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. 

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. 

Righteous Victims

 

Benny Morris is a Jewish historian and the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. I think "righteous victims" is intended as a description of how, in Morris's view, both sides see themselves, and the subtitle indicates the subject matter of virtually all his work. Though a Zionist and an Israeli, he has said that his work as a historian has been motivated by deep curiosity about what actually happened. I don't know in what context he made this remark but it seems likely that he was defending himself against countrymen wondering about how a Jew could write such things. I re-read last night the chapter in Righteous Victims on "what happened" at the time of the formation of the Jewish state, beginning with the vote on the UN partition of Palestine in November, 1947, and then on to the aftermath of war. Some excerpts:

On November 28, in the hours before the crucial vote, the Arabs succeeded in obtaining a short delay. But only a serious compromise proposal could have warded off the vote for partition, and this the Arabs proved unable to put together. . . .

The voting was broadcast live on radio around the world. Nowhere was attention more riveted than in Palestine. When the tally was complete, thirty-three states had voted yes, thirteen no, and ten had abstained. Partition had passed, but not very comfortably (had three of the ayes voted nay, the resolution would have failed). The nays had consisted of the Arab and Muslim states, Cuba, and India; the ayes, of the United States, the British Commonwealth states, Western Europe, the Soviet bloc, and most of Latin America. Among the abstainers had been Britain, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and China.

The Zionists and their supporters rejoiced; the Arabs walked out of the hall after declaring the resolution invalid. They could not fathom, a Palestinian historian was later to write, why 37 percent of the population had been given 55 percent of the land (of which they owned only 7 percent). And "the Palestinians failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust . . . they failed to see why it was not fair for the Jews to be a minority in a unitary Palestinian state, while it was fair for almost half of the Palestinian population—the indigenous majority on its own ancestral soil—to be converted overnight into a minority under alien rule." The Arab delegates asserted that any effort to implement the resolution would lead to war. [Zionist leader and later Israel's first Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion knew that there would be war. But still, he said, "I know of no greater achievement by the Jewish people . . . in its long history since it became a people" . . . .

The Zionists had effectively exploited the unusual situation, in which, for a brief moment, there was Soviet-American agreement on the Palestine problem. Helped to a great extent by the nations' feeling of guilt about the Holocaust, the Zionists had managed to obtain an international warrant for a small piece of earth for the Jewish people. What remained was for the Jews to translate the formal leasehold into concrete possession and statehood, in war—and for the Palestinians to pay the price. . . .

Operation Hiram resulted in the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] occupying all of northern Palestine up to the international frontier, as well as a small slice of southern Lebanon, and in the crushing of the ALA [Arab Liberation Army], which ceased to be a military force. The Syrian and Lebanese armies failed to interfere significantly in the fighting, leaving Qawuqji for all practical purposes to fight alone. During Hiram, IDF troops carried out at least nine massacres of Palestinian civilians and prisoners of war (at Eilaboun, Saliha, Safsaf, Jish, Hule, Majd al-Kurum, Bi'na, Deir al-Assad, and Arab al-Mawassa). . . .  

During the first stage, there was no Zionist policy to expel the Arabs or intimidate them into flight, though many Jews, including Ben-Gurion, were happy to see the backs of as many Arabs as possible. And, without doubt, Jewish—both Haganah and IZL—retaliatory policies and the IZL/LHI terror bombings were precipitants. . . .

During the second stage, while there was no blanket policy of expulsion, the Haganah's Plan D clearly resulted in mass flight. Commanders were authorized to clear the populace out of villages and certain urban districts, and to raze the villages if they felt a military need. Many commanders identified with the aim of ending up with a Jewish state with as small an Arab minority as possible. Some generals, such as Allon, clearly acted as if driven by such a goal. . . .

In the course of 1949-50, most of the abandoned Arab fields, groves, and orchards were parceled out to and cultivated by kibbutzim or immigrant settlements. . . .

It was mainly the plight of the Palestinian refugees that fueled Arab animosity toward Israel. Their massive presence served as testimony to the Arab world's humiliation, as proof of the injustice that had befallen the Palestinian people, and as a spur to anti-Israel action. Of the 700,000 or so refugees, about half were in Jordan, most of them in the West Bank. Another 200,000 were in the Gaza Strip; about 100,000 in Lebanon; and more than 60,000 in Syria.

The epigraph to Righteous Victims is from a poem of Auden's, "September 1, 1939":

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

National Review takes a swing at Taylor Swift

I showed my daughters the above from National Review, just to turn them against a "leading conservative magazine and website covering news, politics, current events, and culture with detailed analysis and commentary." Doing my best to give them the guidance they need. I didn't read the article, and so cannot tell you whether the detailed analysis included a reconciliation of Ms. Swift's "averageness" with the seemingly contrary verdict rendered by the vaunted and inerrant free market. Have to save my three remaining free articles for something more entertainingly dumb, like probably the next three articles they post.

I've learned a lot about Taylor Swift in the last weeks. Yes, there's a fair amount of overchewed bubblegum, "sparks flying" applied to the advent of a new romance, etc., but Claire directed my attention to the following, from "Mean":

And I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody's listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things. . . .

I have no idea who she thinks needed to hear this, but I think it's National Review.

Some song lyrics

Listening to music, probably over-analyzing the lyrics, but maybe it's fair considering that Dylan won the Nobel for literature. One of John Prine's great songs is "Angel from Montgomery," about a woman in a stale marriage in Montgomery, Alabama. Her complaints include this about her husband:

How the hell can a person
Go to work in the mornin'
And come home in the evenin'
And have nothin' to say?

Bonnie Raitt, when she covers the song, seems unanswerable, but if you just set down the words, and think of jobs you might have had, I feel like the poor guy deserves a defense. I've now come to the end of my complaints about the lyrics to John Prine songs.

I have zero niggling complaints about the lyrics to this song on a similar theme, by Emmylou Harris. I'll set them down, but first, the footnotes. The "Indian" in the song refers to a motorcycle make, like a Harley, except it's a 1949 Indian. Meridian is a town in eastern Mississippi. Its population is only about 40,000, but if you make it the center of a circle with a radius of 85 miles, Meridian is the biggest town in the circle—it's 88 miles to Hattiesburg, which has a population of about 47,000, and around 20 miles east to the Alabama state line: "a little southeast of Meridian" puts you in rural west central Alabama. The annual college football game between in-state rivals Alabama and Auburn is called the Iron Bowl on account of the high iron content in the state's soil, which gives it a red tint. The song's lyrics:

Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon
Sitting on the front porch, cooling in the shade
Singing every song the radio played
Waiting for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town, me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.

She loved her brother, I remember back when
He was fixing up a '49 Indian
He told her, little sister, going to ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again.
But he never got farther than Vietnam
I was standing there with her when the telegram come 
For Lillian. Now he's lying somewhere
About a million miles from Meridian.

She said, "There's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound.
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm going to swing my hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm going to make a joyful sound."

She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush at the back of the yard
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line
Just a little southeast of Meridian.

Well, she tried to love him
But it never did take
It was just another way for the heart to break
So she learned to bend
One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got them
You keep on falling, there ain't no bottom,
And there ain’t no end. At least not for Lillian.

No one could tell when she started her skid
She was just 27 and she had five kids
Could've been the whiskey, could've been the pills
Could've been the dreams she was trying to kill
But there won't be a mention in the News of the World
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther
Across the line than Meridian.

Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid that hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground.

I guess Harris was the valedictorian of her high school class and, at college, an English major, which may account for some compositional aspects of the song—for example, the way in which the theme of stunted lives is introduced in the brother's story and then, in the longer account of Lillian's life, deepened with details related in parallel phrases: "going to ride the wind"—"going to make a joyful sound"—"never got farther than Vietnam"—"never got farther across the line than Meridian." Here is a video of her performing "Red Dirt Girl" for a live audience in . . . 2000 (yikes). 

 

 

On the first 60 pages of DeLillo's Underworld

I saw the same edition of the book I'm reading, pictured above, for $2 on a clearance shelf at Magers & Quinn this afternoon. It was Cormac McCarthy who died, not Don DeLillo. Two dollars must make Underworld less per pound than anything at the grocery store. It's 827 roughly 7 x 11 inch pages. Medium-sized print. I read recently that McCarthy's Blood Meridian, published in 1985, just attained best seller status for the first time.

Underworld begins at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan on October 3, 1951, the Wednesday the Giants won that season's National League pennant, in a playoff against Brooklyn, on a homer by Bobby Thomson in the bottom of the ninth inning. The play-by-play aspect of the chapter is historically accurate, as far as I can tell, but DeLillo pretty clearly has more than baseball on his mind. In his telling, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover are sitting in box seats with tickets they got from Giant manager Leo Durocher. During the game Hoover, the director of the FBI, is informed that the Russians just successfully tested an atomic bomb. Two shots heard 'round the world. If the question is what's Underworld "about," the best answer is probably America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Another DeLillo touch concerns a bored fan in the upper deck who tears pages out of a Life magazine and sends them fluttering down on the fans below:

The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskeys. Piping times, an optimistic bounty that carries into the news pages where the nation's farmers record a bumper crop. And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola. And here's a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn't know he was in this week's Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason's face. Here's a Budweiser ad, pal. In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to identify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents. Not that Jackie's in a mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings.

Yes, Jackie, not much of a fan, has overserved himself beer and ballpark fare, and he vomits on Sinatra's shoes, hosiery, and pants cuffs just before Thomson hits his homer. It later develops that one of the character's elderly mother is a huge fan of Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners. This character works in waste management and whenever he shops can't help but see the shining merchandise as future garbage. What besides ads for shining merchandise was falling from above in the Polo Grounds? The Life feature story was about the Prado art museum, and it included a reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. The torn facing pages of this image land on the breast of J. Edgar Hoover, who studies it and is repelled. 

Lunching out

I usually work, without taking a lunch, till about 1 o'clock, and notwithstanding the morning oatmeal am famished when walking out of school. Luckily the most direct route home takes me past some favorite eateries that I haven't visited since pre-pandemic times. Today it was Kramarczuk's, where I had the cabbage roll pictured above, with rye bread and the side of cucumber, tomato, and onions in a vinegar dressing. If I remember right, it was about $12 for everything. Regarding the bread: delicious, but back in the day you just served yourself from the plastic bags left open by the napkins and stuff, and they'd bring out new loaves when either the rye or pumpernickel was depleted. Now if you want bread they give you three slices from the loaf they keep on their side of the cafeteria line. Probably shouldn't complain since my own habits may have played a part in the development of the new policy. 

After spending the morning around 4th- and 5th-graders and their mostly 30ish teachers, it was nice to dine surrounded by mature Slavs—maybe I'm not next in line for extinction, after all. I'm sort of curious about where they come from, however. They used to live in the neighborhood, which is now specked with high rises that are presumably home to the young professionals who may be seen walking their designer dogs while on a work break from the home office. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s no longer possible to buy a case of High Life at Surdyk's, the neighborhood liquor store that now includes a cheese shoppe. For gazillions of my out-of-town readers, Kramarczuk's is in "lower northeast" Minneapolis, just across the Hennepin Avenue bridge from downtown. It used to be inhabited by people with names like, well, Kramarczuk, who would have had no use for local businesses such as "Base Camp Fitness."

I like how, if you click on "salads" at Kramarczuk's online menu, the first listing is for "American Potato" and the second is for "German Potato." You can have kale but you'll have to scroll. 

One day last week I lunched at Emily's Lebanese Deli, about a mile up University Avenue, almost to Broadway, where nordeast still looks like nordeast. I had some kind of a combo platter and was reminded that, though famous for liking everything, the stuffed grape leaf isn't among my all-time favorites. I'll go back, but maybe not before I've had the Bar Burger at the bar in Jax. Seventeen dollars, but what the hell, I used to get by without a part-time job. Might have a beer with it. 

The Internet: pros and cons

In 2002, the Internet Age still in its infancy, the philosopher Bernard Williams (pictured) wrote:

Moreover, the Internet shows signs of creating for the first time what Marshall McLuhan prophesied as a consequence of television, a global village, something that has the disadvantages both of globalization and of a village. Certainly it does offer some reliable sources of information for those who want it and know what they are looking for, but equally it supports that mainstay of all villages, gossip. It constructs proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign. The chances that many of these messages will be true are low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone pick out the true ones is even lower. In this respect, post-modern technology may have returned dialectically to a transmuted version of the pre-modern world, and the chances of acquiring true beliefs by these means, except for those who already have knowledge to guide them, will be much like those in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the global nature of these conversations makes the situation worse than in a village, where at least you might encounter and perhaps be forced to listen to some people who had different opinions and obsessions. As critics concerned for the future of democratic discussion have pointed out, the Internet makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find each other and talk only among themselves. 

Whew. Williams was dying of cancer when he wrote this, in his book Truth and Truthfulness, and so did not live to have his prescience confirmed.

However, counterpoint. Without the Internet, you couldn't sit at home and experience intense enjoyment from, for example:

 

The lyric in the line that seems overcrowded with syllables is, "Try to hide my sorrow from the people I meet." In some versions, this is amended to "Sing my song for the people I meet," which scans better, but I like the first way: more in line with what the song seems to be about—someone at the end of the line, given up, but then has caught a hope and is trying to edge back toward life. 

Local resident does well but dies young

Prince died on this day in 2016. A few weeks ago, footage of him being interviewed during a 1970 Minneapolis schools teacher strike made a social media sensation after it was discovered by a music fan who, in his job for the local CBS affiliate, was alert enough while reviewing old tape to recognize an unnamed interviewee, age 11, who said he was on the teachers' side "because they work, they be working extra hours for us and all that stuff." 

The above picture, of the 1971-72 basketball team at Bryant Junior High in south Minneapolis, has also been widely disseminated on social media. Prince, wearing #3, is kneeling at one end of the front row. Discussions of Prince as a basketball player inevitably quote his junior high coach, Richard Robinson, who said he was an excellent player but couldn't crack the starting lineup because he was undersized and there were so many other talented guys on the team. The Current has, here, "an oral history of Prince's love of basketball" that includes Robinson's reminiscences. He wasn't blowing smoke about having some good athletes on his junior high basketball team. I'm reasonably sure that #20 is Greg Boone, who a few years later was runner-up to Kevin McHale for Minnesota's Mr. Basketball Award. And #21 standing in the back row is Duane Nelson, who was good enough to play college basketball at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—he was widely regarded during his life (he died in 2011) as Prince's half-brother, though the picture got murky after the musician died without living parents, offspring, or a will, and a probate court started hearing evidence from diverse claimants. I believe the kid wearing #4 and kneeling at the opposite end of the front row from Prince is Russell Gary, who played college football at Nebraska and was later an all-pro defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Big #31, Calvin Anderson, went to Nebraska with Gary and played in the offensive line for the Cornhuskers. It's kind of humorous to read about Coach Robinson remembering how the wispy Prince, who in his maturity attained the height of 5' 2", repeatedly complained to him about being only the sixth or seventh man with this group. He quit playing basketball after his sophomore year at Minneapolis Central High School. Friends say he had other interests. 

I have a bit of a biographical connection to this photograph. I graduated high school the same year as Prince and his teammates, and I think my junior high basketball team might have played against Bryant in a tournament—it's also possible that they were only in the same tournament and that, though we didn't play them, their Afros made an impression on me. What I know for sure is that, a few years later, several of the kids in this picture were seniors on the basketball team at Central High, which went through the regular season undefeated. They were joined by a junior, Andra Griffin, who, after a college career at the University of Washington, was selected in the fifth round of the 1981 NBA draft by the Seattle Supersonics. I was on the team at Columbia Heights. Our team was pretty good—co-champions of a competitive league—but, to give you some idea, we beat Minnetonka in a close game early in the season, and when Central played Minnetonka in a holiday tournament they slipped past them by the score of 88-48. A 40-point win was not uncommon for them; like I say, Minnetonka was no weakling. Central was in the same region as us, so all season we knew that they stood in the way of us qualifying for the state tournament. We ended up being the #2 seed in the region tournament, and, had it gone according to Hoyle, would have played Central in the championship game. But we lost in the semifinal to North High School, and a couple nights later North, in a huge upset, toppled Central. The two teams had played twice during the regular season and Central had won by 66-54 and 79-65. I don't have a scrapbook; I'm pulling this information from the 1976 Central High yearbook. 

Back to Prince, my fellow class of '76er. Here he is (below) performing "When You Were Mine" at First Avenue on August 3, 1983, by chance my 25th birthday. I was probably playing in a softball game, like an idiot. Information about the show, including the setlist, is here: I guess that night was the first time he ever did "Purple Rain" live. The show was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, which sheds some light on the following tidbit from the Wikipedia article on Prince:

While attending Bryant, he was trained in classical ballet at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through the Urban Arts Program of Minneapolis Public Schools. He grew to become an advocate for dancers, and would later use his wealth to save the ailing Joffrey Ballet in Chicago during the 1990s.

If you know "When You Were Mine" from the record "Dirty Mind," it's fun to hear him sing it that evening in his (surprisingly low) natural voice. For the recorded version, he also made some changes to the lyrics, perhaps anticipating the sensibilities of people like Tipper Gore. I've always loved Prince, partly for his music but also because he was a worldwide superstar who never left the city of his birth, Minneapolis. When in 2015 the Minnesota Lynx won the WNBA championship, he had the team over to Paisley Park and played a private concert for them that began in the wee hours of the morning after they had won the final game, which he attended. When his death was announced six years ago, Lindsay Whalen recalled that night, here. Quit the team but always loved basketball!

 

 

Pauline Kael: life as a (New Yorker) film critic

I may have read this before, possibly the last thing Pauline Kael wrote for publication in The New Yorker, but if I have it was long enough ago and enough forgotten so that I could enjoy it again when I stumbled across it recently. She was the long-time movie reviewer at The New Yorker and I, as a long-time subscriber, had taken note of how different she sounded from the rest of the magazine—almost the only regular contributor whose voice you could never imagine belonging to Eustace Tilley, the magazine's lorgnette-wielding mascot. Someone said something like she marched through the magazine's elegant copy in mud-spattered combat boots, and in the most enjoyable parts of this article she pulls back the curtain:

My life was especially hectic during my first years at The New Yorker, because I (literally) spent more time and effort restoring what I'd written than writing it. The editors tried to turn me into just what I'd been struggling not to be: a genteel, fuddy-duddy stylist who says "One assumes that. . ." Sometimes almost every sentence was rearranged. The result was tame and correct; it lost the sound of spoken language. I would scramble for nine or ten hours putting back what I had written, marking the galleys carefully, so they couldn't be misread, and then I would rush to see William Shawn to get the galleys approved. Since he was the person who had instigated the finicky changes, the couple of hours I spent with him were an exhausting series of pleas and negotiations. He had given me a handshake agreement when he hired me that no word would be changed without consultation, and he stuck by his word, but I had to fight for every other contraction, every bit of slang, every description of a scene in a movie that he thought morally offensive—not my description but the scene itself. He didn't see why those things had to be mentioned, he said.

William Shawn was the magazine's editor and you can imagine him wincing while holding up a lorgnette to Kael's copy. (By the way, he was, in addition to finicky, the father of Wallace Shawn, known to many as a writer and actor in such films as My Dinner with Andre, Clueless, several Woody Allen movies, more.) In another of these "editorial meetings," one concerning her pan of a Terrence Malick movie, Shawn said to her, mournfully, "I guess you don't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael is said to have replied, "Tough shit, Bill"—what's for sure is that the magazine published the review as she'd written it, no punches pulled.

I read her avidly not for the reviews of foreign films I'd never see—though I read those, too—but rather for the takedowns of beloved movies that she thought did not deserve popular adulation. After her long reviews were published, they were then excerpted in the Movies section of Talk of the Town, at the front of each week's issue. I remember, or at least think that I remember, a couple of these. In her review of Dances with Wolves, she quoted something portentous the Costner character says, like how he'd never known who he really was till he began living with Native Americans, before commenting, dismissively, summarily:

This is a kid's daydream of being an Indian. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.

The Talk of the Town condensation of her Beverly Hills Cop review read, in its entirety:

Eddie Murphy tricks the white dumbos. For some reason, audiences love it.  

Doesn't make me feel less creaky and old to think of all her reviews of current movies I read and that this piece, a kind of swan song, was published 28 years ago now. She died, of complications from Parkinson's, on September 3, 2001, a Monday (since 9/11 was a Tuesday), a different era when I already qualified as middle aged. 

Amy Schneider on Jeopardy!

I'm not a big enough Jeopardy nerd to have an opinion about who should be the host, or to hate (or approve) the idiosyncrasies of notable contestants, but I do record the show and then periodically binge several episodes, usually on weekends, and I just saw the game in which 40-day champion Amy Schneider was finally defeated. For the fun of it, and aided by the pause button—I'm obviously refuting my claim about not being a big Jeopardy nerd—I logged the correct and incorrect answers of Schneider and the contestant who beat her.  I suspect her performance was approximately as dominating as in many of the games she won. The guy who beat her, in other words, lucked out. Over the course of the game, Schneider gave 28 correct answers (and one that was wrong), while the eventual winner gave only 16 correct answers (and two wrong ones). This would be a recipe for amassing twice as much money as your nearest competitor, which results in "a runaway game": in "Final Jeopardy," meant to be climactic, the contestants can bet only as much as they've won, so if the leader has more than twice as much as the other contestants there is no drama about who will win. 

Just about all of Schneider's wins were like that, and quite late in the game that ended her streak she led the fellow who beat her by $22,400 to $4600. Ho-hum, another day at the Jeopardy office for her. But he then put a small dent in her lead with a couple correct responses before landing on the last Daily Double, which permits a contestant to bet up to everything they have on a single question. Happily for him, it was late enough in the game, and he was far enough behind, so that it was easy to see his only chance was to make a large bet. He bet everything he had, and his earnings shot up to well past half hers when he then answered correctly. He was now in a position to pass her in Final Jeopardy—another big bet, another right answer, and a wrong answer from her is all he needed, though Schneider's record indicated she was unlikely to be stumped.

The category for Final Jeopardy was "Countries of the World" and the "answer" was:

The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an "h," it's also one of the 10 most populous.

This strikes me as a typical Final Jeopardy item in the respect that, while no one is apt to know the answer immediately, it's intended to elicit and reward educated assumptions—in this case, that a country among the ten most populous is probably in Asia. So you've got 30 seconds to find in your mind's map of Asia a country ending in the letter "h." The fellow in second place, who had $17,600, wrote the correct "question":

What is Bangladesh?

His bet was $12,000, lifting him to $29,600, a couple thousand more than Schneider, who wrote:

What is ???

It's so easy for a tremendous player to lose that it's a wonder someone could win 40 times in a row. If I weren't a fan, I'd assume that skill in Jeopardy, like being able to run fast or having an ear for music, falls along the bell-shaped continuum. Since the contestants are screened, they all must have minds packed with information and it should therefore be impossible for one of them to win 40 times in a row—especially considering that there's a degree of luck, as exhibited in the game Schneider finally lost. But a better model seems to be, say, Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky in hockey. The end of the continuum has outliers. It's not surprising that the outliers should play in the NHL, or get on Jeopardy. 

I imagine some right-wingers must be chortling about how Schneider, who earned just under $1.4 million on Jeopardy, is going to owe about $630,000 in federal and state (California) income taxes. It does seem that the tax code ambushes regular people on whom one year fortune suddenly shines. People who earn that kind of money every year can arrange things. You have to prove you're not "regular" by making that much over and over again before they give you a break.

Coen bro does Macbeth

The entity usually referred to as "the Coen brothers" has always seemed like one person to me. I know that Frances McDormand is married to one of them, I have no idea which, but presumably the brothers are distinct persons to her. Now that one of them, I guess Joel, has written and directed a film version of Macbeth maybe I'll achieve some clarity myself. McDormand plays Lady Macbeth in the movie and I see now that she's Joel's spouse. A household proprietorship instead of the familiar brotherly one.

I'm a little puzzled about some of the conventions surrounding the film project. It's said the movie was "written and directed by Joel Coen," which must mean that, in addition to directing, he's responsible for a script that's adapted from the play written by William Shakespeare in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Yet reviewers, sophisticated ones, often make it sound as if the thing dropped from the mind of Joel Coen. Here is Joyce Carol Oates.

(as the child speaks brightly & is allowed to be "cute," in the sole playful scene in the entire film, I thought: Coen is preparing us to think this little boy is real, before he's savagely murdered.)
(a transparent move, yet still effective.) https://t.co/Pb0q33FnJZ

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 14, 2022

The scene she describes, whether "out of place" or not, wasn't invented by Joel Coen: it's Act IV, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play. The murder of Macduff's family serves no political or strategic purpose, which may contribute to the impression that it's extraneous, "spliced in." But the senselessness is the point. Macbeth's first murder followed an agonizing scene of moral deliberation. The boundary once crossed, however, there's no more reasoning. He's self-aware enough to diagnose his own disorder:

                                        I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.

This speech had begun with a bit of wayward information dropped, as it were, unintentionally:

I hear it by the way; but I will send;
There's not a one of them but in his house
I keep a servant fee'd . . . .

"Keep a servant fee'd"—that is, pay them to spy. He succeeds to the throne after killing the king and his profit on it is that he takes up residence in a nightmare world of paranoia and madness. He tries to escape by committing more and more murders, the consequent slaughters making less and less sense. In general, Shakespeare's savagery receives short shrift, and a movie version that elided the slaughter of Macduff's family would be contributing to the trend. The scene in which Macduff receives the news is brutal. What we call "toxic masculinity" is one of the play's themes. His wife had tempted Macbeth to act on his foul ambition by taunting him, "When you durst do it, then you were a man." Macduff, told of the slaughter of his family, is advised by a third party to "Dispute it like a man." 

MACDUFF:
He has no children. All my pretty ones?

Watching TV on Christmas Eve

Arriving back home last night from my family's Christmas Eve gathering, I turned on the TV, mainly just to see what's on when no one's watching, and after clicking past "It's a Wonderful Life" (predictable) I came to "The Godfather" on a cable channel, POP, I had never heard of. It was the scene in which Vito Corleone gets shot multiple times while making a purchase from a fruit vendor. I thought I'd stay up till Michael commits his first and second homicides, at Louis' Italian American Restaurant in the Bronx, but of course by the time that happened I'd settled in and I watched to the end.

The Christmas Eve airing had me debating with myself which scene in the movie is the most "Christmassy." There are several contenders, but I think I vote for the one in which Carlo beats his wife, Connie, who moves through the house, breaking dishes, brandishing a knife, and trying to get away from him as the camera trails behind. Finally she retreats into the master bedroom, and then into the bathroom off the master. Now there is nowhere else to go and when Carlo follows her in there the camera stays back in the bedroom. You can hear, but not see, what's happening in the bathroom while the camera dwells for one or two seconds on the perfectly made bed and, propped up on the pillows, a smiling stuffed animal. 

The movie had begun with the wedding of Connie and Carlo. Probably a sly announcement of genre since it's said that comedies end with weddings and tragedies begin with them.

Overrated?

Someone, trying to start a row on social media, asserts that the four most overrated musicians of all time are, in alphabetical order:

Dylan
Elvis
Sinatra
Springsteen

Got my attention, as I like them all, and love, A D O R E , two of them. I therefore read on and see that the troublemaker has added a bauble. Three of them, he says, are merely overrated, while the fourth is "straight up bad." His entrapped readers are supposed to guess which one that is. I guessed Dylan, only because the Nobel Prize seems like it might open up the most space below. (On the theory that "overrated" is "longest distance from pedestal to true estimation of merit.") Turns out, though, that he has in mind Elvis. Guy's a philosophy professor so of course he has an argument—it's that The King, whenever he recorded someone else's song, unfailingly failed to come up to the level of the original. I don't think that can possibly be true, but I have to say that, regarding the only example he cites, he might be right. Here's Big Mama Thornton singing "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog." It's for a woman to sing, right?

 

 

Red Dirt Girl

 

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is the title of Neil Postman's meditation on the Zeitgeist, and I'd say I have a pretty good start. Though "amused" might come up short as a description for how I feel about the above YouTube video, which I've played around a dozen times today. The couple look almost as if they walked out of the frame of "American Gothic" to cover this great song by Emmylou Harris.  The woman, however, is too young and feels the music too much. I thought Mr Cornflakes was just there to play guitar, maybe a little too fast, and it's lucky I was sitting when he joined in the singing. He's like the Joe Friday of backup vocalists: "Just the facts" (of a dirge). I'd say the effect made by the space between, on the one hand, the meaning of the lyrics and his partner's voice, and on the other his businesslike accompaniment, is indescribable—because why try to describe it, you can just watch.

Here is Harris performing it herself (below). The majority of her own recordings are covers too and it's America's loss if she could have been writing more songs as good as "Red Dirt Girl." I think every state has a state bird and a state flower but maybe only Alabama has a state soil: red, because of the oxidized iron. 

 

 

 

Seen your video

Reading the Wikipedia article on Paul Westerberg while listening to Tim can bonk you with a bit of synchronicity, encouraging biographical interpretation of song lyrics, for just as you note that he was born on New Year's Eve 1959 you hear him sing:

Income tax reduction
One hell of a function. . . .
We are the sons of no one
Bastards of young,
The daughters and the sons. . . .

Actually, though, I think I recall, from reading Trouble Boys a few years ago, that when his dad was dying Westerberg, by this time at least a nominal rock star, served as his steady bedside nurse. Here is the Official Music Video for "Bastards of Young":

 

They'd been advised that making a video would be good for their bottom line and that is what they produced! An earlier record included "Seen Your Video," about three minutes of instrumental followed by a half minute of lyrics, which go like this (complete):

("All day, all night, music video")
Seen your video
The phony rock'n'roll
We don't wanna know
Seen your video
Your phony rock'n'roll
We don't wanna know
We don't wanna know
We don't wanna know
We don't wanna know
We don't wanna know
We don't wanna know

The Kunin Collection at MIA

Myron Kunin was the Twin Cities businessman who founded the Regis Corporation. From the Star Tribune obit, published on Saturday, November 2, 2013:

Kunin, Myron "Mike" of Minneapolis, age 85, died peacefully on Wednesday morning. . . . Myron, a lifetime Minneapolis resident, grew up near Lake of the Isles, and lived for the last 30 years in a house less than six blocks away from his childhood home (where his mother, Florence, lived until her death, at 102, in 2007). His father, Paul, was a Russian immigrant, a barber and beautician, who owned a beauty salon in Minneapolis, and met Florence when he styled her hair. Myron was born in 1928. He attended Kenwood elementary, West High School, and then the University of Minnesota. Mike married Anita Hochfeld, of Portland Oregon, whom he met when she was visiting her cousins in Minneapolis. They recently celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary. Mike had several different jobs after college, but he eventually purchased his father's salon business in 1958, renamed it Regis Corporation, and over time he transformed it entirely. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, Regis grew rapidly and continuously, as Myron foresaw the changing American marketplace and adapted Regis accordingly. When he stepped down from the Board of Directors, after 50 years at the helm, the Regis corporate group had more than 13,500 salons and more than 65,000 employees.

I quote the parts of the obit concerning his business career as it was to me something of a revelation—not that he was a successful businessman, I knew that, but the scope and specific endeavor were to me unknown, for I knew him mainly as an art collector. I had no understanding of how much money he spent to acquire his collection, which was in two main areas: African statuary art, and contemporary American painting, especially portraiture, "contemporary" in the sense that Kunin was alive when most of it was created. The year after he died, Sotheby's auctioned his collection of African art for over $40 million. Part of the American collection is on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It's not hard, from the Kunin collection at the MIA, to come toward some conclusions about what interested him, and it's not what I anyway would expect from a beauty salon magnate. He put it this way in a 2005 interview:

I try to buy things that are an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Master artists, and that have some kick to them. I like a painting that reaches in and grabs your heart and stomps on it. . . .

To get a taste of what he meant, you can go here, the blog post of a recent visitor to Minneapolis who feels as I do about the Kunin collection at the MIA—it's the best thing in the museum. She has a lot of pictures of the portraits in the "portrait room," which is just one of the rooms holding the collection. Here's a picture I took of a painting in another room:

It's by John Wilde, a Wisconsin artist who died, age 86, in 2006. I could be wrong, but I think Wilde had in mind the famous painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Breughel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is the subject of possibly Auden's most famous poem. If Kunin had the same thought, it might explain part of what he liked about this picture, since he was attracted to works that seemed "an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Masters." Here, female Icarus comes to the rural Midwest and jumps out the top of a barn. As in Breughel's painting, every detail is carefully wrought and adds to the total effect. The birds flit about the nude falling figure who, though her hands are spread like wings, will soon land on the concrete below. The fence visible at the lower right is of barbed wire. Through the window at the far left the head of a man with a clown face is visible. The abandoned wagon is in the role of what Auden, in the closing lines of his poem about the Breughel picture, described as

the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In my photo, it's almost as hard to see as clown man, but the abandoned wagon holds an abandoned doll lying prone and splayed, like the main exhibit is about to be. 

Just looking

Spent much of the afternoon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Have long had an inkling, now confirmed, that I’m under appreciative of the kitchenware from the T’ang Dynasty. Same holds for most religious art. Regarding the above Madonna & Child, painted by the Italian Segna di Bonaventura in about 1325, the explanatory note visible at the lower right of my photo (click to fix the orientation) directs attention to how the artist indicates the humanity of the Christ child by having him play with his mother’s fingers—and, I thought, by how his head resembles that of the 40ish alcoholic who lived across the via from Segna.

It’s not a universal rule, but generally my interest rises as we approach current times. The below painting, which by pacing off its width I estimate to be 18 x 15 feet, is sharp and visually striking: you can’t make it out in my photo, but VICEROY is printed with photographic realism on the white paper of the cigarette extending farthest out from the pack. The museum’s explanatory placard in this case reads:

Jesse Trevino
American born, 1946

Mi Vida, 1971-73
Acrylic on drywall, mounted on aluminum

Jesse Trevino was drafted out of art school in 1966 and deployed to Vietnam as an infantryman. A few months later, he was seriously injured while on patrol, and doctors eventually amputated his right arm—the one he had used to paint. He painstakingly created Mi Vida with his left hand, marking his rebirth as an artist. It portrays his postwar life, from his new prosthetic to his daily coffee and pan dulce. Trevino painted Mi Vida in private, on the wall of his bedroom, when he was still struggling with chronic pain and the transition to civilian life. Before his rehabilitation, he had made art for assignments and had not painted from his life. With this ambitious work, he found a new direction for his art, rooted in his experiences and perspective as a Chicano. He went on to become a major public artist in Texas, making large-scale murals and mosaics for civic spaces. 

 

Readings

When humans first went to the moon, and walked on it, the New York Times collected the thoughts of some Big Minds on the import of the event. The above illuminated snippet is the contribution of the artist, Pablo Picasso. I got a kick out of it because I remember distinctly what I was doing that day and my reaction was similar. I was almost 11, and my dad had taken me golfing that afternoon. But he was interested in the moon walk, play was slow, and, to get home on time, we walked off the course after around 14 holes, which really frosted me. Later, watching the shadowy figures at our neighbor's house, because they had a color TV that was also bigger than our black and white, I thought to myself: This is why we quit golfing? And for how long did that astronaut rehearse his precious speech about one small step for a man? Bullshit, all bullshit.

Well, in another 45 years it made for a good Mad Men episode.

For some of you who know me pretty well, and may be wondering why if my dad was taking me golfing in my pre-teen years I'm not somewhat better at it today, I have one thing to say: Do not suppose I haven't wondered the same thing.

As one who reads a lot, and sometimes tries to write good sentences myself, I often come across things that arouse my jealousy. Here is today's example, the opening to a piece in The New Yorker by Philip Gourevitch:

 

Man, I wish I could do that. Haven't ever even  hitchhiked!

Then there is the other end of the spectrum:

Once I overheard my daughters fighting and the older one suddenly asked the younger one if she was "a popular girl at school." The younger one seemed puzzled by the sudden turn but answered that she was not popular. "I'm surprised," the older one said, "because you're definitely mean enough." That's what this makes me think of. What a flip, pompous dolt (to say nothing of being spectacularly wrong)! No wonder he's wildly successful, a best-selling author and syndicated columnist for The New York Times. 

Weather! Waugh!

Whew, it's hot, every day in Minneapolis at least 90 for more than a week now, and the local nuts who are sure that a cold snap disproves the theory of anthropogenic climate change are not talking about the weather. They've moved on to crime. I wonder whether there might be a connection. Some days in these parts it's just too cold to go outside and shoot people, which anyway is hindered by the wearing of mittens. Hot weather, on the other hand, provokes surliness, short tempers, and trigger fingers. Everyone has a gun, or may have a gun, so when carrying to advance the cause of personal safety there is a reason to be the first to escalate a disagreement. It seems that, contrary to theory, "responsible gun owners" are rarely on the scene to prevent crimes from happening. They might even be the ones shooting each other. 

To stay out of the line of fire, I lounge in the air conditioning, reading in bed—most recently Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, about whom I've written before, here and here. Of the Waugh novels I've read, A Handful of Dust is still my favorite, but there is no down side to trying to discover one I like even better. The action of Scoop is set off when a ridiculous media magnate is determined to send a correspondent to a war brewing in East Africa. He receives a tip from a socialite concerning a popular, dissolute novelist who, she contends, is just the man for the job. Actually, he isn't, but it doesn't matter because he is a distant cousin of an obscure rural columnist for the magnate's London daily and, as the two men share a last name, the unknowing columnist is sent to Africa by the unknowing big shot: a case of confused identities. The comedy of errors then proliferates madly. It's less easy than in A Handful of Dust to discern a serious purpose lurking in the comedy, but in both novels there is just no relief from stupidity, vanity, error, and folly. It's interesting to me that, in my paperback Penguin edition, the admiring Introduction to Scoop is by Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most notorious of the "new atheists" and thus it might seem an odd enthusiast for the fiction of a deeply conservative, Catholic novelist. If you're serious about Original Sin, you might share with atheistic absurdists a generally dim view of human activity here on Earth. 

Dylan turns 80!

Bob Dylan was born on this day in 1941, at Duluth, Minnesota. Since it's his birthday, and a big one, MPR this afternoon replayed this documentary, "Boy from the North Country," about his Minnesota roots. It's continuously interesting. First time I heard it, I was driving in my car, it happened to be on, and I ended up sitting in a parking lot, Target I think, listening for a half hour or more till it ended.

In The Guardian today, Dave Simpson interviews luminaries about their favorite Dylan song. Mick Jagger, for instance, votes for "Desolation Row," and it happens that within the first minute of MPR's  documentary one learns that the opening lyrics to that song relate to a 1920 lynching in Duluth that Dylan knew about from his dad, Abe Zimmerman, an 8-year-old Duluthian at the time of the crime. Sometimes in these exercises the subjects can't resist the temptation to advertise their aficionado status by naming obscure songs that hardly anyone knows, but you could not say that of "Desolation Row," and I think the only song named more than once is "Blowin' in the Wind." I couldn't name one favorite without feeling guilty about having slighted a hundred, but I have a fondness for the long somewhat opaque ballads—"Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." If I was trying to show off, maybe I'd name "Abandoned Love," recorded in 1975  for Desire, but it didn't make the cut. Ten years later, it was included in the Biograph compilation. If you root around the Internet, even just at YouTube, you'll notice that, in a couple different stanzas, the lyrics to the Biograph version diverge sharply from what Dylan sang one night in a famous live show at a club in Greenwich Village—he was not on the playbill, but was at the club. When the evening's headliner, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, called him up, Dylan sang "Abandoned Love," and one of Elliott's fans had a tape recorder running:

 

 

Hemingway on TV

 

I happened to see the above viral TikTok on the same evening that I got around to watching the recent Ken Burns' film Hemingway on PBS and was reminded that, on first reading The Sun Also Rises, my leading question was: The money that these people spend on liquor, hotels, and tickets to the bull fight while pursuing their pleasures across Europe—where does it come from? Jake Barnes has a job, but it doesn't appear to require attendance, and no one else puts up with workaday indignities either. On the evidence, one might develop the hypothesis that it's possible to be disillusioned while running down a trust fund. 

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

"What brought it on?"

"Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England."

Yes, I can imagine. The film points out that, though Hemingway loved to recall his early days as a starving artist in Paris with first wife Hadley, the truth is they lived comfortably on her inheritance. Hadley was supplanted by wife #2, Pauline Pfeiffer, who was even more loaded with family wealth: seem to have been star-struck dilettantes too, happy to bankroll, for example, a months-long African safari. The book that came out of that experience was Green Hills of Africa, one of the leading exhibits in the Hemingway Masculinity Cult featuring him as the talkative expert on topics A to Z, including fishing, hunting, boxing, bull fighting, drinking, all matters military, and of course how-to-make-love-to-a-woman. Don't recall him mentioning that the safari, including the entourage functioning as the audience for his camp-fire wisdom, was paid for by his wife's family. 

Somewhere, the literary critic Malcolm Cowley takes up the question of why so many literary geniuses seem to have been, in their private lives, insufferable narcissists. The conclusion of the discussion is a kind of linguistic shrug of the shoulders and the observation that (I'm going from memory) "no complete son-of-a-bitch ever wrote a good story." Many of Hemingway's best stories criticize, implicitly but to harrowing effect, a character who resembles the version of himself that he rather oddly enjoyed presenting to the world—this one, for instance, which Burns also highlights. 

The Stephen Hawking industry

I've sometimes wondered—had to wonder, being in no position to judge—whether Stephen Hawking's status as a best-selling author, and the difficult circumstances of his life, have caused the public to overrate his contributions to science. Now I see there is a book that takes up this question, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, by Charles Seife, reviewed here by the estimable James Gleick. Short answer to my question is, as the title suggests, Yes, Hawking has been successfully hawked to the public as a scientific genius. It wasn't perhaps a real hard sell. There's more romance to some scientific topics than others, and Hawking's interests, cosmology and black holes, are among the sexiest. It also helps to have some kind of "hook," a personal tic or oddity that captures attention. With Einstein, the hair, suggesting he was too lost in ruminations and calculations to go to the barber. And it's true, so far as my understanding extends, that relativity "came out of his head" rather than being derived from the process one learns about in school concerning hypotheses that are then tested by experimentation, &c. Einstein just figured out in his head what must be true, and it seemed super weird, but the experimenters confirmed he was right: a triumph of pure thought.

Hawking's analogous trait would have been the disease—motor neuron disease to Brits but what we Americans call Lou Gehrig's Disease—that disabled him to such a degree that any image of him might conjure the phrase "pure thought." His body couldn't do much besides keep his brain alive. That such a man should then be the successor to Newton and Einstein is a pretty good story—so good as to be readily believed even though the truth is in quite another direction. It's not that Hawking wasn't a good scientist. The work he is known for, however, was achieved in the 1960s, before disease had crippled his body, and it's probably the case that disability hindered his scientific work: by 1966 he could no longer write or type, and even the math that I can do is abetted considerably by writing, drawing, diagramming, doodling. Hawking could not hold a pencil. The notion that his genius was a kind of compensation for having been stricken with a dreadful disease is mostly a heap of rubbish. What might be thought of as the Stephen Hawking Industry arose at the intersection of science, which he was good at, and his need to support a "life style" that required, for example, round-the-clock nursing attention, personal aides, medical devices and gadgetry, a voice box synthesizer—the comparatively healthy cannot begin to fathom what was required to sustain him. Perhaps the most memorable sentence of Gleick's review states that, while Hawking "considered suicide," he "had no way to accomplish it." He wasn't well enough to start a car in a garage, jump from a roof, shoot himself, cut his wrists, swallow pills or poison. Instead, he participated, to a degree, in the monetizing of celebrity. He might have told interviewers that he was no Newton or Einstein, but he cultivated these kinds of comparisons, and his "modesty" could be viewed as part of the campaign. 

A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, is chiefly responsible for having created a science superstar. More than 25 million copies have sold, and it has generated the predictable commercial offspring—a movie, an opera, a tenth anniversary edition, an expanded and illustrated edition, an abridged sequel called A Briefer History of Time. Hawking's original 100-page manuscript was, in Gleick's summary of Seife's assessment, dull and "uneven," alternately assuming the reader to be a physicist and a middle school student. It was then improved considerably, less by Hawking than by his graduate students and editors at Bantam. The editing was done with an eye on putting Hawking, not science, at the center. Ka-ching!

Some biographies are in the mode of Life-of-the-Saintly-Genius, and another variety takes an equal pleasure in knocking down the scaffolding on which some supposed giant is perched. This one, assuming Gleick's review of it to be apt, corrects an established version resembling the former tendency without descending into the latter pit. Hawking, in the revision, is famous for the wrong reasons, which is not to say that he was a fraud or that his life's story isn't full of human interest. 

Hopper's America

Spent some time today scrolling through an internet collection of Edward Hopper paintings. He lived from 1882 to 1967. Judging by the pictures that have people in them, a pandemic was raging through his entire career. It's always 2020 in Hopper's America. The women like to read; the men are more apt to get dressed.

Jennifer Senior on Philip Brickman and Happiness Studies

Jennifer Senior (pictured) is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist and the author of a book called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. I haven't read it, but the title, which I guess is just the flip reply of a new father she knew to her inevitable question, indicates that the book doesn't altogether accept the notion that new babies are a source of joy in the lives of their parents. Indeed a conclusion of social science, consistent through the years, is that adults self-report being, if anything, a little less happy after becoming parents. It isn't that hard to understand. You had gotten used to living for yourself and suddenly 8 pounds of puling neediness that does not for years let up, and the rewards for your sustained efforts uncertain. But I'm not sure the "paradox" is "modern." Here is the internal monologue of a character in a 19th-century Russian novel (Anna Karenina) as she travels to a relative's house:

Dolly shuddered at the mere thought of the pain she had endured from sore nipples, from which she had suffered with almost every baby. 'Then the children's illnesses, that continued anxiety; then their education, nasty tendencies. . . . It is all so incomprehensible and difficult. . . . And what is it all for? What will come of it all? I myself, without having a moment's peace, now pregnant, now nursing, always cross and grumbling, tormenting myself and others, repulsive to my husband—I shall live my life, and produce unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children. . . . Well, supposing the best: that none of the other children die, and that I somehow succeed in bringing them up; at the very best they will only escape being ne'er do wells. That is all I can hope for. And for this, so much suffering and trouble. . . . My whole life ruined!'

It seems the author understood what Mrs Tolstoy was experiencing in the other rooms while he was holed up in the study with his manuscripts, self-actualizing. Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy became a religious fanatic, intent upon giving away his wealth and renouncing his copyrights. You can imagine what Mrs Tolstoy thought of that. Finally, time for some ease and comfort only to find that now she's married to John the Baptist. Fine for him to apostrophize on happiness and the meaning of it all!

Though she's a political columnist with her guns often pointed at the Narcissist-in-Chief, Senior seems to have carved out for herself a secondary beat that might be described as happiness-and-the-meaning-of-it-all, with a particular interest in the insights of social science. Here, for example, is her long and I think engrossing article about Philip Brickman, a psychologist and co-author of a paper that introduced the terms "hedonic treadmill" and "hedonic paradox." The social science data point that gave rise to these terms concerns how transformative life events, both good and bad, appear to have surprisingly little effect upon satisfaction, happiness, and contentedness. Lottery winners and people paralyzed in car crashes in time return to the vicinity of a "set point" for happiness, as if there were some kind of internal thermostat with a preset temperature: the needle wobbles with the weather but always settles near the degree mark God or DNA determined. It seems that our adaptive capacities deserve either the credit or blame. Regarding the striving high achievers whom we may eye enviously: they become almost immediately acclimated to the more rarefied air and, instead of enjoying the view, keep their sights fixed upward upon elevations not yet attained. Their successes therefore only fleetingly boost their life satisfaction. This is the "treadmill" and "paradox" described by Brickman.  

But, again, while Brickman and his colleague may have introduced new vocabulary, the idea itself doesn't seem new. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860, compared the desire for riches to guzzling seawater: "the more we drink, the thirstier we become," he wrote, before adding that the same could be said of fame. It isn't hard to see that a treadmill and an unslaked thirst are representations of the same idea. Schopenhauer had a keen interest in the texts of eastern religions, where he would have found the same diagnosis in, for example, Buddhism's "four noble truths." The Buddha lived around 2500 years ago. That the social sciences are investigating and describing problems about as old as written records of human thought suggests that the diagnosis is more obvious than the cure—a conclusion that might tend to be confirmed by the fact that Brickman, a pioneer of human happiness studies, committed suicide at age 38. Senior's exploration of his successful professional life, centered on of all things happiness research, and his own distressed private life is more absorbing than most things one finds in a daily newspaper. 

More on Elmore Leonard's "The Switch"

My favorite Elmore Leonard novel is whichever one I'm reading, or finished most recently—right now it's The Switch. There's around ten that I read over and over again. I think he might have written more than forty, so it's a bit like an endless Chinese menu from which I keep ordering a few dishes I know are good. His first novels are westerns and I haven't read any of them. Then, in the mid-1970s, when he was in his late 40s, he switched to the crime genre. Those are the ones I know something about and love.

First time I read The Switch, I wrote about it here. The Frank Dawson character had plainly made the biggest impression upon me. But, on re-readings, one's eye tends to stray and this time mine settled on Richard Edgar Monk.  The last name is perhaps something of a sly jest since Monk lives alone in a small house in Detroit on West State Fair Avenue across from the Michigan state fairgrounds. He had lived there with his mother, his wife, and his young son. Then his wife left him, taking the kid with her. Then his mom died. That's why Monk is now alone. Here is Leonard performing what I believe is called by English teachers "character development":

Richard wanted to go to California to look for his wife and boy and believed he could do it himself because of his interest in police work and procedures. He read books on it, watched police shows on TV and, until recently, had had a job with Alert Security Services—patrolling shopping centers, rich neighborhoods and construction projects—which Richard felt was good training. The trouble with the job, he'd only made three-sixty-five an hour, one-ten a week take-home, had to buy his own uniform and wasn't able to save anything. So he had begun drawing fifty bucks on the side to disappear or look the other way whenever the coon came at night in the truck to pick up building materials. That was fine until he got questioned, readout and fired without notice.

Now he had a two-tone police uniform and no job. He was patiently waiting for the big one the coon, Ordell Robbie, told him was going to come anytime now.

The wannabe cop, an American loser who also—surprise!—is a racial bigot: though they aren't usually the subject of literature, our country is full of these guys, and to me it seems natural to think, for example, of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who assigned himself to the armed neighborhood patrol and then killed Trayvon Martin. To round out the portrait of Monk, one of the rooms in his house is devoted to the guns and Nazi paraphernalia that he collects.

[Spoiler alert.]

I can't resist relating one incident that will divulge a bit of the plot. The "big one" in the passage quoted above refers to the criminal plot that, in its execution, supplies the main action of the novel. These are not sophisticated criminals—hell, Monk is one of them. The building supplies that Ordell steals, paying Monk to look the other way, are sold at a low price to Dawson, who puts them to use improving the rental properties he owns. That's how "coon" Ordell happens to know Dawson, the country-club golf champion and grown-up college Republican. Ordell concocts a scheme to deliver a payday out of all proportion to funds generated by the building supply scam. He and his main accomplice will kidnap Dawson's wife, Mickey, and extort a big ransom. He brings Monk in because they'll hold Mickey in the nondescript house on West State Fair while negotiating the ransom delivery. This begins well enough, though it soon develops that the criminals have failed to consider the possibility that Dawson might have a young hottie on the side and could care less about Mickey, his aging trophy who ends up a prisoner on West State Fair longer than had originally been intended. The celibate Monk has drilled a hole in the bedroom door where she's held (and another in the door of the bathroom she uses), through which he hopes to view her undressed. It's frustrating though because she only has the clothes she was kidnapped in and so rarely undresses. She does, however, discover the hole in the bedroom door. When she knows she's being observed, she moves to a corner where she can't be seen and lights a cigarette. Then, having crept along the wall that the door is on, she slowly slides the cigarette toward the hole and, when almost to the bored edge, suddenly jabs the lit end into it. Downstairs, the brains of the operation are trying to cope with the incipient unravelling of their criminal scheme and so are not too distressed by Monk's howls. 

Roger Angell turns 100

Apparently the fellow who empties my recycling bin has tipped off NPR and the result is "Hangover From Alcohol Boom Could Last Long After Pandemic Ends."

It won't be a problem if the pandemic never ends. The Covid body count over just the four days of the Republican convention surpassed that of 9/11. Happily, no one will ever ask where you were when a thousand people died, day after day after day, every day for six months, now going on seven.

Well, many of them are old with "co-morbidities," a medical term easier to pronounce than, say, "expendable." Culture of Life seems to have lost some cachet when the refrigerated trucks were double parked outside the ICU and our president was telling Bob Woodward one thing while telling us another. 

Roger Angell, about whom I wrote here and here, is one oldster who has not succumbed. He just turned 100 and, since my dad is only 87, there is now an opening in the category of My Favorite Nonagenarian. Angell's longtime employer, The New Yorker magazine, marks his birthday here. Though the article refers to "his matchless oeuvre of baseball writing," it supplies no specimens, so I will. Describing the effect upon witnesses of a dominating pitching performance, with particular reference to the Giants' Madison Bumgarner in the 2014 World Series, Angell wrote of the quiet associated with the slow accrual of strikeouts, ground balls, and pop-ups before concluding that "the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room." 

And here he is, unabridged, on the topic of old age. Better than the alternative, as is often said, even if I suspect that those who are actually bearing up under the strain of all the years may often register silent disagreement. 

Since the hyperlinks are recommended readings, I should have the decency to save you eye strain by summarizing ten jillion current contributions to journalism: Biden is ahead and favored to win, but it's relatively close, especially in "the battleground states," so Trump still has a chance. Except for the hyperventilators, that's what they all say. There, you can skip it for a few weeks.

Jim Gaffigan

Embarrassing confession: until he went on his anti-Trump Twitter tirade, I wasn't a fan of comedian Jim Gaffigan. 

When I say "fan," I mean fan of his comedy. I think I either confused him with that Smarter-Than-a-Fifth-Grader guy or else placed him in the same "school" and therefore decided I wasn't interested. But then he let Trump have it and I became Gaffigan-curious. Having now spent a fair part of the afternoon on his You Tube channel, I conclude that he's funny, funny, funny. Clean, too: not much bad language, unlike in his tirade against Trump.

Speaking of bad language, I'm watching the Twins game as I type this, and either they have to pump up the volume on the piped-in crowd sound or else turn off the mics that hang down near the playing field. Dick Bremer felt obliged to apologize once and took a pass on several other opportunities. Oh my god! Two out, nobody on, Cruz up, and they walk him intentionally. Worked, too, as Rosario strikes out on two pitches. 

Anyway, Gaffigan. I am not a comedy theorist or anything, but my impression is that stand-up, being a public act, can achieve a sort of easy effect just by violating ordinary boundaries: saying stuff that usually can't be said in a crowd. Back in the day before it was okay to say "fuck" in public, comedians would walk out on stage and say "fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking fuck" and the crowd would howl with laughter. But it's only funny, if it's funny, because "you can't say that"—nevertheless, he did. Even funnier if she said it because then it's more of a violation. Or was more of a violation. Now you have to ratchet it up a bit, talk about masturbation or your romantic partner's pubic hair or something as not even Dick Bremer is much affected by "fuck." 

That obviously is not Gaffigan's thing. I wonder if he owes something to it, though. He wouldn't seem so funny if in the background there weren't a million practitioners of this other "brand." And then you come to find out it can be his brand too, when the topic is Trump. Here is my favorite installment to his rant:

Fuck Lou Holtz. Biden is Catholic in name only? Compared to who? How many abortions did trump pay for? How many women has he raped? How many times did pull the shit he did in Ukraine. Wake up. He's a crook and a con man.

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

First runner-up:

I know you hate snobs and elites I get it but look at Ivana and that douche bag Jerod. Think they are on your side? Do you think they've ever done a real days work in their lives. Wake up

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

His refrain is "wake up." Not knowing how to spell the names of the douche bags is unconscious perfection. 

The clip above is a compilation of his religion jokes—Catholicism, his own faith, providing the biggest target. Below, on eating at McDonald's. 

 

 

 

 

Wilson on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is the subject of the concluding chapter to Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore, subtitled Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Quick, name a book by Holmes! Well, take your time, as much as you want, actually. If you come up with The Common Law, I'm going to guess that you are a law professor, and if that's wrong my next guess is that you're some other kind of professor. We regulars might recognize snippets of Holmes's writing, but they are not from a book, nor would it be normal to regard them as contributions to American literature. He was a justice on our Supreme Court for three decades, from 1902 until 1932 (the year he turned 92), and his opinions are the source for at least two pretty well known limitations, memorably expressed, on the right to free speech: you can't shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater (unless there really is a fire), and you can't urge people to break the law if there is "a clear and present danger" that you'll succeed. Low level rabble-rousers, carry on! The First Amendment protects you until people stop laughing and begin weighing what you have to say. 

Holmes also, in an opinion declining to deem unconstitutional a state statute requiring the sterilization of institutionalized persons, deployed the sentence: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." 

Wilson's choices for his subjects in this supposed study of "Civil War literature" are unusual but his expositions are invariably so absorbing that I anyway am not inclined to complain. I suspect there is a biographical link explaining the selection of Holmes.  Wilson was born in 1895 and served in World War I. He did not feel he could participate in the killing, so he volunteered for a medical unit, with the result that he ended up dressing wounds, assisting in the treatment of mustard gas victims, and patrolling the floors of a military hospital to prevent crazed and damaged soldiers from jumping out of windows or otherwise harming themselves further. Up to that point, his biography was mainly prep school and the Ivy League—Princeton, from which he was graduated in 1916. Holmes, born into Boston Brahminhood in 1840, fought in the Civil War. He went in a moral crusader and came out the other side chastened and disillusioned. His letters home, from which Wilson quotes extensively, inform his father that his (Senior's) moral enthusiasm for the war to end slavery and save the Union would be slaughtered by . . . a close-up view of the slaughter, the stupidity of it, the butchery. This roughly speaking matches the Civil War experience of a non-Brahmin, Ambrose Bierce, who also gets a chapter in Patriotic Gore. And it is a match for Wilson's experience in the next big war, known at the time by its defenders as "the war to end all wars."  He's interested in people who faced the question of how to live—what to do next—when at around age 22 you come to the conclusion that most of the fine things you've been taught to believe aren't compatible with what you've experienced yourself participating in a war.

When the Civil War was over, Holmes went to Harvard Law School and, after a clerkship, became what Wilson calls a "jobbist." The word isn't in the dictionary but it seems a version of what is called today "career-oriented." He took a job in a small Boston law firm and worked long hours. He married but had no children. In the evenings, he worked at writing his treatise on the common law, which was published in 1881. The next year he became a professor at Harvard Law School and then, in December, when there was a vacancy on the Massachusetts State Supreme Court, he was appointed to fill it. In 1899 he was elevated to Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. Three years after that, President Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court. According to Wilson, Holmes had some of the unattractive traits that one stereotypically associates with this type of person:

[His] ambition and . . . relentless pursuit of it were dismaying to some of his friends. A man who knew him well, James Bradley Thayer, a partner in the law firm for which Holmes first worked, said of him that, in spite of his "attractive qualities and solid merits," he was "wanting sadly in the noblest region of human character—"selfish, vain, thoughtless of others;" and one of his ex-secretaries, not himself a New Englander, once said to me that Holmes had a streak of "the mean Yankee." 

This brief for the prosecution is filled in with the testimony, also quoted by Wilson and tending toward the corroborative, of the James brothers, William and Henry, fellow elites and friends of Holmes—or perhaps one should say acquaintances. It's evident, however, that Wilson finds such a portrait one-sided. He admires Holmes's industry and brisk rationalism, his intellectual skepticism and suspicion of all movements and fashions. In the famously bitter Introduction to Patriotic Gore, Wilson had advanced the thesis that the sea slug, implacably sucking in and devouring everything in its environment, is the perfect emblem of all wars, and that, with respect to our Civil War, the moral crusade against slavery provided a cover for the North's wish to impose its superior power on the South. Now in the last chapter he enlists, somewhat obliquely, a distinguished jurist in support of this view. I think this is probably the way to account for a chapter on Holmes in a study of Civil War literature, to which Holmes did not even try to make a contribution.  It also seems to me that Holmes's disenchantment was of a somewhat different flavor than Wilson's: with the former, the empty space formerly occupied by a moral crusade remained empty, whereas Wilson filled it with an alternative history featuring unalloyed savagery. There is though one respect in which Wilson's apparent identification of himself with Holmes seems apt, and this relates to "jobbist" not necessarily being a pejorative. A man has to fill the emptiness with something. Wilson suggests that the dogged industry that looked to some like distasteful careerism might have been something more like a defense mechanism: while some disillusioned soldiers give in to despair, Holmes, determined to make his contribution, immersed himself in work. There does not appear to have been much or any pecuniary basis for Holmes's industry, although there was plenty of that going on during the unusually protracted period of his active adulthood. Wilson ends his chapter (and the book) by noting that Holmes, who had no children and survived his wife, bequeathed the largest share of a modest estate to the government of the United States. 

Notes and comments

Twins won again last night, this time 3-2 against the Indians in Cleveland. We've had a lot of close, entertaining and generally low-scoring games against divisional rivals Cleveland and Kansas City. Maybe this shouldn't surprise inasmuch as Cleveland and Kansas City both pitch a lot better than they hit. Good news is we've been winning our share of the games. Last night, a solo bomb by Cruz and another with a man aboard by Sano was enough. Our bullpen has been great. Ditto for Kenta Maeda, last night's starter who allowed one run in five innings pitched. His ERA now stands at 2.21. In the American League this season, only the Indians (87) have allowed fewer runs than the Twins (102). 

During the inning breaks, I looked in on the Republicans. Yes, I enjoy picking scabs when there is nothing else to do. I happened to see the segment in which Trump, sitting in the Oval Office with some Americans he said he freed from captivity, told a pastor who'd been held in  Erdogan's Turkey: "To me, President Erdogan was very good." The minister had just described the conditions under which he'd been held for 21 months and he shifted slightly in his seat. I'm used to Trump loving on dictators and tyrants but it's a little weird that, as this conversation occurred a couple years ago, it was edited to present to the world at the RNC—and the praise for Erdogan made the cut. Reminds me how, according to legend, at the Mets first spring training manager Casey Stengel was heard complaining, to no one in particular, "Doesn't anyone here know how to play baseball?" No, because most of them are named Trump, unless their name is Kushner and they're married to a Trump, so it's not as if they're the ones signing off on the video because they performed so well in the minor leagues. 

The Falwells sure sound like a fun couple! Count me among those men who fail to understand the pleasures associated with watching as another man screws your wife, but whatevs! As the Woody Allen character says in one of his movies, when it comes to human sexuality "normal" is not a useful concept. Real journalists don't have to take advice from me but I think they should investigate contacts between Falwell and the Trump campaign in 2016. Notwithstanding Trump's Christian lifestyle, many evangelicals were suspicious of him, and it helped his cause when Falwell endorsed him after visiting with Michael Cohen. This may sound wild but what if the force of Cohen's presentation was augmented by "evidence" that some secular humanists might describe as "racy"?

Oh, they're already on it!

The McCloskeys sound nice, too. They're the St. Louis power couple—personal injury lawyers, not evangelical leaders—who earlier this summer pointed guns at BLM protestors outside their mansion. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiles them here. More than one reason not to buy in these gated communities. The covenants and restrictions! The association dues! The pricks next door! Of course the McCloskeys were recruited to tell their tale of woe at the RNC last night, but alack and alas, I missed their segment. 

Why are the police in Kenosha so tight-lipped about the "officer involved shooting" in their city on Sunday? One theory might be that they are busy developing a story that is in line with what's already known and won't be refuted by anything the public might subsequently find out. It's referred to as "an officer involved shooting" because the officer, from a distance of about one foot, aims his gun into the back of a black guy and pulls the trigger around a half dozen times. So, in that limited sense, yes, the "officer" was "involved." 

Edmund Wilson's Civil War

Back in 2012, when the biopic Lincoln was in theaters, it received an unfavorable notice on the editorial page of the Star Tribune newspaper from Edmund Santurri, a religion professor at St. Olaf College. Dr. Santurri's complaint was essentially that the movie did not do justice to Lincoln's deep religious sensibility. I gave an unfavorable notice to Dr. Santurri's unfavorable notice, here, where I argued briefly that his editorial overstated the case, that Lincoln had as a younger but mature adult been skeptical on religious questions (as Santurri allows in the editorial), and that the religious language and allusions of his subsequent presidential oratory do not establish that his views changed. 

Well, a couple weeks ago I got a nice message from Dr. Santurri. It seems he'd been googling himself and came across my 8-year-old post. I hadn't persuaded him, nor do I recant my opposing view, but he seems as temperate and decent as you'd expect a professor of religion to be. 

Dr. Santurri's note set me to thinking again about Lincoln, and how it might have happened that I developed a heterodox view of probably the most famous and loved figure in American history. I think it has a lot to do with the chapter on Lincoln in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Though it's a door stop, coming in at around 800 pages, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in American culture, American literature, American history, our Civil War, or Lincoln, who is the subject of one of its chapters. I wanted to reread that chapter but discovered that I no longer own the book—I vaguely remember that my copy was in poor shape, the combination of its 800-page mass and many perusals having defeated the binding, and I probably discarded it before my most recent move. So I made an online order, which arrived a few days ago, and I've been happily communing with Edmund Wilson till about 2 in the morning for the last several nights. Kinky!

Here is a Wilsonian sentence that, reading it again, I remember being smitten by the first time around:

There has undoubtedly been written about [Lincoln] more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The reference is to Sandburg's six-volume Lincoln biography, The Prairie Years (2 volumes) and The War Years (4 volumes). It's an immense work of hagiography and, even if you've never dipped into it, so influential as to account for your view of Lincoln, assuming you've mainly just accepted what you heard from school teachers. This is the Lincoln who was born poor, the son of a saintly mother who died young, whose stepmother believed in him, who always had an improving book in his pocket for when he took a break from splitting rails, the honest store clerk and spinner of humorous yarns that, on closer inspection, were infused with unassuming profundity, the homespun genius who was rebuffed by Ann Rutledge, the love of his life, and whose lofty principles caused him to lose elections, a source of dejection until, in 1860, a desperate country turned to him, and he led it through the Civil War, freed the slaves, composed an American scripture for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote kindly letters of condolence to war widows, and, the great struggle finally won, was martyred on Good Friday, 1865. What Wilson, in about 30 pages, erects against this "sentimental rubbish" is a Lincoln who was embarrassed by his impoverished background, determined to make his way in the world, cold, calculating, supremely intelligent, possibly even more ambitious than he was smart, and persuaded of his superiority to other men. Wilson's authority for this quite different portrait is Lincoln's own papers, including speeches he gave in his 20s at the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, and, perhaps more decisive, the testimony of people he knew before he was famous, in particular his Springfield law partner William Herndon. Herndon's own life is interesting—his alcoholism delayed progress on the biography of his former law partner, and in the end he needed the assistance of an editor and co-author, Jesse Weik, to get to the finish line. But Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life was published in 1889, and the negative reviews may be attributed, if your view of the question is Wilson's, to the way in which it undercut the flourishing industry of Lincoln worship. Wikipedia:

The book received wildly mixed reviews due to the inclusion of such unvarnished elements as Lincoln's mother's illegitimacy (and even the rumors of Lincoln's own), its sometimes viciously negative portrayal of Herndon's longtime enemy Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's suicidal depression, and other decidedly less than hagiographic accounts of the martyred president who was quickly becoming the most venerated and romanticized figure in American history . . . .

Particularly damning was the denunciation of the book by Robert Todd Lincoln, whose grudge against Herndon stemmed largely from Herndon's accounting of Ann Rutledge as the only romantic love of his father's life. Weik felt that Herndon's portrayal of Robert's mother and the Lincolns' domestic life was especially hurtful.

Wikipedia doesn't say so, but, according to Wilson, Herndon is also the principal source for information about Lincoln's religious skepticism. When he first knew Lincoln, the future president was already familiar with the views of Voltaire, Volney, and Thomas Paine. Herndon loaned him works by Darwin, Spencer, and Feuerbach. He also flatly states that Lincoln did not believe "that Jesus was . . . the son of God" or that "the Bible was the special divine revelation of God as the Christian world contends." I mentioned before that, in the handbill Lincoln produced to respond in 1846 to a political opponent who charged him with "infidelity," he gave no explanation for not being a member of any church, "a current fact." But it was more than a current fact. Lincoln was never a member of any church. On Good Friday, 1865, he went to the theater. In presidential "fact sheets" such as are distributed to kids in social studies class, the space for "religion" is most commonly filled with "Methodist," "Episcopalian," and "Presbyterian." For Lincoln, the usefully tactful phrase is "no formal affiliation" (ditto for Thomas Jefferson). 

The subtitle of Patriotic Gore is Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. It's an idiosyncratic work in the respect that authors you'd expect to hear about—Melville, Whitman—are not featured, but we learn a lot about such figures as Frederick Olmsted, Sidney Lanier, and John W. De Forest. One of the chapters I like most is devoted to Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy.  In other chapters Wilson discusses William T. Sherman, the Union general who burned a swatch across the South from Atlanta to the sea, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: I don't think these men, however well known, are usually thought of as having made contributions to American literature.

You'd be excused, from what I've said so far, for concluding that the book is aggressive and revisionist. The title (from the state song of Maryland) is reductive—patriotism engenders "gore"—and the effect of the chapter on Lincoln is to depict a human, not a saint. The pervading ambience, however, is of learnedness worn lightly and expressed in a style at once elegant and conversational. The chapter on Grant is the opposite of reductive. Mark Twain had tried to persuade the former general and president to write a memoir, but Grant, pleading that he had no literary gift and anyway didn't need the money, declined. Three years later he had been swindled out of all his money and diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. He now undertook the composition of his memoirs in order to leave something to his family, and, as Wilson explains, it turns out that he did have a literary gift, even if his sensibility was sometimes clouded by the cocaine he used to ward off pain. He dictated the first part and then, when he could no longer speak, wrote out longhand the remainder. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant was completed eleven months after he'd begun and a week before he died. It was an immediate best seller and earned for Grant's family about $450,000. Wilson quotes, approvingly, from the contemporary review of Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, a man about as unlike Grant as can be imagined:

. . . . I found a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man, withal, humane, simple, modest; from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free; never boastful where he himself was concerned . . . . I found a language straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.

Wilson's narrative of Lee's surrender to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse does, however, have a revisionist thrust—and it turns out that the truth is more interesting than the more familiar melodrama. Grant was as one with Lincoln in his inclination, or determination, to offer the South generous terms, but The Personal Memoirs also make clear that he did not by a long stretch revere Lee and had never subscribed to the theory of the Confederate general's nearly mystical powers. This probably accounts in large degree for his success. Whereas the former Union generals had minced around, Grant had a clear-eyed view of his side's advantages, and he pursued the Confederate army implacably, engaged it steadily in a vicious war of attrition that the out manned and out supplied Confederates could never win, and by the early spring of 1865 had reduced the opposing army to a ragtag collection of starvelings. "There is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant," said Lee, adding, "and I would rather die a thousand deaths." Wilson observes, "He would hardly have spoken thus of McClellan."

Two lesser splendors of Evelyn Waugh

When I last wrote, here, of Evelyn Waugh, I cribbed my title, "Splendors of Evelyn Waugh," from an essay by Edmund Wilson called "Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh." I'd only read the novel called A Handful of Dust, and loved it, so there had been no misery. I've now read two more, The Loved One and Men at Arms—still no misery, though for me neither one is quite up to the level of the one I happened to read first. The Loved One is a satire on the funeral industry in southern California. It's very brief, quite funny, and maybe a bit of a confection, like a movie you enjoy and never think of again. Waugh, an Englishman, spent some time writing for the studios in Hollywood, an experience that must account for the American setting. The author's gimlet eye traveled well.

Men at Arms, the first installment in a World War II trilogy called Sword of Honor, is longer and more ambitious. Reading around hither and thither, one gathers that the novels of this trilogy—the second and third installments are Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (published in the U.S. as The End of the Battle)—are often regarded as Waugh's finest. I doubt it's an opinion to which I'd subscribe, for Men at Arms bores me intermittently. The hero, if that's the right word, is Guy Crouchback. Like the main character in A Handful of Dust (and like Waugh himself), he is shocked to be abandoned and divorced by his wife, and, in the case of Crouchback, sees military service in a just cause as a way to rally himself. But he's in his mid-30s. The title might appear to promise scenes of battle, but nine-tenths or more of the book concerns Crouchback's efforts to enlist, and, once he's in, the long days and weeks and months of nothing as his somewhat eccentric unit trains and awaits orders. You can see perhaps why it might be subject to dullness—the dullness seems to be the point. Think you know about soldiering in time of war? No, Waugh is saying, it's not like that.

Some part of the narrative interest must arise from the reader wondering what will happen when Crouchback and his colleagues finally "see action." When this happens, toward the very end, the details are farcical. The short chapter describing their expedition across enemy ground ends, "The brigade resumed its old duty of standing by for orders." The next sentence, the first one of the following chapter, is: "Three weeks later the Brigade was still standing by for orders." Crouchback's final fate is determined not by enemy fire or any battlefield event but, rather, by a gift of whiskey for a hospitalized colleague. The hospitalization is not the result of a wound incurred in battle. The patient, however, dies. 

I say I was intermittently bored. The book is often very amusing in a way that elicits from critics and reviewers the compound adjective, seriocomic. In one of my favorite episodes, Crouchback, a Catholic, listens as a somewhat absurd fellow communicant relates a story about a divorced Catholic who had a one-night stand with his ex that resulted in a pregnancy and thus the perpetuation of an English Catholic family through a male heir who, but for the tryst, would never have been conceived. Crouchback's friend discerns God's providence. Crouchback is more taken by the suggestion that the divorced Catholic had not really screwed another man's wife, since by canon law she was still married to him. He turns the question over in his mind and, having satisfied himself that the man was indeed sinless, at the next opportunity boards a train for London, where he knows his ex, the inaptly named Virginia, resides. She's no longer married to the man for whom she left Crouchback, and her history apparently raises his expectation of success, but the seduction does not go well:

"I was wrong in thinking the army had changed you for the better. Whatever your faults in the old days you weren't a cad. You're worse than Augustus now."

"You forget I don't know Augustus."

"Well, take it from me he was a monumental cad." 

A tiny light gleamed in their darkness, a pin-point in each easy tear which swelled in her eyes and fell.

"Admit I'm not as bad as Augustus."

"Very little to choose. But he was fatter. I'll admit that."

She might be loose but she's not dumb:

"You used to be so strict and pious. I rather liked it in you. What's happened to all that?"

"It's still there. More than ever. I told you so when we first met again."

"Well, what would your priests say about your goings-on to-night; picking up a notorious divorcée in an hotel?"

"They wouldn't mind. You're my wife."

"Oh, rot." 

"Well, you asked what the priests would say. They'd say: 'Go ahead.'"

The light that had shone and waxed in their blackness suddenly snapped out as though at the order of an air-raid warden.

"But this is horrible," said Virginia.

Guy was taken by surprise this time. 

"What's horrible?" he said.

"It's absolutely disgusting. It's worse than anything Augustus or Mr. Troy could ever dream of. Can't you see, you pig, you?"

"No," said Guy in deep, innocent sincerity. "No, I don't see."

"I'd far rather be taken for a tart. I'd rather have been offered five pounds to do something ridiculous in high heels or drive you round the room in toy harness or any of the things they write about in books." Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. "I thought you'd taken a fancy for me again and wanted a bit of fun for the sake of old times. I thought you'd chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless lunatic pig." 

This is notable partly because in the novel Guy Crouchback often seems to speak for the author, whose Catholic faith and generally conservative views the character shares. But there isn't a question about who appears in a better light here, right?  At least to me, an outsider, Crouchback and his Church, as well as his friend who told the story about how the male heir got his start, appear ridiculous. The light in a hotel room illuminates something wet and smug that might go undetected in the reading room of a theological library. 

Splendors of Evelyn Waugh

Just finished reading, with considerable pleasure, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust. If all his books are this good, I have a baseball season's worth of indulgent gratification to look forward to, because he wrote seventeen novels. The best known of them is Brideshead Revisited. In reading around about Waugh, I gather that his career is often thought of as falling into two phases, an early one, audacious and hilarious, characterized by satire tending toward farce, and then a later one, more serious and conventional, on which his reputation as a leading "Catholic novelist" rests. Brideshead Revisited (1945) belongs to Phase Two. In retrospect, A Handful of Dust, which was published in 1934, four years after Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism, seems transitional. It's farcical and funny, but you'd have to be comatose not to detect a serious undercurrent that seems consistent with what a conservative and observant Catholic would likely think about the crazy events that are described, poker-faced, without any moralizing commentary. You laugh and laugh but by the end you may think that the book is more disturbing than funny.

The main character is Tony Last, the proprietor of a country house at Hetton, a small town in the northeast of England nearer to Scotland than it is to London. His wife, Brenda, starts an affair with one of their visitors, John Beaver (the names are Dickensian), a Londoner even more shallow than her undiscerning husband, whose suspicions are not even aroused when she rents a small apartment in London and starts staying there almost all the time. The reason for the affair would appear to be nothing  more  than that she needs something to do. She explains to Tony that she is auditing an economics course, the absurdity of which betrays her indifference about whether he is deceived. Nevertheless he is deceived. Their young son, who as a practical matter has been abandoned by his mother, is then killed in an accident, whereupon Brenda delivers to Tony a second grievous blow. Believe me, it's funnier than it sounds. The conversations they have with their respective barristers (English for lawyers)! Back then, there could be no divorce without "cause," the most common being abandonment and adultery. One service provided by Tony's firm is detectives who will accompany the client on a vacation with a lover, either actual or a plausible actor, so that "evidence" can be gathered for divorce court. So Tony goes off on one of these trips with a strumpet he has recruited from a bar usually too seedy for him to patronize. Against his instructions, she brings along on the trip her daughter: nothing else to do with the girl. Comedy ensues, the effect amplified somewhat by the fact, never mentioned, that this farce is executed for the purpose of working up "evidence" even though Brenda is actually guilty of both adultery and abandonment. 

Tony soon leaves England on a cruise, his apparent idea being that a change of scenery will change something else. But wherever you go, there you are. In the end, he comes to grief in the Amazonian interior of Brazil. I won't go into the details, except to say that I take the novel's geographic diversity to be an aspect of Waugh's religious—Christian, Catholic—sensibility. There is nothing anywhere in this world for the pilgrim. If you're at Hetton, you might yearn for the attractions of London, home to bounders like John Beaver who are screwing your wife when not worrying about what men's club they might be of sufficient status to join. You escape to Brazil. Maybe the natives there will reveal that the true savages are in England. No, the Brazilian ones disappoint, too. In one of Waugh's many brilliant strokes, a scene from Brazil is at one point juxtaposed against one concerning the world Tony has left behind. To travel into Brazil's interior, it is necessary to hire natives who can transport provisions and function as guides in the jungle. But Tony and his partner—there's a story behind how they made common cause!—arrive in the village when the men are all away on a drunk and so the two white men end up negotiating with a woman, Rosa, whose guile is exercised entirely in the service of obtaining . . . cigarettes. Meanwhile, back in London, an ancillary character, an acquaintance of Tony's who is a member of Parliament representing a rural district, has his finest moment. He's another frequenter of the club scene and, by the way, the fellow who accompanies Tony to the bar where he finds the woman to go off with him for the purpose of manufacturing and collecting evidence. This fellow, Jock by name, spends his time enjoying himself in the capital and being occasionally puzzled by the mail he receives from his constituents, who have questions and problems relating, for example, to their pigs. The following is what's placed opposite the negotiation with Rosa. It's also representative of Waugh's prose.

Ten o'clock on the river Waurupang was question time at Westminster. For a long time now Jock had had a question which his constituents wanted him to ask. It came up that afternoon. 

"I should like to ask the Minister of Agriculture whether in view of the dumping in this country of Japanese pork pies, the right honourable member is prepared to consider a modification of the eight and a half score basic pig from two and a half inches of thickness around the belly as originally specified, to two inches."

Replying for the Minister, the under-secretary said: "The matter is receiving the closest attention. As the honourable member is no doubt aware the question of the importation of pork pies is a matter for the Board of Trade, not for the Board of Agriculture. With regard to the specifications of the basic pig, I must remind the honourable member that, as he is doubtless aware, the eight and a half score pig is modelled on the requirements of the bacon curers and has no direct relation to pig meat for sale in pies. That is being dealt with by a separate committee who have not yet made their report."

"Would the honourable member consider an increase of the specified maximum of fatness on the shoulders?"

"I must have notice of that question."

Jock left the House that afternoon with the comfortable feeling that he had at last done something tangible in the interest of his constituents.

This statesman ends up with Brenda after Beaver leaves for America.

Finding Vivian Maier

When I saw the above photograph, my first thought was: thank goodness styles have changed, or that I was born in 1958 instead of 1938, because otherwise the fellow farthest left with the bird legs could have been me. The picture was taken by Vivian Maier. Until yesterday, I'd never heard of her. That's not particularly surprising. When she died at 83 in 2009, hardly anyone had heard of her. A couple years earlier, she had stopped making payments on a storage unit she'd rented in Chicago. The contents, which included tens of thousands of photographic negatives and prints, were sold at auction to three different collectors. One of them, John Maloof, was interested mainly in Chicago neighborhoods, and here were all these photographs of Chicago street scenes. Eventually, though, he got interested enough in the photographer to google her name. The exercise turned up the obituary of a Vivian Maier who for 40 years had worked as a nanny in Chicagoland. Could this be the woman whose photographs he had? Yes. He tracked down some of her former charges and summarized their description of her:

She was a socialist, a feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. . . . She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone. 

That's from the Wikipedia article about her. She might not have shown the pictures to anyone, but Maloof posted a selection of them to Flickr, where they attracted lots of attention, including from art critics. Before long, the photographs Vivian Maier took on her days off from caring for other people's children were the subject of exhibitions around the world. She's now pretty widely regarded as one of the leading American photographers of the 20th century. 

You never know what's going to happen to you, even after you're dead. Maier made a fair number of "self-portraits"—they often showed only her shadow. Maloof ended up making (with Charlie Siskel) a film about her, Finding Vivian Maier. It was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2015. You can view hundreds of Maier's photographs here.

 

Casey Cep on Johnny Cash, &c

No doubt it is a sign of encroaching fuddyduddyism, but I regret that the way people get their music nowadays is putting cultural artifacts like album covers and liner notes in a category with phone booths and white Democrats from Dixie. Who would want to be without the liner notes to Johnny Cash's 1996 album "Unchained," in which he wrote:

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.

I confess I know this not because I own "Unchained." Last night, I saw a woman, Casey Cep, interviewed on TV about the post office, because it was Mother's Day and she'd written an article about her mom, a mail carrier, that was published in The New Yorker, where Cep is a reporter. I was so favorably impressed by her in the interview that I found the article online, read it—it's great—and then surfed around finding other stuff she's written, including a review of a book about Johnny Cash wherein she quotes the above extract from the liner notes to "Unchained." In the same review she relates the following detail from Cash's life:

Here and elsewhere, Beck [the author of the book under review, Richard Beck's Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash] wrestles with questions about solidarity and patriotism, and with the complexities of Cash's simultaneously conservative and countercultural appeal. That's a familiar bind for country-music artists, as the recent Taylor Swift documentary "Miss Americana," the career of the Dixie Chicks, and a long litany of actions and notable inactions before them testify. In Cash's case, it came to a head when he was invited to perform for President Richard Nixon at the White House, in 1970. The Administration announced that Cash would perform "Okie from Muskogee," the famous anti-antiwar anthem by Merle Haggard, and "Welfare Cadillac," a racist dog whistle by Guy Drake—but he refused and instead performed his prison set, including "What Is Truth," a protest song of sorts that he likened to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

I'd heard of this kerfuffle before, which leads me to believe Ken Burns covered it in his film on country music? I was 11 when Cash played for Nixon so don't think I remember about it from contemporary accounts! Though Cep doesn't explicitly mention it, the craziest aspect of the whole thing must be that Nixon specifically requested Cash to play two songs that were not Johnny Cash songs. He probably didn't even know. 

Casey Cep, on the other hand: doesn't seem to be much she doesn't know about. The daughter of the mail carrier went to Harvard and then, on a Rhodes Scholarship, to Oxford, where she studied theology. The New Yorker sent her to Alabama to report on Harper Lee, and the upshot was Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which made all the lists of best books of 2019. She is the same-sex spouse of another New Yorker writer, Kathryn Schulz. Cep's abiding interest in religion must be upsetting to votaries of stereotypes relating to Ivy League lesbians. An interview she did in connection with the publication of Furious Hours concluded:

Q: In addition to your English degree from Harvard, you have a master of philosophy in theology from Oxford. Issues of religion and religious leadership come up in this book. I wonder if you think of theological concerns as central to your overall project.

A: Thank you for noticing this. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I often say that Sunday services were my first book club, because week after week very thoughtful, very loving people gathered around the same book and tried to figure out what it meant. I was steeped in scripture as a kid, and I've devoted quite a lot of my adult life to studying religion and theology, so I find that it is one of the great themes that interests me—not only as a writer, but as a person in the world, trying to figure out how to be a good partner and community member and citizen of the cosmos. I end up writing about it so much because I think about it so much.  

Flipping coins: an academic paper

I found this academic paper, on a topic at the intersection of philosophy and math, a hundred times more interesting than one expects an "academic paper" to be. If a tossed coin lands heads 92 times in a row, would you be surprised? The author of the paper, Martin Smith, argues that you should not be surprised, and makes a stronger case than I for one would have thought possible. 

The article, very clearly written, is only about 7 pages long, but I understand if you don't want to click and read so will try to give the main points myself in a lot less than 7 pages. We should make a distinction between what you'd predict and what would surprise you. Suppose you determined to flip a coin just five times. Would you predict that it would land heads every time? No, because most likely it wouldn't. To be precise, the chance of this is only 1/2⁵, or 1/32, a titch above 3%. Pretty unlikely. But suppose you then flipped the coin five times and got five heads. Should you be surprised? No, because there had to be some specific result, and HHHHH is just as likely as, say, THHTH. If you're not surprised by THHTH, then you shouldn't be surprised by HHHHH, either. You wouldn't have predicted five heads in a row. Most likely, something else happens. But "something else" encompasses all the other possibilities. If you actually flip the coin five times, there has to be some specific result, and HHHHH is as likely as any other. Five heads in a row doesn't require an explanation.

Neither does 92 heads in a row, for the same reason. That is, the argument doesn't change on account of the number of trials. (Smith chose 92 because, in a Tom Stoppard play, one of the characters flips a coin in a gambling game—heads he loses—and as the curtain rises is trying to make sense out of having lost 92 games in a row.)

My reasoning faculties find the argument to be sound. All the rest of me says to keep looking for the flaw. This isn't an unusual sensation in human affairs and reminds me of a story about the paradox of Zeno, who postulated that you could never traverse the distance between two points, since you'd first have to cover half the distance, and then half the balance, and on and on, with the result that, at the end of time, you'd still be some distance away from the destination. To demonstrate, a teacher had a boy and a girl face each other from opposite ends of a classroom. The boy then advanced toward the girl, the teacher measuring off half the distance each time. After a few advances, the boy was getting pretty close, and grinned at the girl. Trusting Zeno, she said, "You'll never get here." He answered, "Right, but I'll get close enough for all practical purposes." Maybe he was being a jokester, maybe he sensed that there was something unfair about chopping up distance but not time. 

One's strong impression of reality, or whatever you want to call it, might make you doubt Zeno, but it isn't always a good guide to the truth. Apparently it's true that all matter is made of just over a hundred different kinds of atoms—these tiny particles we can't see that jiggle about constantly, because they attract one another until, having been drawn together, they instead repel. I anyway think the atomic hypothesis is true, though it's not on account of my "strong impression of reality" that I've reached this conclusion. Crediting only my own impressions, I'd say there are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of different substances just in my house alone. 

I'm inclined to give my assent to Smith, partly because it seems people's probabilistic impressions are unusually susceptible to error, so that what seems true might very well not be. There is, for example, an entire literature about "the Monty Hall problem"—so called, I think, because it's hard to make people believe that the best strategy in a certain game is indeed the best strategy. If you're of a certain age, like mine, you'll know that there used to be a game show hosted by the TV personality Monty Hall. In the big game at the end of the show, there would be three prizes concealed behind three doors. Behind two of the doors would be something like a live, impassive goat. But behind the third door there'd be something like a sports car. The contestant gets the prize behind the door she chooses. The wrinkle is that, after she's made her choice, Monty reveals the prize behind one of the unselected doors. This is always a goat, so it's evident that Monty knows where the big prize is and wants to heighten the suspense. He then offers the contestant a deal (the name of the show was "Let's Make a Deal"): if he wants, he can take the prize behind the remaining closed door instead of the one behind the door he originally chose. 

Should the contestant switch? Does it make a difference? In experiments, more than 80 percent of people stick with their original choice (according to the Wikipedia article on the Monty Hall Problem). It's not that hard to show, however, that by switching a contestant doubles the chance of winning the valuable prize. After making your original choice you have a one-third chance of winning—that's not controversial. It seems people must reason that the chance they've chosen correctly rises after Monty reveals a goat. This reasoning would be sound if Monty revealed at random what was behind one of the unselected doors. Remember, though, it never happens that he reveals a sports car and the contestant immediately loses. It's always a goat, followed by the offer to switch. The likelihood that the contestant has chosen correctly therefore remains one-third. Monty is in effect divulging that the two-thirds chance the contestant was wrong is not evenly distributed between two unselected doors. Rather, all two-thirds attaches to the unselected door Monty hasn't yet opened. By switching, the chance of winning the car goes from one-third to two-thirds.

I can't think of an experimental test for Smith's argument, but, if you doubt the one I've sketched out above for the Monty Hall Problem, you might accurately simulate the game by taking a couple of deuces (goats) and an ace (sports car) from a deck of cards.  After "shuffling," deal face down one card to yourself and two to someone you are co-quarantining with. Now, to make it more interesting, you each ante a dollar and the person with the ace wins the pot. This is obviously a bad game for you, right? Suppose you make a rule that, before seeing who has the ace, your co-quarantiner has to look at his two cards and turn a deuce face up. It's an illusion to suppose this changes anything, right? It's still a bad game for you. But if there were yet another rule, one requiring you and the co-quarantiner to now swap the remaining downturned cards before looking to see who has the ace, the game would become a money-maker for you. If you're still not persuaded, just play a bunch of games and see who wins how often under what rules. 

What I find intriguing about Smith's argument concerns what, if true, it suggests about our minds—namely, that they seem to be repulsed by randomness, prefer order, and therefore are constantly exercising themselves to discover patterns. It doesn't mean there aren't patterns. It means that detecting a pattern when there is none is a common mistake compared to failing to detect a pattern. I think this would explain a lot, like the hold of elaborate conspiracy theories on the human mind. Oswald was not enough of a marksman to have shot Kennedy! There must have been additional gunmen in Dealey Plaza and a conspiracy involving Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Soviet Union! But what if Oswald just got lucky? (It happens, I once hit two doubles in the same baseball game.) A basketball player misses a foul shot that would have won the game. She choked! But wait, she doesn't make them all when practicing in her driveway. What if the fateful, errant shot was just one of those that she happens to miss? We're told that everything happens for a reason. I'll subscribe, if "random chance that might not have been realized but was" is allowed as a reason.

What will future generations condemn us for?

Everyone must occasionally wonder whether, if they'd been alive in New England in the 1690s, or the Commonwealth of Virginia circa 1840, what opinion they would have held regarding, respectively, women accused of "witchcraft" or the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery. Once we've given ourselves the benefit of the doubt on those and similar questions, the next uncomfortable line of inquiry might relate to current practices we accept that our children, or their children, will find intolerable and shocking. It seems doubtful they'll have a lot of patience for excuses we'd offer from beyond, if we could. Ten years ago, the Washington Post, recognizing that we probably aren't made of better stuff than judges in Salem, Masssachusetts or the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, asked a group of scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals to nominate candidates for things for which we should perform preemptive penance, before our descendants condemn us for them.  Kwame Anthony Appiah submitted:

 

 

If you're willing to entertain the notion that the world is ruled by a stern justice, and are okay with ascribing the adjective "prescient" to Appiah, then it's safe to note that ten years hence life in America has taken a hard gut punch from a virus that has spread widely after incubating most easily in

1. jails and prisons;
2. meatpacking plants; and
3. nursing homes.

Our president frequently anthropomorphizes the virus by speaking of "the invisible enemy." It seems maybe the next step in that analysis would be to allow that our weaknesses, though largely invisible to us, were spied out beforehand by this "enemy" who then targeted them for attack.  

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!

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. 

Michel de Montaigne

I finished a "selection" of Montaigne's essays today. Would never have made it but for "shelter in place." The "selection" was 436 pages, small print, and the style is not what you'd call "breezy": Montaigne's father had ideas about education, which resulted in a nothing-but-Latin rule at home, and it shows not only in the quotations and allusions from classical literature but also in the brocaded style. At the end, I was rewarding myself with one chapter of an Elmore Leonard novel (Maximum Bob) for every 5 pages of Montaigne.

In case you're wondering (and still reading), Montaigne was a 16th-century Frenchman. He is widely regarded as the progenitor of the modern "essay." He was born rich and as a young man, having suffered something like a mental crisis when both his father and best friend suddenly died, he retired to the family chateaux to think things over. Eventually he began writing down his thoughts in "assays" on various subjects. He kept revising his assays and composing new ones till dying, age 59, in 1592.

Some people place Montaigne on a level with Socrates for wisdom and overall human excellence. His essays are like self-help for people who think they're too smart for, I don't know, Suzy Ormond and Dr. Oz. He has a lot of opinions and advice, including about money and the practice of medicine. His idea seems to have been that the proper object of human reflection is human beings, and, since he knew himself best, he'd as we say "put himself out there"—he could be wrong about someone else, but not about himself. One thus learns arguably too much about his gallstones; also, that his favorite time to evacuate his bowels is immediately upon rising in the morning and his favorite time to have sex is just before falling asleep at night. Fairly representative, from what I can tell. 

He tackles every subject. One of his early essays is titled, "To philosophize is to learn how to die"—probably a source for the frequent comparison to Socrates. A practicing Roman Catholic, he did not live to see his essays placed on the index of books the Church until 1966 forbade Catholics to read. There are signs (scholars say) that he self-edited with an eye toward pleasing (or at least not provoking) the Vatican, but if so the stratagem failed. He would not have been angry about that or, it seems, anything.  He might have been amused, however, to behold the high esteem in which he's held, since he counsels against having too high or low a view of our fellows. I think one of his essays is the likely source for the saying about no man being a hero to his valet. As his last essay draws to a close, he writes:

It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses. 

Now, back to Maximum Bob, uninterruptedly. 

Science v. politics

Richard Feynman, who in 1965 won the Nobel Prize in physics, is known to the general public, if he is known, as the member of the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle accident who figured out what had happened. You can read a brief summary here. When Feynman was asked to be on the commission, his impulse was to run the other direction. He'd have to spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C., which was a long way from his home in California—he was on the physics faculty at Cal Tech, in Pasadena. Moreover, he had always suspected that the space shuttle program was less about science (which he loved) and more about government and public relations (which he despised). He was also 67 years old and ailing with the cancer that would take his life within about a year and a half. In his memoir What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he relates how he decided to join the commission only after his wife told him:

"If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission there will be eleven people—all in a group, going from place to place together—while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." 

I think it's likely that Feynman was attributing to his wife his own thoughts about himself, but in any event, she (or he) was right: he might not have played well with others, but he figured out why the Challenger had crashed.

His whole account of his time on this commission, as related in What Do You Care, makes for pretty enjoyable reading. He was predisposed to despise all the Washington dipshittery, and to some degree his suspicions were confirmed, but he also had some pleasant surprises: for example, he found a friend in fellow commissioner General Donald Kutyna, to whom he was immediately attracted upon observing that after the first commission meeting the general took the subway back to his job at the Pentagon:

I thought, "This guy, I'm gonna get along with him fine: he's dressed so fancy, but inside, he's straight. He's not the kind of general who's looking for his driver and his special car; he goes back to the Pentagon by the Metro." Right away I liked him, and over the course of the commission I found my judgment in this case was excellent. 

I was thinking recently of this episode from Feynman's life because it relates to tensions at the intersection of science and politics, a current topic. Feynman was a pain in the arse of William Rogers, the former Nixon cabinet secretary who led the commission. Rogers, a lawyer charged with heading what was essentially an inquiry into a technology failure, had a thankless job, and perhaps no part of it was worse than having to deal with a free-wheeling iconoclast like Feynman who understood much more about the subject matter. Their last mild squabble related to the commission's final report. There was a question about whether Feynman, who had solved the problem, would sign on: the facts of the case reflected poorly on NASA management, and Rogers, but not Feynman, was inclined to accept a conclusion obscuring this fact with bureaucratic language. In the end, Feynman agreed to sign on only if he could write his own report, which was included as an appendix to the main one. The last sentence of Feynman's report, and thus the last sentence of the final report (including appendix) of our federal government's inquiry into the Challenger shuttle disaster, is:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Doesn't that explain our federal government's failure in this coronavirus crisis? People like Trump can say anything. He can say there are 15 cases and in a few days those will go to zero. He can say it's contained and that there's no reason to worry. He can say we're going to "open everything up" at Easter, "a beautiful timeline." But that's all public relations taking precedence over reality. The virus ("Nature") isn't affected by Trump's speech acts. Public policy in this case has to take account of the subject matter of microbiology and epidemiology, two of ten million subjects about which Trump's ignorance is comprehensive and his interest in learning, negligible. So, while he blathers and dithers, thinking of it as a political problem for him, the virus, according to laws well understood by scientists, spreads in the population, and the necessary measures are not taken—a monumental failure. 

It's not as if conservative political views make it impossible to comprehend the truth of the situation. Here is Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and daughter of Dick, tweeting something sensible the other day, when Trump was still talking about crowding the churches on Easter and the cure being worse than the disease:

There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus. https://t.co/AchwfXtuLi

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 24, 2020

We'd all have a better chance of getting through this if people who think Ivy League epidemiologists are all effeminate alarmists would at least listen to her. The president, alas, is an irresponsible menace.  

UPDATE: Just adding a video clip of probably the most dramatic moment of the Challenger investigation. Pretty sure that the reporter mispronounces Feynman's last name: should be like Fine-man (not Fayn-man).

 

 

Joseph Cornell's "dime-store alchemy"

Probably his biography is not the most curious in 20th-century American art, but Joseph Cornell's is the one I've been reading about, and it's plenty curious. He was born in 1903, at Nyack, New York, which is on the west bank of the Hudson River about 20 miles north of Manhattan's northern tip—despite a population of only about 7,000, Nyack is the birthplace of Edward Hopper, too. Cornell's father earned a good living in the textile industry, first as a salesman and then as a designer, but in 1917 he died of leukemia, leaving behind his wife, Joseph, and Joseph's three younger siblings, one of whom, Robert, was afflicted with cerebral palsy. The mother went to work but for years the family lived in poverty's inner-ring suburbs. Joseph nevertheless was sent to Phillips Academy, a prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, through the largesse of his deceased father's former employer. He was a terrible student and left school without graduating. Upon returning home, which on account of strained finances was now a modest house in Queens, he got a textile sales job through one of his father's connections and went to work supporting the family. We are now up to 1921, the year he turned 18. Cornell spent the rest of his life in the house in Queens, with his mother and Robert, who was disabled by his disease. Robert died 44 years later, in 1965, followed by the mother in 1966, and then Cornell himself, age 69, in 1972.

My introduction to Cornell was an essay, "Stargazing in the Cinema: On Joseph Cornell," by Charles Simic, the author also of an unusual book called Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. The essay includes the following paragraph:

"A gourmet art by a man who ate junk food" is how Robert Motherwell described [Cornell's] work. Even to people who saw him fairly often he was a complete enigma. They remember him as drab looking, always preoccupied, speaking in monologues, oblivious to other people, an eccentric and a loner. Unmarried and with no sexual experience till the very last years of his life, he lived with his mother and an invalid brother who suffered from cerebral palsy in a small house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, whose basement he had turned into his studio. He ate little, never touched alcohol or set foot in the famous bars the painters and writers then frequented. He made appearances at art shows and gallery openings, greeting acquaintances and making a speedy departure. Cornell, who roamed the streets of Manhattan for almost fifty years, was usually to be found at home in Queens by eight o'clock in the evening. Except for time spent at boarding school in Massachusetts, this strange man never traveled beyond the five boroughs and their environs.

One of the somewhat comical aspects of the story is that this man should have fallen into work in the sales field. Despite his manifest unfitness, he pounded the Manhattan pavement, presenting samples to manufacturers and between appointments killing time in thrift shops and junk stores, for another of his quiddities  was that he collected what "normal" people would call "trinkets" or "cheap souveniers"—Simic catalogues these objects as "old books, movie magazines, silent-film postcards, nineteenth-century toys, engravings, theatrical memorabilia, dolls, maps, and much else that anyone else would regard as nothing but trash." Another word that recurs in critical commentary is "ephemera." All this stuff, whatever you call it, came home to Queens. Sounds like mental illness, right? Maybe, but Cornell was also interested in New York's contemporary art scene and was much taken with, for example, the surrealistic collages of Max Ernst. In the basement of the house in Queens, he began tinkering endlessly with all his "junk," arranging and substituting and rearranging the found pieces until he had an "image" that pleased him. He would then mount them in a box—at first, in pill boxes purchased at drug stores and then emptied of their contents, though sometimes with the advertising (like Sure cure for that tired feeling) intact, and then later in the larger shadow boxes that made him famous. 

It wouldn't be exactly right to say that Cornell labored on anonymously and became a hero of modern art when his boxes were discovered in the basement of the little house in Queens after he died. He showed some of his first assemblages to Julien Levy, the owner of the gallery where he'd seen Ernst's collages. Simic reports that Levy, in his memoirs, says his first reaction was that Cornell was showing him some lost works of Ernst. When persuaded that it was Cornell's own work, he offered to include some of the boxes in an exhibit of surrealist art his gallery was putting on that winter—this was the winter of 1931-32—and the young textile salesman thus became a member of the New York art world just when the Great Depression was making it impossible to peddle his wares. Cornell occasionally had to return to regular work in order to keep his odd little family going, but he was able to exhibit his boxes, and to sell many of them (for a fraction of what they'd command today). He also made avant-garde movies, like one called Rose Hobart, which was constructed by cutting and splicing together, out of sequence, the found footage of an early talkie called East of Borneo. As you can imagine, the entire plot was gone: instead, Cornell's radically abridged version highlights the movements, expressions, and tics of the female lead, Rose Hobart. 

Simic doesn't think much of Cornell's experimental films, and I trust his judgment, but I think he might have mentioned that Rose Hobart is connected to the boxes in the respect that it was made from a lost print that fell into Cornell's hands, just as the boxes are made of objects he found at flea-markets, second-hand stores, junk shops, etc. It's like he meant always to rescue lost things and turn them into art. I haven't mentioned that he was a convert to Christian Science, a consequence probably of having rested up in their reading rooms during his peregrinations around Manhattan. In a way that may seem at once creepy and moving, his weird religion ties in with the rescue theme and his repressed sexuality. As a middle-aged man, he formed platonic friendships with young New York ballerinas, and some of his best known boxes depict famous and unattainable women, such as Lauren Bacall, in a way calculated to lift them out of sexualized publicity stills and fix them forever in a box as something more like religious icons. You get the feeling, or I do, that he could have been a dangerous person if he hadn't been able to transmute his stunted personality into art made of these discordant and discarded pieces of "junk" he collected and painstakingly arranged inside a glassed box into which the viewer gazes, a little like at the movies, though with no storytelling, only the 3-dimensional image of discarded things brought together. His first inspiration was drawn from the surrealists, and he is still sometimes regarded as one, but his purpose or intention—the effect, anyway, of his art—lies in the exact opposite direction: whereas the discordant objects and absurdist subjects of surrealism evoke anger and nihilism, Cornell's boxes are more apt to elicit nostalgia, or something like stifled yearning. "Somewhere on the island of Manhattan," writes Simic, "there were, [Cornell] believed, a few objects, dispersed in unknown locations, that rightly belonged together despite being seemingly incompatible in appearance"—harmony, in other words, out of garbage and dissonance.  I think  Christian Science is ridiculous, but (if an outsider dare speak) one senses behind Cornell's art a religious sensibility. I'm thinking mainly of the way in which ordinary objects, in his hand, become charged with mystery and significance, like a sacrament. 

Cornell is a fairly popular YouTube subject. The below is a short introductory video, but there are a lot more, some quite lengthy and detailed. I just discovered that if you google "images of Joseph Cornell" you get the above picture of him, taken the year before he died, and lots of pictures of his boxes. 

 

 

 

 

Museum meanderings

If you're not on Twitter, and if you're old enough to know me you probably aren't, then you wouldn't know that today the site has been won by the formerly obscure Nicole Najafi, who posted a thread she introduced, "I went on a date with every presidential candidate so you don't have to." Nine installments, one for each of nine candidates, only the Democrats—I'm guessing that her imagination, though fertile, balks at contemplating a date with Trump. The thread is brief and, assuming you enjoy it half as much as I did, well worth five minutes. Here's a teaser, the one for Joe Biden:

He takes you to dinner in the Meatpacking District. He orders you a cosmo before you arrive, like on that "new show Sex and the City." He talks all night about a hot nightclub where his friend Barack has a table and can "get us in." Barack never shows up.

Whole thing is here. Maybe it helps to know that there is a genre of Twitter threads in which hip young single women describe the nightmarish dates they've been on. 

I read Ms. Najafi's work while again sipping a coffee in the atrium of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I think I'm making progress in my art education. For example, there is now an outside chance that I'd be able to distinguish a famous work by Edouard Manet (French, 1832-83) from one by Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926).Honestly, till about a month ago I wasn’t sure whether there were two artists or maybe just one whose last name is sometimes spelled wrong. Claude Monet is famous for the water lilies. Also, his painting, "Impression, Sunrise," gave a name to an artistic movement and makes him perhaps the quintessential impressionist. I prefer Edouard Manet, possibly because I like bars: one of his more famous paintings, "A Bar at the Folies-Bergères," is at the top of this post. 

I think I might be making similar progress differentiating the two Pauls, Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Gauguin (French, 1848-1903). The former is best known for the still lifes of fruit, etc., while the latter is the one who went to Tahiti, where he painted, for example, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" I learned of an interesting connection between the two in a college text I still have:

[Gauguin] began as a prosperous stockbroker in Paris and an amateur painter and collector of modern pictures (he once owned Cezanne's "Fruit Bowl, Glass, and Apples"). 

But Gauguin gave up on the rich collector life:

At the age of thirty-five, however, he became convinced that he must devote himself entirely to art; he abandoned his business career, separated from his family, and by 1889 was the central figure of a new movement called Synthetism or Symbolism. His style, though less intensely personal than Van Gogh's, was in some ways an even bolder advance beyond Impressionism. Gauguin believed that Western civilization was "out of joint," that industrial society had forced men into an incomplete life dedicated to material gain, while their emotions lay neglected. To rediscover for himself this hidden world of feeling, Gauguin left Paris for western France to live among the peasants of Brittany . . . .

And, eventually, to Tahiti. A better painter than husband. 

It's sort of weird how the French seem to make the best painters, the Germans the best philosophers, the English and the Russians the best novelists, while here, in the USA, we have the best country-western artists. 

At the museum

Latest old-guy thing to do is hang out at the art museum—the Minneapolis Institute of Art—while the kids are in school. It's free! Well, a cup of coffee at the café is about four dollars, but you can nurse it for around an hour while reading something you brought along. It's three miles from my house, so if I walk there, it takes nearly an hour and I'm ready to rest upon arrival. Have to fortify myself beforehand as walking slowly, then standing, repeat, repeat, repeat, beats up my arthritic knees.  I spend about the same amount of time with the coffee as I do in the galleries, and I bus home. Kind of a funky neighborhood. Party in the bus shelter last night! Or, maybe, sometime earlier this week: the "public space" is probably not freshened up daily. You meet some characters when riding the #18 along Nicollet Avenue during nonpeak hours. Today, one guy agreed to pay another a dollar for a cigarette. The seller, having received in payment a fistful of coins, counted it out after the exchange had been made, then reported to his customer that he'd only given him 99 cents. The customer, grinning, replied, "A penny saved is a penny earned" and they both laughed. 

I stumbled today upon Georgia O'Keeffe's "City Night." Since I never have a plan, I wander aimlessly and stumble on everything I see. This painting was familiar to me only because once, several years ago now, I helped chaperone a school field trip to the museum and our guide stopped in front of "City Night" for a short presentation that ended with her asking the kids how the painting made them feel. There were a couple sort of comical responses and then my step kid volunteered, "Small and lonely." One of the other more famous paintings in MIA's permanent collection is of a more comforting city street scene, Camille Pissarro's "Place du Théâtre Francais, Paris," shown below. Is there a word for "the little plaque to the side of the painting that describes it"? For this Pissarro, it says:

After a chronic eye infection limited the amount of time Camille Pissarro could spend outdoors, he began a series of views of Paris seen from hotel windows. Hoping to show the beauty of the bustling city, he painted this view down the Avenue de l'Opera and other vistas at different hours and seasons, and under varying weather conditions.

Waiting on the #18 at 26th & Nicollet, I found myself wondering about Pissarro's hotel bill, and whether another Parisian "vista" might have afforded a view of the oddly picturesque litter at a deserted cab stand. 

Dolly!

 

Under the influence of Ken Burns's Country Music, I've been listening, while pedaling my stationary bike, to Pandora's Loretta Lynn station, and the Willie Nelson station, and the Hank Williams station, and I find that I like, or love, some stuff that I would never have thought might appeal to me in the least—Dolly Parton, for instance. I thought she must be a ridiculous person who, thanks to ten million rubes, had managed to parlay a pleasant voice and plastic surgery into a financial empire. Where did I get such notions? Am I now overcompensating for my past pissy neglect or is she in her way one of the most gifted Americans of our time? The songs she's famous for: I assumed she just performed them but of course she's the songwriter. Shania Twain calls "Coat of Many Colors" her favorite song, ever, and I'm sure her tastes have more to recommend them than mine.

The Wikipedia article on Parton conveys a vivid, likable personality. Her origins sound . . . like a country song:

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, a very small community in Sevier County in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. She is the fourth of twelve children. . . .

Though her career may call to mind the similarly diverse talents of Kris Kristofferson, she's not like him a former Rhodes Scholar:

After graduating from Sevier County High School in 1964, she moved to Nashville the next day.

On her business acumen, which she claims to have inherited from her illiterate father:

In 1974, her song, "I Will Always Love You," written about her professional break from Wagoner, went to number one on the country chart. Around the same time, Elvis Presley indicated that he wanted to record the song. Parton was interested until Presley's wily manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her that it was standard procedure for the songwriter to sign over half of the publishing rights to any song recorded by Presley. Parton refused. That decision has been credited with helping her to make many millions of dollars in royalties over the years.

I would have predicted, considering all the fame, wealth, and plastic surgery, her personal life to be in a puddle, but here is the article on the subject of her marriage:

On May 30, 1966, Parton and Carl Thomas Dean were married in Ringgold, Georgia. . . . Dean, who is retired from running an asphalt road-paving business in Nashville, has always shunned publicity and rarely accompanies his wife to any events. According to Parton, he has seen her perform only once. She has also said in interviews that, although it appears they spend little time together, it is simply that nobody sees him publicly. . . . In 2011, Parton said, "We're really proud of our marriage. It's the first for both of us. And the last."

An asphalt road-paving guy! She could as well have married around 80 of my high school classmates, except that they did not hail from Nashville. Regarding her public image:

Parton is known for having undergone considerable plastic surgery. . . . [She] has repeatedly joked about her physical image and surgeries, saying, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." . . . When asked about future plastic surgeries, she famously said, "If I see something sagging, bagging or dragging, I'll get it nipped, tucked, or sucked." Parton's feminine escapism is acknowledged in her words, "Womanhood was a difficult thing to get a grip on in those hills, unless you were a man."

I won't try to pull anything out of the long section on her philanthropic work. Ditto for the even longer section on "awards and honors," but I will call attention to the way in which it's easy, in the nearly endless catalog of musical citations, to pass over such a deceptively casual sentence as, "She has also been nominated for two Academy Awards and a Tony Award." 

I know, I know, you can't judge everything by awards, the people who give them out are fallible, too—James Joyce never won the Nobel—but, where there's this much smoke . . . .

Here's a couple of multimillionaires performing, as Oprah sings along, "Coat of Many Colors" and then, because I love it so, Emmylou Harris,"Two More Bottles of Wine":

 

 

 

At the movies: Bombshell

Saw, with stepkid, at Lagoon Cinema, Bombshell, the title a possible play on words: what the Fox anchorwomen are, "bombshells," or, alternatively, what they report, though it's not really a "bombshell" that Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, et al are turds. At the dramatic center is the perfectly coiffed Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron. Will she do the right thing? 

Sometimes, with regard to people who don't resign their jobs in the Trump White House, the point is made: The pay can't be that good, why don't they just do the right thing? One thing the movie glides over pretty easily is that, for Kelly, the pay was that good. She will keep her mouth shut. "At what price?" asks her husband. "At the price of this apartment we live in," she replies, and she elaborates. That quiets him down. Action x is the "right" thing to do, unless someone pays you enough money not to do x, in which case not doing x is the new "right" thing to do—so obviously true it needs no exposition. The possibility of doing two right things, telling the truth about the turd and moving to a cheaper apartment, doesn't arise, but, in the end, she does tell the truth, which is that Ailes sexually harassed her, too.

There is one scene, in particular, that's hard to watch and makes you hate Roger Ailes, even if you don't really require a special invitation. When, therefore, his downfall comes, it's especially delightful, but back outside walking to your car it feels like kind of a cheap thrill, the way for example the camera zooms in at his moment of disgrace so that you can contemplate the pores in the skin of his fat, sick, disgusting face. He's physically grotesque and at one point Theron's Kelly observes that, probably for this reason, he prefers sex acts that do not require disrobing. Feels like piling on.

Oh god, am I feeling sorry for Roger Ailes?

With Margot Robbie, a composite of all the more anonymous Fox victims and the casualty in the hard-to-watch scene, John Lithgow as Ailes, and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, who started it all by suing after she was fired: she got $20 million, so no need for a cheaper apartment. Not Christmas-themed in the least and I liked better our breakfast at Our Kitchen, a hole-in-the-wall on 36th Street just west of Lyndale. According to Rory, the pork sausage patty is to die for, and I can vouch for the cheese omelet, hash browns, and pancakes. I am not one of those who complains about getting "too much" whipped butter.

 

The Further Education of Jake Gittes

In the movie Chinatown, one of my favorites, the central character, Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, is a private investigator specializing in marital investigations—that is, his clients are married people who suspect that their spouse has a little something-something going on a back burner. Gittes investigates and collects evidence, often in the form of photographs—the "ocular proof" lacked by Othello—that he then provides to the client in order to confirm their suspicions. He's been hired by someone pretending to be Evelyn Mulwray, wife of Hollis Mulwray, who heads the water department of the City of Los Angeles. Gittes gets the pictures, which are published in the newspaper, thereby discrediting Mulwray, whereupon the real Mrs. Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, shows up in his office at about the same time her husband shows up dead, the evident victim of an accidental drowning at a reservoir during a drought. Gittes, pissed about having been played, continues to investigate, which draws him into a vast corruption scheme involving preeminently Mrs. Mulwray's father, played by John Huston. Great, great movie.

In the climactic last scene, where the extent of the corruption is revealed to Gittes and the moviegoer, Evelyn pulls a gun to defend against her monstrous father. Gittes urges her to put the gun down. "Let the police handle it," he advises, but she replies, chillingly, "He owns the police!" There follows a double shooting, the second victim being Evelyn, whose head pitches forward onto the horn of the car she's escaping in. A stunned Gittes is led away from the scene by a cop who, trying to console him, speaks the film's last words of dialog, barely audible on account of the blaring horn: "Forget it, Jake," he says. "It's just Chinatown."

The desolating force of these words derives from the way in which, over the course of the movie, the career path of Jake Gittes is sketched in. He hadn't always been in marital investigations. He had been a cop, a detective, investigating crime. He was assigned to the Chinatown district. Corruption was rampant—to such a degree that a dutiful cop, such as Gittes was, would either have to get on the supplemental payroll or get out of police work. Gittes got out, and into the more lucrative business of marital investigations. He wears nice suits, has a nice car, an assistant, and well-appointed office space. He also has the proud, hard-bitten demeanor of a man who has put away youthful delusions and succeeded. All this background is so skillfully inserted, or suggested, that you hardly notice, often because you are only  conscious of being entertained. For example, Gittes's everlasting contempt for all the dumb dirty cops he knows from his former career is conveyed in a scene in which he converses with one such ex-colleague who has had the water to his residence shut off. Gittes asks him how he could know he had no water service, since (I'm going from memory, but try to imagine Jack Nicholson's voice):

You don't drink it [because you're an alcoholic]. You don't bathe in it. Did the water department write you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.

The upshot of this strain in the movie is that Gittes, in his mind, associates his Chinatown experience with the corruption that had stripped him of his idealism and driven him from the police department, which exists to advance the public interest, into the tawdry realm of marital investigations—a more remunerative form of private sector employment that's a different flavor of tawdry than what he knew from police work. He considers himself a man of the world well versed in the ways of Chinatown. But the movie is in some sense "The Further Education of Jake Gittes." The consolatory speech with which the movie ends is overwhelmingly ironic. It's not "just Chinatown." The corruption isn't limited to that part of L.A. It's pervasive, beyond anything that the hard-bitten Jake Gittes could have imagined.

I guess I've seen the movie enough times so that it's become a permanent part of my brain's furniture. I think of it frequently, often as a kind of interpretive tool to explain to myself things that happen in the world, like yesterday's testimony of Gordon Sondland, who bristled when the lawyer questioning him used the term "irregular channel" to describe the drug deal he was pursuing on behalf of Trump in Ukraine:

I'm not sure how someone could characterize something as an irregular channel. When you're talking to the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff of the White House, the Secretary of Energy. I don't know how that's irregular. If a bunch of folks who are not in that channel are aggrieved for some reason for not being included, I don't know how they can consider us to be the irregular channel and they to be the regular channel when its the leadership that makes the decisions.

Or, as Fiona Hill explained today, she regarded Sondland with a mixture of annoyance and pity, "[b]ecause he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy, and those two things had just diverged." So some people in the employ of the federal government were still pursuing the national interest. That was the "irregular channel" of dutiful cops. The "regular channel" is for all the high-ranking White House officials trying to swim in the dirty water sluicing out of the Oval Office—Chinatown. 

Samuel Sewall in his Diary

Chasing after some scrap of information the other day, I ended up leafing through a book I bought once for a college course—an anthology, America in Literature, volume 1, covering the colonial period up to the Civil War, edited by David Levin and Theodore Gross. I don't think the editor's selections are at all idiosyncratic and one thing their anthology makes you realize is that, before 1850, America had contributed virtually nothing to the world's literature. Quick, name a great work written by an American within a normal lifetime of our Declaration. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography? I've read it more than once, and enjoy it, but I'm not sure it qualifies, and anyway, supposing it's allowed, name another. This anthology is filled with diaries, personal narratives, sermons, pamphlets, and poetry in imitation of European models. The interest is largely historical. What was it like to be a pioneer, a Puritan in 17th-century America, a slave? Our early "literature" can shed light on such questions, but when Jane Austen and William Wordsworth were at work there was no American of genius similarly employed. And then, suddenly, without warning or barely a sense that the field had been ploughed: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), and, though it wasn't published till later, the poetry of Emily Dickinson composed mostly during the Civil War years. It's almost as if a civilization, like a teenager, has to attain the age of majority before you can expect anything of it.

Paging through that book: what a bleak landscape—I'd rather watch Fox News's coverage of the impeachment hearings than read again the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, or Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, or any of the ghoulish theologizing of the Puritans. The professor, Edward Griffin, assigned the Journal of John Woolman, a Quaker who lived from 1720 to 1772, and I was an earnest enough student to force my eyes to pass over all the words, but, seeing it again in this anthology, all I could remember of it was trying to whip up artificial interest by tracking how much time elapsed between the author's nocturnal emissions, which he duly and self-laceratingly recorded in his journal. 

There is one glorious exception, and that is the Diary of Samuel Sewall. Sewall, who lived from 1652 to 1730, was one of New England's leading citizens. If he hadn't kept a diary through almost his entire life, he'd be known, if he was known, only as one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. To his credit, he was in later life ashamed of the part he'd played, though a cynic might say that both his legal judgments and subsequent renunciation were in line with current public opinion. But he kept this diary, too. He makes no visible effort to be eloquent, just notes things that happened, lots of weather reports, lots of church-going, and, most notably, lots of death, including in his own family, children, not an excess of emotion in these parts or any other, just the facts, and you get the idea that it wasn't that he was at all stone-hearted: death was just more common then, it happened all the time and was normal. Finally, when he's in his mid-60s, his wife dies, and, a couple years later, he undertakes the courtship of a widow whom he identifies as Madam Winthrop. In Boston in 1720 you did not "date"; you paid visits and talked, then, after awhile, you'd pop the question—that part was the same. The reader of the diary can deduce, though Sewall never spells it out himself, that notwithstanding his prominence he is much more interested in her than she is in him. For example, she always seems to be away when he calls on her—suspicious, since when taking his leave he'd usually mention when he expected to call again, or  would send a note a few days in advance (which she would not answer). Consequently, he spent a lot of time sitting around with her maid and her kids, waiting for her to show up, and you can again deduce, from his very spare prose, that they know the score and feel a little sorry for him: there's a fair amount of, "Well, she should be back soon" or "You might want to call on her at So-and-So's." He sends her gifts (always noting in his diary how much the gift cost) and then notes later, after seeing her, that she failed to thank him for it. He persists with the courtship, and persists too in recording, Dragnet-style, the many small indignities he suffers. It's hard, but intriguing, and somewhat humorous, to imagine him returning home from these defeats and recording them in his diary. At first, she had been polite but expert in parrying his gallantries. As time passes and he doesn't give up, she adopts more aggressive strategies. For example, she tells him she's noticed that he doesn't travel in a horse-drawn carriage. Niceties soon give way altogether and the "courtship" takes on a purely mercenary aspect: he tells her, directly, what she could expect to receive if they were to marry and he then die first. She's not impressed. His next-to-last visit took place on Friday, November 4, 1720:

Went again about 7. a-clock; found there Mr. John Walley and his wife: sat discoursing pleasantly. I showed them Isaac Moses's writing. Madam W. served comfits to us. After awhile a table was set. I urged Mr. Walley to crave a blessing; but he put it upon me. About 9. they went away. I asked Madam what fashioned necklace I should present her with, she said None at all. I asked her whereabout we left off last time; mentioned what I had offered to give her; asked her what she would give me; she said she could not change her condition: she had said so from the beginning; could not be so far from her children, the Lecture. Quoted the Apostle Paul affirming that a single life was better than a married. I answered that was for the present distress. She said she had not pleasure in things of that nature as formerly: I said, you are the fitter to make me a wife.

Paul, especially in his first letter to the Corinthians, does take a dim view of matrimonial love, asserting famously that he thought it best for people to remain single, like him, though allowing that "it's better to marry than burn." This is the biblical text Madam Winthrop refers to, not (one suspects) because she esteems it but because she hopes to encourage Sam Sewall to leave (and not return). The sophisticated judge and lay biblical scholar replies that Paul's instruction was guidance for another time, when it was thought the world would soon end. Just in case you missed it, she then plays what she must have hoped would be the ace of trumps—she's no longer interested in sex—to which he replies (in effect), "Great, neither am I!" The "courtship" arrived at this point on November 4 after having begun with Sam's first mention of Madam Winthrop on October 11. There'd be one more visit, on November 7, when Sam, before a dying fire (symbolism!), announces his intention to call no more, eliciting from Madam Winthrop some kind words in which one might detect more relief than kindness. A question raised by this remarkable document is just how much of what the reader detects was first detected by Sam Sewall. He might seem obtuse, but it's his words that reveal the truth of the situation, all of it modestly conveyed, in few words, a possible small masterpiece of precision, humor, and humanity.

Sewall was also the author of "The Selling of Joseph," one of the first anti-slavery tracts published in North America.

Linda Greenhouse on Evan Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor

The above picture, of Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg waiting to address a group of congressional women in 2001, heads Linda Greenhouse's review, in NYRB, of a new biography of O'Connor by Evan Thomas. It's a poignant photo, I think, since, in the intervening 18 years, one of the two has sunk into dementia and the other, beset by geriatric health complaints, is trying to hang on till there is a Democratic president to fill her position. They were looking hale and alert in 2001, dressed similarly, despite their frequently opposing views, in business attire and sensible shoes. I like how O'Connor was caught with her heel out, airing her foot. Of course she's the one with dementia. One of the details in Greenhouse's review concerns how Thomas, interviewing O'Connor at the start of his project, immediately realized that she would not—could not—be a significant source for his book: too far gone in the disease, which also marred the last 20 years of her husband's life, a grim circumstance that caused her to retire from the Court before she otherwise might have.

I had not known that O'Connor was the author of a memoir about her youth, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, which did provide Thomas with a source for information about her early life, summed up by Greenhouse:

Thomas draws on [Lazy B] to describe how formative were the values of self-reliance and attention to duty that her stern father, Harry Day, imparted to his oldest child as he initiated her into the rigors of life on a sprawling, isolated, and nearly barren ranch near Arizona's border with Mexico.

A former president of the Junior League, she played golf and tennis at the Paradise Valley Country Club. There was not a whiff of the counterculture, or even of explicit feminism, about her. 

I am not sure that there isn't in the spaces of the transition between paragraphs the whiff of a contradiction, inasmuch as O'Connor was apparently initiated into the rigors of life on the forbidding ranch, perhaps in the forenoon, before showing up for her evening lessons in golf and tennis at the Paradise Valley Country Club. Well, she was a Republican, privileged but flinty. Barry Goldwater was a family friend. She could make high scores on standardized tests and landed at Stanford Law School, where she was, improbably, the love interest of classmate William Rehnquist. Greenhouse reports that Thomas had access to letters Rehnquist wrote Sandy Day, including one that included a proposal of marriage and the sentence, "I know I can never be happy without you." Sandy turned him down. Years later, when President Reagan appointed her to the Supreme Court, in 1981, Rehnquist was already serving as an associate justice, and the rookie O'Connor, probably hoping for a mentor, was put off by her old boyfriend's "aloofness." Despite similar voting records, their interpersonal relations were ever cool. No one knows where love goes but when it goes it's gone, gone, gone. I'm not sure whether it's sad or reassuring to reflect that even the lives of the high and mighty are evidently blighted by the kinds of disappointments and resentments that, viewed from a disinterested perch, seem trivial and petty.

Greenhouse mentions that O'Connor's appointment came early in Reagan's first term, after he had promised during the campaign to put a woman on the high court. It seems like an odd promise for Reagan to have made, too much like affirmative action. It's a court-watcher's parlor game to speculate on the possible connections between the circumstances of O'Connor's appointment and her centrist jurisprudence on affirmative action, which came to the Supreme Court after it had become somewhat more conservative with the retirements of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. By 2003, hers was the swing vote, and, to the bitter disappointment of conservatives in a case involving the University of Michigan's law school, she ruled that in admissions policy race could be considered as one factor among others for a period, she suggested, of roughly 25 more years. I don't credit the suspicion that her appointment as the first female justice had anything to do with her decision. Rather, as Greenhouse suggests, she was simultaneously suspicious of and sympathetic to the view that, if schools and businesses thought there was value in having their student body and work force "look like America," the law should cut them some slack, but not too much, or forever. 

O'Connor is probably most famous, or infamous, for the Court's decision in the Planned Parenthood v Casey case, where she once again had the swing vote and could have taken a long stride toward overturning Roe v Wade. Instead, she wrote, with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, the majority opinion—it was 5-4—upholding the right to an abortion established in Roe while allowing states to impose restrictions that did not create "an undue burden" to exercising that right. It's probably fair to say that pro-choice activists were unhappy but relieved with the decision and that the other side was unhappy, surprised, and infuriated. Actually, O'Connor's position here might have been predicted by those who had followed her career in the Arizona state legislature, where she was not a reliable vote for either side on policy relating to abortion.

In an earlier case, argued and decided soon after she had joined the Court, O'Connor had first infuriated conservatives by joining the liberals in striking down an Alabama law establishing "a moment of silence" at the start of the public school day. In a separate concurring opinion, she wrote it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that Alabama was attempting to endorse prayer in public schools. Greenhouse relates here a couple of interesting sidelights gleaned from Thomas's book. One of O'Connor's law clerks, during the period that the Court was deliberating, urged her to assume the "good faith and proper motives" of state legislators. O'Connor, who had served in Arizona's state legislature, told him that she would not, and that state legislators were among "the most venal, self-important people you can imagine." The other detail is interesting mainly on account of her calculations regarding her career. She had been mentioned as a possible candidate for Chief Justice and realized that her decision in this case burned bridges to the powers that had landed her on the high court in the first place. Sure enough, a year later Chief Justice Burger retired and Reagan had to elevate someone. He chose Sandy Day's old boyfriend, William Rehnquist.

Greenhouse, the former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times who now teaches at Yale Law School, is a woman not at all sympathetic toward the high court's rightward turn, and though I may be wrong I think it's possible to detect in her review a certain determination to celebrate the first female justice as the kind of old-fashioned conservative that liberals may regard these days with nostalgic fondness. Thus she lingers on the admittedly high-profile cases in which O'Connor deviated, by a foot or several yards, from conservative orthodoxy. Or possibly it just seems that O'Connor was less doctrinaire than she was, because she stayed about where she'd always been while the Court lurched to the right, placing her eventually in the middle and endowing her with an ersatz aura of reasonableness. The truth is that she voted with the bloc of conservative justices—Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas—roughly eighty percent of the time. I don't think Greenhouse conveys this fact, but she does take up the abomination of the Court's decision in Bush v Gore, and is as engaging and informative on this topic as she is on others. I remember that whatever network I was watching on Election Night, 2000, called Florida for Gore relatively early in the evening and then of course retracted, but I guess the whole election had been called for Gore by at least one network—the one O'Connor was watching at a party that, upon Gore being named the winner, she stomped out of after announcing that this was a "terrible" result. Her husband had to explain to the other party attendees that she had been hoping to retire but did not want a Democratic president to appoint her successor. Wouldn't you know, the Florida recount on which everything depended then came to the Supreme Court, and O'Connor cast the crucial vote handing the election to Bush. She also inserted into Justice Kennedy's draft decision the weaselly phrase essentially admitting that the Court's "reasoning" was ad hoc and should not be regarded as precedent in any subsequent election dispute: the unsigned decision was, she wrote, "limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."

In this one case, then, O'Connor and her fellow conservatives were all in favor of the big bad federal government telling a state how to resolve its disputed election. Given that O'Connor's rooting at the election night party had been reported in the press, including the degree to which her preference was dictated by personal desires, she could not very easily retire to Arizona now that she'd gotten Bush into the presidency. So she labored on till 2006, steadfastly avoiding the president and all White House events as her husband sank deeper into dementia. He is, by the way, a somewhat pitiable and forgotten figure. He'd been a highly successful Arizona lawyer, but seems never to have adjusted to different circumstances in Washington, D.C., and then, eclipsed by his wife the Supreme Court justice, he starts noticing his own declining mental abilities, which he heartbreakingly documented in a journal that Thomas got access to for his biography. Mr O'Connor probably wasn't consoled by the consideration that he'd prevailed over a future chief justice in the wooing contest for the hand of Sandra Day, girl ranch hand, country club athlete, Episcopalian, Republican state legislator, conservative jurist, and first woman to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.