Eric The Blue

Ralph Ellison writes a sex scene

I read, basically over the course of July, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s 568 pages in the Vintage Book paperback I’ve owned, I don’t know why, for years: maybe I saw it in a book store one day not long after noticing that it’s #19 on the Modern Library list of hundred best 20th-century novels in English. 

Anyway, 568 pages in 30 days, so 19 per day. Could have made faster progress. Once, in a coffee shop, a first Tinder date was in progress at the next table, and the strained, cringey conversation overwhelmed my interest in the literary masterpiece. It might also have helped if I’d known from the start that a sex scene unfolds beginning around page 500.

Sex scenes in “serious novels” can be problematic, as evidenced by the fact that not even John Updike consistently  dazzles in this subgenre. The things people do with their bodies tend to connect them to the so-called lower animals and thus may undercut the aura of elevation the author has conjured. There is too the problem of which words to use. The ones in anatomy texts seem inappropriately clinical for describing the experience of the participants, but the unclinical ones have almost attained the status of cliches, so worked over are they in common parlance. The censor could actually be the author’s friend, since the construction of an opaque curtain requires less linguistic resourcefulness than is needed to narrate events happening on the other side of it.

In the first 500 pages of Invisible Man a narrator who bears a close resemblance to Ralph Ellison—Black, smart, from the South—has a succession of deflating and often absurd experiences: rich liberal white do-gooders, the administration of his Black college (Ellison attended Tuskegee), his bosses in the Communist Party after he moves to Harlem, others . . . they all disappoint. 

It’s the Communist Party that gets most of the attention in the novel’s second half. The narrator is at first a rising star, but then he begins to comprehend that he’s the object of jealousies and, probably, back-room machinations that are hidden from him. His rise stalls out as his portraits of his colleagues, smug spouters of Party jargon, grow progressively more superb. 

The principals in the sex scene are the narrator and the wife of one of the higher-ups in the Party. Only she’s there for the sex; he hopes she’ll be chatty and help him understand what the bosses are keeping from him. There isn’t much sign of Ellison worrying, circa 1950, about the perspective of a censor:

“Come on, beat me daddy—you—you big black bruiser. What’s taking you so long?” she said. “Hurry up, knock me down! Don’t you want me?”

I was annoyed enough to slap her. She lay aggressively receptive, flushed, her navel no goblet but a pit in an earth-quaking land, flexing taut and expansive.

I take it that she had an innie and part of the sex play involved him drinking liquor from it. You barely need to read between the lines to see that she has expectations arising from the race of her partner. Of course the word taut is deployed. I laughed through the pages-long scene and thought at first it was Ellison’s inability to overcome the aforementioned challenges that made it seem ridiculous. Only slowly did it occur to me that no one was laughing harder than Ellison. The narrator’s scheme is for a long while stymied by the steady flow of demands and complaints emanating from his loquacious partner but eventually:

“Sure,” I said, picking up some silken piece of clothing. “You brought out the best in me. I overpowered you, but what could I do?”

“And wasn’t I a good nymphomaniac?” she said, watching me closely. “Really and truly?”

“You have no idea,” I said. “George had better keep an eye on you.”

She twisted herself from side to side with irritation. “Oh, nuts! That ole Georgie porgie wouldn’t know a nymphomaniac if she got right into bed with him!”

“You’re wonderful,” I said. “Tell me about George. Tell me about that great master mind of social change.”

She steadied her gaze, frowning. “Who, Georgie?” she said, looking at me out of one bleary eye. “Georgie’s blind’sa mole in a hole’n doesn’t know a thing about it. ‘D you ever hear of such a thing, fifteen years! Say, what’re you laughing at, boo’ful?”

Himself. Her. The general situation. He slips her dress over her head, pulls it down over her hips, and laughs more when she tries to arrange their next meeting. 

State of the new race, same as the old race?

No one knows who’s going to win the presidential election, so it’s recreational to contemplate the effusions of confident pontificators. For example:

Rasmussen issued a Trump v. Harris likely voter poll today that should be as reputable as any:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a two-way matchup, 50% of Likely US Voters would vote for Trump, while 43% would vote for Harris …..

So, a seven-point lead, which tends to confirm past data suggesting that Harris is not an improvement upon Biden, at least not before his final collapse.

This is John Hinderaker of the loony Power Line blog. He probably knows that the poll aggregate site RealClearPolitics currently shows the results of 15 surveys. Of these, eight are based on interviews conducted entirely after Biden dropped out. Hinderaker highlights Rasmussen’s result, which, of the eight, is by far Trump’s best: his second best, from CNN, is +3. The average of the eight is Trump +1.6. If you throw out the Rasmussen result and average the other seven, Trump’s lead drops below a single point. (Harris is ahead in two of the polls.)

According to Hinderaker, the Rasmussen survey “should be as reputable as any.” Why? Because it’s an outlier? I’ve sometimes wondered why Republicans, when they lose, leap to the conclusion that they were cheated—and actually appear convinced. One factor might be the way in which they spend their lives lying to one another and end by believing their own b.s. 

The New York Times’s take on the current state of the unsettled race is in line with the evidence and still pretty sobering for us Democrats:

In the Times’s national polling average, Trump is ahead of Harris by one point, 47 percent to 46 percent. That’s narrower than Trump’s recent lead over Biden, but similar to Trump’s lead over Biden before last month’s debate…. The race has in some ways reset to where it was. 

There are also a couple of important differences. Harris is a far stronger campaigner than Biden. She’s a fiery, skilled speaker who can describe her own agenda and make the case against Trump in ways that Biden could not. She has more potential to make gains than Biden did.

That said, polls point to a potential weakness, too: Harris appears to be a worse fit for the Electoral College than Biden. She is stronger among younger voters and voters of color but weaker with older voters and white working-class voters. Because swing states are disproportionately old, white and working class, Harris is likelier to win the popular vote and lose the election than Biden was.

Think of it this way: It’s a bad trade for a Democrat to win more votes in California and fewer in Pennsylvania. As a result, Trump’s narrow national lead is probably a bit stronger than it looks.

Though not “a bit stronger than it looks” on John Hinderaker’s Earth-2. That would be almost impossible.

I part ways with the Times’s take only with respect to what isn’t said. They’re essentially saying that Harris appeals to the wrong type of voter—young brown ones instead of the old white ones she needs to win. Weird that you can say that without commenting on how weird—undemocratic—it is.

Mountains of praise when a molehill would do

It must be a symptom of rightfully diminished expectations, or something worse, but it seems that people in public life who make the obviously correct choice—Pence declining to participate in his boss's coup, Biden quitting a race he wouldn't win against Pence's former boss—are treated as if they were George Washington not lying about the cherry tree. 

What of the fact that a problem with the foregoing is that Pence is regarded as moral royalty only by his political opponents? His own side thinks that making the obviously correct choice identifies a scoundrel.  As long as we're collecting symptoms, that one recommends a diagnosis of terminal moral rot. It appears the unfurling of scrolls of poor polling data persuaded Biden to "stand down," which distinguishes the motive for his retirement from George Washington's. But Trump would never tamp down his own aspirations, vanities, ambitions, feverish fantasies out of fealty to a principle higher than the wish to wield power, line his pockets, and avoid prison.

I see that a New York Times columnist, the high-minded David French (link is to an article behind a paywall), urges us to criticize but not demonize Trump. If by this he means Trump isn't a demon, I have counterarguments. Has he ever even laughed? Cartoon villains seem more human. In cases like his you have to wonder about the family of origin—by all accounts, it was rich and negligent. Too bad, but some people are able to overcome these disadvantages. 

Basketsful convene

I have received the information about the voting preferences of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan but, to be frank, am still leaning in a contrary direction. Something about Donald Trump makes me think he might prove to be untrustworthy. 

It's the all-star break or else I would never have been watching when the author of Hillbilly Elegy told the assembled Republican delegates:

And while we're on the topic of grandparents, let me tell you another Mamaw story. Now, my Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq, in 2005. And when we went through her things, we found 19 loaded handguns. They were—[his momentum is interrupted by laughter and applause].

Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over the house. Under her bed. In her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn't get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arms' length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That's who we fight for. That's American spirit. 

Kid Rock. Hulk Hogan. Loaded handguns in the silverware drawer. (Because you never know when granny will need to "protect her family" that doesn't live with her.)

Well, in the world according to them, they're putting their best foot forward.  Their nominee would soon have some thoughts on "the late great Hannibal Lecter." 

Nerding out on baseball math

Because I "interact" with a lot of baseball-related social media posts, my feeds fill with the questions, observations, and provocations of other fans. Recently, I saw someone wonder about the distance between the pitching rubber and first base. The question aroused in my nerdy soul a memory from junior high, when I realized in math class one day that this "Pythagorean Theorem" could answer a question I'd wondered about—namely, whether the pitching rubber is closer to home plate or second base. I knew that it was 60 feet, 6 inches from the rubber to the plate and 90 feet between consecutive bases. Now I was practically being directed to notice that, according to Pythagoras, the distance from the plate to second base was the product of 90 feet and the square root of 2: that's 127.28 feet or, rounding to the nearest inch, 127 feet, 3 inches. So the pitcher throws from a point that's more than 6 feet closer to the plate than it is to second base. The math contradicted my impression from watching on TV, where the ubiquitous zoomed-in view from the centerfield camera has a foreshortening effect. 

The question about the distance from the rubber to first base elicited in the answers a lot of error, and I suspect that the source for the correct answers was usually not math but Google. A couple people mentioned the Law of Cosines, which works, but to me it seems simpler just to consider another right triangle: one leg goes from first base to the point where the diamond's diagonals intersect (the "center" of the diamond), the other leg goes from the diamond's center to the point in the middle of the pitching rubber that's 60.5 feet from home plate, and the hypotenuse connects that point on the rubber to first base. The first leg is half of 127.28 feet: 63.64 feet. The second leg is 63.64 less 60.5 equals 3.14 feet. So the hypotenuse, which is the distance from the rubber to first base, is the square root of the sums of the squares of 63.64 and 3.14, and that turns out to be [drum roll, pressing buttons on calculator] 63.72 feet, or, if you prefer, essentially 63 feet, 9 inches.

To cavilers, yes, the world in which people play baseball is not the world of Euclid, where instead of having things that take up space, like bases and pitching rubbers, there are "points." When talking about "the distance between the rubber and first base," then, you have to make choices about what points to use. Another way of describing the above solution to the problem would be to say that in a triangle in which a side measuring 60.5 feet forms a 45-degree angle with a side measuring 90 feet, the length of the third side, to the nearest inch, is 63 feet, 9 inches.  

His mysterious ways

Coming slowly toward the conclusion that Big News Stories do not bring out the best in social media users.

Examples? A lot to choose from, but the atoms in my brain are so arranged as to make me especially annoyed by breathlessly pious pronouncements along the line of "God holds President Trump's life in His hands" and "It was the work of God that he tilted his head to the side," etc., etc., etc.

Seems like, in the alternative, and with more utility, God might have arranged for a minor traffic mishap, a speeding ticket, anything to keep the dude from arriving on time on the other side of Pittsburgh with his "AR-style 556 rifle." If it has to be a last-second thing, so that His heroism is evident, I'd happily accept such Hollywood ruses as "making the gun jam." Would have been appreciated by the family and friends of the guy who was shot and killed.

 

 

First Ave: Lucinda (& Slim)

My mini-tribute to Slim Dunlap, here, didn't mention that the lyrics to the song I highlighted, "Times Like This," were in time made almost unbearably poignant when he suffered a debilitating stroke that required his wife to become his devoted caregiver:

Well, we found ourselves some trouble
Or did it find us?
Trouble seems to find you when it's most unjust
Things got a little hairy
We thought we'd lost a lot
Now we know our fortune isn't what we still got
We know we can lose it all
But if we still got each other then
Girl, that's all there is:
You can blow all the rest a kiss. . . .

It would be a sweet guy who wrote those words, and it seems he's sweet enough so that his friends—almost all musicians, almost all bigger acts than he—came together to put out a 2-CD set of Slim Dunlap covers, "Songs for Slim: Rockin' Here Tonight," that I read somewhere raised about $150,000 to defray the family's medical expenses. This article in Pitchfork expertly fills in details.

One of the contributors was Lucinda Williams, whose history at First Avenue, like Slim's, is not wholly musical: he worked there as a janitor before he became "the replacement Replacement" in 1987, and she was married on stage in the club in 2009. Here she is on "Songs for Slim" performing his "Partners in Crime":

 

Robert Towne, 1934-2024

Robert Towne, the movie director, screenwriter and script doctor who died last week at 89, was best known to me for three work outputs: he wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), and, with Warren Beatty, Shampoo (1975). Born in 1934, he had a hot hand while coming up to and then passing "the big 4-oh."

I watched The Last Detail last night on YouTube and it's standing up better than, say, our president. It resembles Chinatown in the respect that a rollicking and often funny surface hides, but only a little, quite a bleak view of things. The movie is a road trip, up the east coast to a naval brig at Portsmouth, Maine, and America, as seen out the windows of Greyhound buses and AmTrak trains, looks down-in-the-mouth. It's not any better close up, as evidenced by a detour the traveling trio takes to the house in which one of them grew up in Camden, New Jersey. This Jersey guy, a gentle dimwit, age 18, has been given an absurdly harsh sentence for a minor theft that offended the sensibilities of his commanding officer's wife, and the other two sailors, members of the shore police, are trying to show him a good time before turning him over to the authorities in Maine. But there isn't much fun to be had. While their young prisoner is having his first sexual experience in a whorehouse, the other two wait in the scroungy anteroom and discuss their pasts. "Have you ever been married?" the one asks the other, played by Jack Nicholson, who answers, without sentiment, and as near as I can remember, "Yes, once, she had nice titties and wore argyle sweaters, but she wanted me to go to trade school for TV repair, and I just couldn't do it." 

The back story to how one more patriotic American came to serve his country in its armed forces.

Near the desolating conclusion, the three have a picnic of hot dogs in a park on a day too cold for a picnic. The Nicholson character has forgotten to buy buns. His partner complains that it's not a hot dog without a bun. Their prisoner, who has run a stick lengthwise through a wiener and then dipped the end into the top of a small mustard bottle, offers the mustard to his guard.

The method of sketching a character's past, in a way that's funny while advancing dark themes, has something like a functional equivalent in Chinatown. Jake Gittes, played again by Nicholson, is a private investigator in LA. He used to be a cop but quit to open a practice specializing in "marital investigations." A new case brings him to the city morgue, where he runs into a former colleague, an overfed, alcoholic, corrupt dope who mentions that, in the drought that's hit southern California, water service to his apartment has been cut off. Nicholson, in Towne's script:

How'd you know? You don't drink it. You don't bathe in it. Did the water department send you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.

It helps, in these conversational snippets, if you can hear Nicholson's voice, the way he hangs on to vowel sounds, drawing out the pronunciation, which somehow memorably expresses the emotion of contempt. As a cop, he'd been assigned to the Chinatown precinct, and it seems that crime, abetted by rampant police corruption, had driven him into the field of marital investigations. If everyone is on the make, he'd at least do it honestly. He sees himself, and so does the moviegoer, as a noirish good guy schooled in the ways of the world by his Chinatown experience. But by the time the curtain falls on the movie's crushing last scene, you come to understand that Jake's cynicism had been insufficient. In the last line of dialog, Towne has a cop comfort the marital investigator, 

Forget it, Jake. It's just Chinatown.  

even though what the movie has demonstrated is that the rot is general, unconfined.

In Shampoo, Angelinos cavort sexually with the husbands and wives and significant others of friends and colleagues and acquaintances while unwatched TVs announce the news of Nixon's 1968 electoral victory. It's amusing, even if the idea is something of a downer: people get the leaders they deserve. In the last years of his life, Towne presumably felt no need to recant. 

Ripening

Until pretty recently, I got annoyed at the grocery store with people who appeared to be lost in thought while blocking my way. Now I understand that most likely they remembered twenty seconds ago something they need that's not on their list, but they already forgot what it was so are trying to re-remember. 

Back when I was more easily annoyed, items on the game show Jeopardy were all either "something I know" or "something I've never known." Now it seems there's a third category, "stuff I know I used to know but can't think of before Ken reveals the answer." 

At least a summer supper of hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, corn on the cob, watermelon and Miller Lite hasn't gone bad.  And the Twins on their way to Chicago to play the Unmighty Whiteys. 

Reality bytes

Conservative jurists who have been nominated to be on the Supreme Court: We're just umpires calling balls and strikes.

Once they've been confirmed and have their lifetime appointment: We are writing a decision for the ages!

                                            ***********************

Mitch McConnell: I will not be voting to convict Donald Trump in this impeachment trial. We have the criminal law to deal with his behavior.

Supreme Court: Sucka!

                                                *******************

Sonia Sotomayor: If the president decides that his political rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that an official act for which he has immunity?

Trump Lawyer: It would depend upon the hypothetical, but we can see that that could well be an official act.

Six Supreme Court Justices (three appointed by Trump, two others with crazy wives they might not want to disappoint, and the boss of them all): Yeah, I agree with that. 

                                           ***************

Supreme Court: There's no constitutional right to abortion, because the Constitution is silent on the question.

Also the Supreme Court: The Constitution is silent on the question of presidential immunity, so if we want to get to our preferred conclusion, we're just going to have to make some stuff up. 

[They make some stuff up.]