Does he want to suggest that these words are a call to mindless obliviousness, immune from accommodating th meanings and consequences of what happened?

For five, the entirety of the second paragraph is a highly impressionistic paean to nothing so much as Wieseltier’s patently self congratulatory assertion of his own profundity, superior sensibility, and brilliance in diagnosis of the American sensibility. Evidence please to shore up that diagnosis, of the lack of a sense of living history in the American mind, of dodging the darker emotions, of clinging desperately to “an illusion of immunity, of the panic-stricken desire for indifference, that Americans aren’t lingering enough over the bombing, and all the other items so sneeringly laid out. And what of the utter abstracted stupidity that closes the second paragraph: the surmise that perhaps some are worried if Boston is too long lingered over America might be moved to reiterate some iteration of attacking Iraq—...some airborne division might be dispatched for some more shock and awe... Is he really positing that as an imaginable possibility, or is it just a disingenuous rhetorical ploy to give context to a snivelling swipe at Obama—The worry is plainly ridiculous,-- (as though anyone sane is harboring such worries)—as our government prefers highly analytical inaction...? (To be noted that this is about the 9.569^th time Wieseltier has faulted Obama for not doing more war like things, without ever once hinting at one concrete detail of what these things might include.)

For six, evidence please: for the lack of righteous anger, for intellectual and moral confusion, for the curses directed at the “allegedly” heavy hand of law enforcement. My Canadian’s sense of the response from the wall to wall cable television coverage, from such of the American conversation within earshot via American radio, from reading news papers and magazines, from watching the investigation unfold, the beginnings of the administration of criminal justice, the mooting of the related questions of rights and liberties in the specifics of the case, from seeing these questions raised, from, most genrally, sensing the burning desire to have satiated the overarching preoccupation with “Why?” with “How from the shadow of thought to the act?” is a screamingly loud refutation of the entirety of Wieseltier’s diagnosis and his “superior” recommendations. Recommendations to do what specifically? Why nothing really.

For seven, evidence please of this society’s sense of its security left unshaken, of its stupidity to be inferred therefrom, of its fantasies of invulnerability, of the refusal to try to draw policy conclusions, of an Administration, as representative of its people, and its agencies not trying to do their best to cope with, deter, defend against terror at home and aboard, all lost in a complacent miasma of inactivity. For six, I have no doubt, I assume, I would bet on it, those is whose duty it is to consider what the policy consequences of this terrorism might be are doing their due considering. But please Wiesletier, so sure of the nascent policy consequences waiting full birth, gives us a hint. What policy consequences occur to you that you’d care to detail? I’m equally certain, assume, would bet on it, that one this question, you have nothing to say.

So I’ll finish where I began a few comments above: ... this is one of stupidest, most supercilious, overwrought, going nowhere things Wiselseltier has ever written in these pages...

On Theme In Literature: A Response To A Friend

First of all, for Aristotle plot, the causality among events,  which I previously suggested is, as causality, an aspect of my conception of theme as world view--theme NOT BEING a moral or homily to be ascribed, tacked on, simple-mindedly to a text, as in an Aesop fable-- is more important than character. That's against you saying: ...  I follow the fortunes of characters, sympathizing, mocking, admiring, puzzling over motives, but with the expectation that it will lead somewhere significant.... And what you say, now that I've considered it, seems in fact inconsistent with an Aristotelean notion of plot. 

I think Aristotle is right that plot is more important than character. I may not understand what he meant, only having in my mind what has been said commonly about him, but it makes sense in the context of what I mean. 

Character doesn't exist outside world. It is a function of world. It is in a good book an effective representation of people so that we are interested, affected, aroused, moved, sometimes overjoyed, sometimes distraught and so on. That's what responding to literature involves. But moving from response to critical response means to think through one's feelings, which itself involves necessarily asking what it all means. That involves understanding character in light of what it all means. For that, what you "follow," which is of course fine, is inadequate to critical understanding, I'd respectfully argue.

And it is in the context of this understanding that "Trust the teller..." Is to be understood. The issue is of course the tale itself as contra-distinct from some external stated intention. But that trust needs a refinement beyond what you say you follow. The tale itself in its literary properties, in all its complexities, in understanding why sometimes just what you feel about say one character  is insufficient when seen against the whole, is what engenders resolutionary meaning, even if ambiguous and paradoxical--those qualities part of the essence of good literature.

Not to cavil, but saying stories are different from life, to escape truism, must mean that stories represent a vision life. For a God based writer, that representation may be of a universe determined by a God. His fiction may cleave to that. If the author wants to project a world of chance, of contingency, he will represent that. And one more point, your distinction between life--as chance, "no coherent pattern"-and literary art--as presumably constituted by "coherent patterns," my very argument in fact--needs the addition of the complicating fact that we in life see the world in coherent patterns, however things impinge on us, and literary art is of a piece with us in the nature of things seeing what's around us as world, as coherent pattern.

It's in these terms that I'd speak about the theme of Lear, or, more to immediate hand, Gatsby. For Lear, I'd have to give it some thought. For Gatsby, which I've been thinking about lately for obvious reasons, I'd conceptualize it as a matter of intellectual shorthand as something like irretrievably blackened idealism. 

I don't agree at all with your notion of theme, needless to say.

The Place Beyond The Pines

I thought it was great. For all its length I didn't want it to end. It had me from the first long opening shot to the final lingering shot of the place the kid rides away from, leaves the place beyond the pines behind to get to a place beyond the place beyond the pines.

I've heard people say the third part is a let down. Not to me. I think it's a fitting complement to, and resolution of, the movie's themes as they expand in scope, complexity, intensity and depth from part to part to part.

I'm going from imperfect memory here.

I ask myself what's the movie about, as well as how it's about what it's about, as Ebert used to say. I think it's about a great many things but a central and rather slapping-one-across-the-face thing is the theme of fathers and sons and the generational consequences of fathers' acts and omissions. So Gosling's father, absent as one, leaves a drifting wayward son. Gosling is determined, partly in reaction to that, to do right by his son, who is some of the wages of the drift of his life. 

He's so elemental that unnuanced linearity is of his laconic  essence. He will do right by his son. He quits his job. He tells Eva Mendes to be with him. She asks, trying to maintain and ascend a more complex linear path, how will he take care of them. Bourgeois stability, the opposite of what he has been in his life, is important to her even if she struggles with her deep attraction to him: she has a man, a house, a job, schooling she's doing. Her return fling with him is mostly that. So now he sees he needs more money than his bust out job can possibly provide him, seeing materially with what he needs to compete for her. So he cottons on to Mendelsohn's original suggestion of robbing banks, which he does with his own extreme, fear-induced excitable, flair.

Now he feels he can get Mendes and his child to be with him. He thinks it will just happen. And we expect, at this point not realizing how tis movie goes, that he will confront her new man, and beat his time. His simple mindedness has him unable to understand propriety. He just shows up at her house, owned by her partner. He in effect busts in to her house with a crib and starts assembling it thinking nothing of it. Her man confronts him, with due shock at his mindless temerity, just coming in, thinking to turn their lives upside down, just like that. And the new man's more bourgeois stability, house, job, providing for his "family" proves no match for the muscled, outlaw, outlier strength  and violence Gosling wreaks of. But just at the point that one might think he's done what he needs to to dispose of the competition, Mendes is utterly shocked and repulsed by him and lovingly tends to her man.

As we ascend class to the next part of the movie, we move into greater moral murkiness and complex ambiguity. Cooper, a bar passed patrol cop, the son of a well regarded judge, who he's driven to react against in his life, is of his essence a morally divided man, so restlessly ambitious he rips off his hospital tubes and aids and tries immediately to get out of bed. His shooting of Gosling is, *to my mind,* his attempt to jet himself ahead in his career. He had no need to enter the home, having called for back up. He probably broke protocol by doing so. He knew Gosling was upstairs. He needn't have entered the room as sirens signalled other police arriving. He made a desperate lunge for the career propulsion of heroics. He burst into the room shooting first.

The scenes between him and Bruce Greenwood, especially the first one, are marvels of nuance and levels of meaning consistent with ambiguous morality. Greenwood ambivalently investigates him in that first interview while signalling explicitly to him what to say. 

Then the intensity of Cooper's desire to one better his father is steeped in naïveté when he tells his commanding officer he wants to be made Lieutenant and the head of a squad. And his simmering reaction against his father is evident when he says in his speech, with his father watching, that he wishes to act to serve justice rather than sit and talk about it.

His marriage fails and his overweening ambition and guilt ridden moral ambiguity seem to be part of what wrecked it and in seem in significant part to have yielded his complex, morally deficient son, who is so self-alienated that, in his absurd wiggery, he can't be any kind of authentic self. Gosling's son, absent a biological father, a source of some inner emptiness, still has the benefit of a father in Mendes's partner, who's shown as an uncomplicated good man who has made a stable good life for Mendes, their daughter, and Gosling's son. In Gosling's conception of family, Mendes, their child and his motorcycle all have pride of place.

Generational circles start to close in the complicated relationship between the sons and in Gosling's son's growing realization of who his biological father is and was, learning of it from Mendelsohn--note the bike riding as an echo of his father's motorcycle riding--the kind of brilliant outlaw, outlier gifts Gosling had, his outlawry itself, and how he died at the hands of Cooper. 

But lineage isn't destiny, though virtually necessary to, but not sufficient for, the kind of man a son will be. So transcending any necessary fate, that aided by the fathering he's gotten from Mendes's partner, Gosling's son murders neither Cooper, who is both politically triumphant and abject when kneeling before Gosling's son in his grief out of his love for his son who he imagines has been shot, nor murders Cooper's son. 

And in the end, lighting out, Gosling's son, on his motorcycle, literally and metaphorically leaving the place beyond the pines for a place beyond that point, sets out to seek to make his own new destiny out of the soil of both his complex past and who he understands himself to be as evidenced in not getting imprisoned within the enclosing of the generational circle around him. In leaving and riding he is both his fathers and he is own young man too.

David Mamet's Phil Spector

I watched David Mamet's Phil Spector. I thought it great.

The difficulty of formulating of a defence theory and the lavish celebrity trial preparation, easily afforded by the ghoulish Spector, set the context for the evolving lawyer client and person to person relationship between Spector and his understated lawyer.

Pacino, 10 pounds ham to 90 pounds real character, is tremendous as Spector, illuminating his psychic fragility, his utter whacko creepiness, his manic brilliance, his hermetic wealth, his musical accomplishment, his unwieldiness, and generally his spectacular, irresistible (partly as in you-can't-turn-away) outsizedness.

The crazy finally overwhelms the brilliant in Spector when he shows up for trial wearing a Jimi Hendrix wig, (which he claims isn't a wig.) His lawyer decides that that day she can't put him on the stand. ( I haven't been able to find out if he ever testified at either trial.)

Mamet is exceptional in extrapolating the tension from two bookends of the facts-of-the-case spectrum: the sheer outlandishness of the notion that Lana Clarkson would that particular night kill herself or even put a gun in her own mouth and the mysteriousness of the lack of blood splatter on Spector given the prosecution's theory of the case.

In that tension, within what is depicted in the film, I was left with reasonable doubt.

I thought Mirren really effective in her subdued playing of Spector's lawyer. And while Mamet initially makes a strong point of how expensive she is, we see her, payment having presumably been made, working the case agonizingly slowly, deliberately, self-questioningly, and conscientiously, all sotto voce to Spector's (via Mamet) Shakespearean, larger than life presence, a continuous mix, as noted, of brilliance and craziness.

That mix is shown particularly in the powerful scene when Spector breaks down in rage at the mock cross examination, understanding the rehearsal for what it is, as he keeps saying, while regardless of that understanding being unable to control the mock affront he perceives. In that we see what a ticking time bomb he embodies.

His lawyer's calm quieting him down, almost as if talking to a child, punctuated by Spector needing to gloat, even here, that he was right, Lennon was wrong in that particular orchestration of Lennon's record, and Spector's regaining, temporarily, his self possession are simply amazing film making, a great tribute to Pacino, Mirren and especially Mamet.

There's a lot of great meat in this film, all underlain by Spector's music and I'll be thinking about it and wanting to talk about it for some time to come.

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Some Thoughts On Ray Charles's Genius Loves Company

This may be slightly contrarian.

The tremendous Ray Charles's best selling record was his last, posthumously released, so close was it recorded to his end, a series of duets nicely titled Genius Loves Company. Joining him are such stalwart singers as Norah Jones, Michael McDonald, Diana Krall, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, a few others. 

Some singers lose their chops with age and Ray Charles, sick at the end of his years, lost his. The sad result is that to a singer his duetting partners tend to carry him. He just, understandably , didn't have it anymore. So why is it his best selling record: nostalgia , sentimentality, genuine reverence for Charles, the popularity of his duet partners, hyping of the record, wanting one last bit of Charles, lack of discernment? Likely all of these reasons and others along their lines. 

When I bought it a few weeks ago, downloaded from iTunes, I had no idea it was Charles's last record. I had never heard of it before, but heard one track of it that I liked and decided to get it, only to be disappointed musically by it overall. 

Still had I known how the entire record played, had I found it musically unprepossessing, I would've bought it in a heartbeat regardless for most of the reasons I briefly just speculated about, save, I hope, for lack of discernment, so much do I love Ray Charles.

One final thought: I'm often in mind of Billie Holiday's last record, Lady In Satin, recorded near the diseased end of her drug shattered life, with only raspy traces of her voice left. But hers is a record of astonishing emotional power, owing, I think, to her channeling her fraught experiences and fraught state of being into her interpretation of what she sang and conveying all that emotionally and dramatically. You feel her pain. 

Not anything close to that in Genius Loves Company. There, at best, we get Ray Charles trying hard to sing up to the songs, but sounding light voiced, not quite up to them, and, as noted, needing the help his duetting partners give him, as though he were leaning on them while they walked together.

A Short Theory On Love

A SHORT THEORY ON LOVE AS CHOICE.

Experience has taught me this: for adults "falling in love" as a romantic matter is a choice. The usual preconditions have to be in place, sexual attraction in most cases, soul to soul compatibility in all cases. But feelings of love need, I'd argue, some recognition in mind, usually evident in saying so, to oneself, to another, to the chosen other. 

Articulation is a commitment to those feelings, their relative implementation. 

Romeo and Juliet is English literature's classic depiction of young romantic love. That state of being for the "star crossed lovers" emerges without choice. Their attraction to each other, soul to soul, overwhelms them. It's foregone in their first encounter. 

The comedic complement to that mysterious operation in Shakespeare is A Mid Summer Night's Dream, where the emotions woken up with are the workings of fairies and spirits and magic dust, with no accounting for, with the sheer repudiation of, rationality. 

The adult answer to Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare is his mordant tribute to mature love, perhaps the thematic template for Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Antony and Cleopatra. They each give up kingdoms and ultimately their lives for their adult, tarnished love for each other but as matters, I'd argue, of mature choice.

Evidence for my thesis exists in the very rituals leading to marriage or to its non institutional equivalent, proposal, acceptance or rejection, then in marriage at least the formal repetition of choice in the completion of vows. 

And to my mind a classic illustration of the operation of choice lies in the spurning lover seeking to reengage with the spurned lover. The spurned lover will be working on getting over the grief in being spurned, or may have accomplished it. Now confronted by the importuning to resume affection, the spurned may plead, "Why are you doing this? I've just gotten," or "I'm just getting, over you." Now he or she has to decide whether to cap dormant or latent or subsisting feelings, if still there--they may not be--by the assent to them. Unassented to, love will not find love; reciprocity will be denied.

On Friendship

There's a so so book review in TNR,http://www.tnr.com/book/review/friendship-better-romance, on friendship. It makes one point I like and that is this: the "scientizing," my neologism, of folk psychology: "This tendency to repackage the obvious carries over to citation, with professional identifications giving false authority to anodyne comments." And it speaks briefly though inadequately about the power of friendship:

...We all have friendships, premonitions about friendships and regrets about friendships. The best friendships seem to activate our best—usually dormant—parts. They can end in betrayal or outrage or in that more tragic..

and refers to a brief example from the book:

...'For the past forty years, Richard Levinson has spoken on the phone with his friend and fellow trial lawyer John every single day'...

I had such a best friend, my law partner in fact, James Rose, who died too young two years ago and a bit, in December 2010. From September 28, 2004 to the day he died, December 23, 2010, to be exact, he practiced law in Bracebridge, Ontario, and I practiced law in Toronto, both under the banner, Basman Rose. Before that for about 15 years, we were partners in a larger downtown Toronto law firm, where our friendship formed and cemented itself. 

What didn't we do together but everything, traveled--an annual tradition inaugurated by a last minute decision to fly from Toronto to Little Rock to be there for Clinton's winning the presidency first time round, fought cases, fought each other, got drunk a million times , ate a million meals, sat it out in a million bars, listened how many times to the blues, saw each other through all our relative crises, got pissed off with each other, laughed about it after. 

It's said people are as sick as their secrets. Well on that score we were healthy. We talked about everything and everyone, the glorious and the shockingly inglorious. No secrets. 

From the time we became friends till the day he died, we kibitzed and laughed at everything. Always, and more than anything else, we were laughing. 

The trial lawyer daily phoning his friend put me in more intense mind of my friend--he's always on my mind, more or less. I had dinner with one of my best friends last week and told him a long story about certain experiences I'd been having.

He asked me who else I'd told or would tell this story to. I mentioned a few people who were our mutual friends and ruled some in and some out and said the reasons why. He then asked me if I would have told this story to James Rose. "Oh my God," I said, "in a heart beat. We thrived on sharing these kinds of stories with each other. This kind of story was so us."

And in thinking about it, though I've had the same thought innumerable times, as I lived through the experiences forming the story, complicated, bittersweet, enlivening, making-life-worthwhile experiences they are, I was again struck but even more forcefully, like a hammer to the head, how much of each other's lives we shared and in a way lived, and how we in our friendship lived a certain life together, like a marriage but it was a friendship between two men who believed at bottom they were forever kids.

Him dead is like living without something, say one of your senses, or an arm or a leg. It's living with a certain kind of irreparability. You keep on. You keep having a relatively full life. But too you live that life with a sizeable hole in it and there is, ultimately, nothing to fill it in. But at least there is the poignant and intangible concreteness of memory and the deep thanks to the way things sometimes go that I had such a friend.

Is Friendship Better than Romance?

www.tnr.com

<​p>Last month, I went on a very successful “friend date.&rdquo

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