Lance Mannion

Studio 60: Starter thread for Starter Wife Refugees

Have at it, folks!

Looking for something to read during the commercials or another one of Harriet's self-righteous lectures?

Craig Lindsey, movie critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, occasional visitor to this blog and sometime pseudonymous commenter, wrote a piece for Philadelphia Weekly in which he cheerfully declares Studio 60 the show he loves to hate.

And last week, Victoria, of imtalkinghere, left a long, thoughful comment here defending Studio 60 and Aaron Sorkin.  "I’ll miss Studio 60," Victoria says, "because I take this world seriously and these days that can burn a person out, and sometimes it’s a comfort to spend a diverting, well-played hour with characters who aren’t criminals, or emergency room doctors, or street thugs, or dumb-ass mafia types. Hold the adrenaline. A little style + rhythm is not a bad thing."

Fred Thompson is not a President but he may play one on TV someday so vote for him in 2008

The only halfway rational reason Fred Thompson can have for thinking he can be the Republican nominee for President is that he believes none of the other candidates stands a solid chance of winning the nomination and when they all fail to go into the convention with enough delegates wrapped up he'll be there, ready, willing, and able to step in as the compromise.

But those other candidates include Rudy Giuliani and if Giuliani can't convince enough Republicans he should be President then how on earth can Fred Thompson?

To put this in the tivial, politics as a combination of sporting event and Hollywood Battle of the Celebrities that the Beltway Press Corps prefers, Fred Thompson is the guy you cast if you can't cast the guy you would normally cast when you can't cast Rudy Giuliani.

Or:

Fred is Rudy's third-string backup.

The Mo Dowd Approved knock on Hillary is she is ambitious.  She shouldn't be President because she wants to be President.

Don't they all?

Well, sure.  But Hillary wants it too much.  How can we tell she wants it too much?  Why, she's actually worked hard all her adult life to be qualified and competent to do the job.

By that standard, if working for the job is a sign you don't deserve it, then not working at all for it must be proof that you should have it and therefore Fred Thompson is the candidate, of either party, who has most earned the job by doing nothing to earn it.

Since he left the Senate, after a single term, Thompson has half-assedly pursued a second-rate acting career and diligently piled up big bucks as a lobbyist.

Ah, but while all the other candidates were busy working at being United States Senators or mayor of the most important city in the nation, or at serving as governors of out of the way backwaters like Massachusetts and New Mexico, Arkansas and Wisconsin, or at founding and running their own organizations for political and economic change, Fred Thompson was doing the more important work of building an image as a movie tough guy.

And image is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know when you walk into the voting booth, at least as far as the beautiful minds of our elite Press Corps are concerned.

Fred Thompson is a tough guy, declares Newsweek's Howard Fineman, as if being a tough guy was the qualification for President of the United States as opposed to the leader of a street gang.  How do we know he's tough?  Why, says Time's Mark Helperin, we know Thompson's tough because he's played so many tough guys well on TV and in the movies.

This is what it takes to be President, according to one of the most influential journalists in America:  The ability to be passively accepted in a part someone else has written for you, someone else has directed your performance in, someone else has dressed you for, someone else has photographed to make you look like what you're playing, and someone else has edited to make sure only the very best of what you said and did makes it onto the screen, proves you are what you appeared to be and that then qualifies you to be President of the United States.

This isn't even childish.  Children aren't normally that divorced from reality.  This is so mind-bogglingly delusional that if your average fifth grader suggested it the school guidance couselors would swoop down on him and carry him and his parents off into therapy.

The reason it isn't proof that Helperin is insane is that it is representative of the political views of the chattering class to which Helperin belongs.  In their reality, politics is always and solely about winning.  It's a game without any real consequences to consider.  The game ends on election day and immediately a new one begins.  Image is a deciding factor in an election, but Helperin and Fineman and their ilk have declared it the deciding factor.  This would be stupid enough if they hadn't also decided, against all evidence, that only one kind of image is a winning image, the image they imagine Ronald Reagan projected.

It's stupid, because Reagan is the only President of the last three generations who won by projecting Reagan's image, although it can be argued that several Democratic contenders have lost because they did not in the judgment of the pundits project a sufficiently Reaganesque image.  It's stupid and disingenuous because the pundits and insider journalists keep pretending that the Image is defined objectively by rules set by the American people, instead of being a product they themselves have helped create and which they themselves judge.

A aside:  the Insiders have fallen in love with Rudy Giuliani because he's such a tough guy.  He is in fact a tough guy, but he's tough in the way every garden variety sadistic, narcissistic, authoritarian bully is tough.  He pushes people around because he doesn't care about them and he takes it as his due that he can push people around.  But the Insiders don't see the real tough guy.  They see the one he played on TV on September 11.   Giuliani, in their minds, is qualified to be President not because he ran one of the biggest cities in the world, but because he was on TV a lot the day that city suffered a major terrorist attack.  They are in love with the image of Rudy as surrogate President, a role he was playing that day by default.  Imagine if we'd had a real President taking charge, instead of the puppet one who was ordered to go into hiding by his Puppetmasters so he wouldn't get in the way while they tried to figure out what to do about the fact that the terrorist threat they'd ignored had proved horrifically real?

What would have happened is that Rudy Giuliani would have been on our TV screens a whole lot less often that day.  He'd have still been a major presence on the local news, in which case he'd have been the hero for the moment not to the country but to New Yorkers, who would have reacted in the way they have reacted since, by saying, Good job today, Rudy, now what are you going to do about cleaning up the mess and taking care of the firefighters and the cops and their families?  The answer would have been exactly the same, not much. This explains a fact that the Beltway Media is studiously ignoring, that despite his image as the hero of 9/11, if he's the Republican nominee in 2008 he's going to get killed in his home state.  Killed!

Image unsupported by acts is meaningless to those who know the truth.  David Broder and his disciples keep waiting for George Bush's poll numbers to bounce back but they forget that during Hurricane Katrina the Media accidentally reported the truth about George Bush---his image as a regular guy and tough, hands on President was just that, an image.  Faced with a real job to do as President, he was, as he always was and always will be, in way over his head.

Giuliani isn't all image; it's just that his image---the image they've created for him---is all his fanboys in the Media care about. Thompson, though, is all image.  He has no record of any kind of real political achievement in his past.  You'd think that after the last six years it might have sunk into a few heads in Washington that it's not a good idea to elect a guy despite his lack of real achievement, even though you like the image you've helped create for him.

But that lesson can only be learned by people to whom what has happened to the country as a result of George Bush's incompetence matters.

The Howard Finemans and Mark Helperins of the world have managed to separate cause from effect in their thinking about politics and in the process have learned to ignore effect entirely, so entirely that a President's actual Presidency is irrelevant to trying to assess what he has done and what he might do.  Again and again, they cover the image, and they judge the image by whether or not it wins the particular game at hand.

And it's through "thinking" like this that Fred Thompson becomes a serious candidate for President of the United States.

Thompson can be a President because he projects the image of a President of the United States.  That image earns him the right to the job because that image can win him the job, and winning the job is the job.

Ok, let's move on to 2012.

Related:  Back in April, Richard Brookhiser wrote an article for TIME in which he praised Thompson as a great communicator, ranking right up there with Ronald Reagan and---wait for it---Arnold Schwartzegger.  This prompted David Sirota to say, "What the---?" which in turn prompted Bill Nothstine to make a list of all the special skills a politician needs to become a Great Communicator.

"Great communicators," advises Bill, "learn their craft in media designed to sell popcorn and soap."

Read Bill's entire list and you too can one day be a Great Communicator according to TIME.

Studio 60: You're on your own again tonight

Attention Aaron Sorkin Fan Club Members:  Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip comes on in nine hours (10 PM EST) and we still have no guest host lined up for live-blogging.   We're all set for next week and the week after, but unless we get a volunteer soon, I'll open up a thread and let you all go at it on your own again tonight.  BYOB.

Damaged goods: Why I wasn't scandalized by Notes on a Scandal

Someday, when virtual reality rules, cgi of Gollum in Lord of the Rings quality comes standard with CorelDraw, and every home has a Holodeck, I will be able to perform the experiment I want to perform every time I see a movie I didn’t like—make a “model” alternative version.

I’m not thinking recuts or mash-ups.  I mean I would like to remake Notes on a Scandal starring a middle-aged Glenda Jackson and a very young Vanessa Redgrave or a fifty-year old Vanessa Redgrave and Kate Winslet at her current age or a middle-aged Vanessa Redgrave and a very young Vanessa Redgrave.  Then I could see if the reason I think is the reason I didn’t like the movie as much as its leads’ performances deserved for it to be liked is the reason.

And that reason is that I think that, as good as they are, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett at their current ages are fundamentally miscast.

Haven’t read Zoe Heller's novel, but that shouldn’t matter.  The most faithful movie adaptations of books still need to be movies that stand on their own without outside reference.  Judging by the script as I watched it played out, it seems to me that the parts call for an aging leading lady pitted against an ingenue still in her blooming, sensuous prime.

With Dench as the voyueristic repressed lesbian spinster, Barbara Covett, and Blanchett as Sheba Hart, the art teacher whose affair with one her students makes her the object of Barbara’s perverse desire to control instead of love, we have an elderly character actress and a leading lady just beginning to show the signs of the wear and tear of time.

Dench does an admirable job of attempting to play a 45 year old Glenda Jackson.  No way, though, that Blanchett can play a Kate Winslet.  They’re just too different in type.  Even though they aren’t that far apart in age, Winslet is still an ingenue.  Blanchett was born a leading lady.  She has always been grown-up beyond her years, possessing, or at least seeming to have access to, a wisdom that no one under the age of, say, 600 hundred has earned.  She doesn’t even seem quite human.  There’s something too ethereal about her.  Casting her as a several thousand years old elf queen in his Lord of the Rings movies, Peter Jackson was casting her perfectly to type.

Leaving aside the fact that Blanchett’s Sheba is too grown-up for Barbara—Barbara seems to target inexperienced and naive women who she can count on not to know their own minds, to be in doubt or denial about any latent lesbian tendencies, and who could therefore be more easily deceived.  In a way her choices for her “lovers” are as age inappropriate as Sheba’s choices (I’m including her husband, a man much too old for her at the time they married.  Normal boundries don’t exist for either women.)  Sheba as written falls into that category, but one look at a woman as mature and elegant as Blanchett and Barbara would know she stood no chance.  But Sheba’s name tells us that one look at her is all it takes—one glance at her biblical namesake, Bathsheba, was all it took to undo King David.

Bathsheba is one of the most famous objects of voyeurism in literature (along with Artemis, Susannah, and Lady Godiva.  Who am I missing?) and Barbara, the spy, is meant to be watching her all the time as if watching her in the bath.   But unlike Susannah, who also gets spied on while bathing, Bathsheba, as far as we know, is quite happy to have been watched.  Susannah is outraged at the elders.  Bathsheba marries David without an apparent qualm or complaint and doesn’t seem to even notice the absence of her late husband Uriah.

Sheba’s name, then, suggests that she is someone who expects to be an object of desire, and she appears to have left a string of Davids in her wake, men who have thrown aside all they hold dear and gone against their better natures in order to possess her, her husband being the most important in her life, sacrificing his first wife and family for her.  But her father may have been her first David. I don’t think we’re meant to infer actual incest in their relationship, but given her mother’s obvious anger at her, we can guess that early in her life Sheba’s father began preferring her company to his wife’s and that Sheba liked this and encouraged it.

So there’s a suggestion of exhibitionism in her name too.  She should be one of those women who seem to be undressing even when they’re simply walking across the lunch room.  Blanchett does not have that kind of overtly physical sensuality. 

But Sheba is also an emotional and psychological exhibitionist.  She doesn’t pay attention to boundries in casual conversation with near strangers any more than she pays attention to them in her physical relationships.  Blanchett handles this side of Sheba beautifully.  Telling Barbara all about herself, she is utterly careless in a way that at first suggests confidence and then quickly shows itself to be utter carelessness and narcissism.  But without the physical carelessness and vanity to go with it, Blanchett’s emotional nakedness comes across as simple ditziness.  She’s just chattering, a garden variety neurotic who has no other topic of conversation except herself.  It’s hard to see how Barbara, even considering how much she wants to believe that Sheba is truly offering herself, would be fooled into thinking she could count on this woman to join her in her secret, separate world.

Sheba should be a palpable physical force, to herself as well as to sensible people around her.  She should be as carried away by the power of her own body as they are by the sight of it.  She is heedless, a butterfly.  She is what she wants.  In this case she is like a butterfly who, flying at top speed at a flower she’s decided she must drink from, zooms straight into a spider’s web in the way and then decides, at least temporarily, that the spider coming down to devour her doesn’t look that bad.

This is why partly why I think Dench is miscast.  There isn’t enough erotic charge left in her to draw Sheba’s body towards her.  Sheba should be reacting seductively to Barbara’s advances.  Sheba has mommy issues, but Dench, even when she lets her severely spinsterish guard down and tries to get cuddly, is a little too grandmotherly to be bringing those out.

Meanwhile, Blanchett, who can be very sexy, in a grown-up, directed, healthy way—with her it’s a case of mind over matter.  She can turn it on or off as if with a switch, which is what made her the right choice to play Katherine Hepburn in Scorsese’s The Aviator—is not convincing as a character driven by her instincts and desires, either physical or psychological, at the mercy of her body or her id or her heart.

So when her husband begs to know why she has destroyed their lives by sleeping with one of her students and she has to say, “I don’t know,” we don’t believe her.  A woman like her must know.  She’s too smart, too cool, to self-controlled to have taken herself by surprise to that degree—unless there’s underlying psychological damage that gets in the way of self-knowledge.

This means that Blanchett’s performance invites psychoanalysis.  Her Sheba becomes a case study to be analyzed and explained away.  Instead of being symbollic of the fact that we are all too often at the mercy of our bodies, which is to say, we are often out of our own control, she’s merely a familiar type, a common neurotic we can distance ourselves from by “understanding.”

Oh, I see!  She took her older husband away from his first wife as a way of working out her own Elektra complex and getting back at her terrible, emotionally abusive mother.

Oh, I see!  She goes after a boy her daughter’s age as a way of punishing her younger self for coming between her mother and her father.  She’d have gone after her daughter’s boyfriend if she had the nerve or the chance.  She doesn’t and didn’t, so she steals him at one remove, making her student a stand-in for the fifteen year old she really wants.

She is just damaged goods.  Which makes Barbara’s thinking of her as a potential soulmate even more delusional.  Barbara wants to keep her “lovers” the way she keeps her cat.  She wants the sense of control without her pet’s insisting on a personality of her own.  Cats keep their secrets.  Blanchett’s Sheba is a dog.  She demands to be known as herself and because of her neuroses—neurotics are people who are too much themselves to themselves all the time—she can be known.  The stray Barbara picks up at the end of the movie is a fairly blank sort of person.  Barbara will be able to write herself onto this young woman the way she writes herself into her notebooks.  She can’t do that with Sheba, it turns out, but as it is she can’t do it not because Sheba realizes too late what Barbara is and what she herself has thrown away, but because Sheba is already over-written.

Cross-posted at newcritcs.

Sometimes life imitates art, sometimes it imitates the Three Stooges

From this morning's Times Herald-Record:

About 12:15 p.m., a flatbed trailer from South Fallsburg-based MB Consultants, also known as Murray's Chickens, got on the Exit 107 on-ramp, en route to Route 17 eastbound and Monroe with hundreds of caged, live chickens aboard.

"I was coming around the turn..." [the driver said.]  "Next thing I knew..."

You can take it from there.

Driver wasn't hurt.  A few chickens came to a fowl end.

Photo by Michele Haskell.  Heather Yakin's whole story with more pictures by Haskell here.

A reason to cheer up after that last post

Father's Day is coming up and Donald E. Westlake has a new Dortmunder novel out.

What's So Funny?

Gilbert Sorrentino's last courageous words, "Enough of this bullshit," are wise in their way, but for sheer practicality and getting through the day, nothing beats this piece of wisdom from the unluckiest thief in the world, John Dortmunder, "a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness":

"Whenever things sound easy," Dortmunder said, "It turns out there's one part you didn't hear."

Mourning the death of a writer whose books I've never read

I know I'm in a bad mood because if I wasn't I'd have finished reading this post by Wolcott simply resolved to read something by the late novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, and his son Christopher, right away and I'd have headed off to the library.

Instead I'm sitting here thinking that Gilbert's last words to Christopher contain all the wisdom worth knowing about life, the contemporary literary scene, and trying to write anything worthwhile.

"Enough of this bullshit."

Major plot spoiler by way of a review of Shrek the Third

Warning!  Warning!  Stop right here, turn back, go away, and do not read past this point unless you have already seen Shrek the Third, have no intention of seeing it, don't mind having the plot spoiled, or don't think a movie like Shrek the Third can have much of a plot to spoil!

I guess it’s in keeping with the spirit and humor of the movie and sort of consistent with the King Arthur myth that Artie saves the day and proves himself the rightful king of Far Far Away by conducting a successful group therapy session for the villains.

I guess.

Memorial Day Parade. May 28, 2007

"Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman."

Ten-thirty Sunday morning and I'm sitting here with my fifty-second mug of coffee and the empty plate where late sat an English muffin slathered in raspberry jam, feeling comfortable, well-nourished, mostly wide awake---the fifty-third mug should do it---and self-satisfied because I have already been very productive today.  I've polished off several minor jobs around the house that have needed doing for a while.

Little jobs not worth bragging about.  I'm only mentioning them because the reason I was able to attack them and get them done by ten AM is that our local hardware store opens at eight.

The funny thing was that when I was still on my twenty-eighth cup of coffee and wandering around the house, surveying the damages and making a list of supplies to fix them, I was actually thinking I would have to save it all for tomorrow.

I had forgotten the stores are open.

I was thinking----well, thinking is not the right word.  What's the word for reacting to a random memory as if it's a thought?  What's the right word for reaching into your closet and pulling out an old jacket you haven't worn in years and putting it on without consideration, as if in a more conscious moment you wouldn't have looked at it and said, I could've sworn I gave this rag away to Goodwill ages ago?  This morning I was "thinking," It's Sunday, the stores are closed.

This was odd, because I didn't even grow up when there were real Blue Laws in New York State.  The stores in our neighborhood were closed on Sundays, but that was only because the store owners were giving themselves a day off.  The malls were open, the grocery stores were open---though they couldn't sell beer until after one in the afternoon---restaurants were open, movie theaters, the downtown library, bowling alleys, pool halls---yes, when I was eight I spent a lot of time in pool halls---pretty much every kind of business, they were all open.  I think only liquor stores were legally required to shut their doors, and I don't know why I think that.

But my parents grew up when things were stricter on Sundays and their shopping and entertainment habits had been shaped by that.  On Sundays our family went to church in the morning and then we visited relatives in the afternoon.   I remember my mother evincing guilt whenever circumstances forced her into the malls on Sunday.

She'd gotten over that by the time I was in high school, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's still a wizened, ill-tempered, scolding old angel who hitches a ride on her shoulder whenever she's walking into Target on a Sunday afternoon and hisses into her ear that she's breaking the Third Commandment.  I hope he gets brushed off like lint before she's through the doors.  I’ll bet he sticks sometimes though.  In my mother’s catechism Sunday is still the Lord’s day and we’re meant to remember that and keep it holy.

Are there any places in the country that still have stringent Blue Laws?  Are there people working to bring them back?  I’m surprised that the Right Wing Christians who want all our children praying in school, want them all taught that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, want us all to believe that there was a Noah and he built an ark, want all unmarried young people, especially those of the female persuasion, to hate and fear sex, want married people to feel dirty and guilty when they have sex with no intention of a pregnancy resulting, want us all living in their idea of a Christian nation which seems to be very much like Hawthorne’s conception of Salem village but without the same joie de vivre, pious, sober, sexless, authoritarian, conscience-stricken, banal, empty, aren’t also out advocating shuttering every business and bar and bowling alley on the Sabbath.  Maybe they are and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

Sunday is the Lord’s day and once upon a time people were compelled to remember that and keep it holy, or at least dull, even Jews who believed the Lord’s day was Saturday, the Sabbath, Sabado, and had already kept it holy.  (This varied from place to place, depending on how civilized the place was, which is to say, how many Jews lived there.  When I lived in Boston most of the stores and restaurants downtown were closed on Sundays, although I’m not sure what if any laws compelled them to, but on Harvard Avenue and around Coolidge Corner in Brookline everything was open except the dry cleaners, including and especially the Jewish bakeries and bagel shops.)  The champions of forced moral improvement tried to herd the rabble into church by giving them nothing else to do on a Sunday but contemplate a joyless and life-hating God Who apparently couldn’t count on the faithful’s faith to draw them into the pews.

Stores were closed.  Restaurants were closed.  Bars were most certainly closed.  Baseball parks were closed.  I’d like Major League Baseball to revive the tradition of Saturday afternoon doubleheaders, but I know that those were a hold over from the days when games couldn’t be played on Sundays in most of the major league cities.  Frankly, I can’t imagine, let alone worship, a God who doesn’t want to go to a ball game on a bright summer Sunday afternoon.

Charles Dickens hated the way the London of his youth was forced to close down on Sundays.  And it wasn’t just his own boredom that infuriated him against the custom.  In his day most people worked six days a week, ten and twelve hours a day, and he thought it was a gross injustice that people who devoted most of their waking lives to keeping other people’s businesses and factories going didn’t have one day they could devote to enjoying life for themselves and one of the many causes he put his considerable energies into was getting the blue laws of his day repealed.

This is from Little Dorritt.  London on a Sunday through Dickens’ eyes:

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.  Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency.  In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.  Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people.  No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world--all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again.  Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets.  Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up.  Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst, according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill.  Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night.  Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat.  Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river.  What secular want could the million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day?  Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman.

A girl Republican political hack's got to do what a girl Republican political hack's got to do

Thought Monica Goodling, the Justice Department political hack whose job appears to have been filling the rest of the Justice Department with political hacks like herself, chose a strange way to describe herself Wednesday to the House Judiciary Committee.

“At heart, I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way,” said the 33-year-old Ms. Goodling.

Don't lawyers prepping their clients to testify, whether before a court, an investigative committee, or a legislative body, warn them away from self-pity and special pleading?  Apparently not, or maybe it's just too ingrained a reflex, a fact of our weak natures proof against the best lawyering that when we're in trouble we instinctively feel bad for ourselves and beg for everybody else to feel as bad for us as we do ourselves---whatever it is, everybody does it, from mobsters on down to a retiree asking the town justice to let him out of traffic ticket.  "I'm really a nice person, go easy on me!"

So her advertisement for her own nicess is not the part of her mini-self-portrait that made me sit up and take notice.  It was her calling herself a "girl."

Goodling is 33.

That's not even the very end of girlhood.  That's the brink of middle-age.

Goodling is a conservative Christian so I presume she is aware that 33 is the age at which Christ was crucified.  Consequently, for centuries, 33rd birthdays have been superstitiously observed as the beginning of the make or break year in life.   If you haven't done it by the time you're 33, a lot of people have felt, give it up, you're not gonna.

By the age of 33 most "girls," certainly most good Conservative Christian girls like Goodling, have been married and become mothers.  These woman don't think of themselves as girls.  The girls in their lives aren't testifying before Congress.  They're demanding to know why they can't play their Dora the Explorer DVDs for the tenth time today.

A 33 year old girl is only two years away from being Constitutionally able to become President of the United States.  She is 8 years older than she needs to be to run for one of the seats of the men and women grilling her on Wednesday.  There's probably no point in reminding anyone in the Bush administration that a 33 year old is 15 years older than a lot of young women we are sending over to Iraq.

I'm sure I'm making too much of this.  Lots of grown women refer to themselves as girls in a casual way.  I know seventy year olds who talk about themselves and their friends as "the girls."  But it's one thing to use the word in conversation, another thing to go before a Congressional committee in your role as a professional and formerly high-ranking government official, with your career and reputation and the possible freedom of your former colleagues and boss on the line, and beg for people to let you off the hook for your admitted misconduct on the grounds that you are just a good girl who made a few naive mistakes.

Probably a good strategy though, considering that the Right Wing Republicans on the Committee are probably like most Right Wing Republicans these days, firm believers that ideal woman is in fact a girl.

A particular kind of girl too.

A good little one.  Docile, obedient, quiet, unassuming, content with whatever the grown up men in her life choose to give her to do.

Daddy's little girl.

They don't even seem to want wives anymore.  They want daughters.  Virginal ones who will never date, let alone marry, without daddy's say so.

From Justice Kennedy's weird affirmation of the women aren't adult enough to know their own minds or make morally correct decisions for themselves school of thought that underlies the entire anti-aboriton movement nowdays to the very, very creepy chastity balls, the Right has infused itself with the notion that a woman's place isn't in the home, or the kitchen, or even the bedroom, it's on daddy's knee.

So it's no wonder that Goodling would choose to describe herself as a girl to influential men she needs to stand between her and a bleak future as a disbarred and unemployed one-time political hack with a dubious law degree.

And it worked.  According to the New York Times the Republicans on the Committee fell all over themselves, figuratively, hurrying over to pat her on the shoulder and say There, there.  Of course, as the Times notes, this wasn't exactly statesmenlike of them:

The only people odder than Ms. Goodling were the House Republicans who rushed to praise her. Even in these partisan times, a Justice Department official who admitted to her level of wrongdoing ought to draw bipartisan condemnation.

But maybe it was not a cynical move on her part, just an instinctive one, based on her own view of herself.  I suspect she really does think of herself as just a girl.  And how lucky for her that she does because good little girls don't have any power of their own, they just do what they're told; they have no ability to make moral choices for themselves, they have to rely on daddy to tell them what's right and what's wrong.

A good little girl, even one who is a top official in the United States Department of Justice, who is a senior counselor to the Attorney General, who is in a position to decide the professional fates of hundreds of people, many of them powerful, highly-regarded, influential men and women in their own rights, could not possibly have been responsible for any nefarious goings on in daddy's office.

And that's exactly how Goodling portrayed herself in her testimony. Oh, she may have crossed a line here or there, without meaning to or even knowing there was a line there to be crossed, but really, guys, she just had no idea!

Actually, being a good little girl seems to be the key to success as a woman in the Bush Administration.  From Condoleeza Rice and Harriet Miers on down, the Bush Leauge women seem to see it as their role to be part cheerleader, part gunmoll, part devoted kid sister, and part loving daughter, the kind of daughter who takes over the household and caring for daddy when mommy slips off to the bedroom to nurse yet another headache.

Goodling's description of herself could be the first item on the resume of every successful female job applicant at the Bush White House.

It's because she was a quiet girl who tried to do the right thing (as defined by her very partisan conscience) and treat (the right) people kindly along the way that she's where she is today and where she was Wednesday.

Studio 60: The phone lines and threads are now open

Because Matt and Harriet need to know how much you care...

Keira Knightley's smile and the courage of Maid Marian

Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice.

I can't remember if Keira Knightley smiled even once throughout all of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest.

This is too bad, and a big mistake on director Gore Verbinski’s part, because Knightley has one of the most joyful smiles in the history of film.  Throughout Pride and Prejudice the merriment was threatening to explode out of her.  The brilliance of her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett was in making Elizabeth a happy person.  Her Elizabeth believes that people are meant to be happy, they are put on earth to enjoy life, and her initial dislike for Mr Darcy is a reaction to his refusal to enjoy himself at a dance.  It’s compounded by his apparent revulsion at the sight of other people enjoying themselves.  Her dislike turns to actual loathing when he steps in and prevents her sister and his own best friend from being happy.

(As in Jane Austen's novel, in this movie the enemy of happiness isn’t depression, misery, or evil.  It is self-importance masquerading as duty and responsibility.  The bad guys in life are people who do the “right thing” in the name of propriety, which is why Elizabeth and her mother are so at odds.  Mrs Bennett has lost track of her interest in seeing her daughters happy because she is obsessed with her duty to get them properly settled.)

When Darcy declares his love for Elizabeth he insults her by presenting his feelings as a disgusting rebellion against his better judgment.  But he also infuriates her by his perversity.  He has turned the thing that should make him happiest, his love, into a cause of his own misery.  He has become his own worst enemy, which is, ironically, what saves him.  As angry as she is, Elizabeth is still the champion of happiness and she can’t stand still and watch a basically good and decent man make himself miserable.  There’s a part of her that is now bent on saving Darcy from herself, even as she’s storming away.   Which is why, if I’m remembering it right, the scene ends with the laughter about to burst out of her again.

If I’m not remembering it right it’s because so much of that movie is so infused with Knightley’s laughter it's difficult to recall a moment when she isn't smiling or laughing.

But all through Dead Man’s Chest her smile is conspicuously absent.  She isn’t exactly frowning; she’s wincing, as if she’s suffering from a massive migraine.

It was probably brought on by all the noise and confusion around her.  Dead Man’s Chest was a loud and hyper-active mess in which even Johnny Depp got lost amidst all the disjointed action.  But maybe what was causing her headaches was her own annoyance at not having a character to play.  It was probably just me, but every time the camera focused on her face—which it did all too seldom— she seemed to be thinking, “What’s gone wrong here?  In the last movie I was a smart, resourceful, bold and brave but beautiful and feminine young woman, not to mention the female lead and the object of Orlando Bloom’s desire.  Here I’ve been reduced to the role of boy sidekick, which as far as I can tell seems to be why Will has forgotten I exist and Captain Jack has developed a sudden interest in rogering me.”

There is a problem for film makers trying to do costume epics today.  How do you portray your female characters in an era when women were relegated to a very restricted domestic role in society without offending the sensibilities of 21st Century women in the audience who want to identify with strong, active, self-reliant heroines?

Hollywood’s answer to this for the last generation has been the same one used for finding something to do with the heroines of action-adventure movies—turn them into boys with breasts.

The heroines kick butt, curse, strut, and wield advanced weaponry as good or better than the guys.

I think that if you can’t come up with anything for your female lead to do except be a more slender shadow of your hero then you don’t actually have a female lead and you might as well save the cost of paying a starlet’s salary.  I also think that if all your male lead is doing is kicking butt, cursing, strutting, and wielding advanced weaponry then you don’t actually have a male lead either and you need to go back and rethink your script, but nevermind.  I didn’t like Casino Royale as much as I expected to, but I did like the way the character who could have been just another Bond girl was given actual work to do, work that didn’t require her to act like male action adventure hero.

There were so many things wrong with Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that it’s hard to know where to begin when trying to explain why it was such a bad movie and a travesty of the Robin Hood story.  (The best critique and correction of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which besides being funny is almost as good a Robin Hood movie as Galaxy Quest is a Star Trek movie.  Well, maybe that’s pushing it.  But it’s a good Robin Hood movie, just as Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a good Dracula movie, and pretty darn funny itself.)  But one of the things wrong with Costner’s Robin Hood was Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s Maid Marian.

She’s introduced as a boy.  She wears a mask and boy’s clothes.  She challenges Robin Hood and fights him like a boy.  She wields a sword like a boy.  And she takes a whuppin from him like a boy.   And it’s as a boy that she wins Robin’s love on the spot.

This anachronistic and implausible “Anything you can do, I can do better” act is meant to portray Marian as the equal of any man.  But this concept of turning girls into versions of the boys is actually misogynistic and more sexist than a straight, old-fashioned portrayal of the heroine as a damsel in distress, because it devalues any qualities she might have besides kicking butt, cursing, strutting, and wielding weapons, qualities like intelligence, wit, independence—these seemingly independent heroines are really just sidekicks to the heroes who do the real heavy lifting—and courage—if you can beat up every guy in the joint, or out-draw, outbox, out-fence, or out-slaughter them, you don’t need to be physically brave.  And if you spend all your time fighting, you don’t have time to demonstrate your moral courage—and by devaluing the qualities that make them individuals it devalues them as anything but playmates for the heroes.

This is the lads’ mag ideal of the perfect girlfriend transferred to the big screen.  The perfect girlfriend plays video games with you all day, goes out to the bar with you all night, where she stays out of the way while you yuk it up with the guys, then she takes you home and takes you to bed where she does all the work.  Repeat the next day.

Compare Mastrantonio’s Marian to Olivia de Haviland in the classic Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn.

(Don’t bother comparing Prince of Thieves to that film or Costner to Flynn, because it would be just too embarrassing for Costner.)

De Haviland’s Maid Marian is a variation on the classic damsel in distress, but within the confines of that archetype, she has plenty of room to be her own person.  She is intelligent, outspoken, independent—she insists on her right to love whatever man she chooses to love, she has no qualms about telling off Prince John, she stands up to Guy of Gisbourne, and when she is captured by Robin she stands up to him.  She is cool under pressure and thinks quickly.  At the archery tournament she does a remarkable job of keeping her real feelings in check in order not to give Robin and his men away.  She is not fearless, but she is brave.  She takes her life in her hands when she goes to warn Robin’s men of the trap Gisbourne has set and when she’s discovered and faces his wrath and the implicit threat of torture and execution, not to mention the threat of a beating and a raping on the spot, she looks him in the eye and dares him to do his worst.

Most important of all, Marian is the moral intelligence of the movie.  She starts off, like, perhaps, the audience, thinking she knows what’s right and proper, assuming she is on the side of goodness and truth, and satisfied in her own conscience, and then has to reject all she thought was true and learn to accept a much less romantic, and much less self-centered, view of how the world really works.  Robin is her teacher, but she is a precocious student, and she learns what she needs to learn by using her own eyes and ears and brains.

In the first Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, Knightley’s character, another Elizabeth, is very close to a reincarnation of de Haviland’s Maid Marian.  Early on, when we’re getting to know the adult Elizabeth, she objects to having to wear a corset in a scene in which she is meant to be symbolically rejecting the confines of the traditional, subservient role of 18th Century women but which is not the least bit anachronistic despite this because corsets could be torture devices and it’s hard to imagine that any woman of the time ever put one on without complaint.  But the fact is that within the script Elizabeth doesn’t leave the confines of those traditional roles.  She leaves the society in which those roles make any sense and so she has to adapt and adapt quickly to survive.  Elizabeth is a classic damsel in distress, but as with de Haviland’s Maid Marian, the archetype doesn’t define or limit her.

She is smart, strong, outspoken, independent.  She stands up to her father and insists on her right to be her own person and make choices about life and love for herself.  She is not fearless, but she is very brave.  When the pirates come and carry her away, she tries to fight them off, but when that doesn’t work, she doesn’t collapse into tears and then spend the rest of the movie waiting around to be rescued.  She immediately sets to work planning her escape.  This is important.  She doesn’t fight her way out because she can’t, and not just because she’s a woman.  These pirates can’t be killed.  She has to think her way out of trouble.  And this thinking is what ends up defining her.  Elizabeth turns out to be the smartest person in the movie, outfoxing even Captain Jack Sparrow.

She does eventually join the fight.  But she joins it as woman.  Her weapon of choice is a chamber pot and her first line after braining the pirate threatening her lover is a reference to her corset.  She fights well, because she’s tough and resourceful, and she’s enraged, but she doesn’t turn into a shadow of Jack Sparrow or Will Turner.  She never picks up a sword.  Even if she was strong enough to use one with deadly force—swords are heavier than they look in the movies—she wouldn’t know how to defend herself with one.  Why would she?  Who’d have taught her?  I suppose, like Will, she could have taught herself, but then where would she have gotten the same access to swords as he had to practice with or a space to practice in?  It doesn’t matter though, because it’s not the weapons she brings to the fight that count, it’s the brains and the courage, both of which she has to spare.

In short, thanks to some smart screenwriting, Elizabeth doesn’t have to give up being an 18th Century girl in order to become a 21st Century heroine.

But come Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, there she is, not just out of her corset, but out of her dress, disguised as a boy and stripped of all the best qualities she displayed in the first movie.  A great deal of the time she’s wearing a big floppy hat, which is meant to hide her beardless face from Davy Jones’ crew but which has the effect of hiding the fact she’s Keira Knightley from the audience.  But, hey, at least now she knows how to fence.

The script doesn’t even go the Mulan route, finding humor and developing her character in the ways she has to act in order to try to pass herself off as a boy.  Instead of Elizabeth thinking out her disguise and her ruses, her boys’ clothes do all the work for her.  The person she is, which is to say the woman she is, ceases to matter.  She might as well be a boy for all the script gives her do in disguise, and it wouldn’t have mattered who played her after this point, because she’s not a character anymore either, she’s just a stick to beat the plot along.  Actually, she’s just a model for the character in the video game, an object for game players to project their own identities upon, and since most of those game players are bound to be boys, for all intents and purposes she is a boy.

No wonder Knightley never smiles.

Dead Man’s Chest was mostly two and half hours of warm up for the third movie, At World’s End, which opens tonight.  (That’s not why I won’t be live blogging Studio 60.  I have to work.)  As I said, even Johnny Depp got lost along the way in Dead Man’s Chest.   I was hoping that At World’s End would get back to the fun of the first one, which, although it contained plenty of swordplay and derring-do, was a success because of its characters, Captain Jack first and foremost, but also Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa, Knightley’s Elizabeth, the two goofy minor pirates and the two goofy British Marines, and even Orlando Bloom’s somewhat too stolid Will Turner.

But from what I’ve seen of the extended trailers it looks as though the film makers decided that what they needed to do with the third one is top the second one for wretched excess and video game loopiness.

And although she’s hard to pick out in all the strangely colorless confusion, Knightley’s still dressed like a boy, still fighting like a boy, and still without anything to do.

But at least she’s no longer not smiling.

Now she’s out and out scowling.

Her migraine appears to have progressed to the point of an incipient stroke.

Related self-promotion:  Me on Orlando Bloom as Errol Flynn's humorless kid brother and on why Robin Hood has to die in the end.

Self-conscious begging:  A good way to support this blog is to shop through my Amazon store where, among other things, you can buy on DVD most of the movies I've reviewed.  Please visit Mannion at the Movies today.

Studio 60: Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is officially kaput but it's ghost still lingers in the form of six unaired episodes that NBC was probably saving in hopes of bringing in boffo ratings during the May sweeps but which the network's now just going to burn off over the next month and a half or so, Thursday nights at 10 PM EDST, starting tonight.

I wasn't planning to watch any of them.  Thursday nights aren't good for me, usually.  And I certainly wasn't planning to live-blog them.

But old live-bloggers never die, they just lurk away.  I've had lots of calls for some wrap up live-blogging for old time's sake.

I can't do it tonight and I'm not sure about next week.  Ken Houghton, who despite having lived through the ordeal once, has volunteered to handle the guest hosting chores again but later on in June.  No one else has stepped up to offer their services...yet?

Any takers?  Email me if you're cra---

Email me if you're willing and able.

Probably won't get anybody for tonight at short notice so what I'll do is set up an open thread.

It'll be there at the top of the page waiting for you if you can't bear the thought of watching Studio 60 without commentary.

Anger issues at Barnes and Noble

Anger is the theme here at the B and N cafe this lunchtime.

Three year old boy with his new stuffed dinosuar:  Why is he angry, mommy?

Mother:  He's a T-rex.  T-rexes are just angry.

At the table next to me three older women are threatening to start a tontine.  They're all going to try to outlive each other.  Whichever one lives longest gets bragging rights on the others.

Youngest woman to the oldest who may be her mother:  If you live to a hundred, I'm going to a hundred and ten.

Other woman who appears to be the oldest's younger sister to her niece:  If you live to a hundred and ten, she'll live to a hundred and twenty just to spite you.

The time line is confused here.  They're talking as if they're all the same age.  They also seem to regard death as a game like dodge ball.  If you get hit you go to the sidelines where you have to watch the survivors having fun without you.

Now the daughter is complaining that her mother stole a sip from her mocha latte when she wasn't looking.

Daughter:  You did that just to get your germs all over it, didn't you?

Mother:  I did.

Daughter:  You wanted to give me your germs.

Mother:  Of course.

Aunt:  I'll bet she spit in it just to make sure.

Daughter:  I'm sure she did.

And they all laugh.  They're having fun.  This is their idea of a good time.  Three elderly white women playing the dozens.

An elite enterprise

Two on the Aisle by Edward Hopper.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post...

Somehow I doubt TIME movie critic Richard Schickel had ever visited newcritics when he sniffed:

Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Chuck Tryon, a professor of film and media studies who has a blog where he has the temerity to post reviews of movies despite bringing nothing to the table but his hasty, instinctive opinions, responds to Schickel's sniff with a growl in Storming the Gates.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Tom Watson, who reviews books and music and movies on his blog, despite bringing nothing to the table but his hasty, instinctive opinions, reviewed anti-blogger Richard Ford's new novel The Lay of the Land back in January in a post called Richard Ford's Jesus of Suburbia.

Tom even has the nerve to give hasty, instinctive opinions about painting, as in this post defending Edward Hopper.

Maud Newton, that rabble-rouser, who has made her name typing up hasty, instinctive opinions on matters bookish and literary at her place, gets all hasty and instinctive about 17th Century English poet John Dryden's propaganda efforts.

And in M.A. Peel's hasty, instinctive opinion, one of the long-running themes of The Sopranos has been the importance of poetry to saving one's soul and the show has provided an ongoing visual and symbolic gloss on the poems of William Butler Yeats.

For the hasty, instinctive opinions of Ralph DeMarco on Philip K. Dick, The Viscount on Joni Mitchell, Kathleen Mahar on jazz singer Anita O'Day, and much more, click over and join the democratic activity at the elite enterprise known as newcritics.

The perils of blog rolling or Sorry about that, gang

Last month I happily and proudly added poet Sherry Chandler and novelists Po Bronson and Neil Gaiman to the Literary and Artistic Types section of the blog roll.

I forgot to reconfigure the list to display more items.

Last night when I happily and proudly added Mile Zero to the Literary and Artistic Types I discovered what happens to a list when you don't reconfigure it to display more items.

Items disappear.

They're not erased.  They just don't show up on the blog.

They've winked off into another dimension the way Captain Kirk and various members of the Enterprise's crew used to do from time to time, waiting for Spock and Scotty to figure out how to bring them back.

The list was configured to display 30 items.  After adding Sherry, Neil, and Po, I had 33.  This meant that three items on the list could not be displayed.  Three good blogs vanished from the blog roll.

Last night I found this out and after, banging my head on my desk ten or twelve times and repeating my mantra "Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid STUPID Lance!", I fixed it and now the three items that had been invisible for a month have re-appeared.  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back into view:

The Sheila Variations!

Tingle Alley!

And Writing in the West with John Clayton!

Please show how good it is to have them back from accidental oblivion by visiting them right now and again and again throughout the week.

Literary notes from my basement in Terre Haute

Novelist Richard Ford has never met a literary blog he's liked.

Then again, he's never read a literary blog.  Not Maud Newton's, not Mark Sarvas', not Beatrice, not a one.

But he knows he wouldn't like one if he read one.  He's like Clarence Darrow who didn't like peas and was glad he didn't like them, "because if I liked them, I'd eat 'em, and I just hate 'em."

Ford prefers newspapers.  He'd rather read book reviews---and I presume have his own books reviewed---in the papers.

Newspaper book reviews are edited, you see.  Ford "wants the judgment and fliter a newspaper book editor could provide," says the New York Times.

Now, I've reviewed books for newspapers---really.  People have paid me actual cash money to blather on in print the way I do here for free.---and I can tell you the way the filter and judgment of my editors would come into play if I wanted to review a novel by Richard Ford.

Me:  I'd like to review The Lay of the Land.

Editor:  When did you get interested in geography?

Me:  It's a novel by Richard Ford.

Editor:  Who's Richard Ford?

Me:  He's a famous novelist.  He won the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day.

Editor:  I thought that was a movie.

Me:  It is.  But it's also a novel.

Editor:  Aliens attack earth and blow up the White House?

Me:  In the movie.  The book's different.

Editor:  That movie came out years ago, why are they just putting out a novelization?

Me:  They're not.  It's not.

Editor:  What's not what?

Me:  Independence Day the novel by Richard Ford isn't a novelization of the movie about aliens attacking.

Editor:  Then why do you want to review it?

Me:  I don't.

Editor:  But you said---

Me:  I said I wanted to review The Lay of the Land.

Editor:  Which isn't about geography, right?

Me:  Right.  It's a novel.  By Richard Ford.

Editor:  Who also wrote Independence Day.

Me:  Yes.

Editor:  So he's a screenwriter too.

Me:  No.

Editor:  But---

Me:  Forget Independence Day.

Editor:  It was a good movie.

Me:  I'm talking about Ford's new novel, The Lay of the Land.  I want to review it.

Editor:  And who's Ford again?

Me:  Famous novelist.  Pulitizer Prize winner.  His most famous book's The Sportswriter.

Editor:  So he writes about sports?

Me:  He used to.  He was a sportswriter once.

Editor:  So this new one, The Lay of the Land, it's about sports?

Me:  No.

Editor:  I thought it might be about golf.  You know, "Play it as it lays," Lay of the Land?

Me:  Play it as it lies.

Editor:  What?

Me:  Nevermind.

Editor:  So this book isn't about golf?

Me:  Nope.

Editor:  Do you like golf?

Me:  Um---

Editor:  I love golf.  You ever read The Greatest Game Ever Played?  That's about golf.  Good novel.

Me:  It's not a novel.

Editor:  Did you see the movie?

Me:  Yes.

Editor:  Is Lay of the Land going to be made into a movie?

Me:  Not that I know of.

Editor:  Hard to make a good movie about golf.

Me:  It's not about golf.

Editor:  What isn't?

Me:  Ford's novel.

Editor:  Oh.

Me: It's about the sportswriter from his first book---

Editor:  I thought you said it isn't about sports.

Me:  It's not.  It's about the sportswriter's family.

Editor:  And the sportswriter's Ford, right?

Me:  Not in the novel.

Editor:  What's he in the novel?

Me:  Ford?

Editor:  Yeah.

Me:  He's not in the novel.

Editor:  I thought he was the sportswriter.

Me:  He used to be a sportswriter.  Then he wrote a novel about a sportswriter called The Sportswriter.  But the sportswriter wasn't him.  Just somebody a lot like him.

Editor:  And this new novel's about another sportswriter?

Me:  The same sportswriter.

Editor:  It's a sequel?

Me:  Kind of.  It's part of a series.  Independence Day was about the same guy too.

Editor:  I thought it was about ali---

Me:  The book!

Editor:  Oh, right.  So he's written three books about this sportswriter?  It's a trilogy?  Like Lord of the Rings?

Me (sighing):  Sure.  Like Lord of the Rings.

Editor:  But it's not a fantasy?

Me:  No.  It's a realistic novel.

Editor:  So what's the local angle?

Me:  Local angle?

Editor:  Ford.  He a local author?

Me:  No.

Editor:  He grow up around here?

Me: He grew up in Mississippi.

Editor:  He live in our circulation area?

Me:  Maine, I think.

Editor:  The book, is it set around here?  The land we're getting the lay of, it's this area?

Me:  New Jersey.

Editor:  The writer coming to read at Barnes and Noble?

Me: No.

Editor:  So there's no local connection?

Me:  Not really.

Editor:  Forget it.

Me:  But---

Editor:  If there's no local angle, why would we review it?

Me:  Well, Ford's considered an important writer and I thought our readers who like to read novels would---

Editor:  Which readers?

Me:  The ones interested in books.

Editor (smirking):  Oh, right.  All five of them.

Me:  Whatever.

Editor:  Listen.  This guy Ford's a famous novelist, right?

Me:  Yeah.

Editor:  So he's been reviewed by the New York Times?

Me:  Definitely.

Editor:  Good.  When the Times reviews this golf book, we'll run their wire copy.  If we have room.  Meantime, you want a book to review?  Here's a memoir by a guy who lives in a town just south of here, spent his whole life growing award-winning orchids.  Give me, what?  Two, three hundred words?

For the record, the editors I wrote for weren't stupid.  They were just clueless about contemporary literature.  Novels weren't their thing.  They weren't book editors.  They were features editors or arts and entertainment editors or "Style" editors.  The papers my reviews ran in didn't have book editors.  They didn't have book sections.  At most they had two pages in the Sunday arts and leisure section.  Very few newspapers have book editors or book sections.  And many of the papers that do are cutting back---on editors, on pages devoted to books, on reviews written by local reviewers.  When and where they have space, they're running more wire copy.

Ford knows this and he regrets it.  But he doesn't see literary blogs as an alternative.

He has no respect for bloggers.  To him a literary blogger is just "some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute".

Meanwhile, Richard Schickel, long-(long, long, long)-time film critic for TIME has expressed his disgust for bloggers who presume to review movies.

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity....French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I'll warrant....We have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering....They need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion. ....At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books [] blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn't take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).

Ok.  This fondness for credentialism that's become a hallmark of members of the traditional media when sneering at bloggers is very strange coming from people who work in jobs that up until just a few generations ago were done and done well by people who hadn't finished high school.  There was a time when having a college degree in journalism was an obstacle to getting hired by a daily newspaper.

But as for credentials, a random sampling of my blog roll would turn up doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, scientists, lawyers, college professors, best-selling novelists, poets, and working journalists, actors, filmmakers, television writers, and film and drama critics.

It flatters their own vanity to think that the bloggers challenging them are pajama-wearing agoraphobes who'd spend their days muttering to themselves if they didn't have computers, but these blogophobes only prove their own ignorance by missing the fact that a whole lot of highly accomplished people blog, people who have credentials and resumes that make holders of simple BAs in journalism look like a pitiful pack of underachieving goof-offs.

And they doubly prove their ignorance by proving it to the very people they need to think them smart and savvy---bloggers and blog readers are their audience.  We're the readers of their newspapers and magazines and the buyers of their books.

On top of which, Schickel's proudly admitted undemocratic views are very strange coming from a citizen of the country that produced Abe Lincoln, Tom Edison, Booker T. Washington, and the Wright Brothers.  We are a nation of autodidacts and self-made men and women and it's ludicrous to think that of all the many jobs there are to be done film criticism is one of the ones that require special and esoteric training.

A college degree is a good thing and nothing except genius beats years of experience on the job, but the fact is that neither the degree nor the experience is a guarantee that the person doing the job knows how to do it.

Ford's some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute and his cousin, Brian Williams' Vinny who hasn't left his apartment in two years, very easily could have taught themselves more about literature or politics than most Workshop trained MFA's or Ivy League poli sci professors know, nevermind what their own courses of study and personal experience and native intelligence could give them on your average journalistic hack of a film critic toiling away on the back pages of a decidedly middle-brow news magazine notorious for rewriting its own reporters' and critics' copy to dumb it down.

But besides being creepily un-American---in fact, almost a parody of a French academician's---Schickel's attitude towards criticism is hilariously packed with unintended, self-caricaturing irony.

A commenter at Kevin Drum's place---and thanks to Kevin for this stuff on Ford and Schickel---left this quote from playwright Brendan Behan about critics:

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

The definition of critic might as well be "somebody who has no business telling other people how to do their jobs."

In the traditional media, every day, movies are reviewed by people who've never held a camera, novels are reviewed by people who have never written a chapter of a book, rock bands are reviewed by people who've never played an instrument except air guitar, and plays are reviewed by people who were onstage once in their lives, in sixth grade, when they played a Pilgrim and forgot their lines and were so sick with stage fright they threw up on Myles Standish.

Most reviewers of classical music are trained musicians, and most art critics have some training as painters.  But the rest of us---and I get to include myself because, like I said, there are newspapers who've paid for my blather---got the job despite our credentials, or lack of them, not because of them.  We were able to convince some editor desperate for copy that we could fill the space with words that would come together in a fairly intelligent fashion without getting the rag we're writing for sued in the process.

Critics don't have to be able to do the work they critique.  They have to be able to appreciate the best of the work and be able to explain why and how what they're writing about at the moment measures up or doesn't measure up.  In other words, they have to be a good audience and they have to be able to write well.  They have to have good eyes, good ears, some experience using them, and a clear and snappy prose style, qualities that you don't have to be taught, even if they can be taught, which is debatable.  You don't have to go to a special school, you just have to school yourself.

Critics---Americans---don't have to prove their right to an opinion, as Schickel insists they do.  They have to prove they know what they're talking about by what they say.  Their degrees and resumes don't matter if what they write is stupid and unreadable.  Critics prove themselves by being right.  I don't mean right in that their opinion is unquestionable and definitive.  I mean that readers who read their reviews and see whatever work's being reviewed say, Yep, the critic and I were looking at the same thing and I can see what he saw and I understand why he liked or didn't like what he saw but...

The but is always a part of any assessment of a critic's work.

I'll bet Schickel hates that but.

The but means that readers are free to reject the critic's judgment, even if they think it was honestly and fairly and intelligently reached.

The but means that everybody is entitled to an opinion, a notion Schickel sneeringly rejects.

Clearly, Schickel believes that artists produce and critics pronounce and the rest of us rabble fall in line.  Bloggers are just people with opinions and to make it worse they have comment sections where other people with opinions can come along to say, But!

Epilogue:  Ford's dismissive sniff towards that guy in his basement in Terre Haute puzzles me.

For one thing, why Terre Haute?  Does Ford think he has no readers in Terre Haute?   Does he think folks in Terre Haute are on the whole illiterate?  There's a big state university in Terre Haute, one that besides having a large English department, employs one of the best biographers of the last generation, Gale E. Christianson, whose lives of Isaac Newton and poet and naturalist Loren Eisley are as far as I'm concerned works of literature.  Surely there are a few people in town who read novels.

The other thing that puzzles me is what does Ford think that guy is doing in his basement in Terre Haute?

My guess is he's writing a novel.

And this is something Ford's got to know.  Most great novelists started out as some guy or gal sitting in a basement, or an attic or a cheap rented room, in some place as obscure and far away from literary glamor and greatness as Terre Haute---some of those obscure and far away places were in Paris and New York, the distance and obscurity are spiritual and metaphorical but very real to that guy or gal. 

A few years from now Richard Ford will be blurbing that guy from Terre Haute's new novel.

Or...because an awful lot of the reviewers for the Sunday Times Book Review are writers themselves who once upon a time were just some guy or gal sitting in their basements in their own spiritual Terre Hautes...a few years from now he'll be reviewing Ford's new novel in the Times.

Of course, he'll post a link to his review on his blog.

Recommended:  Of course I always think that a long explore of my blog roll is a good and profitable way to spend some time, but today I'm pushing the two subsections called Film Majors and Literary and Artistic Types.  Take a look when you get a chance.

The Tomb of Henu

Our house Egyptologist, the soon to be fourteen year old, asked me to post this.  From Reuters by way of MSNBC:

Cairo---Belgian archaeologists have discovered the intact tomb of an Egyptian courtier who lived about 4,000 years ago, Egypt's culture ministry said on Sunday.

The team from Leuven Catholic University accidentally found the tomb, one of the best preserved of its time, while excavating a later burial site at the Deir al-Barsha necropolis near the Nile Valley town of Minya, south of Cairo.

The tomb belonged to Henu, an estate manager and high-ranking official during the first intermediate period, which lasted from 2181 to 2050 BC and was a time of political chaos in ancient Egypt.

The archaeologists found Henu's mummy wrapped in linen in a large wooden coffin and a sarcophagus decorated with hieroglyphic texts addressed to the gods Anubis and Osiris.

The tomb contained well-preserved painted wooden statuettes of workers making bricks, women making beer and pounding cereal, and a model of a boat with rowers, a ministry statement said.

"The statuettes (are of) the best quality of their time. They are characterized by realistic touches and unusual details such as the dirty hands and feet of the brick makers," the statement said, quoting Belgian team leader Harco Willems.

Minya is 225 km (140 miles) south of Cairo.

The 14 year old is up on his Egyptian mythology but is still learning the history.  He'd like to know what sort of political unrest Henu was living through and what it effect it had on daily life.  He's also wondering about the significance of the find, if it's interesting for more than just the great condition of the artifacts.  If anyone out there has some good books to recommend on the history of Ancient Egypt, he'd much appreciate it.  Me too.  My image of life under the Pharaohs is defined by Yul Brenner and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.  I assume Henu would have had more to do than fend off the sexual advances of Anne Baxter and I'd like to know what that was.

Lance Mannion, dirty old man, can't resist the temptation to take the red convertible out for another spin

Another goddamn update!  Monday 6:45.

Updated again Monday at 3:10 PM

Updated Monday at noon.

I thought I was making fun of myself in this post a couple weeks back, Observations from my red convertible, caricaturing myself as a dirty middle-aged man on the brink of a mid-life crisis.

The blonde thought so too.

Apparently, however, Garance Franke-Ruta knows me better than my own wife.   

I'd have said the the telling paragraph in that post of mine was this one:

I don't like this.  It makes me feel like I'm just one more pulled muscle, one more childhood favorite's death, one more grizzled baby boomer buttonholing me to rave about Bobby and tell me how much I'd appreciate it because "you're the right age to remember" (I'm not and I don't, not clearly anyway), one more reach for the Zantac away from an eye tuck, orange hair, and a red convertible.

Not so.  Franke-Ruta's got me dead to rights.  It's the one above it.  Franke-Ruta:

Critics of my article have raised some good points, but by and large the responses were disturbingly marked by a far greater concern for access to pornographic depictions of teenagers than for the exploitation of young women. “I Want My Barely Legal Porn!” Matthew Yglesias trumpeted at his eponymous blog, boasting his argument “befits a man whose blog was once featured in Playboy‘s ‘Girls of the Pac Ten’ issue (really!).” Not to be outdone in proving his appreciation for young women’s forms, blogger Lance Mannion prefaced his defense of current law with this panting anecdote:

I have begun to worry about myself. I had been a long time praiser of older women, proud of the fact that on the beach I could look past the 17 and 18 year olds in bikinis to ogle their mothers…. Lately, though——well, lately, not so much. There’s a college town near here that because it’s where our drug store, video store, church, and barber are, I visit a lot. It’s spring, the weather has been beautiful, and that means the lawns around town are dotted with blankets on which lie somehow already magically tanned college women in mostly nothing more than their glistening skin, and on my last trip up there I almost drove off the road, twice.

If Franke-Ruta read my blog regularly, she'd know I didn't write that to prove my "appreciation for young women's forms;" she'd know that my apreciation for women's forms, young and middle-aged, was a well-established fact about myself I demonstrate again and again, but I like that adjective, panting.

Ladies, please.  When I'm leering at you I don't pant, I drool.  I also wolf-whistle and call out, Hubba-hubba!

I'd let this pass, but Franke-Ruta, realizing she lost the first couple of hands since she first called for a law raising the age of consent for women who are in the mood to expose themselves on camera for shows like Girls Gone Wild to 21, has raised the stakes.

She's adopted a Reefer Madness approach and is now arguing the equivalent of one puff on a joint leads  straight to a short lifetime's addiction to heroin.  Girls who lift their bikini tops on Spring Break have joined the pornography industry and are economically exploited sex workers.

And I and every other liberal blogger who did not take Franke-Ruta's initial argument seriously are all for this.

Rejecting Franke-Ruta's argument is the same as endorsing Girls Gone Wild, even if you fairly explicitly condemned the show and called its producer Joe Francis pondscum.  Noticing and enjoying the fact that beautiful young women are beautiful is the same as pushing them in front of Francis' camera, and getting in front of his camera is the same as doing hardcore porn to support a drug habit.  By disagreeing with Franke-Ruta we're proving ourselves sexual exploiters of innocent young girls too naive and foolish to make rational decisions about their own bodies.

We show "a far greater concern for access to pornographic depictions of teenagers than for the exploitation of young women."

Notice Franke-Ruta accuses us of lusting after "teenagers" instead of college-aged women, erasing the difference between twenty year old adults and fourteen year olds.

I'm one step away from a trip to Bangkok.

I would let this slide except that the gang at TAPPED, of which Franke-Ruta's a part, has usually been admirably diligent in ignoring the fact of my existence---a couple of times they've referred to me without linking or even mentioning my name---so I'm not happy that when one of them deigns to acknowledge me it's to give the impression that I am a fan of Girls Gone Wild and defender of the porn industry who cruises college campuses spying on young women out to improve their tans.

Franke-Ruta manages to get my name in and spell it right, but she doesn't include a link to my post.  She has links to the other bloggers she mentions, but not to me.   I'm not sure if she was just trying to show her contempt or if she was afraid to send readers to my post because they might find out she was deliberately missing the joke or because they might follow the link I provided to this post by Lindsay Beyerstein.

In case you think I'm kidding around or over-reacting, read this comment on Franke-Ruta's post by Ann Bartow, who used to be a semi-regular reader of this blog (and may still be, for all I know).   Bartow is a law professor who blogs at Feminist Law Professors:

Garance, you’ve done an excellent job responding to your critics and bringing the focus back to the harms that Joe Francis inflicts on women. Men who claim that the consumption of pornography has no negative consequences do not want the effects of porn production scrutinized very closely, for obvious reasons. They are odious. No one who enjoys the suffering of other people is liberal, or even fully human.

So this is how I'm being introduced to the larger blog world, as odious, as an enjoyer of the suffering of others, as not a liberal, as not even fully human.

And all this time I thought I was just a simple dirty old man.

Hat tip to Avedon Carol, who is also guilty by association, according to Franke-Ruta.

Case of an ambiguous pronoun update:  Ann Bartow, who I'm glad to say is still checking in here from time to time, has checked in to to say that I misunderstood her comment on Franke-Ruta's post:

Lance, I'm still a reader, and like you, I am being misunderstood. It is the effects of porn production that I am claiming is odious.

The porn industry is not in the least "self-policing" and there are few industries that get LESS scrutiny. If you want to know more about the odious aspects of porn production, do some research on sex trafficking, and the high percentage of trafficked women who are forced to perform in prostitution. And the people who consume the porn that is produced through violent coercion are less than fully human.

GGW's Francis has been accused of exploiting underage women and in at least one case raping an 18 year old. Some "liberals" are characterizing his prosecution as "censorship." I've seen him in action and talked to some of his victims, and I do not think the problem I see is one of "free speech."

And I can see now that the they in "they are odious" does in deed refer to the effects of pornography that is produced through coercion.  And I accept that Ann wasn't implying that I'm one of the not fully human types who enjoy that stuff.  But Franke-Ruta pretty much says flat out that I and everybody who didn't think her initial proposal to raise the age of consent was such a great idea support the porn industry, which is presented as something very close to white slavery.

To clarify:  Nothing can be inferred about a person's opinions on Girls Gone Wild, let alone the entire international pornography industry, from the fact that he or she disagrees with Franke-Ruta.  Nothing can be inferred about a person's opinions on GGW and the porn industry from the fact that that person admits to liking to look at pretty young women.  But Franke-Ruta infers like a house afire.  And the upshot of her post is that she says that all of us who disagreed with her are complicit in the various degrees of awfulness that abound throughout the industry.  Now, along comes someone as highly regarded and well-known in blogging circles as Ann Bartow who leaves a comment praising what Franke-Ruta wrote about one of the higher degrees of awfulness in the industry.  But because Franke-Ruta built from her premise that not being critical enough of GGW was the same as liking pornography of that awfulness, the effect of Ann's comment was to make the people Franke-Ruta named as insufficiently anti-porn the logical examples of the not fully human enjoyers of coerced porn in readers' minds and Ann's comment comes off as an endorsement of the whole of Franke-Ruta's posts.

At least that's how it felt to me.

And I blame Franke-Ruta for that, not Ann.

As for the porn industry itself, I don't know that much about it.  I'm sure it's not particularly self-policing, as Ann says, and as a good liberal I'm all for regulating a workplace to protect the workers.  I just don't think that raising the age of consent is the first step that needs to be taken.  I'd also like to see a precise definition of coercion.  And pornography for that matter.  Not a legal definition.  If we ever get a good one of those I'm sure we'll all recognize it when we see it.  I mean one that we can all use for the purposes of discussion, particularly one that would make clear how Girls Gone Wild, Playboy, something you used to have to go into a back booth at a video store to rent, and something that would get you arrested if you downloaded it off the internet to rent aren't the same things.

At any rate, Ann and David W. are having an interesting back and forth in the comments.  Check it out.

Apologetic update:  Up above I wrote that "the gang at TAPPED, of which Franke-Ruta's a part, has usually been admirably diligent in ignoring the fact of my existence..."

Now that gang at TAPPED includes Ezra Klein, Scott Lemieux, and Rob Farley, and all three of them have done the very opposite of ignoring my existence over the years and I'm very grateful for their links and their comments and I'm especially grateful to Ezra for the times he invited me to guest post at his place.

But they are only three hands on a fourteen member crew (with occasional guest posters) and I'd say on the whole most of the rest don't know me from a hole in the ground.  Which is fine.  I don't feel snubbed.  I'm a firm believer in people blogging about what they have to blog about without worrying about linkages and blogrolling.  I was just worried that thanks to Garance the first impression a lot of TAPPED's readers were going to have of me is that of a middle-aged lecher who supports forcing young women into acting in dirty movies.

Of course I was assuming that Garance's TAPPED readers would find their way to her post.  Now that Atrios has linked to this post, it's a whole lot of other people who are finding their way here and then over to there, so I may be the one responsible for giving myself a netwide reputation as a dirty old man.

Other posts Franke-Ruta should have linked to update: In the comments, cs points out that my post wasn't the only one Garance mentioned that she didn't link to:  "I believe GFR mischaracterized a Roy Edroso post without linking to it," cs wrote.  I checked and it's true.  What's more, I'm not sure she even read Roy's post, because all she quotes from it is a part I quoted in my post.  So, here's the link to that mischaracterized post of Roy's.

And Mr Jon Swift himself stopped by to drop the link to his modest proposal regarding raising the age of consent.
   

Kiss Me, Elia or The Taming of the Snitch

My favorite film blogger, The Siren, writing about the movie version of Kiss Me, Kate, is trying to force me to do a post defending Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

(Yes, it's all about ME!)

I won't bite.  Not today.

I'm just going to pretend I didn't read the Siren's post,

Instead I'll recommend another of her posts, this one,  Elia Kazan:  Enough Already, in which she explains to Right Wing ranter Mark Steyn, that Kazan, the director of many great movies, including On the Waterfront, but no profile in courage---he went before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named names and helped ruin careers and lives in the process---was not as a result of his snitchery martyred by Hollywood for his anti-communism.

The proof of Kazan's un-martyrdom, as the Siren shows, is how much work he managed to get after he ratted, including On the Waterfront, for which the Liberals and Pinkos and Fellow Travellers in Hollywood punished him by awarding him the Oscar for Best Director.

But that's not enough for Steyn.  Why, remember, a few years back, when Kazan was punished again, this time by being given an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement?  Damn Hollywood Liberals added insult to injury by by not clapping loudly enough.  Will they never stop torturing the man?

The Siren:

What an odd parallel universe is inhabited by Mr. Steyn and those like him, one where Kazan's accomplishments are considered incomplete because Hollywood failed to grant him a 10-minute standing ovation, and didn't get rid of those pesky protesters outside the theater. The honorary Oscar was voted unanimously. The Siren watched the Oscar ceremony and saw Kazan accept his award. The television cameras showed her at least half in the auditorium were on their feet and applauding. She heard no boos. But the presence of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro onstage, Warren Beatty on his feet applauding, that means nothing to Steyn if Ed Harris and Nick Nolte and some other weenie libs are sitting quietly in their seats.

For Mr. Steyn and the professional indignation specialists over at Libertas, it will never be enough that Kazan went on to have a distinguished, artistically fulfilling and lucrative career after his testimony. He must be loved, not despite, but because of his having named names.

Go read the whole post.

You should read her post on Kiss Me, Kate too.  Just keep in mind she's wrong about Taming of the Shrew.

But you didn't hear it from me.   I'm not going to get into it.  Can't make me.  No way.  No how.

The Mommy Party, The Daddy Party, and the Spoiled Teenage Brat Next Door Party

Oh for Pete's sake.

(Pete being Pete McCloskey, the last good Republican.)

Tell me that at the Republican Presidential Debate the other night Brit Hume didn't really ask the candidates a question along the lines of "If a plot line that was rejected by the writers of 24 as being too contrived and outrageous even by the show's usual nightmare world standards somehow replaced reality and you had only 30 seconds to save America before the next commercial break would you get all personally Jack Bauer-ish and torture every brown person you can lay your hands on?"

Guess he did.  Tom Watson heard him.

What was the follow up, what game platform will you have installed in the Oval Office, Wii or PS3?

Now there's a question that would have separated the boys from the bigger boys and brought the crowd of arrested adolescents who make up half of all that's left of the Republican base to their feet.

The other half of the base is mostly Right Wing Christians of an apocalyptic bent.  What a party.  Half of them think they're the heroes of a movie adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel and the rest think they're living in the End Times.   The Big Tent.  Whatever mass delusion you're a victim of, you're welcome here!

And did Mike Huckabee really make a beauty parlor joke about John Edwards?  Mike Huckabee, the guy, who if life really was like high school, would be the candidate most likely to get a daily wedgee called Edwards a sissy?

Recently, the New York Times revived the old Democrats are the Mommy Party, the Republicans are the Daddy Party journalistic trope----in the coverage of politics, a journalistic trope is anything that allows a reporter or pundit to substitute a lazy caricature of a candidate or an issue for actual thought.  The "idea" behind this one is that the Democrats are warm and fuzzy, the party you go to when you've got a boo-boo that needs a kiss and a Band-aid, the party that will pick up after the mess, while the Republicans are stern and earnest, they will tell you no when you need to be told no and tell you to shake it off and take it like a man when you need to be told that, and you go to them when you need someone to come out on the front porch and chase away the bullies and the neighbor's scary dog.

The Democrats are the party of comfort and good housekeeping.  The Republicans are the party of discipline and standing tall.

The Democrats are the party of girls and mamma's boys.  The Republicans are the party of men.

I don't know what kind of upbringings the journalists and pundits who have embraced this trope had but the fact that they think the models are realistic suggests that they grew-up over-indulged and over-identified with their mothers and in constant fear of their fathers' disapproval while desperately seeking their attention and applause. 

Probably it says nothing about them except that they're happy to have found an easy way to sound thoughtful and objective while insulting Democrats (and mothers) and sucking up to the Republicans---although come to think of it this very act suggests "issues," as the pundits try to separate themselves from their mothers and seek in vain for Dad's approval.

No matter.  The last Republican President who acted like a real father, which is to say, like a grown-up, was Eisenhower.   Reagan did a fair job of acting like everybody's favorite TV dad.  In reality he was a removed and clueless father to his own children, overly-devoted to and dependent upon his wife, whom he tellingly called "Mommy."

Since Ike, the Republicans have given us three Presidents who suffered from serious to the point of emotionally crippling daddy-issues.  I don't know about George Herbert Walker Bush's relationship with Prescott Bush.  Nixon's father was a nasty son of a bitch who probably despised all his sons.  Reagan's was an emotionally and physically absent alcoholic.   And we're living through George W. Bush's acting out of his twisted feelings towards his dad.

Actually, I think there's a history of the Presidency to be written about the how their daddy issues affected many of the men who've occupied the Oval Office.  Washington and Jefferson both lost their beloved fathers when they were boys.  Lincoln's father was an ignorant, belligerent, emotionally abusive man who must have made the sensitive young Abe wonder, hopefully, about his mother's fidelity the year before he was born.  FDR's father was an old man when he was born and young Franklin definitely grew up his mother's son.  And on and on.

All I'm saying here is that, as usual, image doesn't match reality and and whatever else we need or want from our political leaders, they are not people we should looking to as parental role-models.

The Republicans have never been the Daddy Party, nor have the Democrats been the Mommy Party, but over the last decade the Republicans have increasingly behaved even less like fathers then ever.  In their bullying and swaggering, in their irresponsibility when it comes to money, in their treating the world as if it was America's playground and telling everybody who doesn't let us make the rules that we will either beat them up or take our ball and go home, in their it's all about ME attitudes towards every issue (They hate us for our Freedoms!), in their certainty that the rules and laws don't apply to them, in their You're not the boss of me contempt for anybody who tries to hold them accountable, in their solipsistic inability to distinguish between their self-aggrandizing dreams of personal glory and their real lives, in their refusal to do their homework, in their belief that they can skate by without paying attention in school, so to speak ("Global warming?  That won't be on the exam, will it?  Unfair!"), in the happy way they substitute insults and bullying for argument, in their unwillingness to accept responsibility for anything ("It's Clinton's fault!"), in their sense of entitlement and privilege, in their self-pitying world view ("Why won't you tolerate my intolerance?") they have become the Party of the Arrested Adolescent.

It's not the Mommy Party versus the Daddy Party.

It's the Grown-ups versus the neighbors' spoiled teenage son.

An apology for engineers

Last Friday's post, Gender policing and the nature, and nurture, of the beasts, read to a lot of people like a string of grumpy prejudices.

Good reason for that.

I was feeling grumpy, and those are my prejudices.

Ken Muldrew thinks I should be ashamed of some of those prejudices, the ones about engineers.

He thinks Garrison Keillor should be ashamed of having the same prejudices too.

I can't speak for Keillor.  In fact Keillor may not have been speaking for Keillor in that quote I used, the one about engineers being merciless men bent on the eradication of beauty.  The quote's from Keillor's novel, Wobegone Boy, and that's the narrator speaking.  The narrator has a lot in common with Keillor, but he's a character in a novel.  Characters in novels, and movies and plays and poems and TV shows, should be assumed to be speaking for themselves.

Iago speaks for Iago, Hamlet speaks for Hamlet, and Cleopatra speaks for Cleopatra, even if when he was writing their speeches Shakespeare was nodding in agreement with some of the things he was having them say.

Keillor's actual opinion of engineers is a mystery to me.

Ken called Keillor my "friend."  He was being sarcastic.  I've never met the man.  Keillor, I mean.  I've never met Ken either.  I would like to meet Ken.  Ken lives up in Canada.  He teaches at the University of Calgary.  I'd like to go to Calgary.  I'm prejudiced in favor of that part of Canada, though I've never been up there.

I would like to meet Garrison Keillor too.  I have talked to him.  I interviewed him once, by phone, for a newspaper article I was writing.  He was very nice.  Almost too nice.  When I ended the interview because he was on a book tour and I knew he had to catch a plane out of whatever city he was talking to me from to get to the next city he had to peddle Wobegone Boy in he offered to call from his hotel room there so we could continue talking.

I almost took him up on it, but I was good; I was on a deadline and I had enough for the article because he had already talked to me a lot longer than our interview had been scheduled to last.

Thing is, I didn't ask him about that quote about engineers.

So all the prejudices to be ashamed of in Friday's post are my own.

I'm not sure I feel ashamed.  Exactly.

There are things I feel bad about and think I need to apologize for or at least explain.

One of them is that I wrote about engineers as if all of them are civil engineers.  As if there are no mechanical engineers, no chemical engineers, no electrical engineers.  As far as I know, none of the latter group has ever built a bridge, ugly or handsome.

Ken Muldrew isn't an engineer.  He's a scientist specializing in cell biology.  His defense of engineers was wholly disinterested.

I'm sure I must have mentioned before how proud I am of how many scientists read this blog, even when they show up in my comments to scold me and tell me that what I've written is drivel.

Many engineers read this blog too.  Maybe not as many as used to though.  I feel bad about that, if it's the case.

I also feel bad that my attempts to be funny came off as just ignorant and mean.  Actually, I am ashamed of that.  As we keep trying to tell Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Imus and the entire Right Side of the Bandwidth, it's not a joke just because you say, "I was joking."

I was joking.

I'm sorry.

And I feel bad that my stupid, failed attempts at humor distracted from my point.

My point wasn't that engineers are merciless men and women bent on the eradication of beauty.

My point was that engineers are trained to think a certain way and that if a young woman of talent and intelligence goes into engineering, when she's done with her training she will think like an engineer, at least when she is doing her job, and my belief in this fact is one of the reasons I don't consider myself a feminist.

I want to see all the young women who want to be engineers and who would be good at it become engineers, but I don't think the world will be a better place because more young women get to be engineers.

I believe that many feminists, enough of them for me to make generalizations about what feminists think, believe that sending more young women into the professional workforce and promoting them will result in a better world because women have certain qualities that men lack and the world needs.   I believe that many of these feminists think those qualities make women morally superior to men.

I think that a young woman who becomes a civil engineer will go out and build bridges not much different from the bridges her male colleagues are building.  I believe that many feminists believe she will go out and build prettier, safer, more family and environmentally friendly bridges, and that the women construction workers who do the actual labor of building her bridges will receive better pay, enjoy more family leave, and not suffer from any sexual harassment on the job.

I think that will only be true if that young woman engineer is a saint and a heroine as well as a good engineer.

But those are other prejudices of mine I will have to apologize for or explain in another post.

Back to engineers.

I have great respect for engineers, all engineers, including the civil engineers who build what I think are ugly bridges.

Engineers, if they are any good, and there are lots of good ones, have to be very smart, very hardworking, and very focused.  That focus is the basis of my prejudices about civil engineers.

Aesthetic concerns are not an important part of every engineer's training.

If you give an engineer a problem to solve she will solve it by engineering.  Similarly, if you give a lawyer a problem to solve she will solve it through litigation and by writing new laws.  And if you give a dancer a problem to solve she will solve it with a dance---Jules Feiffer has made a lot of hay out of this over the years.

Right click on image to enlarge.

If you want to see what the world would look like if all its problems were solved through engineering, drive the stretch of Route 202 in Pennsylvania between King of Prussia and Devon, which is one long concrete shoe box with the lid cut off, or take a walk along the St Joseph River in Fort Wayne where the flood control project turned the riverway into something as aesthetically pleasing as an open storm sewer.

All across America handsome little trestle bridges are being torn down and replaced by big ugly concrete cantilevers with high, boxy sides that totally hide the view of whatever body of water they're crossing.

If enough civil engineers were set to work, given time, the whole country would look like the Borg were here.

It's already looking that way.

But here's the thing.  This growing ugliness is not the engineers' fault.

There are plenty of engineers who would love to build handsome bridges.  They would very much like to plant trees and fit their projects into the landscape.  They would like to accommodate our human need to see the land and the sky around us.  They would like to leave the world a better looking, more comfortable and comforting place, as well as a more efficient and safer one.

But the people who give them their marching orders and pay their salaries won't let them.

Those people are cheapskates.  They want projects done fast and faster and they want them done at budget prices.  They don't care how a project looks when it's done, they just want it done.  They're not even much concerned that it gets done right.

I'm talking about the people who order big public works projects.

Politicians and the folks who elect them.

Us.

The engineers are building the world we want them to build.

Not the world they want to build.

A lot of what happened to New Orleans when Katrina hit was due to a massive failure of engineering.

But that wasn't the engineers' fault.

In fact it was the engineers who were warning for a long time that the engineering was failing because it was old and worn out and needed to be fixed and replaced.

The politicians wouldn't give them the money.

We wouldn't give them the money.

And if the engineers had their way New Orleans would be being rebuilt in a way that will make it a lot less likely that it will wash away in the next big hurricane.

But the politicians won't give them the money.

We won't give them the money.

Fact is, most Americans don't care what the world around them looks like or how actually well-built, well-designed, well-crafted, well-engineered it is.

They just want their problems solved in a way that doesn't raise their taxes.

And if that results in a world that looks like a gigantic shopping mall, that's fine with them.

As long as there are some good sales and they don't have to walk too far to their cars.

Now that's a prejudice!

And I'm not even grumpy.

Nance and Dutch

Dutch Leonard has a new book out.

Up In Honey's Room.

Detroit.  World War II.  Spies.  Escaped POWs.  Deadly blondes.  The hero of The Hot Kid.  Carl Webster.  A little older, none the wiser.

Leonard's in Detroit, talking up his book, goes on the radio.

Over in the suburbs, Nancy Nall tunes in.  Nance loves Dutch.  Loves him for his books.  One of her writer-heroes.  A long-term love affair.  Nance and Dutch's books go way back.  Matter of fact, Nance was on the radio herself a few months ago, talking about the books.  This same station.  Did a commentary about how those books helped her get to know and appreciate her new home, Detroit, and its decrepit, dangerous charms.

Nance isn't thinking about that though when she turns on her radio.  She's thinking about Dutch.  Only interested in what he has to say.  For the moment she's forgotten she ever did the commentary.

Host of the program interviewing Dutch remembers it though.

He plays it.

Interrupts himself talking to Dutch to play the tape of Nance talking about Dutch for Dutch.

So there's Nance.  Sitting there stunned.  Listening to Dutch listening to Nance talk about Dutch.

Her hero.  Forced to hear her going on in a way that sounds to her like herself gushing like a schoolgirl.

Nance's reaction.

Just kill me!

Kill me now!

Leonard's reaction?

According to the host he loved it.  Sat there, his smile broadening by the minute.

Go over to Nance's.  Listen to her commentary.  She's posted the link.  You'll see.  Dutch wasn't smiling for nothing.

Shed no tears for Aaron Sorkin, but let us mourn now famous live-blogging

Shakespeare's Sister passed on the news to me yesterday.  Aaron's Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip isn't on NBC's schedule for the coming fall.

Sad news for me because it means there won't be any more Studio 60 live-blogging. I had a great time with all of you who took part in our Monday night Snark on Sorkin parties.  But it's possibly good news for Sorkin himself because it frees him from a show his heart was apparently never in.

The premise of the show, the backstage drama of putting on a cutting edge sketch comedy show very much like Saturday Night Live, was promising---what would Sorkin do with a Belushi or a Chris Farley or a young Sarah Silverman?  The answer, it turned out, was ignore the fact they ever existed or that any larger than life or difficult and brilliant and creative people had anything to do with putting on a show like Saturday Night Live.

August J. Pollak, some guy with a website, quotes a poster at Television Without Pity who says in a paragraph what a lot of us were observing week in and week out here during the live-blogs.

Sorkin has no clue how Saturday Night Live was and is made. If you read the book Live From New York you can see there IS a story there. It's a fascinating one (and rarely a funny book, BTW), and a page turner: full of egos, battles with the network, fights and love amongst the cast, tragedy, redemption, comeback stories. For God's sake how do you make that boring? If you're Sorkin, you ignore how a weekly sketch show is written and performed so you can take out all the stress and tension that goes into making it. You cast bland and unfunny actors playing bland and unfunny actors, rather than actors playing out of control writers or young comedians straight off the improv stages at major cities getting their first taste of fame. Instead of the reality of a hard-ass creator/overlord who was the inspiration for Dr. Evil overseeing it all, you replace him with two smug, bland head writers who do nothing but mope. Instead of a shark-like network executive you turn a professional woman in a simpering little girl who has nothing better to do than pine about her sex life and take naps on her boyfriend's couch.

That last bit up there refers to the way Sorkin utterly wasted the talents of Amanda Peet, the only one of his two female leads who had a talent for comedy.  I'll get to his other, unfunny, female lead in a bit.

Not only did Sorkin seem to have no interest in the real history of Saturday Night Live, he didn't seem to have any interest in what made it funny either.  In fact, he wasn't at all interested in comedy either as something worth creating, or as an effect of someone's writing or acting, or as entertainment, something audiences might be tuning into his show in hopes of enjoying.

Sorkin didn't appear to care about television in general, period.  Not as a medium for art or communication, at least.  In fact, and this is something that impressed us live-bloggers every week, based on his ludicrously dated pop culture references, it was a good bet that Sorkin had given up watching television when he was in college and never gotten back into the habit.  As Tom Watson observed, Sorkin's idea of a celebrity was anyone who had been a regular guest on the Merv Griffin Show.  I think the only reason Tom tuned into Studio 60 week after week was that he was hoping to catch the inevitable Charro joke.  Other than what he'd watched when he was a kid, Sorkin didn't care what had gone on in television after about 1982, a bad year for him to have unplugged his TV set, something else I'll get to in a minute.

Sorkin was overly-fascinated with network television...as an asset, a cash cow a multi-national corporation could milk to fund billion dollar deals in Asia (and thank God I'll never have to hear Ed Asner growl the word "Macao" again, except in my nightmares) which gave him an excuse to treat us to long lectures cribbed from a college-level intro course in macroeconomics.  But the only fact about television that truly excited him was that it was the business that treated the world to that great literary and creative genius, Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin loved writing about Sorkin.  Studio 60 was his autobiography.  The first half-dozen or so episodes had as their main theme what a brilliant writer Aaron Sorkin was and how badly television needed his brilliance to save it from itself.

The other main theme, the one that continued through all the episodes, unfortunately, was also autobiographical, and that was how foolish Sorkin's former girlfriend, Kristin Chenoweth, had been to give him up.

After the early critical lambasting the show took, most of it pointing out that Sorkin had created a show about comedy that wasn't funny, he began to describe Studio 60 as a romantic comedy.

The problem here was similar to the problem he was having with comedy.  His comedy wasn't funny and his romance wasn't romantic.

Week after week, the romantic leads, Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson, struggled mightily to convince us that they were passionately in love with each other and week after week they barely managed to convey the sense that they liked each other enough that each one was glad the other one wasn't dead.

And now, here I am at last, at the points I promised to get to, Sorkin's unfunny leading lady and the importance 1982 should have played in the writing of Studio 60.

A big obstacle to Sorkin's making his romantic comedy romantic and funny was that Sarah Paulson was neither romantic nor funny.  This wasn't entirely her fault.  She was badly cast.  Good as she may have been in other things (and she had her fans among the live-bloggers here who remember her as Deadwood's proto-dominatrix, the duplicitous and sexually manipulative nanny, Miss Isringhausen), Paulson didn't have it in her to play the kind of character Sorkin needed his leading lady to be.

And that leading lady wasn't Kristin Chenoweth, although Paulson couldn't approximate her or her talents either.  Chenoweth is a Broadway musical star.  What Studio 60 needed, and what Matthew Perry's character would have fallen in love with, was a brilliant comedic actress like...

Shelley Long.

Long, remember, came out of Chicago's Second City.  If her career had taken a different turn, she could have wound up where a lot of Second City alums landed, on Saturday Night Live, where she'd have been terrific,  if the writers at the time happened to know how to use her talents (No guarantee of that.  See below.), or she could have wound up her generation's version of Elaine May.  I don't know if she'd have even needed her own generation's version of Mike Nichols.

What's more, Long's real life backstage paralleled her character's life on stage. Diane Chambers and Shelley Long had a lot in common, including the fact that when they both left Cheers, they left behind a lot of very mixed feelings.

Long occupied a place on the Cheers set very much like the place Paulson's character, Harriet Hayes, was supposed to occupy on the set of Studio 60.  Long was a brilliant comic actress, the star of her show---it took a little while for Ted Danson to come into his own and for the first two seasons, Long was carrying him.  Danson knew it, and didn't mind it, and went along with it, and learned from her.  But that's another post.  Long was an audience's favorite and an object of erotic fantasy as well as a great talent.  She was also, onstage and off, one of the gang yet not one of the gang.

Long was often temperamentally at odds with her castmates and with Cheers' writers and producers.  In her case the temperamental differences stemmed from Long's artistic perfectionism, while in Harriet's case the differences were supposed to be caused by Harriet's religious views, which Sorkin, true to form, treated as an excuse to lecture his audience and not as a part of Harriet's emotional make-up.

Now, the reason 1982 is important for Sorkin is that it's the year Cheers premiered.

It was also the year another romantic comedy about a pair of Can't Live With You/Can't Live Without You lovers went on the air, Remington Steele.

Another hit show in this vein, Moonlighting, premiered in 1985.  And Northern Exposure appeared in 1990.

From all their influences showed up in his writing for Matt and Harriet, Sorkin might as well have not watched a single episode of any of them, and like I said, based on his pop culture references, he very well may not have.

At any rate, the very first lesson Sorkin could have and should have learned from Cheers and the rest is that casting matters above all.  Writing is secondary.

I'm guessing he cast Matthew Perry first, so he had it somewhat easier than the creators of Cheers had it, because they had to find both their romantic leads.  Sorkin just needed someone who could spark off of Perry.

Once you have two leads who can start a fire together, then you need to give them interesting things to say to each other.

But this puts the formula exactly backwards in the Sorkin view of the universe where writing, particularly writing by Aaron Sorkin, is the be-all and end-all.

Sorkin could never let go of the idea that he could write Harriet and Matt into sexual combustibility.  In fact, he seemed to believe that the only reason we cared about their romance was all the great Sorkinisms they would spout at each other in their verbal foreplay.

This actually applies to all of Sorkin's characters on Studio 60 and the whole cast.  Sorkin was only interested in his actors and characters as mediums for channeling the voice of Aaron Sorkin.  Week after week the only reason any given character had to speak was that he or she needed to tell us what Aaron Sorkin was thinking or that he or she needed to prompt another character into telling us what Aaron Sorkin was thinking.

Instead of creating an entire television series, maybe Sorkin should have just started a blog.

Changing the channel:

Bill Nothstine sent me word last week that May 7 was the 20th anniversary of Shelley Long's last episode of Cheers.

And up above where I speculated about how Shelley Long would have fared on Saturday Night Live and said it would have depended on whether or not the writers knew how to use her, I was thinking of Julia Louis-Dreyfus who was so wasted on SNL that I never suspected she had a tenth of the comic ability she showed on Seinfeld.

But when she was on SNL only one of the writers had an inkling of what she was capable of.  Unfortunately, that writer was kind of an odd man out on the writing staff.  The producer at the time, Dick Ebersol, never got any of his jokes or saw anything remotely humorous in any of his ideas.  He didn't last with the show long.

But one day he got a chance to create his own show and he remembered Julia and brought her aboard.

This guy.

Soon to be cross-posted over at newcritics, but not today because there's a whole of good new stuff by others up right now for your viewing pleasure.