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April 2020 posts
April 29, 2020
April 26, 2020
Happy birthday to Will
Shakespeare was baptized on this day in 1564. His birthday is celebrated on April 23, which is the date of his death in 1616. Since his birthday is unknown, but very close on the calendar to the opposite bookend, we just assign April 23 to both his vitals. The most likely date of his birth is today, April 26. Infant mortality was high. No sense dallying.
As I noted here, King Lear was almost certainly composed in 1604. I just reread it: uff da! As has been argued by others, certain scenes, preeminently the one in which Gloucester has his eyes gouged out on stage, are so difficult to behold that "doubts of its propriety as art have been expressed even by critics who are reluctant to admit that Shakespeare can ever be at fault."* By the time the assault on our sensibilities is ended, it's natural to regard the work as a statement of nihilism and despair. The last scene includes probably the most shocking stage direction in the world's literature. Edmund, who is dying, remembers that he has sent his captain to the prison with a commission to hang Cordelia, so that her murder will look like a suicide. A messenger is dispatched to recall him. One then reads:
ALBANY: The gods defend her!
Enter Lear, with Cordelia in his arms
This aggressive juxtaposition is the last note in a theme insisted upon by the whole structure of the play, including the famous double plot. It's not enough that one old man wanders the earth in misery and intermittent, subsiding sanity. There have to be two. Also, God defends no one.
All that is true. It's also true that other scenes are excruciating for their tenderness and the fellow-feeling between sufferers. Lear, locked out of doors in the storm, has perhaps for the first time the thought that someone besides him might be cold:
In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in. . . .
[He's now alone]
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'r you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel. . . .
You're reading along, frequently checking the notes at the bottom of the page for help with the Elizabethan English, and then this cry from the heart. I have taken too little care of this needs no gloss. The language is similarly strong and plain when, in the next act, the strands of the double plot converge and Lear meets the blinded Gloucester in a field near Dover:
GLOUCESTER: O, let me kiss that hand.
LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. . . .
[Snip]
What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?
GLOUCESTER: Ay, sir.
LEAR: And the creature run from the cur. There thou mightst behold the great image of authority—a dog's obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! . . .
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
This section is preceded by Lear's famous self-description,
Ay, every inch a king
which is intended by him as self-mockery, though Shakespeare intends an irony, since the speaker has through deprivation achieved moral kingship. The nihilism and savagery is mixed together with something like redemptive suffering. The world is so wicked that it's dangerous to be good, and the upshot is Edgar and Kent, instead of giving up, put on disguises and persist in being good. They're almost the only ones still alive at the end.
The tendency among almost all readers must be to resolve the contraries in favor of one or the other contender. The third option, which according to the poet Keats would comport with Shakespeare's own habitual caste of mind, requires there be no resolution and that the contraries be held in the mind in a kind of equilibrium. My last thought about this is that, as has also been frequently observed, King Lear seems less than almost any other Shakespearean play made for the stage. The "pitiless" storm in Act III is really a metaphor for disorder and in the theatre it cannot be as impressive as it might be in the mind of an imaginative reader. You could in the theatre pump up the volume and the special effects and the result would be that the audience is made aware of your effort. It seems that the theatrical storm has to be artificial and therefore makes a poor analog for what it poetically represents in the play. So I think the reader could strive to attain Keats's lofty solution; in the theatre, a director has to make choices. Between the storm and the scene with Gloucester and Lear, the disguised Edgar leads his father to Dover, where, as Edgar knows, Gloucester means to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff. In a scene that's a little hard to imagine when reading, Edgar leads his blind father to what he says is the cliff's edge. It's really just flat land in a field. Gloucester then "leaps," which, given the actual circumstances, can mean only that he pitches forward six feet in the field. Of course he isn't dead. Edgar, now pretending to be a passerby at the bottom of the cliff, tells his swooning father that he has survived a long drop and "Your life's a miracle." The orthodox way of playing this emphasizes Edgar's devotion to his scarred, blind, helpless, desperate father whose life, notwithstanding his attempt to end it, is "a miracle." But the critic Jan Kott, who is very much of the savagery and nihilism interpretive school, argues that the scene should be played like a grotesque pantomime. The theatre audience must comprehend that Gloucester's life is not a miracle. He fell on his face in a field. Another bit of pitiless cruelty.
______________
*Lionel Trilling in Prefaces to the Experience of Literature.
April 25, 2020
The Onion falls off the pace
I've heard people say that Biden should be a more forceful presence during this "difficult time," but wouldn't the other side of the argument be that it's smart to stay out of the way when your opponent is continuously displaying his unfitness? Trump's daily coronavirus briefings out-onion The Onion, which back on March 25 ran a piece featuring a Wyoming man who spent $2513.67 on an array of household cleaners in the expectation that the president would announce one of them to be the magic bullet for "The Wuhan." He was ready, when Trump gave the word, to shoot 20 squirts of Windex up each nostril. It was intended as satire, not prophecy.
Possibly Biden lacks the energy to get in the game. If so, it's probably working for him. He's got my vote, but I also think it's sort of quaint that the framers took the trouble to stipulate that the president must be at least 35 years old. Was there not among them a single young slave owner to suggest they might be worrying about the wrong end of the spectrum? To bring the Constitution into 21st-century reality, there should be an amendment stating you can't be president if, on internet forms, you have to swipe your phone four or more times to bring your year of birth into view for selection.
There you go, kids. Can't say, "Ok, Boomer" to that.
April 23, 2020
April 21, 2020
History; puzzles
That's the clock radio at my bedside. Pretty sure it's the same one I had in high school, which is a way of saying, the only one I've ever had. That I'm probably right may be seen in the way the plastic of the side panels is colored to look like stained wood. On a clock radio. No one has thought to do that for at least 40 years. Another of its endearing features is that, when resetting the time, including for an alarm, you can only go forward. So, for example, it's relatively easy to "spring ahead" one hour for daylight savings time, but to "fall back" a few months later I have to spring ahead 23 hours. You press a button for "fast" and then, when you're getting close to the desired time, switch over to "slow" to creep up on it. Don't know how many times I've lost concentration and sped past the time I wanted to set. Once, when I was in my 20s, or maybe my 30s, I almost remembered in time so instead of going forward 23 hours again I just left it like 7 minutes fast for a few months. This was before cell phones, and I was young and had a job and often got in quite late after pursuing recreational activities, so I was always using the alarm, and when setting the time I'd just take account of the 7 minutes. Sometimes, I'd want to eat breakfast before leaving; sometimes, not; I still remember that the bus I caught came at 7:28, actual time, not my clock radio time.
I've had the same carping complaints about this radio for upwards of a half century now. In other words, it works as well today as it ever has—no planned obsolescence. Nowadays, it's tuned perpetually to 91.1 FM, which is the news station of Minnesota Public Radio. I just about always fall asleep at night with the radio on. MPR plays the BBC over night, and at first I lie toward the radio, listening to the news show, but before long the attraction is the modulated voice of the announcer and I fall asleep. The slight British accent helps, almost like having an English nanny doing a lullaby. The volume has to be just right: loud enough to make out the words during phase 1, soft enough to permit sleep after that. When I wake up, the process is reversed. Often around 7:30 I realize, however dimly, that I had heard the same news spot much earlier in the morning, when I was paying much less attention. It seems MPR fills the air time in part by repeating the same stories, and I'm onto them, though barely.
On Sunday morning, I start paying attention when The Puzzle airs for the first time. This is the segment that ends with Will Shortz, who is the New York Times crossword editor, announcing some kind of puzzle challenge. Listeners send in their answers by a midweek deadline and, from those who are correct, one is chosen at random to play some other puzzle on-air with Shortz that coming Sunday morning. Listeners can play along anonymously during the on-air puzzle before hearing the new challenge for next week. And on and on and on it goes: the answer to last week's challenge, then the on-air game, then the new challenge, the solution for which is divulged at the start of next week's segment. Before the on-air game begins, host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asks the contestant how long she (or he) has been playing the puzzle, and usually the answer is "since solutions were submitted by postcard." Of course you email them now. Possibly public radio's slice of the demographic pie trends grizzled and gray. Postcards!
I got on this whole topic of my radio and The Sunday Puzzle, their respective long histories, and my own lengthening history, because while drowsily listening a couple mornings ago I remembered something someone had recently pointed out to me, and I thought it was just the kind of thing Shortz would make a puzzle out of. It has to do with the word
CORONAVIRUS,
which has the unusual quality of alternating consonants and vowels, beginning to end, despite being eleven letters long. The challenge would be to submit a word of at least twelve letters that has this same characteristic. Winner is the submitter of the longest qualifying word, ties broken by the random drawing.
I like the topicality of "coronavirus"; also, the difficulty of the puzzle. When you start playing around, you notice how many English words have what are called diphthongs, not to mention common double vowels like oo and ee or the "blended" consonant sounds formed by sh, ch, th, and ng—all deal breakers for my puzzle. Even worse is the fact that a 12-letter word is going to be polysyllabic, and since a lot of syllables both begin and end with a consonant, it's common to have two consonants in a row at a syllable break. The longest words I've thought of with the required pattern—"widower," "sidecar," and "perusal"—are way too short. If you want to cheat by googling something like "12 letter words," I'd never know. I just did it myself, however, and you're going to spend some time scanning lists of very unfamiliar words for one with the right pattern. Shortz would probably be put off by the ease with which one might cheat, and the likelihood that the winning cheater submits a word from Mars.
Too bad "coronavirus" no longer qualifies as a word from Mars.
April 19, 2020
While keeping a social distance
Whipping up a little lunch, I see out the kitchen window my energetic young neighbor doing burpees on his deck. I take an interest, because I hardly know him: first thing he did upon moving in a couple years ago was erect a privacy fence, and he's rejected a couple neighborly blandishments. My kitchen is high enough so that I can see over the fence into the space above his deck, but he disappears while descending for his burpee before popping up into sight again. He was probably born in the 80s but he's wearing those super-short shorts, popular in the 70s, that barely cover your butt. His nevertheless have slits up the side, and I think they should be tighter, because they fly up a little when he's ascending. His is the corner lot. Letting my eye drift into the background, I see that the guy who owns the corner lot immediately across the street is leaning against his elevated garage, smoking a cigarette and contemplating Mr Burpee from the opposite direction. He watches until our exhausted neighbor collapses into some deck furniture, whereupon he stubs out his cigarette on the bumper of his truck and disappears into the garage.
Another week of sheltering in place and I'll be filling you in on the neighborhood dog walkers, too.
April 16, 2020
Books of the Bible: Hosea
I attribute slow progress in my Bible-reading project to the prospect of I Chronicles and II Chronicles lurking behind II Kings. Thinking about tackling these interminable historical books while stuck at home during the Age of Coronavirus is dispiriting, like trying to see through layers of tedium: a hideous torture concocted by some fiend for a temperature-controlled hell. You'd be tempted instead to request the lake of fire, just so that you could feel something. Maybe by skipping ahead I can recover lost momentum, and the Book of the Twelve, sometimes called the "minor prophets," seems like a good place to start. I think they are called "minor" because they are brief, an attractive feature. Two-thirds of a case, however, might be made for "minor" in the sense of "insignificant." I'm looking at you Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Only the most eccentric enthusiasts would complain if any of you had been consigned to the apocryphal writings. Happily, the Book of the Twelve opens with Hosea, one of the four exceptions.
There are difficulties, however, and a little context relating to history and proper nouns is needed. In his prophetic oracles Hosea repeatedly addresses Ephraim. Who's that? Ephraim originally referred to one of the twelve tribes of united Israel. But after the death of Solomon, in the tenth century B.C., the kingdom split apart. The details are blurry to secular history. They are also described, not with less blur, in the historical books of the Old Testament that I cannot yet bring myself to tackle. What the lay reader of the Old Testament has to know is that this division resulted in a "southern kingdom," made of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and a "northern kingdom" made of the other ten tribes. Old Testament writings from after the division consistently use "Judah" to refer to the whole of the southern kingdom. The most common proper noun referring to the northern kingdom is "Israel," but sometimes Ephraim, one of the ten northern tribes, is used instead. The book of Hosea uses both "Israel" and "Ephraim" to refer to the northern kingdom. If you're reading along, and think Hosea sometimes is railing against all of Israel and sometimes against a sad sack named Ephraim, that's wrong. We're in the post-division historical period. Hosea is a northerner prophesying to the northern kingdom, which he sometimes calls "Israel" and sometimes "Ephraim." Confusing! Overall Old Testament reading tip: remember that the most commonly deployed proper nouns—including "Israel"!—can refer to different entities, and you too will wander in the wilderness unless you keep at hand your historical bearings.
Another bar to comprehension—and to enjoyment, since the sensation of incomprehension banishes pleasure—relates yet again to textual problems. The book of Hosea shows signs of being essentially a crude amalgamation of fragments. The content is not continuous, doesn't "flow"; the different sections don't fit together. The alert reader receives almost immediate notice, for the first chapter describes events from Hosea's life, as does the third chapter: why are they separated by the very different second chapter? Well, on closer review, the first and third chapters don't fit together, either. The first—
And the Lord said to him [Hosea]
—is in the form of a third-person biography, whereas the third chapter—
And the Lord said to me [Hosea]
—is in the form of a first-person autobiography. My impression, from having dipped into the commentaries, is that scholarship recognizes the problem, and has sought to answer the question about the relationship between the first and third chapters, but there are only opinions, no consensus.
There is no doubt, though, that both chapters 1 and 3 concern Hosea's marital history. In chapter 1, his wife is named Gomer, and in chapter 3 she is not named, so there is a question about the number of marriages. But of all possible biographical information it would be possible to relate, the two fragments, whatever their relationship, both zero in on the topic of marriage. That seems significant. Here is how the topic is introduced in chapter 1:
When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, "Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord."
A lot of harlotry! I don't know that I've ever seen the word in print, let alone on someone's lips, and here it comes, three times in one sentence supposedly spoken to Hosea by God. On the most literal interpretive plane, the directive is incomprehensible: the people have been faithless, therefore Hosea should marry a faithless woman—what sense is there in that? But the illogic is built upon a kind of syntactical parallel construction that suggests an analogy: God's relationship to his faithless people is like Hosea's to his faithless wife. The corrupt text makes it a challenge to piece together the details of Hosea's purported private history with Gomer, but the general movement is: marriage, "harlotry," anger and judgment and separation, finally a wooing back.
This implied parable should be kept in mind while reading, in chapters 4 through 14, Hosea's prophetic oracles, which otherwise present a bewildering sequence of wildly discordant pronouncements, judgment and condemnation followed by forbearance and then more denunciations. As a literary composition, the work lacks organization, but it's hard to miss the portrait of a two-minded God who is repelled by his people's apostasy and unwilling to be done with them:
For I will be like a lion to Ephraim,
and like a young lion to the house of Judah.
I, even I, will rend and go away,
I will carry off, and none shall rescue.
I will return again to my place,
until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face,
and in their distress they seek me, saying,
"Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn, that he may heal us;
he has stricken, and he will bind us up."
Last note: speaking from experience, I think one might form the impression that Hosea is obsessed with the sexual immorality of the people, since their "harlotry" is repeatedly decried. In these instances, however, the intent is to recall by verbal association Gomer's faithlessness, and the aptness of the analogical thinking depends not on any specific behavior but rather on the underlying broken relationship: the marital bond is broken, as is the covenant between God and his people. Hosea 6:6 has been the source of much scholarly attention, partly on account of translation difficulties:
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.
God's impatience with the outward forms of devotion is a prophetic theme—sometimes, as in Amos, it elicits derision and nausea as opposed to mere impatience. What does he care for? From the linguistically advanced one learns that the Hebrew words translated here as "knowledge" and "steadfast love" both convey a sense of reciprocal intimacy for which it's hard to find English equivalents.
April 14, 2020
Kids say
Agnes Callard, whose wardrobe I mentioned here, is like me these days spending more time around her kids than she otherwise would, and noting the things her 7-year-old says. It can't be wrong to spread the word about the amusing utterances of other people's kids! When making coffee in the morning, she always lets him "help" by depressing the plunger that pushes the grounds to the bottom of the tube, leaving the elixir ready to be poured into a cup. He did this every day for awhile, very serious and proficient. Then today, or maybe it was yesterday, having performed his duty he said over his shoulder while padding out of the kitchen, "You should learn to do that yourself. I'm going to grow up, you know."
Same kid is doing the distance learning thing at home. Today (or maybe yesterday) the math lesson concerned the number 7, and he was supposed to write down something that there's 7 of. His mom suggested days of the week, which he immediately rejected. After thinking about it for a couple seconds, he says, "How about the number of fingers you have if three get shot off in a war?"
I see that his mom, who's on the philosophy faculty at the University of Chicago, suggests I give up the chief pleasure of my life. A real wet blanket with, however, a fun kid.
April 13, 2020
April 11, 2020
Domestic tranquility
Since I didn't have kids until my classmates were transitioning from hoping their kids knew about birth control to hoping for grandchildren, I heard stories about the cute things their youngsters said, and I swore I'd never do that even when I doubted I'd ever be tempted. For the most part, I've kept my word. Today, however, I overheard my daughters arguing, and at first I paid no attention, but when it got loud enough I pricked up my ears and heard:
6th grader: You're being such a jerk.
3rd grader: Well, you suck.
6th grader: Are you popular in school?
3rd grader [puzzled, but honest]: No.
6th grader: I'm surprised. You're mean enough.
I guess I thought I knew where it was headed, and then, that's not where it went. In other news, I got the above six books in the mail today. Trying to spend a little money to help my favorite businesses stay afloat. I feel I can afford it—hell, the books cost less than a tank of gas, and it seems like I haven't had to buy gas since places you might drive to were open. I've heard that the handles of gas pumps are a likely means of coronavirus transmission so maybe this explains why so far I feel fine.
Anyway, I love Elmore Leonard and have decided I'd like to collect mass market paperback editions of all his crime novels. This is a start, though I have to say that I'm disappointed with the two books on top, especially Rum Punch. You can't see it very well in the picture, but the bar code sticker affixed to the upper left of the hard cover says "Carver Public Library" on it. Inside the back cover is the pocket where in ancient times the library card was inserted. I don't care about looking like a library thief, but, as I said, I was trying to buy mass market paperback editions. They seem more like a collectible item to me. As Leonard's reputation rose, the marketing changed: now paperback editions of his novels are made to look like belles lettres, and you can even buy his books in Library of America editions originally devoted to the likes of Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Henry James. I like the garish covers of the early paperback releases and they are getting harder to find. The edition of Swag is a paperback, and has a nice picture on the cover, but it's oversized. I like the ones that can fit in the hip pocket of your relaxed fit jeans.
April 10, 2020
Imperfect pitch
HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2020
It's sort of humorous how Trump, whenever he's trying to kiss up to Christian conservatives, hits a false note. And that they love him anyway.
Two Corinthians is one of his faves! Oh, and happy Crucifixion Day!
April 09, 2020
The new press secretary, etc.
Ladies and gentlemen, the new press secretary to the President of the United States:
She's blonde! She's thin! Bonus: she's a bigot!
Judging by the activities of the old press secretary, the new press secretary will be expected only to lie about Trump on TV and Twitter, which she's been doing anyway for years. Now she'll get about $15k/mo of US Treasury funds for the same work. Sweet! A couple years ago, asked on TV about all the golf Trump plays, she said that Obama was on his way to the golf course when he expressed outrage over the beheading in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But Pearl was killed in 2002, when Obama was representing a district on the south side of Chicago in the Illinois state legislature. He was elected president a little more than 6.5 years later. So . . . timeline problems.
"Only the best people."
My stepson is still working two jobs, one at a Caribou, the other at a bagel shop, both just doing the drive-through now. Because I think he's my most likely link to the coronavirus, I was quizzing him recently about his experience at work, and he told me everyone these days is either unusually pleasant or insufferably rude. Sounds right. In the mailbox a few mornings ago I found this postcard addressed to my middle-schooler:
I've met Mrs Marr at conferences and came away with the impression that she'd have been at Woodstock but for another timeline problem. I'm trying to bring this around to where I started, stitching together disparate threads into a unified compositional structure. Some people (middle-school teacher) stepping up; others (the president, his staff) same old shitshow.
April 07, 2020
Concerning t.p.
Out of delicacy I did not mention, when writing recently about Montaigne, that in one of his innumerable byways he proposes a solution to the riddle concerning why people say "Bless you" to a sneezer. It is, says the French wise man, because there are only a set few involuntary effusions emitted from the various human orifices and, of the possibilities, a sneeze is least offensive, so bless you for favoring me with that one instead of any of the more disagreeable options. I have no idea whether there's any merit to the theory, but I read it when the great toilet paper hoarding was first in the news, and I remember thinking there might be a connection between the shame associated with the more repugnant emissions and people's irrational unwillingness to contemplate even the theoretical possibility of being caught without the convenience of toilet paper.
By the way, I'm running low, but while making coffee this morning, specifically while poofing open a #4 coffee filter, it occurred to me that a remedy of last resort was literally at hand. My mind must have been stewing subconsciously on the impending crisis.
Anyway, I saw a spot on the news tonight that persuaded me the issue really has nothing to do with human psychology. It's a matter for another of the social sciences, economics. Everyone uses about the same amount of toilet paper. By that I mean everyone's use is constant for them—it doesn't vary according to weather or season or Republican versus Democratic administration or anything like that. So steady, constant demand over time. Suddenly, though, where you are when you use it has changed. In the pre-coronavirus age, lots of toilet paper got used in office buildings, schools, dormitories, airports, shopping malls, restaurants, other public places. Now it's all used at home, and, as everyone has surely noticed, what you have at home is quite a different product from what is good enough for public rest rooms. What you used at work and what you use at home are both called "toilet paper" in the same way that IPAs and Bud Lite are both called "beer." They're actually different products, different manufacturers, different supply chains, etc.
But now the steady demand for the soft, embossed, double- or triple-ply product used in homes has spiked—because no one is ever at the places stocked with the other stuff anymore. It's not that people are hoarding Charmin. They really do need more. Why isn't more produced, to meet the demand? Probably because the suppliers aren't sure the increased demand will endure. Moreover, toilet paper is both cheap and bulky, so the people who make it do not want to pay to store it. They want to ship all of it immediately, which accounts for why they are reluctant to ramp up production to meet a possibly fleeting rise in demand.
Strange times indeed!
April 05, 2020
Normies
Since I've recently regaled my legions of readers with miniature disquisitions on Montaigne and Milton, here are some more ordinary pastimes, opinions, and observations.
A good dinner may be secured at McDonald's, brought home, and washed down with two cans of Miller Lite.
Around 11 on Sunday morning is a good time to have two fried eggs, toast with butter and jelly, two strips of bacon, lots of greasy hashbrowns, and several cups of black coffee, though with sugar and cream in the last one, for dessert.
If you go to a "nice" place for brunch, and order a Bloody Mary, it is apt to come with way more than you need or even want. I just want the vodka, the tomato juice, ice, spices, and something to stir it with, like a pickle. Everything else is unnecessary and distracting.
I think I maybe developed my opinions about Bloody Marys at the Poodle Club, a bar on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. It has since burned down, but in the early-80s, when I first moved into the neighborhood, it had a weekend breakfast special: two eggs any style, two toast, and your choice of a Bloody Mary or a screwdriver—$1.99. This was almost forty years ago, but still, as you'd predict, the Bloody was not accessorized. The first fifty I ever had were at the Poodle. I had them at the bar with the eggs and toast. On Saturday morning, the cigarette haze from Friday night had not lifted and was augmented by the smell of spilled beer on the floor. I'm not sure all the customers had been home. I remember once hearing the guy on the next stool tell the bartender he wanted "the special, with a screwdriver, hold the eggs, hold the toast, and keep them coming." The Poodle Club ambience got imprinted on my brain and associated with the idea of a Bloody Mary. When I finally had one somewhere else, and it came in a curvy glass with pepperoni and a radish. . . seemed sort of ridiculous.
It's odd that I have such strong opinions about food and drink but am not at all particular. Truest sentence my mom ever spoke was, "He's easy to cook for."
Pretty good chance that history will adjudge Trump to have been a subpar president.
The best game is baseball.
A lot of people who vote reliably for the Democrats have an unduly dismissive attitude toward country music. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings: every one of them, beyond merely terrific. Probably others too, more current, but I don't know about them. I do like Nikki Lane.
When I talk to young people who like me prefer the Democrats, and there are a million of them around where I live, I find that their reasons aren't my reasons. With me, it's got nothing to do with yoga or the horrors of genetically modified plants in agriculture. Have they noticed, though, that the other side is depraved and completely whacko? Nixon was a crook, Reagan an avuncular dunce, and George Shrub . . . wasn't avuncular. But look at their team now! Holy shit!
I think I've been channeling (subliminally till just this instant) a Twitter thread I saw in which people were challenged to confess their most "normie" opinion. So someone said they thought the Beatles were a good band. Someone else said with almost any band their best songs are the ones they did after their real fans accused them of having sold out. Someone said they liked the Eagles, to which someone replied: "That's a bridge too far." Or maybe Cold Play was a bridge too far, I can't remember for sure. Some of the responses were pleasingly layered, such as (paraphrasing on all these that are inside quotes): "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a great work of classical music, although people who don't appreciate classical music agree." Naturally, I remember the food ones, like: "The parking lot at Olive Garden is usually packed as the unlimited garden salad is quite good." Another contribution: "Melted cheese elevates many dishes." I got into the thread because someone I follow, Jennifer Frey, offered, "Potato salad, lots of it." My opinion about potato salad is that, as with the Bloody Mary, it's too often too busy. You have to let the potatoes speak for themselves, like the vodka. Within reason though. At Stand Up Frank's, a bar in north Minneapolis, if you ordered a Bloody for yourself and a screwdriver for your friend, the bartender would put a straw in one drink and two straws in the other, so that you'd know which was which, not that it mattered. My normie about that was, if you must have two, have three, so that you won't even be able to find your car in the lot and therefore won't try to drive it.