A dozen eggs were on the counter waiting for me when I walked into Crossroads Music on Monday night. Michael Clark, the proprietor, had read a recent lament in these pages in which I had observed that my home hens had taken the winter off.

    Lisa and I take our older kids to the shop one evening a week for music lessons, and Michael had resolved to share the bounty of his younger birds. I can sympathize; when our flock was in its first laying year, we had so many eggs that we tried to give them once a week to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

    Those were the days, though our hens’ decline is not unexpected. Having had chickens as a child, I remember that after a couple of years production trailed off. They freeloaded out their days, pecking at their feed and offering us only the entertainment of watching their regular squabbles.

    Even if impractical and expensive, there is a certain satisfaction in keeping a flock of chickens around. As a side result, I have become much more aware of our neigboring ecosystem. I fret that predators will somehow get through the wire fencing. All of a sudden in the last few weeks there have been raccoons about, knocking over the garbage cans and slinking along Cranberry Hole Road after dark. There are signs that mice hang around the shed where I keep feed, searching for fallen grains. Hawks greedily drift by overhead. A weasel’s tracks show up in the snow.

    The two roosters begin to crow before dawn. We have gotten used to their noise. I let them out when it’s time to wake the kids up for school, then refill the water and feeder.

    Well before nightfall, the birds will hop to their roosts. I release a ring on the outside of their yard to shut their steel-lined door, keeping varmints out and the cocks’ racket inside. It’s a nice routine. Sometimes lately, I’ve been getting eggs; mostly I just play farmer.

    On Tuesday I fried two of Michael’s dozen for breakfast. By coincidence, there were four eggs in our coop. It was as if our birds were trying to tell me something.

   Rusty Drumm wrote recently in the praise of fish and fishermen, likening their tales to love sonnets, and to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .” in particular.

    It was a really wonderful piece, and yet among the 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote, there are few that are as transporting as number 18.

    After reading them — the first 126, including “Shall I compare thee,” written to a Young Man, and the remaining ones to the Dark Lady, who appears to drive him crazy — one can be forgiven for concluding, although we’re warned not to treat the sonnets as a diary, that they show Shakespeare, an adept when it came to treating of love, to have been a rather unlucky lover.

    The Young Man (the Earl of Southampton?) was apparently willing to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, and the Dark Lady’s fooling around drove Shakespeare to feverish madness and to conclude that she was “as black as hell, as dark as night.”

    “Maybe he was too taken up with his writing,” Mary surmised when I’d finished Helen Vendler’s “The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

    But, by the same token, these unrequited, or periodically unrequited, loves provided plenty of stimulus for his kaleidoscopic brain, and the sonnets that resulted are intricate, complex, and reflective, anything but Johnny-one-note paeans to Venus.

    Time’s bending sickle, though, is the real villain, summer’s lease having all too short a date. Yet we are urged to bear it out even to the edge of doom.

    Well I shall, and gladly, having been blessed with the love of a woman of infinite variety, generous to a fault, and rare to find it (though when she does, watch out), who, as I began to inch my way back from the doghouse not long ago, asked if I still had that quote of Dante’s that I had pinned to my office wall almost 27 years ago.

    I did. A beacon to blithe lovers such as I, it warns, “How brief a blaze a woman’s love will yield if not relit by frequent touch and sight.”

    “. . . If this be error and upon me proved / I never writ, nor no man ever loved,” Bub.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattlelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

    The Italian artist has taken over the center of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building with almost every hyperrealist sculpture and art piece he has ever conceived. The dozens of works are suspended in a dizzying amalgamation that viewers take in by climbing or descending the spiral.

    Since this is not a review, I won’t touch on the more critical aspects of it from an art historical perspective. I’m not certain that it succeeds on that level. This is, rather, a visual appreciation of a work that I think anyone who has a chance to experience it should.

    The objects include self-portraits, realistic facsimiles, and taxidermy of animals, full-scale painted billboards, perching pigeons, upside-down cops, a praying Hitler, and other odd, irreverent, and punkish visual pranks and jokes sometimes striking a chord, sometimes simply facile and bratty.

    It is the installation that makes the show. Upon entering at ground level the eyes are drawn up to a clotted grouping of things all too detailed and obscured to take in at once. Entering the spiral ramp, the details of each object begin to emerge and the overall piece begins to engage: dangling feet lead to legs, bodies, and heads; an elephant either Klanish, ghostly, or embarrassed, hangs hiding under a sheet; a seemingly full-scale dinosaur’s skeleton and a 20-foot-long foosball table are some of the objects that emerge.

    Students of modern art history will note references to international artists and countrymen such as Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni.

    The objects may refer to other works (the foosball table was actually used for a competition as part of a larger work) or are stand-alone pieces. They may suspend by themselves or sit on pedestals to provide some grounding and better visibility. Without its room-like setting, for example, a squirrel that has committed suicide in its well-appointed kitchen would not be readable, whereas a respectable older woman crammed into a gleaming new stainless-steel refrigerator is a piece that can stand (or hang) on its own.

    At each new level and each new vantage point the objects become more and more fascinating. Even the ones that may be familiar offer new interest and insight. At the same time, the architecture remains in view, forever part of the work. With no art displayed in the bays, the building’s form is its function and an inextricable accomplice in the work. In fact, all of the self-references and cross-references flying back and forth between the works themselves and the building can be as dizzying as the horses, donkeys, dogs, wax figures, and death-masked effigies doing their acrobatics throughout the installation.

    With each new angle and vantage point, from worm’s eye up to bird’s eye, the piece forces you to constantly engage with it and its components. I cannot remember any exhibit that ever saturated me with its imagery in such a way. It is exhaustive and exhausting. Upon reaching the top, I was relieved and a bit elated. It is somewhat like reaching Valhalla, and the delirium from so much engagement certainly plays a factor in the exhilaration.

    That is the show’s strength. Its weaknesses become more apparent on the way down. We decided to take the ramp rather than the elevator. At the time, it seemed there might have been even more to glean from the parts now that they had been taken in whole. That was where the spell began to break. It was not clear if it was the objects themselves or the intensity that had built up over such intimate and repetitive viewing, but seeing them once in this context was certainly enough.

    Those same works that seemed to possess such mystery and present endless revelation had nothing to offer on second glance. Weaknesses already apparent became fatal flaws and strengths became merely amusing tidbits. It seems that the genius of the artist was to understand his own works’ limitations and play against them, by refusing to elevate them in one way while quite literally doing so in another. This may leave you with some disappointment, but only because of what the experience initially offered. That would be my endorsement of this unusual and still compelling juggernaut.

—

    Jennifer Landes is arts editor at The Star.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

    The Italian artist has taken over the center of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building with almost every hyperrealist sculpture and art piece he has ever conceived. The dozens of works are suspended in a dizzying amalgamation that viewers take in by climbing or descending the spiral.

    Since this is not a review, I won’t touch on the more critical aspects of it from an art historical perspective. I’m not certain that it succeeds on that level. This is, rather, a visual appreciation of a work that I think anyone who has a chance to experience it should.

    The objects include self-portraits, realistic facsimiles and taxidermy of animals, full-scale painted billboards, perching pigeons, upside-down cops, a praying Hitler, and other odd, irreverent, and punkish visual pranks and jokes sometimes striking a chord, sometimes simply facile and bratty.

    It is the installation that makes the show. Upon entering at ground level the eyes are drawn up to a clotted grouping of things all too detailed and obscured to take in at once. Entering the spiral ramp, the details of each object begin to emerge and the overall piece begins to engage: dangling feet lead to legs, bodies, and heads; an elephant either Klanish, ghostly, or embarrassed, hangs hiding under a sheet; a seemingly full-scale dinosaur’s skeleton and a 20-foot-long foosball table are some of the objects that emerge.

    Students of modern art history will note references to international artists or countrymen such as Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni.

    The objects may refer to other works (the foosball table was actually used for a competition as part of a larger work) or are stand-alone pieces. They may suspend by themselves or sit on pedestals to provide some grounding and better visibility. Without its room-like setting, for example, a squirrel that has committed suicide in its well-appointed kitchen would not be readable, whereas a respectable older woman crammed into a gleaming new stainless-steel refrigerator is a piece that can stand (or hang) on its own.

    At each new level and each new vantage point the objects become more and more fascinating. Even the ones that may be familiar offer new interest and insight. At the same time, the architecture remains in view, forever part of the work. With no art displayed in the bays, the building’s form is its function and an inextricable accomplice in the work. In fact, all of the self-references and cross-references flying back and forth between the works themselves and the building can be as dizzying as the horses, donkeys, dogs, wax figures, and death-masked effigies doing their acrobatics throughout the installation.

    With each new angle and vantage point, from worm’s eye up to bird’s eye, the piece forces you to constantly engage with it and its components. I cannot remember any exhibit that ever saturated me with its imagery in such a way. It is exhaustive and exhausting. Upon reaching the top, I was relieved and a bit elated. It is somewhat like reaching Valhalla, and the delirium from so much engagement certainly plays a factor in the exhilaration.

    That is the show’s strength. Its weaknesses become more apparent on the way down. We decided to take the ramp rather than the elevator. At the time, it seemed there might have been even more to glean from the parts now that they had been taken in whole. That was where the spell began to break. It was not clear if it was the objects themselves or the intensity that had built up over such intimate and repetitive viewing, but seeing them once in this context was certainly enough.

    Those same works that seemed to possess such mystery and present endless revelation had nothing to offer on second glance. Weaknesses already apparent became fatal flaws and strengths became merely amusing tidbits. It seems that the genius of the artist was to understand his own works’ limitations and play against them, by refusing to elevate them in one way while quite literally doing so in another. This may leave you with some disappointment, but only because of what the experience initially offered. That would be my endorsement of this unusual and still compelling juggernaut.

—

    Jennifer Landes is arts editor at The Star.

    Who knew that so many homicidal maniacs were running around loose in the Swedish countryside? Before Stieg Larsson’s revelations of murderous Nazi enclaves, before Henning Mankell’s dramatic decapitations, I had viewed Sweden as a liberal template for humanistic advancement. Now, though, it has to be acknowledged that Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is a touch unconventional, and that Mankell’s police inspector, Kurt Wallander, is serially depressed. Can this be chalked up to the effect of Swedish winters on the human psyche?

    The fascination with Scandinavian mystery novels was kick-started by the phenomenal success of Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the first of his Millennium trilogy, originally planned as a 10-book series. The author’s tragic death of a heart attack before he knew of the unprecedented worldwide acclaim for that book and the two sequels — they would have made him a multimillionaire — is a real-life drama beyond even his capabilities to imagine.

    Now Scandinavian writers with names like Jo Nesbo and Lars Kepler are being hailed by the critics. Nesbo is a Norwegian musician and writer of mysteries featuring the burned-out hero Harry Hole, and Lars Kepler is the pen name of a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, two impossibly gorgeous Swedes.

    My introduction to Swedish novels was through another his-and-hers team, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Their excellent Martin Beck police procedurals from the 1960s and ’70s are, I’m pleased to see, being reprinted with admiring jacket blurbs from writers like Michael Connelly. They usually open with a bloody murder and concern themselves with painstaking investigative work by a cast of individualistic policemen who become more appealingly familiar as one reads each successive novel. This provides a compelling reason to pick up each book as it becomes available. Larsson was planning the same strategy.

    What makes a successful mystery, beyond, naturally, a plot with suspense and unexpected revelations, is a believable central investigator with a regular cast of supporting characters and an intriguing setting (country or town). I’m a fan of the writers Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri because they amply supply all of these elements in their very different mysteries set in Italy. A passion for Italian cuisine is their one connecting tissue, but Leon’s mysteries are always set in Venice, where the delightful Commissario Guido Brunetti gives the reader a tour of the ancient streets, monuments, and gardens with their fabled history. Camilleri’s amusing, iconoclastic Inspector Montalbano pursues his criminals in Sicily, where the sun and the sea play a large and sometimes lethal part in the crimes he investigates.

    Some of the interest in Swedish mysteries surely has to do with how little we know about the country. Is it a socialist paradise or is it home to a rabid cadre of political operatives and murderous industrialists? Could it be both? Why are most domestic relationships depicted as so tortured? Isn’t anyone happy in paradise?

    And poor Kurt Wallander — is he ever going to get a vacation? Despite the violence that is an essential part of the action, there is pleasure in accompanying him to places like Skane, Malmo, and Ystad, but how on earth does one pronounce Gryt, Fyrudden, or Saltsjobaden? I don’t know, but the dreary weather and unfamiliar territory lend color and authenticity to the novels.

    “Lars Kepler” has had one book published, “The Hypnotist.” It has an original, well-paced story and enough mayhem to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader. Bodies literally litter Stockholm. More lie scattered, staining the snow, in the upper reaches of the country, and the hero, the hypnotist, while likable, has some truly terrible ideas. Early in his career he decides to gather a group of psychotics and put them and himself under deep hypnosis to release their various original traumas. It is an effort at group bonding that goes seriously wrong, generating a plot the twists and turns of which keep one glued to the page.

    The authors of that book, the Ahndorils, have a second one, “The Paganini Contract,” translated and waiting in the wings, and a third planned, so we can look forward to weeks of gruesome reading when they are finally released to us Swedish crime addicts.

    Jennifer Hartig is a regular contributor of book reviews to The Star. She lives in Noyac.

Perhaps it has always been so, but it struck me last week that so many of the sports stories I wrote in the past year had to do with people who had surprised themselves. In brief, they had not known it — whatever that might be, a faster time, a stronger performance, a more chiseled body — was in them.

    Ed Petrie, the East Hampton High School boys basketball coach who recently retired after a Hall of Fame career, was said to have gotten the best from each of his players, presumably not only surprising themselves but others — perhaps even him!

    The first woman to win outright a triathlon here — and they have been contested in Montauk and Sag Harbor for the past 30 years — said she hadn’t known she had it in her. The high school golf coach would probably have been content with yet another league title, but his team outdid itself, winning Suffolk County and Long Island championships as well. Driving back from the Bethpage golf course with the silver trophy given to the best high school golf team on Long Island had been a mystical experience, he said, and perhaps in all the cases I’m talking about the achievement had been, at least to some extent, a mystical experience.

    I ended the recap of the year in sports with the words of Joe Vetrano, a 51-year-old Pan-Am karate champion, who continues, he told me, to learn more about the sport as he continues to practice. He said he presumed it was the same with writing, with everything. It never ended, he said. One could always work to improve.

    That sounds better to me than Churchill’s injunction never to give up. Well, yes, it’s so: One shouldn’t give up, but more than that one should, rather than just stubbornly hang on, work toward getting better, toward being better at whatever one’s hand findeth to do.

    That’s why it’s good, at least good for me, to hang around athletes. As far as I can tell, they are always upbeat. They are earnest and ever optimistic. I’m sure they have their low moments, but I doubt they last long. There is joy in what they do, in graceful movement, in mastering challenges, in daily practice.

    I would have said in past years, perhaps, that graceful movement and athletic feats were the province of the young, but, as we have seen, that is not so. Aging athletes turn in surprising performances too — all the more surprising because they are older. One has to look no further here than Albert Woods, who in his 80s has become an All-American swimmer. In his 70s, he took up the breaststroke, said to be swimming’s hardest stroke, and has gone on to win many national championships. He has surprised himself.

    My father once, borrowing from Aristotle, advised that I practice the quality or qualities I admired, just as I would baseball, which he knew I liked.

    I would love to say that I have become courageous as a result — it’s a quality I admire. But because I’m a coward I haven’t practiced acting courageously that much!

    But if it’s optimism you want, at least as much optimism as can reasonably be expected — I’m surprised I was hesitant when first offered the sports beat 32 years ago — I’m your man.

   The price of The New Yorker magazine if you buy it on a newsstand is $5.99, so it came as a surprise when I received a notice at the end of December telling me that if I renewed the subscription I get in the mail, I could send a second — free — subscription to anyone I chose.

    Newspapers and magazines are not rolling in money these days, but I didn’t think things were so bad that a well-regarded and venerable journal like The New Yorker would have to resort to such tactics to enlist subscribers. Tut-tutting about the undignified depths to which a publisher might be forced to sink, I took advantage of what seemed a surprisingly generous deal.

    The price of a year’s subscription is $69.99; that’s for 47 editions. I am not so good at simple arithmetic (at least not anymore), but I think that as a subscriber I pay only about $1.54 a copy. The dilemma was who to give the free magazine to.

    My husband and I share the copies of The New Yorker I get without a problem, so it seemed silly to send another subscription to him, even if he does spend part of every week in New York City. On the other hand, I thought, maybe if I had it sent it to him at my own address, I could pop each copy into an envelope and mail it to my daughter in Nova Scotia.

    That turned out to be a mistake. I sent her the first free copy that arrived, but the postage was $2.64. A gift subscription sent to Canada would cost $120 for a year, or about $2.54 cents a copy (without the hassle of going to the post office). So I began hunting for someone else, or some organization, to send the free subscription to.

    Then, this week, opening my mail, I came upon another offer from The New Yorker. As a courtesy to “selected professionals,” the mailing informed me, I could subscribe for $25 for 25 issues. A dollar apiece. Having just plunked down my $69.99, all I could do was sigh.

    It next dawned on me, slowly, that maybe I was coming out on top of this subscription game, after all: I am now getting two subscriptions for that $69.99 . . . and so that works out to, what? Seventy-seven cents per issue?

    Though perhaps the value of doubles arriving at the same time in my very own postal box diminished the true value. . . .

    Of course, this being the digital age, there had to be another solution to sending copies of the magazine to Nova Scotia. Going to its Web site, I found an offer that seemed to say the publisher, Condé Nast, was offering a free four-week trial for an online subscription. I signed her up. But when I tried to find out how much an online subscription would cost once the trial was over, I couldn’t.

    Did The New Yorker not want me to know? That seemed rather below its dignity, too.

    I clicked on the customer-service button, but didn’t find any advice, just an e-mail address for inquiries.

    Back on The New Yorker’s home page I went, to look for a phone number. Naturally, I couldn’t find one.

    I could have pulled down the Manhattan phone book, but I doubt subscriptions are handled by Condé Nast in Times Square these days, anyway. Probably Des Moines, or something, right?

    It was time to consult a member of the younger generation, who might be more skilled at finding answers on the computer. I set my daughter on the case, up in Nova Scotia, and she wrote back quickly to break the news gently: I hadn’t signed her up for a four-week magazine subscription, but for a four-week trial of the magazine’s online digital archive.

    Oh, well. A digital archive sounds interesting. And maybe a $2.64 trip to the post office is easier, after all.

   It being the New Year, I suppose I should make some resolutions — resolutions for the irresolute. My first one is not to write, at least for the moment, about politics or the state of the economy, dreary subjects that have nothing much to do with the hope that should attend a new beginning.

    Instead, I will write about my imminent colonoscopy, and how everyone’s been ingesting flavorsome food here at the office as, drearily, I sip from a bottle of Gatorade whose contents look very much like Pres­tone.

    Come to think of it, perhaps it is a good way to begin the New Year, cleansing, you know, and there is, of course, a certain probity involved.

    Like jury duty, these tests come along every few years, an annoyance that must be borne. One must be stoic. But, speaking of stoicism, back to my resolutions.

    I resolve not to smoke in the coming year. I resolve not to contract any ghastly diseases, and I resolve not to lose my mind, which means, I think, that I must stop playing Scrabble with Georgie, who’s been cleaning my clock lately.

    I resolve further not to play fast and loose with the facts — insofar as they are known to me. I resolve not to eat Cheerios in our coffee cups or to leave them in the sink overnight where they will become impossibly caked.

    I resolve not to speak ill of myself in 2012. I resolve, moreover, not to take Tim Tebow’s name in vain. I resolve not to caress my incredibly soft cashmere sweaters in public, or to use many words of more than five syllables. I resolve not to relish violence overmuch, only in sustainable doses as on Sunday afternoons when the Steelers are playing.

    I resolve not to complain about having to shoulder the coffee-making burden at home.

    I resolve not to eat any flavorsome food, or any food at all, for that matter, today.

    I resolve not to cease wondering what it’s all about.

    And I resolve to order a cosmopolitan and a small Capri pizza for Mary, and a glass of house Chianti and a small Gorgonzola salad for me at Sam’s tomorrow night.

   You can’t even really call it a January thaw, since December was mild, and, save for a 15-degree night a week ago yesterday, 2012 has had above-average temperatures. This has been a very good thing where the Amagansett Rattrays’ gardening, outdoor chores, and playtime are concerned, as we (read: your humble correspondent) let things slide this fall.

    A week or two after Thanksgiving, a guy at the boatyard  in Montauk, where I keep my boat, said, “We dodged a bullet.” And, if you remember what was expected to be in the running for storm-of-the-decade at the end of December 2010, this still seems to be the case. There is still plenty of weather to come, but the break we’ve had so far on this end of the Island has been welcome.

    Saturday was mild enough to let Evvy and Ellis and me spend the morning outside, which was a relief since Ellis, who is not quite 2, has taken a recent interest in painting. Evvy and I laid paper and pots of colored tempera out for him on the brick patio, saving the hassle of cleaning up spills had he gotten in touch with his diminutive muse indoors.

    While the kids were busy, I took on our two small garden plots, hacking back the growing season’s weeds and dead stalks. After that, I pulled the electric hedge trimmer and a pair of loppers out of the basement and attacked the vines along the sides of the raised beds.

    By this time, the kids had become bored with painting and were tearing around in a plastic, battery-operated Barbie Jeep. Ellis had figured out how to get the thing moving, but not how to steer; chaos ensued, but there were no injuries.

    On Sunday, it was a little colder and windier but much the same. The kids played in the lee of the house while I turned the garden soil and thought about putting in a bigger plot this spring and if it were possible to keep the deer at bay.

    According to the National Weather Service, the temperature will fall by the weekend. Saturday and Sunday will see highs only in the mid-30s. This will make for less time in the Barbie Jeep, and the painting sessions will move inside. I’ll still try to get some yardwork in, but it depends on what the kids want to do, which is fine. The garden can wait for another thaw.

At some point at the end of this week, I’ll start my Christmas shopping. Being used to operating on a deadline, I am familiar with this sort of pressure. Moreover, buying gifts late reduces the chance that our children are going to discover them before they are wrapped.

    Well, that’s my positive spin on the procrastination, anyway. Being a confirmed localist, my plan is to walk into town, as we still call it for some reason. I’ll stroll past the vacant stores, marvel at the high-end clothes shops with no one save a bored and lonely salesperson in them, and dip in at the bookstore.    

    Next, I’ll have a look around the hardware store, and that fancy home place over by Waldbaum’s whose name I can never call to mind. On the way back to the office, I’ll take a pass through the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s Bargain Books to look for odd titles. Beyond that, there are a few places in Montauk I may go to, and Sag Harbor is a good bet for stocking-stuffers.

    My wife has done the heroic work this holiday, staying the week at her parents’ place in New York City while shepherding the kids around to shows, a birthday party, and a trip to Hoboken to stand on line for two hours in the cold of a wind-swept street at a bakery made famous on one of those reality-TV programs people seem to like these days. Before she left for the city, she spent hours ordering toys online. The boxes stack my office, which  will become Santa’s workshop on Christmas Eve.

    We celebrated Hanukkah with a party on Saturday in New York, where the kids got a few gifts. Ellis, who will be 2 in February, received a Play-Dough set and some small race cars that roll down a plastic ramp. The girls, 7 and 10, got electronic devices they had been coveting thanks to the pooled resources of several aunts and family friends. I drove home on Sunday, stopping in Riverhead at Home Depot to buy a light bulb. (That’s a column for another day.)

    The house has been quiet this week, just me and the dogs and the rumbling every now and then of the furnace. I’ll be glad when the family returns and the holiday really gets going.