Lance Mannion

Unfortunate News

Hello everyone. 

This is Oliver/Jack. I'm sure most of you are aware, but my father, Lance/David passed away suddenly on Thursday of natural causes. It was a total shock to everyone. We are coping as best we can. There is a link to his go fund me below. A service will be live streamed on Wednesday at 11:00 am EST. There will also be a recording posted. A link to the stream will be posted to his twitter.

After the service I will post the recording as well as a final roundup of tributes and such. Thank you all,

 

Here is the go fund me generously set up by Susan Madrak.

Writers aren't people exactly...

Sunday night, April 18, 2021.

A writer trying hard to be one person. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, detail from a caricature by Barry Blitt, in the New Yorker. November 2009.

It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly, or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying---only to see their faces in reflecting chandeliers.

--- from “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Lots more to read: "Slow Fade: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" by Arthur Krystal in the New Yorker, November 16, 2009.

In which our hero confounds the merit of the artist with that of her work and learns a lesson about young women artists as businesswomen

Originally placed on display, Thursday, November 5, 2020. Copied from the original, Thursday morning, April 15, 2021.

A life drawing class full of female art students or, as Henry James might have seen it, ruthless young businesswomen in the making: Detail from “In the Studio” by Marie Bashkirtseff, 1881. Dnipro State Art Museum, Dnipro, Ukraine. Via Wikipedia.

Today is the novelist Henry James’ birthday. He’d have been 178 years old. There are some who would say that’s how long it takes to read one of his novels. There are some, as, indeed, James himself might rejoin, who should, as it were, restrain their opinions, or, to be precise, keep their yaps shut. At any rate, as it is, to say plainly, I don’t have much to say about James off the top of my head this morning. Today is also the 156th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and I have much to say about Lincoln, and am at work saying it. Meanwhile, I’m reposting this one from back in November when I was reading James’ third novel “The American”, which, as it happens, reads like a breeze. James didn’t develop his more discursive later style until late in his long career. In the end he got windy. But in his youth and middle age he was generally breezy. Like here:

November 5, 2020:

This scene from Henry James’ early novel, “The American”, can serve as a reminder that James, at least in the first half of his career, was a comic novelist in the same way Dickens was. He could be as heavy-handed in naming his characters as Dickens, as well. The hero of the novel, the American of the title, a young but precociously successful businessman, is named Christopher Newman. At any rate, here’s Newman, on his first trip to Paris, determined to educate himself on matters of art, and ending up being educated on the subject of women artists as businesswomen. My favorite line is the one in which Newman remembers what he’s been informed about not “confounding the merit of the artist with that of [her] work”, which he then immediately proceeds to do. The artist's name is Claire Noemie, and, as you can guess, she turns out to be the romantic heroine and to have a terrible secret. James could be as melodramatic as Dickens too:

We [the narrator narrates] have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the æsthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.

As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, “Combien?” he abruptly demanded.

The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders, put down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands.

“How much?” said our friend, in English. “Combien?”

“Monsieur wishes to buy it?” asked the young lady in French.

“Very pretty, splendide. Combien?” repeated the American.

“It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful subject,” said the young lady.

“The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it. Combien? Write it here.” And he took a pencil from his pocket and showed her the fly-leaf of his guide-book. She stood looking at him and scratching her chin with the pencil. “Is it not for sale?” he asked. And as she still stood reflecting, and looking at him with an eye which, in spite of her desire to treat this avidity of patronage as a very old story, betrayed an almost touching incredulity, he was afraid he had offended her. She was simply trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go. “I haven’t made a mistake—pas insulté, no?” her interlocutor continued. “Don’t you understand a little English?”

The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was remarkable. She fixed him with her conscious, perceptive eye and asked him if he spoke no French. Then, “Donnez!” she said briefly, and took the open guide-book. In the upper corner of the fly-leaf she traced a number, in a minute and extremely neat hand. Then she handed back the book and took up her palette again.

Our friend read the number: “2,000 francs.” He said nothing for a time, but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to dabble with her paint. “For a copy, isn’t that a good deal?” he asked at last. “Pas beaucoup?”

The young lady raised her eyes from her palette, scanned him from head to foot, and alighted with admirable sagacity upon exactly the right answer. “Yes, it’s a good deal. But my copy has remarkable qualities, it is worth nothing less.”

---from “The American” by Henry James.

From the Illinois prairie to Washington, D.C. by way of outer space

Posted Wednesday night, April 14, 2021.

Color photograph of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency, via the Hubble Newsletter.

This is how Carl Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., began his career as a space traveler:

Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (Pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and corn fields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state. On birthday as a boy, he received a little three-inch refracting telescope. To the extent that it had a brand, it was “the white one,” and that very first night, he hauled it to the backyard and aimed it expectantly at a pristine pitch of rural American sky. Curt got his celestial bearings, pressed expectant eye to eyepiece, and suddenly those points of distant light inflated into worlds as real as Breese. And each was so different! Mars, the color of rust and capped with white. Jupiter and its watchful red eye and tan and brown bands of clouds---and moons! It had moons! Four of them! AND YOU COULD SEE THEM! There was Saturn, rings and all, just as the textbooks promised! You’re in sixth grade learning about all this stuff and it’s just a few photos in science class…, but then you strap on that telescope for the first time and all at once you’re not dealing in the theoretical. You’re a space traveler. Science suddenly isn’t a class you take in school, something that begins and ends with fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions---it is a thing that is absolutely, metaphysically happening and I have seen it and there’s no going back from that.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The power of tiny, undirected changes

Posted Sunday morning, April 11, 2021.

The flowers of most common Magnolia trees are pale and without scent for an evolutionary reason. Magnolias evolved millions of years before bees and butterflies and had to rely on beetles for pollination, and beetles aren’t interested in color or scent. Magnolia tree in blossom, via Wikipedia.

Today’s Sunday sermon is by the late and lamented Oliver Sacks, physician, neurologist, writer, and, he wouldn’t have thought incidentally, atheist who, when dying of liver cancer, in terrible pain but still joyfully at work as a writer, didn’t have to resist a deathbed conversion because he didn’t feel the temptation. It strikes me that the sentence at the end of this passage, “we are made of cells, and cells go back to the beginning of life” is a biologist’s version of Carl Sagan’s “We are star stuff”...

Linus Pauling has said that he read [The Origin of the Species] when he was nine. I was not that precocious and could not have followed its “one long argument” at that age. But I had an intimation of Darwin’s vision of the world in our own garden---a garden which, on summer days, was full of flowers and bees buzzing from one flower to another. It was my mother, botanically inclined, who explained to me what the bees were doing, their legs yellow with pollen, and how they and flowers depended on each other.

While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, was among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when “modern” insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings---and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.

The notion of such vast eons of time---and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety---was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided...a sense of deep meaning that belief in a divine plan had never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. The idea that it could have worked out differently, that dinosaurs might still be roaming the earth or that human beings might never have evolved, was a dizzying one. It made life seem all the more precious and a wonderful ongoing adventure (“a glorious accident,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it)---not fixed or predetermined, but always susceptible to change and new experience.

Life on our planet is several billion years old, and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes. We humans retain, for example, the remnants of gill arches, much modified from our fishy ancestors and even the neural systems that once controlled gill movement. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We bear, too, an even older past; we are made of cells, and cells go back to the very origin of life.

---from “Darwin and the Meaning of Plants”, one of the essays collected in “The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks.

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Contingently related blogging: "THAT Carl Sagan".

Postcard from the Edge of the Sea

Posted Wednesday morning, April 7, 2021.

A view from the beach at Halibut State Park in Rockport, Massachusetts, Sunday afternoon around two, April 4th, 2021. Copyright Thomas Levenson. Posted here by permission.

Just when I’m beginning to resign myself to the probability that thanks to the debilitations and declining competencies of creeping old age I won’t ever get to look out at the open ocean again, author, historian, science journalist, and, as he puts it, sometime documentary filmmaker---films he's worked on have won awards, including a Peabody and a local Emmy---and longtime online confederate Tom Leverson posted this photo looking out at the open ocean from the beach at Halibut State Park in Rockport, Massachusetts. Rockport was a regular stop on our travels when Mrs M---the Blonde as she was then known---ventured outside of Boston and Tom’s postcard has made me homesick and desperate to return and sad that I can’t.

Tom, whose latest book “Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich” will be out in paperback in May (it's available in hardcover now), reports that the air temperature when he was out there Sunday afternoon was in the high 50s. He didn’t say what the water temperature was, but it’s the North Atlantic in April, so...not warm. Or how hard the wind was blowing and from which direction. (It was 17 mph and from the northeast. I looked it up. Also, the average temperature of the water off Rockport in April is 44 degrees. I looked that up too.) But still a fine way to spend a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.

That rock at the center with the waves breaking over it looks like a stranded walrus, doesn’t it? Makes me want to go to its rescue, which would be going to my own rescue. Ah, well.

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In addition to his other accomplishment, Tom teaches science writing at MIT. His bio at his department's web page features samples of his writing, including this essay he wrote for the Atlantic last spring: "Stop Trying to make 'Wuhan Virus' Happen". You should visit his personal website to read more about his books and watch one of the documentaries he worked on.

Make sure to follow him on Twitter.

Friendly reminder: the photo of Halibut State Park is copyrighted.

A symbol of the best in all of us

Stone originally rolled away from the notebooks, Easter Sunday morning, April 21, 2019. Resurrected, Easter Sunday morning, April 4, 2021.

Detail from “The Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb” by Annabile Carracci. 1590s. The Hermitage, via Wikipedia.

From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019:

Happy Easter. Shh. We’re at mass. Father Bob’s leading us through a rousing recitation of the renewal of our baptismal vows.

“Do you reject Satan?” he asks at the top of his voice while smiling broadly, knowing we will.

“We do!” we shout back with great good cheer.

“And all his works?”

“We do!”

“And all his empty promises?”

“You betcha!”

Ok, that was me. And I said it under my breath. The rest of the congregation cried out lustily that they do.

Yes, I’m taking notes in church. It’s my form of meditation. You might be surprised that I’m in church and at mass. We’re here with Mom Mannion. We’re visiting the old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with her and my brothers Larry and Lyle and my sister Liz and their families. After mass we’re all going out to brunch. Right now there’s nothing for me to do but pretend I’m still a good Catholic or at least a dependable CAPE one. I have to say Father Bob gives good a good mass. He’s a big barrel-shaped, moon-faced, gray-haired cleric of about fifty-five. Mom Mannion thinks the world of him. Pop Mannion did too. I don’t trust him. But I don’t trust any priests these days. I enjoy his sermons though. I’ve sat through three in the last two months. That makes three masses more than I attended in the year before, and one of those was a funeral mass. Pop’s funeral. Father Bob said the mass and delivered the eulogy. He did Pop proud. He also did the benediction at the dedication naming the town hall after Pop. Last time we were up here Father Bob’s took for his text for his sermon the parable of the Prodigal Son. I got a real kick out of it. I should write a post on that. I took notes. Naturally.

Now he’s moved on to expanding on the baptismal vows.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

Of course we don’t.

He fires off the questions---too fast for me to keep up. I’m writing them down as I catch them, so I’m not putting them in order. I got the first two in order.

“Do you BELIEVE?”

“Do you believe in BELIEVING?”

Here are the ones I caught after that:

“Do you believe in Fairness?”

“Do you believe in Justice?”

“Do you believe in Mercy?”

“Do you believe in Peace?”

“Do you believe that this year our family is going to make a difference?”

Our family is the parish. The difference is that together we’re going the world a fairer, more just, merciful, and peaceful place for everybody.

Father Bob’s turned this part of the mass into a pep rally for Social Justice. This isn’t perfunctory or rote. Father Bob, without being preachy about it, preaches regularly that the point is social justice. Everybody means everybody. As in we’re all in this together. As in nobody gets left behind. It’s implicit in the parish’s mission statement, which is printed on the front page of the weekly bulletin:

We are an Evangelizing
Roman Catholic Community
of Christ’s Disciples that
Welcomes All
Prays Joyfully
Grows in Faith
Proclaims God’s Kingdom Acts
Justly:
This is our Mission

The parish has a dedicated Social Justice Ministry. Its members are busy organizing the parish’s participation in next weekend’s CROP Walk. Father Bob will be leading the parish contingent on the walk.

Today’s gospel was from John, Chapter 20, Verses 1-9. The painting up top, by Annabile Carracci, depicts a scene from Luke’s Easter story. I couldn’t find a painting I liked based on John’s. There’s a great painting by Alexander Ivanov based on John’s story of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus outside the tomb while Peter and John are taking a look around inside, but it’s not as colorful or joyful as Carracci’s. I like John’s story better than Luke’s. I like what John has Jesus saying to Mary--- “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” ---but I imagine him smiling when he says it and then nearly laughing when she still doesn’t realize it’s him---she thinks he’s the gardener---and he snaps her into focus with an amused and affectionate “Mary!” But he isn’t smiling in Ivanov’s painting and doesn’t look even mildly amused. He looks still mostly dead and as if he spent all day yesterday harrowing hell and it took more out of him than being crucified.

Father Bob gave his usual lively reading. It’s more accurate to say he performs the gospels rather than reads them. Today’s sermon started with the Easter story but he moved on to touch on other things. He told us about a couple of minor frustrations he’d experienced in the past week, Both his chalices broke. One was chipped on the lip, which he discovered when he went to drink from in during the Eucharist. The other sprang a leak. “A chalice is made to do one thing!” he said in mock dismay and irritation, as if he was saying “You had one job!” But he was leading into reminding us what a hard year we’ve been through, in which his frustrations were trivial in the grand scheme of things. Here’s something he said that made me sit up and take notice, which I think made a lot of people around me take notice too:

The Church, he said, had another hard year “mostly brought on by its own doing.”

We all knew what he was referring too. Even the Pope has trouble bringing himself to be that self-accusatory.

But Father Bob left that to sink in. He worked his way to his main subject.

Notre Dame.

“A symbol of the best in all of us.”

Symbol. That’s the key word. Symbol. Not totem. Not icon. And of all of us. The Church first, but only as the starting point. All of us.

Then he conjured up for us the image---the altar with its gold cross still standing, looking almost untouched by the fire amid the burnt wreckage and scorched ruins. Another symbol. Not a miracle. A piece of luck giving us something to focus on and think about: that no matter the trouble and the suffering and the difficulty we go through, some good can still be left standing inside us and from that and around that we can rebuild.

Mass is ending. We’re going in peace.

Reuters.

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Correction: My brother Luke pointed out that Father Bob didn't deliver Pop's eulogy. He did. And he did a beautiful job of it too. Technically, what Father Bob did was give the sermon----in the church missal it's called the homily---devoted to Pop.

Jesus' best joke, according to Kurt Vonnegut

Triumphal entry from the notebooks, Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019. Posted on Good Friday, April 10, 2020. Unstuck in time, Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021.

From the opening credits scene in the 1972 movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.

Posted this one on Palm Sunday last year. I’m posting it again today because it’s Palm Sunday, but as the Tralfamadorians would say, I have always posted it and I always will post it. Seen from their point of view, this blog is one long post stretching back to September 2004 and forward from there to now and however many more years I keep at this. So, listen: This blog is unstuck in time...

Last month [March 31, 2019.] was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” I was surprised when I learned this. I thought it was older. If you’d asked me I’d have said it was published in 1965. I don’t know why 1965. I read it in 1971. I thought of it as a classic. I thought classics were old. Like “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick”, classics I had already read. 

Of course I knew it wasn’t that old.

I knew when World War II was. I knew Vonnegut was still alive. But In 1971, 1965 seemed a long time in the past to me. I couldn’t imagine that a book that famous had only recently landed in the bookstores. That it was as new as the last Hardy Boys mystery I’d read, which probably actually was the last Hardy Boys mystery I read.

How could I go back to reading about those two teenage sleuths and their chums solving mysteries in Bayshore after reading what happened to Billy Pilgrim in Dresden?

In February of 1945, when the allies firebombed Dresden, Billy was only a few years older than Frank and Joe.

Vonnegut himself, who was in Dresden that day as a POW, was only twenty-two.

If I could work my will every future edition of “Slaughterhouse-Five” would come minus the first chapter. The first chapter is about how Vonnegut came to write the novel. It doesn't get the story rolling. It's really an author's introduction. If I could work my will it would be noted as such, what's now Chapter 2 would become Chapter 1, and the novel proper would begin where the story begins and with what then would be one of the greatest opening lines in American literature.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

Vonnegut is echoing Melville. He might as well have begun “Listen: Call him Billy.” But what he wrote is better than Melville. “Call me Ishmael” doesn’t get the story rolling. It doesn’t even mean anything, at least not to any readers who aren’t well-versed in their bible reading and know who the Ishmael in the Book of Genesis was. “Call me Ishmael” is just Melville clearing his throat. It’s the second paragraph where he hoists the mainsail and sets sail.

That’s not just a metaphor.

If I could work my will I’d seriously consider eliminating “Call me Ishmael” from all future editions of “Moby-Dick”. The second paragraph is one of the greatest opening paragraphs in American literature. It’s one of the greatest paragraphs ever written.

Back to “Slaughterhouse-Five”.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” is actually printed as two lines. “Listen:” is the whole first paragraph. I think Vonnegut made a mistake there. So I’ve always corrected it in my head. I’ve corrected it here because I can work my will here.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

I'm surprised Vonnegut used a colon there.

Vonnegut hated semicolons.

“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he declared.

I’ve always assumed he felt the same about colons.

On the other hand, James Baldwin seems to have liked them: he used them frequently.

Maybe an editor stuck it in.

It seems appropriate to put “Slaughterhouse-Five” in the line of American classics that arguably begins with “Moby-Dick.”

Hemingway had his opinion. I have mine.

I’m open to the argument that I’m wrong. I argue with myself about it. All American literature began with Melville. Or it began with Hawthorne.

If it didn’t, it began with Washington Irving, specifically “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

Or it began with “Huck Finn”. Hemingway could be right.

It’s more than appropriate to mention Twain and Vonnegut in the same breath.

If all American literature did begin with “Huckleberry Finn”, it runs in a straight line to “Slaughterhouse-Five”, barely taking a breath at anything Hemingway himself wrote.

For the record, the novel by Twain I think pairs best with “Slaughterhouse-Five” is “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. I probably think this because I read them at about the same time. Close enough in time that I might as well have read them back to back. To make the case “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “A Connecticut Yankee” are books separated at birth by eighty years I would have to read them back to back now.

I don’t have the time or the mental or physical energy.

An interesting thing has happened concerning my love for Vonnegut.

Somewhere along the line “Slaughterhouse-Five” stopped being my favorite of his books.

“God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” took over.

Eliot Rosewater makes a cameo appearance in “Slaughterhouse-Five”.

He and Billy Pilgrim share a room in the psychiatric ward at the veterans hospital. Billy, unstuck in time again, has traveled back to 1948, when he was still in optometry school. He had had a nervous breakdown. Eliot Rosewater was “tired of being drunk all the time.” Vonnegut gives him one of my favorite lines in the novel.

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”

In one of their scenes together, Rosewater tells Billy that everything there is to know about life is in “The Brothers Karamazov” by Feodor Dostoevsky.

I think everything there is to know about life in these United States is in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”.

The reason I think that is “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is about money.

Vonnegut puts it right there in the first paragraph.

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

Not as good an opening paragraph as "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" or even "Call me Ishmael" but it's pretty good.

"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is another one I need to re-read to make the argument. I last re-read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” two and a half years ago when I was in the hospital recovering from back surgery (July 2016). Two and a half years feels like ages ago.

In 1971, I might have started out to read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in the line of classics I’d already read: “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”; “Moby-Dick”; “Treasure Island”; “Last of the Mohicans”; “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. But very quickly in I realized it was a break with those books. I knew it for the first adult novel I would read. Those other books were adventure stories. Boys’ adventure stories. “Huck Finn” is a boys adventure story. “Slaughterhouse-Five” centers around what a boy like I was could consider a boy’s adventure. I was used to adventure stories set in during World War II. One of my favorite books at the time, “The Guns of Navarone”, is an adventure story set during World War II.

In 1971 when I first read “Slaughterhouse Five”, I read it at the house Mom and Pop Mannion had just bought on Lake George. The previous owner left-behind all her furniture. That included a bookcase full of books that were Book-of-the-Month Club selections going back several years. “Slaughterhouse Five” was one of them.

Pop Mannion became a Vonnegut fan about a week before I did. He read that same copy of “Slaughterhouse Five” and then passed it on to me.

Pop’s birthday is coming up. April 27. It’ll be the first one without him. Pop didn’t like us to make a fuss about his birthday. He used to like to say whenever his birthday was coming and he saw us starting to make plans for a party, “What does the fact the earth has made another trip around the sun have to do with me?” On the 27th the earth will have made just three days short of three-quarters of another trip around the sun without him. He died on August 1 of last year.

You know what recurring line from “Slaughterhouse-Five” goes here, don’t you?

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007. The earth has made twelve trips around the sun without him, almost to the day.

This time I’m not going to resist.

So it goes.

Today is Palm Sunday. It’s a good occasion to re-tell what Vonnegut called the only joke in the New Testament. It occurs in the gospel of John. Chapter 12, verses 1-8, to be exact. It’s the scene in which Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with oil and Judas objects. The oil is expensive. Judas complains that the money spent on the oil could have been better spent on feeding the poor. Jesus tells Judas to leave Mary alone. “The poor,” he says, “you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

Conservative Christians and Republicans have taken great satisfaction in using that passage to argue against the government safety net.

“What’s the use of wasting the taxpayers’ money on programs that won’t eliminate poverty?” they will propound, as if the only point of SNAP, Medicaid, housing subsidies, the ACA, school lunches, unemployment benefits, universal preschool, and other welfare programs was social engineering and evening out the wealth. “They don’t work. There’s always going to be poor people. Jesus himself said so.”

Vonnegut contended that Jesus was being ironic at Judas’ expense. The nuns who taught us at St. Helen’s taught us the same thing. It was six days before Passover. Jesus had a week left to live. He knew what was ahead of him, and he knew who was going to bring it about. And he was letting Judas know that he knew.

“You can help the poor later,” he was tacitly saying, “you know, after I’m arrested, tortured, condemned to death, marched up to Golgotha, crucified, die in agony and doubt, and am buried, which is going to happen within the week, thanks to you.”

Vonnegut gave his exegesis of John’s gospel in a lay sermon he preached at the invitation of the pastor of an Episcopal church in New York City many trips around the sun ago. He tells that story and recounts his sermon in an essay in “Palm Sunday”, a book he subtitled “An Autobiographical College.”

Often his non-fiction was better than his fiction.

Vonnegut sometimes called himself a Christ-worshiping agnostic. He was closer to being a Christ-worshiping atheist. His friend Isaac Asimov was a straight-up atheist. Asimov died in 1992.

So it goes.

He died on April 2, ten days before Palm Sunday that year. I think he’d have liked to have died a day sooner. I think he’d have thought April Fool’s Day was a more appropriate death date for himself.

Vonnegut delivered a eulogy at a memorial service for Asimov which was sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He opened with what he called his best joke. “Isaac is up in heaven now.” Vonnegut said that it was the funniest thing he could have said to a roomful of humanists. Had the mourners rolling in the aisles. He said he wanted someone to rewrite the joke for his funeral when the time came: “Kurt is up in heaven now.”

I hope someone did.

There are several spots in that second-to-the-last paragraph where I could have worked in a semicolon or a colon. I left them out in Vonnegut’s memory. And to be funny. I think Vonnegut himself would have recognized the joke and laughed. If he were up in heaven now.

The picture up at the top of this post is from the opening sequence of the movie adaptation of “Slaughterhouse-Five”. It’s one of the best film adaptations of a great novel I can name. It was directed by George Roy Hill in 1972 and starred Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim. I’ve always wondered why Sacks didn’t go on to have a better career than he did. He was good as Billy at every stage of Billy’s adult life. George Roy Hill was in the middle of an already great career. Hill directed his last movie in 1988. He died in 2002.

So it...you know.

Pop Mannion liked the movie too. But he thought Hill got the ending wrong. The movie ends on the planet Tralfamadore with Billy and Montana Wildhack celebrating the birth of their child. Montana Wildhack is the adult film star the Tralfamadorians brought from Earth to be Billy’s companion and mate.

Montana Wildhack was played by the to my teenage eyes mind-bogglingly voluptuous Valerie Perrine. Perrine’s another one I wonder about. Why didn’t she have a more stellar career? She fared a bit better than Sack in the ‘70s. She had major roles in several more good movies after “Slaughterhouse-Five. “Lenny”. “Superman”. “Superman II”. After that though it was mostly cameo appearances in which she often played parodies of herself and guest appearances on TV shows.

She should have been the Judy Holliday of the 70s and 80s.

She was that good and that funny.

The Tralfamadorians celebrate with Billy and Montana. The last image of the movie is of fireworks bursting in the night sky above the geodesic dome that’s Billy and Montana’s home and cage and the two of them waving to their invisible, skyborne hosts/captors/keepers. Pop Mannion thought the movie shouldn’t have ended there. He thought the story should have come unstuck in time one last time and jumped back to where it began, with Billy back in Europe in World War II, trudging through the snow, on his way to being captured by the Germans and sent to Dresden.

I think Pop was right. So…

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time…

 

George Segal in "California Split": Addicted to hope

Posted Friday night, March 26, 2021.

Portrait of two gamblers. One does it for the company. The other does it to be left alone. Both are addicted to hope: Charlie and Bill at the track (Elliot Gould and George Segal, second and third from the left) in Robert Altman's "California Split". 1974.

You know George Segal’s gone, right? Died Tuesday, the 23rd. Eighty-seven. One of my favorite actors. Going by the outpouring of emotion on Twitter, he was one of everybody’s favorite actors. The people who worked with him at any point in his long career in the movies and on TV especially. I should be able to write up a retrospective without having to think, just drawing from the movies through which I first got to know and like him when I was a kid---”No Way to Treat a Lady”, “The Bridge at Remagen”, “Where’s Poppa?”, and “The Hot Rock”, which I remember as having seen all at once, “The Hot Rock” being the only one I saw in a theater. Mom and Pop Mannion must have just gotten cable at that time---but I have a hard time writing up anything these days. But I want to show my appreciation. So I hope you don’t mind if I cheat and re-post the review of “California Split” I wrote in 2010 for a series of reviews of films directed by Robert Altman. I think it’s one of Altman’s best and it was Segal’s performance that made it so. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I’m assuming you know that calling this series of discussions the I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is a joke.  I don’t hate Robert Altman. 

Altman’s one of my favorite directors.

He’s one of my favorite American artists.

I don’t know how I’d have felt about the man. Probably what George Segal, the star of tonight’s feature, “California Split”, felt when he was working with Altman.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant.  I wasn’t in his rhythms…I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked.  Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was little bit behind in that area.  He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player.  Elliott [Gould, Segal’s co-star on California Split] was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy…I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that.  Risk was not a part of my persona and it was part of his.

That distance Segal felt, Altman used it in the movie. He made the movie about it. I think Segal’s wrong about Altman not having time for that innocence. Maybe he didn’t off the set. It’s in the movie. It’s in every close-up of Segal and I’m not going to swear to this but I think there are more close-ups of George Segal in “California Split” than there are of any other actor in any of Altman’s other great movies from the 1970s, which is to say, the movies he made in his prime.

Altman’s movies were about people in groups, as members of societies.  He worked mainly in long shots and medium shots because he wanted to fit as many people into every shot as clowns want to fit in a circus car.  The difference is that the clowns want you to see them one at a time as the climb out of the car. If Altman had been a ringmaster he’d have had the car made entirely of glass and not let the clowns out so the audience could see them all crammed in there together and trying to get along or get away.  Every contorted face and body is interesting and important because of the pressures put on the person they belong to by the owners of the other faces and bodies rubbing up against them and for the pressures they put on them.

“M*A*S*H”, “Brewster McCloud”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”, and “A Wedding” are all about people crammed into small spaces and forced to get along. The 4077th, the Astrodome, a haphazard collection of buildings hemmed in by wilderness that hardly deserves to be called a town, the tents and performance space of a travelling Wild West show, a single house. In “Nashville”, Nashville is a small, company town and in “The Long Goodbye”, Los Angeles might as well be a single street and a short strip of beachfront for all the room the characters have to escape each other’s company and problems.

In “California Split” the cramped and closed in space is the mental and spiritual one of shared addiction. The addiction isn’t to gambling. It’s to expectation.

All the characters, except Segal’s Bill Denny, but including the call girls, Barbara and Susan (Ann Prentice and Gwen Welles), who do not literally gamble, do what they do, take the risks they take with their money, their happiness, their jobs, their lives, for the joyful feeling of being on the edge of something wonderful.

That’s why Segal gets his close-ups. Close-ups are isolating and Bill is isolated within the community of hope addicts.

Bill’s the literal gambling addict. At least, he’s the one who knows what he’s doing when he gambling. He’s past hope. His addiction has lost whatever thrill it used to give him.  At the point we meet him gambling has cut him off from everything meaningful in his life, from the small, crowded communities he is supposed to be part of, his family, his office. He is alone, a cramped, closed society of one, and he hates the company.  Even sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s playing poker with, he’s all by himself. He latches onto Charlie [Gould] because Charlie is involved.  Charlie lives on risk and hope, like all the other gamblers. But for him gambling is social. He can’t do it without conversation. Bill flinches from the people close to him.  Charlie reaches out to them. He has to bump, nudge, nuzzle, rub up against all around him. He loves the company. The attention of other people make him happy, even when the attention comes in the form of a beating or a stick-up.

Not that he’s a good guy, necessarily. In many ways, he’s a supreme asshole. He’s as addicted to expectation as the others, but he doesn’t expect happiness as much as he expects excitement, and so he gambles with other people’s emotions. He rubs shoulders in order to rub people the wrong way. He wants them to get angry with him because anger makes people unpredictable. It makes them reckless. It makes them interesting.

It makes them fun.

Bill wants to be like Charlie. He wants to be having fun. He wants to have friends. He wants to feel like part of the crowd.  He wants to think that what he’s doing at the poker table, at the track, at the casino is something nicer, happier, better than gambling.

The good feelings and good times only come in bursts, and in Charlie’s company, and even with Charlie there Bill can’t always sustain the mood, or the illusion of the mood. He falls back in on himself. He shuts himself off and up, and that’s how the camera often finds him.

Charlie is able to enjoy his life because he is corrupt and dishonest.  It isn’t right to call him a rule breaker or an antirules guy because he doesn’t seem to know that there are rules (not counting the rules of the games he plays and bets on) or why there are or need to be rules.

Bill, however, is a rules player. He even has rules by which he conducts his gambling. And he’s an innocent. At any rate, he remembers what it was like to be innocent. Bill is stuck in the middle of two opposing desires, although both would allow him to join in a society and shake his loneliness. Either way, he would belong again. He could give in, give up, and become like Charlie, and at least enjoy his self-destruction. Or he could give up gambling and go home. He can’t make up his mind, so he sits and broods and hates himself for both impulses.

Altman caught that.

Once an actress asked Altman how she would know when the camera was on her in a crowd scene so that she would know when to do her acting.  Altman told her to do her acting when she felt the moment was right, the camera would find her.

One of the many risks Altman ran when he made a movie was that the camera wouldn’t find an actress or an actor at a crucial moment, that it would get there too late or at the wrong angle.  And that probably happened many times. But those times didn’t matter because of all the other times when Altman had the camera right there.

He trusted that there would be lots of those times because he made sure that there was always something for the camera to catch.  If one character in a shot wasn’t doing something worth paying a lot of attention to, not just one other but several others were. He chose his actors to make sure of this.  And he kept track.

His eyes and ears were open in a way more disciplined, more exacting, more rules playing directors aren’t.  They pay attention to their plans. Altman paid attention to what was happening and paid so close attention that he could see what was about to happen because of it.  He could get the camera there a beat ahead.

He saw and he heard George Segal. And he made his movie about what he saw and heard.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“California Split” is available to stream at VUDU.

Since when are robins shy?

Mined from the notebooks, Friday morning, March 19, 2021. Posted Thursday morning, March 25.

When the red red robin came bob bob bobbin along four years ago: 21 degrees, 17 mph winds, snow, but today’s the day the robins have picked to move back into our bushes. The view outside the window of the Mannionville Ranch House, March 11, 2017.

They’re back. A little behind schedule. And not making their usual show about it. Our robins---the ones who spend the early weeks of spring in the holly bushes outside our living room window, before their time share is up and they turn the bushes over to the catbirds---haven’t necessarily returned from the south. All robins don’t migrate. Some do, some don’t. The ones who don’t hide out deep in the woods sheltering from the winter winds and dreaming of worms. According to my notebooks, they arrived on March 9th last year. In 2017, when I took the photo up top, they moved back in on March 11th. They’re here now. I’ve heard them, clucking and cheeping indignantly in the early morning, as if the sun has done them an affront by rising without their permission. Robins are snooty birds, puffed up, and full of themselves. They pose with their beaks in the air and look down over them at the rest of the bird world and the human world, our part of it, anyway. I’ve written before how they often glare in our window disdainfully, either from the bushes or the telephone wires, as if we’re riffraff who don’t know how to manage the property or our lives and are ruining their neighborhood with our carelessness and disorder. At any rate, like I said, I’ve heard them, but I haven’t seen them, not up close or for long. I’ve caught a couple of glimpses. One at the edge of a field as we drove by yesterday, on its own, glaring at a flock of starlings, no doubt disapproving of the starlings’ messiness, gluttony, noisiness, and presumption. The other Wednesday, the 17th, St Patrick’s Day. He or she---robins aren’t sexualy dymorphic in their plumage like cardinals and goldfinches---landed in the bushes, coming in low and fast, a black blur, and settling deep in the branches so it was out of sight when I moved closer to the window for a better look. I’ve never known robins to be shy like this in the past. This year they’re as shy---and sneaky---as leprechauns. Maybe I should get out there and dig down under the bushes to see if they’ve laid a pot of gold beneath their blue-egged nest.

"Mother, I'm a Poet!"

Posted Wednesday morning, March 24, 2021.

The poet John Ashbery in New York City, 1971. Photo by Gerard Malanga, via LitHub.

Another case of one thing leading to another: a few weeks ago my pal and favorite living American poet Steve Kuusisto wrote, poetically but factually, about rutabagas. At about the same time I happened to find my old signed copy of John Ashbery’s book of poems “The Double Dream of Spring”, which I acquired---book and signature---when Ashbery came to read at Iowa sometime while I was at the Workshop between 1983 and 1985. It---the book with the signature had been cleverly hiding in a corner of a bookshelf since we moved here from Syracuse seventeen years ago. It’s a thin book with a gray binding and black lettering, seemingly deliberately designed to blend into the shadows. But it peeked out at me like Harry Lime in “The Third Man” when I was rearranging that set of shelves to make room for some of the two hundred or so new books I’ve piled up in the last year. Since I hadn’t read it in years, possibly not since I left Iowa, I immediately sat down to dig in. My memory was that Ashbery---as a reader and a poet---had left me cold. His poems were overlong, abstruse, too full of literary games for my money, and humorless. When he died in 2017, thinking I should blog about him, I dutifully bought “Where Shall I Wander”, the only one of his books Barnes & Noble had on hand, and wasn’t much warmed up. I put it on my bookshelf, the same one where “The Double Dream of Spring” was hiding and forgot about it. I didn’t expect my temperature to rise now, though it immediately started to when I saw Ashbery’s plain, unaddressed, business-like signature, probably exactly like the one he used to sign checks, and happy memories of my time at the Workshop flooded back. But when I searched the table of contents for familiar titles, looking for a poem to begin with, one jumped right out at me: “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”. With Steve’s rutabagas in mind, I turned to it right away. And loved it. Warmed me right up. And made me laugh. It’s a short mock-epic about Popeye the Sailor Man’s friends anxiously waiting for him to come home from wherever he had sailed to. I didn’t remember Ashbery as showing any sign of a sense of humor when he read at Iowa, in his poems or in his demeanor. I don't remember him reading "Farm Implements and Rutabagas" or if he did he read it in such a that he killed the joke. But maybe was he or I was having a bad day. Or I was. I could be moody in those days. I did a bit of Googling, looking for some critical enlightenment, and I found this, a reminiscence by Ashbery’s good friend and once upon a time apprentice, the poet Douglas Crase, like Ashbery a Pulitzer Prize winner himself: “Driving By the Lake With John Ashbery”. I learned a lot about Ashbery, including the fact that not only did he have a sense of humor, it was a very wicked one, borderline mean. He could even be cutting with his beloved mother, who could be equally cutting with him. Which makes me wonder how I’d have dealt with him and he with me if we’d said more to each other than “Would you sign this, please, Mr Ashbery?” and “Sure.” At any rate, I got a real kick out of this anecdote from Crase’s essay:

There would be other lessons that art was a jealous mistress, but none more memorable than on the morning I arrived in Pultneyville to pick him up for our first ride farther east along the lake. It was October, bright and chilly, and his mother, then seventy-nine, was raking leaves in the front yard. She was not making much progress. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and her nose was dripping. As John came out of the house she said to him—and she had a voice that could rise in a nasal whine to match his own—“John, if you were any kind of a son at all you’d help your mother with these leaves.”

John, his hand already on the car door, turned briefly back and replied in exasperation, as though she should have known better, “Mother, I’m a poet!”

So he was, I can now see and appreciate, and, after having read all of “Double Dream” and a generous selection from the Library of America’s two volumes of his work, a prolific one. But, still on the subject of one thing leading to another, in my Googling I turned up a review of Ben Lerner’s novel “The Topeka School”, from which I learned that Lerner, a poet as well as a novelist, has been strongly influenced by Ashbery, to the point of titling his first novel after one of Ashbery’s poems, “Leaving the Atocha Station” and giving Ashbery an offstage cameo in “The Topeka School”. According to Andrew Epstein, the author of the review, a professor at Florida State University and who has written extensively on Ashberry and hiis work, allusions and references to and quotes from Ashbery’s poems pop up throughout both books. So now I’m reading both novels.

Meantime: I considered ending the post by quoting “Leaving the Atocha Station”---Ashbery’s poem, not Lerner’s novel; it's short, but not that short----but it's long, abstruse, constructed as a linguistic game, and it leaves me cold---again, Asbery’s poem, not Lerner’s novel, which I’m enjoying, warmly. So here’s “Farm Implements with Rutabagas”. It still cracks me up. Particularly this bit from the first line: “‘Popeye sits in thunder…’” Although, to be a stickler, the Sea Hag wasn’t part of Popeye’s extended family. Or maybe she was in the comics. Ashbery would have known that...

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”
But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder
And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”
She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”
“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant
Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach
Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched
One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

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To read Crase’s essay, follow the link to “Driving by the Lake With John Ashbery” at LitHub.

Andrew Epstein’s review of Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School” can be found at Epstein’s blog Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets.

Steve Kuusisto’s paen to rutabagas in on his blog, Planet of the Blind.

"The Cross of Snow"

Posted Saturday morning, March 19, 2021.

Saorise Ronan as Jo March in a scene from Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women".

Today’s Morning Song is a morning dirge.

Woke up early the other morning thinking about Greta Gewig’s adaptation of “Little Women''---deliberately. I was trying to cheer myself up and muster the mental energy to face the day. This isn’t a response to the political situation. I’ve never let that get to me to the point where I can’t think about anything else but my outrage and anger. By never I mean since I was a kid. Life in these United States has always been one damn thing after another. The difference this time out is a lot of white middle class, middle-aged intellectual types have been caught up in trials and tribulations that to them are as terrible as those suffered by the poor, the not-white, and other marginalized and less privileged Americans and have chosen to obsess over it on social media and make themselves feel worse in the process. With me, on mornings like this, of which there have been way too many lately, finding ways to cheer myself up is just something I’ve increasingly needed to do, as over the last several months my health has been flagging and with it my morale. Gerwig’s “Little Women'' has joined my list of favorite movies of the last ten years and Saorise Ronan’s Jo is one of my favorite movie heroines of all time, so thinking about it, whether deliberately or whether something reminds me of it or if it just pops into my head, lifts my spirits and gladdens my heart. It would cause my soul to sing out with joy and laughter, if I had one. It’s past time for me to rewatch it. I haven’t seen it since last February. But I don’t really need to. I can replay whole scenes in my head, maybe not shot for shot and line for line, the way I can with “Casablanca”, “His Girl Friday”, and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, but that’s because I haven’t seen it enough times. Like I just said, it’s past time. This morning the scene I replayed was the one in Jo’s New York City boarding house where she’s standing in front of the fireplace---too close to the fireplace---furiously scribbling down an idea for a story in her notebook and Frederich, her seemingly too stern and earnest would-be suitor, with whom she’s been arguing, suddenly calls out, “You’re on fire!”

“I know,” she replies, somewhat dismissively. She means it figuratively: Her mind is on fire, kindled by her talent and ambition. He means it literally. The hem of her skirt is glowing. But they get it put out before it flares up, and Jo is unfazed. Happens all the time, she says.

It’s a hilarious scene, perfectly staged, perfectly shot, perfectly designed, and so perfectly Jo. It sums up everything we love and admire about her---her focus, her devotion to her work and her art, her practicality, and her courage---and it predicts the future of her and Frederich’s romance and marriage: she’s going to blaze ahead, and he’s going to chase close behind, ready to put her out when she’s gotten too hot for her own good. It made me laugh to think about when I woke up and it’s making me laugh again now as I type. But it’s an example of Gerwig’s anachronistic approach to adapting the book. I don’t mean it’s anachronistic of the Shakespeare’s having the clocks chime in Julius Caesar’s sundialized Rome variety. I mean that Gerwig has pushed the story ahead of its time thematically and given it a spirit and a heroine more “modern” than Alcott’s own, as if Alcott was predicting the turn of the 20th Century instead of looking back nostalgically at the middle decades of the 19th.

“Little Women” was behind its times, in style and spirit. It was published in 1868 and 69, and by then George Eliot, whose writing Alcott admired and paid tribute to---something Gerwig acknowledges in the scene at the beach when Jo reads “The Mill on the Floss” to Beth---had already written, among other books, “Adam Bede”, “The Mill on the Floss”, and “Silas Marner.” But while the influence of “The Mill on the Floss” caused Alcott no anxiety, and Eliot’s heroine Maggie Tulliver is clearly a model for Jo, “Little Women” is a...nicer book: more accepting of people’s faults; less critical of the society the March sisters are a bumptious and rebellious part of; nearly apolitical, which is perplexing considering it’s set during the Civil War---both of Alcott’s parents were ardent and active abolitionists, Alcott herself served as a nurse in a hospital in Washington D.C.---religious, but not questioning---again perplexing, considering that Alcott’s father Bronson Alcott was notorious for his free-thinking views---not particularly philosophical---perplexing again, considering Ralph Waldo Emerson was a close family friend and benefactor and Henry David Thoreau was the young Louisa’s tutor---and not deeply psychological: Alcott’s characters are types, Dickensian in their lack of complexity; they are who they are and that’s pretty much all there is to them. “Little Women” is a domestic comedy with a traditionally comedic ending. The three surviving March sisters get married, start families, and live happily ever after.

Alcott’s novel is about the joys---and sorrows---of childhood and its inevitable end. Gerwig’s movie is about the joys---and sorrows---of achieving adulthood. Alcott’s story ends with Jo coming home. Gerwig’s story is all about Jo breaking away. I prefer Gerwig’s story, that’s all.

But something occurred to me this morning that made me stop laughing.

People did catch on fire in their homes regularly in the 1800s and died horribly from their burns. One of those who died that way was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife Fanny. In 1861, her dress caught on fire from a candle she was using to seal wax packets of keepsakes. Longfellow suffered severe burns trying to put the flames out. This would have been heart-rending news in the Alcott household. Longfellow and the Alcott's were members of the same literary and intellectual circle. But it’s not even subtext in the scene in the movie. Not that it should have been, it’s simply that what could have been a wholly fun post is about to have a sad ending. One of my favorites of Longfellow’s poems is one he wrote as a eulogy for Fanny. He wrote it in 1879, when he was 72. Eighteen years after she died, nearing the end of his life---he died in 1882---he was still grieving.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,

   A gentle face — the face of one long dead —

   Looks at me from the wall, where round its head

   The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Here in this room she died; and soul more white

   Never through martyrdom of fire was led

   To its repose; nor can in books be read

   The legend of a life more benedight.

There is a mountain in the distant West

   That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

   Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

   These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

   And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

 

----"The Cross of Snow" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Hall of Fame? Try Hall of Shame!

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday, June 6, 2020. Originally posted Tuesday, June 16, 2020. Replayed Friday night, March 19, 2021.

New York Yankees great Yogi Berra at bat in a spring training game in Florida sometime in the 1950s. Berra is most famous as one of the best major league catchers of all-time. But he was a terrific hitter too, with a lifetime batting average of .285, 358 home runs, 2150 hits, and 1430 runs batted in. He was a pretty solid outfielder as well, when his knees needed a rest. And he was underappreciated as a manager. In 1964 he guided the Yankees to the World Series. He led the Mets to the Series in ‘73. You could look it up. Undated and uncredited photo via the Yogi Berra Museum.

Today’s Philip Roth’s birthday. I’ve been working all day on a post commemorating it. I know, I'm always working on a post. But this one's almost done. Just needs a few more graphs. It's about what I have in common with Roth. Spoiler: it's not writing. It's health. Mine's a bit better, being as I'm not dead yet. I hope to post it tomorrow. Meanwhile, there’s this from last summer. Coincidentally, no player was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. You could look it up.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Saturday, June 6, 2020:

How did I not know---or how did I forget---that the baseball writers elected nobody into the Hall of Fame in 1971?

Yogi Berra was on the ballot, fer cryin' out loud!

I just found this out from Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel" which I started reading this afternoon.

Berra fell one vote short. Inexcusable. Inexplicable. But as Casey said, you could look it up. Which I did.

They didn't elect Luke Gofannon of the Ruppert Mundys of the Patriot League either. Lifetime batting average of .372, 3180 hits, 490 home runs. Sixty-three of those HRs in 1928. You can't look that up because Major League Baseball erased all the records and with them the existence of the Patriot League. You can search through the archives all day, dig your way down to the first line-up card of the original 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings deposited in the Hall of the Fame, and not find a trace of a clue that the Patriot League ever existed.

Hall of Fame? Hall of Shame, Smitty calls it. Smitty’s the less than reliable narrator of "The Great American Novel," a once-upon-a-time player for the Mundys, so he says, who suffered through their last, disaster-filled season, went on to be a sportswriter of national repute and a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and now, in his eighties, is determined to set the record straight and restore the memory and the glory of their times of the Patriot League, its great teams, and heroic players and legendary characters like Gofannon, Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, Big John Baal, who killed a pelican roosting in the outfield of their Florida spring training ballpark with a line drive to right, along with their wily manager Gil Gamesh, in a prose style he swears he didn’t steal from Hemingway although Hemingway was convinced he did and vowed to kill him for the theft…

Every once in a while I would get a Christmas card from Hem, sometimes from Africa, sometimes from Switzerland or Idaho, written in his cups obviously, saying more or less the same thing each time: use my style one more time, Frederico, and I'll kill you. But of course in the end the guy Hem killed for using his style was himself.

Here's another conundrum: how come I didn't read "The Great American Novel" when it came out in 1973? That was the year I was discovering Roth.

I read "Our Gang", "My Life as a Man", "Goodbye, Columbus", and---don't tell Mom Mannion---"Portnoy's Complaint", practically one after the other, but not "The Great American Novel". I don't know why.

Something else I can't look up. I hadn't begun keeping a journal yet…

My explanation for not having read it until now is that life and a whole lot of other books got in the way.

I think I half-forgot it even existed. But I'm glad. It makes reading it now all the more fun. It's fast making a play to be my favorite baseball novel of all time.

That’s not a long list. “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “The Brothers K”, and that’s about it. I’m very particular about baseball novels.

I have strongly mixed feelings about “The Natural”.

For the record, Yogi was elected to the Hall the next year, 1972, along with Early Wynn, who was also snubbed inexplicably in ‘71, and Sandy Koufax. Koufax was the youngest player ever inducted---he was only 36---and went in in his first year of eligibility.

You could look it up.

Oh, the places you'll go without seeing any evidence of cancellation

Posted Thursday, March 11, 2021.

Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon.

I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, or D, or E, F, G...?

That Carl Sagan

Posted March 4, 2021.

An iconic Carl Sagan Moment: Sagan juggling with the solar system in an episode of "Cosmos"

First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued:

...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field was taught under physics. Problem the second: physics. Bob therefore switched studies, his base camp now the university’s new geology building. Myriad mineralogy labs lined the hallways, and to study the stuff of the Earth was to spend long days and late nights in them, over big, binocular-type microscopes adorning tall black lab tables. Pappalardo was seated in one such lab on one such night behind one such microscope when another student, first name John, last name Berner, and so of course they called him Bunsen, walked in.

Hey, Bob, asked Bunsen, you know about this course Sagan is offering? This course on icy moons?

Bob did not know about this course Carl Sagan was offering, this course on icy moons, but he went home that night, pulled out the course catalog, and looked it up. ICES AND OCEANS IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM. Instructor: SAGAN, CARL.

That Carl Sagan, yes. He of Cornell, yes, of course. The prominent professor was for Bob part of the university’s initial allure. But Sagan didn’t always teach, had a lot going on. Carl Sagan, recently of Cosmos (book and television series) and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television series). Carl Sagan, of the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, the robotic explorers that in 1979 transformed the four telescopic dots of Jupiter’s moons into jaw-dropping globes of fire and ice,and later, around Saturn, revealed worlds diverse, living, geologically active, almost fully-fledged and practically planets (further study needed). Carl Sagan of the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, which in 1976 revealed the Martian surface to be barren, though certainly in possession of everything necessary for life to exist (further study needed). Carl Sagan, a superstar in a profession bereft even of minor celebrities, who brought astrophysics into blue-collar living rooms, who in turtlenecks and with windswept hair spoke like a philosopher, practically in verse and presented the the pursuit of knowledge as something intrinsic and vital to the soul of every human being, who used his platform and lilting baritone to advance social causes, who planned protests against nuclear weapons test sites, arms linked with fellow activists, who crossed police lines and was placed gladly under arrest---Armageddon’s Thoreau---in order to advance his cause. Page one the next day: a rebel astronomer in handcuffs! Carl Sagan with a Ph.D. behind his name and a childlike imagination in his head, who had, for example, lobbied for light to be added to the Viking lander so that at night martian animals might be attracted to it and scurry up to investigate. Well, why not? Nobody knew what waited on the surface of the Red Planet.

That Carl Sagan.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The Vulcan really drove the point home

Posted Thursday, March 4, 2021.

The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa:

When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they closed their eyes. Scientists on Earth solved these puzzles: the former formed by fire mountains in Luna’s primordial past; the latter, cosmic rays colliding with rentinas. Astronauts drove cars up there. They played golf. They brought mice with them. Pets! In space!

Bob was never going to be an astronaut---that just wasn’t in the cards---but he was a child of Star Trek, and across five-year missions, Spock pointed the way in first run, and then in syndication, and then in animation (the Vulcan really drove the point home): science…

---from “The Mission: or, how a disciple of Carl Sagan, an ex-motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world's worst typewriter saleswoman, California mountain people, and an anonymous NASA functionary went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency at Saturn, traded blows with Washington, and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean inside of an ice world called Europa (a true story)” by David W. Brown.

Oh, the places you'll go without seeing evidence of cancellation

Posted Thursday night, March 11, 2021.

Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon.

I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, D, E, F, G...?