Lance Mannion

Boston by way of Japan

Posted Saturday morning, June 10, 2017.

And people will tell you Twitter is a waste of time.

One of my favorite artists is the 19th Century Japanese painter and illustrator Hiroshige, and thanks to Twitter pointing me to this gallery at Kenga Rex, I just spent the last couple of hours immersed in his work, starting at the Kenga Rex website and moving on from there to Wikipedia and beyond. I wasn’t counting but I must have looked at over a hundred paintings. It made me nostalgic and long to be…back in Boston.

What? You thought I was going to say Japan? How could I be nostalgic for Japan? I’ve never been there. But Boston’s where I discovered Hiroshige, in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Asia collection. I spent a lot of time at the MFA during my four years in Boston. I don’t remember which day it was but if memory serves, one morning a week admission was free. The Asian wing was my favorite part of the museum. It was cool and shadowy in there but not at all gloomy or dim. There was lots of maple woodwork and it all glowed and I thought the intent was to give the impression of being inside the paper houses and shops depicted in the paintings. It was just a pleasant place to be. But those paintings were a revelation to me. They were beautiful, vivid, bright with color, and funny. The ones that riveted my attention, anyway. They were mostly scenes from everyday life and I was happy to see that everyday life in Japan in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Century struck painters as comic. But what most caught my eye and stirred my imagination were what I thought of as Hiroshige’s people-scapes---his landscapes, seascapes, and street scenes seemed to me to be less about the land, the sea, and the streets than about the tiny figures of people making their way through them. It was a busy, merry little world even in the rain and the snow.

I was also surprised to learn that those painters, Hiroshige in particular were favorites of some of the French impressionists and post-impressionists. The effect of this was to make me appreciate both the French and the Japanese painters more. I’m not sure why or how, exactly, except it helped me identify with their paintings, to see life as I knew it in what had been merely…well, works of art. Museum pieces to be admired and studied. Suddenly, they were the stuff of life. And what’s more, when I walked around Boston I began to see the place as it might have been seen through the eyes of a Hiroshige.

Ok, that’s as much John Updike as art critic as I can channel. Couple more paintings, then I’ll send you over to Kenga Rex.

Here’s a Hiroshige street scene:

And here’s one by the French impressionist Camille Pissaro:

The Road to Versailles Louveciennes. Camille Pissaro. 1869. Via Wikipedia.

As my dear sainted grandmother would say, Get the picture?

Ok, to view the gallery at Kenga Rex, follow the link to Vision of 19th Century Japan, 20 Best Artworks by Hiroshige.

Dirty sexy bible stories

Mined from the notebooks, May 28, 2017. Posted Friday, June 2.

Lot and His Daughters by Francesco Hayez.

Following up on my post, All the idiots, two by two: The bible’s a strange book to take as the literal word of God, the first two-thirds of the Old Testament particularly. Taken at face value, it’s an anthology of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, legends, just-so stories, fables, poems, prose poems, and historical narratives that all seem to share a single theme: people stink and they’re stupid, as well as being rather randy and bloody-minded monsters in their treatment of each other. The ones who set themselves up as kings and tyrants are especially randy, bloody-minded, and monstrous. God appears regularly to meddle, usually with fatal results for the heroes as well as the villains and much collateral damage among the innocent bystanders. Somehow all his meddling---and mass murdering---adds up in the minds of many Christians to proof that the universe is ruled by a benevolent deity who has the best interests of his “children” at heart.

But much of what’s in there is storytelling for storytelling’s sake, although again with the shared theme that people stink and they’re stupid as well as being rather randy and bloody-minded monsters towards one another. And there doesn’t seem to be any moral to these stories. Take the story of the Levite’s concubine. I did once, actually. Back in grad school. It was one of the best stories I wrote in Iowa. I turned it into a Hawthorne-esque morality tale set in the wilds of upstate New York in the 17th Century. I called it “Van Zandt’s Whore”. The fiction editor at the Atlantic told me he couldn’t publish it under that title. I offered to change the title. Then he told me he couldn’t publish it because it was too long. I offered to cut it down. That forced him to tell me he couldn’t publish it because although he thought it was a good story, it wasn’t good enough for the Atlantic, maybe I should try the New Yorker. I’d hold a grudge but he tried to publish two other stories of mine---neither of which were biblically inspired or at all Hawthorne-esque---but it his boss who told him that although they were good stories they weren’t good enough for the Atlantic. Him I hold a grudge against. Or I would. But he’s eighty years old now and hasn’t edited the magazine since 1999. He was succeeded by Michael Kelly.

Kelly was killed in Iraq before he got a chance to turn down any of my stories.

So it goes.

That’s a literary allusion. You might not have caught it. I’m that subtle. It’s amazing the Atlantic never published my stuff. Or the New Yorker.

By the way, I did try the New Yorker, many times, and I was told pretty much the same thing by Roger Angell when he was the fiction editor there. Good stuff, but not good enough for the New Yorker, maybe I should try the Atlantic.

Anywho…

Another of those strange stories that seem to be in there for storytelling’s sake is the story of Lot and his daughters and what happened to them after they escaped from Sodom. It’s one of the stories Mr Schick didn’t have us read in our sixth grade religion class. Probably for the best. If I’d read it back then it might have become one of my favorite bible stories for all the wrong reasons. It has been a favorite story among painters though. For all the wrong reasons that are the right reasons when put on canvass. One thing the bible has been good for: inspiring artists who wanted to paint their models naked and get the pope’s blessing while they were at it. Francesco Hayez, for example. He painted the painting up top.

And Rubens...

I prefer the Hayez, but only because I think it’s truer to God’s word.

Salman Rushdie explains the marriage of Samantha and Darrin Stephens

Posted Sunday night, March 26, 2017.

This is the kind of question that keeps fans of TV shows up at night: Why was Darrin such a pill about Sam using her magic?

I wasn’t really a fan of Bewitched. I don’t remember watching it regularly when I was a kid. I’m not sure we Mannion kids were allowed to. It was on pretty late on a school night. Thursdays at 9. I know I was watching the night Martin Luther King was killed. I remember going into the kitchen to tell my parents after the news bulletin, I felt like I was fulfilling a solemn and very grownup duty.

Most of the episodes I saw I saw as re-runs during the days when I was home from school sick or it was a rainy day during a vacation. It wasn’t a show I looked forward to, more one I enjoyed mildly while waiting for a real favorite to come on. Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian, or The Addams Family or a good game show like Password. I watched those shows for their own special sakes but with the hope that today they'd show one of my old favorite episodes again. I didn't have any favorite episodes of Bewitched. The episodes I enjoyed best featured Aunt Clara, Doctor Bombay, and, especially, Uncle Arthur---he was played by Paul Lynde, after all.

I didn’t like any of the episodes with the second, fake Darrin except the ones that included Doctor Bombay or Uncle Arthur.

There were no episodes featuring Aunt Clara and the fake Darrin. Dick Sargent took over for Dick York in the sixth season. Marion Lorne who played Aunt Clara died in 1968 after the fourth season. She won a posthumous Emmy that year.

At any rate, I don’t recall being particularly bothered by Darrin’s priggishness about Sam’s magic. But I was aware that it did bother some fans and I did wonder about it myself. I understood why he didn’t want her “help” designing and pitching his ad campaigns (He did, however, value her advice and suggestions) and why he didn’t want her to magic away living expenses. But it seemed mean that he expected her to do the housework and cooking by hand and puritanical that he wouldn’t let her treat them to a secret night out on the town in Paris or a weekend getaway to Hawaii. It made sense that he would want her to be careful never to be seen using her magic. (And there was good reason to worry she would be, considering their pathologically nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz. Gladys gave snoops a bad name.) Basically, Darrin was afraid of witch-burners, figurative and possibly literal, coming after his wife and daughter.

Later, I learned there’s a feminist reading of the show and that Samantha Stephens was a crypto-Second-wave feminist. Her witchcraft was symbolic of all the ways she was superior to Darrin and his mortal male colleagues and Darrin’s objection to her magic making and insisting on her sticking to homemaking like all the other guys’ wives was the patriarchy at work keeping women in their subservient place. Sam’s sneaky and clever ways to practice her magic despite him and then convince him to go along and not mind or even admit to the wisdom of her “disobedience” were subversive acts. The joke was on the husbands who were watching the show with their wives and would look over at the woman they were tricked into imagining as a closet witch and wonder what secret “magic” they possessed and what schemes to put their magic to work they were cooking up.

Wives, of course, identifying with Samantha, would start wondering why their husbands wouldn’t let them use their magic.

Both husbands and wives and the children watching with them would wind up rooting for Sam to rebel and for her rebellions to succeed.

I could see this, although it wasn’t until college that I was presented with the idea. I can still see it but I’m not about to go looking at old episodes for examples.

When I was a kid, though, I’m pretty sure that after a few cursory thoughts I shrugged it all off and just accepted the sitcom logic at work. All TV marriages had their trouble spots and the contention over when, how, and why Sam should use her magic was the Stephens’. It was the premise of the show. It’s what set up and drove the plots of each week’s episode. If Sam was free to practice magic openly it would have produced different plots and Bewitched would have been a different show.

But like I said, Bewitched wasn’t one of my childhood favorites. I don’t have any significant feelings about it, not even nostalgic ones. It’s important to me only because of that memory of Martin Luther King’s death and because my first high school girlfriend looked like Elizabeth Montgomery. (No, that was my second girlfriend who looked like Scarlett Johansson, although it’s better to say Johansson looks like she could be her daughter. At the time, she just looked like herself to me. But my first girlfriend’s resemblance to Montgomery was noticed and remarked upon. She didn’t see it herself. She thought she looked more like Jane Fonda. Sunday in New York-Barefoot in the Park Jane Fonda, not Klute Fonda and definitely not Barbarella Fonda. And she wasn’t wrong.) I don’t have any desire to watch old episodes. I didn’t think much about it back then and I don’t think about it much except accidentally when somebody or something reminds me of it and gets me started. That happened tonight, obviously. And the somebody who got me started was...Salman Rushdie.

I just started reading Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and came across a passage that gives the answer or, at least, an answer to the question. Darrin doesn’t want Samantha to use her magic because that would mean she’s a witch and he did not fall in love with and marry a witch. He fell in love with and married her---the girl he supposed her to be because that’s the girl she led him to believe she was. From the point of view of the folks at home, Darrin was demanding that Sam repress the most wonderful parts of her nature in order to live a lie. From Darrin’s point of view, he was asking her to be her true self and be true to that self and to him.

Rushdie’s novel opens in Moorish Spain in the year 1195 CE with the story of Ibn Rushd, a physician, philosopher, and early scientist who marries a genie. He marries her not because he dreams of genies. He doesn’t believe in them. But despite evidence, he doesn’t realize she’s a genie---jinnia is the correct word, a female member of the Jinn---a princess among the jinn, in fact, because she doesn’t let on and he “being a man of reason...did not guess she was a supernatural being”.

Ibn Rushd and his jinnia wife, who calls herself Dunia, keeping her jinn name secret, are poor because he’s been disgraced and is living in anonymous exile. Dunia could of course make them rich by magic, granting him a wish he doesn’t know he could ask for but she doesn’t. The narrator anticipates our question...

Why did the jinnia princess not cry Open at the door of a treasure cave and solve their financial problems at a stroke?

And answers for us:

Because she had chosen a human life, a human partnership as the “human” wife of a human being, and she was bound by her choice. To have revealed her true nature to her lover at this stage would have been to reveal a kind of betrayal, or lie, at the heart of their relationship. So she remained silent, fearing he might abandon her.

So maybe that’s the key to Darrin’s obstinacy. The lie at the heart of his and Samantha’s relationship. She didn’t tell him she was a witch before they got married because she knew from long, sad experience that humans hated and feared witches and she was afraid he would break up with her. Unlike Dunia, however, she can’t keep her own secret.

I’d have to watch the pilot to see if Samantha confesses because her conscience won’t let her continue to pretend or because her meddlesome and intrusive family just make it impossible for her to keep her secret. Probably it’s both. But whatever her reasons for owning up, Darrin is right to feel deceived and even betrayed. It would have been understandable if he’d demanded a divorce on the spot. Of course, then there’d have been no show, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to consider it. His making her promise not to use her magic is his price for not leaving her.

It would also have been understandable if he’d gone into denial.

Witches aren’t real therefore Sam can’t be a witch therefore she shouldn’t act like a witch.

Instead, he tries to understand and cope. But he’s still within bounds to think she isn’t a witch anymore and not because she married him and he doesn’t want her to be a witch. Because she chose to leave the world of witches and warlocks and stop being a witch herself. That’s why she met Darrin. He’s not wrong to think she doesn’t want to be a witch and that in marrying him she promised herself she’d given that life up. And she does try or at least seems to want to try. But she’s a character in a sitcom and the plot requires that she can’t give up witchcraft.

As far as I recall, she didn’t often use her magic for the fun of it or to solve every and any problem that came along. Mainly she had to resort to it to undo trouble and mischief caused by her family or by characters and creatures from her pre-Darrin past butting into her married life, the equivalent of old boyfriends and friends who hadn’t grown up and wanted to drag her back into arrested adolescence with them. I forget how old Samantha was supposed to be, but she was the witches’ equivalent of twenty-something, several years hundred years old---she was a teenager at the time of the Salem Witch Trials, I think---and had quite a past to catch up with her. Her magic wasn’t her true nature expressing herself. Magic was a tool like any tool a desperate and resourceful heroine might reach for in a moment of danger and distress, and the skill with which she put that tool to work not the tool itself was the expression of her resourcefulness, intelligence, and pluck. When the trouble was cleaned up, she went cheerfully back to living her new ordinarily mortal life, generally to her family’s disgust, disappointment, and dismay. It wasn’t Darrin who didn’t respect her as a person in her own right. It was her mother Endora and the rest of the lot who expected her to be what they wanted her to be.

The exception was Aunt Clara. He love for Samantha was completely accepting and uncritical. She loved Darrin and he loved her, exasperating as she could sometimes be. Not only that, she liked visiting her niece’s home because it was a home for her. She came there to escape into normalcy.  In her old age her powers, apparently never great to begin with, were waning and she was losing whatever little control of them she once had. Back in the witches’ world she was seen as incompetent and bumbling. But when she was Sam and Darrin she was just taken for herself, their lovable and loved if slightly dotty Aunt Clara.

I suppose you could argue from that, along with Sam’s apparent contentment with a life in which she’s defined as Darrin’s wife and Tabitha’s mother, that Bewitched was as conservative and conformist as any 1950s sitcom. I see it another sign of its very 1960s subversiveness. The Stephens household was a haven for what we self-congratulatory folks here in the 2010s would regard as a contemporarily liberal ideal of a modern family as being put together ad hoc and being whatever the people who make it up make it, as if we invented the idea. Accidental families are at the ending of every Dickens novel. Home, in Dickens’ world and in the Stephens’ house, is where kind and like hearts gather.

I’ll save the uneasy place of the unhappily closeted Uncle Arthur for another post. But if he was at home anywhere it was with Samantha and, grudgingly, Darrin, who, grudgingly, not only put up with him but accepted him as a part of his family.

Darrin provides Samantha with a human home and in that home she is free to be the person---the human, not the witch---she wants to be. He’s sexist and patronizing and too much a man of his times about it, but he’s not wrong to see himself as helping her escape into a life of her own choosing and devising. Together they succeed in this, just not on the terms he thinks he set at the beginning of their marriage.

The very important difference between Ibn Rushd and Darrin Stephens is that Darrin is a decent-hearted and loving human being. Ibn Rushd is selfish, self-involved, and self-absorbed. He loves Dunia but abstractly and he doesn’t appreciate her. She is young (jinnias, like witches, don’t age like humans), incredibly beautiful, and sexually voracious. But he takes in her beauty without being much moved by it, reacts to it as his due, in fact, because a man of his brilliance and renown is owed a beautiful wife, and in bed he finds her as much an overly demanding nuisance as a wildly exciting sexual partner. The real basis of his loyalty to her is her loyalty to him. What he loves most about her is that she’s an adoring audience for his philosophical musings and lectures.

In the end, Ibn Rushd does abandon Dunia, without ever learning her secret. He leaves her with hardly a thought or a trace of regret to pursue his own, separate ambitions when the Caliph recalls him from exile.

Darrin, on the other hand, who loved and appreciated Samantha from the start, grows to love and appreciate her more as, despite his wishes and her best intentions, she fails again and again to keep her promise. He’s always grumpy about it but time and time again he realizes that her magic is her specialness. It’s not her being a witch herself that he minds. It’s the trouble that follows her that drives him crazy, and he knows that that trouble isn’t (usually) her fault. It’s her meddlesome family that constantly upends his life and hers. And in that he’s just another situation comedy husband tormented by an interfering mother-in-law and the wacky neighbors, and dependent on his sensible and loving wife to get him out of jams.

At the end of many episodes, he winds up echoing Ralph Kramden, saying in his own fashion what Ralph says to Alice, “Baby, you’re the greatest!”

So there you have it, class, another example of how a cheesy sitcom can give as much insight into human nature as the best literary fiction.

But while I’m at it…

You knew I wasn’t done, didn’t you?

While I’m at it, here’s something else I’m wondering about. Why was Bewitched on so late at night? Nine o’clock was past most little kids’ and even elementary school age kids’ bedtimes. What was it about the show that persuaded the network to schedule it as if it wasn’t fare for the whole family but something parents would want to watch after they’d put the kids to bed? I don’t remember noticing when I grew old enough to notice that the show was particularly sophisticated about sex and adult relationships like The Dick Van Dyke Show surprised and delighted me by being. Rob and Laura’s sex life was integral to the show’s subtext. Plots revolved around it and not just theirs but their friends’ and neighbors’ too. They lived in Cheever and Updike Country, after all. The possibility that someone would make a mistake---or a conscious and thoughtful choice---that would ruin people’s lives was often in the mix. It was the Mad Men era and the Petries and the Drapers were living parallel lives on opposite sides of the Hudson River. The difference being, of course, that Rob and Laura were good people and Don and Betty were not. Rob and Laura were lucky in their inherent characters and in having found each other, and they knew it and appreciated and cherished their luck. But they were still human and Carl Reiner and his team of writers never let us forget it.

But not only did the Stephens live a life parallel to the Drapers’, Darrin had Don Draper’s job. He moved in the same circles. He’d have had to deal with the same people or the same sort of people as tempted and corrupted Don and Don tempted and corrupted in his turn. and that would have included the same greedy and stupid clients, greedy and conniving clients, greedy and morally bankrupt clients, scheming and unethical co-workers and rivals, pliant secretaries, and ambitious and amoral models and actresses. But it seemed only the clients ever entered the picture and they weren't morally bankrupt or all that greedy and stupid, just obtuse and and resistant to change and too focused on their companies' bottom lines. Darrin's challenge was simply to get them to see the merits of the ad campaign he'd designed for them, while Don faced the additional challenges of avoiding being used by them for their own corrupt and corrupting purposes and using them to further his own unscrupulous ends.

Meanwhile, it wasn't just the show business types they met through Rob's work on The Alan Brady Show who filled the Petries’ lives with glamour, sex, and romance. Back home in New Rochelle their circle of acquaintance included many other young and attractive married couples like themselves. That was the defining fact of the suburbs in the 1960s that Updike took advantage of in his fiction and in his own life. Adultery was apparently a community sport in Ipswich as well as Tarbox. Adultery was in the air in New Rochelle. That doesn't seem to have been true over in Connecticut where the Stephens lived.

The only neighbors Darrin and Samantha interacted with were the Kravitzes and they’d gladly have done without their attention. And as far as was ever shown---or I ever saw---their only human friends were the decidedly middle-aged Tates, Darrin's boss Larry and his wife Louise. I wonder if the irony ever crossed the mind of Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner that Don and Darrin both had distinguishedly handsome, prematurely white-haired bosses who were also their best friends. But Roger Sterling was a cad and Larry Tate was a gentleman. His affection for Samantha was fatherly and he would never have gotten drunk and made a pass at her in her own kitchen. Meanwhile, Louise was a model of stability and wifely conformity, too sensible, conventional, and dull to cause herself or anyone else except her husband any trouble, and the only trouble she caused Larry was fallout from the typical situation comedy wife’s habit of not taking her husband as seriously as he took himself, interrupting him at work to make him deal with minor problems at home, and spending money he would rather went unspent. Neither of the Tates was the type to inspire or encourage impropriety in their younger friends or to be inspired to it themselves by the examples of misbehaving younger friends.

As for Samantha and Darrin themselves, they were an affectionate couple but nowhere near as sexy as Rob and Laura. But Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were singers and dancers. They knew how to move with sensuous energy and grace. Poor Dick York suffered from crippling back pain that eventually forced him to quit the show to be replaced by the bland and diffident and nearly asexual Dick Sargent, while Elizabeth Montgomery was pregnant three times during the run of the show. Two of her pregnancies were worked into the story---I suspect a lot of people forget that Tabitha eventually had a baby brother---which meant that the costumers and directors didn’t have to try to hide the fact but also that Samantha’s role as a young mother was more visually established than was Laura’s. And while Mary Tyler Moore was often dressed to accent her figure and show off her legs and made up to bring out her spectacularly gorgeous eyes, Montgomery was more often plainly and almost dowdily dressed like the ordinary young suburban housewife and mother she---and I mean both Montgomery and Samantha---was supposed to be, which I suppose served a thematic purpose but downplayed the fact that Montgomery was as beautiful as Mary Tyler Moore.

Even when she got the fun of playing Sam’s wild cousin Serena, her attractiveness was hidden. Serena’s free-spiritedness was expressed as kookiness and a childish determination to misbehave rather than a young woman’s desire to rebel, and her mod fashion choices were accordingly those of a little girl playing dress up. She outfitted herself wildly, which is to say comically, but not in a way that suggested true wildness. Serena was willing to let it all hang out but "it all" didn’t include any sign of sexual adventuresomeness. She didn’t like Darrin and wasn’t attracted to him so there was no chance she’d cause trouble for Samantha in that way. Serena was a clown and Montgomery was just clowning around when she played her, and clowns aren’t sexy..or funny, for that matter.

What I’m getting at is that it seems to me that Bewitched was comparatively tame family entertainment so its later time slot strikes me as odd. Was it simply due to the exigencies of scheduling or did I miss something I would catch if I bothered to go back and re-watch the show? Was there more subtext than I remember? Were there more episodes like the one in which Endora brings a statue of Venus to life in order to tempt Darrin into betraying Samantha? Were there more guest appearances by starlets like Francine York who looks to be obviously naked under her carefully arranged drapery?

Maybe Salman Rushdie has the answer to that one too.

Back to reading.

Oh, by the way...

Again, you knew I wasn't done, didn't you?

By the way, Tony Nelson had a simpler and better reason for not wanting Jeannie to use her magic. He was less scrupulous about it and it was easier for him to shrug it off or go along when she did because he only ever knew Jeannie as a genie and he didn't expect her or need her to act "human." But he needed her to be more careful than she herself saw the point of being. He knew that if she got caught it would mean the end of his career as an astronaut. Actually, he had two good and simple reasons. The second was he didn't want to be her master. Jeannie being a genie he rescued from captivity offered herself to him as essentially a slave and he would not at all comfortable with that. It might seem hypocritical that he let her stick around, accepting her devotion and her help while maintaining she was free to go anytime she wished. But he knew that if she left she could easily wind up someone else's slave, someone who would have no qualms about exploiting her.

How’s that? Salman Rushdie didn't help me with that one. I thought it up myself, when I was a kid watching I Dream of Jeannie in re-runs on days I was home from school sick and Bewitched wasn't on.

Now, back to reading.

How to be a columnist like Jimmy Breslin, according to Jimmy Breslin

Revised Friday evening to include more quotes from Breslin, because what was I thinking leaving all that good stuff out?

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday night, March 22, 2017.

He was no good, and he could prove it. Jimmy Breslin in 1970. Photo by Michael Evans, courtesy of the New York Times.

Breslin’s gone, as you probably heard.

I didn’t get to know of Breslin as a columnist. To me he was a book writer. Can’t recall for certain what was the first book of his I read. You’d think, Mets fan that I am, it’d have been Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? But I have no memory of it. Just about every book I bought or was given when I was a post-Hardy Boy reading kid lives on the bookshelf at the Old Mannion Homestead, but that’s not among them. Maybe I read Pop Mannion’s copy, if he had one. If he did, it’s lost. But if it wasn’t Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, it was surely The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

I still have that one. I remember feeling very grown up when I bought it with my allowance money. I also remember Mom Mannion’s frown of disapproval when she saw what book instead of the latest Allistair MacLean I’d bought. I don’t know how it was on her radar that she knew it was something I probably shouldn’t be reading at my age. Come to think of it, it was probably the movie she was aware of and she’d read a disapproving review in The Evangelist, our diocese’s weekly newspaper. I don’t know why she didn’t make me hand the book over.  I’m guessing the reason she didn’t was  the Catholic magazine she subscribed to, St Anthony’s Messenger, which I remember as being a little more hip than The Evangelist, was less censorious.

Breslin would have appreciated Mom’s quandary.

The next of his books I read was How the Good Guys Finally Won which I remember as being one of the best books on Watergate going. Charles Pierce remembers it that way too:

Pierce, getting ready to quote Breslin:

And his Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, an account of the downfall of Richard Nixon as seen from the office of then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, is one of the most underrated studies of those events, and certainly the most entertaining, but with gleaming edge to it when it was needed.

Consider, for example, Breslin's description of the hiring of John Doar, a hero of the Kennedy Justice Department when civil rights workers were being killed in the South, as lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's investigation of Nixon's crimes. Breslin was sharp enough to see what Doar's hiring would mean. You can hear the bell tolling away in the background.

Breslin, quoted:

And so John Doar came to Washington. Melvin Laird assured people in the White House that Doar was a fine choice. "He will not find anything if there is nothing to find," Laird said. "We couldn't ask for anything more." Which was a proper determination, providing that Richard Nixon was more or less innocent, as Laird at the time believed. The one who knew differently, Nixon, said nothing. He should have. For John Doar believes in everything Richard Nixon does not. And John Doar is a fearsome opponent.

Breslin as a columnist I got to know later, like I said. But again it was through a book. The collection called The World According to Breslin. I did read some of his work in its natural environment, newsprint. Our local paper ran his columns occasionally. This started after Son of Sam made Breslin more famous or infamous by association. I remember one he wrote in the summer of 1979 particularly, and I remember it best for a single sentence. Skylab’s orbit was deteriorating and it was coming back to earth, in pieces as it broke up and burned up re-entering the atmosphere 945 years ahead of schedule. People down below began to wonder where those pieces would land and worried it might be on top of them. Breslin hoped so. Well, he hoped pieces would come down on New York City and make hash out of certain people. He made a list he thought the world---the part of it where he lived and worked, at any rate--- would be better off without. He put himself at the top of the list. He felt he deserved to be hash.

“I’m no good and I can prove it,” he wrote.

That line has been cracking me up for almost thirty-eight years. I use it seriously about myself. Most people don’t believe me, if you can believe it. But it’s a fact. In fact, I’m thinking of making it the new tagline for the blog.

Breslin’s list includes people who were notorious in the day but I’m guessing only the names of Billy Martin and Truman Capote resonate today. If Skylab had waited just a couple more years to begin its descent and Breslin made his list sometime in the 1980s there’s a name would've made the list that resonates today, although I wonder if at the time Breslin would have foreseen lasting fame for the bearer of it. Actually, first time Breslin mentioned the guy he didn't use his name. He referred to him as "a young builder named Junior with a Big Ego."

Breslin despised Donald Trump from the get-go.

At any rate, I was thinking I should re-read one of Breslin’s books in his honor. Not The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Table Money. It’s another novel. A fine one. About Irish working class types in New York City. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s down in a box in the basement and I don’t know which box and don’t feel like searching for it at the moment and beside, I should read something new, new to me, something of his I haven’t read. That’s what I decided the other night upon hearing the news he was gone. I put The Good Rat on reserve at the library. It arrived today. I started it tonight. It’s about the trial of a pair of cops who'd been moonlighting as hitmen for the mob. Breslin wasn't looking forward to covering it. He didn't think there'd be much in the way of material for a column. He didn't foresee a book coming out of it.

I was hesitant about this trail from the start. These criminals held their secret meetings at a bar next to a golf course. If you look at how mobsters live today, you would say middle class and be right. The late, great Queens defense attorney Klein the Lawyer once said on behalf of some beast, "How could he commit a crime? He lives in a house." Middle class drowns excitement wherever you run into it. And the idea of cops who use their badges to murder depresses me. It it dreary and charmless and lacks finesse. It promises no opportunity to marvel, much less laugh.

Then he heard the chief witness for the prosecution, the good rat of the title, begin his testimony.

Then the trial starts and I am pulled out of my gloom. An unknown name on the prosecution witness list, an old drug peddler, a lifelong fence, steals the show and turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal. Right away I think, Fuck these cops. I have found my book.

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At this time we point out that Kaplan required no help from mobsters in any of his business ventures, legal or not. He made millions selling marijuana, for example, and virtually none of it went to to gangsters. He was a big earner for the Lucchese Mafia family in many businesses, though, and everybody was afraid of bothering him. Some associates believed he could have them killed. Mafia danger is the illusion of Mafia danger. Also, mob families couldn't move in on him because they didn't know how to do what he was doing. He was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys. Gangsters can't do what he did because it requires effort and thought. Kaplan ran legal garment businesses that made great money and let implied threats do the heavy lifting. Gangsters can manage private sanitation pickups or union organizing with violence, but Burt's schemes required actual work.

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...Now, after doing so much evil, he is at last committing what he believes is an atrocious, unforgivable act.

Throughout the trial Kaplan refers to himself by various street names for an informer. He is asked what he means when he says this.

"A stool pigeon is a rat. Just like me."

Burt Kaplan's voice looses eagles that swoop and scream and slap against walls. He carried his loyalty to the Mafia almost to the end, until he believed there were leopards about to pounce. At the last stroke of midnight he turned in his claws.

Judd Burstein, one of Kaplan's lawyers, says, "He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the omerta." He is about to become what he despises.

The trial took place in 2006, but Breslin reaches back in time from time to time to reminisce about tough guys he covered in his youth. In the process, he writes about the earliest days of his own career as a columnist, which began when he was assigned to cover the sentencing of a mobbed up union boss named Tony “The Pro” Provenzano. Maybe you heard of him. If you did, it might be because Breslin turned him into words other people have been unconsciously quoting and paraphrasing ever since, thinking they’re just saying what things are when they’re really relating the world according to Breslin:

Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old Herald Tribune, they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.

Breslin went. A number of things about Tony the Pro riveted his attention, one of which was his pinky ring. Provenzano was proud of it and liked to show it off while pretending he was doing anything else but.

I wrote about it all, including the ring. At the newspaper this was regarded as exceptional. Reporters had written about tough guys before, but not about their jewelry. There was a sudden new respect for me. I knew exactly how to take it. I announced I was great. Big JB Number One. It happened you needed no extra ability to do such a story. It was all there, like an order in a store being placed on the counter in front of you. A moron can pick it up and go home. Just write down what they do and say. But I declared that it took tremendous courage and talent to do the story. I had to contend with murderers. Why shouldn’t I boast? I wasn’t out of some Harvard or Princeton that gets people jobs on their school name. I attended John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens, the full five years. Was I nervous about the mobsters? You want to be afraid of something, be afraid of being broke.I remember John O’Hara wrote me a letter. I made sure everyone was looking when I threw it on the floor. “I don’t need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender…

Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why the dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.

I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”

Exactly, the point. Who else? Who else could tell the dangerous fruitcake’s story? Who else could tell any New Yorker’s story? Who else would you want to?

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Pierce’s appreciation of Breslin includes appreciation for another of Breslin’s novels, World Without End, Amen. Story of a disgraced New York cop who travels to Ireland to forget and winds up drawn into the Troubles by his estranged father, a gunman for the IRA, a fantasy set in an alternative universe because, as you know in our universe, only Muslims can be terrorists.

Pierce’s post is a dual eulogy. He writes in praise of Chuck Berry too. Not Chuck Berry the guitarist. Not Chuck Berry the pioneer rock and roller. Chuck Berry the wordsmith, the near-poet Pierce credits along with Breslin with re-inventing American English. To use a Berry-ism, motorvate on over to Esquire to read the whole piece.

"And the Academy Award for Best Performance as President of the United States goes to...": Donald Trump at the Oscars. Scene 3

Friday, March 10, 2017.

“There is no mercy in a country that turns its back on those most in need of protection…”: Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III taking House Speaker Paul Ryan to task at a hearing before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce on the Republicans’ bill to repeal and sort of replace the ACA. Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

This is the third of four parts. Part one is here. Part two here.

I think of Joe Kennedy III as my Congressman. It’s irrational. It’s nostalgia at work. There’s a part of me that still lives in Boston. It’s only a little saner than the parts of me that live in Dickens’ London and Hemingway’s Paris. But at least I did once live and vote in Boston. Tip O’Neill was my Congressman back then. That was a long time ago. Kennedy was born the first year I was in town. The districts have been redrawn since then. I can’t tell for sure from the map but I think at least one of the apartments I lived in is in his district. It at least includes the old neighborhood of the church where his grandfather and great-uncle Jack were baptized and, when I went to church, and I went to church back then, not regularly, but more often than you might think---I was dating a good Catholic girl at the time---that was my church. St Aidan’s. Bobby and Jack’s pictures hung on the wall behind the baptismal font. It’s gone now. Mostly. Swallowed up in a condominium complex. If you want an idea of how that came about, see the movie Spotlight. The Boston Archdiocese had some legal bills to pay. But it’s still standing there in my memory as the church it was. Mass is still being said. I’m still dating that girl. I still get to Fenway on Saturday afternoons in summer and pay $3.50 to sit in the right field bleachers and cheer on Dewey Evans and Wade Boggs and Jim Rice---I told you it was a long time ago. I still work in the bookstore downtown and walk across the Common every morning to get there with my coffee mug steaming. If home is where the heart is, Boston’s home. So, ridiculous as it is, I claim Joe Kennedy as my Congressman and the other night he made me and all his constituents, actual and imaginative, proud with his stirring rebuke of Paul Ryan for calling killing the ACA along with a lot of people who are going to lose their insurance a “mercy.”

"I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill 'an act of mercy.' With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture…The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us. There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering. There is no mercy in a cold shoulder to the mentally ill. This is not an act of mercy. It is an act of malice."

My heart leapt as I watched. There was no hope Ryan would feel the sting. A man with no heart can’t have a change of heart. But it was good to hear the words spoken. Particularly satisfying to hear that last word applied. But I knew as I was watching that I was as much moved by who was speaking as by what he was saying. The Kennedy name still lights a fire in me.

I mentioned in the second post of this series how the whole time I was growing up and for more than a decade into my adulthood Democrats around me were hoping for the second coming of JFK. I was one of them. At some level I still am. For a second the other day I thought I saw him.

The truth is I don’t know how proud I’d be to claim this Kennedy as my Congressman if he really was my Congressman. My sense is that he’s doing a good job and he’s a real up and comer. But I don’t read the Boston papers except to follow the Celtics and the Red Sox and I suspect my sense that he’s the real deal is more a matter of my hoping that he is.

The Kennedy name is no guarantee of political skill or success or even of being on the right side of an issue. Joe Kennedy III’s father Joseph Kennedy II was a pretty good Congressman during the twelve years he served in the House but I don’t recall he did anything to greatly distinguish himself. His uncle, Robert Kennedy Jr, is distinguishing himself as an anti-vaxxer kook these days. His aunt Kathleen Kennedy Townsend did all right by herself as lieutenant governor of Maryland, as far as I know, but that’s as far she went. His cousin Patrick, his uncle Ted’s son, had something of a mixed career; whatever potential he had he self-sabotaged thanks to his various addictions to alcohol and drugs. Ted’s other son, Ted Kennedy Jr, is just getting started as a member of the Connecticut State Senate but he’s something of a late bloomer at fifty-five. Given how many of them there are, there are probably plenty more members of the extended clan involved in politics in one way or another. But right now Joe III is the only one making a national reputation for himself and I can’t help hoping he’s the one and so, for a moment---one, brief shining moment---that’s who I saw him as.

Saw being the operative word.

I wasn’t just carried away by what I heard. It was also what I saw. His words were persuasive but his looks gave them force. The family resemblance is strong. Briefly I saw the three of them. His grandfather and his great-uncles. Robert, Ted, and Jack.

I caught myself.

I caught myself in the middle of telling myself a story about this Kennedy that was really about those Kennedys.

It was a story I wanted to hear. Needed to hear. And it wasn’t based on the facts of the moment but on memories and nostalgia, strongly Influenced by my having recently seen Jackie and the biography of Bobby I’m currently reading.

This is something we all do all the time. We make up stories based on what we already know or think we know and tell ourselves those stories while we are supposedly paying attention to what’s happening before our eyes.

The question then becomes what are we really paying attention to---what are we really seeing as opposed to what we think we’re seeing? The answer is a lot of things going on inside our own heads, much of which we’re not conscious of even as we’re “seeing” it. Unless we work hard not to, in most situations, what we’re paying closest attention to is ourselves.

It’s high near impossible to leave ourselves out of our thinking. It’s our fundamental bias. We tend to take our own word for things, usually without knowing that’s what we’re doing, which is why we don’t take it into account when forming impressions and making judgments. We tell ourselves stories and believe them completely to the point that the story is more real than reality and no contradicting stories will shake us out of our belief.

This explains why Trump’s voters are having such a hard time admitting they made a mistake in voting for the lunatic. They’re still telling themselves the same stories that allowed them to vote for him in the first place, the stories in which he appeared as “Donald Trump” the tough-minded, common-sensical boss America needs to make itself great again and not as Donald Trump the raving, racist egomaniac who doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt people and break things. And make money while he’s at it.

I think it also explains why so many members of the political media who should have known better---who did know better---didn’t see that raving, racist egomaniac doing his damnedest to pretend he wasn’t that racist, raving egomaniac in his address to Congress last week.

As I said in Scene 2, they saw what they wanted to see for the sake of the story they wanted to tell, Trump turning around his Presidency with one great “Presidential” speech. But they saw something else, and it was that something else that enabled them to see what they wanted to see for the sake of that story. They saw what they were used to seeing under the circumstances whenever a big commanding figure appears in the well of the House of Representatives before an assemblage of Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen and other high government officials, flanked by the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, against the backdrop of the American flag.

They saw the President of the United States.

Who they forgot for the moment was Donald Trump.

Fade out on Scene 3. Follow the link to Scene 4.

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Here's my review of Jackie: Mrs Kennedy against Death.

This is the biography of RFK I'm reading, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye. It's available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon. Please help this blog keep chugging along. Buy books!

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Try to see him and not them.

Mandated. Chapter One: The Sorrows of Young Lance Mannion and the Republican Health Care Plan

Posted Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

Portrait of the Blogger as a Less Than Happy Young Man: That’s me in the glasses on the right,looking soulful while eating a cookie at a reception after Uncle Merlin’s graduation from Boston University a hundred years ago. That’s Uncle Merlin with his back to the camera on the left. His grandmother and mother are sitting at the table between us. A nice day and I had a good time even though I was generally miserable those days. But at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that if I’d choked on that cookie I could have gone to the hospital without worry because I had my own health insurance. And I wasn’t even mandated to.

When I was twenty I dropped out of college.

The college I was no longer attending disagreed on the technicalities. According to them, I flunked out. And I guess technically I had. But I didn’t see it that way. In the middle of the semester my sophomore year I stopped doing the work and stopped going to class. I heard from friends this perplexed several of my professors who thought I was a good student and on my way to earning A’s in their classes. But I’d just been going through the motions for a while and then simply couldn’t see the point of it anymore. Nothing was interesting. Nothing was fun. Nothing seemed worth the time or the trouble. I spent most of my time reading the library. I had no intention of coming back anyway so I just quit. I just didn’t go through the formalities. That was the beginning of the most miserable two years of my life.

I was probably depressed but it didn’t occur to me and I’d have denied it anyway. I knew from depression. My grandmother suffered from it terribly. I thought all depressed people suffered the way she did, unable to bring themselves to do anything except sit in a chair and stare into space or weep silently for hours on end. I could do things. I did things. I did lots of things. I did them mostly without enthusiasm or enjoyment but I did them. And I had a plan. I blamed my unhappiness on having gone to the wrong school and I made up my mind to get into the right one. Boston University. So I got a job. Two jobs, actually, one to pay for my upkeep, the other to pay for classes at Albany Stare where I went part-time to repair my GPA and make myself presentable as a potential transfer student. This didn’t leave me a lot of money to play with. But I didn’t mind. I was unhappy but I was busy and I was doing something I hadn’t done in my life so far---paying my own way. I felt independent, responsible, and like I was getting somewhere. Back on track, at any rate.

Part of paying for my upkeep was paying for my own health insurance. I don’t remember if this was my idea. Probably not. Probably Pop suggested it because I was no longer automatically on his insurance. There was no requirement that insurance companies cover children over eighteen. He was allowed to keep his kids on his policy while they were in college. I think it’s likely I had two options. Pay Pop whatever extra his insurance company charged him to keep me on his policy or buy my own. That there was a third option, going without health insurance, either didn’t occur to me or struck me as out of the question. I was twenty and felt invincible but I knew I wasn’t and I wanted to be able to see a doctor or go to the hospital whenever life inevitably and routinely proved my lack of invincibility.

I can’t tell you the details of the policy. My bet would be I never really knew them. Probably I let Pop pick it out for me. He wouldn’t have let me buy a shitty policy but almost certainly it provided only the most basic coverage and I’d have been in trouble if something really serious happened to me. It was from Blue Cross Blue Shield, I remember that, and I remember being pleased about that. I thought Blue Cross was the best insurance company going, the way I thought Ford made the best pickup trucks and Hyatt ran the best hotels. I was a sucker for their advertising. But I can still picture the paper ID card and remember the little surge of pride every time I opened my wallet and saw it in there. The sight of it assured me I was a responsible and independent grown-up now. For the life of me, though, I can’t remember if I ever had to take it out to use it. Seems likely I’d remember if I had, considering how many buttons I’d have busted when handing it over to the receptionist at the doctor’s office and how disappointed I’d have been when it didn’t earn me the pat on the head I’d have expected---”You’re carrying your own health insurance? My, aren’t you a responsible young man! So unlike other young men your age. Are you dating anyone? Would you like to meet my daughter?”

At any rate, I carried that card for two years. When I got into BU I went back on Pop’s insurance, stayed on it through grad school (His must have been a generous insurance company or, more likely, his employer, the State University of New York, was a tough negotiator on behalf of its professors.) When I left Iowa I bought my own insurance again for the year I was out of school and living off a fellowship. Then I want to work teaching and I’ve been covered ever since.

Now, obviously, this little stroll down Memory Lane was inspired by the Republicans’ finally releasing what they call their health care plan---since it doesn’t include the costs or mention how many people are going to be stripped of their insurance, it’s not so much a plan as an advertisement for one. The first teaser trailer, so to speak.  But what does it really have to do with what’s going on now?  Virtually nothing.

This is just a fragment of my autobiography. A story---practically just an extended anecdote---about me and only me. And it happened a long time ago. The world has changed. Health care has changed. The only lessons I’m comfortable drawing from it are ones about who I was way back when from which I can infer some things about who I am now and how I got this way.  Basically, all it is is background that explains why I’m unsympathetic to young single people who are mad that they are required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty on the grounds that they’re young and invincible and it’s unfair to make them buy a product they don’t need or want.

First, I want to say to them, you aren’t invincible, and sooner or later life’s going to prove that to you, and, second, when it inevitably does, when you walk out in front of a bus or fall off a cliff or discover that young people can get cancer, who’s going to pay for it after the hospital and the doctors have taken every penny you have and sent you back to live in your parents’ basement? We are! The rest of the costs are going to be passed along to us directly and indirectly.

This isn’t just me being a grumpy old man. I’d have made the same argument back when I was twenty, although back then it would have been as much a boast about my own good sense and personal responsibility. (I’d have counted on nobody pointing out that if really had any sense and was a responsible a young adult I’d have still been in school and on my father’s insurance and not have had this particular reason for boasting.) But my point would have stood and still stands: Nobody is ever perfectly free of responsibility to others and no personal choice is completely personal. We’re social beings, we can’t survive outside society, and that makes us intimately involved in each other’s lives. Whatever I do affects you. Whatever you do affects me. Things are not simply ok to do because we might think it’s not anyone’s business but our own.

“Who am I hurting?”

“You want a list? How much time have you got?”

But there are too many things I don’t know that I need to know before judging. I don’t know how much my insurance cost. I don’t know what it covered. I don’t know if my policy was the nearly worthless type that would have been cancelled right away under the provisions of the ACA and if I could have afforded the equivalent of the better policies now required because I don’t know how much money I made with my two jobs. I don’t know off the top of my head what the cheapest policy for a young single person costs today. I don’t know how much money the young people complaining make. I do know that the ones who are complaining are either over 26 or their parents for one reason or another don’t have insurance themselves. It would be nice to think that everyone over the age of twenty-six has a job with benefits that include health insurance or is making enough money they can afford to buy a decent policy for themselves. But that’s simply not true. That’s why we need an affordable health insurance program. It’s why we need national health insurance. It’s why we need national health care!

If I’m going to lecture young people on what they should do based on what I did when I was their age then I should know what it really was that I did when I was their age. Memory is not a good basis for judgments of any kind. Not only do we forget more than we remember, we misremember more than we remember accurately, and often that’s because we need to misremember. We select memories that serve our interests at the moment, the main interest of the moment being our vanity. We actively edit memories even in the process of remembering. “When I was your age…” is usually the opening salvo of a lie.

And it’s not only the case with old memories. We do it with memories from yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.  We misremember in the process of forming a memory. The fact is that most of what we think we know about ourselves and the way the world works is based on fictions we’ve invented as we go or made up afterwards to make sense of what’s happening in a way that comforts us. Basically, we don’t understand our own lives any better than we understand other people’s lives because we don’t do a good---or honest---job of self-observation and analysis.

A lot of what I don’t know is knowable, even information from four decades ago. It’s possible that at the bottom of some box in Mom and Pop Mannion’s attic I could find my copy of my actual policy or the check stubs from my monthly payments. My tax returns from those two years might be up there too. Someone at Blue Cross could probably tell me that the likeliest policy a twenty year old single male would have bought at the time and how much that cost and what it covered. It’s even possible that somewhere in their archives is their copy of my policy. I could look it all up...if I had the time and the staff and the inclination and the reason. But I have none of those because…

I’m not a United States Congressman. It’s not my job to know any of this stuff. I’m not making policy and enacting laws that affect the lives of millions of people. It’s one thing, then, for an old coot like me to complain about kids today based on how I think the world used to be. It’s another thing for the likes of Jason Chaffetz to tell people who can’t afford health insurance that they could if only they’d give up their iPhones.

End of Chapter One. Follow the link to Chapter Two: Problem is we don't know what we think we know.

That time Pop Mannion was smarter than John Kenneth Galbraith

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, January 1, 2017. Thursday morning, February 9, 2017.

Actually, there were probably lots of times when Pop was smarter than Galbraith, but I’m thinking of this one time in particular that I know of for sure because I was there

The six foot-nine inch U.S. Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith (Guess which one he is) with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during Jackie’s visit to India in March of 1962, twenty years before five foot-six inch Pop Mannion proved himself smarter than Galbraith, at least on the subject of the Democrats running Southerners for President. Photo courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Musuem.

On the drive up this morning to the old Mannion Family Homestead for New Year’s dinner with the clan, Ken and I began listening to Adam Hochschild’s recent book about Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Spain in Our Hearts. One of the main figures in the book, young volunteer named Bob Merriman who fought for the Republicans against Franco and the fascists and who may have been one of the models for Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, had studied economics at Berkeley where one of his classmates was John Kenneth Galbraith. Ken had never heard of Galbraith---Has anyone under fifty? Anyone without a degree in economics, at any rate?---so I gave him quick a biographical sketch and the titles of his two most well-known books---If anyone under fifty has heard of him, have any of them, including the economics majors, read The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State?---and I added Ken’s personal connection to Galbraith. He’s one degree of separation from Galbraith. Through me. I had dinner with him once. Not much of a connection, but it’s a good family story.

It’s a story in two-parts. I think I’ve told the story before, although a long time ago, so I feel it’s safe to tell it again. This time I’m starting with the second part and finishing with the first which is where the title of this post comes from.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Pop Mannion was president of the local chapter of The Freedom Forum, a now long defunct organization of civic-minded professionals who met regularly to hear prominent movers and shakers in government, law, academia, and other patches of the public square speak on important issues of the day. It was sort of a Kiwanis Club for policy wonks and political junkies. In October of ‘82, Galbraith was the invited speaker. As president, it was up to Pop to introduce him. Galbraith was six foot-nine. The lectern and the microphone were set up to accommodate his height. Pop Mannion is five-six. When it came time, they couldn’t find a step stool tall enough for Pop to stand on so he could see and be seen behind the lectern. So he stood beside the lectern and pulled the microphone, which was on a bendable stand, over and down. It required a considerable stretch on his part and caused some good natured laughter. Pop, of course, took it in good fun. But things got more amusing when Galbraith strode over to take the mic. He paused a bit and looked down smiling from his great height, making sure the audience had time to enjoy the Mutt and Jeffishness of the scene.  When he stepped up to lectern, he made a bit of a show of readjusting the mic and settling his notes on the lectern, demonstrating that both were still too low for him. Then he began with an anecdote, inspired by the moment.

It was about the first time he met Charles de Gaulle.  DeGaulle was a mere six foot five. But it was a novelty for both men to be looking someone they were having a conversation with in the eye without having to stoop and Galbraith felt that was worth remarking on. He asked de Gaulle if he found it was an advantage for a politician to tower over everybody in the room. De Gaulle said he’d found it was but he added, “But we still must beware of the little men.”

Galbraith delivered the line with a slight sideways glance and a smile in Pop’s direction.

That’s the second part. Here’s the first part.

There was a dinner before Galbraith’s speech and---another prerogative of being president---Pop was seated at the head table with Galbraith. I happened to be home on a visit from Boston and Pop had brought me along as his guest so I was at the table too. I didn’t take much part in the conversation. Too tongue-tied and overawed at being in the company of Galbraith, whom I admired, having read both The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State (without having majored in economics---earned a C in the only economics course I ever took) and his Ambassador’s Journal, which I remember as a very interesting book filled with insights into the cultures and ways of India where he served as JFK’s ambassador but which I probably read for the high-toned gossip it included about the Kennedys. Also I was overwhelmed by my now one degree of separation from John Kennedy and all I wanted to talk about with Galbraith was that, but fortunately I knew better and kept my trap shut. You wouldn’t really call it a conversation anyway. Mainly it was a matter of someone asking a polite question and Galbraith then holding forth. That’s the way these things go.

The talk was mainly about politics, naturally, and everybody at the table, most of whom were liberals, wanted Galbraith’s reassurance that things were going to be ok. If you think Democrats and liberals are demoralized now, imagine your way back to 1982. Reagan had won in a landslide in 1980. The Republicans had picked up twelve Senate seats. The bright spot was the House, where the Democrats still held a sizable majority, but it was hard to focus on that. The Senate election coming up didn't look at all promising. (The Democrats did manage to add a seat. Still left them in the minority, 54-46.) And we didn’t have the consolation of having had eight successful years of a Barack Obama as President. The thought of Jimmy Carter filled everyone with a mixture of sadness, gloom, frustration, and fury. The question at hand was what could and should the Democrats do to regroup and whom could they run in ‘84 who’d stand even half a chance against Reagan. No one at the table, including Galbraith had any convincing answer.

No one except Pop.

“Fritz Hollings,” he said.

Hollings was then senator from South Carolina. He’d been governor. He wasn’t especially conservative for a Southerner of his time, but he was far from especially liberal either. Pop was wasn’t thrilled with him, he was just putting his name out there for discussion, but he thought Hollings was competent and personally appealing and he looked the part of President. That last was important. Carter had never looked like anyone’s ideal of a President and by the end of his term he looked beaten down, careworn, defeated, and unhappy. And that wasn’t even in comparison to Reagan. Pop thought we needed someone robust and confident-looking and confidence-inspiring to stand toe to toe with Reagan. More to the point, though, he thought we needed to run someone conservative enough to carry states in the South and Midwest. Galbraith disagreed. Vehemently.

“No!” he boomed. Actually, I don’t remember if he boomed. I don’t remember what he sounded like, actually. But I remember he was emphatic enough that he as good as boomed. “No more Southerners!”

He didn’t add not now! Not ever! Never! But it was implied.

I suspect he wasn’t thinking only of Carter. As a member of Kennedy’s inner circle, he didn’t hold Lyndon Johnson in the highest regard either.

When Ken and I reached the old homestead, I told Pop about what we’d talked about on the drive up. He remembers that night. Remembers introducing Galbraith. Remembers Galbraith’s joking at his expense. He remembers having dinner with him. He doesn’t remember that turn in the conversation, although, considering the time he doesn’t doubt the question came up. So he doesn’t remember making his case for Fritz Hollings. Know what else he doesn’t remember?

Fritz Hollings.

Sic transit etc.

Another thing Pop doesn't remember? Ever thinking he was smarter than John Kenneth Galbraith. But time proved Pop right and Galbraith wrong, at least on the question of running a Southerner. Took ten years to do it, though.

Hollings did try for the nomination in 1984. Didn’t get very far. I doubt Pop was much surprised or cared. By that time he had his eye on another Southern governor. Guy who’d been the youngest governor in the country and had ended his two-year stint as the youngest ex-governor a month after that dinner with Galbraith, 1982 being the first of the Comeback Kid’s comebacks.

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Yes, in 1982 and in 1992, Pop was thinking like a New Democrat. Keep in mind, though, that Pop is one of the last of the true New Deal Democrats. In his heart, Franklin Roosevelt is still his President. Pop served two stretches as our town’s supervisor---Sounds like he was in prison. I imagine that some days it felt like he was.---the first go-round for ten years, the second for eight. During his time in office, he built parks, improved the infrastructure, and worked on his stamp collection, just like his hero. I have to ask him if he was inspired to start collecting stamps when he was a kid by the example of the President. At any rate, as a politician, Pop modeled himself on FDR as best he could. He was able to do something however, FDR couldn’t do but would have liked to have done and tried when he could manage it to do---balance the budget. Things have to be paid for and as Pop liked to say, throwing shade at Republicans, “You can’t do it with smoke and mirrors.”

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In the spring of 1961, President Kennedy sent his Vice-President on a series of good will trips to Africa and Asia. It was partly done to give Lyndon Johnson, who was already feeling miserable, bored, useless, and neglected as VP, something to do that might help cheer him up. "I cannot stand Johnson's damn long face,' Kennedy told Florida Senator George Smathers. "He just comes in, sits at the Cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad." It was Smathers who suggested sending Johnson on around the world trip "so he can get all of the fanfare and all of the attention and all of the smoke-blowing directed at him, build up his ego again, let him have a great time." In May, Johnson landed in India, where he came under the satirical eye of Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith.

Galbraith...gave the President a sample of his famous wit in a note about Johnson's arrival. "Lyndon...arrives next week with two airplanes, a party of fifty, a communications unit, and other minor accoutrements of modern democracy. I...will try to make him feel good that he was on the ticket. His trip may not be decisive for the peace of Asia. The East, as you know, is inscrutable." In New Delhi Johnson had what he called "a belly to belly talk" with Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru, an neutralist in the Cold War. [Baffled editor's note: "Belly to belly"? Look at Nehru in the photo up top. He was five-ten. Johnson was six-four.] A want of "appreciable business" between the two produced long silences on Nehru's part until Johnson hit on the subject of rural electrification, a matter on which they were in fervent agreement. The conversation impressed Galbraith as innocuous: "Both Nehru and Johnson spoke rather formally on education, which they favored; poverty, which they opposed; freedom, which they endorsed; [and] peace, which they both wanted."

The rest of Johnson's stay in India consisted of brief trips outside New Delhi, where he campaigned as if he were running for Congress. Galbraith told a translator: "If Lyndon forgets and asks for votes, leave that out." Johnson rode on a bullock cart, drew water from a well, laid a cornerstone at an engineering institute, shook hands all around, handed out pencils with the inscription, "Compliments of your Senator, Lyndon B. Johnson---the greatest good for the greatest number," and recounted the triumphs of electrification in rural America. Galbraith advised the State Department that Johnson "carries all precincts visited and would run well nationwide."

That's from Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 by Robert Dallek.

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Please help keep this blog chugging along: buy books! Dallek's Flawed Giant, along with Hochschild's Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, Galbraith's The Affluent Society and The Great Crash of 1929, and the Library of America's collection of some of Galbraith's most influential books, Galbraith: The Affluent Society & Other Writings, 1952-1967: American Capitalism / The Great Crash, 1929 / The Affluent Society / The New Industrial State are available at Amazon.

Nude With Sitcom: A Study in Comparative Mores, also known to art historians as Laura Petrie Naked

Posted Friday morning, January 27, 2017. Originally posted Sunday, July 10, 2011. Somewhat revised.

Not Laura Petrie.

A blogger’s life is like the king’s, according to Alice, terrible hard.  In order to write my review of Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs I had to do some intensive research that required me to watch eight or nine episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

You’re feeling bad for me already, I know it and I appreciate your concern.

All the episodes are available to watch online and I put links to a few of the ones I watched in the review.  More Easter Eggs. You’ll find them. One of the episodes I watched but didn’t link, though, to is called “October Eve”.

That’s the one about spending twenty-four minutes imaging Mary Tyler Moore naked.

Actually, there were two episodes about that.  The other was “Never Bathe On a Saturday”. You remember that one.  Laura and Rob are spending a night in a hotel and Laura gets her toe stuck in the bathtub spout and Rob has to help her get it unstuck, except that the bathroom door is locked, so he has to think up all kinds of ways to break in most of which lead to him hurting himself?  We never actually see Laura naked in the tub but of course we “see” Laura naked in the tub.

In “October Eve”, a nude painting that Laura posed for when she and Rob were newlyweds and that she’d thought was destroyed, because she’d thrown a pot of black paint at it, resurfaces in a swanky gallery in midtown Manhattan where all the world will see it. Fortunately, Sally sees it first and calls Laura to warn her and eventually the painting is sent to a mountaintop in Brazil before anyone else Rob and Laura know can see it.

Now it’s important that Laura hadn’t actually posed nude for the painting.  We learn what happened in a flashback. She’d posed in a new outfit Rob loved.  But the artist, played by a surprisingly handsome, young and dashing-looking Carl Reiner---sans toupee, so it must be the beard---insists on his vision. He paints what he sees, he tells her, when, horrified and mortified she finally views the finished painting.  And he’s dumbfounded that she expected him to paint anything else. He’s too much of a genius in his own mind to bother painting what’s expected of him, particularly some “peasant’s” housewife in slacks and a sweater.  “For that kind of picture,” he informs her, “you take a camera, go down to Central Park, get on a pony, and snap your brains out!”

Laura’s anger and her feelings of having been humiliated and in a real way violated, although played for laughs, are also meant to be taken seriously and they make sense in the moment.  She has been betrayed and taken advantage of.  She trusted that one thing was going on while the whole time this stranger was up to something very different.  She has no more understanding of his attitude than he has of hers.  It also makes sense that she didn’t tell Rob about it when she got home.  For one thing, she’d have been worried he might rush down to Greenwich Village and get in a fight with the artist.  But, more to the point, she’d have been worried that Rob wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t taken her clothes off for another man.

This is projection on her part.  Rob is not the type whose jealousy would carry him away to where he thought Laura would lie to him about that, although for a minute or two his imagination might get the better of him and he’d be upset by thinking about how upset he’d be if she really had posed nude. But what Laura is feeling is guilt. She’s blaming herself for having allowed herself to be used like that. She can’t help thinking that she should have known what the artist was doing, what kind of person he was. She can’t help thinking that she should have looked at the work in progress and put a stop to it. This is one of the things that’s done to a victim, blaming.  And the blaming can come from within as well as from without.

So it makes sense that when the painting resurfaces that all those feelings of Laura’s would also resurface, that she would again feel humiliated, violated, and guilty. It also makes sense that Rob, finally finding out what happened but also finding out that Laura had been keeping a secret, would have some trouble processing the information.  And it makes sense that both Rob and Laura would be embarrassed by the thought that people they know might see the painting.  The artist was right about one thing. He had genius. Naturally, we don’t see the painting, which the artist has titled October Eve—Eve as in naked in the Garden of Eden Eve, but also possibly eve as in evening. Since he “saw” Laura naked he could have just as easily have seen her in the twilight as in the light of mid-day in his studio.  But we’re convinced that it is beautiful, and its beauty isn’t just due to it’s being of Laura.  It’s also apparently erotically charged and incredibly life-like. It doesn’t matter that Laura didn’t actually pose nude. October Eve is so real and so much like her that she might as well have.

More to the point, though, is that anyone who sees the painting won’t be able to look at Laura without thinking of October Eve, that is, they’ll “see” her naked.  They won’t be able to look at her in the same way again.

They won’t be able to think of her in the same way either. On some level, they will always wonder.

Which would explain something that didn’t make sense to me when I watched the episode the other night or anytime in the past when I watched it before.

Sally’s reaction.

Again, it makes sense that Sally would be embarrassed on behalf of her friend.  She’d know how she’d feel if a painting of her like that turned up in a busy and famous gallery in New York City where not just friends but people she works with and has professional relationships with not only could but very likely would see it.

And it makes sense that Sally would wonder.  The Laura Petrie she knows wouldn’t pose nude for a painting and might very well not pose for a painting at all.  And the artist who is suddenly famous is also suddenly notorious, in that way all artists are notorious even if they haven’t done anything that would make them notorious.  Artists are suspect.  Sally can’t help wondering how Laura could have hooked up with this guy and, although she wouldn’t have used the phrased, if she hooked up with him.  Artists and their models, after all…

What doesn’t make sense to me is Sally’s desperation for an explanation. It’s not simply the case that she’s curious and wants Laura to explain how this odd thing happened.  She wants Laura to explain it away.

It’s as if Sally isn’t just thinking of Laura in a different way but thinking of her as a different person, a person she might not like.

I don’t get this. Sally is in show business. She’s a writer. She works on The Alan Brady Show. She lives in New York City.  Her circle of acquaintance includes people who work in the movies and in theater.  Almost certainly, she knows and is even friends with writers and musicians and actors and dancers and artists and their models, which means that almost certainly she knows other women who have done things more…um…bohemian than what she’s reluctantly suspecting of Laura and who are still her friends.

I suppose it could be that the possibility that Laura has an…er…artistic side cuts so much against what Sally “knows” about Laura that she just can’t accept it. It could be that she has such a high and idealized opinion of Laura that something other women could do without comment or censure would strike her as terribly wrong if Laura did it. The feet of clay or in this case body in oil syndrome.

It could be that Sally is so familiar with Rob and Laura’s shared biography that she knows there’s no way Laura could have “posed” for this artist until after she married Rob.

But all that is the kind of backstory and subtext that would only occur to the most obsessive of fans---like me. Casual viewers were only going to see that Sally is thinking Laura needs to explain it away.

It’s simply a plot device. If Sally of all people is shocked by the painting then of course everybody else Rob and Laura know will be too.

This means that the episode depends on the audience being, if not shocked themselves, understanding of why most other people would be shocked.

And I don’t understand.

This post, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, is really about me. Aren’t they all?

I don’t need the painting’s existence explained. I need to have it explained why it needs to be explained away.

Which is what I’ve been up since the other night, explaining that to myself.  And I’m having a hard time. Not explaining it.  Accepting the part of the explanation that says there’s anything to find shocking.

My explanation of course begins with reminding myself that it’s not 1964 anymore and hasn’t been for a very long time.

Back then nudity was not at all common in the movies.  The only thing close to the mainstreaming of pornography that we now pretty much take for granted was Playboy and there’s something almost innocent to our eyes about the centerfolds from those years. The idea that one of those girls who looked like the girl next door might actually live next door was part of the allure, but if it turned out that you knew that the girl next door actually was one of those girls…?  Times were changing---and one sign of that was this episode and the fact that they could get away with a whole episode about Mary Tyler Moore naked and that it could be treated as a joke and not a dirty joke. It was assumed that the audience, although they’d understand why some other people would be shocked at the idea of Laura having posed nude and might even be a little shocked themselves, wouldn’t be too shocked.  James Bond movies were about to hit the theaters.  Rock and Roll was already here to stay.  Never mind “October Eve”, plenty of other episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show were built around the possibility that love---and sex---with a proper stranger could tempt the most loving and devoted husbands and wives, including Rob and Laura. But still…

So you might assume that my inability to grasp the concept is due to the difference between 1961 and 2011. Except, you know, what is the difference?  Really?  In many ways we are not all that more sophisticated or forgiving. You could find evidence that in many ways we are even less so.

Thanks first to Polaroid and now to digital cameras there are many contemporary Laura Petries with nude photos in their pasts. Photos?  Videos. You don’t have to do a thought experiment. We know what happens when one of these gets seen by strangers.  Even people who pride themselves on their sophistication and tolerance find themselves going “Ewww” when they learn about them, although I’d guess the more usual still somewhat prudish and judgmental reaction is “What was she (or he) thinking?”

Even actors and actresses who have appeared naked on camera, professionally, will be embarrassed when something they did privately becomes public. And that’s the crucial matter. It’s a violation of their privacy. It was the same for Laura.  That artist violated her privacy twice, the first time when he painted her in a way she hadn’t consented to be painted and the second time when he put the painting on public display.

So that part of it I understand or I would understand or understand better if “October Eve” had been a photograph.

The fact is that the reason there’s a part of me that said, “I don’t get it” when I was watching is that October Eve is a painting.

Now here’s the other thing.

I’ve never been able to grasp the concept and that’s always been because it’s a painting.

I wasn’t old enough to stay up to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show when it was on in prime time.  Since I was a little kid, I’ve watched it in re-runs and I’ve been doing that so much and for so long that I’ve completely lost track of when I first---and last---saw particular episodes.  I can’t tell you, then, what I thought the first time I saw them.  You don’t remember anything anyway.  You remember the last time you remembered it.  I’m sure that things I now take for granted went right over my head the first time I saw them and so although I can’t tell you what I did think the first time I can make some pretty good guesses about what I didn’t think. Sometimes, even still, I’ll come across an episode I hadn’t seen in a long while and I will be surprised. I’ll say to myself, “I can’t believe they got away with that!” and then I’ll know that I must have been fairly young when I last saw that episode because one of the reasons they got away with it is they could count on kids like me not getting it.

Still, there are a few episodes I do remember watching for the first time. It’s not that I remember when or where or under what circumstances I saw them. It’s that I remember them vividly. I mean the stories scene by scene, the dialog line for line, the images practically shot by shot---they fixed themselves immediately and permanently in my imagination. With most of them it happened because they were so darn funny.

But there are a couple that stuck for other reasons. One of those reasons is my reaction to a particular episode. And one of those episodes is “October Eve”.

Because I watched the show only in reruns, which meant that I watched it on rainy days after school or mornings when I was home sick or very late at night when I was the only one in the house  left awake, it was a long time before I had watched almost every episode. I’ve learned since it’s become available on the web that there are still some episodes I haven’t seen or haven’t seen since I was so young I can’t remember having seen them.  But this also means that there are episodes I saw for the first time when I wasn’t a kid anymore and if “October Eve” was one of those, that might explain my reaction, which was: “So what if she posed nude for a painting?”

But if I wasn’t a kid, I wasn’t an adult either. Probably not even college age.

I had several friends in college who picked up extra money posing for art classes. I didn’t think anything of it except maybe I should register for some art classes. My friends were actresses (and an actor) and dancers, one of them was an artist herself, so there was something almost expected about their modeling. We were all young bohemians together.  This is an important distinction, though. They weren’t posing. They were modeling. There was a professional relationship between them and the artists and art students they modeled for, even if, as it was in a few cases, they were having affairs with those artists. But that’s how I know I saw “October Eve” before I got to college.  By that time I was old enough---or enlightened enough---or had been wised up enough by women who were my friends---to understand the importance of consent.

I have no way of knowing since I’ve long lost contact with most of them, but I’d bet that few if any of my friends would mind or mind that much if one of the paintings or sketches they modeled for suddenly appeared in a gallery near where they lived. They would, however, probably be mortified if something else was at issue.

This is something that happened to two friends of mine who weren’t part-time models. Each one posed for some photographs by the same student photographer who managed to talk both of them (separately) into posing nude for him after he had taken a number of shots of them clothed for a portraiture class he was taking. I still don’t know how he did it.  Neither of my friends was all that uninhibited.  Neither of them, like I said, was among the friends who modeled for art classes. And the guy himself wasn’t someone you’d guess many women would choose as a guy they’d want to see them naked under other circumstances. I guess there’s just something very persuasive about a camera. At any rate, the photos of them clothed were for his class so of course the guy’s teacher and classmates got to see them.  The nudes, as far as anybody knows, remained in his portfolio. Still my friends were embarrassed by their existence and terrified for a long time that the photos would escape his almost certainly less than careful keep. This guy was not to be trusted in anything, which makes it all the more inexplicable to me that they took their clothes off for him.

By the way, I know this because my friends confided in me. For some reason, people have always told me stuff they probably have shouldn’t. Maybe in a former life I was a priest.

The point is that I understood the violation that would have occurred if those pictures had turned up on the walls of the campus art gallery one day and I know I didn’t think about that the first time I saw “October Eve.”

All I understood when I saw it the first time was Laura’s embarrassment. Of course she was embarrassed. Who wouldn’t be embarrassed to be caught naked in public?  Her mortification and her self-recrimination and her fear went right past me.  So, like I said, I know I didn’t see it for the first time in college. I saw it when I was younger. Much younger. But not when I was a little kid. Possibly when I was around 12 or 13. More likely when I was 16 or 17.

How do I know that?

Because what fixed the episode in my memory was the idea of Mary Tyler Moore nude.

Not the idea.  The image.

I had to have been just old enough to draw in my head what she looked like without her clothes and have the image boggle my mind---so, at least junior high---but still too young---too stupid and immature---to consider what, besides its being a little embarrassing, it meant to Laura that some stranger was “seeing” her naked.

It’s my other reaction, “So what if she posed naked for a painting?” that tells me I was probably well along in high school.

It’s not that I was a typically callous and dirty-minded adolescent male. It was that I was becoming more artistically minded.

I thought that if anybody the Petries knew saw the painting that instead of being ashamed and trying to explain it away all Laura ought to have had to say was, The painting’s beautiful and the man’s a genius, the rest is none of your business.

(Maybe I was beginning to understand the privacy issue too.)

This makes me a little impressed with my young self. It means that I understood the difference between Botticelli’s Venus and a centerfold. It means that by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade I was already corrupted. I was already making exceptions for artists. I already believed that works of art and art were special.

It means that I was already setting myself up for a life that was disappointing, maddening, frustratingly full of failure, and very, very interesting.

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“October Eve” was written by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff who Ken Levine will tell you made one of the best comedy writing teams in the business.  They apparently made exceptions for artists too.  They let the painter off the hook in the end.  Both Rob and Laura get over their shock and embarrassment and Laura forgives him for taking advantage of her.  And the Petries are sophisticated people. They recognize the painting’s beauty---its own beauty as a work of art apart from its being a beautiful picture of Laura.  It turns out they own the painting.  Laura paid fifty dollars for it in advance.  They could demand he destroy it, but they don’t. They could demand he give it to them. They don’t do that. They could ask for part or all of the thousands of dollars he’s to make when the painting sells (again).  They don’t do that either. All they ask is that it be sold to someone who will display it far, far away where no one they know is ever likely to see it, which is how it ends up on that mountaintop in Brazil.

The fact that at the end the Petries and the artist have become friends strikes me as more a sign of the times than anything else.  Our times and their times. I can’t imagine that that character in a TV show today would get away with it like that or that we’d wind up liking him. Unless the show was Bored to Death.

But think how this would have been handled on Mad Men in an episode where an October Eve of Betty turned up.  Right off, we’d know that everything Sally wonders about Laura would be true about Betty.  The fun part would be watching the different ways first Henry then Don tried to deal with the painter.

At any rate, if you want to judge for yourself, here’s the link to the episode at Hulu. The Dick Van Dyke Show episode not the Mad Men episode.  Matthew Weiner hasn’t gotten back to me on the script I sent him on spec yet.

‘Twas the night before…

Posted Saturday night, December 24, 2016.

Our Advent Calendar this year…

Each window opens on a scene and a couplet from “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Ken and Oliver have been impressed---mildly impressed---well, sort of amused---by my having the poem memorized. They just needed to tell me what the picture showed and I was able to recite the lines that went with it. I told them I’d learned it by heart when I was a kid because Pop Mannion used to read it to my brothers and sisters and me many times every year. Often we made him read it several times in one sitting. He had fun with it and liked to include commentary and sound effects. My favorite part was when he’d read “He filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk…” he’d follow up as if talking back to himself with an indignant “Who’s a jerk?”

Still cracks me up to think of it.

By the way, I didn’t remind the guys that my memory was refreshed every year when they were kids and I read it---recited it---to them several times every Christmas season.

I could type it out for you here to prove I have it down cold, but it’s late, I’m tired, and Saint Nick won’t come until we’re all in bed, so here’s a link. Enjoy! And Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Happy 25th of Kislev!

Posted Saturday night, December 24, 2016.

This year, Hanukkah begins on the same day as Christmas is celebrated. https://t.co/bZRMpafxpZ

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) December 24, 2016

My best friends in our neighborhood when I was growing up were Jewish so Hanukkah was always an important part of the Christmas season to me, as much of a lead up to the big day as getting our tree, the Christmas concert at school, and sneaking up into the attic where Santa had hidden the presents. Not sure Sandy, Phil, Jerry, Janie, and Chuck felt as warmly about Christmas or appreciated my folding their holiday into mine. But they were generally tolerant and forgiving of my ignorance and Catholic chauvinism. The first religious bigot I had to face down was me. Anyway…I was trying to remember a year when we were kids when the first night of Hanukkah coincided with Christmas eve and I couldn’t. Turns out there’s a reason. It never happened. In fact, it’s only happened once before in my lifetime and we weren’t kids anymore.

This article by Kat Eschner sort of explains why this has been so and why it might or might not happen again while I'm still around to see it. Follow the link to "Someday, Maybe We’ll Have Hanukkah in July" at Smithsonian.com.

Zachary Crockett has more details and a helpful chart at Vox where he answers the question "How often does the first night of Hanukkah fall on Christmas?"

Now who’s laughing like an idiot?

Tuesday afternoon, December 20, 2016.

“What are you doing Saturday night?” Considering what the Jackson Pollock painting they’re looking at says to her, her answer isn’t surprising. Woody Allen and Diane Davila in the scene that contains my second favorite joke in Play It Again, Sam.

Talking to Ken and Oliver about this and that the other night somehow led to us talking about Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam and me trying to tell them my favorite joke from that film. But I couldn’t. Just thinking about it, I got laughing so hard I couldn't get the words out. It was uncontrollable. I’d say I was laughing like an idiot except that I was actually laughing like a genius---Pop Mannion. Laughing fits like the one overcoming me have overcome him in the same way as far back as I can remember. I was even making the same comic strip Teeheeheeheehee laughing sound he’ll make. The guys got a real kick out of that. It was more evidence I'm turning into my father. I think they think it’s a necessary step for clearing the way for them to turn into me. Why they’d want that, though, I can’t imagine. At ay rate, I couldn’t tell the joke for the life of me, and not only did they miss out on the joke, they missed out on the story that explains why I find the line so funny. Here it is.

First the joke. Allen's character is telling his friends (played by Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts) why his wife left him for a guy he describes as a big blond Nazi. Guy's also a skier. Allen says:

She wants to laugh; she doesn't laugh enough. Insufficient laughter; that's grounds for divorce. Oh, and skiing! She wants to go skiing. She wants to ski down a mountain laughing like an idiot.

You had to be there. And there was with me in college just dumped by my high school girlfriend---the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson, not the one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery---for a guy she was going skiing with weekends while I was away at school.

He was big and good looking but he wasn't a Nazi. Actually, he was Jewish. Also a nice guy. It's also the case that I was funnier and made her laugh, so she didn't need to go skiing down a mountain laughing like an idiot. Just go skiing. I did’t ski. So Woody’s and my situations weren’t quite parallel. Still it helped cheer me up to keep quoting the line whenever someone asked what happened with me and Chris. Still does, although no one’s asked me about her in a long time.

Post script. He dumped her before the next winter's ski season when he went away to college. Skiing and laughing together aren't enough to sustain a relationship, I guess.

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“The hideous, lonely emptiness of existence…” You didn’t think I wasn’t going to include it, did you? The scene from Play It Again, Sam that contains my second favorite joke in the movie:

Chronicle of My Recovery

Adapted from my Twitter and Facebook feeds and mined from the notebooks. September 14, 2016.

On Wednesday morning, July 27, I went into the hospital for long-needed surgery on my back. The operation appears to have done what I needed it to do, put me back on my feet, but the recovery’s taking a little longer than I expected.

July 27. 7:38 P.M. Apparently I'm alive folks!

July 28. 7:54 A.M. I haven't had coffee it 36 hours! Just ordered a whole pot from the hospital cafe. They say it'll take 45 minutes. That's inhuman!

July 28. 11:00 A.M. Physical therapist came by. Had me take a walk around the hospital floor. Did three laps. Spent the whole time talking about his junior high school age son’s golf game. Apparently the kid’s a phenom.

July 29. 3:42 a.m. The night nurses hate me.

July 29. 8:30 a.m. I'm such a goddamn big baby!

July 29. 7:54 P.M. Feeling much more upbeat tonight. Seems the last person to get the news I was having major surgery was me. Apparently what happened last night was I forgot where I was and tried to make a break for it. But I had a good day and have been up and walking around and they'll probably send me home tomorrow.

The nurses did tape this over my bed though.

 

July 30. 7:38 A.M. Hey, what's going on here? I'm still in the hospital!

July 30. 2:00 P.M. Cheryl, the day nurse is great. Cheerful, friendly, interested, concerned, encouraging, although her favorite words of encouragement are, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

July 31. 10:50 A.M. Today's medical update: Most important thing, Mrs M showed up early bearing coffee, so clearly she's not holding this invalid thing against me.

Next: I may be sprung today but it's more likely going to be tomorrow because there's equipment that needs to be in place at home beforehand and it probably can't be delivered until tomorrow.

Finally: I still hurt but I'm definitely on the mend. I'm getting around. In fact, I feel best when I'm up and walking, so the danger is I'll wear myself out doing laps around the floor. Have to learn to pace myself.

July 31. 5:23 P.M. HOME! I'm home! Hospital kicked me out late this afternoon. And it's all legal and everything! No one's coming after me to drag me back! So we're celebrating tonight with pie!

August 1. 8:12 A.M. Hey! Where are the nurses to make a fuss over me? Why hasn't room service sent up my coffee yet? It's almost like I'm not in the hospital anymore!

August 2. Valium now or Valium in an hour?

August 3. Today's interesting medical fact: you aren't in a condition to drive when you're doped up on percocet and valium. Somebody should have warned me ahead of time so I could have made plans.

August 4. Today's planned two steps on the road to recovery: beginning the switch from Percocet to Tylenol and...shaving!

August 5. Beautiful morning here. How is it by you? Been out for a walk yet? I have. Yup. All the way up to the corner and back. Mrs M could hardly keep up. Gonna do it again in a little while. If I get up to speed, I might just keep walking until I reach Cape Cod.

August 6. 8:26 P.M. Well, today was just no darn fun.

August 7. 1:02 P.M. The Mannion guys and Mrs M have gone off to the movies. I don't mind being left behind. Sitting for two hours in the theater would probably be torture. So I'm here alone and ready to party! Of course, shape I'm in, a party means taking a Valium and a four hour nap. But still...wild man!

August 7. 10:27 P.M. Going through my Twitter and Facebook timelines and liking just about every post. I think this is because there's simply lots going on out there to like and not because I overdid it on the painkillers.

August 8. 9:48 A.M. Took a walk all by myself just now. Just me and my walker all the way up to the corner and back. Felt like a real hero. Now I feel like a nap.

August 10. 9:13 A.M. Just got back from dropping Mrs M off at the bus depot. Later, I'll be taking Oliver to work. Yep. I can drive. I've quit taking the Percocet and Valium so if a cop stops me I'll pass the drug tests. So I'm mobile! Where should I go?

August 12. 8:26 A.M. First extended drive. 45 minute round trip taking Oliver up to work and...A bear! A bear! We saw a bear in the road!

August 13. 12 P.M. I was a goddamn superhero yesterday. And I'm paying for it today. So I think I've earned the right be a goddamn big baby for the rest of the afternoon.

August 13. 7:20 P.M. Laughter isn't the best medicine. Percocet is. But laughter's a close second, followed by pizza. Which is why tonight is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and pizza night here in Mannionville!

August 15.  8:58 A.M. All right. This recovery business has gone on long enough. The operation was two and a half weeks ago. I've been home from the hospital for two weeks. It's time for me to be all better and to get back to work busting broncos and fighting crime.

August 15. 10:43 P.M. Side-effect of Percocet they don't warn you about: an uncontrollable urge to whistle. I've been whistling "Don't Fence Me In" non-stop for the last half hour. My family hates me.

August 16. 12:30 P.M. This morning I was at the surgeon's for my first post-op follow up. Folks there were pleased with my progress. But to help the healing I was fitted with a "bone growth stimulator." I'm not sure how it works but the way it was explained to me sounded very scientific.

It *sounded* scientific but how would I know? For all I understood it, they might have been outfitting me with a magic wand.

At any rate, I'm supposed to belt the thing on and wear it for two hours every day. And, said the tech, at the end of six weeks...PRESTO!

All better.

My response to this news was a stoical, "SIX MORE WEEKS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?"

I don't think I'm very good at this stoicism thing.

August 19. 9:00 A.M. Took a walk along the riverfront this morning and saw a Trump voter suffering from real economic anxiety.

August 20. The Mannion guys have been taking real good care of me, leading to the question, Who’s carrying who these days?

August 21. 10:19 P.M. Ok. I need to be all better in the morning so that's what I'm going to be. No more malingering.

August 24. 8:45 P.M. Being a good patient and wearing my bone growth stimulator which requires me to sit still for 2 hrs doing nothing. So basically it's like being sent for an adult time-out.

August 29. 10:07 A.M. Sears sent me an email this morning asking if I need help with my "appliance repair." They mean fixing our washing machine which I bought a new part for from them just before I went into the hospital. I do need the help. It's just a matter of putting in the part but I can't do that myself because of the bending, lifting, and twisting involved. And I was warned by my doctor. NO BLT! (That's bending, lifting, and twisting. You probably figured that out.) But if this morning's an indication, I'll be able to do it.

YARD WORK!

I DID YARD WORK!

Nothing heavy. Just some weeding and hedge trimming. Very little BLT. But I was on my feet and out moving about for a good 20 minutes with a minimum of pain and without collapsing.

I would still be at it, in fact, if it wasn't so hot and humid.

So, thanks anyway, Sears, but I think I got this.

September 9. 12:44 P.M. Ok, I think I’ve milked this recovery business for all the pity and attention it’s worth. When my surgeon and set things up back in May, he warned me that the recovery could take up to six weeks and I laughed a cavalier’s laugh. Two, maybe three weeks tops, I promised myself. It’s now been six weeks and two days. So I must be recovered. And actually I am feeling much better. But I’m also tired of feeling sorry for myself. And I’m feeling guilty about it too. It’s not just that I am feeling better enough that any complaints I still have sound to me like whining. And it’s not just that as we’ve been so sadly reminded by Father Blonde’s death that there are worse things or that I know there are people who’ve gone through more intensive surgeries and suffered longer and more difficult recoveries or that there are even more people with illnesses and conditions that no surgery can fix. While I was in the hospital, the daughter of some friends of ours, a little girl fifteen months old, went into the hospital too. She was being treated for leukemia. She’s now down in New York City at Sloan-Kettering undergoing a second round of treatment. Reports are she’s bearing it all with cheerfulness and patience. She’s a little heroine and an inspiration and object lesson to whiny and self-pitying adults like me to shut up.

September 14. 10:30 A.M. Back at B&N for the first time in the seven weeks since the surgery and my favorite barista remembered my Membership number!

Chewie, we're home!

The day young Ensign Jimmy Carter was almost lost at sea

Sunday, September 4, 2016..

Newlyweds: Ensign James Earl Carter and his bride the former Rosalynn Smith. July 7, 1946. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Carter National Historic Site via PBS and The Washington Post.

Jimmy Carter padded his resume a bit when he ran for President in 1976.

He made a point of telling voters he’d been a farmer, a businessman, an engineer, and a nuclear physicist. He couldn’t hide the fact he’d been governor of Georgia but he didn’t emphasize it or, rather, he treated it matter-of-factly, as not something worth boasting about, unlike those other jobs he’d held. He was much prouder of those things. What he was really proud of, though, was that they let him run for President as not just another politician. He’d held real jobs. Done real work. Demonstrated real talent and ability. He was knowledgeable and skilled in many fields.

His resume, selectively evaluated and applied, helped him run in the first presidential election after Watergate as an outsider and a populist. He wasn’t like those political animals in Washington. Most definitely not like that scheming liar Richard Nixon.

For the same reasons, he was prouder of things he wasn’t. At least, he could make it sound that way when he was on the stump. Here he is in Iowa in 1975, as described by Rick Perlstein in The Invisible Bridge:

The event, on February 26, 1975, was the first of Carter’s unprecedented twenty-one campaign visits to the state---the first of many time perhaps (for the event was too far below the radar for any record of it to have been preserved) in which he drawled winsomely that, since his assets were already listed in his campaign literature, he would instead note his liabilities.

“I’m not a lawyer.” (A good laugh line.)

“I’m not from Washington.” (That one was even better.)

“I’m not a member of Congress.” (Bull’s-eye.)

“I’ve never been part of the national government.” That line, a reporter said, drew so much laughter that he couldn’t continue.

He was a farmer. But almost only nominally in 1976. He’d grown up on a farm but by the time he ran for president his primary non-political occupation was running a warehousing and seed-growing business for other farmers. So he was a businessman. It was a stretch calling himself an engineer but not too much of one. He studied engineering in college at Georgia Tech and then at the Naval Academy and as an officer in the submarine corps he was expected to know his way around an engine room and every other part of a sub.

As he relates in his recent memoir, A Full Life:

While not on duty, each officer was responsible for supervising one of the major functions of the ship’s operations. In addition, I was expected to learn from experienced enlisted men about every valve, pipe, lever, switch, hatch, torpedo, compass wheel or instrument that was used in the normal operation of the ship and in times of combat or other emergencies.

If things broke down, Ensign Carter had to know how to fix them in a hurry. Which happened now and then.

On one occasion we had  a fire in our engine room while submerged, and, as engineering officer, I was the leading firefighter. I donned the appropriate clothing and gas mask, discovered the source of the fames in the main motor, and directed the application of carbon dioxide and dry powder, since water or foam could not be used. I was wearing headphones and speaking into a microphone to the captain, and I reported that the fire was under control. The next thing I remember was lying on a table in the crew’s mess room with a hospitalman’s mate trying to get me to breathe oxygen.

So I suppose he could have added firefighter to his resume.

As for nuclear physicist, that was a bit of creative licensing. He’d studied some physics, having taken a few graduate level courses when he was a young officer recently recruited into Hyman Rickover’s newly formed nuclear-powered submarine corps. What nuclear physics he actually knew, he learned by doing. Rickover sent him and another young officer along with a team of seamen to the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York,---where he could have crossed paths with my grandfather, Pop Mannion’s father, a metallurgist at GE---to assist in building one of the twin nuclear engines that would power the USS Seawolf, the Navy’s second nuclear-powered submarine, then under construction. And while he was at GE, he took those classes at nearby Union College.

Union is practically right down the street from Mom and Pop Mannion’s house, the house I grew up in. Pop Mannion’s best friend taught computer science there. Pop taught there himself for a year. At his friend’s urging, he was trying it out while on a sabbatical from the state university at Albany to see if he was interested in making a change. (He decided the place was too small and the faculty too chatty. He wondered when his potential future colleagues got any work done, they were so busy yakking it up in the department halls.) I had friends who went to school there. I went to dances and parties and concerts and plays on its campus. I considered going there myself but I had an itch to move away from home and as Oliver Mannion likes to say, “Thank God for that or you’d never have met mom and I wouldn’t be here.” Our good blogging buddy, Chad Orzel, teaches physics there. My nephew, Lyle Mannion’s son, was accepted at Union. But he was accepted by RPI too and RPI won.

All this is to say I’m familiar with the place, So when at Father Blonde’s funeral last Saturday [August 27] one of Mrs M’s cousins told us that his son would be starting school there this fall, I had some things to tell him. Some of what I told him was in answer to his actual questions.

One was that the college scenes in The Way We Were were filmed at Union. It was big news at the time that Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford were being spotted here and there around town. A teacher at the high school got a job as an extra and was that close to both of them. He can be glimpsed at the punch bowl in the scene at the college dance. Redford, he reported, was short.

Another bit of trivia I passed along is that when I was a kid Union’s one claim to presidential greatness was that Chester A. Arthur graduated from there. There’s a statue of him on campus. The statue got a bit part in The Way We Were too. There’s a brief scene in which Redford and Bradford Dillman, playing their characters’ young selves as a pair of campus cut-ups, put a fishing pole in the statue’s hand as a prank.

Nowadays, of course, as I told Mrs M’s poor too polite to look bored or wander away cousin, Union can claim, with more pride but less accuracy, Jimmy Carter as one of their own, and, I said, I think they should erect a statue of Carter to honor him. But, I added, the statue should acknowledge the reason behind Carter’s connection to the school and depict him not as President or elder statesman and humanitarian but as a young Navy officer. In fact, it should depict this incident from when he was an ensign serving aboard the non-nuclear sub Pomfret in 1949 and a storm came up while the Pomfret was running along the surface. I told Mrs M’s cousin the story, but here’s Carter himself telling the story in A Full Life:

I was standing watch on the bridge about two hours after midnight, with my feet on the slatted wooden deck, when I saw an enormous wave dead ahead. I ducked down beneath the chest-high steel protector that surrounded the front of the bridge and locked my arms around the safety rail. The wave, however, smothered our ship, several feet above my head. I was ripped loose, lifted up, and carried away from the ship. This was my first experience with impending death, but when the wave receded I found myself on the main deck directly aft of the bridge and was able to cling to our five-inch gun. In the interval before the next wave, I scrambled back onto the bridge, where I found the lookouts hugging their protective rail, drenched above their waists. We all donned life preservers, and I tethered myself in place with a rope. If we had been traveling just a few degrees at an angle to the waves, I would have been lost at sea. It would have been impossible for the ship to return to the same site, and finding me in the dark would have been a hopeless effort. The next morning I made a report to the captain, but with a minimum of dramatic effect, just telling him that I had been swept from the bridge, landed on the afterdeck, and recovered without injury.

He reported it to the captain “with a minimum of dramatic effect”? Hard to imagine any less dramatic retelling of the story than the one he gives in A Full Life, but never mind. That’s the scene I think the statue should show, young Ensign Carter clinging to the gun mount while the ocean swirls around him.

When Carter was running for president as a farmer, didn’t fail to mention he’d been in the Navy. Counting his time at the Academy, he served for about ten years. He told that story or encouraged to get told. It was hardly on par with JFK’s PT-109 heroics but it portrayed Ensign Carter as a brave, unflappable, and resourceful young officer and implied the potential for heroism while emphasizing his humility. Carter was vain about his modesty.

“You almost drowned, Governor Carter?”

“Shucks, Ah hardly thought about it. Ah was more concerned for my shipmates.”

What he didn’t emphasize or what I don’t recall him emphasizing is that he was a young officer on the rise. He was on the command track. If he hadn’t left the Navy, he’d have very likely been made captain of his own sub within a few years.

But his father died in 1953 and for reasons he claims in his memoir he still can’t entirely explain he felt obligated to resign his commission and return to Georgia to take over the family business.

The decision almost cost him his marriage. Rosalynn had no wish to return to Plains and the stifling, narrow-minded, parochial small town life she believed she and Jimmy had long outgrown and left behind for good. She liked being a navy wife for the independence it allowed her. (Jimmy was often away at sea, and she commanded the homefront while he was gone with a free hand and a confidence most housewives of the time could only dream of.) And she was, although shy and not particularly socially ambitious for her own, ambitious for her husband who was highly regarded by his superiors and definitely on the command track.  What she didn’t realize at the time was that her multi-talented and extremely ambitious husband had just exchanged the command track in one profession for what would prove to be the ultimate command track in another. Politics.

Carter wouldn’t have liked saying it in so many words, because it went against the central theme of his campaign, but it was implicit whenever he did talk about his time as governor: Among his many skills, talents, and accomplishments was that he was an extremely smart and gifted politician. Practically a natural. Arguably born to be president.

His competence at almost everything he set his hand to, his wide-ranging intelligence and extensive breadth of knowledge, was the basis of Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live.

The “Ask President Carter” sketch is so funny because of its inherent truthfulness. It was possible to imagine Carter being able and happy to help people with their most mundane but practical problems, from explaining to a frustrated postal worker how to recalibrate the armature on a malfunctioning automatic letter sorting machine to talking a strung-out teenager down from a bad acid trip.

The “Pepsi Syndrome” skit in which Aykroyd’s Carter attempts to shut down a nuclear power plant in full meltdown and is mutated by exposure to the radiation into the amazing colossal President was inspired by Carter’s visit to Three Mile Island after the disaster there. But it had a biographical fact behind it too.

When he was in the Navy, Rickover sent Carter and part of his crew from GE to help dismantle and rebuild a Canadian nuclear power plant that had been destroyed by an accident that had resulted in a meltdown of the reactor. Carter and his men took turns working in ninety-second shifts inside the reactor. They wore protective gear that probably didn’t protect them very much.

So, Rosalynn was almost certainly right. If he’d stayed in the Navy, he probably would have risen very high. Possibly becoming an admiral. Possibly rising even higher. Oliver Mannion gets a kick out of imagining an alternative universe in which people remember former Secretary of the Navy James Earl Carter or even former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Carter.

Since his days as president, Carter has added painter, poet, novelist, and carpenter, plumber, and electrician to his resume. Teacher has been available to him all along. The title of his memoir, A Full Life, is the opposite of resume padding. It’s an understatement.

That Carter was good at pretty much everything he set his mind to reminds me of one of my---and Oliver’s---favorite moments from The West Wing.

President Bartlet and his wife Abbey, the doctor, are having one of their many minor affectionate arguments in which Abbey expresses her usual frustrations about being married to the President of the United States. Bartlet defends himself and their marriage by pointing out that things could have been worse. She could have married an astronaut.

Bartlet: Did you know that hardly any of the guys who landed on the moon are married to the same people they were married to before they went there?

Abbey (baffled by what strikes her as a complete non-sequitur): What?

Bartlet: I'm just saying that it could be worse. I could have been an astronaut.

Abbey (Not about to put up with any of his self-aggrandizing arrogance): You could not have been an astronaut.

Bartlet: I’d have been a great astronaut.

Abbey: You're afraid of heights, speed, fire and small places!

Bartlet (after almost conceding the point): I’d have overcome it to go to the moon.

At which point Abbey remembers just what kind of man she’s married to.

Abbey (with as much love and admiration as exasperation): I know you would have.

I imagine similar conversations took place regularly around the Carter household. Are probably still taking place.

I believe Jimmy Carter could have been an astronaut if he’d set his mind to it, and he’d have been a good one, the commander of a moon mission, perhaps. He over-achieved in everything he did.

Until, of course, he became president.

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Carter's memoir, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, his novel The Hornet's Nest, and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Pelstein are available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

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“Ask President Carter.” You didn’t think I would try to get away without posting it, did you?

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post and would like to help keep this blog chugging merrily along---and you can swing it---please consider making a donation. It'd be a real help and much appreciated.

 

How I'm still a devoted son-in-law

Sunday morning, August 28, 2016.

Hank Greenberg, Father Blonde’s baseball hero, parking one in the summer of 1945. This was taken at a game in Detroit, but it’s likely the next time the Tigers were in Philadelphia, the then 13 year old Father Blonde was in the stands hoping to see the Hammer belt one out of Shibe Park. Photo courtesy of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I got resoundingly booed yesterday when I started to give the toast to Father Blonde at the luncheon Mother Blonde hosted after the funeral. Maybe I shouldn't have led off with the fact that I'm a Mets fan. Probably shouldn't have added the score of Friday night's game either. But I just had to point out the happy irony that the Mets and the Phils are playing each other this weekend.

Don't worry, I won the crowd back right away when I told them how Joe never held my being a Mets fan against me. And this is true: there were years when he was happy the Mets were doing well, not just because he was happy for me (the way he was happy for Pop Mannion when the Dodgers were having a good year), but because he felt losing served the Phillies right. Joe grew up a Phillies fan when the Phils were busy losing most of the games that have added up to making them the losingest team in MLB history. In 1945, when he was 13, the Phils went 46-108. He never got over it. The Athletics weren’t much better---52 and 98---but he went to more of their games, partly because it hurt less to watch them lose, mainly because they were in the American League and that meant the Tigers to town regularly and Joe would go to see his hero, Hank Greenberg. (Greenberg was home from the war in ‘45. In ‘46 when Ted Williams was back, Joe went to see the Athletics play the Red Sox too. When the Cardinals were in town to play the Phillies, he’d go their games to see Stan Musial. Both the Phillies and the A’s played in Shibe Park, a half hour trolley ride from Joe’s parents’ house in Havertown.)  So I don't think he'd have minded that the Mets won 9-4 Friday night and then clobbered Philadelphia again last night 12-1. In fact, he would have wanted to talk about it this morning more than I would have, because complaining about the Phillies is apparently more fun for their fans than cheering them on.

So, for Father Blonde's sake, I hope the Mets complete the sweep today. Because that's the kind of devoted son-in-law I am.

The happy news from Father Blonde's funeral

Sunday morning, August 28, 2016.

We buried Father Blonde yesterday, and here's the happy news from the funeral. Yes. Happy. If there can be such a thing as a happy funeral, then Old Father Blonde's was a happy one, which is in keeping with the spirit of the man. Thank you one and all for your expressions of love and support and for your encouragement and prayers. Joe was never a fan of the internet himself but he liked hearing about my adventures in blogging and so he knew you were out there, he knew many of you by name, and he was always glad to learn of your news. Mrs M, the Mannion guys, and Old Mother Blonde send along their thanks too.

I have to say the Navy does right by its veterans. They sent an officer and a sailor to the gravesite to play taps and perform a flag ceremony. And they provided a locker for the ashes. An actual locker. A small one but handsome. Navy blue with brass fittings and gold trim and the Navy seal and Joe's name and rank in gold letters. Joe only served for three years after college but they were three of the best years of his life and he'd have been proud.

He'd have been prouder to see the line of fine young men who are his grandsons lining up to bring the communion gifts to the altar during mass and delighted to hear the talented young woman who is his granddaughter sing the hymn of St Francis. Francis was Joe's middle name.

Catholics still do death best. But what was best and most Catholic about Joe's mass wasn't the mass itself.

Growing up Joe's two best friends, Roy and John, and he were scourges of their neighborhood. They weren't vandals or delinquents, and they weren't bullies---exactly. They were incorrigible teasers and pranksters. And their two favorite victims were Joe's sister Joan and John's little brother Jimmy. Joan fought back but Jimmy took it like a saint. He adored his brother and his friends and followed them everywhere, no matter what punishment he had to take for it. He especially admired Joe who besides being a good athlete was the smartest kid in their school.

Roy and John are gone. Joan's gone too. But Jimmy's still with us.

Know what he's doing these days, although he's semi-retired?

Father Jim assisted at the mass and delivered the eulogy.

He said nothing about all the teasing.

Old Father Blonde

Posted Tuesday morning, August 23, 2016.

This pair of beachcombers are my in-laws, Joe and Jan Montgomery, known around these parts as Old Father and Old Mother Blonde, on one of their visits to us when we were down on Cape Cod on vacation. The picture was taken at Oyster Pond in Chatham in July of 2001. And, yes, that is how Old Father Blonde dressed for the beach, like he was out to play a round of golf early in the morning in mid-March. One time Navy man though he was, he never cared much for the ocean except as a part of the view. Mother Blonde liked to plunge into the surf just like her daughter and grandsons, but he never went near the water. He loved coming to Cape Cod though. He and Mother Blonde met down there in the 1950s. But it wasn’t just nostalgia that made him love the place. He loved the landscapes and seascapes. He loved taking the family out for ice cream and mini-golf. (Excellent golfer that he was, he always lost at mini-golf to Mother Blonde. Drove him crazy.) He loved the Lobster Claw restaurant in Orleans where he loved the swordfish. He loved just sitting on Uncle Merlin’s porch. But mostly what he loved was watching his grandsons have fun.

You’ve probably guessed where this is going.

Joe died the other day. It was sudden but not really a surprise. He was 84 and had been in failing health. But it was sudden. As Mrs M put it on her Facebook page, after over a decade of fighting his way through various assaults on his body by cancer, stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure, “his mighty heart finally gave out.” And his was a mighty heart. We’ll be celebrating that heart and his life on Saturday, the 27th, at Mother of Divine Providence Church in Mrs M's hometown, King of Prussia, PA. There’ll be calling hours at the church at noon---no wake. Joe wanted a minimum of fuss. That’s the way he was. He didn’t want to put anyone out on his behalf.---followed by a mass at 1 p.m.---which I expect his ghost will grumble through. If you happen to be in the area, you are welcome to join us. It won’t be a sad affair, I promise. Joe was one of those people who tended to put everyone in a cheerful mood and he’ll probably manage to do it somehow again on Saturday.

Mrs M is doing ok, considering. Ken and Oliver are heartbroken but they’re doing their best to be cheerful for their mother’s and grandmother’s sake and for Joe’s because they know he’d have wanted them to.  I’m heartbroken too. He was a good man, a good father, a wonderful grandfather, and the best sort of father-in-law anyone could hope for. He made me feel like one of his own from the first time we met.

Who’s carrying who these days?

Lifted from the Facebook timeline. Saturday, August 20, 2016..

Today's medical update contains a minimum of whining (I hope).

First, I still hurt but I’m definitely on the mend. Taking longer than I expected but I can see and feel the progress.

Second, and more important, thank you all for your concern, support, encouragement, advice, and well-wishes. You've done more than cheer me up. You're really helping with my getting better. It's that mind/body thing my friend David Weiss (which should be pronounced Wise) has opened my eyes to. I've also had the love and support of my wonderful family, starting with Mrs M and Ken and Oliver, Mom and Pop Mannion, my brothers and sisters and their spouses, Mrs M's family, and all my nieces and nephews. It's been great hearing from everybody. I especially enjoyed getting a phone call from our old pal Nancy Nall Derringer whose voice I don't get to hear often enough anymore.

Third, I want to give a special shout out to my worrywart Jewish uncle Mortie also known as Stephen Kuusisto. If Steve could have, he'd have checked into the hospital with me, set up a camp bed in my room, and rode herd on all the doctors, nurses, and techs the whole time I was in there, AND he'd have moved in here and be fussing and fretting full time. What a mensch! Also, what a nut. But I love the guy!

But back to the Mannion Men.

They've been great. They've done heroic work taking care of me, their mother, and the house. I'm proud of them both.

But because of their schedules and because he's the biggest and strongest, Ken has had to be my arms and legs and back more of the time. In fact, he's been my surrogate me since I began having problems three years ago. It's been a job for him. And he should be able to put it on his resume. So, that's the why the photo. It was taken in Valley Forge in the fall of 1993. He was 4 months old. The circle of life, huh? This leads to the question I probably never foresaw back then, Who's carrying who now?

Kipling in Iowa or Why The Jungle Book Had Me Dreaming of Cornfields

Tuesday morning. May 31, 2016.

Mowgli (Neel Sethi) and his panther mentor Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) prepare to meet the elephants in The Jungle Book, director Jon Favreau’s reimagining of the Walt Disney cartoon classic as a heroic action-adventure tale in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s novel and stories.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the pass. And “Here shall I find peace,” said Purun Bhagat.

---from “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat” in The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

James Alan McPherson turned out to be a very shy man. Jim, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction---he won it in 1978 for his short story collection Elbow Room---wasn’t a reason I chose to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop, but he was a reason I was glad to be going there. I looked forward to having him as a teacher. I was hoping some of the Pulitzer luck would rub off.  I was relieved when he turned out to be kind, patient, tolerant, and encouraging. Writers don’t always make the best teachers. I’d heard stories about other writers who’d made life hell for their students. John Cheever had taught at the Workshop. It didn’t go well. Jim was not like John Cheever. He did have one serious drawback as a teacher, however. He didn’t talk.

Not much, at any rate. Not in class. Less outside class. In class he let us do most of the yakking and kept discussions on track and arguments from getting out of hand with judicious nods and shakes of his head, wry smiles and doubtful frowns, and the occasional joke, muttered quietly, so quietly that if you were at the far end of the table you only knew he’s said anything, let alone something funny, by the laughter of the two people sitting on either side of him. He kept his opinion of whatever student work was being workshopped that week to himself, and you only found out what he thought of your story or novel chapter in the one on one meetings he held in his office later. And then it was indirectly. He let you know where he thought your story needed work but he didn’t tell you how he thought you should go about fixing it. Instead, he’d suggest something to read. “So and so has a scene like this in his/her short story/novel,” he’d say.  Then you’d have to go puzzle out for yourself how whatever he’d had you read could help you fix whatever it was he thought needed fixing. It was a bit like having to solve a zen koan. At any rate, that’s how I got to reading Isaac Babel’s short stories...without ever quite understanding what particular lesson I was supposed to learn from them.

Jim thought I should read "The Story of My Dovecot."

I left our meeting heading straight for the library where I checked out Babel’s Red Cavalry and The Odessa Tales, determined to have all the stories in both read by next week’s class.

I also left disappointed that we hadn’t gotten around to talking about---or, really, that I hadn’t managed to steer the discussion around to talking about---a writer I assumed was a mutual favorite, Rudyard Kipling.

At our first class meeting, after introducing himself and his goals for the class and letting each of us do the same, and with no stories ready yet for us to workshop, rather than sending us on our way early, Jim had surprised me and I expect the whole class by reading us “The Rout of the White Hussars”. In all likelihood, I was the only one in the room beside Jim to whom the story wasn’t new. Students at the Workshop then weren’t a particularly widely-read bunch. My friend Ann took an informal poll once and discovered that out of the fifty students in the fiction writing program only a handful had read Moby-Dick. And I’m pretty sure I was the only one at the table (Ann was in a different workshop that semester) who didn’t think it was strange that Jim had chosen to read us a story by Kipling.

But it was strange.

Not going to get deep into why it was strange that a writer teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-1980s was reading Rudyard Kipling to his students. It simply was and it shouldn’t have been.

Kipling is a problematic figure in the history of English literature and there’s no use in pretending he wrote only The Jungle Book and the Just-so Stories. But it’s also mistake to read him as if all he wrote were variations on “The White Man’s Burden.”

Kipling is a terrific poet and one of the greatest prose stylists and storytellers in English literature. Mark Twain rated Kipling among his favorite writers. Kipling is who Hemingway wanted to be when he grew up and learned how to tell a joke.

But most of us at the Workshop at the time were writing with the ambition of getting published in The New Yorker and that meant most of us were diligently imitating the likes of Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Quirky, minimalist, domestic realism was the fashion.

I say most of us, but I really wasn’t one of us, yet. Jim’s reading Kipling meant a great deal to because it made me feel at home.

I’d come to Iowa more than half-convinced I was going to be out of my league and when Jim started reading those old, familiar, beloved words I suddenly thought, Hey, maybe I’ll be all right here.

I wouldn’t have said Kipling was one of my major influences. But Twain sure was, and Twain was a major influence on Kipling and I’ll bet I picked up on it.  And I arrived at Iowa after at least a year’s worth of immersion in Kipling’s direct literary descendants Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene---the line of succession goes, I think, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Maugham, Greene, le Carre---so if I’d become the famous writer I thought I was going to be, there’d have been someone’s Ph.D dissertation in teasing that out.

More to the point here is that Kipling was one of my favorite writers back in junior high when my reading was mostly boy’s own adventure stories and I read as much of his work I could squeeze in between Stevenson’s, Twain’s, Melville’s, Conan Doyle’s, Jules Verne’s, and Alexander Dumas’. “Gunga Din” was one of the first poems I memorized on my own. In fact, I didn’t find my way into Kipling’s world through the Just-So Stories or The Jungle Book as I suspect a lot of young readers do. Gunga Din was my guide. And in that world Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera weren’t my brothers as much as Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris were my mates.

Fact is, if there was one work by Kipling I didn’t love, it was The Jungle Book.

It may just have been that I came to it a little too late and I thought it was too much of a little kid’s book. But I think it was more Kipling’s own fault. He’d taught me to expect one sort of thing from him and The Jungle Book didn’t deliver it. There was nothing in it I wanted. No soldiers. No Soldiers Three. No Mulvaney, Learoyd, or Ortheris. No battles with guns and cannon blazing. No men who would be kings. No captains courageous. No Tommy this and Tommy that. No Din! Din! Din! Where the mischief ‘ave you been? No villages, towns, or temples. No crowds. Herds and packs but no crowds. Kipling was good with crowds. No romance. No ghosts. And no good jokes. At least none that I understood as jokes.

Just animals talking, and talking pompously, thou-ing and thy-ing at each other like characters in a biblical epic.

Of course you know why I’m bringing all this up.

We finally got around to seeing Disney’s new movie version of The Jungle Book the other day.

Because it wasn’t among my favorites, I can’t say it bothered me that there’s not a whole lot of Kipling’s Jungle Book in it. There’s more of it than I expected, however, and more of the spirit of Kipling than that. There are scenes and images that reminded me of Gunga Din---the movie not the poem, but the spirit of Kipling is very much alive in that---and others that reminded me, more obliquely, of The Man Who Would Be King---again, the movie, but still.

Of course the artist whose spirit this Jungle Book’s meant to conjure up isn’t Kipling’s. It’s Walt Disney’s.

This Jungle Book is a re-imagining of Disney’s Jungle Book, famously the last full-length cartoon Walt himself steered through to completion. And here’s something I can’t tell you. How good a job it does at that. I’ve never seen the original in order from start to finish. I’m not sure I’ve seen all of it. I refused to go see it with the family when I was a kid on the grounds that it was a little kids’ movie and it wasn’t on the Mannion guys’ To Be Watched Over and Over Again Until Mom and Dad Run Screaming From the House List when they were little kids. They both claim to have seen it more than once but I can’t recall ever having been forced to sit through it with them.

As far as I’m concerned, that Jungle Book is a cartoon short consisting of just its two great musical numbers, “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You”.

Both songs are in this Jungle Book. I’d be inclined to say it would have been better if director Jon Favreau had left them out (although I’m sure the powers that be at Disney didn’t give him the choice, even if he’d wanted it), because they come across as breakings of the fourth wall and actually take you out of the onscreen story. But Christopher Walken does such a surprisingly delightful job with “I Wanna Be Like You” that I’m glad Favreau didn’t have the choice, if he didn’t, or chose to leave the songs in if he did.

I can tell you, with pleasure, that Favreau does an excellent job working in homages and parallels to at least two other but more recent Disney classics. Tarzan and The Lion King. There are nods as well to some non-Disney movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the second Hobbit, the most recent Planet of the Apes, and The Wizard of Oz. But those two, Tarzan and The Lion King figure most prominently. At several points, Favreau includes extended visual quotes from The Lion King and even restages the stampede in the ravine, and he’s almost made Mowgli’s story into another retelling of Tarzan’s origin story.

Favreau knows how to tell an origin story. He directed Iron Man, which I still rank as the second best of the Avengers movie franchise. (Guess which one I think is the best.) He also knows how to direct what’s essentially a live-action cartoon---and all superhero movies are essentially live action cartoons. He takes the material and the characters seriously but isn’t over-serious in going about it. He has a light comic touch and is skilled at mixing comedy with drama.  He hasn’t directed all that many films, but you have to admire a career that includes Made, Elf, Iron Man, Chef, and now The Jungle Book.

Kipling’s Jungle Book isn’t the little kids book about talking animals I took it for when I was a kid myself. It’s a Boy’s Own Adventure Story. I probably don’t need to say that I don’t think it’s Kipling’s best of the form---although it’s been a long time since I last read Kim and Captains Courageous and both pale in my memory compared to their obvious inspirations, The Prince and the Pauper and Treasure Island. I told you. Kipling was one of my favorites. But he wasn’t one of my very favorites. ---but that’s what it is, the epitome of a boy’s own adventure story and that’s what Favreau’s Jungle Book is. In fact, based on my unreliable sense of the cartoon---a lighthearted musical comedy about about a boy playing with his stuffed animals come to life, with Mowgli as a Christopher Robin free from all adult supervision and able to join in the hijinks and share in the danger---I’d say that’s the main point of departure for Favreau’s movie. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Favreau wanted to direct The Jungle Book: to make an adventure movie.

He’s made a rousing one.

The many chases, fights, perils, and escapes are genuinely thrilling and surprising, the dangers and violence are shocking and terrifying. Favreau keeps it all moving briskly without the characters and story getting lost in the action. He varies the tempo and the scale and mixes things up so that the movie isn’t just one, extended action scene. And his Mowgli isn’t just a lucky boy who grows up and learns a lesson. He’s a true young hero.

Thirteen year-old Neel Sethi stars as Mowgli. Stars is the right word. It’s very much his movie. His movie-star voiced animal co-stars are his supporting players and sidekicks.  His Mowgli is brave and curious, of course, but he’s smart, active, energetic, clever, and competent, without his becoming a miniature adult in a kid suit. He has a wide-eyed look of astonishment that comes over him in the dangerous moments that lets you know he’s still a little boy making it all up as he goes along and regularly surprised that there’s more to the world than he has even begun to know.

What he does know, however, he knows. This Jungle Book isn’t about a young innocent learning lessons. It’s about a young hero putting to work lessons he’s already learned and teaching himself new lessons on the run...and the climb.

One thing I can say for sure about the cartoon Jungle Book. The voice work of the four main animal stars was excellent. It would have been hard to top Phil Harris as Baloo, Sebastian Cabot as Bagheera the panther, George Sanders as Shere Khan the tiger, and Louis Prima as King Louie the orangutan. But Walken, as I said, is a delight as Louie, doing a bit of Robert De Niro. Idris Elbla as Shere Khan scared me. Ben Kingsley is Obi-wan-esque as Bagheera. Imagine the younger, post-Revenge of the Sith Obi-wan, getting to know Luke as a little boy, which happens, and maybe we’ll get a movie that shows that.

Bill Murray is Baloo because who else?

Add to this, Scarlett Johansson as an unnervingly seductive, gender-bent Kaa the python.

The CGI work on the animal characters is exquisite. There were very few moments when I noticed those aren’t real animals up on the screen. 

And Favreau doesn’t forget that the jungle and all the terrain through which Mowgli travels are as intrinsic to the spirit of the story and the formation of Mowgli’s character as the animals. The sense of place is as important here as it is in all Kipling’s fiction. Favreau pauses from time to time---but never for too long---to give us the visual equivalent of passages like this from “The Miracle of Puran Bhagat,” one of the stories in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book:

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

Never a villager — not even the priest — was bold enough to speak to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley and saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.

At the end of my two years at Iowa, I asked Jim McPherson to be on my thesis committee.  He declined. Politely but reticently, with no more explanation than was absolutely necessary. He had already agreed to serve on too many other students’ committees and simply couldn’t take on even one more. This was almost certainly the truth. There were twenty-five of us with essentially whole books that needed reading, and, although there were three other members of the faculty, each of the four of them had to serve on five or six committees. Jim would have been the first choice of almost of us and had probably already turned down at least ten requests by the time I asked him. Assuming I wasn’t one of the first five to ask him. Which I tried to assume.

I tried not to take it personally. Jim was in fact my third choice. I’d already nabbed Ron Hanson and I’d had the bright idea to ask one of the poets teaching in the Poetry Workshop, James Galvin, and in going over my thesis (a pair of novellas) Galvin gave me one of the best pieces of advice I got while I was at Iowa: boiled down it was “Make it sound like you talking.”

That, by the way, as Galvin explained, not permission for lazy, “colloquial” writing. Read some of his poetry and you’ll see what he meant.

Anyway, I was happy with my committee, they seemed happy with me, and I was able to tell myself that Jim’s---the first Jim, McPherson---begging off was not a judgment on my writing.

I told myself that. I still tell myself that. I’m telling myself that right now.

It nagged at me and still nags at me. There’s some insecure part of me, which is to say the whole writer part of me, that can’t help suspecting that whatever else he might have thought, he was certain of one thing.

I was no Rudyard Kipling.

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The Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau. Screenplay by Justin Marks, based on the novels by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Neel Sethi. With the voices of Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, Lupita Nyong'o, Giancarlo Espisito, and Gary Shandling. Rated PG. Still in theaters.

Listen: Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time

Monday. May 16, 2016.

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) unstuck in time on the planet Tralfamadore in a scene from the movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my whole life chasing after Kurt Vonnegut.

I mean that metaphorically, as a comment on my so-called life as a writer. Vonnegut was one of the first grown-up influences on my ambitions, my sense of what writers do and how they go about it, the way I looked at life and people, and my prose style.

But I mean it as matter of geographic fact too. I chased him out to Iowa for grad school even though he wasn’t teaching there at the time. He was still the reason I went there. I figured if they’d had Vonnegut teaching there that had to be the place for me. But I’d chased him to Boston before that. That was kind of incidental. I didn’t go to Boston because he was there or had been there. He had been there, briefly. He taught at Harvard. In the prologue to his novel Jailbird, he called his stint at Harvard “undistinguished.” I went to Boston University more than ten years after he gave up the Harvard gig. But at BU, through Leslie Epstein, I met Samuel Shem, the doctor who wrote the wonderfully cynical novel about learning how to doctor, House of God, and Shem was a friend of Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's son the doctor and writer. It was a practically a flip of the coin that sent me to Iowa instead of staying at BU where I’d also been admitted. Leslie himself advised Iowa. I’ve never been sure if it was because he honestly thought the Iowa Writers Workshop was better than his own program or he just wanted to get rid of me. But if I had stayed at BU I might have gotten to know Shem better and through him might have met Doctor Vonnegut and through him...well, you know.

Before Boston, I could have caught up with him on Cape Cod, except at the time when Pop and Mom Mannion were taking us there for family vacations I hadn’t read any of his books. I probably didn’t even know who he was. My favorite living author at the time was Franklin W. Dixon. Sue me. I was a kid. I didn’t know.

By the time I got around to reading Slaughterhouse Five---that is, by the time I was old enough that Mom and Pop Mannion allowed me to read it. What were they going to say? I’d already read M*A*S*H and Catch 22---our family had stopped going to the Cape and so had he. He’d moved to New York City.

But the first place I chased him to, again unwittingly, and again arriving too late, was Schenectady. I say unwittingly because it wasn’t my choice to move to Schenectady. If anyone had listened to me we’d have stayed put in our house in Latham. But Mom and Pop didn’t listen and dragged me with them and the rest of the family to Schenectady in time for me to start first grade. My favorite living authors at that time were Robert McCloskey and Virginia Lee Burton.

Vonnegut worked in public relations at General Electric or, as he disguised it in his fiction, the General Forge and Foundry Company. He disguised Schenectady as Ilium, New York. He worked there at the same time as my grandfather...and tens of thousands of other people. Vonnegut left GE and hightailed it out of Schenectady, headed for Cape Cod, a few years before Pop Mannion started at GE. To insist even harder on that tenuous connection, Vonnegut’s older brother Bernard, the scientist, taught at the University at Albany at the same time as Pop (Pop left GE to start Albany’s computer science program when I was around ten) and they knew each other and chatted regularly. For a short time the computer science department and the department of atmospheric sciences had offices in the same building, which is where I met Bernard myself. Pop introduced us as they were passing the time of day in the hallway. We didn’t talk about his brother.

There’s more.

When Vonnegut worked for GE, he lived in a hamlet across the Mohawk River---disguised as the Iroquois in his novels---from Schenectady called Alplaus. Derived from the Dutch.  Aal Plaats. Place of Eels. My first girlfriend lived there and whenever I rode my bike out to visit her I would pause in front of the house I’d been told had been his and stare at it as if I expected a rift to open up in time and I would be able to look through it back thirty years to see him coming down the steps and down the front walk to greet me.

We’re up in Schenectady right now, visiting the old Mannion Homestead, and this morning, in what’s become a routine when we’re here, I took a drive across the river to Alplaus. I don’t drive straight there and my girlfriend’s house isn’t my destination, it’s simply the end point of my tour of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood is defined by where my high school friends lived and the limits of my range on my bike. Her house was at the western boundary. Nowdays, when I meander my way out there, that’s where I turn around to head back to the Homestead, after pausing to think fondly about that girl and the good old days.

Nostalgia isn’t really the point of the drive, exactly. The city of Schenectady itself isn’t much to look at, but the area surrounding it, shaped topographically and historically by the river and the Erie Canal, is beautiful. Even a short drive will take you up and down hills, on country roads that wind through woods and wide open fields and meadows, past farms and orchards, and into shady neighborhoods of handsome older houses, one-hundred, two-hundred, and some close to three-hundred years old, and, of course, along the river. Alplaus is one of those neighborhoods and it was built along the river. My girlfriend’s house was (still is) a large, late Victorian farmhouse with white clapboards, black shutters, and a porch that wrapped around two sides. You couldn’t see the river from the porch, the houses and trees across the street were in the way, but you probably could get a good look at it from the attic window. I don’t remember ever having been up there though.

The main point of these morning drives is to clear my head and take in the scenery, but I can’t help the onslaught of memories. Just about everywhere I look, lurking in ambush, is a memory from my kidhood and adolescenthood. Not all of them are pleasant. I don’t mind that though. In fact I like it. I like to be reminded of what was and to see what what still is but I also like to see what isn’t and what’s there in its place. I’m not one of those old men who hate to see change because it reminds them of their own impending final change into dust and nothingness. Not yet, at any rate. Not all change is for the better, some of it is decidedly for the worse, but on the whole I tend to like to see things change because generally to see them say the same is really to see another form of change---decay. Change of the kind I like to see, no matter how much of what I used to know and love is left behind, is life continuing itself.

Still, another point of the drive is to trigger memories and revisit the past. Not for mere nostalgia’s sake but for the physical connection. Sight is a sense, seeing is touching. My drives are a way for me to not get in touch with the past but to touch it. The past becomes physically present, and I am physically present in it. That’s a way of saying I feel physically present in time and to myself. I’m connected to the whole of my life, and I feel like I’m still me. Like I am a me.

For instance, on my way out of town, shortly after I set out, I happened to look out the window and glance up a side street that climbed a hill to the middle school. Over the top of the rise I saw the building’s entablature, a sight I’d probably seen hundreds of times when I was growing up. I was jolted out of the present moment and set down in one or all of the moments when I’d looked that way before.

It wasn’t that it was 1966 again or 1976 or 2016. And it wasn’t all those years at once. It was one eternal year full of eternal moments. I think of this a Tralfamadorian way of looking at life and I learned it from Kurt Vonnegut the first time I read Slaughterhouse-Five  or, to be Tralfalmadorian about it, I’m learning it now as I am reading Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time again. I’ve always been reading it and I will always be reading it. Like Billy Pilgrim, I’m unstuck in time that way. My drives are deliberate attempts to unstick myself in time.

And that’s what I thought happened when later on the drive today I made my way across the river over to Alplaus. It was rush hour and for several miles I passed the long, slow-moving line of cars full of commuters headed the opposite direction. Once upon a time, just about everybody in one of those cars would have been on their way to work at General Electric, either at the main campus downtown or at the Research Lab and Atomic Power Lab in the suburbs. Some are still on their way to those places but most are aiming for offices and office parks in Albany and its surrounding suburbs. This morning, as I approached the river and saw the line of cars crawling across the bridge and down the hill on the other side I became unstuck in time, not at all to my surprise, but the eternal moment I was thrown back into wasn’t one when I was in a car but the one when I as at home reading Player Piano for the first time and getting a shock of recognition as I read Vonnegut’s description of the novel’s protagonist Dr Paul Proteus’s morning commute to the General Forge and Foundry company. I was remembering vividly how excited and amused I was to see a piece of my world turning up in Vonnegut’s fiction world and how I jumped up from the couch to go looking for Pop Mannion so I could show him that passage.

There was only one thing wrong with that memory.

What I was remembering never happened.

Not like that.

It couldn’t have.

That passage isn’t in the book.

This afternoon, at Barnes and Noble, I grabbed a copy of Player Piano from the shelf and sat down in the cafe to skim through it to find the passage to copy down for blogging purposes and...I couldn’t find it.

Instead I found this:

Ilium, New York is divided into three parts.

In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all the people live.

If the bridge across the Iroquois were dynamited, few daily routines would be disturbed. Not many people on either side would have reasons other than curiosity for crossing.

During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war---production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.

There’s no description of the morning rush hour in Player Piano because there’s no morning rush hour in the dystopian future where the story’s set. That’s a main theme of the book! 

Player Piano is set in a time when most people don't have jobs to rush to in the morning. They've all been put out of work and so rendered without purpose to society and the economy and to themselves by machines.

Not something I needed to be reminded of. It’s not something I have to remember. It’s something I know! It’s something I talk about and routinely write about. It’s something I’m prepared to devote an entire class period to discussing if ever some English department does a foolish thing and let me teach my dream course on Vonnegut, Asimov, Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula Le Guin.

So how could I remember a passage in a novel that goes against what I know to be that novel’s plot and theme?

At first I thought the passage must be in there, that what I was remembering was a description of Proteus remembering what life used to be like in Ilium before the war. So I skimmed back through the book two more times.

Nope.

Then I thought maybe I was misremembering reading it in Player Piano. Maybe I read it in another book. A good part of Slaughterhouse-Five takes place in Ilium. Billy Pilgrim doesn’t work at the General Forge and Foundry Company. He’s an optometrist. But Vonnegut might have had him making that commute. I went to fetch a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Nope, again.

But Ilium and General Forge and Foundry show up again and again in Vonnegut’s fiction. The passage could have been from one of the other of his books I read in high school. I looked through those---Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House---and couldn’t find it in any of them.

It finally occurred to me that what I might have been remembering all these years---it’s a longstanding memory. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t remember it, which, of course, may be a trick of memory itself.---is an early act of mature literary analysis on my part. In reading the book I recognized that something can be made present by its skillfully arranged absence. The rush hour traffic that Paul Proteus didn’t have to put up with implied the rush hour traffic Vonnegut had had to and the rush hour traffic people were still putting up with when I read the book. Somehow I had unconsciously rewritten the actual memory of what Vonnegut had written---or, rather, hadn’t written---and turned it into what I had been inspired to imagine by his writing. I’d turned a real memory into a false one.

I think that’s what happened.

I’ll never know. I’ll never know what sort of memory it is or how it got in there and how come it’s still in there even though I know now it’s a false memory. But there it is. I’m still remembering it and in the same old detail. Yet more evidence that my memories of anything can’t be trusted.

How about that?

There’s only one place left for me to chase Vonnegut to, and since neither of us believe in it, I’m not going to catch up with him there.

I thought I would catch up with him at last when we moved here. He was still living in New York City and we’re not that far from there and get into town regularly. But the bastard died on me before I could track him down.

So it goes.

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Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, and most of Vonnegut's other books are available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop Mannion attempts to fathom life on the Moons of Endor

Saturday morning. March 5, 2016.

Was just talking politics with Pop Mannion. Always frustrating because he still thinks TV news is what it was it Cronkite's day and the New York Times is still what it was when Tom Wicker and R.W. Apple covered politics for them.

And he thinks the GOP is what it was when he was our town’s supervisor and his best ally in getting stuff done was a Republican.

He can't get his head around the fact there are no moderates or even conservatives left in the GOP.

And he can't even see that political news has become all about scandal and spectacle and how that plays into the Republicans’ hands.

And he refuses to believe that the New York Times’ political desk has become the Paper of Record’s anti-Hillary bureau.

I think he’s been watching too much TV political news. Too much Matthews. Too much Maddow.  And, sadly, too much Fox.

It isn’t the case that he’s turning into one of those old men, those guys who watch Fox and are poisoned by it.  He’s still the good, staunch liberal Democrat he’s always been.  He’s for Hillary.  He appreciates Bernie, but he’s not taken with him. Pop’s one of the last great New Deal Democrats.  And if you’re thinking to yourself, Then shouldn’t he be for Bernie? you really don’t understand FDR and the New Dealers.

They weren’t revolutionaries. They were problem solvers.

Pop has been a problem-solver all his life. Solving problems was what he did as a scientist and college professor.  It’s what he did as town supervisor.  Bernie doesn’t strike him as a fellow problem-solver. Hillary does. In his judgment, she’s the most presidential candidate on the stage right now.

That’s what’s troubling him.

He can’t understand why there seems to be such a strong effort by everyone in the media to tear her down.

What's going on with the emails, he wants to know. Is she going to be indicted? And, thinking too well of his son the world-famous blogger’s savvy and political insight, he looks to me for an explanation. 

But he doesn’t like my explanations.

Actually, it’s more like he can’t fathom them.

That political journalism has become a toxic mix of celebrity worship and sports journalism, that controversy for controversy’s sake sells advertising, that the Republicans who aren’t vicious are crazy, that the powers that be at the TV networks are afraid to offend them because they want their voters’ as an audience, which is to say, as customers, more than they want Pop because Pop can’t be as easily suckered into buying what the advertisers are selling, and that the political press corps, besides being craven, corrupt, and depraved, just plain hates the Clintons for no rational reason that anybody has been able to come up with, and that’s especially true of the reporters for the New York Times---none of this computes for him, and he keeps circling back, demanding that I re-submit my data.

So, Pop and I don't have arguments exactly. We just go around and around in circles as my answers to his questions make no sense to him.

As far as he's concerned, I'm answering questions about what life is like on earth by telling him what it's like on the Moons of Endor.

Anyway, it'll soon be baseball season and we'll have more to talk about than politics. That'll make us both happier.

Assuming both the Dodgers and the Mets do well.