Lance Mannion

Literary taste as moral arbiter

"People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said.  "They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigerette of confusion and conflict."  He turned to the two elder Baudelaires and pointed at them with his hooks.  "Look at yourselves, Baudelaires.  Do you really think we're so different?  When those eagles carried me away from the mountains in that net, I saw the ruins of that fire in the hinterlands---a fire we started together.  You've burned things down, and so have I.  You joined the crew of the Queequeg, and I joined the crew of the Carmelita.  Our captains are both volatile people, and we're both trying to get to the Hotel Denouement before Thursday.  The only difference between us is the portrait on our uniforms."

"We're wearing Herman Melville," Klaus said.  "He was a writer of enormous talent who dramatized the plight of overlooked people, such as poor sailors or exploited youngsters, through his strange, often experimental philosophical prose.  I'm proud to display his portrait.  But you're wearing Edgar Guest.  He was a writer of limited skill, who wrote awkward, tedious poetry on hopelessly sentimental topics.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

                                                   ---from The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket

The most unfortunate event in a series of unfortunate events

We finished The Grim Grotto yesterday.

Now we are bereft, a word which here means, we want to start the next book in the series right away but are sad to find that the inconsiderate author has not obliged us by having published it yet.

Anybody heard how long we have to wait for Book the Twelfth in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events?

(When you follow the link, hit refresh/reload a couple of times, just for fun.)

Have you heard what it's called?  What it's about?  Tell me, please!

I don't think we can stand the suspense!

By we I mean the 8 year old and me.  The blonde and the 11 year old are a little more even-keeled about it.  I've been impressed by the 11 year old.  He's been waiting two and a half years now for the final Star Wars movie and not even seeing the trailer at the beginning of The Incredibles last month has caused his Jedi-like patience to fray.

But his brother and I are as anxious to get our hands on the next installment of the Baudelaire orphans' woeful tale as Count Olaf is to get his hands on their fortune!

Maybe we'll be able to tough it out, a phrase which here means, Not drive ourselves crazy with expectation between now and the time when Lemony Snicket's editor decodes the torn pages Snicket sent him from the Hotel Denouement and locates the manuscript Snicket has hidden in, it appears, the Galway Kennell.  We survived the wait between finishing The Slippery Slope in September and the library's delivering our copy of The Grim Grotto just in time for Thanksgiving vacation.

Devoted friends of the Baudelaires will point out that the book was in the bookstores in October.  Yes, but we weren't waiting for just the book.

We wanted the tape.

When I say we've now read all 11 books, I mean that we have listened to all 11 books.  Tim Curry has read them to us.  Well, Tim Curry read us Books the First and the Second and the Sixth through the Eleventh.  Lemony Snicket himself read the other three.  Say what you will about Curry's performances in The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Wild Thornberries Movie.  They pale in comparison.  The work he does on the Series of Unfortunate Events is one of the best acting jobs I've heard or seen.

I love the darkness he puts into the word dark whenever he gives Esme Squalor's address, "667 Daaaarrrrrk Avenue."  And the tears that fill up the words and make his pronunciation of "Lake Lachrymose" drip with melancholy.

And what Curry does with the 209 evers that take up two whole pages in The Reptile Room makes for a glorious, and hilarious, aria for unaccompanied human voice.

Books on tape have been one of the secret joys of parenthood for the blonde and me.  Not to mention the salvation of a hundred long distance car rides.

In fact, I was enjoying listening to the boys' books so much that a couple years ago I began listening regularly to grown up books on my own.  Since then most of the books I've "read" have been books I've had read to me.

This has created some confusion in my own head about my reading.  Often I'm not sure if I liked the book or liked the reading of it.  Sometimes it's clear.  I like Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware mysteries because I really enjoy John Rubenstein's reading of them.  I'm pretty sure if I ever tried to read them to myself I'd find them slow going.  On the other hand, I like Robert Parker's Spenser novels whether or not I read them or Joe Mantegna reads them to me.  But I can't say whether I liked Brideshead Revisited because of what Evelyn Waugh wrote or because of how Jeremy Irons read what Waugh wrote.

The part of me that's a reader is conflicted.  But the part of me that loves the theater (but never comes late) and movies because he loves good acting has no problems with it.  Some of the books I've listened to have included the performances of their careers by the actors reading them.

There's Rubenstein and Curry, of course, but Stockard Channing's work in her readings of Beverly Cleary's Romona novels is also wonderful!  Jon Cryer will never get another gig as good as the one he's got doing Chet Gecko, the best lizard detective at Emerson Hickey Elementary School.  And while Joe Mantegna does a fine job on the more recent Spenser novels, you should try to find Burt Reynolds' readings of Stardust, Chance, Small Vices, and Hush Money.

Harry Potter fans know that what Jim Dale's doing with his reading of the books is better than anything that's been in the movies so far and it was stupid of the producers not to hire him to replace Richard Harris as Dumbledore. They had a chance to wise up and use him as Mad-Eye Mooney in Goblet of Fire but apparently they've blown it, again.

Ralph Fiennes, though, is an excellent choice for he who shall not be named.

Anyway, I could go on and on.  There's William Gaminara's Sharpe, Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe, Martin Jarvis's Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.  Plenty of others.  But if any of you have some favorites, I'd appreciate it if you'd put them in the comments.

Christmas is coming and we've got some traveling to do.

Post card

Under the railroad bridge at Valley Forge.  Novemeber 2004.

Be thankful if you've got your health

Seven years ago I was at a Dunkin' Donuts on Thanksgiving day.  I wasn't working as a cop, and I wasn't homeless, friendless, or trapped far from home by a snowstorm.  What I was was the son in law of a woman who not being a coffee drinker herself did not own a coffee maker and could only offer caffeine-addicted visitors instant.  That Christmas the blonde and I gave her a Mr Coffee.  This has kept me out of Dunkin' Donuts when we come to visit, but in the meantime a Starbucks and an excellent independent bagel emporium have opened in town so I have continued my own tradition of escaping the house on Thanksgiving morning for a decent cup of coffee.  Just because you give someone a Mr Coffee doesn't mean you can rely on them to keep a can of Maxwell House around the house.

So, that Thanksgiving morning I was sharing the counter at the King of Prussia, Pa. Dunkin' Donuts with two couples in their sixties who were out for breakfast together.  Their conversation was about vacations but turned to questions of health.

First wife:  I always say, if you can't go first class, I'm not going at all.

First husband:  That's what I tell her, only I don't say first class.  I say, if you're going to do it, do it right.

First wife:  It's better, you can't afford two weeks, you take one.  Take a nice vacation every other year instead of every year, rather than skimp and skimp and skimp.

All four agree that the best way to see the country is to drive all day and spend the night in a motel.  This is first class.  The alternative is a Winnebago or camping out.  None of them wants to go to Europe.  There's still too much to see here.  Besides, says the first husband, Americans are hated everywhere they go.

First husband:  The French hate us.  The English hate us.  They don't want us there.  They want our money.  They don't want us.  The Germans!  The Germans hate us!

While the counter girl was delivering my coffee and donut the topic of conversation changed.  The first husband is telling the second couple how his sister has "The Alzheimer's."  His mother-in-law has her mind.  "But her body's gone."  The second wife's mother has Alzheimer's too.

Second wife:  It's terrible to see, watch their personality change, and then they're not there at all.

A nurse once told the second husband some things about pancreatic cancer.

Second husband:  One.  Don't let them tell you, you don't want to know.  What's the good anyway?  And two, don't let them cut you.  It won't help.  You should just go home, and in three months you'll be in the ground.

The first husband and wife each lost their fathers within two days of each other.  His father fell off a roof.  The second husband' s father died at 98.

Second husband:  And it was because he wanted to.  He stopped eating.  He said, "My time's up.  I don't want to be here anymore."

Second wife:  I think that once the quality of life goes, that's it.

Her father was sick for a long time before he died.  He'd had trouble swallowing.  The doctors did a battery of tests on his throat, esophagus.  Bloodwork.  They found nothing wrong.  Sent him home.  The man's weight dropped to 123 lbs.  The doctors told them the weight loss didn't mean anything.  The second wife was furious.

Second wife:  The man looks like this, and you're telling me he's not sick?

She was frantic.  Her doctor pushed to have her father admitted into the hospital.  Hospital wouldn't take him because the insurance wouldn't pay for it.  Finally, her father collapsed.  In he went, into Intensive Care.  Two days before he died an MRI was done on his whole body.

Second wife:  Cancer.  He had cancer.  Riddled with it.  Cancer all over him.

The internal economy of Dotheboys Hall

"Nicholas astonishes Mr. Squeers and family"---drawing by Phiz, from Nicholas Nickleby, by Chales Dickens.

Thanksgiving night.  We're down visiting the blonde's old homestead for the holiday.  Old Mom Blonde and Old Pop Blonde are well and doing fine and say Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.   Old Mom Blonde did it up grand for Thanksgiving dinner.  The blonde made one of the apple pies I married her for.  Everyone ate their fill and then some and now the whole gang have collapsed into a trytophanic slumber.  Only I am left awake to tell the tale.

We've been here since Tuesday, so we avoided the nightmare of Thanksgiving eve travel.  We were able to do this because the boys' school shut down for the long weekend at 10:45 Tuesday morning.  The school district has surrendered the idea that any work gets done on that traditional half day of school on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  Most places still fight the fight.  My sister in law, old Sis Blonde, teaches kindergarten and her school district had a full day of school on Wednesday.  But she teaches in Philadelphia.  Philadelphia's school system has been ravaged by white flight and so are for the most part refuges for the poor.  Philly keeps its kids in school as much as possible, for as long as possible every day, in order to get them out of their neighborhoods and into a safe place for as much of their young lives as they can.

The problems of inner city schools like Philadelphia's and Chicago's and East St Louis' and Syracuse, New York's are mostly caused by things that happen outside of the schools and so are beyond the power of the schools to fix.  They can't be solved by increased government spending, higher pay for teachers, smaller class sizes, or computers in every classroom.  Nor can they be solved by vouchers, charter schools, and increased privitazation.  I happen to be for all of those things, because all of those things can help.  Somewhat.

I know that as a good liberal I'm supposed to be against vouchers and charter schools, but I'm not.  Conservatives like those things because they don't like public schools. The whole idea of public schools goes against the first commandment of conservativism these days.

Thou shalt not admit that people who are not exactly like you exist and have problems that it might be your responsibility to help solve.

They also have this vaguely articulated faith in something called "competition" as the means of improving everything.  They don't want to know that schools are not like car dealerships.  If Honest Bob's Buick undersells Tommy the Dealmaker's Toyotas and drives Tommy out of business, the mess left over is a lot of unsold cars.  But if one private school drives another out of business, what you have left over is a bunch of kids with no school to go to.  They can't go to the first private school because one of the ways the first private school succeeded was by keeping kids like them out in the first place.

But a lot of kids in public schools really have nowhere to go now.  Their schools are operating as a whole lot of different public entities, including part time jail, day care center, health clinic, and a fort where parents can send their kids to hide from the hostiles who are fighting tribal wars in their neighborhoods.  "School" is far down on the list of things those schools have to be.

Vouchers and charter schools and privitization are not the long term answers but they can help save some kids in the here and now.  I am even glad to make the case that they help public schools.

But I am for those things only if two other things go along with them---tough governement regulation and vigilant government officials.

Vouchers, charter schools, and privatization all require that money the government formerly controlled suddenly be up for grabs, and a lot of the hands grabbing for it will belong to thieves.

Libertarians and Republicans of a certain stripe like to assure us that we know better how to spend our money than the government does.  The trouble with that argument is that we might but we can't do the job the government can do of making sure that the people we hand over our money to are honest.

(At the moment we don't have a national government that cares if the people raking in our money are thieves.  But most local governments do care and try to make sure it doesn't happen.)

A certain type of Republican can't stand to look at a thing---a mountain, a house, an idea, a government program---and know that no one is making any money off it.  Or not as much money as they could.

Those happen to be the type running Washington right now, and that's reason enough to be extremely distrustful of Bush's plans for Social Security.  The motive behind the "reform" isn't to save the system, which they don't give a good goddamn about because it violates the first commandment (see above).  It's that they see this great big pile of loot sitting there inside Al Gore's famous locked box and they can't stand it that no one's getting rich off it.

That's the real point of privitization:  More hands in the till.

Most of those hands will belong to a relatively honest type of sharper, the kind willing to obey the law as long as it doesn't get in his way of making a buck.  I mean a buck, a very particular buck.  This type will go along, honest enough, at least by his own lights, content to rake it in by the sackful, until  one day out of the corner of his eye he sees a stray dollar flutter by on the breeze and suddenly he'll be seized by the desire to have it, that dollar.  All his other dollars won't mean squat to him.  He must have that dollar, he will have that dollar, and he will have it by hook or by crook.

Types like this, their attitude toward money is the same that some good husbands have toward women.  A good husband can work for years as Hollywood producer, surrounded by starlets, or as a photographer and get the swimsuit gig for Sports Illustrated, or as a teacher at a boarding school for 18 year old Swedish flight attendants, and never even be tempted, and then one day he'll fall madly in love with a lady accountant.

Types like this are all businessmen and women, and they will have your Social Security money in their hands and some of them, some day, are going to steal it.  Add that to what will be stolen by the already committed thieves.

The more steps taken toward privatizing our schools the more we will have on our hands schools that are shams, fronts for crooks, shady tax dodges, and the results of careless investors and reckless entrepeneurs out to make a fast buck and frustrated by the the drain actual pupils are exerting on their investment.

Recently here in Philadelphia the feds went after a woman who had been pocketing all kinds of dough from the government to run a charter school.  The woman had figured out that she could pocket more of the money for her own use if her school did without students.

She didn't do without teachers though.  She had several on her payroll.  All relatives.

And then there's a charter school down in Florida which has students but found a way to turn them from overhead into assests.

It hired them out as day laborers.

Charles Dickens would have had a field day with both frauds.  The system that would be created by privatization is the one he was satirizing in Nicholas Nickleby with Dotheboys Hall, the nightmarish boarding school for the children of parents who just wanted to get the kids out of their hair on the cheap, run by the villain, con artist, and professional sadist Wackford Squeers.

After some half-hour's delay, Mr Squeers reappeared, and the boys took their  places and their books, of which latter commodity the average might be about  one to eight learners. A few minutes having elapsed, during which Mr Squeers  looked very profound, as if he had a perfect apprehension of what was inside  all the books, and could say every word of their contents by heart if he only  chose to take the trouble, that gentleman called up the first class.

Obedient to this summons there ranged themselves in front of the  schoolmaster's desk, half-a-dozen scarecrows, out at knees and elbows, one  of whom placed a torn and filthy book beneath his learned eye.

`This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,' said  Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. `We'll get up a Latin one,  and hand that over to you. Now, then, where's the first boy?'

`Please, sir, he's cleaning the back-parlour window,' said the temporary head  of the philosophical class.

`So he is, to be sure,' rejoined Squeers. `We go upon the practical mode of  teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb  active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement.  When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It's just the same  principle as the use of the globes. Where's the second boy?'

`Please, sir, he's weeding the garden,' replied a small voice.

`To be sure,' said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. `So he is. B-o-t, bot, t- i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants.  When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes  and knows 'em. That's our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?'

`It's very useful one, at any rate,' answered Nicholas.

`I believe you,' rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his usher.  `Third boy, what's horse?'

`A beast, sir,' replied the boy.

`So it is,' said Squeers. `Ain't it, Nickleby?'

`I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,' answered Nicholas.

`Of course there isn't,' said Squeers. `A horse is a quadruped, and  quadruped's Latin for beast, as everybody that's gone through the grammar  knows, or else where's the use of having grammars at all?'

`Where, indeed!' said Nicholas abstractedly.

`As you're perfect in that,' resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, `go and look  after my horse, and rub him down well, or I'll rub you down. The rest of the  class go and draw water up, till somebody tells you to leave off, for it's  washing-day tomorrow, and they want the coppers filled.'

So saying, he dismissed the first class to their experiments in practical  philosophy, and eyed Nicholas with a look, half cunning and half doubtful, as if  he were not altogether certain what he might think of him by this time.

`That's the way we do it, Nickleby,' he said, after a pause.

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was scarcely perceptible,  and said he saw it was.

And that's why when Republicans say the word Privatization I say, Read your Dickens and hold onto your wallet.

 

Embrace your inner ogre

We're two family movie nights away from it now, having watched The Alamo and Around the World in 80 Days in the meantime, but let's talk about Shrek 2.

I didn't like it.

I know, I know.  I'm outvoted by children of all ages everywhere.  It's ok.  I'm not about to make a case that it's a bad movie.  I think it's probably every bit as good as everybody else says it is.

What I didn't like was the look of it.  The animation style annoys me.  I think it's the color pallette more than anything.   The colors strike my eye as too bright but not at all vivid, if that makes sense.  Watching it is like being on a drive on a bright summer day and trying to admire the scenery up ahead with the sun glaring off the car's hood.

And Shrek himself is the color of canned peas.

So while the rest of the Mannion clan was enjoying the movie immensely, I was doing my best to ignore it or at least not look at it.  Which meant I paid too much attention to the dialogue, which, except for Donkey's lines, and Eddie Murphy may have had a lot to do with that, wasn't particularly well-written.  Antonio Banderas sells Puss in Boots.  But the rest of the cast seems to be forcing their way through their dialogue as if trying to shoulder their way through a locked door.  A lot of that is because what isn't jokes or pure plot mechanics (Seize them!  Seize them!) is mush and hookum.

Who was it decided that children's movies must always have a moral?

And why must it always be a variant of the same one?

Follow your heart.  Listen to your heart.  Follow your dreams. Believe in yourself.  Be true to yourself.  These are all versions of the same idea.  Kids, don't listen to the grown-ups, do what you want to do!

Even movies that have another, better moral built into them make their characters spout this junk at some point.

Around the World in 80 Days---only if your kids insist and you owe them---has a terrific moral.  Be open to adventure.

But every fifteen minutes or so one or the other of the three leads stops the movie dead to natter about how Phileas Fogg needs to follow his dream or how good it is that he's following his dream.   But his dream is to build a flying machine, which isn't really so much a dream as it is an ambition and a fairly practicable one considering the movie's set in the late 19th Century.  He even bumps into the Wright Brothers along the way.   And it isn't at all clear how accepting a bet to travel around the world in 80 days is following his dream, because if building a flying machine is his dream then he'd be much better off staying home and working on the damn thing, wouldn't he?

But, nope, it's a kids' movie so he has to follow his dream.  He is also true to himself and believes in himself and listens to his heart.

Hearts are capacious things.  Lots of room to store a lot of junk.  Following your heart, listening to your heart, seem to me to be like blindfolding yourself, climbing up into a large, crowded attic, grabbing the first thing you fall against, and coming downstairs expecting that you're carrying your grandmother's lost silver tea service when the odds are infinitely greater that what you have in your hands is a broken lamp, last year's Halloween decorations, or your own personal version of the Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Plus, because they happen to be close enough to each other inside you, it's easy to mistake the grumblings of your stomach for the beating of your heart.

Nazis, Muslim extremists, bank robbers, and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth listen to their hearts.

Napolean followed his dream.

And that guy phoning you up from some basement boiler room to peddle you a hot stock that'll be worth less than nothing in three days?  He believes in himself.

But Shrek and Fiona spend the movie listening to their hearts and following their dreams and being true to themselves.

The original joke behind Shrek was that it was fun to identify with our inner ogre and watch him wandering loose in the world, a grumpy, misanthropic, cynical, self-centered slob.  But now we're not just supposed to fantasize about letting our inner ogre loose.  We're to embrace him!  He is our real self and we need to be true to him.

Just what the world needs.  More ogres.

The other favorite movie moral is that it's good to be tolerant.  Which I have nothing against.  I even like it when the hero or heroine has to learn this lesson.  But in Hollywood it's usually the hero or heroine someone else---that is, some grown up---has to learn how to be tolerant of.  This is expressed in one of two ways:

"Why can't you love me for who I am?" And: "If you really loved me, you'd be happy for me!"

I think Fiona has to simper both these bits of drivel a couple times each during the course of the last half hour of the movie.

These are not morals we want to be teaching our kids.  They're going to come back and bite us on the ass when the kids are teenagers.

"Why can't you love me for who I truly am?"

I do love you for who you truly are.  I don't love the foul-mouthed, multiply-pierced, barely scraping by with a C- average dork you're pretending to be in order to impress your foul-mouthed, multiply-pierced, flunking out of school dorky friends, whom I am under no obligation to love for who they truly are, thank God, that miserable job falls to their poor, suffering parents!

"If you loved me, you'd be happy for me!"

No, if I loved you, I'd be furious at you, because, a.) you're too young to be riding a motorcycle, b.) you're too young to be having sex, c.) you're too young to be dating your 25 year old biology teacher, and d.) you're way too young to be having sex while riding on a motorcycle with your 25 year old biology teacher!  If I loved you, I'd lock you in your room until you are 19 at which point I'd march you down to the local Army recruitment center and sign you up, which since I do love you, I will do, if you don't straighten up and fly right!

Once upon a time, all fairy tales had the same moral.  Life is very hard and you will suffer pain and sorrow, but if you are good and do what is right you will earn a modest degree of happiness someday.

Now it's, You should be extremely happy right this very minute and if you're not it's because you're not being self-centered enough or because some grown up is telling you you're being too self-centered.

I know, I know.  I'm embracing my inner ogre.  Or at least my inner old fogey.

The moral is that the best children's movies, like the best children's books, don't have morals.

They have lessons.  A lesson is something implicit in the story that kids pick up intuitively.  A moral hits them over the head with itself.  The Incredibles is full of lessons, about courage, about honesty, about love, about the will to power, about how office jobs suck the life out of you and management is the enemy, and, yes, about being true to yourself in the sense that you were given the talents you have for a reason and you were meant to use them.  But there's no moral.

And, the SpongeBob movie, I'm told---and I have to be told because I'm not going to see it, no way, no how.  I have different problems with SpongeBob---doesn't even have any lessons.

Except for the ones that are in every show.

It's good to be cheerful.

It's good to laugh.

It's good to have and be a friend, it's nice to have a pet, and Krabby Patties are the best!   

The Gay Black Jewish Liberal Hollywood Starlet Devil makes them do it!

I've always felt that if the defenders of marriage really meant it, their defense of marriage laws wouldn't stop short in defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.

If they had their courage of their convictions, their definitions would go the whole hog:  Marriage shall be between a man and a woman who shall stay married for life for the whole purpose of having and raising children.

Obviously, if they proposed this a whole lot of them would be defining themselves right out their own marriages, which is why they've been content with trying to make marriage a club gay people can't join.

But it turns out there is at least one conservative group who accepts the logical outcome of the defense of marriage argument.   It's called The World Congress of Families.  Nick Simmonds has the story over at his site, Neogaidaros.

You remember how when the gay marriage argument was picking up steam a couple years ago, a lot of conservatives argued that we couldn't let boys marry boys and girls marry girls because if we did, then we'd have to permit anybody to get married any which way they wanted and pretty soon we'd be allowing incest and polygomy?

That never made sense to me.  Any move to re-set a fence line doesn't mean that fence should be torn down.  Besides, doesn't the Bible justify polygomy?

Well, yes it does, and the World Congress heeds the word of God.

Nick's post is a good one.  I especially liked his conclusion:

Let me add that this attempt bespeaks a deep need on the part of right-wing religious conservatives to blame someone else for the problems that they are having to confront. Discussion of marriage for the past two weeks has centered on the fact that divorce rates are much higher in conservative areas, but rather than examine themselves radical conservatives insist that they are being victimized by a liberal culture that practically forces them to get divorced. Nothing else will fit the victim metanarrative of American conservatism, that insistence that all evils are visited upon poor, normal white folks by the minorties, the homosexuals, and the race-and-sex-traitor liberals. The fact of the matter is that these social conservatives are more than complicit in their own problems, they are the cause.

The old Puritan strain rises.  Since 1620 it's been an American characteristic to believe that evil comes from without never from within.

We're good, and how can good people behave badly, unless we've been tricked or forced into against our will.

The devil made us do it!  There are witches among us!  It's all their fault! 

I love this game!

I'm getting a complex.

Nance has been talking more about sports than I have.  I've been at this for two months now and I think I've had one post devoted to sports, and all I did was put up a picture.

Even more embarrassing, I think she now knows more about sports than I do!

If that's the case, though, maybe she can tell me.  Can the Pacers replace those four guys or do they have to play with only six guys for the duration of the suspensions?  How can they keep that up?  They get Miller back after one game, but he's an old man!  Won't this kill him?

Anyway, it looks like an interesting b-ball discussion's building in Nance's comments section.  If it doesn't get de-railed by a Sponge Bob thread.

Mrs Mannion says, 'Gee, thanks a lot, kids!'

The blonde says thanks to all of you who left your birthday greetings below.

Those of you who missed her big day can still score points by leaving a message here or down there with all the others.  Strangers need not feel shy.  Think of it as like being in one of those annoying theme restaurants when the wait staff marches out to humiliate some poor sap whose heartless friends have ratted him out and everybody at the nearby tables feels forced to join in singing Happy Birthday.

(Typepad is having some problems with the comments sections on all their sites.  The fields where you're supposed to enter your name/nickname, email address, URL if you have one are invisible.  But if you type a comment, and then hit "preview" the fields will then appear and you can fill them in.)

The boys and I threw Mrs M an intimate little celebration here at the homestead.

Cake, ice cream, and presents followed by the episode of Law and Order I'd taped the night before.  Her birthday was Tuesday but Cub Scouts bumped it till Wednesday and then exhaustion from chaperoning the 11 year old's class field trip to New York City forced her to beg us to put it off for another night, much to the 8 year old's disappointment.  He was very proud of the present he'd picked out for her and couldn't bear waiting another night for her to gush over it.

He gave her a watch.  I'm sorry I don't have a picture of it.  It's a beaut.  What my dear old ma would call "jazzy."   Silver bracelet style band, an ice blue face.  He picked it out himself.  He needed only a minimal of prodding...er...guidance.  His first choice was red and heart-shaped and had a big black fake leather band with metal studs.  I reminded him that, as cool as that one was, his mom was looking for a watch she could wear around the office and he should buy her something "professional."

He liked the idea and told the sales clerk that's what he needed, "Something professional, please."

The 11 year old gave her the new novel by one of her favorite writers, Russell Banks.  The Darling.

Yes, I gave her something too!  Geez.  Give me some credit.

You know, that's a question I find only women ask.  "What did you get her?"  I've noticed, too, that they never ask the blonde what she got.  They ask me, before her birthday.  I guess to make sure I didn't buy her a new power saw or tickets to a Knicks game.  It's some sort of test for husbands and boyfriends, isn't it?  It's in that rule book you all keep somewhere but never let us look at?

I gave her a car coat.

Did I pass?

The Club for Growth of a Democratic Majority

Loyal reader Mack is still waiting for an answer to his question below about the possibility of an impending metal shortage.

Meanwhile he sends along this news.  The ultra conservative and ultra-rolling in it PAC, The Club for Growth has a bold new plan for putting the Democrats back in control of Congress.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, says his organization's goal is to punish moderate Republicans and make them an endangered species.

"The problem with the moderates in Congress is that they basically water down the Republican message and what you get is something that infuriates the Republican base," Moore says.

"They will learn to conform to our agenda or they will be driven from our party," he says simply.

I like this idea.

Drive as many moderates out of the Republican Party as you can, sir.  They'll have a place to go.  Sen. Jim Jeffords' door is wide open.  A sizeable contingent of Independents  would become the Obi wan Kenobis of Congress.  "If you strike me down, Darth, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Both the Republicans and the Democrats would crawl on their knees through the snow for their votes.  And you can bet the Democrats, as the new majority party, would come bearing the better gifts, like committee chairmanships that didn't require groveling, cringing, and a total abandonment of principle and every last ounce of self-respect.  The Independents would have so much more clout that I can't believe the moderates haven't all defected already.   I read the papers every morning expecting to find that they've climbed over the wall en masse in the night.

Presumably, Moore means that the moderates will be driven from office, by Club-financed right wingers challenging them in party primary races.

This would also be good for the Democrats.  It would save us the trouble of having to defeat a bunch of incumbants.  Somebody will probably point out to Moore that a lot of these moderates he wants to see gone are from Blue States and he'll tone it down before the moderates' Kerry-voting constituents get wind of what he's planning.

The Congressional district that surrounds Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University, is represented by Sherwood Boehlert, who is what passes for a moderate Republican these days.  If Boehlert goes down in a primary, what are the odds that those granola-eating, Volvo-driving, yoga-practicing, gay marriage supporting Ithacans are going to send the right winger to represent them in Washington?

The only reason Pennsylvania is still represented by two Republican senators is that Arlen Specter managed to beat back a right wing challenger in a primary.  Pennsylvanians who voted for John Kerry and Specter and are now watching Specter's humiliation at the hands of the radical right are probably wondering why they bothered.  They can't take back their votes but they can take out their anger on Rick Santorum when he comes up for re-election in 2006.

Boehlert, by the way, knows out how to grovel with the best of them.   He supports the DeLay Rule.   He wasn't there to vote for it, but he woulda if he coulda, so please don't hurt him, Mr DeLay, sir.  Another supposed moderate from upstate New York, my former congressman, Jim Walsh, stepped right up to to drop right down to kiss Tom DeLay's ring.  Walsh hasn't really been a moderate since 1994 when he handed over his integrity and his manhood to Newt Gingrich in exchange for some supposed clout that has never materialized.  I don't understand why the people in his district, who went for Clinton, Gore, and Kerry, keep sending him back to Washington, since he clearly no longer represents them.   He is like far too many of the moderates, no longer R-Your District Here.  They are R-DeLay.   Habit and a lack of a strong Democratic challenger, I guess.  Boehlert benefits from the same inertia.

Perhaps Moore has the right idea.  It's time for the moderates to be driven from office.  The Democratic Party should join with the Club for Growth to get rid of them. The trouble with them, though, is the opposite of what Moore thinks it is.  It's not that they water down the Republican message.  It's that they don't do anything at all anymore to dilute it.   

Recount 'em all!

Doesn't the name Richard Daley ring a bell with anybody in the media?

John Kennedy became president because Hizzonner da mayor stole votes for him in Cook County.  Richard Nixon knew that Daley stole those votes.  The only reason he didn't holler bloody murder is that he knew that his people had stolen votes for him in other states.

Stealing votes is a time-honored American tradition.  It used to be the Democrats who were very good at it.  But then we got religion.

Now stealing elections is primarily a Republican art. 

Here and there news of voting machine screw ups and other oddities in the counts keeps bubbling up.  (Via John Aravosis and Kevin Drum.)  And so far the news has two recurring points.

The screw ups benefited Bush.

A lot of the screw ups were in Florida and Ohio, the two states that throughout the whole campaign were expected by everyone to decide the election.

But we're assured by the New Pravda that the Washington Press Corps has made of itself that this doesn't mean Bush stole those votes.  And we're admonished that even to consider the possibility is to enter the territory of Roswell, the Grassy Knoll, and the CIA beaming radio signals into our fillings.

A typical bit of this condescension appeared under the byline of Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post recently.  I put it that way because so much of what comes out of DC lately is really a group project, written by committee at the tables of the finer restaurants in the nation's capital and it doesn't matter whose name or picture appears with it when it's published or broadcast.  Call it the Committee to Decide, Disseminate, and Enforce the Conventional Wisdom.  I realize there's not a funny acronym to made of that but I'm not as smart or quick-witted as Michael Berube.

Under Applebaum's byline the Committee blithely dismissed as paranoia any suggestions that the Bush Leaguers could have stolen any votes.  Why, gosh, said Applebaum for the Committee, how can you possibly doubt the electronic voting machines?  Do you doubt the reliability of your ATM machine?  Proving that her name should be Applesandorangesbaum.  John Aravosis at AMERICAblog cuts to the chase:

The big media told us that it was impossible that there was any problem with counting votes this election. I believe the word they used on ABC News, for example, was "conspiracy theories." And Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post today makes it very clear that there were NO voting irregularities because if they can count our money at the ATMs, then this proves they can count our votes (yes Anne, it proves they CAN, it doesn't prove they DO - I know I know, "nuance," that's so blue state of me).

As it happens, I do doubt my ATM's reliabilty.  It's a machine!  It's a computerized machine!  Machines and computers have a long and distinguished history of screwing up. That's why we check our bank statements!  That's why there are bank statements!

Bob Somerby was rocked back on his heels by Applebaum's stunning nitwittedness.

"There’s almost no way to be this daft," he says, "Unless you’re a Washington journalist!"

As Somerby points out, it's practically un-American to trust that the people in power have our best interest at heart, un-American to suppose that politicians and bureaucrats have honor, scruples, or any integrity when it comes time to defend their jobs.

The best reason, though, to suspect the Bush Leaguers stole votes isn't the news of miscounted votes.  Nor is it the discrepencies between the exit polls and the final results.  And it isn't any anomolies in the vote counts in Ohio and certain precincts in Florida.

Those are reasons, all right, but the best reason to suspect they stole votes is that they were quite openly preparing to do it before the election.

That's what all those lawyers were for.  That's what all the poll monitors were sent out to do or if not to steal votes than chase as many Kerry votes aways as possible, which amounts to the same thing.  That's why they talked so loud and so often about their concerns that Democrats were planning to steal votes.  It's called sleight of hand.  "Hey, look over there at that guy!  Is he stealing a vote?  Nevemind what I'm doing.  Don't watch my hand.  Look at him!"

In fact, we know they did steal votes in Nevada and in Florida.  All those new Democrats whose registrations those Republican hacks threw away?  And the voters in Florida Jeb Bush purged from the voter rolls?  What do you call it when you take away someone's right to vote?  You don't have to walk into the booth and snatch the ballott out of a person's hand to steal their vote.

It is strange to hear the supposedly very well educated gasbags of the media go on as if they'd never learned about Richard Daley and Mark Hanna and Tammany Hall in history class.

It is weird to hear people who by profession are supposed to be cynics pooh pooh any talk of Bush family connections to Saudi oil driving the foreign policy of either George Bush's administrations.

It was bizarre to hear them, both this time and when we went to war to save Kuwait's oil from Saddam in '91, dismiss out of hand the idea that the United States would go to war for something other than the most noble of reasons.  We've sent soliders to die to save banana plantations, for God's sake!

It was almost funny, except that it was maddening, to hear them scoff at anti-war colleagues' arguments that the most constitutionally mendacious man to occupy the White House since Richard Nixon was lying about the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And it's spooky to hear them wave off any concerns that the election might not have been on the up and up, as if the driving political mind of this administration belongs to the ghost of Bob LaFollette and not Karl Rove.

They routinely refer to Rove as Bush's brain.  But then they proceed to "analyze" what Bush is up to as if it was Rove and not Karen Hughes who went home to Texas to spend more quality time with the family three years ago.

My feeling is that the election wasn't stolen.  Doesn't mean that votes weren't stolen somewhere along the line.  I just don't think enough were to tip the election.

I think this because apparently during the afternoon on Election Day the Bush Leaguers really thought they'd lost, and I figure they must have known how many votes they stole or were capable of stealing.

And because Kerry's people haven't been screaming about it.  The Kerry campaign knew the Republicans were prepared to steal the election if they couldn't win it fair and square.  That's why the Democrats had all their lawyers out on election day.

But it's just my feeling.  I don't really know.  No one in the media knows either.  Mainly because there isn't a good paper trail, thanks to Diebold and a whole lot of corrupt or stupid election officials of both parties.  (There is a paper trail, however, in those anomolous Florida precincts.  They used optiscan ballotts and some Democrats down there better be pushing to look at the paper.)  It is not tin foil hat time to think that maybe people who stole one election---and they did steal it in 2000, although more by making sure the votes weren't counted instead of stealing ballots.  Still, a whole lot of votes went missing in Broward County.  They probably would have stolen even more votes if they'd known it was going to be so close.  But Jeb Bush's minions had done a pretty good job of erasing Democrats from the voting rolls and they probably thought they had it in the bag.---it is not paranoid to think that such a crowd would have tried it again.

It is foolish to talk as if Karl Rove does not have a job.  It's foolish to talk as if the Republican Party is in the hands of the likes of Christopher Shays and the old, un-co-opted John McCain and not Tom DeLay.  It is foolish to talk as if there is no historical precedent.  The only reason to talk so foolishly is that you are a fool or you are announcing as openly as you dare that you are in the bag for the Bush administration.

So let's recount the votes.

It doesn't cost much.  It doesn't take much time.  It'll put everyone's minds at ease.

There is only one good reason to oppose re-counting the votes.

You know something the rest of us don't and you're afraid the outcome will go against your guy.

Don't spoil him

Mining the notebooks again this morning.  Twelve Novembers ago, on a Sunday morning,  I was in a grocery store in a town outside of Boston.

Two women and two men in having their morning coffee. Regulars. One of the men finds the coffee jug empty, makes a new pot himself, quite at home.

"See you in here every Sunday," says one of the women, who is smoking and has a smoker's rasp. She has a job as a demonstrator. I didn't catch what it is she demonstrates, but the other woman thinks this is an appropriate job for her because she is a "people person."

Conversation turns to talk of dog foods, which apparently is not a non-sequitur. The first man, who made the coffee, advises the second woman, "Don't give him anything from a can."

The second woman says she feeds her dog a mix of canned and dry food.

The man warns her, "Dry. Only dry."

"He won't eat it."

"He'll eat this new stuff they got. Sportsman's Choice."

The first woman establishes the man's authority on the subject: "He keeps hunting dogs," she says. "How many have you got?"

"Three." He asks the second woman, "What do you have?"

"A golden retriever."

"That's a hunting dog," says the first woman.

The man tells the second woman, "Don't spoil him."

November 19, 1863

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

                                                                                         ---A. Lincoln

Grit

(You've probably landed here because you've followed the link from Terry Teachout's site.  Thanks for stopping by!  Glad to have you!  As you can see, Terry posted the whole of this quote at his place, although he didn't include the great picture of Wayne as Rooster Cogburn.  Worth the price of admission, I think.  Feel free to look around while you're here.  I've posted a sort of official welcome to the site.  The post that this quote is follow up to is called Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man and if you're curious about what else goes on here follow the links to your right or jump to here.)

Lucky Ned Pepper said, "Well, Rooster, will you give us the road?  We have business elsewhere!"

Rooster said, "Harold, I want you and your brother to stand clear!  I have no interest in you today! Stand clear and you will not be hurt!"

Harold Permalee's answer was to crow like a rooster, and the "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" brought a hearty laugh from his brother Farrell.

Lucky Ned Pepper said, "What is your intention?  Do you think one on four is a dogfall?"

Rooster said, "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience!  Which will you have?"

Lucky Ned Pepper laughed.  He said, "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!"

Rooster said, "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!" and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits.  It was a sight to see.  He held the revolvers wide on either side of the head of his plunging steed.  The four bandits accepted the challenge and they likewise pulled their arms and charged their ponies ahead.

It was some daring move on the part of the deputy marshall whose manliness and grit I had doubted.  No grit?  Rooster Cogburn? Not much!

                                                    ----from True Grit by Charles Portis

Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man

What do you know?  The winner of the National Book Award for fiction was the book that comes closest to sounding like "the one book I'll think about reading and decide to read a mystery instead."

It's also the one book among the five that is least like the others.

Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, the story of the Irish mistress of a 19th century South American dictator.

Now that the awards are out of the way the lit chat blogosphere will move onto other things---like who got what amount of big bucks as an advance for his/her new novel and whose site has just been linked to by Maud Newton, their usual concerns.

Lots of the bloggists have strongly defended the five NBA nominees against what they saw as unjust criticism by the likes of Caryn James and Laura Miller in the New York Times, both of whom were less than thrilled with the nominated books.

(By the way, it's a sign that you are a little too Blue State if when you read NBA up there you pictured Lily Tuck and not Shaquille O'Neal.)

Much of the argument for the defense seems to me to be less of a defense of the books themselves than a defense of the possibility that the books might be good despite their all being slight, workshoppy, products of a narrow demographic, and not authored by Philip Roth.

In fact, a lot of the counsels for the defense don't even seem to have read the books and their discussions of the nominees center around links to interviews with the authors, as if the defense strategy is, "Look at all these nice, smart women!  How can you not believe that they wrote fine books?"

To his great credit, Ron Hogan of Beatrice set out to interview all five nominees himself.

Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus, is reading Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping and liking it, although not quite as much as a science fiction novel he's reading alongside it.

Cheney's main focus is science fiction, but is main interest is writing, and he gives a lot more serious thought to the art of fiction than many of the bloggists of the supposedly literary fiction stripe, whose blogs consist for the most part of book chat, links to each other's sites, gossip and news purely of interest to young writers on the make.  Which is why their defenses of the NBA nominees sound suspect to me.  I keep hearing the sycophantic simper of careerists trying to curry favor, although I'm not sure who's getting the grooming, the nominees, the nominees' agents, Rick Moody, who chaired the nominating committee, or the publishers and editors of the nominated books.

Cheney teaches high school and right now he has his 11th graders reading one of my favorite books of the last 10 years, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I'm not sure I would trust a seminar of college English majors with that one, but Cheney's a braver man than I am, and although his students groused and whined at first they seem to be into it now, so even though students in Oklahoma and Cobb County, Georgia are being shortchanged in their educations, there's at least one class of high school juniors up in New Hampshire who are lucky enough to have a teacher who is actually teaching them.

Although he's on the side of the defense when it comes to the NBA nominees, Cheney does, quietly, raise an important point.  While Caryn James and Laura Miller wondered how likely it was in a year when Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick produced new books, the five best books would be by a group of nobodies several of whom were publishing their first novels, Cheney wonders how the five best books, any year, never include any science fiction.

Considering that one of the best novels of the last 50 years is a work of science fiction, Slaughterhouse Five, that's a good question.

I'd also like to know how it could be that there are no mysteries or westerns on the list either.

Westerns, you ask incredulously?

Yep.  If I made a list of the best books of the last 50 years---which would of course be a list of the best books written in the last 50 years that I've read, making it an incomplete and suspect list---it would include two westerns.  Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.  And True Grit by Charles Portis.

I'd say Portis's Rooster Cogburn is one of the greatest characters in American fiction except for the fact that John Wayne played him in the movie and I can no longer separate the two in my head.  I don't know if Cogburn's a great character because of how Portis wrote him or how Wayne played him.

True Grit includes one of my favorite scenes in all contemporary literature.  It was a pretty good scene in the movie too.

Lucky Ned Pepper said, "What is your intention?  Do you think one on four is a dogfall?"

Rooster said, "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience!  Which will it be?"

Lucky Ned Pepper laughed.  He said, "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!"

Rooster said, "Fill your hands you son of a bitch!"

Berger had a new novel this year.  Portis hasn't published one in a while, which is frustrating to his fans, one of whom is Scott McLemee, who has a post up about a close encounter with Portis in a bar in Little Rock.  It comes with a link you should follow to McLemee's appreciation of Portis as the best comic novelist of our time.

Neither Berger nor Portis specializes in westerns, but both are something else that the list of NBA nominees seems always to lack: comic writers.

Funny is banned from serious fiction circles, while it is a regular feature of mysteries and thrillers, westerns, and sci fi novels.

The most damning thing Caryn James said about this year's nominees is that as a group they show no almost no sense of humor.

That fact alone is enough to keep me from reading any of them.  But the real reason I probably won't bother is the one brought up by Our Girl in Chicago.

Too many books, too little time.

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna; Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. II In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned -- A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns. III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. IV Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.                                              ---Wallace Stevens

Susannah and the elders

Has anyone noticed what an arrogant boast is woven into the title of Tom Wolfe's new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons?

It's really a dysphonic and off-putting title, nowhere up to the standards of catchiness set by Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi," said Flaubert.  I am Madame Bovary.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, says Wolfe, but he's not really claiming to be his heroine.  He's bragging that as a novelist he's up there with Flaubert.

Wolfe is out on the road selling his new novel the way he sold his last two, by deploring the bad behavior he glamorizes and celebrates in the book.

In I Am Charlotte Simmons Wolfe writes voyeuristically about the lives of college students, he exaggerates the excesses for effect, and he assigns motivations to his characters that are based on his need to deplore what is clearly turning him on.  Now he's running around claiming that a fantasy of his own invention is proof that liberals are turning America into a new Gomorrah.  The youth of America, Wolfe says cackling like an Inquisitor about to set the match to a particularly succulent young witch, are committing "moral suicide."

Along comes David Brooks to make the point less crassly and with more of a put-on sympathy in the New York Times.

Brooks gets a going over from Matt Yglesias and my new favorite blogger Lindsay Beyerstein.  She's my new favorite because she's smart, has an original slant, and has named her site Majikthise, after a character in Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Brooks' point is that now that he's read Wolfe's novel he sees more clearly how liberals have brought about the moral decay of the nation.  Look at all these college students fucking like rabbits, he says in language more acceptable to the New York Times, what a shame, how awful, and it's all your fault, you nasty blue staters.

Rubbish, says Matt.  Chastity and sexual fidelity are morally neutral virtues.  Bad men can be faithful to their wives and girlfriends while heroes can be energetic rakes.  Worse than rubbish, says Lindsay, because Wolfe and Brooks are up to the old right winger's trick of positing an ethical system that has only one value, chastity, and using it to trap liberals into defending or seeming to defend bad behavior.

Yup.

What also irks me about Brooks and Wolfe is that they are obviously tittilated by the bad behavior they're decrying.  Two old men leering at the college girls with their bare belly buttons and tattooed behinds and blaming the girls for giving them erections.

Reminds me of the story of Susannah and the elders.

Wolfe invents a beautiful young woman, strips her naked as often as he can, he and Brooks spy on her while she's naked, then they drag her from her bath, put her on trial before the whole community, and accuse her of being a wanton hussy.

But We Are Not Charlotte Simmons.  Charlotte Simmons is a fantasy thunk up by a bad novelist with an ax to grind.

Brooks' argument and Wolfe's sales pitch depend on people taking for granted that Wolfe is not a bad novelist but a very good one.

To accept this, you have to accept Wolfe's theory of what makes a good novel---diligent journalism.

A.  Balzac and Dickens were journalists.

B.  Balzac and Dickens were great novelists.

C.  I am a journalist.

D.  I am a great novelist like Balzac and Dickens.

Although Dickens wrote journalism all his career, the amount of reporter's legwork he did for any one of his novels was pretty minimal.  He relied on memory and imagination more than on his notebooks and it's interesting to read pieces from The Uncommercial Traveller and then see what Dickens did with them when he drew on them for, say, Our Mutual Friend.

Wolfe has almost no imagination.  When his notebooks fail him he steals from trashy movies.  Almost nothing he's done the legwork for would show up any differently in a work of non-fiction than they do in his novels, except that in his journalism the actual words and actions of the real people he's writing about don't let him indulge his taste for cheap melodrama.  In his novels, Wolfe is unbound (ha ha, Lance).  He can go wild.   

Tom Wolfe writes about monsters. There's no real feeling in any of his creations. They are moved by his theory of what moves people, which is: Appetite.  They are hungry.  Hungry for power.  Hungry for sex.  Hungry for money.  This is defensible as a view of how human beings are.  In fact, it's a point that needs to be driven home, because most of us tend to see all human behavior as motivated by ideals, good ideals or bad ones, but still purely spiritual motivations that do not take the body into account at all.  We don't take the body's needs or desires into account when we judge ourselves or other people and consequently are quite often blind to our own bad behavior.  I want this, but I am a good person, therefore what I want and the reasons I want it must also be good.  I watched a friend, a nice person, well-meaning, basically good hearted, destroy someone else's marriage, the whole time telling herself she was behaving well, that she wasn't doing what she was doing, stealing another woman's husband, because she was not that kind of person.  What happened, just happened.  She couldn't see or wouldn't admit that she was motivated by fear, by sexual desire, by a pure animal selfishness.  She had no idea that she or the man she seduced away from his wife could be motivated by anything resembling an appetite.  If Balzac wrote about such a woman---and I'm sure he did; he wrote about almost every kind of person there is; I just haven't read all his novels yet---he'd have made something very interesting of her.  But Wolfe could make nothing of her but a scheming monster driven by sexual rapaciousness.

What makes Wolfe's characters monsters is that they are moved by one appetite at a time. Balzac's characters are moved by a confusion of appetites, ideas, ideals, and real needs. Balzac's characters actually need money.  Wolfe's characters just want it.

Wolfe can compare himself to Dickens and Balzac, but he's ignoring the fact that Dickens' main rivals for the title Champion of the World of Victorian Fiction were Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, who were not journalists, and he's missing the obvious which is that the French writer most like what he says he emulates is Zola, who was far more of a journalist than Balzac and much less of an artist. Still, Zola could teach Wolfe a thing or two.  It's not what you put in your notebook, it's what you take out of it to put in your story. And as much as Zola had to tell his audience about the rise of department stores or the way French misers collected their money, what is interesting about his work now (and what was probably of most interest to his audience then) is that he could write sympathetically about what it is like to be a young girl let loose in a department store or what it is like to be a passionate young woman married to a miser.

Even in his journalism, which was wonderful, but especially in his novels, Wolfe has been a writer of what James Joyce would have called improper art.

Proper art, according to Joseph Campbell channelling for Joyce, is static, while improper art is kinetic.

Improper art is kinetic in that it moves the observer either to desire, positive, or to loathe or fear, negative, that object represented. That's clear and simple. Improper art is kinetic, it moves the observer either to desire or to refuse, to fear or hate the object represented.

Proper art moves you to stand still and admire it.  To say with awe, Wow, look at that, what a piece of work!   Improper art deliberately moves you to run away in disgust at the thing presented or to run out and buy it.  Proper art speaks to the soul.  Improper art ignites an appetite.

(Campbell doesn't say what Joyce thought of people who have improper reactions to proper art.)

A proper artist then would have you look at Charlotte Simmons and say, My gosh, what a character.  What a beautiful portrait.  It's human to feel an erotic thrill when Molly Bloom goes into her monologue at the end of Ulysses.  But a reader's main reaction is shock.  Not a prude's sexual shock.  The shock of recognition.  The shock of watching an imaginary person come alive before your mind's eye.

Wolfe doesn't achieve this shock with Charlotte or any of his creations.  He doesn't even claim to be after it.  He's out there bragging that he's trying to create improper art.  He wants us to run away in disgust.

But first he wants us to leer and lust after Charlotte.

What he wants is to enlist us in the conspiracy of the elders against Susannah.

Happy Birthday, Mrs Mannion

This is the blonde.  Today is her birthday.  Fill up the comments section with birthday wishes.

Unique entertainment by Madame Fry and her three talented daughters

Doubters among you have expressed disbelief that it snowed here on Friday.

Ha!

This preview of winter was far more cheering than it was disheartening.  It was a pretty snowfall and we got just enough to cover the grass and make snowball fights possible.  As the 8 year old said, "It looks more Christmassy than Christmas!"  And the weather since has been beautiful.  No wind, bright blue cloudless skies, and the temperature warm enough that after a little brisk activity you felt like taking off your coat.  Or I did, so I did.

I have gone through most winters with my coat off or at least unzipped.  There was a cartoon in the New Yorker many years back that showed a young couple walking through the snow in the City.  She's hunched up inside her parka, her scarf up over her chin, her hat low on her head, and he's strolling along with his sport jacket off and thrown over his shoulder and his shirt sleeves rolled up.  The woman's snarling at him, "It's January already, you can put your jacket on!"

A friend cut it out and sent it to me with a note that said, "How does it feel to have your whole life summed up in a cartoon?"

That cartoon appeared when the blonde and I were dating.  It was a fairly accurate depiction of what the two of us looked like walking around downtown Boston together.  I taped it up on the wall over my bed.  The blonde was not amused.

The blonde grew up just outside Philadelphia.  The winters are often harsher where my sister lives in Texas than they are in Philadelphia.  An inch of snow paralyzes the city for days.  But the blonde was senstitive to cold and even the mild winters there were a trial for her.  On particularly bitter mornings while she was waiting for the bus to arrive to take her to school, the cold would reduce her to tears.

Boston was a shock to her.

I, on the other hand, having been raised by wolves in the arctic regions around Schenectady, New York, only noticed the cold when the lenses in my glasses shattered from it.  It wasn't just that I was unsympathetic to the blonde's sufferings.  I couldn't even imagine that she was suffering.   "Buy some long underwear!" was all I could advise.

It's a wonder our relationship survived our first winter together.

But years of living in Boston and then Fort Wayne, Indiana, and at last and especially in upstate New York have made her heartier.

These days, when my Philadelphia in-laws, who start shivering down there at the end of September and who think they're risking an adventure out of a Jack London story if they venture this far north in February, arrive for a visit, it's the blonde who scorns them as "weather wimps."  And if you make the mistake of coming our way for a winter holiday, she's more likely the one who'll drag you out into a blizzard, march you around in the snow for several hours, and when, with icicles dangling from the end of your nose and your teeth chattering hard enough to spall away the enamel, you point out that it's a mite chilly and suggest ducking inside somewhere for a hot chocolate to warm up with, wave you off with a brisk, "This is nothing.  Syracuse is much worse."

The 11 year old is even more insufferable.  We have to wrestle him to the ground to force gloves and a hat on him.  I worry that if he ever decides to race in the Iditarod he'll set off without his mukluks.  His sled dogs will think he's showing them up.  "I'm adapted to the cold," he says to any adult who suggests that considering the mercury in the thermometers has frozen he might want to zip up his jacket.

A chip off the old block.  I'm so proud.

But nobody gets bragging rights for having been outside this weekend.  Like I said, no wind, lots of sun, a bright blue sky.  Fine weather for a hike in the woods, and that's what we did Saturday.  We drove up to New Paltz and hiked about the Hugoneut Nature Preserve.  Except for being pelted by snowballs by one or the other or both of the guys every fifteen feet or so, it was extremely pleasant.

The sky was incredible.  A perfect blue and not a cloud in it.

At one point I stopped, threw back my head and watched a lone leaf, brown and curled, very high up, tumbling slowly over and over on a straight line straight across the sky.

After we'd tramped about for a while we went into town to have lunch at a place called Barnaby's.  We ate in the bar which is below street level.  Low ceiling, exposed brick and beams, rough wood plank floor, cut glass lamps over the booths, plump cheerful waitresses, excellent food.  I've said how I'm most comfortable in 18th Century style rooms that look as though Thomas Jefferson had just left them.  But I like to do my eating and drinking in the 19th Century, in snug bars and cozy taverns where Sam Weller and Mr Pickwick would feel right at home.  Barnaby's fits the bill.

It's located in a big brick building that a hundred years ago was the village opera house.  The menu notes that there's no record that a single opera was ever performed there.  But the place was hopping every night anyway.  There were concerts, lectures, plays, and, when they came along, silent movies.  If your kids ever ask you what families did without television, there's your answer.  Live entertainment.  For 35 cents you could attend a performance by Madame Fry's Concert Company of Boston, including Madame Fry and her three talented daughters.  "An excellent programme comprising solos for voice, violin, and flute."

There were framed playbills on the walls, that's how I know.  Madame Fry's talented daughters might have been enchanting, but I think I'd rather have been around on Monday, November 9th, 1885 for:

Unique Entertainment

Humorous and Dramatic and Song Recitals

by the

Meige Sisters Vocal Quartet

and

Charles F. Underhill

Miss Hattie, 1st Soprano

Miss Jennie, 2d Soprano

Miss Edith, 1st Contralto

Miss Florence, 2d Contralto

Course tickets $1.50 Single Admission 50 cents

On the other hand, Madame Fry and her talented daughters had as their warm-up act, one William Wentworth, humorous and dramatic reader and impersonator.

I wonder who Wentworth impersonated.  James G. Blaine?  Mark Hanna?

Who they?

Kind of comforting thought, knowing that 130 years from now the names Tom DeLay and Karl Rove will probaby rate the same sort of Who they?

From 'The Log from the Sea of Cortez'

About noon we sailed and moved out of the shrouded and quiet Amortajada Bay and up the coast towar Marcial Reef, which was marked as our next collecting station.  We arrived in mid-afternoon and collected on the late tide, on a northerly pile of boulders, part of the central reef.  This was just south of Marcial Point, which marks the southern limit of Agua Verde Bay.

It was not a good collecting tide, although it should have been according to the tide chart.  The water did not go low enough for exhaustive collecting.  There were a few polyclads which here were high on the rocks.  We found tow large and many small chitons---the first time we had discovered them in numbers.  There were many urchins visible but too deep below the surface to get to.  Swarms of larval shrimps were in the water swimming about in small circles.  The collecting was not successful in point of view of numbers of forms taken.

That night we rigged a lamp over the side, shaded it with a paper cone, and hung it close down to the water so that the light was reflected downward.  Pelagic isopods and sysids immediately swarmed to the illuminated circle until the water seemed to heave and whirl around them.  The small fish came to this horde of food, and on the outer edges of the light ring large fishes flashed in and out after the small fishes.  Occasionally we interrupted this mad dance with dip-nets, dropping the catch into porcelain pans for closer study, and out of the nets came animals small or transparent that we had not noticed in the sea at all.

                                           ---The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  John Steinbeck.