Lance Mannion

The delicate convolutions of Hercule Poirot's brain

Posted Sunday evening, October 11, 2020.

Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) sees to the proper operation of his digestive apparatus in a scene from the TV series adaptation of Agatha Christie's mystery novel "Death in the Clouds".

Those times when Hercule Poirot becomes a “mere member of the human race," as explained by Hercule Poirot...

“They say an army marches on its stomach,” said Poirot. “But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mer seizes me, I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no gray cells, no order, no method---a mere member of the human race somewhat below average [in] intelligence! It is deplorable, but there it is!”

---from “Death in the Clouds” by Agatha Christie.

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The "Poirot" television series adaptation of "Death in the Clouds" is available to watch on YouTube.

Lee Iacocca, young at heart

Posted Saturday night, September 19. 2020.

A salesman through and through. “Listening to Lee talk about a car, I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.”: Lee Iococca in 1968 standing at the open driver's door of the 2 millionth Ford Mustang to roll off the assembly line. Photo courtesy of Ford, via Automotive News.

Along with a couple hundred dozen other books, I’ve been reading A.J. Baime's “Go Like Hell”, the book the movie “Ford v Ferrari" was based on, once removed. (Development hell. Long story. You can read about it here.) Baime’s introduction of Lee Iacocca into the story definitely places Iacocca in the American grain...

It was this world of money and cutthroat competition that Lee Iacocca stepped into in the winter of 1960. Iacocca’s promotion to the top man at the Ford division occurred the same week that John F. Kennedy was voted into the Oval Office. Inside Iacocca’s nerves slithered, but his outer shell was impenetrable. His colleagues saw a salesman through and through. After listening to Lee talk about a car, one once said, “I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.”...

Iacocca embodied the other end of the American dream. He was the son of Ellis Island immigrants, raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he was the first top man in the Ford division who had real dealership experience, selling on the floor, and he hadn’t shed the bootstrap urgency...He had rougher edges than his associates. He could work the phrase “son of a bitch” into every other sentence. He had dreamed of working at Ford since he was in high school. The day a recruiter from Dearborn showed up at Lehigh in a big Lincoln, and Iacocca smelled the leather interior , his resolve had only strengthened.

During his first six months on the new job, Iacocca took a hard look at the American car buyer, not just in the present day but what the customer was about to become. He had the benefit of a new tool feeding him information. Computers had arrived in offices...Sitting in Henry II’s office one day, Iacocca began to map out his vision of 1960s America. He clutched his Ignacio Haya cigar like a stage propped, and he armed himself with numbers. He was very good at math.

“Next year there will be a million more 16-year-olds than there are today." The key to the future, Iacocca reasoned, was the youth market. The war-baby generation was coming of age. Soon the kids would be filing into government offices to get their driver’s licenses...Trends come and go, but one thing never changes: the primary goal of every sixteen-year-old is to own a car...If Ford could get the kids when they were young, he argued, Ford could get them for life.

…

Iacocca gathered a team of admen, engineers, and designers, and began to outline a new theme for Ford. “What we need is a campaign, a philosophy that is young at heart,” he told them,. The team went to work in a large windowless room at the Ford office called “the tomb,” where Iacocca enforced security so rigid the garbage was burned under his supervision. Weekly late-night meetings were held in a nearby motel called the Fairlane Inn. Iacocca’s underlings began to understand the depth of his ambition. He was proof that you couldn’t have enough balls in this town.

Iacocca’s vision included a new model, and a marketing theme to sell it, a way to make a statement: Ford cars were about performance, style, adventure. He knew America was ripe for something different. The numbers were there in the market research, and he could feel it in his gut. Together with his chief engineer Donald Frey, he approached the styling department. Within days, a secret prototype was in the works. The original name as Tornino, after the Italian city of Turin. But it would one day soon become a car called Mustang.

---from “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans" by A. J. Baime.

"A man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster in short."

Mined from the notebooks Friday, July 24, 2020. Posted Monday night, August 10.

Aaron Burr. Detail from a portrait circa 1793-94, when he was in his late thirties and a U.S. Senator from New York. Attributed to Gilbert Stuart. Via Wikipedia.

Started “Burr” this morning. The best and best-written of Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire”. The first quote contains Vidal’s own words and is from the novel’s afterward. The next two quotes and the last one are the words of the narrator Charlie Schuyler. The line about Washington is Burr’s himself..

Obviously I have made up conversation, but whenever possible I have used actual phrases of the speaker. Certainly the opinions Jefferson expresses in the book are taken from life, and often represented in his own words. He wrote and talked a great deal about everything.

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He is a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster in short.

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I find his brilliance disturbing. We do not want the old to be sharper than we. They were there first, and got the best things.

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“How fitting that the first American President should have been a land surveyor.”

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...the euphemisms can come later.

---from “Burr” by Gore Vidal.

Young Abe Lincoln awake in the night, listening to the dark sayings of the adults

Posted Monday night, July 6, 2020.

Life-size diorama of young Abraham Lincoln reading by the fire late at night in his family’s cabin in Indiana, on display at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library.

Sarah Bush Lincoln recalled Abraham’s yearnings as a boy to express himself plainly and extract clear meanings from the adults around him. “Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.” When the Reverend John P. Gulliver praised him in 1860 for the clarity of his speeches, Lincoln explained: “Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when any body talked to me in a way I could not understand.” After he clambered into bed at night in his family’s little cabin, he recalled, he listened closely to the “dark sayings” of the adults, trying to make out their meaning. “I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I know to comprehend.” He used that approach throughout his life. “This was a kind of passion with me,” Lincoln said.

---from “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn.

"The people had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity"

Posted Saturday night, May 30, 2020.

“Columbian Exposition–The Grand Basin Court at Night–Electrical Illumination of MacMonnnies’ Fountain and the Administration Building.” Drawing by Charles Graham, Harper’s Weekly June 1893. Via Chicology.

The White City illuminated at night was a radiant electrical vision long remembered by all who witnessed it, acclaimed as the most fabulous spectacle in a fair brimming with fabulous spectacles. On Monday evening, May 8, as twilight gathered...the sky darkened to a deep indigo over the lake, and the air grew perceptibly chillier. Suddenly, the gold-domed Administration Building came brilliantly to pulsating electrical life, provoking a prolonged sigh of pleasure from the crowd. Next, the long classic sweep of the peristyle on the far end of the great basin burst forth from the twilight’s shadow, wondrously luminous with the tens of thousands of Westinghouse’s “stopper” lamps glowing softly up in the cornices and along the pediment, highlighting the hundreds of statues. The crowd clapped wildly at this bravura burst of electricity. Next, all the white palaces glowed to electrical life, radiant visions of an imagined past, followed swiftly by thousands of lights encircling the dark waters of the 1,500-foot Great Basin, its rippling surface now a-shimmer. Hundreds of arc lights lining the waters came on, spreading their clear, blue white coronas....Ghostly gondolas and long electric craft looked like a fairy fleet. Then, from the highest roofs swung to luminous life, four massive searchlights, each raking the night sky, even as it shone, white, then bloodred, then green, then blue. The people, who had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity, let out a steady, breathless chorus of “Oh!” and “Ah!”

Then all went dramatically, suddenly dark, and the White City loomed only as a spectral vision. The murmur of the crowd mingled with the sound of the chilly spring winds off the lake. Out of the total blackness, with a rush and a roar “the great electric fountains lifted their gushing and gleaming waters. There were two of these fountains, one on either side of the MacMonnies Fountain, and through all their many changes each was the counterpart of the other, alike in color and form.” The gushing colored waters formed beautiful shapes and hues. Finally, at 9:30, the lights were quelled and the electrically dazed and sated crowds drifted slowly home, awed by the transformation of the dark into something so magically new.

---from “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes.

Lara's theme

Posted Wednesday night, May 27, 2020.

Detail from “The Umbrella” by Marie Baskirtseff. 1883. The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburgh. Via Wikipedia.

I think Pasternak captures Lara’s youth and her naivete perfectly in having the only way she can begin to understand what happened to her---what was done to her---is to see herself as a character in a what she regards as a grown-up’s novel and in how she can only see what happened as her fault...

The weather was trying to get better. “Drip, drip, drip,” the drops drummed on the iron gutter and cornices. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw.

She walked all the way home as if beside herself and only when she got there did she realize what had happened.

At home everyone was asleep. She again lapsed into torpor and in that distraction sank down at her mother’s dressing table in her pale lilac, almost white dress with lace trimmings and a long veil, taken from the shop for that one evening, as if for a masked ball. She sat before her reflection in the mirror and saw nothing. Then she leaned on her crossed arms on the table and dropped her head on them.

If mama finds out, she’ll kill her. Kill her and take her own life.

How did it happen? How could it happen? Now it’s too late. She should have thought earlier.

Now she’s---what is it called?---now she’s---a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a French novel, and tomorrow she will go to school and sit at the same desk with those girls, who, compared to her, are still unweaned babies. Lord, Lord, how could it happen!

Someday, many years from now, when it was possible, she would tell Olya Demina. Olya would clutch her by the head and start howling.

Outside the window the drops prattled, the thaw was talking away. Someone in the street banged on the neighbors’ gate. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.

---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Yura Zhivago dreamed of prose

Posted Wednesday night, May 27, 2020.

Detail from a drawing, “Boris Pasternak Writing”, by Pasternak’s father Leonid Pasternak. 1919. Courtesy Tate Gallery, London.

This is memoir as much as fiction, and “Doctor Zhivago” is that book of biographies…

Yura thought well and wrote very well. Still in his high school days he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.

Yura forgave those verses the sin of their coming to be for the sake of their energy and originality. These two qualities, energy and originality, Yura considered representative of reality in the arts, which were pointless, idle, and unnecessary in other respects.

---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Yura Zhivago considers his calling

Updated Tuesday evening, May 26, 2020.

This post has been moved. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. To see the post follow the link to "Yura Zhivago considers his calling".

Tolstoy's complacent disciple

Posted Thursday night, May 14, 2020.

Detail from “Leo Tolstoy” by Leonid Pasternak, father of author Boris Pasternak. Circa 1902. Via Wikipedia.

He was one of those followers of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in whose heads the thoughts of the genius who had never known peace settled down to enjoy a long and cloudless repose and turned irremediably petty.

---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak.

A determined mother accomplishes her task

Posted Wednesday night, April 29, 2020.

The kindly but determined Princess Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskáya and the son she dotes on and intends to see rise in the world,. Aneurin Barnard (left) as Boris Drubetskoy and Rebecca Front as Princess Drubetskáya in the 2016 BBC One adaptation of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

“Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if it is to last.” More bedtime reading from Leo Tolstoy.

...The elderly lady who had been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasíli in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had assumed had left her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and fear.

“How about my son Borís, Prince?” said she, hurrying after him into the anteroom. “I can’t remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me what news I may take back to my poor boy.”

Although Prince Vasíli listened reluctantly and not very politely to the elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an ingratiating and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go away.

“What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would be transferred to the Guards at once?” said she.

“Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can,” answered Prince Vasíli, “but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I should advise you to appeal to Rumyántsev through Prince Golítsyn. That would be the best way.”

The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskáya, belonging to one of the best families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of society had lost her former influential connections. She had now come to Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son. It was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasíli that she had obtained an invitation to Anna Pávlovna’s reception and had sat listening to the vicomte’s story. Prince Vasíli’s words frightened her, an embittered look clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she smiled again and clutched Prince Vasíli’s arm more tightly.

“Listen to me, Prince,” said she. “I have never yet asked you for anything and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my father’s friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God’s sake to do this for my son—and I shall always regard you as a benefactor,” she added hurriedly. “No, don’t be angry, but promise! I have asked Golítsyn and he has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always were,” she said, trying to smile though tears were in her eyes.

“Papa, we shall be late,” said Princess Hélène, turning her beautiful head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by the door.

Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if it is to last. Prince Vasíli knew this, and having once realized that if he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable to ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence. But in Princess Drubetskáya’s case he felt, after her second appeal, something like qualms of conscience. She had reminded him of what was quite true; he had been indebted to her father for the first steps in his career. Moreover, he could see by her manners that she was one of those women—mostly mothers—who, having once made up their minds, will not rest until they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary to go on insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make scenes. This last consideration moved him.

“My dear Anna Mikháylovna,” said he with his usual familiarity and weariness of tone, “it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask; but to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father’s memory, I will do the impossible—your son shall be transferred to the Guards. Here is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?”

“My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you—I knew your kindness!” He turned to go.

“Wait—just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards...” she faltered. “You are on good terms with Michael Ilariónovich Kutúzov ... recommend Borís to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at rest, and then...”

Prince Vasíli smiled.

“No, I won’t promise that. You don’t know how Kutúzov is pestered since his appointment as Commander in Chief. He told me himself that all the Moscow ladies have conspired to give him all their sons as adjutants.”

“No, but do promise! I won’t let you go! My dear benefactor...”

“Papa,” said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, “we shall be late.”

“Well, au revoir! Good-by! You hear her?”

“Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?”

“Certainly; but about Kutúzov, I don’t promise.”

“Do promise, do promise, Vasíli!” cried Anna Mikháylovna as he went, with the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came naturally to her, but was now very ill-suited to her careworn face.

Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed all the old feminine arts. But as soon as the prince had gone her face resumed its former cold, artificial expression. She returned to the group where the vicomte was still talking, and again pretended to listen, while waiting till it would be time to leave. Her task was accomplished.

---from Book One: Chapter IV of “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

Merely a man of the world <---Previously

Merely a man of the world

Posted Tuesday night, April 28, 2020.

Stephen Rea as the artless schemer Prince Vassily Kuragin in the 2015 BBC One adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Told you I was re-reading “War and Peace”...

Prince Vasíli was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons he met. Of these plans he had not merely one or two in his head but dozens, some only beginning to form themselves, some approaching achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He did not, for instance, say to himself: “This man now has influence, I must gain his confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special grant.” Nor did he say to himself: “Pierre is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need.” But when he came across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this man could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince Vasíli took the first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, become intimate with him, and finally make his request.

He had Pierre at hand in Moscow and procured for him an appointment as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which at that time conferred the status of Councilor of State, and insisted on the young man accompanying him to Petersburg and staying at his house. With apparent absent-mindedness, yet with unhesitating assurance that he was doing the right thing, Prince Vasíli did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he thought out his plans beforehand he could not have been so natural and shown such unaffected familiarity in intercourse with everybody both above and below him in social standing. Something always drew him toward those richer and more powerful than himself and he had rare skill in seizing the most opportune moment for making use of people.

---from “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

How the weather was in East Prussia in January of 1945

Posted Tuesday night, April 14, 2020.

Detail from “Inn Valley Landscape” by Lovis Corinth, 1910. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

The next guest could be seen coming from far away, silhouetted against the horizon and crossing the fields, enveloped in swirling snow. Crows with ragged wings dived down on the fluttering figure. This visitor was a young woman, and she was pulling along a sledge with two suitcases on it. The sledge kept tipping over as she hauled it across the snow-covered clods of earth. She had difficulty standing upright in the violent gusts of wind, which blew the skirts of her coat apart, and it was some time before she finally reached the major house that lay, like a last refuge, behind the black oaks. The young woman had a violin case on her back, and that, too, made the people from the Settlement stare at her.

---from “All For Nothing” by Walter Kemposki.

Every night he wrote a story. Every morning he reread it indignantly and threw it in the trashbin

Posted Monday night, March 23, 2020.

Victor McLaglen and J.M. Kerrigan in a scene from John Ford’s 1935 classic suspense drama “The Informer”, set during the Irish Troubles and based on the novel by Liam O’Flaherty.

More Borges. No special reason. Just like the paragraph. I like it for the writing. I like it for its deadpan humor. I like it for the wry way it lays out Liam O’Flaherty’s resume as a developing writer. I especially like the lines about O’Flaherty’s parents being “desperately Catholic” and O’Flaherty achieving such "distinction as a revolutionary" he had to “relinquish” the Empire. And of course the line about his rereading his own stories “indignantly” rings true. It’s every writer’s regular thought to look at their own work and demand of themself, “Who do I think I am, trying to get away with writing this crap?”

No special reason for the photo up top either. It’s just that the movie was based on O’Flaherty’s novel.

Borges:

Liam O’Flaherty is a “Man of Aran.” He was born in 1896 to parents who were poor and desperately Catholic. He was educated in a Jesuit college. From boyhood he professed two passions: hatred of England and reverence for the Catholic Church. (The first of those passions was mitigated by his love of English literature; the second by socialism.) In 1914, the two loyalties clashed. O’Flaherty wished for an English defeat, but was enraged by the spectacle of a small Catholic country, Belgium---so comparable to Ireland at that moment!---trampled by a strong, heretic nation, Germany---so much like England! In 1915, he solved the problem by enlisting under a false name to keep his family honor intact. He spent two years fighting the Germans. On his return he seized the opportunity provided by the Irish revolution to fight England. As a revolutionary, he achieved such distinction that for a time he had to relinquish the Empire. We know he was a lumberjack in Canada, a stevedore in a Venezuelan port, a Turkish agent in Asia Minor, and a suboy, a linotypist, and “subversive” orator in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In a tire factory in St Paul, he scribbled out his first stories. Every night he wrote one; every morning he reread it indignantly and threw it in the trashbin.

---Jorge Luis Borges, “Selected Non-Fictions”.

Borges on Cowboys

Posted Friday night, March 20, 2020.

John Wayne makes his appearance in John Ford’s classic western “Stagecoach” and in one shot establishes himself as a major movie star, a legend, and an icon.

Reading essays by Jorge Luis Borges, just for the fun of it, and it is fun. And funny. Borges had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp pen. One of the essays was about the place of the cowboy in American literature, of all things. But then Borges wrote of all things. In the essay I came across this line and it gave me a real kick: “to this day [cowboys] have not inspired a good film.”

Borges wrote that in 1938.

“Stagecoach” came out in 1939.

I’ll bet he saw it. I wonder what he thought of it.

Even more I wonder what he thought of “The Searchers”.

Technically, Ringo and Ethan Edwards aren’t cowboys, although Ethan did work on his brother’s ranch before he went off to fight on the wrong side in the Civil War. So I suppose those don’t count as cowboy movies. But then there’s “Red River”. I’d like to know what Borges thought of that one. I’d like to know what he thought of Howard Hawks as a director. And John Ford. And John Ford versus Howard Hawks as directors and as men. I wonder what he thought about Wayne, as a man, as an actor, and as an icon. I wonder what he thought about all the things.

I’ll go back to my reading now, and find out what he thought of Virginia Woolf...and Ellery Queen.

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"Selected Non-Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges is available in paperback at Amazon.

"'Nothing is easy,' she said, and with that attitude she ran the whole show..."

Posted Sunday night, March 15, 2010.

Detail from “Old Lady” by Theodore Allmendinger, circa 1941. Courtesy of the Greater Latrobe School District Art Conservation Trust. Chosen as painting of the month, February 2015, by students at the Greater Latrobe Senior High.

Setting: the von Globig’s impoverished estate in East Prussia near the end of World War II in the winter of 1945 as exhausted and demoralized German forces retreating from the Russian front are passing through, with the Red Army close behind...

Another family member was ‘Auntie’, a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin. She was always on the go, and in summer she went around the house in a limp, washable dress. Now that it was cold, she wore a pair of men’s trousers under the skirt of the dress and two cardigans over it. Since [her nephew Eberhard von Globig] had become a special officer ‘in the field’, although in fact he was behind the lines, she made sure that everything went smoothly [in his manor house]. ‘Nothing’s easy,’ she would say, and with that attitude she ran the whole show…

When more money had been coming in, [Eberhard and his wife Katharina] had furnished a comfortable apartment on the first floor of the house, three rooms, a bathroom and a little kitchen. It had a warm, comfortable living room with a view of the park, where Katharina could write letters or read books. And when Eberhard came home they were undisturbed there. It meant that they didn’t always have to sit down in the hall with Auntie, who had a finger in every pie and always thought she knew best. Auntie, was always jumping up to fetch something, or staying put when that was was more of a nuisance.

---from “All For Nothing” by Walter Kempowski, translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

"And so grew the book..."

Posted Saturday night, March 14, 2020.

Mary Antin, circa 1915. Via Wikipedia.

“I had no plan when I began...One day I found myself thinking of the time I went to school in Polotzk, and I wrote about that. Another day I kept seeing the little girls I used to play with, and I put them in. Then it was the marketplace that haunted me, or the Dvina gurgled in my ears all night, or there came into my mind a tale the women used to tell while picking feathers of a winter evening. I put those things down just as they came, and so grew the book. When it came to putting those fragments together, I found that they fitted wonderfully well, considering their haphazard origin. A little re-arrangement of the loosed sheets, an introductory sentence here, a connecting phrase there, and the story fell in chapters that named themselves. I never knew what I was going to do until it was done.”

---Mary Antin on how she wrote her classic memoir of her coming to America as a Russian-Jewish immigrant when she was a child and how she grew and thrived in Boston in the early 20th Century, “The Promised Land”, quoted in Jay Parini’s “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America”.

Once we had a President who knew how to president

Posted Thursday night, March 12, 2020.

"You cannot believe this man": President-elect Barack Obama meeting with Vice President-elect Joe Biden and the members of his economic advisory team November 7, 2008, three days after he was elected President.  John Gress/Reuters via the Boston Globe.

This is from Reed Hundt’s “A Crisis Wasted”. Hundt was a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team in 2008. Obama disappointed him. You can guess that from the title of his book. Keep in mind the book is sharply critical of Obama, then, when you read the passage.

Scene: The first public meeting of Barack Obama’s economic transition team, Obama Campaign offices, Chicago. November 7, 2008, three days after Obama was elected President. Characters: Barack Obama. Joe Biden. Theodore Geithner. Peter Orszag. Christina Romer. Jared Bernstein. Austan Goolsbee. Geithner was already tapped to be Obama’s first Secretary of the Treasury. Orszag was his first director of the Office of Management and Budget. Romer became Obama’s first chair of his Council of Economic Advisers. Bernstein served as the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to the Vice-President. Goolsbee was chief economist for the Economic Recovery Board and served on the Council of Economic Advisers; he succeeded Romer as chair when she resigned in 2010.

Note: By “worst briefing” I take the participants and Hundt to mean the briefing that delivered Obama the worst bad news and offered him the least help, not that it was an incompetent mess...

After Goolsbee’s housing presentation, Orszag “laid out the harrowing budget situation.” Geithner “push[ed] strongly for long-term discipline in our overall budget strategy.” He felt he got “pushback” from Romer, Goolsbee, and Bernstein, but Obama took Geithner’s side.

In the meeting Geithner thought Obama was “substantive, realistic, and comfortably in command,” while he himself personally was “weary and dark...always sucking the hope out of the air in our meetings.” Romer thought, “The President-elect was brilliant. I called my husband and said, ‘You cannot believe this man.’ We were all exhausted and he was still going strong. It was lots of substance, but he didn’t really tip his hand. He listened. He asked questions. He obviously heard and understood everything.”

As the president-elect rose to leave and everyone stood with him, Goolsbee told Obama, “That’s the worst background briefing an incoming president has had since 1932, and possibly since Abraham Lincoln.” Obama answered, “Goolsbee, that’s not even my worst briefing this week." Goolsbee could not remember if the other briefing was like “Pakistan and India are about to go to war,” but it was of that nature. As the economy turned out, Goolsbee was right---it was Obama’s worst briefing.

---from “A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions” by Reed Hundt.

How people were politely socially unsocial before there was social media

Posted Saturday night, December 21, 2019.

“Morning News” by Francis Luis Mora, 1912, San Diego Museum of Art via Wikipedia.

Before there were smart phones and Twitter, there were…newspapers?

Then he got out his newspaper, and Johnny also got out his, and for a time there was no conversation between them…

Major Grantly had The Times, and John Eames had the Daily News, and they exchanged papers. One had the last Saturday, and the other the last Spectator, and they exchanged those also. Both had the Pall Mall Gazette, of which enterprising periodical they gradually came to discuss the merits and demerits, thus falling into conversation at last…

---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.

My daughters

Posted Tuesday night, December 17, 2019.

Who needs Star Wars?: Eliza Scanlen, Saorise Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh as Amy, Jo, Meg, and Beth March in Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of “Little Women".

I just became the father of four quirky teenage daughters who are making the house cheerful and merry even with their bickering…

Which is to say I started reading “Little Women” this morning, preparing to see the movie which opens next week.

"Jo does use such slang words!" observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug.

Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle.

"Don't, Jo. It's so boyish!"

"That's why I do it."

"I detest rude, unladylike girls!"

"I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!"

"Birds in their little nests agree," sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the "pecking" ended for that time.

"Really, girls, you are both to be blamed," said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion. "You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn't matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady."

"I'm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty," cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down a chestnut mane. "I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!"

And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.

"Poor Jo! It's too bad, but it can't be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls," said Beth, stroking the rough head with a hand that all the dish washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch.

"As for you, Amy," continued Meg, "you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you'll grow up an affected little goose, if you don't take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking, when you don't try to be elegant. But your absurd words are as bad as Jo's slang."

"If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?" asked Beth, ready to share the lecture.

"You're a dear, and nothing else," answered Meg warmly, and no one contradicted her, for the 'Mouse' was the pet of the family.

As young readers like to know 'how people look', we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within. It was a comfortable room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls, books filled the recesses, chrysanthemums and Christmas roses bloomed in the windows, and a pleasant atmosphere of home peace pervaded it.

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her 'Little Miss Tranquility', and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

---from Chapter One of "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott.

The unforgiving partisanship of the Bishop's wife

Posted Monday night, December 16, 2019.

Geraldine McEwan as the imperious and domineering Mrs Proudie in the 1982 BBC miniseries based on Anthony Trollope's novel "Barchester Towers", with Clive Owen as her overly-accommodating husband the Bishiop of Barchester. Mrs Proudie re-appears in all her formidable glory in "The Last Chronicle of Barset".

There are partisans, and there are partisans!. Mrs Proudie was a partisan!

But to explain all this to Mrs. Proudie was beyond his power. He knew well that she would not hear a word in mitigation of Mr. Crawley's presumed offence. Mr. Crawley belonged to the other party, and Mrs. Proudie was a thorough-going partisan. I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon the earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs. Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called Mrs. Proudie a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred. He believed her to be simply a vulgar, interfering, brazen-faced virago. Mrs. Proudie in truth believed that the archdeacon was an actual emanation from Satan, sent to those parts to devour souls,—as she would call it,—and that she herself was an emanation of another sort, sent from another source expressly to Barchester, to prevent such devouring, as far as it might possibly be prevented by a mortal agency.

---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.