Lance Mannion

Moses Herzog is disappointed by the positive results of his check-up

Posted Tuesday night, November 13, 2018.

Fifty years ago, Saul Bellow was looking into the future and reading my mind after my last check-up for satirical effect, the bastard...

Dr. Emmerich, stooped but energetic, examined him, sounded his chest and his back, flashed the light in his eyes, took his blood, felt his prostate gland, wired him for the electrocardiograph.

“Well, you are a healthy man---not twenty-one, but strong.”

Herzog heard this with satisfaction, of course, but still he was faintly unhappy about it. He had been hoping for some definite sickness which would send him to a hospital for a while. He would not have to look after himself. His brothers, who had given up on him, more or less, would rally to him then and his sister Helen might come to take care of him. The family would meet his expenses and pay for Marco and June.

---from “Herzog” by Saul Bellow.

Babe Ruth and the Celebrated Horse Dexter

Posted Saturday night, November 10, 2018.

“Trotting for a Great Stake”: Chromolithograph by Currier & Ives, 1890, courtesy of the Springfield Museums.

So, I’m back to reading “The Big Fella”, Jane Leavy’s new biography of Babe Ruth. Like I said, the reason I stopped almost right when I started and thought I was putting it aside for a while wasn’t the book itself. It’s that it wasn’t telling me anything new about the Babe. Leavy was telling the story well---in a way that sounded new because good writing sounds new and good storytelling is new or news at the same time it’s very old, a tale as old as time, and whatnot. But I needed more distraction, I guess, and I got impatient. And I didn’t take proper note of the subtitle.

“Babe Ruth and the World He Created”.

I didn’t hear in my head the emphasis on and.

When I got thinking about it, I got curious. What was that world he created like, I wondered, what was in it? Maybe I already know too much about the Babe, but there are probably things about the world around him I don’t.

Turns out, there’s a lot. Like the ghost of a champion harness-racing horse named Dexter.

The “Celebrated Horse Dexter.” A sports celebrity in his day---just after the Civil War---whom Leavy likens and then unlikens to Ruth, the Babe being as friendly, good-natured, and obliging celebrity as Dexter, apparently, was not…

The Union Race Course was the first dirt track in the nation and home to Dexter, a four-legged nineteenth-century superstar known for setting records and defying convention. The big bay with four socks, a blaze on his nose, and a lot of flash was trained by the great Hiram Woodruff, who operated a hotel on the premises. Currier & Ives memorialized their feats in a series of lithographs: “The Celebrated Horse Dexter, ‘The King of the Turf,’” “Going to the Trot,” and ‘Coming from the Trot.” Daniel Webster had frequented the place. Oliver Wendell Holmes composed odes to its steeds.

Unlike the genial Babe, who drew people to him, Dexter’s disposition was “so wicked that he had to be gelded,” the New York Times noted in his obituary. Also, unlike the Babe, Dexter had objected to trivial exhibition of his prowess, one September day in 1869, between races at another Long Island course, Dexter had been called on to entertain the crowd. Breaking away form his young handler, he dashed across the field at world-record speed, crashing into the stable with such force that he split the doors and wrecked the sulky behind him. He then proceeded to circle the mile-long track in 2:21.

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“The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” by Jane Leavy is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Rule Breaker in Chief

Posted Thursday night, November 8, 2018.

Went back to Jane Leavy’s “The Big Fella”. You knew I would, didn’t you?

If the twenties were a monument to modern man’s creative capacity for mischief, as E.B. White wrote, Ruth was the chief mischief maker. In a city of rule breakers---everyone who bent an elbow in 1927 was breaking the law of the land---he was rule breaker in chief. He never embodies the traditional public virtues that defined ancient celebrity, and he didn’t have to. Instead, he gave the public glimpses of a bad boy having the time of hs life. Hadn’t they told him he was a bad boy? He did his adult best to fulfill the mandate: punching out umps, chasing after boobirds in the grandstand, driving the wrong way up a one-way street (“I’m only going one way!”), sleeping with other men’s wives but ignoring his own. Everybody loved, forgave, and maybe even envied the Babe for being himself.

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“The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” by Jane Leavy is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

You know what they say, flunkeys go out the window when players demanding their money come to the door

Posted Thursday night, October 4, 2018.

Bob Newhart as the incompetent squadron commander Major Major Major escaping his responsibilities in the movie version of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”. (Click on the photo to watch the clip on YouTube.) Major Major has a real-life counterpart in Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck.”

Like I was saying, not every character in Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck” is a thief, fool, out and out villain, or Donald Trump. There are plenty of decent, honest, and talented people at work trying to help the USFL thrive and survive. But in the mix there are some gray characters. Willing stooges, hapless flunkeys, and accidental aiders and abetters oblivious to their contributions to the general malfeasance. One of them is Bud Huan, president of the San Antonio Gunslingers. Clinton Manges, the cheap and crooked owner of the Gunslingers, liked to hire friends and family because they worked cheap and tended to be unquestioningly loyal. Huan was a friend who was in way over his head. And when Manges stopped paying his players, it was left to Huan to deal with their anger and frustration. He dealt with it by not dealing with it. Remember Major Major Major in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and how he avoided the responsibilities of being a squadron commander by climbing out the window whenever a problem came knocking at his office door? Either Heller was working from life and depicting a common type or Huan read the book or saw the movie…

Because Manges was now (wisely) keeping his distance, the target of player wrath toward Huan, a nice yet overmatched man whose previous managerial experience came as the owner of a feed store. Huan was one of the the few executives with a window office in the double-wide trailer [that served as the company’s headquarters], and as members of the Gunslingers arrived with increased frequency to collect their (non-existent) checks, Huan---who could hear them approaching outside his closed door---often climbed out the window, dashed to his car, and drove off. It was utterly absurd---the 71-year-old Korean War veteran, who came to work in a suit and tie, carefully lifting one leg, the the other, over the sill…

For the record, one time Huan wasn’t fast enough to make his escape and a player collected his pay from him, at the threat of beating his head in with a baseball bat.

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“Football for a Buck” by Jeff Pearlman is available in hardcover and for kindleat Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Barry the hedge fund manager meets an architect with the easiest job in the world

Posted Thursday night, September 20, 2018.

Barry Cohen, the hedge fund manager who’s the main character of Gary Shtenytgart’s new novel “Lake Success” , has had a screaming fight with his normally even-tempered, cool-headed wife…

Barry recoiled. This was exactly how he pictured his banker buddies’ marriages, ungrateful women screaming at stupefied men over absolutely nothing. Once, when he was still huffing his way up the VP-MD axis at Goldman, he had gone to a party at Greenwich manse, and the architect who had designed the house was there on the veranda completely shit-faced. Barry asked him the secret of his success, and the architect had pointed at the lawns full of glimmering couples beneath them and said, “I have the easiest job in the world. Bankers. The same four houses, the same four cars, the same four wives.” He took another drunken look at Barry in his loafers and Moncler sweater and said, “Here’s my card.”

---from “Lake Success” by Gary Shteyngart.

A fantasy borrowed from enthusiasts for a Third World War

Posted Saturday night, August 25, 2018.

The author cautions his readers:

This is fiction, not history, so it should not be used as a reference book. I say, for example, that the United States ambassador to Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War was Henry Clowes, of Ohio. The actual ambassador at that time was Frederic Courtland Penfield of Connecticut.

I also say that a neutron bomb is a sort of magic wand, which kills people instantly, but which leaves their property unharmed. This is a fantasy borrowed from enthusiasts for a Third World War. A real neutron bomb, detonated in a populated area, would cause a lot more suffering and destruction than I have described.

---from the Preface of “Deadeye Dick” by Kurt Vonnegut.

"Another Great Day for the Coinage!"

Posted late Sunday night, August 12, 2018.

For some reason I have never been able to fathom, this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Jailbird” cracked Pop Mannion up…

I had a whimsical idea: I thought of calling the secretary of the treasury, Kermit Winkler, a man who had graduated from Harvard two years after me, and saying this to him: “I just tried out to of your dimes on Times Square and they worked like a dream. It looks like another great day for the coinage!”

Interestingly, another of Pop’s favorite novels was “Herzog” by Saul Bellow, which is about man consoling himself for his troubles and sorrows as his life falls apart by writing letters he never sends to famous and important people. dead friends and living enemies, former students and soon to be former colleagues, and anyone else he can think of. As town supervisor and then president of the county historical society, Pop got his fair share of letters and email from cranks. I wonder if he dreamed of paying the crankiness forward and writing such letters himself.

"Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair"

Posted Sunday afternoon, May 6, 2018.

An abandoned hacienda on a still-thriving farm in the Bajio region of Mexico. Photo courtesy of photographer Andres Gonzalez via Wikipedia.

In 1945, the environmental scientist Norman Borlaug, the wizard of Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet”, was working for the Rockefeller Foundation as a field botanist in the Bajio, a wheat-growing and wheat-dependent agricultural region of Central Mexico, trying to figure out how to beat the stem rust that afflicted the wheat crop and caused poor yields. His own living conditions in the were rough. The heat was suffocating. The food was lousy. The work itself---planting maize and then inspecting the young plants for stem rust---had to be done on hands and knees and was exhausting and painful. But it’s what he saw of how the farmers lived and how a culture based on centuries of economic abuse and political injustice and nature’s cruelty affected their thinking and their spirits that got to him...

Much worse was the poverty. Borlaug had been poor all his life but always well fed and decently clad. In the Bajio he first encountered  destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational. If Borlaug offered to procure steel plows and hoes, they told him that metal siphoned “heat” from the soil. If he asked about fertilizer, they told him it was a government plot against the farmer. Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair…

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

Ursula LeGuin refuses a prize

Posted Monday night, April 30, 2018.

Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem whom Ursula LeGuin described as “a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man but a courageous one”. LeGuin once turned down the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award in protest of the SFWA’s unjust treatment of Lem. She appreciated the irony of what followed and wrote about it in an essay titled “A Much-Needed Literary Award”. Photo courtesy of Anthology Film Archives via the Village Voice.

My dead writer friend---dead before she became a friend---Ursula LeGuin was amused to discover there was a literary prize given to writers who had turned down other more notable and prestigious literary prizes for a principle. The prize was named after the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre who’d famously turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature for reasons only a philosopher could truly fathom and it was called with elegant simplicity and straight-to-the-pointedness The Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal. LeGuin coveted the award but to win it you had to be offered a prize that it would have been against your principles to accept, which is not in your control. The opportunity to be considered for the Sartre prize did come her way but to her cheerful regret before the Sartre Prize existed:

I refused a prize once. My reasons were mingier than Sartre’s, though not entirely unrelated. It was the coldest, insanest days of the Cold War, when even the little planet Essoff was politically divided against itself. My novelette The Diary of the Rose was awarded the Nebula Prize by the Science Fiction Writers of America. At about the same time, the same organization deprived the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem of his honorary membership. There was a sizable contingent of Cold Warrior members who felt that a man who lived behind the iron curtain and was rude about American science fiction must be a commie rat who no business in the SFWA. They invoked a technicality to deprive him of his membership and insisted on applying it. Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first-rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry of the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership and, feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t to that. So---with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground---my award went to the runner-up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.

---Ursula K. LeGuin, from “A Much-Needed Literary Award”.

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Books by LeGuin, Lem, and Sartre are available in hardcover, paperback, and for kindle at Amazon and as audiobooks from Audible.

Just people vs. people

Posted Friday night, April 27, 2018.

The Trojan War is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek---maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use. I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take side, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged and exalted.

---Ursula Le Guin, from “No Time to Spare”.

Coop was a sweet man

Posted Saturday night, April 7, 2018.

Gary Cooper and my third favorite Bridges, Jeff and Beau’s father Lloyd, as Marshall Will Kane and his unreliable, opportunistic, and rivalrous deputy just before they begin their epic fistfight in “High Noon”,” a scene they would have to film twice, thanks to seven-year-old Beau.

Ken and I are listening to Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon:The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic”. It’s a pretty grim book which isn’t a surprise, considering it’s centered on on one of the most shameful periods in post World War II American history. But it’s not without fun, being also about making movies, and this is one of my favorite moments of fun in the books. In fact, I love this story, mainly because of what it says about Gary Cooper but also because I’m a Bridges fan. All three Bridges. Lloyd, Beau, and especially Jeff. I became a fan of Lloyd when I was a little kid and “Sea Hunt” was one of my favorite Saturday morning TV shows. So I was predisposed to become fans of his sons when I became aware of them. I became a fan of Beau when I was a teenager and he starred as a young Ben Franklin in "The Lives of Benjamin Franklin", one of the most interesting of TV miniseries of the time---five different actors played Franklin at various stages of his life, including Willie Ames, Richard Widmark, Melvin Douglas, and Eddie Albert. I thought Beau was the best.---and  “Gaily, Gaily”, a movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1890s. Jeff was already a movie star but I was later and slower to join his fan club. The movies that made him a star---“The Last Picture Show”, “Fat City”, and “Bad Company” were rated R and I wasn’t allowed to go see them. But then I saw “Rancho Deluxe” and then, with greater appreciation and affection, “Hearts of the West”, another movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1920s. It contained an exchange between Bridges as a would-be novelist and Andy Griffith as a one-time famous one I took to heart and that’s stayed there ever since. “Son,” Griffith says, “You’re not a writer until someone else calls you a writer.” (You can imagine how I felt in grad school when the novelist Fred Busch called me a writer.) After that, it was “Starman”, then “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (which also renewed my fanship for brother Beau), and finally “The Fisher King” that convinced me that Jeff was the greatest movie actor of his generation. (No apologies to Meryl necessary. This is why I contend we need the word actress. It cuts down on wordy clarifications like this one.) But to get back to “High Noon” and the making of “High Noon”:

The last day on location was devoted to filming the fight scene between [Marshal Will Kane and Deputy] Harvey Pell, played by Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges] in the livery stable. Lloyd Bridges says [Cooper, who was fifty and an old fifty] was reluctant to do the scene because his back was hurting and he had other physical ailments as well. But in the end he decided to perform it without a stunt double.

Before the filming began, Bridges smuggled his wife, Dorothy, and his seven-year-old son, Beau, who were visiting the set, up to a hayloft to watch. Lloyd explained to Beau that it would be a pretend fight and no one would get hurt. But when at the end Cooper threw a bucket of water on Beau’s supposedly unconscious dad, the boy burst out laughing. “My father did not tell me he was going to get knocked out,” recalled Beau, himself now a highly respected actor, more than sixty years later. “Then Cooper goes over and throws a bucket of water on him, and I wasn’t ready for that, and I just started cackling and laughing and I destroyed the shot.”

The two men had to film the entire fight scene again. Cooper never uttered a word of complaint.

Beau said his father bawled him out all the way back to the hotel, but when Cooper got on the elevator with them he invited Lloyd and his family to join him for dinner. “He was a sweet man,” Lloyd Bridges would recall”

Bridges, by the way, was a committed ultra-liberal activist who for a very short time was a Communist, which earned him an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named names. Just about everybody named names. If you didn’t you risked being arrested for contempt of Congress and then blacklisted. Actually, naming names didn’t always save people from the blacklist. Bridges wasn’t blacklisted but he was “graylisted.” He had been a young star on the rise but he didn’t work steadily again until he was cast in “Sea Hunt”, eight years later.

I told you it’s a grim book. Very few people come off well in it. But you know who comes out among the best? Cooper. Who was a very conservative Republican.

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“High Noon” by Glenn Frankel is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible. “High Noon” the movie is available for streaming, also at Amazon.

"The dog, he argues from reason."

Posted Wednesday morning, February 7, 2018.

Poirot is definitely onto something. He almost always is. But what really struck me in this passage was that in 1937 when Dumb Witness was published, the mail was still being delivered more than once a day. But then, imagine what it would be like in the back room of the post office if all our DMs, Facebook Messages, and email was still written and sent on paper. By the way, Captain Hastings is narrating, and Captain Hastings is very much a doggy person…

“Is he an old dog?” [I asked.]

“Oh, no, sir.” [replied Ellen the housekeeper.] “Bob’s not more than six. And sometimes he behaves like a puppy. Gets hold of cook’s slippers and prances about with them. And he’s very gentle though you wouldn’t believe the noise he makes sometimes. The only person he has it in for is the postman. Downright scared of him, the postman is.”

Bob was now investigating the legs of Poirot’s trousers. Having learned all he could he gave vent to a prolonged sniff (“H’m, not too bad, but not really a doggy person.”) and returned to me, cocking his head on one side and looking at me expectantly.

“I don’t know why dogs go for postmen, I’m sure,” continued [Ellen].

“It’s a matter of reasoning,” said Poirot. “The dog, he argues from reason. He is intelligent, he makes his deductions according to his point of view. There are people who may enter a house there are people who may not---that a dog soon learns. Eh bien, who is the person who most persistently tries to gain admission, rattling on the door twice or three times a day---and who is never admitted? The postman. Clearly, then, an undesirable guest fro the point of view of the master of the house. He is always sent about his business, but he persistently returns and tries again. Then a dog’s duty, is clear, to aid in driving the undesirable man away, and to bit him if possible. A most reasonable proceeding.”

Poirot beamed on Bob.

“And a most intelligent person, I fancy.”

“Oh, he is, sir. He’s almost human, Bob is.”

---from Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie.

Jean-Paul Sartre, still always wrong

Posted Saturday night, February 3, 2018.

Never been a fan of Sartre, probably because I can’t pronounce his name. But it’s why I find this funny:

In Alix de Saint-Andre’s novel Papa est au Pantheon, the government approaches the daughter of a dashing and dead writer named Berger---a thinly veiled caricature of Andre Malraux---whom the French president has to induct into the Pantheon. The motivation is, well, political. As the director of the Pantheon tells the daughter, few things are more economical than pantheonization. “We bring out the students, bring out the Republican Guard and bring out a new stamp: and all of this costs nothing.” The publicity for the government is free, automatic, and overwhelming. Still, there is a caveat: “You need a good client.” Some “engaged writers” are too Catholic (Charles Peguy and Francois Mauriac), others are too Communist (Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard); one was not enough of resistance fighter (Andre Gide), while another was too much of a flake (Marcel Proust). And Sartre? Forget it, laughs the director: he is “still always wrong.”

---from A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning by Robert Zaretsky.

A novelist's business is lying

Posted Thursday night, February 1, 2018.

Ursula Le Guin on what writers do, particularly science fiction writers, or at least one in particular…

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on - what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that ulocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

---from the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Toby Veck, banged and buffeted, and touzled, and worried, and hustled, and lifted off his feet by the wind

Posted Monday night, January 1, 2017.

One of Dickens’ great talents was that no matter how bad the weather really was, he could make it feel so much worse. He could also make it funny. Here’s poor Toby Veck, whose job as a ticket-porter keeps him outside all day in all weather, dealing with a winter wind:

And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the winter-time, as Toby Veck well knew.  The wind came tearing round the corner—especially the east wind—as if it had sallied forth, express, from the confines of the earth, to have a blow at Toby.  And oftentimes it seemed to come upon him sooner than it had expected, for bouncing round the corner, and passing Toby, it would suddenly wheel round again, as if it cried ‘Why, here he is!’  Incontinently his little white apron would be caught up over his head like a naughty boy’s garments, and his feeble little cane would be seen to wrestle and struggle unavailingly in his hand, and his legs would undergo tremendous agitation, and Toby himself all aslant, and facing now in this direction, now in that, would be so banged and buffeted, and touzled, and worried, and hustled, and lifted off his feet, as to render it a state of things but one degree removed from a positive miracle, that he wasn’t carried up bodily into the air as a colony of frogs or snails or other very portable creatures sometimes are, and rained down again, to the great astonishment of the natives, on some strange corner of the world where ticket-porters are unknown.

---from The Chimes by Charles Dickens.

By the way, The Chimes is usually collected with Dickens' Christmas stories, but it's a New Year's story. (With goblins.) So from Charles Dickens, Toby Veck, the goblins, and all of us here in Mannionville---:Mrs M, Ken, Oliver, and myself---Happy New Year!

Exaggerating his own cleverness

Posted Friday night, December 29, 2017.

Inspector Chrome is speculating about the motives of a serial killer he and Hercule Poirot are chasing, but it sure sounds like he’s describing a certain President of the United States, doesn’t it?

“I think I’ve got the psychology of the case fairly clear. Dr. Thompson will correct me if I’m wrong. I take it that every time A B C brings a crime off, his self-confidence increases about a hundred per cent. Every time he feels ‘I’m clever---they can’t catch me!’ he becomes over-weeningly confident that he also becomes careless. He exaggerates his own cleverness and everyone else’s stupidity. Very soon he’d be hardly bothering to take any precautions at all. That’s right, isn’t it, doctor?"

---from The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie.

But as I’ve said, he’s an all too common type. Which is why it still baffles me that so many supposedly savvy political journalists didn’t recognize him from the get-go and so many still seem to be expecting him to turn into somebody else.

The thing with con artists is they never tell you their story

Posted Tuesday night, December 26, 2017.

Actor and writer Greg Sestero is talking about his enigmatic and emotionally manipulative friend Tommy Wiseau, the director of the cult classic movie The Room, but if this reminds you of a certain President of the United States, it’s because he’s an all too-common type:

I barely paid any attention to Cliff’s play. I spent most of it thinking about Tommy’s eerie behavior. Why was he always so secretive about everything? why did he get so angry that Cliff rang my doorbell? Maybe, I thought, we weren’t friends. Maybe Tommy had somehow conned me the whole time. That’s the thing with con artists. They never tell you their story. They give you pieces of it and let you fill in the rest. They let you work out the contradictions and discrepancies. They let you believe that the things that don’t add up are what makes them interesting or special. They let you believe that in those gaps are the things that hurt and wounded them. But maybe there’s nothing in those gaps. Nothing but your stupid willingness to assume the best of someone.

---from The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero & Tom Bissell.

"The world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now"

Posted Tuesday night, November 21, 2017.

The narrator, who is a writer, is planning a trip to Israel to escape her marriage but she tells he sons she’s going to do research for her next book:

I told him that the book had to do with the Hilton in Tel Aviv, and asked if he remembered the hotel, where we had sometimes stayed with my parents. He shook his head. Unlike my older son, whose memory was like a steel trap, the younger one seemed to recall little of his experience. I chose to think of this not as a native lack, but rather the result of being too absorbed in the invention of other worlds to pay very much attention to what happened in the one world he had so little say in. My older son wanted to know why I needed to research a hotel I had been to so many times, and the younger one wanted to know the meaning of “research.” Naturally they are both artists, my children. After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity. My children’s progressive, highly creative private school was primarily engaged with teaching every child enrolled there to believe that he or she was, and only be, an artist. One day, speaking about my father on the walk to school, my younger son suddenly stopped short and looked up at me in wonder. “Isn’t it amazing?” he asked. “Just think of it. Grandpa is a doctor. A doctor!”

---from Forest Dark by Nicole Kraus.

What places like Singapore are for, according to Hercule Poirot

Posted Saturday night, November 11, 2017.

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Pauline Moran as Poirot’s perfect secretary, the machinelike Miss Lemon in a scene from the mystery series Poirot.

“Your sister?”

Another shock. Poirot had never conceived of Miss Lemon’s having a sister. Or, for that matter, a father, mother, or even grandparents. Miss Lemon, somehow, was so completely machine-made---a precision instrument, so to speak---that to think of her having affections, or anxieties, or family worries, seemed quite ludicrous. It was well known that the whole of Miss Lemon’s heart and mind was given, when she was not on duty, to the perfection of a new filing system which was to be patented and bear her name.

“Your sister?” Hercule Poirot repeated, therefore, with an incredulous note in his voice.

Miss Lemon nodded with vigorous assent.

“Yes,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever mention her to you. Practically her whole life has been spent in Singapore. Her husband was in the rubber business there.”

Hercule Poirot nodded understandingly. It seemed to him appropriate that Miss Lemon’s sister should have spent most of her life in Singapore. That was what places like Singapore were for. The sisters of women like Miss Lemon married men in Singapore, so that the Miss Lemons of the world could devote themselves with machinelike efficiency to their employers’ affairs (and of course to the invention of filing systems in their moments of relaxation).

---from Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie.

Thoreau's poetry pains me too

Posted Sunday night, November 5, 2017.

A hundred and seventy-six years late to the party, but I’m in agreement with Margaret Fuller on this.

Fuller was having none of it. She wrote Thoreau too letters of rejection, each devastating in its own way. “The Service,” she admitted, was rich in thought, but those thoughts were “so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain. I  never once feel myself in the stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic.” Of “Wachusett” she granted a “noble recognition of nature,” two three “manly thoughts,” and a moment of “plaintive music,” but it, too, lacked flow; thoughts were “too detached,” verses were “startling, as much as stern,” unconnected with life; “there is a want of fluent music.” The author seemed, she told Thoreau, “healthful, sane, of open eye, ready hand, of noble scope,” but “as yet a somewhat bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited.” After Fuller spiked “The Service,” Thoreau shelved it for good; it was never published in his lifetime. He salvaged the rugged “Wachusett” only by inserting it, years later, into his essay “A Walk to Wachusett” and then into his self-published first book. Fuller accepted only two more of Thoreau’s poems [for the Dial]: his early, metaphysical verses “Sic Vita” and “Friendship.” The poet Emerson had hailed as America’s purest and loftiest had published, at the end of two years, exactly four poems.

---from Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. 

Thoreau is one of my favorite writers but far from one of my favorite poets. Same goes for Emerson. Both had a profound influence on my own writing and my thinking but their poetry leaves me cold. Too abstract, too Platonic. There’s nothing as concrete in all of Thoreau’s poetry as there is in any single paragraph in his books and journals. Which is odd, because the Transcendentalists considered themselves heirs of the Romantics and their own heirs include the likes of Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. As for Thoreau’s “music” not being “fluent”? I don’t hear any music in his poems at all.