Eric The Blue

Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine"

Last night Amanda and I saw Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest film.  The improbabilities include a State Department official who can afford an 8-figure beach house in Marin County, a plot twist that functions to clear the vision of this putatively intelligent fair-haired Prince of Marin, a rich finance guy  whose depravity is unmarred by a single attractive characteristic, and the fact that we were without children at the 5:40 show on a Thursday.

I should mention that the idle rich are set off against grocery girls and auto mechanics in a way that flatters everyone who punches in.

Cate Blanchett, who plays the depraved moneyman's half-duped wife, starred a few years ago as Blanche DuBois in a Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire, and Blue Jasmine seems like Allen's consciously updated version of the Tennessee Williams play.  If one accepts that premise, it seems notable that Blanche arouses one's sympathy.  As Allen ages--he's now 77--his movies seem more astringent.   It's been awhile since someone advised someone else in (I think) Manhattan to cut people a little slack now and again. 

But I was carried along.  After about an hour of running time, I remember my pleasure being interrupted by the distinct, distressing thought that Allen's movies generally clock in at about 100 minutes. Blanchett and Andrew Dice Clay (as the first husband of Blanchett's working class sister) are early candidates for Oscars, and there's a pretty good chance that Blue Jasmine is a better movie than whichever one is declared Best  Picture. 

In a hole, Republicans keep digging

It's possible, if you spend your waking hours touring websites that feature political commentary, to find Republicans who appear to be in possession of the higher, rational faculties that distinguish our kind from the beasts of the field.  David Frum was an example, but his father recently died, and he's gone silent.  Myra Adams is another:  as this article shows, she can add a column of one- and two-digit numbers and conclude, correctly, that the sum is less than 270.  This suggests that she is serious about what is, or ought to be, job # 1 of a political party: winning elections.  The GOP, however, has begun to resemble a regional protest party more interested in hootin' and hollerin' than in the hard work of getting elected and then governing.

Adams might have done more in the way of analyzing the symptoms she describes.  In theory, politicians are kept from the edge of the cliff by a desire to appeal to a wide range of voters.  In our country, however, you don't really have to do that.  Even what we call a "national election" for president is really 51 state elections, only a small fraction of which are competetive or matter.  You can get trounced in half the states and still win, comfortably--in the last election, for example, President Obama lost 21 states by a double-digit margin but still won 332 electoral votes.

Think about the (Republican) senators and representatives from those 21 states. What reason have they to moderatie their views, or give them less impolitic expression?  Recent history shows that they are more apt to lose to a Republican in the primary than to a Democrat in the general election.  They don't need to "move  to the center"; they need to "protect their right flank."  Ask Richard Lugar about this.  After serving six terms in the U.S. Senate, he was in 2012 defeated in the Republican primary by a wingnut who, during the general election campaign, could not suppress the impulse to vocalize his unusual views on sexual assault. 

Thus ended Lugar's distinguished, 36-year Senate career.  And thus the Republicans managed to lose a Senate seat in a state that Romney won, 54-44. 

You hear a lot about the polarization in American politics.  What's really bad, however, is that the polarization is essentially geographic, and our elections essentially local.  Who has to appeal to the broad middle?  Among Republicans, no one.  Adams writes as if her compatriots who seem to have no realistic plan for winning the Presidency are merely perverse.  But the things you have to say and do to protect your right flank alienate voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which is in Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes, which the Republican candidate for president has not won for six elections in a row now. 

The problem for Republicans is that it's not just Pennsylvania.  The dance I'm describing is danced across the northern tier of states, and it's spreading to places like Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada. 

Elmore Leonard and hooptedoodle

I've been at The New Yorker blog reading the many reminiscences of Elmore Leonard, who died earlier this week.  One, by Joan Acocella, includes a link to a Times piece Leonard once wrote on his ten rules for writing.  I'm not going to copy them down but the Times's headline caught the essence: "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle."  One way to define "hooptedoodle" might be "the parts you, the author, are most proud of."  I suspect the readers of freshman themes would be deprived of some snarky pleasures if their students listened to Leonard on hooptedoodle.  When you have a draft, read it over, and get rid of the parts you think are the very best.  Leonard's version is, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Leonard is preaching from the same Scripture as George Orwell, who in "Politics and the English Language" set out six rules for writers that I will copy.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.  (Possibly the last word in this rule should have been cut?)

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 

Have you ever noticed the degree to which you are inundated with writing that offends against all these rules, except possibly the last?  At work, for example, it seems that anyone who has attained a certain altitude on the organizational chart, and therefore writes things that others have to read, is forbidden the utility of words of one syllable.  Thus where I work we do not plan, we are "planful," and the plans we lay are "strategic," presumably to distinguish them from some other kind.

To Sunburg

Yesterday I drove out in the country with my dad so that he could attend the all-school reunion for Kerkhoven High.  He's a member of the class of 1950.  Our route is mapped above--I-94 to St. Cloud, Highway 23 to New London, finally Highway 9 to Sunburg, where the reunion was hosted on the farm of a classmate just west of town.  The current high school, KMS, for Kerkhoven-Murdock-Sunburg, opened in the late 1970s.  The reunion was for those who had graduated from the old Kerkhoven High.

I got a necessarily brief tour of Sunburg before the reunion began.  It's changed since I was a kid, not for the better.  Even my dad, who's been back more frequently than I, seemed a little alarmed at the dilapidated state of things, including the house he grew up in.  The attendees were mainly from graduating classes in the 1950s, so they were a little dilapidated, too.  At the very first high school reunions, people talk big about themselves and their jobs; at the very last ones, the talk is largely medical.  The years have a levelling power.  It doesn't seem that the quarterback and homecoming queen are more apt to survive, or to be more mobil and hale if they do. It isn't all to the bad.  Classmates, instead of competing with one another, begin sympathizing with one another.  One moment in particular I remembered I was in Keillor territory.  I was sitting alone drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup at a picinic table outside the huge metal outbuilding where the tables were set up and the visiting occurred.  A man, about my dad's age, limped out of the party and took a seat by me.  "Geesh, it's loud in there," he says.  "I can't make out a thing, and when I turn up my hearing aid, all the jumbled sound just gets louder."

Studying the map now, I'm surprised to find a Lake Calhoun in Kandiyohi County.  The one by my house, in south Minneapolis, has been the subject of some controversy lately--has to do with it being named for Senator Calhoun, famous for his support of slavery.  See the big lake just to the east of Highway 71 by Sibley State Park?  That's Green Lake.  The small one just to the east of it is another Lake Calhoun.  Don't know who it's named for. 

The local sporting press

Patrick Reusse writes a sports column in the local Minneapolis paper.  I think he turns out a couple of columns per week, and a lot of them make use of some pretty basic facts of athletic competition.  One team wins, the other necessarily loses.  If  someone hits a home run, the pitcher who served it up failed.  It's the easiest thing in the world to gob spit on whomever has failed most recently, and since in professional sports everyone is being paid a king's ransom, you can work into the spittle the salary of the bum.  People lap it up.  Then in about four days you can do it again. 

Here's a specimen of what I'm talking about.  The Twins have won 16 of 27 games since it was published.  Reusse said they were headed for 100 losses, but, as the team has clawed back to within ten games of .500 (53-63), that would now require losing 37 of the last 46 games on their schedule.  I don't think it's going to happen, but somewhere someone is in a slump or on a losing streak, so it's not like he's going to run low on material. 

I like also his prevailing tone of jaded wisdom.

In the world according to Reusse, striking out is not an athletic but a moral failure.  Using your reserved  space in a big-city daily to taunt some slumping big-leaguer is a better candidate. 

 

Baseball's B-list

I'm in Chicago, and as it happens so are the Yankees, to play the Sox, so it's all A-Rod, or "A-Fraud," all the time here. 

Try naming a few players who've been busted and penalized for using performance-enhancing drugs.  Most likely the names you come up with--A-Rod, Bonds, Braun, Clemons, McGwire, Sosa--point up the fact that only aficionados can distinguish those on the "busted and penalized" list from a sublist of the known guilty who, mainly on account of having been born too soon, escaped formal punishment. 

The real sublist, however, is the one populated by players you probably never heard of.  Here's a sampling:

Neifi Perez
Jay Gibbons
Freddy Galvis
Marlon Byrd
Yasmani Grandal
Everth Cabrera
Francisco Cervelli
Troy Cate
Willie Collazo
Clay Hensley
Jon Nunnally
Grant Roberts
Eider Torres
Darnell McDonald
Steve Smyth
Christian Parker
Josh Labandeira
Matt WhitesidePablo Ozuna
Prentice Redman
Sergio Escalona
Jordan Norberto

As I say, it's a sample.  For the full list, go here. 

These guys, fighting to make it to "the show," or to stay there, or to get back there, are rarely mentioned, and are never accused of spoiling "the game," its "integrity" and "rich heritage."  It's not hard to understand why they do it.  The minimum major-league salary currently stands at $490,000, which is probably northward of what your neighborhood orthodontist pulls down, and the pension plan eliminates former players' worries about the economy's ebb and flow.  There's a scene in Bull Durham that has in this regard considerable explanatory power.  Say you're in the minor leagues, playing regularly and getting twenty-five at-bats per week.  Seven hits, you stay where you are; eight, and suddenly you have new problems, like the maximum bank deposit insured by the FDIC.  One extra hit per week, explains Crash Davis.  That's how close he was.

Of course such guys are looking for an edge.  They're not guilty of crimes against humanity or baseball.  To hate them, you'd have to care deeply about other unknown borderline players being displaced by "cheaters."  The general state of affairs is more evidence for the truth of Thoreau's dictum concerning how "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

 

In Chicago: the Field Museum

 

We're in Chicago for a few days and the thing that has made the biggest impression upon me so far, if you don't count the way the TV in our motel room compels you to click past several cost-added options (such as "adult") in order to watch television shows, has been the "Our Evolving World" exhibit at the Field Museum.  The usual way to conceive of our insignificance concerns the speck in the great blob that is our sun but what about the age of the third planet revolving around it?--about 4.5 billion years.  If human civilization is thought of as being 10,000 years old--a stretch, considering that the Homeric epics were created only about 3000 years ago--then it is to the age of the earth as 1 is to 450,000.  Let's say that you were modeling the age of the earth with a tape measure a mile long.  The period of human civilization would take up about the last eighth of an inch.  God, besides favoring out-of-the way playhouses, has a lot of patience.

The exhibit gives a straight account of such matters without any on-the-other-hand b.s. to mollify the crackpots among us, as is required of science textbooks published in the United States.  At the very start of the exhibit I remember a sign explaining that "theory," as in "theory of evolution," means something very different from "hunch"  before concluding, firmly, that in science not much is better attested to than evolution by natural selection. 

For some adult entertainment back at the motel, I googled "creationist museum" and was soon reading, at the site of Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky:

PREPARE TO BELIEVE

The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings.  Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden   Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden's rivers. . . .

It only gets worse.  What's needed is more antidotes to this sort of determined stupidity.

Getting old

Fifty-five today.  Three score and ten are the years of man, according to the psalmist--"four score if his strength holds."  As if everyone is guaranteed seventy!  Unless my strength holds, I won't even see my youngest out of high school.  For some reason, this happy thought reminds me of some of the repartee in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

Robert Cohn:  Listen, Jake. [He leans forward on the bar.]  Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?  Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Jake Barnes: Yes, every once in a while. 

Robert:  Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we'll be dead?

Jake:  What the hell, Robert.  What the hell.

Hemingway's gifts as a comic writer have perhaps been under appreciated.  Sun Also Rises includes this  retort to the question, "How'd you go bankrupt, Mike?"  At first, gradually. Then, toward the end, all of a sudden.