Lance Mannion

"Mother, I'm a Poet!"

Posted Wednesday morning, March 24, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

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

"It was artistic to be these girls..."

Posted early Wednesday morning, February 3, 2021.

Detail from “Il suonatore di liuto (The Lute Player)”, 1612/1620, by Orazio Gentileschi. The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

“...and to be us, in love with them.”

I didn’t need to have read “Lolita” in high school to see and think along these lines, and I hadn’t read it, and wouldn’t get around to it until just before I went off to graduate school, and I’m glad. It meant I saw these girls as themselves and gazed at them through my own eyes and not through Humbert Humbert’s. At least, I’d have thought, to the degree I thought instead of felt, I was seeing them as they were and not as I wanted them to be and I looked at them through my own unfiltered eyes and what I saw was what there really was to see. But these girls, many of whom were my friends, two of whom were my girlfriends, were artistic and were not only worthy of having love poems written to them and of being painted by Italian masters, they wrote poetry and painted and drew and played musical instruments, and, not simply by the way, got better grades than I did...

Across the street, past the Gellatlys’ house, and past their back yard, was the house of my friend Don. He and I read “Lolita” at about the same time. Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “winged gentlemen of the jury,” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School. These girls were like Lolita, with their field-hockey sticks, and book bags, and scuffed knees on the school bus. Lolita starred in a famous, best-selling book by a high-class foreign author. Therefore, the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them, or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn’t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls, and to be us, in love with them. The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl, Lolita, who looked and talked and acted like girls we got to be next to, and hopelessly far from, every day.

---Ian Frazer, “Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me”, in the December 20, 2020 issue of the New Yorker.

With Doctor Blackwell in Geneva

Posted Monday morning, February 1, 2021.

Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman doctor in the United States, uncredited and undated but likely depicting Blackwell as she'd have appeared in the late 19th Century. Courtesy of Hobart and William Smith Colleges via the Finger Lakes Times.

Wednesday is the 200th birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States. Blackwell studied medicine at Geneva Medical College, a department of Geneva College in Geneva, New York, starting in 1847 and graduating in 1849. Geneva College renamed itself Hobart College in 1852. In 1908, William Smith College for Women opened on the Hobart campus. For administrative and business reasons, William Smith was treated as a department of Hobart, but in 1943 it was formally recognized as an independent school, although it still shared facilities and faculty with Hobart. Technically, that’s still the case, but they call themselves by the collective name of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the plural deliberate but quietly elided, which is how they were known when I arrived there to teach in the mid-1990s. Blackwell was then and I think still is Hobart’s most famous and distinguished alum. William Smith claims her too. When I was there her memory was well-honored by both colleges, separately and together. Her name was invoked with reverence and pride. Her story featured prominently in the lore of both schools. In 1994, a statue of her as a student was installed on campus. But I don’t recall hearing this part of the story, although it probably circulated. I wish it had circulated around to me. I’d have enjoyed sharing it with my students. They’d have gotten a kick out of it. Especially the William Smith students, and especially the science majors and pre-meds among them:

Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to Geneva Medical College as a joke. She was twenty-six years old and had already apprenticed herself to two physicians, but she was rejected by more than a dozen schools. The only acceptance letter came from the students of Geneva Medical College, an Episcopal school in upstate New York. Dated October 20, 1847, it contained the following resolutions: “That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class, meets our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.”

Although this promising letter purported to reflect the deliberations “of the entire Medical Class of Geneva Medical College,” it failed to explain why Blackwell’s admission had been relegated to the student body. The answer was that the faculty had opposed it but did not wish to offend one of her recommenders, and so punted the issue to the students. Nor did the letter explain how those students had come to unanimously support her application: aware of the faculty’s opposition, delighted by the prospect of pranking them, and knowing that their decision had to be unanimous, they menaced the only dissenter until he relented. In the end, the motives of Blackwell’s fellow-students did not matter; she set off right away, starting the fall term a few weeks behind the men in her class.

---Casey Cep, “The Blackwell Sisters and the Harrowing History of Modern Medicine”, in the February 1, 2021 issue of the New Yorker.

Like I said, I think all my students, Hobart and William Smith alike, would have enjoyed the idea of their predecessors of a hundred and fifty years back putting one over on the faculty. But I think the William Smith students’ laughter would have been slyer, more knowing, and more tinged with irony. At the time, William Smith was the tougher school. It had higher admission standards and more rigorous degree requirements. William Smith students as a whole had a higher GPA. You went to Hobart because you didn’t get into Colgate. You went to William Smith because who needs Colgate? But you wouldn’t find many Hobart students who’d admit this out loud.

______________________________________________________________________________

One day after class, I was walking out the door with a William Smith student. She was a science major, biology, I think. Very good student, one of the smartest in the class, and one of the best writers. She had something weighing on her mind and had stuck around to ask me a question: Who did I think were smarter, science majors or humanity majors. Being the son of a physicist and the smartest human being I knew, I was quick with my answer, but I was also talking from experience as a teacher: “Science majors, no question.”

I assumed she was bothered by the attitudes of some Hobart students, who as a group had a problem facing the fact that any woman with any major could be smarter than they were. It turned out that her argument was with other William Smith students whom she felt looked down on science majors as mere technicians, laboratory drudges who might know how to light a bunsen burner or prepare a microscope slide weren’t intellectually up to a real liberal arts education. I'd like to imagine things have changed a lot by now. Among women, at any rate.

Joe among the poets

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, November 8, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, November 9.

Thomas Hardy's desk in his study at Max Gate, the cottage he designed and had built in Dorchester, England.

All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.

---from “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney, quoted by Joe Biden in his victory address, Saturday night, November 7, 2020.

Lots of quoting of those lines from Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” blowing through social media these last few days. I wonder how many people doing the quoting know they’re quoting from a play and not a poem---the equivalent of quoting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” or “All the World’s a stage…” without considering their place in “Macbeth” or “As You LIke It”. Biden probably knows where those lines are from. They’re his signature quote. Of course we intellectual and literary types are happy to have a president who reads and reads poetry. People not poetically inclined but know and respect the value of words are almost certainly as glad, if only because they won’t have to listen to Trump speaking in advertising slogans and brand mottos anymore. There’s no poetry in Trump. No music either unless you count jingles. Trump is obsessive in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. There are so many ways Trump is not like Lincoln, here’s one of my favorites: Lincoln loved poetry. Lincoln wrote poetry. He was a poet. The Gettysburg Address and The Second Inaugural are poems.

Happy as I am about Joe’s affection for Heaney, though, I took this bit from Carlos Lozada’s book “What Were We Thinking” as an admonishment to keep things in perspective. Lozada, you probably know, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Washington Post and “What Were We Thinking” is a collection of his essay-length reviews of books about Trump and the political climate in which he sprouted and has come to fruit:

Critics scoff at the president’s literary indifference, often comparing it to his predecessor’s reverence for the written word; Barack Obama receives rapturous coverage every time he promotes a new list of titles purchased from the local indie shop. To the extent Trump relies on books at all, it is to confirm his instincts rather than to challenge his assumptions; to ratify, not edify...Yes, I would be delighted if our president read more books, even more so if they were good one. But of the many concerns I have about Trump, a thin [To Be Read] pile is not one of them. I’d settle for him reading his briefing material. Or the Constitution.

But the reason I’m taken this morning with this poem by Heaney is only coincidentally to do with Lincoln, Biden, or Trump. I did go looking through my copies of “Field Work” and “Station Island” for a poem that would be appropriate to the moment and just to be different.

I’ve been struggling through “The Return of the Native” for over a year now. I started on Melville’s hundredth birthday when I got the idea that in the matter of writing about sex Hardy could be seen as Melville’s successor. Hardy was as realistic and cynical on the subject as Melville was hysterical. Didn’t get very far, either with the idea or reading the book. Picked it up again--the book, not the idea---last month, when I started Adam Nicolson’s, “The Making of Poetry”, Nicolson’s meditation on Wordsworth and Coleridge’s youthful friendship and how they inspired each other in their days living and writing and walking and talking in the Lake District with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and, sometimes, Coleridge’s put-upon wife Sara, and I got another idea: that in their day wandering not at all as lonely as clouds in the north of England they were wandering through Thomas Hardy’s territory in the southwest, literarily and thematically if not geographically. Their letters, journals, and poems were filled with scenes that could have been taken from Hardy’s novels or, rather, that Hardy could have taken for scenes in his novels, Hardy not having published his first story until years after they were both dead, after all. Sara Coleridge, for her part, was living out a Hardy story.

At any rate, you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I picked up "Station Island" and came across Heaney’s “The Birthplace” and read Heaney’s account of his attempts to puzzle out “Return of the Native” while I’m trying to puzzle it out myself, at a different time of life, of course. But Heaney’s description of Hardy’s “deal table where he wrote” reminded me of the small wooden table in my bedroom in the house on Bloomington where I lived my first year in the Workshop:

I

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost-life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees around the house, breathed upon
day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

II

That day, we were like one
of his troubled pairs, speechless
until he spoke for them,

haunters of silence at noon
in a deep lane that was sexual
with ferns and butterflies,

scared at our hurt,
throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
into the damp-floored wood

where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,

and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house.

III

Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?

So we go back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:

birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth,
like unstacked iron weights

afloat among galaxies.
Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light

for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass

verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.

There were dogs to be heard in the neighborhood when I wrote at that table. No roosters that I recall, although on some quiet nights the quacking of ducks as they settled down for the night carried up from the river. (By the way, the picture up top is of Hardy’s desk in his study at Max Gate, the brick “cottage” he designed and built in Dorchester after he’d made some money as an architect.) And Nicolson’s depictions of Coleridge and Wordsworth on their hikes reminded me of you and me taking our hikes around Iowa City, yakking and yakking about anything and everything, including poetry. And the Mets and Red Sox, naturally. I wish we could get together for a walk, and yak.

Editor's note: Tuesday, December 1, 2020: I corrected a typo in the caption on the photo up top, thanks to the keen eye of reader Charles Sperling. See the comments.

Freeman Dyson remembers remembering

Posted Sunday morning, July 26, 2020.

The late mathematician, physicist, public intellectual, and writer Freeman Dyson in 2015. Quanta Magazine, screen capture from "Freeman Dyson: A 'Rebel' Without a Ph.D." on YouTube.

What I wrote in my post last Sunday, “Six Degrees of Separation from Albert Einstein", where I claimed to have an exceptional memory---that wasn’t a boast. Ask anyone who knows me. Names and faces, books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen---and when and where---places I’ve gone, things I did there, who was with me, what we talked about, what they did and said, what I felt, what they felt---and by the way I’m good at reading minds and intuiting moods, too, which I think is due to my good memory. When you ask me if I’ve heard your favorite joke or anecdote before, it’s likely that not only that I have, but I remember every time you told it and remember it better. I’m just usually too polite to say so. It’s not photographic. It doesn’t take dictation. But it remembers the gist. It recalls in extended illustrated summaries with clips and detailed images. If it doesn’t record whole conversations, it keeps detailed notes. It keeps events in order chronologically. I think it works the way most people’s memories work, it simply remembers more and with more clarity. Except when it doesn’t.

The trouble with even the best memories is that memory is unreliable. It plays tricks. It self-edits. It’s suggestible. Memory is a function of mind and mind is a function of the brain and the brain is like every other part of your body, physically vulnerable, subject to all the shocks that flesh is heir to. A tired or injured brain can struggle to recall its owner’s name. An overstimulated brain can remember too much all at once and jumble things up. A healthy brain at its best can still misfire and remember things out of order or out of place and time. It can forget facts and just plain make things up. I believe my own memory most of the time. But I know there are things it forgets to tell me and things it can’t.

Since we’ve been up here at the Old Mannion Homestead, I’ve been spot-reading the late physicist and Nobel Laureate Freeman Dyson’s “Maker of Patterns”, which Dyson called an “Autobiography Through Letters.” I’ve been doing it in, um, memory of Pop Mannion. Dyson was one of Pop’s intellectual heroes and “Maker of Patterns” is a book he’d have liked to have owned. There was one degree of separation between Pop and Dyson, through Hans Bethe, who was one of Dyson’s teachers at Cornell and a lifelong friend, but I don’t think Pop ever met Dyson. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t. If he had he’d have told me when he loaned me his copy of “The Starship and the Canoe”, and I’d have remembered that. But he liked what he knew of him as a person and a thinker through his writing and he would have been sad to hear of his death this past February at the too young age of ninety-six. “Maker of Patterns” would have confirmed Pop’s good opinion of the man and the scientist. But he would have observed ironically that the book went on one letter too long. The letters that make up the book were written between 1941 and 1978: “the first half of my adult life”. Dyson says he stopped there to keep the book “short and readable”---it’s still 383 pages---and because that’s about when the scientifically productive and politically active part of his life had wound down. “The letters continued for thirty more years, but the second half of a life is usually more interesting than the first. I believe it was Rudyard Kipling who said a man should get half his dying in before forty.” The last letter in “Maker of Patterns” is dated June 15, 1978. The second to last is dated April 27---Pop’s birthday.

“Letters,” Dyson says in his introduction, “are valuable witnesses to history because they are written without hindsight.” The letters that compose the book were all written close in time to the events they relate, usually within a few days afterward, some of them during those events when Dyson would take advantage of a break in the action to dash off a letter or continue one he had started already.

That makes “Maker of Patterns” a fairly reliable record, but still more a record of Dyson’s impressions at the time. Then to tie the letters together into a cohesive narrative Dyson had to write passages between the letters (short, in some cases just a couple of sentences), which not only complicated the writing, it meant leaving out salient facts. Those transitional passages have the job of putting the letters in context, filling in details, giving background, introducing characters, recapping events, and summarizing debates and the issues---intellectual, scientific, philosophic, political, literary, aesthetic, and moral---that stirred those debates, and where he couldn’t find outside sources to help with that, Dyson had to rely on his memory---the memory of a still very sharp but still very old nonageneration looking back over the expanse of time and trying to recall what was happening as far back as forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy odd years ago.

He gets many things wrong. He knows that, and admits it straight away in the introduction: “When I compare my memories to the letters, I see that I not only forget things , I also remember things that never happened.” And he tells this anecdote by way of an apology and a warning to paying customers expecting a traditionally self-assured memoir and, I suspect with chagrin, readers inordinately proud of their own prodigious memories. Don’t @ me.

Dyson:

A striking example of a false memory was a lunch party in 1958 at the home of Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty. Two other couples were there, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his wife Ursula...and the retired diplomat George Kennan and his wife Annelise...After lunch we sat around a glowing wood fire in the living room. Oppenheimer pulled a beautiful leather-bound volume from his bookcase and read a poem, “The Pulley” by George Herbert (1633), in a beautifully cadenced voice. George Kennan had not known Herbert’s poetry before. Oppenheimer said it was high time for the two Georges to get to know each other. Then he turned to Ursula Niehbur and said, “But you of course know him well.” It turned out that George Herbert was a distant ancestor of Ursula. Oppenheimer then continued to read other poems of Herbert, and so the afternoon continued with personal warmth and poetry around the fireside. I have a vivid memory of sitting with that group around the fireside. Recently I was reading some old letters and found one written long ago by Ursula Niebuhr, describing that lunch party and confirming my memory. Every detail of my memory is correct except for one. I was not there. My memory has somehow stolen that scene from Ursula and put me into it. (Dyson xiv)

Here’s a secret of my own prodigious memory: I look stuff up on the sly. Out of curiosity, I looked up the scene Dyson falsey remembered in Ray Monk’s biography of Oppenheimer and George Kennan’s own idiosyncratic exercise in memoir, “Sketches From a Life”. At any rate, I tried to look them up. Kennan makes several cameo appearances in Monk’s book but there’s no sign of Annalise Kennan or the Niebuhrs in the index, or of George Herbert either. And Kennan’s book doesn’t have an index. Just flipping through, I didn’t see any entries from the relevant time period, the late 1940s when Kennan and Oppenheimer met and became friends. But! I did look up the poem Dyson “remembered” Oppenheimer reading to the friends gathered around that fireside, and here it is...

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”

--- “The Pulley” by George Herbert.

"The Killing of a Colorado Rancher": Fact as fiction, fiction as fact

Posted Wednesday morning, July 15, 2020.

Detail from an illustration by Hokyoung Kim for “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, a story by Rachel Monroe in the April 2020 issue of the Atlantic.

Our families are supposed to be the people who know us best, but that often isn’t the case. Sometimes the hardest people to see clearly are the ones we’re closest to.

After the discovery of Jake’s body, and the multiple and confusing confessions from his family members, what seemed to upset his friends most was how they mischaracterized Jake. According to Deb, her son was a drug addict and a drunk, a violent MMA fighter, someone who physically assaulted her and threatened to kill his sister and her family. According to Steph, Jake was a worthless waste of space, lazy and useless. No wonder Jake clung so strongly to his friends. His chosen family was perfectly aware of his flaws—his stubbornness, his arrogance—but equally attuned to his loyalty, generosity, and dedication…

---from “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” by Rachel Monroe.

Couple years ago, in August of 2018, the week after Pop Mannion's funeral, I was looking at a stack of books I’d inherited from Pop. It stood nearly waist high and included "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov", "The Complete Short Stories"" by Muriel Spark, several collections of stories by John Updike, several more by Stephen Millhauser, and one each by T.C. Boyle and Julian Barnes,.

After studying them perplexedly and with indecision, trying to think if I would keep all of them and where would I put the ones I kept, what would I have to clear from the bookshelf to make space for them, what would I do with the books I took down, and, most pressingly, when would I have time to read any of the new ones? After brooding for a minute, I reflexively reached for the book on the top of the stack, the Nabokov and opened to the table of contents, seeing if a story title caught my eye. As I did, I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “here’s the deal. What I’m going to do is read a story a day, from one book or another, every morning, and when I’ve gone through them all, I'll go back and do it again. I figure it will take me at least a year, and we’ll see where that gets us when we get there.”

The self I was talking to and making the deal with was my forty-year-old self. That’s the self who, finally discouraged by rejection notices, broken-heartedly gave up writing fiction and with that reading any fiction he wasn’t paid to review. The deal for the moment was only for me to read that one story a day, but implicit was that doing so might lead to me, my present self, might try my hand at writing short stories, picking up where he’d left off. I had his notebooks and a goodly number of unfinished drafts of stories he’d started, and this, I fantasized, might be a way for him to get back to doing something he’d loved. So I started to read the first story in the Nobokov collection right then and there.

I have to admit, in the two years since, I’ve been less than diligent about keeping to the terms of our deal. My forty year old self has grounds to sue. But I have been reading short stories, for my own pleasure as well as his. Not that many. Certainly not one a day or even every other day. Averaged out, it’s been at most one every couple of weeks. (I’ve also been secretly writing short stories. My own too. Not revisions of his left-overs.) And not all the ones I’ve read---in fact just a handful of them---have been ones in that set of books. Our deal didn’t specify they all needed to be. At any rate, I just finished one this morning. It wasn’t in a book. It was in a magazine---the Atlantic. A very good one by a writer I hadn’t read before. Rachel Monroe. It’s called “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, and it reminded me of stories by Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, and T.C. Boyle. The difference between Monroe’s story and theirs is that theirs are fictions. Hers is journalism and all facts.

A thing I’ve come to believe over time is that journalists can tell better stories than most fiction writers and fiction writers can tell stories that contain more truth than even some of the best journalism. To put it simply, both fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same line of work, describing and explaining the condition and problems of being a human being living among other human beings, and that what they write both count as literature. Hardly an original insight, but it was a salutary one for me, and I wish I’d come to it before I went to Iowa for my MFA.

At any rate, I think Monroe’s story counts as a short story and a good one. But see what you think. Here’s the opening to get you started:

It was weird that no one had heard from Jake Millison in a few days.

Maybe someone who didn’t know him, an outsider to Gunnison, a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo. But Jake’s friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine. If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, he’d text you on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid kits. He definitely wasn’t the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type.

Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his family’s property just outside Gunnison. He’d drive into town most evenings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke, because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close-knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. They’d shoot pool for a couple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. “Everything was like clockwork with him,” his friend Antranik Ajarian told me.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2015—five days since anyone had heard from Jake—his friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway, then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk, and moose, testaments to the property’s glory days as a hunting camp. They didn’t see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo.

In the horse corral, they spotted Jake’s mother, Deb, a wiry woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasn’t responding to their texts because he’d dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with them…

To read Monroe’s whole story, follow the link to “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” at the Atlantic.

Backyard postcard. Saturday morning, June 20, 2020: A tree no longer grows in the woods

Lifted from the album and mined from the notebooks, Saturday morning, June 20, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, July 1.

Saturday, June 20, 2020.

You know what you’re looking at here, right? I mean beside the rotted-out, insect-hollowed stump of a God knows how many years old silver maple? The halfway point of the longest walk I’ve taken since March of 2019. That’s when I had my last appointment with my back surgeon and he declared me well on the mend, finally, two and a half years since he cut me open and went to work on my senescent lower vertebrae, and discharged me with the cheerful instruction never to darken his consulting room again. Naturally, shortly after that, I began developing new back problems. It was like the warranty on the surgery had run out like the warranty on a car or an expensive household appliance.

The symptoms were different this time. For one thing, there wasn’t the same crippling pain running down my leg. There wasn’t any pain. What there was was weakness, in my legs and my back. I couldn’t stand or sit for useful lengths of time, and I couldn’t walk farther than from the house out to the car without risking collapse on the way.

I assumed the problem was muscular and the muscles still needed to heal. I figured I’d get stronger with time. The problem was I wasn’t doing what I needed to do to get stronger---exercise. I’d quit going to physical therapy in January of 2017 because that’s when Mrs M began developing her symptoms and I needed to devote all my time to taking care of her. (Amazingly, my back held me up for the eleven weeks she was in the hospital. Maybe it’s not so amazing.)

This too much sharing? My brother Luke reported the other day he’s joined the Bad Back Club after tossing around a waterlogged forty-pound bag of fertilizer like it was ten pounds of feathers or he was thirty. I told him that the first rule of Bad Back Club is the opposite of Fight Club’s---you talk about it all the time.

At any rate, in the five months left of 2018 after she came home in July and continuing through all of last year, I was spending hours every day in the car driving Mrs M to her many doctors’ and therapy appointments and sitting in the car was always hard on my back. The trips got fewer and shorter after last Christmas, and I expected the time spent not driving would be time spent resting and regaining my strength.

I did a lot of the first. None of the second.

Things got worse. By February I was a near-invalid. Oliver Mannion pushed me to see our family doctor. He sent me in with a long list of symptoms to present to Dr B. Dr B referred me for X-rays and a nerve test, and then he’d decide, after he’d studied the results, he’d whether he would give me a new referral for my back surgeon or for another kind of specialist. Like I said, that was in February. I dutifully set up an appointment for the X-rays right away. I scheduled them for the third week of March.

You can guess why I cancelled them.

Since we evacuated to the Homestead at the beginning of April, my back had been getting even worse. But the other day something finally dawned on me.

The Homestead sits on a half-acre of lawn and woods. Without even venturing into the woods, by just taking a couple of laps around the house, I could hike pretty far---for me---and if I collapsed at any point one or the other or both of the Mannion guys would eventually miss me and come looking. So that’s what I did this morning---minus the collapsing.

Which is how I wandered my way out to the stump.

Almost certainly this tree was there at the back of the backyard and old enough its top branches cleared those of the locusts that stood around it when Mom and Pop Mannion claimed the family homestead in 1962 and it shaded our backyard games and adventures into the woods whose frontier it helped mark. But I have no particular memory of it. In those days, there were many more trees lining the backyard and making up the woods. The woods were expanding, in fact, taking over the yard by the foot every year, swallowing the sandbox and reducing the length of our touch football field---by touch we meant careful of our grip when we played tackle, when we were sure Mom Mannion wasn’t watching out the kitchen window. In the years since I moved out and went a-roving and a college-ing and a marry-ing and a-teaching and a-parenting and a-growing olding on my own, Mom and Pop cut back the trees and the undergrowth and reclaimed some of the yard from the woods, revealing the tree that no longer grows at the edge of the woods.

I noticed it on a visit last fall, and what I noticed was the whole tree lying horizontally across the length of the boundary of our yard and the backyard of neighbors behind. A storm had brought it down. The removal of the remains was the subject of several months of negotiation between my brother Lyle, who has the management of the Homestead, and the neighbors. They worked it out to neither’s complete satisfaction, and here you see the result, and here the story ends.

Honk and Circumstance

Posted Monday morning, May 18, 2020.

Gabrielle Pierce, Xavier University of Louisiana Class of 2020, at her driveway graduation ceremony in front of the stage and podium rented for the occasion by her father Torrence Burson. Gabrielle told CBS’ Steve Hartman that she thinks her commencement was “better than a regular one.” Image courtesy of Gabrielle Pierce via CBS News.

Saturday afternoon, on our way back to the Homestead after checking on the Mannion Ranch to make sure it was still standing and had not been taken over by squatters or squirrels, we swung by the SUNY New Paltz so Ken, masked and gloved, could drop off some books in the library drop box. While I waited in the car for him to return I watched a group of no longer college students posing for each other’s cameras by the outdoor stairs leading up to the main campus in bright blue caps and gowns. It should have been the day of their formal graduation. Instead they had to formalize their graduation themselves. It was a perfect day for it, bright and sunny, not too hot, but warm enough they didn’t have to wear jackets or sweaters under their robes. In fact they all seemed to have on their prettiest sundresses. There were six or seven of them---they moved around, switching places and taking turns as photographer, I couldn’t keep count---I don’t know what their connections were, housemates who stayed in town although classes had moved online, sorority sisters, just a group of friends, or simply classmates who’d arranged the photo op via social media. They were having a great good time, enjoying each other’s company, smiling broadly and laughing heartily. I’m sure the pictures they took came out beautifully. What could I do?

I stepped out of the car---they were about twenty social distances away---and standing by the door I honked the horn several times in as friendly a fashion as I could. When they looked over to see what the matter was, I applauded them heartily. They gave me big smiles, waved, and yelled thank you.

I’m guessing they would have preferred a traditional graduation day (although I don’t know that. They looked awfully proud and happy), although it probably would have included a moment like the one I was witnessing, only with family and guy friends around cramping their style. But I’d bet what they really missed was the real fun of the final weeks of classes leading up to commencement: the parties, the get-togethers, the just hanging out, the last chance to be together as classmates, roommates, housemates, castmates, clubmates, teammates, just plain mates, and friendly rivals, and, for many for whom the coming absences were already making their hearts grow fonder, actors-out of that fondness.They missed the group hugs and goodbyes. And they were probably regretting that they would not be celebrating as a class and have the opportunity to hear themselves applauded by a large crowd of strangers who for the moment it took them to receive their diplomas were no longer strangers.

But twenty years from now they will likely remember their graduation day more vividly than members of the Class of 2019. I hope those memories will be filled with more consolation than regret.

Yesterday CBS Sunday Morning had a story about how graduates themselves and their friends, families, teachers, neighbors, and communities are doing things to make graduation day special and memorable. My favorite, because I’m a dad, was the dad who built a stage with podium in the driveway and presented his daughter with her diploma himself in front of an audience of family and friends who parked their cars at the curb and stood (the proper social distance apart) at the edge of the lawn to cheer and applaud. But many of the improvised “ceremonies” looked like fun, a lot more fun than graduation ceremonies I’ve attended or ones I took part in. I didn’t enjoy my own high school graduation, mainly because I felt like I was somehow making a fool of myself in front of my girlfriend---the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson, not the one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery---but then often felt like a fool around her, even though she didn’t ever seem to think I was a fool, although she wasn’t circumspect about pointing it out when I was being foolish. But the other big reason I didn’t enjoy it was that it didn’t feel like my graduation. It felt like I was crashing. That’s because most of my best friends had graduated the year before and most of the rest were a class or two behind me, that includes my girlfriends. The one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery was a year ahead of me. The one who looked like Scarlett Johansson was two years behind me. I had a much more fun at the former’s graduation. (Uncle Merlin was in that class too.) But what I remember most vividly about that day was the visit to the hospital our gang made on the way to the ceremony to visit one of us who would not be making her scheduled graduation because she was recovering from a car accident she’d been in the night before. The car was totaled; fortunately, she was not.

Mrs M remembers her high school and college graduations with pleasure. She would, the little summa cum laude. Ken remembers his high school graduation day with pride, as he should, considering what a struggle he had getting through high school. He earned very good grades but it wasn’t easy for him. Oliver remembers his high school commencement as hot and boring. His college graduation, though, was something worse---his mother couldn’t be there, and neither could I. We watched it online from her hospital room. Two years ago tomorrow.

To end on a cheerier note, one of my brave, strong, and good-looking nephews (a description of all my nephews and nieces) was scheduled to graduate from SUNY New Paltz Saturday too, my sister Linda’s son and my godson. The students taking their pictures Saturday may have been Z’s friends. His housemates, all guys, are friends with a houseful of girls, and the girls stayed in town while the guys evacuated three weeks ago. Linda wishes Z and his housemates had arranged something similar, with or without their female pals. But that’s why women are going to rule the world when they finally push all the past all the lazy and complacent and self-privileged men standing smugly in their way.

The college is holding a virtual commencement this Friday, but congratulations ahead of time to Z and the rest of the Class of 2020! When you hear a car honking as it passes by your house Friday, that’ll be us, your aunt, your cousins, and me.

______________________________________________________________________________

To watch and read the Sunday Morning story, follow the link to “Parents and teachers pull out the stops to ensure memorable graduations for Class of 2020” at CBS. The plans to hold ceremonies in drive-ins strike me as unimaginative and sad. But the plan to let graduates drive their cars on the Indianapolis Speedway sounds like a blast.

There’s also a more serious companion piece looking at how this year’s high school and college graduates are facing the open question “What happens now?”---”For the Class of 2020, a graduation season like no other”. One of the students featured is still determined to start med school in the fall. She feels even more needed now. I think choosing to be a doctor now is like volunteering for the military during a war. It certainly shows more of a warrior spirit than storming the booths at your favorite diner without a mask.

Where to find Pop Mannion's ghost on his days-off from looking after Mom

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday afternoon, April 15, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, May 3.

Report from today’s long explore. Wednesday, April 15, 2020:

West by southwest of here it gets hilly.

Not far to the north, east, and south are mountains---the Adirondacks, the Berkshires and Taconics, the Catskills, and the Poconos. Due west things level out, as the Thruway hugs the banks of the Mohawk-Erie canal, and the terrain from the eastern outskirts of Utica all the way into Syracuse is as flat and featureless to my prejudiced eyes bored by many trips to and from Syracuse. as any stretch of the Midwest. In fact, I think of that stretch of flatness, dullness, and grayness and coldness---it’s the snowiest region in the state, snowier than Buffalo---as the beginning of the Midwest, geographically, economically, and culturally.

But the hills we were exploring don’t feature in my mental map of New York State.

Long, long time since I’d been out here. Even when I was growing up we rarely made it out here. In fact, I have only two clear memories of having been out this way, both are from high school, one is happy, one is dispiriting, neither was triggered by anything we saw on our drive. It was the place names that recalled them, not the landscape.

I suppose geographers would call these foothills of the Catskills. But to my untrained eye the area looks like a place where the glaciers just sort of casually bumped through on their way south and then on their way back, leaving the landscape looking like a badly made bed with a lumpy mattress and sprung springs, a homely metaphor to describe some beautiful views: long downward and upward curves through hills and valleys covered with meadows just turning green, woods full of mostly bare trees just beginning to flower, and here and there punctuated with small clusters of one and two story buildings, houses and businesses, that can only be generously called towns, and here and there a barn, a cowshed, a farmhouse.

Driving in the mountains you can’t see the mountains for the mountainsides, cliff faces, and ravine bottoms around you and closing you in. Out here the hills are always in sight. When you crest one set of hills you look out at the next set rolling and rising ahead of you.

At the summit of one steeper hill is a Presbyterian church matter-of-factly calling itself Christ’s Church of the Hills. Its address is Schenectady County but it might as well be Grover’s Corners for all the sense there is of the city that’s home to General Electric’s main plant being nearby. The church is closed because of the coronavirus and services are taking place online. On the marquee out front it says ‘Faith, Hope, Love, and Patience, Especially Now.”

I didn’t mean to drive us this far west. I had a turn-around destination closer to the Old Mannion Family Homestead in mind when I set course, but I misremembered the route, overshot it, and I had to guess my way back around. Took an hour or so, traveling in a wide circle to the west, north, and finally eastward to one of Pop Mannion’s signature building projects: The Mabee Farm Historic Site on the southern bank of the Mohawk River in the nearby village of Rotterdam.

Pop was a builder. His most significant architectural achievement was the new town hall, twenty-five years ago, but looking as handsome, square-lined, pointed, clean-bricked, and brightly trimmed as it did the day he stood out front and dedicated it. Pop intended it to be built to last as long as the buildings on the campus of the University of Virginia his second-favorite president and inspiration designed and built have lasted. He built two parks, and a bike path, and helped build a boat. He had his hand in the construction, renovation, remodeling, and expansion of more than half a dozen buildings around the county, including the county nursing home he was in until the day before he had to be moved to the hospital where he died. “I sign your checks,” he joked to one of the doctors at the nursing home, before the pain and the pain-medication took away his lucidity, and he could still remember that he’d been the treasurer for the committee.

The boat building took place when he was president of the Schenectady County Historical Society, one of the jobs he held in his stint as the most unretired retired man in town. The Onrust was built in the big Dutch barn on the grounds of Mabee Farm. During his tenure as president, he oversaw the restoration and repurposing of the farm buildings and the expansion of the property. The boat building was really the work of other organizations and Pop had little to do with it beside making sure the barn and the grounds met the needs of the boatwrights and the boatwrights respected the interests of the Historical Society. But he was proud it was happening on his watch and he took more than a landlord’s interest.

In the first few months after Pop died, Mom Mannion moved into her new digs at the memory care facility and we began using the homestead as the family B&B, concerned relatives and friends would routinely ask if we didn’t feel Pop’s ghost haunting our visits. Usually my answer was a noncommittal "Not really." I didn’t answer “I don’t believe in ghosts.” I certainly didn’t answer “I don’t believe in life after death.” But if I had I would have added that if I did, I wouldn’t believe Pop was haunting the house. He’d be too busy watching out for Mom over at her place. And if he needed a break and some time to himself, he wouldn’t choose to visit the house. He wouldn’t go to his favorite places, Cape Cod and Lake George, either, because he couldn’t bring Mom. So where would he go?

I think here...

Pop Mannion showing Uncle Merlin around the grounds of the Mabee Farm Historic Site in December 2011, back when Pop was president of the County Historical Society and the farm was his lookout and one of his favorite places to spend a day.

"Mistah Christian! MIS-TAH Christian!"

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday night, April 15.

Let me get this straight. Andrew Cuomo is Clark Gable and he’s Charles Laughton?

Tell the Democrat Governors that “Mutiny On The Bounty” was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!

---Donald “Captain Bligh” Trump on Twitter, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Do you really want the link?

What’s too easy is noting that Captain Bligh is the bad guy in the movie---movies. The question he leaves open is which of the two most famous ones was his favorite.

He might mean the 1935 version with Clark Gable as the lead mutineer Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as the tyrannical Captain Bligh. He might mean the 1962 version starring Marlon Brando as Christian and Trevor Howard as Bligh.

It strikes me as unlikely he means the 1984 version, which was called simply “The Bounty”, in which Mel Gibson played Christian and Anthony Hopkins played Bligh. In 1984, Trump was probably too busy building his reputation as a celebrity real estate developer, enviable rich guy, and playboy to get to the movies as often as he might have liked. By that time, too, he was happier mingling with movie stars, and acquiring notoriety and fame by association, than watching them do their jobs on screen while all around him in the movie theater was ignoring his existence. But like I would know.

In 1984, I was in grad school way out yonder in Iowa. New York City only mattered to us as the home of the magazine and book publishers that were going to have the honor of discovering us and making us famous. Donald Trump didn’t catch my attention until 1988, when I was a newly wedded husband so besotted by my cute and frisky young wife to notice much else in the immediate world around me let alone what was happening way back east in New York City. News that there was a Donald Trump in the world only reached me through Doonesbury and our pal Nance’s subscription to Spy.

Still, in “The Bounty”, Bligh is the good guy and real hero, or, any rate, he’s heroic, while Christian is a feckless neurotic who mutinies in a moment of moral panic, and more sympathetic emphasis is put on the two men’s friendship. Their friendship is based on their mutual admiration for each other’s skill as seamen. So, maybe…

But in all three versions the mutineers need the same thing from the captain: water! Bligh cuts the crew’s ration in order to save his precious cargo of breadfruit he’s intending to import to from Tahiti to Jamaica as cheap fodder to feed slaves---”The Bounty” glosses over this point.

It’s fun to think he’s mixed up “Mutiny on the Bounty” with “The Caine Mutiny” and the captain he’s identifying with is the paranoid and incompetent Captain Queeg. I mean, we’re all thinking along those lines already, aren’t we?

Mulling it over, however, he probably means the 1962 version of “Mutiny on the Bounty”. Unless it played at some second-run house in Queens when he was a kid, the likeliest way he’d have seen the Gable-Laughton version at the time was on TV where it would have been pan and scanned and riddled with commercials. It’s possible but not likely it would have made a deep impression on him. The 1962 Brando-Howard version came out when he was sixteen, and I can imagine the teenage version of himself seeing it on the big screen and being enthralled. It’s not a very good movie but it looks gorgeous and it’s romantic and sensual and sexy, and I can see him imagining himself as Brando as Christian.

Brando played Christian as an 18th Century playboy, a rake, a charmer, a dandy, a sensualist, and a not very repressed hedonist who needs only the mildest psychological shove to give in and go native. He also looks more than just in passing like a young Donald Trump---like the young man sixteen year old Donald would have flattered himself he’d grow up to be.

Of course, there’s something else about that version that would have captured the sixteen year old Donald’s imagination and stuck with him for the next sixty years…

I can’t really blame him. After all, Tarita, who played Brando’s love interest Miamiti, captured the young Brando’s imagination and she’s the reason he, like Christian, went native on Tahiti.

Ok, that was fun, but it’s time to call it a night. A last note and a confession before I go, however. My introduction to the existence of “Mutiny on the Bounty” as a movie and a story was thanks to Bugs Bunny. And when I was a little kid I had a “Mutiny on the Bounty” coloring book that was a tie-in to the Brando-Howard version. I don’t recall what my feelings were when I wore out my crayons coloring in the outlines of Tarita and her carefully arranged leis and just long enough sarongs. Whatever they were they were probably subliminal, but still, I’m sure coloring her in for the first time was a sexually constellating moment. And aren’t you glad I shared that?

Last image, because Gable and Laughton are still the best and you know you want to take the image of Gable with his shirt off to bed with you...

Why old man Theroux went to Mexico, and why old man me is contemplating making my own road trip there

Posted Sunday morning, March 1, 2020.

“A trickle here in the dry season”: Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux walks along the culvert that contains the Rio Grande as it flows through Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, near the beginning of his road trip through Mexico, the subject of his most recent travel book, “On the Plain of Snakes”. Copyrighted photo by Steve McCurry, courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Barron’s.

Maybe what I need is a car trip through Mexico…

Knowing the risks that migrants took emboldened me, and hearing nothing but ignorant opinion about Mexicans, from the highest office in America to the common ruck of barflies and xenophobes (maybe disinhibited by their bigoted leader), I decided to take a trip to Mexico. I studied the map. I had no status except my age, but in a country where the old are respected, that was enough---more than enough.

And a further crucial consideration related to my age: how long would I be able to drive alone in my car over great distances, through the deserts and towns and mountains of Mexico? After you’re seventy-six, you need to renew your license every two years. If I failed the eye test next time, my driving days would be over. Knowing that I had limited time---my license with a use-by date---urged me on. My car had served me well in the South, so I contemplated an improvisational road trip along the border and the length of Mexico, from the frontier to Chiapas, with the kind of excitement I felt as a young man.

---Paul Theroux, from “On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey”.

Post script: Old as I am and as in need of feeling the kind of excitement I felt as a young man, I'm still a lot younger than the 79 year old Theroux and don't have to worry about passing the eye exam to renew my license, In fact, I just did---passed the eye exam and renewed my license. So I've got another eight years to make my own road trip.

Connected reading: Ok, man of judgment

By way of a eulogy for Roger Kahn

Lifted from the archives, March 6, 2005. Posted Monday morning, February 10, 2020.

The late journalist, legendary baseball writer, author, teacher, and literary elf on my bookshelf Roger Kahn in 1990. Kahn died the other day. He was 92. Photo by Suzanne DeChillo, courtesy of the New York Times.

One of the best sportswriters who ever was, one of the best there will ever be, and one of the writers who had the most influence on me when I was young and who probably helped me set the tone and style for the blog when I wasn’t so young and who’s probably still at work at that, Roger Kahn, died the other day. He was 92. Kahn was best known for his book “The Boys of Summer” but the book of his that probably taught me the most about writing was “How the Weather Was”, a collection of his work on a wide-range of subjects I read when I was 14. The second of his books that taught me the most still wasn’t “The Boys of Summer”. It was called “Beyond the Boys of Summer” which I read when I was approaching 50. Kahn lived around here, taught classes now and then at nearby SUNY New Paltz, but I only met him once, and it was in a crowd. He came to read from that book, tell stories, and talk about his long and still ongoing writing and reporting career at a local and long-since defunct bookstore and I went to listen and to get a copy of “Beyond the Boys of Summer” signed for Pop Mannion who was also a fan. This was in spring of 2005, my first full year of blogging, There’s no doubt seeing and listening to Kahn inspired me to try to make more of the blog than an online diary. I got five posts out of that night. Here’s one of them, by way of a eulogy…

Roger Kahn's new book is an anthology of his writing, some of it excerpts from his books, some of it magazine articles, all of it good.  It could be called The Roger Kahn Reader or The Almost Portable Roger Kahn. Instead it's called Beyond the Boys of Summer, a title chosen to remind potential buyers of his most famous book and to suggest that there's been more to Kahn's career than nostalgia for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But I already knew that. I'd read just about everything that's in this book before there was this book, except for the introductions and the excerpts from his novels.  Probably everybody else who was in Ariel Books in New Paltz last night to hear him read and reminisce had read as much, or nearly as much, of Kahn's work as I have.   You read some, you're going to read more. And I wish we all could have gone out for a beer together afterwards so that I could've started an argument over which is his best book.

I don't think it's “The Boys of Summer”.

His best book, I think, is A Flame of Pure Fire, his biography of Jack Dempsey.

My favorite book by him, though, is called How the Weather Was, a previous collection of his writing, mostly essays and articles, that I read when I was 14.   I still think of that as the best titled book in the world, even though I know that's the part of me that's still 14 and just finishing up his first grown up book of non-fiction talking.

But my 14 year old self must have known a few things, because other books he read at that age still don't excite him when I ask for the kid’s literary opinion.

But I remember being disappointed when I started reading it, because I was expecting a book about baseball.  I had decided to read it as a warm up to “The Boys of Summer”, which I knew my father had loved and which therefore I must have thought of as a book that required my father's wisdom, experience, maturity, and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers to understand and appreciate.  So I was trying to educate myself to get ready to read the book I really wanted to read when I picked up “How the Weather Was”.

If I'd known anything at the time I might have been warned by the title that something more than baseball was the subject.  I might have recognized that Kahn had taken his title from Hemingway.

All good books [Hemingway said] are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

At any rate, when I was done I didn't think of Roger Kahn as a sportswriter, at least not only a sportswriter, and nothing I've read by him since has convinced me I was wrong. So although it's probable that I wasn't the most well-read Kahn fan in the room last night, I'll bet I was one of only a few who wasn't surprised when Kahn began his reading last night not with talking about the Dodgers or his friend Jackie Robinson or even about Jack Dempsey. He started off talking about Robert Frost.

Which is to say that he started off talking about writing.

Long time ago, Kahn met and got to be friendly with Robert Frost. He wrote about some of their conversations and Frost never minded what he wrote. He had only one request, that Kahn not write about things Frost said about other poets.

Kahn wanted to know why not.

"Because I'm a poet not a critic," Frost said.

Everything else was on the record.

Last night Kahn went back and forth easily from reading to talking off the cuff and it was hard to tell when he was doing one or other.  I never caught him looking down at the page for more than a few seconds at a time. He acted stories out too, stepping away from the lectern to give himself stage room, and did the different voices.  So I was surprised to find in the intro to his book that this story about Frost speaking to some students appears word for word as Kahn told it in the bookstore last night. I thought he was improvising.

I once watched Robert Frost, by nature a friendly sort, virtually dismember an overly aggressive student who wanted to know what a particular poem meant.

"It means what it says."  [Kahn did Frost as a growling dog.]

"Well," the student said, "I know what it means to me but I don't know what it means to you."

"Maybe I don't want you to."

"Could you explain the poem please?"

"Do you want me to state it in worse English?"

Frost, Kahn concluded, "Left his ardent idolater distraught but also perhaps with a first clue as to how writers function and think.  Most writers look on their work as Frost did. It means what it says. As the wise comedian Fred Allen once put it, 'If you have to explain a joke, don't.'"

Kahn recently taught a class at SUNY New Paltz and he told us about how on the first day of class he had brought up Ernest Hemingway and been startled that the name met with a lot of blank stares. When he tried to tell them about who Hemingway was and in mentioning “For Whom the Bell Tolls” he explained that the title came from a sermon by John Donne he was faced with a whole lot more blank stares.

Kahn didn't tell this story to tell us how much dumber than all us grown ups 18 and 19 year olds are.  He told it to brag. He was proud. He said he told the class, "Someday, many years from now, you're going to remember with joy that you first heard the names Ernest Hemingway and John Donne in a class at SUNY New Paltz."

Since the class ended he's been receiving emails and letters from former students asking him what else they should read. "Should I read this guy? How about this book?  What other books should I be reading now?"

Kahn is a little dapper elf, and the whole half of his face under his long nose is an elfin grin. The grin got bigger as he said that and you could see that he was pleased with himself. And why not? He was proud of the fact that he had put John Donne and Ernest Hemingway into the heads of a couple dozen young people. He might have been a little bit sneakily vain that in years to come that the name Roger Kahn would be in their heads alongside the other two, but he didn't care. He cared that he'd given them some things to read for the rest of their lives.

"The infinite spirit of his half-broken heart..."

Posted Monday morning, December 16, 2019.

Detail from “Blue Bonnets and Cactus in the Rain, San Antonio, 1914” by Julian Onderdonk, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, via San Antonio Magazine.

The poet David Biespiel is an old college friend of Mrs M’s and of mine by lucky association. I have a lot of friends I’ve acquired that way. David was Mrs M’s housemate back in our Boston days. He was quiet and unassuming and somewhat diffident as poets go. I didn’t know many working poets in those days but I was soon off to Iowa where I met and befriended and was taught by and played touch football with many poets and there was hardly a minute in their company when you weren’t aware they were poets. They talked a good, loud, vociferous, show-offy, self-quoting game. With David, the giveaway was his thoughtfulness and his observant eye. I’m not sure I was aware he was a poet at the time. I thought of him as a good guy whose Texas origins accounted for the seemingly accidental poetry that crept into his conversation. I also thought of him as a great athlete. He was a star on BU’s diving team. We’ve kept in touch sporadically over the years, lately mostly through Facebook where he has been keeping an eye on Mrs M. But sometime after Mrs M and I landed in Fort Wayne, we got a letter from him, asking me what I’d heard about graduate writing programs. The letter included the news of his day and one, off-hand line that made me exclaim, “This guy’s the real deal!” Actually, it made me think, This guy knows more about writing than I’ll ever know, what’s he doing asking me for advice? I don’t remember him mentioning he was applying for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University he went on to win. David’s enjoyed deserved success over the years, and that success is continuing with his having a poem in this week’s “New Yorker”. Sadly, it’s a sad poem, an elegy for his late brother. It’s sad, but it’s beautiful, and it’s like David...

It isn’t so much that my brother
Didn’t die young, or that he’s alive
Among the counties of the mortal
Bayous I love, at the county line,
Or that, at the beginning of the
Century, Texas, in spite of its
Hot beauty, is cold as another
Republic of magpies keeping the
Granite awake, or that the weight of
His soul is stone poor, dirt, deep farmer
That he is, or was, farming poorly,
Poor as a widower haunting
His own grave—it isn’t even
The gravestone’s chiselled stone
Letters, or those softened clean off, or
The names and dates you can imagine
As facts of our lives once lived in
Failure, but only the consonants
Camouflaged for death that I
Keep hearing all day as if all is lost.
He’s alive as any cloud falling
As rain now into the open mouths
Of the dead, alive as a bruise
Disappearing in my body, like
Passing rain and wind, until the sky
Heals, and the blood of an hour’s
Silent-evening nothing vanishes.
You’d think my brother’s last days
Move past me on every side, the hours
Settling like a tomb through nothing
Of the infinite spirit of his
Half-broken heart, half-spoken
Voice rising like the drawing of water.
He kisses raindrops on the grass. Kisses
For the city he was born in.
Drops for the echo of a future
He enters, as if entering
A house to die in. He can’t make
Up his mind. —As if from a promise
From that house of madness,
I’m required to say,
Cold, beauty, pain will be done in ten
Thousand days from now, and all
That will be left will be the first taste
Of time, first forgotten day of the week,
Whatever city he’s left us in, added
Or subtracted from a bright field running
To blue in the horse-light of spring.
—My brother counts his own hours now,
And I’m thinking of all the lightning-
Fractures of sky I had to go
Under with nowhere to go, nothing to
Do but climb the cloud of long ago,
Feeling again the cold of his hand
The last time, until pleas of
A grunting voice have nothing to say.

David’s latest collection of poems is “Republic Cafe” which is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

Nobody is better at being herself

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, November 5, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, December 8.

Mrs M, in consultation with her neurologist, having her head examined and showing she's made of sterner stuff, Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

That’s Mrs M in the photo up top, looking at an image from her latest MRI with her neurologist. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s been determined from the beginning to see what’s going on inside there. Me, I cringe and look away, forcing myself to take peeks out of the corner of a squinted eye whenever it sounds like the doctor or the technician is pointing out a salient detail. Like I’ve said this many times: this would all be fascinating if the subject of fascination wasn’t my wife. But Mrs M is made of sterner stuff.

In the midst of our now going on two months of rounds to the surgeon’s and the image facilities down in Westchester, as they try to get her shunts adjusted properly to get her hydrocephalus under control, Mrs M had a routine six-month check-up with her neurologist. His office is in Kingston, an hour to our north. That gave Mrs M an hour to fret on our way there.

“Where are we going again?” she asked a dozen times.

“To see your neurologist,” I said each time as if she hadn’t asked the question before.

“Oh, that’s right. And why am I seeing him?”

“It’s just a routine checkup. He’s just going to assess the progress of your recovery.”

“So I’m going to have my head examined.”

“Yep.”

“Lance, did you ever think you’d have a wife who needed her head examined?”

She was being funny. And every time she said it she made us both laugh. She asks this question a lot, not just on this trip but on on other occasions. It seems to be whenever she starts to feel down about her condition and begins to lose confidence and hope. I have a standard comeback---“Yes, but I didn’t think it would be involve MRIs, CT scans, and X rays. I thought it would be on the couch.”---that she seems to find both funny and reassuring.

Another question she asks often in the same vein  isn’t so much a question as an apology. It’s this one:

“Lance, did you ever think you’d marry such a goofus? I try not to be a goofus. I try to be more of a gallant. But it’s hard. Being a goofess just comes more naturally, these days.”

As we got closer to Kingston, she grew more confident about where we were going and switched from asking to stating.

“I’m seeing the neurologist, right?”

“Yep.”

“And what do I have to know going in?”

“Nothing. You just have to answer his questions.”

That would satisfy her for the moment, but pretty soon she’d loop back again.

“I’m seeing the neurologist, right?”

“Yep.”

“And what do I have to know going in?”

About the fourth or fifth time, though, I said, “Nothing. You don’t have to know a thing. In fact, it’s better if you don’t know anything going in.”

“Why?”

“Because then you might be telling him what I told you and then he couldn’t tell what you know from what you’re repeating.”

“Oh, I get it. He wants me to be myself.”

“That’s right.”

“So I just have to be myself.”

“You just have to be yourself.”

“Ok. I can do that. I can be myself.”

“Yes,” I said, “You can. You’ve always been good at being yourself. That’s why people like you so much.”

“That’s why?”

“Yes. Because by you being yourself so well they feel like they can be themselves.”

“Is that why you liked me?”

“Big part of it. I needed help being myself.”

“And I helped you with that?”

“You sure did.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“And I’m seeing the neurologist?”

“You’re seeing the neurologist.”

“And I don’t have to know anything.”

“You don’t have to know anything.”

“I can just be myself.”

“You can just be yourself.”

Today is the 40th anniversary of our first date. It’s true that I asked her out because she was good at being herself. There was no posing or pretense about her and no expectation that I would be anybody with her but myself, and inhibited, introverted prig that I was, I needed all the encouragement to be myself I could get. I still need it. She still gives it. Just by being herself.

And nobody is better at being herself.

Filed under Diary of Her Recovery.

Chair work: On the therapeutic benefits of minor home repair

Sunday morning, August 25, 2019.

Let’s talk about me.

Because I don’t do enough of that here on the blog.

I hurt.

I’m stiff and I’m sore. I’m tired---all the time. I don’t sleep. Often I’m too tired to think. I have no strength in my legs. I have no strength in my back. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. Some days it’s more than I can take. When I saw my back surgeon in March, I complained about all this. He listened sympathetically. He’s a very sympathetic guy. But he said I need to give myself more time to heal. The CT scan and the x-rays he’d ordered showed I’m holding together. The screws on the cage he built around my deteriorated vertebrae hadn’t come loose. (Go ahead. Say it. Say what, Lance? Don’t play the innocent with me. Say unlike the screws in my head.) But it’s been three years. I had the surgery July 24, 2016. It was successful. It relieved the chronic pain, gave me back a great degree of range of motion, allowed me to stand up straight, and walk---well, hobble---with confidence and authority without a cane. For the first year or so after I was definitely on the mend. I didn’t expect to leap tall buildings in a single bound but I thought that sooner than later I’d be able to bound up a flight of stairs and not have to take them one wobbly step at a time. Then I plateaued. A year and a half went by without noticeable improvement. Noticed by me, at any rate. (I had to cancel my appointment back in April of last year because it was scheduled on the very day Mrs M had to go in for the MRI that confirmed the presence of her tumor.) I told Dr R this. He said I was expecting too much too fast. I am, after all, old. He didn’t say it that bluntly. He said, “You’re not going to be as resilient as you were when you were thirty.”  Then he gave me a new back brace and sent me on my way---permanently. He discharged me from his care. “Don’t come back unless it gets worse,” he said by way of goodbye. Well, friendly and caring words to that effect.

It’s gotten worse.

I hate to whine, considering what else has been going on here. Considering what I know many other people have been going through. But, you know, my blog.

It’s not the intensified hurting, being stiffer and sorer and even more tired that’s got me down. It’s the not being able to do the things I want to do and need to do because I hurt too much, I’m too stiff and sore and tired…

Take long walks. Take short walks. Walk any distance greater than the distance between the house and the car. Sit at the table for extended periods and write. Sit in even our most comfortable chair and read without falling asleep before I finish a chapter---before I finish a paragraph! Do more than minimal household chores. Do yard work. (Honest!) Mow the lawn. (I swear!) Fix things!

This! as they say on Twitter. That last one.

I’m not the world’s greatest handyman. No one would call me Mr Fixit without irony or sarcasm. But there are repairs and home improvements I can do---could do, used to do---and I like---liked, would like to---do them. I take---took---pleasure, satisfaction, and pride in doing them.  I own just about all the tools a handy homeowner is likely to ever need. When I meet---met---with a repair I didn’t have the tool or the part Ito do the job I was happy. It meant a trip to the hardware store. I can’t go to the hardware store anymore. Since our local hardware store went out of business in January, going to the hardware store means going to Lowes and I might as well set out to walk the twelve miles to there as walk around in there. I think it’s a mile from the parking lot to the front doors, another mile from the doors to the lightbulb aisle, and a mile beyond that to the end of the aisle where the style and wattage of bulb I’m after is invariably shelved.

Here are some items I long to tackle on my mental job jar: Paint the porch rails. Patch the living room wall. Replace the locksets on the front doors. Level a kitchen shelf. Hang new blinds in the bedroom. Get the washing machine working again. Get the dryer working again. Get the dishwasher working again. Mend the backyard fence. Tighten the bolts on a wobbly kitchen chair. Wait! I did that!

This morning.

This morning was the perfect morning for it. I was out on the porch. It was sunny. It was only 63 degrees. There was a light breeze of 5 mph blowing in from the north, straight at house. It put me in the mood to strap on the toolbelt. Ok, I don’t have a toolbelt. But I have a toolkit, and I was raring to break it out. As you can see in the photo, the porch needs painting but several of the floorboards need replacing. If I could have I’d have rebuilt the whole porch and painted it. I thought of all my tools I could put to work. My circular saw! My electric drill! My sander and spray painter! I thought of how many trips to the hardware store the job would entail. I thought and I thought and I came close to despair. Then I remembered the kitchen chair.

Here was a job I could do without having to stand. I could do it on my knees. Even while sitting down. No heavy lifting. No ladders to climb. I dashed---hobbled at the highest speed I could attain---into the house, dragged it out onto the porch, and set to work with my flathead and Phillips head screwdrivers and hinged set of hex keys. It didn’t take long to remove every last trace of wobble. That was a bit disappointing. I was still eager to work. The other kitchen chairs are more sturdily put together. This one’s left over from a previous set, the sole survivor of a set of four the other three of members of which had wobbled themselves to pieces over the course of twenty years of use. I’ve had to dewobble this one many times before. I’ve cleaned it and polished it many times too. But, to my delight, it needed it again. Again, I set cheerfully to work. I wiped and I buffed. I detailed the joints using toothpicks I keep on hand for the purpose of detailing whatever needs detailing when I clean it. And when I was done, it shone like gold. I brought it back into the house and put it back in its place at the table and waited for the rest of the Mannions to notice and admire my handiwork when they came down for breakfast. That didn’t happen.

It never has.

The guys seem to be oblivious to these things. I’m convinced Mrs M makes it a point of principle not to acknowledge she's noticed. She doesn’t want any of her praise to go to my head. I didn’t mind. It was like old times. I was satisfied with a job well done...with a job done, at last. 

My only regret is that it didn’t require any trips to the hardware store.

Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: A Greek alphabet of famous physics professors I have known...of

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Posted Wednesday morning, April 24. Revised and corrected below, Thursday morning, April 25.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967, around, I’d guess, fifteen years after the young RPI physics major Pop Mannion attended one of Bethe’s seminars. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

“Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoe. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organizer as well.” ---from a letter by Freeman Dyson dated September 25, 1947, collected in Dyson’s autobiography in letters, “Maker of Patterns”.

I wonder if Pop Mannion would have recognized Freeman Dyson’s description of the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe. It’s from a letter Dyson wrote in 1947, when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was his professor. That was at least around five but maybe ten or even fifteen years before Pop himself met Bethe.

Pop counted Bethe as one of his teachers. It was a minor point of pride with him. Minor as in he kept it in perspective. Bethe taught at Cornell. Pop earned all three of his degrees---Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.---at RPI. But at some point in his career as a student, Pop took a week-long seminar with Bethe. I can’t remember exactly when. My impression has always been it was when he was an undergrad. That would put it in the early 1950s. But it might have been while he was working on his masters. At that point, Pop was running the computer department at GE’s atomic power lab (and, incidentally, managing the department’s softball team to the company championship.) That would put it in the late 50s or early 60s and Pop would have been around thirty years old. I like thinking it was when he was a degreeless student, no more than twenty. It’s hard for me to imagine Pop as a college student. Not because he was “born older” like George Bailey. He was. But that’s not the point. It’s simply that he didn’t tell us many stories about that part of his life that didn’t include the girl he was dating at the time, and Mom Mannion wasn’t in college with him, or the United States Air Force, which had him in its ranks as an ROTC cadet. His post grad career I remember because he worked on his Masters and Ph.D. at night and on weekends when I was a little kid and that meant he often wasn’t at home when we Mannion kids wanted to play with him, he was at class or in the library or lab at RPI, and when he wasn’t there he was working and studying at his desk in his “den”, not to be disturbed. The other thing about his seminar with Bethe I can’t recall is where it was held. Bethe might have visited RPI. He might have visited GE. But I like to imagine Pop went down to Cornell when he was an undergrad because Pop lived at home when as an undergrad and I like picturing him making his first long trip away from home. Like I said, having taken that seminar with Bethe was a minor point of pride for him, and he didn’t crow about it. What he was prouder of---well, vainer about, as much as Pop allowed himself a vanity---was the joke he got of it.

Pop also counted George Gamow as one of his teachers, along with Ralph Alpher, who was a friend and a colleague at GE. Gamow he knew through Alpher. It’s more accurate to describe both as mentors. But it was better for the joke to call them his teachers. Here’s the joke:

Pop liked to tell people the list of his physics teachers was so long it ran the whole twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.

His jokes were usually funnier than that.

He was proud of the joke, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. It bothered him that he didn’t have any famous professors whose names could be used for a pun on Omega.

Think about it.

I took my copy of “Maker of Patterns”, Freeman Dyson’s “autobiography through letters” with us on our trip up to the Old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with Mom Mannion and various friends and relations. I’d have taken it up to show him if he was still with us, expecting of course that he already owned it himself. “Maker of Patterns” would have been a perfect gift for his birthday, which is coming up on Saturday. That’s why I’m convinced he’d have owned it already. Pop had a habit of buying himself books that would have been perfect birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day presents for him. It was frustrating. But he didn’t do it to be perverse. He bought books for himself regularly---too regularly in the opinion of Mom Mannion, who had to find a place for them all. If it was left to Pop they’d have piled up in the living room to the point that eventually they have walled him in in his favorite reading chair and eventually one of the towers would have toppled and crushed him where he sat reading his newest acquisition. It was one of his indulgences, of which, like his vanities, he allowed himself few. But if, wonder of wonders, on the off-chance he didn’t already own it, I’d have gotten a kick out of showing him the series of letters Dyson wrote to his family in the late 1940s when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was not only his teacher but the head of his dissertation committee. And I’m sure Pop would have especially enjoyed this story, because it includes as a character another physicist he greatly admired:

Dyson writes:

The event of last week has been a visit from [Rudolf Peierls, an old physicist friend of Bethe’s who’d, at about the same time as Bethe, escaped Hitler’s Germany to England where he’d become one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project] who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learn a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming, and finally he had to be sent to bed, since Dick...did not materialise. About half an hour later [Dick] burst into the room just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

The one-man percussion band was---you guessed it---Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman with students at a coffee hour at Caltech’s Winnett Center, June, 1964. Photo by Kent McCaulley, courtesy of Caltech Magazine.

It’s possible Pop met Feynman at Cornell. Barely possible. But only if Pop took that seminar with Bethe at Cornell and when he was a freshman at RPI. Feynman left Cornell in 1951. Fact is, however, I’m pretty sure he never met Feynman. He’d have never stopped talking about it if he had. It would have been more than a minor point of pride for him and he wouldn’t have cared if he got a good joke out of it. Feynman was one of his heroes.

So he’d have enjoyed this from Dyson’s letter home, dated November 19, 1947:

“Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester [New York, about a two-hour drive from Ithaca]. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Updated and corrected Thursday morning, April 25, 2019 because DAMMIT! there are holes in my memory that need to be plugged: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow joke wasn't Pop's. He appropriated it---from Gamow. Gamow wrote a seminal paper on the Big Bang with Alpher, who was his doctoral student at George Washington University, and he added his friend Bethe's name so that it would always be cited as Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. The paper was published in 1948, when Pop was in high school. But Pop read it, although probably not when it was published, and of course understood it and appreciated its ramifications, as well as getting a big kick out of the joke, which he told me about and explained to me when I was just out of grad school and reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", one of my and Pop's favorite books. I'd asked him in he'd met any of the physicists mentioned in the book. That's when he told me about taking the seminar with Bethe and about the paper and the joke and his connections to Alpher and Gamow and how he liked to tell people about the paper, the joke, and how the joke could be applied to his own resume. Pop never took credit for somebody else's work or their jokes.

As it happens, Pop's connection to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb and probably initially to Bethe was through his boss as GE, Richard Ehrlich, known to Pop and Mom Mannion as their good friend Dick but to us Mannion kids as Dr Ehrlich and someone we had to be on our best behavior around when he visited our house, although I remember him as a kindly, avuncular, and always broadly smiling man. Dr Ehrlich had worked under Bethe at Los Alamos, amd since Dr Ehrlich and Mrs Ehrlich were regular dinner guests at the Mannion Homestead, I can claim one degree of separation form the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and isn't that special? But it makes it likely that Pop took that seminar from Bethe when he was working at GE and not when he was a student and that it was held in Schenectady. One other thing about Dr Ehrlich. His influence on Pop was political as much as professional. He was the chair of the local Democratic committee when we moved to Niskayuna and he recruited Pop to run for town board. Pop got skunked that time out. But he learned valuable lessons that he put to work when he ran for supervisor a few years later.

All this came back in a rush last night when Mannionville stalwarts Joel Hanes and Kaleburg reminded me in the comments here and Facebook pal Neil Calkin reminded me over there about Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. Thanks, old chums, for calling attention to the paper and to my incipient senility.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiograhy Through Letters” by Freeman Dyson is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Another of Pop Mannion's favorite books by about science was Gamow's "One Two Three...Infinity". He cherished his first edition copy all his adult life. It was published when Pop was in high school so it may have been the first adult science book he owned. His affection for it wasn't just nostalgic either. He thought it was a classic of its kind and recommended to everyone as the best introduction to scientific and mathematical thinking about how the world works. He might have known this, but if he didn't it would have done is heart good to find out it's still in print. "One Two Three...Infinity" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop would also recommend Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

A madness in March Madness

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, April 9, 2019. Posted Thursday, April 11.

University of Cincinnati Bearcats guard Jarron Cumberland (No. 34 in white) defends against University of Iowa Hawkeyes forward Luke Garza (No. 55 in black) in their first round game of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, Friday, March 22, 2019. Hawkeyes won 79-72. Garza is not the Iowa player whose over-zealous father made me mad and provided the fodder for this post. Screenshot courtesy of CBS Sports.

I wasn’t ready for March Madness. I’m still barely over the January Jitters. Who won? I didn’t watch. I didn’t watch any of the Final Four either. Or the Elite Eight. Or the Sweet Sixteen. I stopped paying attention when Old Father Blonde’s alma mater Villanova lost to Purdue in the second round. All my rooting interest was gone. I don’t fill out a bracket. I look over the list of teams that are in it and pick a few favorites, usually the Catholic schools---the only times of the year I feel like a good Catholic are Christmas and now---and a couple of attractive underdogs. Liberty was not an attractive underdog. Then as the tournament progresses, I’ll learn about a player who is a true student-athlete and hop on the bandwagon of his school. I also root for the schools that are in and of themselves good stories and come accompanied by interesting characters with their own good stories, like last year when Sister Jean prayed the Loyola Chicago Ramblers into the Final Four. Ramblers gave her a ring, by the way. I didn’t know they gave out Final Four rings. This year I didn’t find a player, a story, or a character to root for, no underdog won me over, and the the Catholics all went early. Every year I try to root for Iowa. I got my MFA from there, after all. Two of the best  years of my life I spent in Iowa City. George Raveling was the coach then and I was impressed by him. Their star player Brad Lohaus went on to play five seasons in the NBA. Two with the Celtics. B.J. Armstrong arrived the year after I left. So did Kevin Gamble. Gamble played six seasons with the Celtics. So you’d think I’d have at least a strong, nostalgic rooting interest in the Hawkeyes. But for some reason my heart’s never truly in it. This year my heart was dead set against them.

[Editor’s note: The reason I don’t mention the names of the father and son below is I don’t know much about the father and haven’t turned up much about him on Google. All I have to go on is what the TV announcers said. If you’re a fan, you’ll probably know who they are. If you don’t and really want to know, they’re easy to find via a quick google. But my quarrel here is with a type not any particular individual.]

First round. Game against Cincinnati. Late in the second half. Iowa’s down. Cincinnati’s been playing them tough. Camera cuts to the father of one of the Hawkeye players in the stands. He’s on his feet. You can tell by his expression this game means too much to him. He’s yelling. Not cheering. Not shouting words of encouragement. Yelling. He’s mad. At the team. At his son. I can’t make out all he’s saying but it’s probably not anything Iowa’s coach Fran McCaffrey isn’t telling his players. Probably includes some stuff isn’t telling them because it’s obvious and he has specific instructions he’s trying to give. The father’s too caught up in the moment, but I suspect he’s too caught up in every moment.

The announcers have done their homework. They’re ready to tell us all about him. He has four sons, all were sports standouts from early ages. The son playing for the Hawkeyes is the youngest. He’s considered the most talented, the one with the best chances of having a stellar pro career. One of the announcers characterizes the father as describes the father as having been “aggressive” in his coaching of his sons when they were growing up, and he tells a story to illustrate.

The father tried to go to all his sons’ games when they were kids. That often proved logistically impossible. One time, he had to miss one of the Hawkeye player’s brother’s little league games to go another brother’s game. When he arrived after to pick up the first brother at the field, he saw he was unusually dejected. Kid was down on himself because he’d had a tough time at the plate. Father turned the car around, drove back to the field, and ordered the kid out of the car. He took a bat and a bag of balls out of the trunk and gave them to the kid. I imagine him dropping the bag and bat at the kid’s feet. The drop is more of a throw. Practice your swing, he said. Hit a hundred of these. I’ll be back in an hour. And he drove off. The announcer told that story as if it was funny. His broadcast partners chuckled along with him. What a character, they seemed to agree.

I don’t find him amusing.

I know this guy from my own little league days when I watched two different coaches humiliate their own sons in front of the whole team for not being as good a player as they wanted. I know him from my time as a coach for Ken’s soccer team. He’s a familiar type.

Aggressive isn’t the word I’d use.

Abusive is more like it.

The words the announcer might have wanted to use are “tough” and “demanding”.  But there are all kinds of ways to be tough and demanding without being punishing and and cruel. For instance, a tough and demanding father might have stayed there and thrown a hundred pitches to his son right then. He might have said Let’s work on your swing while it’s still in your mind what you need to fix. He might have waited until the next morning, if it wasn’t a school or a work day, or until the weekend it it was, and then thrown him two hundred pitches. He might have waited and made a point to be at the kid’s next game and see for himself what was what before deciding the kid needed aggressive coaching from him. And then taken him out for some batting practice if he thought he needed it.

It’s hard to know what to do when your kid is blessed with an extraordinary talent. My sister has agonized over this since her daughter was four. My niece is an extraordinarily talented ballet dancer with not just the talent but the charisma and discipline to be a star with a major professional company. How hard do you push your children to make the most of their gifts? There are parents who don’t push hard enough. There are, however, too many who push too hard.

The father played college football. He had one glory year. It might be he thinks he’d have had a better career if his own father had been harder on him or if he’d been harder on himself. It might be he just lets himself get carried away sometimes and he’s otherwise a great dad. But, human nature being what it is, it’s more likely he’s the type of sports parent who use their kids to make up for their own perceived failures and frustrated dreams of glory and fame.

When I think of parents like that I think of these lines from James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

It’s not just sports parents in working class towns in the Midwest, as the college admissions scandal has shown.

There are probably players for Cincinnati with abusive parents in the stands or at home. It’s not something I hear get talked about during games: how many star athletes are where they are because their parents bullied them to it their whole lives.

Stage mothers are a cliche, but they're real---stage dads too---and they do harm. Sports parents are just as real. It's a curse to be born with talent to parents like that. A worse curse is to be born without talent or with minimal talent to parents like that.

Like I said, the Bearcats were playing the Hawkeyes tough. Cincinnati had the lead at the half. The teams traded leads most of the second half, but Iowa pulled comfortably---but not decisively ahead---with a few minutes left to play. Cincinnati had pulled back to within five with 17 seconds left. But Iowa took over the ball, sank a pair of free throws, and that was all she wrote. Hawkeyes won 79-72.

I can’t say this game and this guy soured me on the tournament. When the game ended I was mad. Mad enough at that guy I was half-determined to root against Iowa in their next game against Tennessee. But by the time that game rolled around, Villanova had already fallen to Purdue, and I was done caring. By last night I’d almost forgotten the men were still playing. Too much real sports has my attention. The baseball season’s started. Pro basketball’s entering its playoff season. The Celtics are in it. The Nets are on their way. The Mets are off to a good start.

By “real sports” I mean sports in which adults are paid for making their employers rich.

I’m ambivalent about college sports as it is. The country is full of real student-athletes with the emphasis on student. The schools they play for take care they get an education the same as they take care of their student-scientists, student-artists, student-doctors and lawyers and teachers and business majors. Some of these schools send student-athletes to the tournament. The Catholic schools have a good record of doing this. But even though they earn degrees they’re still exploited and undercompensated. Many of the schools don’t bother to see their players even get the college educations the NCAA claims is the only compensation the schools need to give these kids.

It didn’t help that Sunday night Oliver Mannion showed us John Oliver’s report from 2015 on the money-madness behind the madness of March Madness. The clip is below. It’s long. Twenty minutes. Here’s a passage from Dave Zirin’s review of the segment in the Nation that will give you enough of a sense of it for now:

If you haven’t witnessed John Oliver’s scabrous, side-splitting shreddage of the NCAA, stop reading for twenty minutes and watch. You will cackle, reach for the nearest stone, and while still joyously bent over, throw it in the general direction of the NCAA’s $85 million headquarters in Indianapolis. Oliver launches a merciless, unassailable argument that the NCAA and their multibillion-dollar machine of nonprofit amateurism is nothing but hypocritical rot. His portrayal of a truly “authentic” videogame deemed “March Sadness,” involving hungry, exhausted players, narcissistic, rageaholic coaches and administrators making snow angels in piles of money, should be watched as a precondition of filling out a bracket.

Yet there is a non-satirical sadness in seeing John Oliver so thoroughly dissect the hypocrisies and odious, sulphur-smelling injustices of the NCAA, because while perhaps never done as hilariously, it has also been done, and done and done again....It recalls arguments made for years by sports columnists like Kevin Blackisone, coaches like Jerry Tarkanian, and an endless line of former NCAA athletes who found themselves used up and tossed aside. In fact, an entire generation of activist athletes, from 81-year-old Bill Russell to 26-year-old Richard Sherman, have argued that the system is unjust. Even the man who founded the modern NCAA, Walter Byers, the executive director of the NCAA from 1952 to 1987, once said, “The coaches own the athletes’ feet, the colleges own the athletes’ bodies, and the supervisors retain the large rewards. That reflects a neo-plantation mentality on the campuses.” The argument against the NCAA is such an entrenched part of the public record, the burden is on those who dare stick their head above ground to defend it.

Yet the system not only survives. It thrives. The same college campuses where people are presumably taught about the importance of liberty, debate and winning the battle of ideas have evidence right on their campuses that none of these post-feudal intellectual staples are worth a damn outside the ivory tower…”

I’d like to say this is why I didn’t watch the game. But it’s not. I’d like to say I feel virtuous for not watching. But I don’t. I’d have tuned in if Nova or even Gonzaga had been in it or if Sister Jean’s prayers had gotten Loyola back to the tournament and again to the Final Four. All I can say is that I plan to resist temptation next year. I expect I’ll have as much luck with that as I have resisting most temptations.

By the way, I really know who won last night. I had planned to watch, even though I couldn’t work up a rooting interest in one team or the other. My loyalties were torn. I was born in Virginia. Lived there for a whole ten and a half months. Another of my talented nieces attends Texas Tech. She’s a theater major. My other sister has agonized over how hard to push her since she was little.

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And now, bloggage, as our old pal Nancy Nall is wont to append to her posts on her webpage. Nance’s extraordinarily talented student-musician daughter is about to graduate from Michigan. Texas Tech bounced the Wolverines from the tournament in the Sweet Sixteen. I haven’t asked but I don’t imagine Nance or her daughter are all that cut up about it…

To read all of Dave Zirin’s column on Oliver’s report, follow the link to “Why Not Even the Mighty John Oliver Can Shame the NCAA”.

For the whole story on Sister Jean, follow the link to “Sister Jean: how a 98-year-old nun became the hottest property in basketball” by Hunter Felt at the Guardian.

For old times’ sake, here’s the Daily Iowan’s report on the Hawkeyes’ win over Cincinnati: “Iowa betting on itself with NCAA Tournament win over Cincinnati”.

Not about college sports but tangentially related: a long read but a must-read on the admissions scandal, “They Had It Coming” by Caitlin Flanagan at the Atlantic.

And now this, from “Last Week Tonight”:

Andrew Yang, the War on Normal People, and Where Trumps Come From

Posted Tuesday night, March 19. 2019. Updated below, Thursday night, March 21.

Unconventional candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 Andrew Yang rallies the troops to fight the War On Normal People. Undated photo by Nanette Konig via Yang’s campaign website.

Andrew Yang has been getting a lot of calls lately.

His inquirers — donors, supporters, journalists — usually want to talk to him about robots and free money and something he calls “human-centered capitalism.” But first, they all ask some version of the same thing: “So, who is Andrew Yang?”

And it’s a fair question. Because most people don’t know the answer.

But this week, Yang, an entrepreneur and veteran of the tech industry, became the latest — and, perhaps, least likely — Democratic presidential candidate to meet the requirements necessary to appear in the party’s first debate in June.

It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office — and it also may have paved the way for another neophyte to wind up on a crowded debate stage, next to a half dozen senators and a former vice president. ---from the Washington Post, Friday, March 15, 2019.

Let’s pretend for a minute that at least half of that crowd won’t have been chased out of the race by June because they can’t raise enough money, I’m not keen on having a debate stage full of candidates standing in a chorus line stretching from wing to wing. I’ve read articles, posts, and tweets by folks who think this will be a good thing for us Democrats. It will show off our diversity and the depth of our bench.

Worked well for the Republicans in 2016, didn’t it?

The debates shouldn’t be a Benetton ad. And with so many people, there’ll be no time for any of them to make any sort of serious points. What are they supposed to do up there then, hold hands and sing “We Are the World”? And yes I know these references are outdated. Forgive me. I’m old. But so’s Biden. So’s Bernie. So’s Warren. And Hickenlooper. And Inslee, although he looks pretty good for 68. We wouldn’t be showing off our diversity. We’ll be showing our age.

I don’t have any real complaint with these candidates as individuals or with just about all the others. Beto’s not wowing me, and the less said about Tulsi Gabbard the better, but other than that…

I’m leaning Kamala because she seems fiercest. My sentimental second choice is Mayor Pete because he strikes me as the smartest and the most serious and he reminds me of Pop Mannion. Booker's third. Then Warren. Then Gillibrand. I’m not real keen on either Biden or Bernie. They’re each on their separate nostalgia trips. Bernie is running a mostly I Woulda Won campaign. He doesn’t realize his moment has passed and he’s done as much as he can to move the debate to the left. Biden has nothing to offer Democratic votes in 2020 except that he was Obama’s VP. Of course I’ll vote for either one if he winds up the nominee. I’d vote for Yang, and with real enthusiasm, I just doubt I’ll get the chance.

I say Bootigieg strikes me as the smartest of the announced candidates, but if he’s smarter than Yang it’s only by a couple of IQ points. And Yang is as full of ideas as Warren with, it looks like, even more detailed policy statements on offer. The big idea he’s been grappling with for years and that drove him into the race to make part of the debate is what to do about the fact that automation is putting more or more people out of work permanently or at least forcing them to take low-skilled, low-paying, no benefits and no future jobs in the service industry. This is a practical version of the philosophic question the poet and essayist Wendell Berry has been asking, What are people for? What do we do when the machines and the computers and the money take over and human beings aren’t needed to generate wealth or even to keep other human beings alive? What do we do when we don’t need each other anymore? This to me is the question of our age because the rich greedy bastards who control the money and therefore the economy and therefore the government have as their answer: To make money for the rich greedy bastards.

We’re here to do that in two ways: by our under-compensated labor and then with our spending what little the owners and bosses begrudge us on over-priced goods, services, and toys. And once we can’t do either, we’re good for nothing. There’s no more use for us. There’s no more point to us. We might as well put ourselves out to sea on ice floes.

The rich greedy bastards think we should best die and decrease the population.

Yang is running to “Put Humanity First.” He has plans for what we can do to give ourselves worth and usefulness instead of letting the owners and bosses throw us away as we become worthless and useless to them, and a key component of his proposed solutions is a universal basic income. At the moment I can’t tell how effective he’d be at putting his solutions to work---that is, I can't tell how good a president he'd be. His background in business, the health care industry, and philanthropy make me think he’d an excellent future Secretary of Labor, but you can’t run for Secretary of Labor.

Maybe Harris and Warren and Booker and Bootigieg and Gillibrand are taking notice.

I hope so.

I do like the title of his latest book,though: “The War on Normal People” . and I just put it on reserve at the library. And you gotta love that his counter to those goddamn red MAGA caps is a navy blue one that says MATH.

Here’s something else I like this about him:

Yang, who lives in New York City and was born upstate…

Upstate means way up the Hudson River, a hard left at Albany, and fifteen miles over on the Mohawk to Schenectady.

My home town.

Well, close. I grew up on its suburban border---the houses right behind the old Mannion homestead are in Schenectady and so were most of the stores we walked to or took a bus to shop. My grandfather worked at the GE plant downtown. And it may be Yang’s father did too.  It’s more likely, though, that he worked at the Research Lab, which is in my hometown, and there he might have known Uncle Merlin’s father. The Yangs might very well have lived in our hometown along with hundreds of professionals---scientists, engineers, accountants, and managers---who worked for GE, including Pop Mannion. [Note: Neither Yang’s Wikipedia entry nor his own campaign website give his parents’ first names or mention where he grew up. Neither say whether his father, who worked at IBM as well as GE, was with GE before or after IBM, whose main research center is right across the Hudson from here in Poughkeepsie, or how long he worked for either. Andrew might have lived in the Schenectady area for a very short time after he was born and spent his formative years in this area. His website doesn’t even mention his father’s connection to GE.] Yang is far too young for me to have known him. He was four years old when I left town for good. But before he went into academia, Pop ran the computer department at GE’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab. KAPL’s campus is next door to the Research Lab’s but they might as well be in different counties. Both do classified work for the Feds and they’re kept apart not just from each other but from the surrounding neighborhoods by guards, and dogs, and barbed wire. [Ok, I may be exaggerating about the dogs and barbed wire. But not about the guards, and there were definitely fences that were high and forbidding if not topped with razor wire. Rumor had it they were electrified though.] So the two sets of scientists and engineers didn’t cross paths at work. But they mixed socially, and given the way circles of acquaintance are drawn, Pop might have known Yang’s father too. Not through work though.

Yang Sr is probably a good deal younger than Pop or Merlin’s dad---in fact, he’s likely closer to my age than to theirs. Uncle Merlin’s father’s career at GE and Yang’s might have overlapped. But Dick Merlin was in ceramics and Yang was a physicist and he might not just have worked on a different floor, he might have worked over the fences and past the guards at KAPL. If he did, he very likely arrived well after Pop left. They still might have known each other, however, if not professionally then through their involvement in the community. As town supervisor, president of the historical society, and a member of the library board and the many other organizations and clubs he was involved in that made him the least retired retired man in upstate New York, Pop knew practically everybody in the area.

This is a long-winded way of saying, there’s a good chance there’s only one degree of separation between me and Andrew Yang and I get a kick out of that. Not enough of a kick to make me want to vote for him in the primary. Like I said, I probably won’t get the chance anyway. He’s going to be on the debate stage and he may even last through to the early primaries, but he’s not likely to still be in it when New York’s primary rolls around next spring. Still, I’m rooting for him to at least put up a good fight.

But it’s this bit in the opening of Reis Thebault’s profile of Yang that sticks in my craw:

It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office…

Who can run for office?

There are rules?

I mean beside the only two the Constitution sets: candidates have to be thirty-five when they take office and they have to be natural born citizens?

Once more with feeling.

The wonder isn’t that we have someone like Donald Trump in the White House. The wonder is we didn’t put one there sooner.

Kooks, scoundrels, knaves, villains, and fools have run for every office since there have been offices to run for, including president. A few of them have been their party’s nominee. A few of those have been elected President. Howard Schultz’s way wasn’t paved by Donald Trump. It was paved by Ross Perot. Trump’s way, meanwhile, was paved by Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Sarah Palin.

“Unconventional” candidates have come along from time to time, candidates like Yang with no political office on their resumes and whose professional backgrounds would not at first glance have seemed to have prepared them for the highest office in the land.  Perot’s one, of course. Pat Robertson. The recently departed Lyndon LaRouche. And for any Democrat over forty the name Ralph Nader has become a proverb and a byword.

But then there was Wendell Wilkie, one of the best persons to have been nominated by either party in the last hundred years, and thank God for him because without him the Republicans might have nominated another unconventional candidate, the fascist and anti-semite Charles Lindbergh.

Thebault is very young. It appears he graduated from college only three years ago. He earned his master’s only last year. But I’m sure he knows all this. So I wonder, if that wasn’t just a throwaway line, what he was getting at? It sounds like a subrosa swipe at Trump but it may also be a knock on his older colleagues not just on the Post’s political desk but on the political beat for all the media at large. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s tired of hearing from those Boomer and Gen X veterans that…

IT WASN’T OUR FAULT!

We had nothing to do with!

It just happened!

It had nothing to do with the way we covered him! He’s simply a genius at manipulating the news cycle.

Who thought he had a chance anyway?

Who knew what he stood for? How were we to know when to take him seriously and when to take him figuratively? What did it matter anyway if he was never going to win? Besides, she was fatally flawed. Inauthentic! Over-prepared! A CLINTON!

At any rate, we won’t make the same mistake again.

But did you see his latest Twitter-tantrum? Isn’t it amazing how he gets away with this shit?

Hope I didn’t give you intellectual whiplash with that transition. But I didn’t really veer off the subject, because I’m imagining Thebault hearing around the office and at lunch and on the campaign trail stuff like this:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question and the universal basic income might be workable solution, but isn’t it socialism? Won’t that cause him problems winning over centrists? And what about him accepting campaign contributions in bitcoin and the fact that Nazis like him? Won’t those things give him trouble with progressives?

Why don’t you write some columns about that?

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There have been too many of them to call them “unconventional,” but it’s actually kind of odd when you think about it that we’ve elected so many generals president of our democracy. We’ve been lucky that none of those generals tried to president like they generaled. Not even Andrew Jackson, although he was probably the most tempted to. Of course William Henry Harrison didn’t live long enough to face any temptation that way. Neither did James Garfield but it’s likely he would have been the very opposite of tempted that direction. Generaling is something he did during the Civil War because he was good at soldiering the way he was good at everything he put his hand to, including teaching. He’d have probably proved just as good at presidenting, if he’d lived---if his doctors hadn’t killed him. He survived being shot. He couldn’t survive 19th Century American medical procedure. You can read about in Candice Milliard’s excellent “Destiny of the Republic”, if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t, I recommend you get right on it!

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To read the whole of Thebault’s profile of Yang, follow the link to “Andrew Yang is running for president. Haven’t heard of him? You will soon.” at the Washington Post.

“The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future” by Andrew Yang is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

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Updated to reflect the brakes slamming on my enthusiasm: I don’t know how much stock to put in this analysis of Yang’s policy positions. The writer is Jeremiah Johnson, the director of an organization that calls itself without irony the Neoliberal Project. I’d never heard of it before following the link from Mike the Mad Biologist’s invaluable daily digest. But from what Johnson writes, it looks to me that if anybody is a neoliberal it’s Yang, so it’s not promising that the director of the Neoliberal Project thinks he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What bothers me more, though, is that it appears that Yang is another business person who thinks government can and should be run like a business. This is why we shouldn’t long for more “unconventional” candidates. Making laws is not like making widgets.

But this is an even bigger let down:

Dem presidential hopeful Yang agrees to interview with Ben Shapiro over anti-circumcision stance

I don’t know if I’m more disappointed that Yang is giving legitimacy to that Right Wing attention-whore or that he chose that subject to talk about as his presidential campaign is starting to get traction.

Doubting Thomases

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 6, 2018. Posted Wednesday morning, February 13, 2019.

Detail from “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio. Circa 1601-1602. Via Wikipedia.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear…, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin[a]), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe...”---the gospel according to Saint John, Chapter 20, Verses 19-31.

The things you learn about someone you loved when it’s too late to talk to them about it.

John 20:19-31, the story of Doubting Thomas, was the gospel reading at Pop Mannion’s funeral mass this morning. [Monday, August 6, 2018] Mom Mannion picked out the readings. She chose his favorite passages, one from the Old Testament, another from the Epistles,as the liturgy requires, and then from the gospels. Pop and I didn’t talk much about religion and before this morning I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what his favorites were. The first reading didn’t surprise me though. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11. That’s the passage that famously begins with the verse “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…” Pop quoted it in one of his campaign brochures the during his first time go-round as town supervisor. Then second reading, from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, wasn't a surprise either. Everyone likes that one, and occurred to me that my mother chose it because it was one of their favorites. It's read at practically every Catholic wedding, and was probably read at theirs. The gospel reading, though, sat me back in my pew or would have if the church had pews. It sat me back in my chair.

Thomas was---is---my confirmation name!

For those of you who aren’t Catholic, the Sacrament of Confirmation is a kind of a self-rechristening. You receive it when you’re (supposedly) old enough to decide for yourself whether or not you want to remain a Catholic. In some dioceses that’s in 7th grade, in others in 9th. I think there are some places it’s eleventh or twelfth, but that’s not typical. Ken and Oliver were confirmed when they were each in junior high. In the diocese where I grew up when I was growing up it was 4th, which still amazes me. I had a hard time deciding what baseball cards to trade. Matters of theology were beyond me. At any rate, because you’re beginning anew, you get to rename yourself. You give yourself a confirmation name.

Candidates for confirmation are allowed to choose their own confirmation names. It’s supposed to be the name of a saint. The practice has fallen out of favor at many parishes, ours being one of them. Ken and Oliver don’t have confirmation names. The pastor banned them. He never explained why, but my guess was that he was tired of arguing with irate parents of kids he told had to pick another name that there was no St Ashley. And no St Tyler either.

When I was a kid, just about every girl had as their first name or middle name Mary or Marie or a combination---Mary Ann, Mary Beth, Jean Marie, Elizabeth Marie. You get the picture. And by the way, all Reginas are named after Mary too. Mary the Regina. Mary the Queen of Heaven. ---so they tended to get ambitious when choosing and looked up the biographies of the more poetically named saints before deciding. Bernadette. Genevieve. Madeline. Monica. To give you an idea. Mrs M’s confirmation name is Theresa. (Her middle name is, of course, Marie.) The boys, being boys and too lazy and careless to do their homework, stuck with the classics because they required less effort and thought. Matthew. Michael. Stephen. Peter. Paul. Often the name was chosen for them, despite the rule, “suggested” to them by their parents who thought it would be a good idea for their son to name himself after his father or grandfather or favorite uncle. I was a little more diligent.

I did my homework.

I would. I was a sanctimonious little snot eagerly looking forward to beginning my career as an altar boy the next year. You may find this hard to believe but I was very devout when I was a little kid. Thing was, by fourth grade I was already developing...doubts.

I considered Martin. After Saint Martin of Tours. One of my favorite saints. But I went with Thomas. Which sounds as run of the mill as John or Patrick. Until you consider which Thomas I meant.

“Oh, Saint Thomas Aquinas! Aren’t you the young scholar?” the nuns would gush when I told them my choice.

“Nope,” I’d say, smugly. “Not him.”

The nuns would look perplexed.

“Thomas More then?”

“Not him either,” I’d say, growing more smug.

The nuns’ bafflement would continue, until it dawned on them.

"Thomas the Apostle?"

"That's the one," I'd say, as smug as any precocious and full of himself ten year old can get, which is pretty damn smug.

I didn’t choose him to be a wiseguy. I enjoyed the opportunities it gave me to be a wiseguy, but the story of Doubting Thomas was one of my favorite bible stories and Thomas my favorite apostle because I realized that’s how I’d have reacted to the news Jesus was alive and well and had come knocking while I was out. I’d have doubted it too and wanted proof.

I also liked Thomas for having been out. The other apostles were afraid of being rounded up by the authorities and were hiding in that locked room when Jesus appeared to them. (I didn’t think Jesus’ picking the lock was much of a miracle, but I guess he was supposed have walked through the closed door.) Thomas was the brave one who’d ventured out to scrounge up some food and,I imagined, do a little spying.

It helped even more to know that when things blew over and the apostles began their missions, Thomas was the one who ventured farthest from Israel, traveling, preaching, and studying in India.

You’d think Pop and I would have discussed it. Maybe we did. My settling on that Thomas might have been due to his influence. Might even have been his suggestion. I don’t remember. As far as I recall, we never talked about it, then or later.  So when the priest read the passage, I was as perplexed as the nuns were back when.

That was his favorite gospel passage? Does that mean Thomas was his favorite apostle? His favorite saint?

Took a minute for it to dawn on me.

Of course the story of Thomas the skeptic meant a lot to him.

Pop was a scientist.

He had a Ph.D. in physics. His dissertation was on wave theory. His first civilian job was helping to design nuclear engines for submarines at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory where he more or less established its computer department. Seeing the nail holes for themselves and putting their fingers in the wounds is what scientists do!

Like I said, though, I don’t know and now I’ll never get to ask him. But it was the pattern of his whole adult life, as a scientist, as a teacher, as a politician and civic leader, as a neighbor and a friend, and as a father. It was one of his lessons to us: Don’t think you know anything until you’ve examined the evidence. Don’t just take other people’s word for it. Go see it for yourself. Put your fingers in the nail holes.

Or in short, don’t be so quick to judge.

But who would play Broadway Joe?

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Saturday, February 2, 2019. Posted way too early Wednesday morning, February 6.

Best football movie not yet made: New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath leading the Jets to their improbable victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, January 12, 1969. Photo By Malcolm Emmons USA TODAY Sports Copyright Malcolm Emmons.

Esquire dropped the link to this article in my mailbox Saturday afternoon, way to late for me to watch all twenty-five “Best Football Movies Ever Made” in time to rev myself up for the Super Bowl, as the well-intentioned editors at Esquire were suggesting…

While baseball might be the American pastime, there's nothing more uniquely American than football. Consider this: Men in tights and giant pads crash into each other, all while we cheer along in the stands (or, more likely, at home) and stuff our faces full of snacks and beer. And in the cold! Naturally, Hollywood has taken notice and made many, many films about the sport. From empowering and crowd-pleasing films that will have you jumping out of your seat and cheering, to behind-the-scenes looks at the business and drama surrounding the sport, here are the best football movies ever made.

My first thought when I saw the headline was: “There are enough good football movies for there to be twenty-five best ones?”

I don’t think there are even ten.

This not an assertion I’m prepared to defend on the merits, but it’s one I’m arrogant enough to assert out of bias without backing down in the face of reasoned argument. I’m also happy to assert this next one:

And of the ten best football movies, whatever you’d rank as number one is not as good as number ten on the list of best baseball movies, of which there are really ten---at least.

I should name them? Ok, smart guy. Here, and I actually have twelve...

“Bull Durham”.

“Eight Men Out”.

(This isn’t just a good baseball movie. It’s one of the few that actually showcases good baseball. The actors playing the Black Sox could play!)

“Field of Dreams”.

“Major League”.

“The Bad News Bears”.

“The Natural”.

(Much better than the book. And I will fight you on this.)

“42”.

“The Pride of the Yankees”.

“A League of Their Own”.

(Points off for letting the younger sister get away with a selfish base running decision at the end and trying to force us to think this makes for a happy ending.)

“Bang the Drum Slowly”.

(Not least for its having one of the most moving closing lines in my movie going experience. “From here on in, I rag nobody.”)

“Moneyball”.

(Extra points for the movement of Philip Seymour Hoffman as A’s manager Art Howe’s eyes as he follows the flight of a liner off the bat of one of his players he doesn’t believe can hit. More points for giving Jonah Hill the chance to prove he can really act. Even more points for introducing me to Chris Pratt.)

“Mr Baseball”.

(Not sorry. Selleck.)

To my shame and chagrin, I have never seen “The Sandlot”, which makes the list of many a true fan.

At any rate, Esquire’s list of best football movies includes several good movies---”North Dallas Forty”, “Heaven Can Wait”, “The Longest Yard”, just to name my favorites. “Brian’s Song” is great but I don’t think it belongs on the list because it was made for TV---a few mildly entertaining ones, a bunch of mediocre ones, and some outright bad ones---”Necessary Roughness”? Really? And it doesn’t include “Semi-Tough”, “The Best of Times”, “Invincible”, or “Horsefeathers”, so take it for what it’s worth.

But I like the irony of it including the movie that makes the case that football should be abolished.

I don’t know why there aren’t more good football movies. There ought to be.

Why hasn't there been a movie about the 1969 Super Bowl?

What do you think? Bradley Cooper too old now to play Namath?

Yeah, you’re right. But he'd have been great in his early 30s. He had the smile for it too.

Keanu could have done it, twenty years ago or so, but he'd have needed a smile coach.

Going back in my imagination, say they made the movie in the late 80s or early 90s, how about Nic Cage?

I can see it.

Go back far enough, and Namath could have played himself. Why not? Jackie Robinson did it. Babe Ruth too. But could he act? How was he in “Norwood”? The New York Times’ Howard Thompson didn’t think much of the film. He saw it as a Glen Campbell vehicle and thought the movie wasted him. Namath had a small part that sounds from Thompson’s cheerfully sarcastic review as though it gave him nothing to do but grin and fondle good-looking young women who didn’t mind being fondled by a guy who grinned like Joe Namath.

I didn’t see it. I wanted to see it because it was based on a novel by Charles Portis and I had just become a Charles Portis fan, thanks to ‘True Grit”. But for some reason I missed it. Judging by Thompson’s review, I’d bet it was in and out of the theaters quick. Back then our local movie houses had just the one screen. But there might have been another reason.

Even though it was rated G by the film board, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops gave “Norwood” their own rating of A-III...

Corny but entertaining Glen Campbell vehicle following his misadventures after military service as he innocently transports some stolen cars to New York, has a one night stand with a pretty hippie in Greenwich Village, meets Kim Darby on a bus and brings her back to his Southern home along with a midget and a performing rooster. Campbell's fans will enjoy the romp, though some may be put off by the salty dialogue and tasteless but brief situations.

A-III means the bishops thought it was suitable for adults only. I’ll tell why that’s relevant in a minute, although you can probably guess.

Namath was the star of another movie that came out around the same time in which he fondled and grinned at Ann-Margret. “C.C. & Company”. That appears to have bombed too. Vincent Canby recommended it as the movie to recommend to friends who wanted a recommendation for a “good bad movie.” Gene Siskel gave it no stars.

I didn’t see that one either. It was rated R. I was too young to go to R rated movies on my own and Mom and Pop Mannion were particular about which ones they’d take me to. “MASH”, “Patton”, “Slaughterhouse Five”, and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, those are the only ones I remember seeing with them.

Actually, with Pop. Mom Mannion stayed home with my younger brothers and sisters while Pop took me and my brother Luke.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised she let Pop take us. She read the diocesan newspaper. She would have known what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops thought about each one of them. “Patton” got an A-II rating from the bishops---suitable for ”adults and adolescents”---but they gave “Butch Cassidy” an A-III---”adults” only---and “M*A*S*H” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” A-IV ratings---“limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling.” Mom was a more conscientious Catholic than Pop. But I guess she trusted Pop to make better judgments regarding our moral education than the bishops. Considering it was Pop and considering what we came to know about the bishops, she was right to.

You know who’d have been better as Namath than Namath? Donald Sutherland. M*A*S*H showed he could fake it pretty well on a football field, although Elliott Gould had the arm. He had the mustache too, so maybe he’d have been a good Broadway Joe.

Come to think about it, there’s enough football in “M*A*S*H” you could argue it should be put it on the list.

I could argue it, anyway.

“All right, bub, your fucking head is coming right off.”

*******

“His ringer spotted our ringer.”

*******

“Oh my God! They shot him!”

“Hot Lips, you incredible nincompoop, it’s the end of the quarter.”

*******

Sorry. That is all. Back to who could play Namath in the movie...

Among today's stars...Chris Evans?

Adam Driver!

He’s got the nose.

I’ll think some more on it.

Meanwhile, Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck” could be the basis of a good movie, although it would make an even better TV mini-series. And Namath makes a cameo appearance. Namath at forty and retired. So you could have Bradley Cooper play him. He probably wouldn’t want to. What’s the point of playing Joe Namath if you don’t get put on pads and throw a football?

The real casting challenge would be Donald Trump.

Remember, the USFL existed only from 1983 to 1985, so we’re talking about the not-quite-yet-forty, pre-weaved, pre-oranged, slim, and---at least to many women’s eyes, and many men’s too---handsome Donald Trump.

I’m thinking Ryan Gosling. Or Ryan Reynolds.

You know who would work? Maybe even better?

Domhnall Gleeson.

Go ahead. Look at him as General Hux in the Star Wars sequels. Try to ignore the uniform and the big speech to the troops in “The Force Awakens”. It’s too on the nose.

His father, Brendan Gleeson, would make a good present-day Trump.

Another movie that not just should be made but needs to be made---the Colin Kaepernick story.

Kap could play himself.

If not, my vote’s Michael B. Jordan.

My vote’s for Michael B. Jordan to play everybody these days.

Even Joe Namath.

He’d be great, don’t you think? And he wouldn’t need a smile coach.

But I guess we’re still a long way away from that ideal of color-blind casting.

R.I.P Joe Papp.