Now That's Just Weird

Did anyone else know that Library Thing has a version in Italian?

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Re-reading this for maybe the third or fourth time: funny and sad and funny again. A happy ending with a wedding, so by Shakespeare's rules that makes it a comedy. The movie is actually well done (Michael Douglas shlubbing around in a woman's pink chenille bathrobe is iconic) but there are are layers and back story you'll only get from the book.
Yes, it's embarrassing how many times my inner life corresponds with Grady Tripp's, but that could be said for any middle-aged writer, teacher or former Wonder Boy. I don't smoke dope like Grady, and I don't have my boss's dead dog, a dead boa constrictor and a tuba in my car trunk-- but the butt-cheek impression left by a James Brown impersonator in the hood of my car is not outside the realm of possibility.

Books: James Crumley, 1939-2008

Word comes that James Crumley has died of congestive heart failure. At least one of his novels, The Last Good Kiss earned him a seat at the table with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and another, Dancing Bear, is for me one of the best American novels of the last fifty years.
A lot of us have the first line of The Last Good Kiss memorized, like the opening of Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” – But it’s Dancing Bear that haunts me as a picture of lonely America in the closing years of the last century. It is also very funny and sometimes poetic and very violent and very sad.
The critics’ darling, Cormac McCarthy, covers some of the same violent ground, but doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already suspect about debased human nature; despite the poetry, there isn’t anything in No Country for Old Men or Blood Meridian you couldn’t learn elsewhere, and the Oprah bestseller The Road was a rehash of every genre post apocalypse novel from Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” to Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, and you’ll have a much better time reading Y. McCarthy and James Elroy have become splatterporn for the literati, assigned by professors as exemplary instruction for the naïve. "America was never innocent,” Ellroy scowls in American Tabloid We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets."

Violence is as American as apple pie, but you need a great soul for it to become tragedy, and that’s what Crumley’s books provide with narrators like C. W. in Kiss and Milo in Dancing Bear. Without a soulful witness, as in the heartless landscapes of McCarthy, Ellroy, and your average slasher film, suffering has no meaning, the dead are left unburied and unmourned as Antigone’s brothers. Crumley looks back more often than Lot's wife, and is all about the regret.
The “dancing bear” of the title might refer to the Indian myth invented for the opening chapter, telling how the bears taught native tribes to gather sweetness from the bee, or it might be a section of forest near the Dancing Bear River stolen from the natives by Milo’s grandfather, and endangered by corporate polluters (“pollution” being our era’s euphemism for poisoning someone else’s earth and water), or it might be the hide of a grizzly killed by poachers, or it might be Milo himself, kept hopping like a circus bear trained to “dance” by making him walk on a hot metal plate.
The later adventures of Milo and C.W., in Bordersnakes and The Mexican Tree Duck sometimes teeter on self-parody— the New York Times in a snide review, called the setting “a Montana demimonde undreamed of in the philosophies of Dale Evans”-- but then, The Thin Man and The Little Sister aren’t as good as Red Harvest or The Long Goodbye. For a while there, in The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case and the war novel One to Count Cadence, James Crumley crafted very good books, and in Dancing Bear he made a great one.

My neighbor the detective, who knew Crumley out West and told me about his death, has Crumley stories to tell, but my favorite is from the Chicago Sun-Times. Crumley showed up late for a reading once and apologized, explaining, "I lost my watch."
"Any idea where?" he was asked.
"Yeah," Crumley said. "I threw it out a car window in El Paso in 1978."

Books and Favorite Scenes: Dickens' Dog-and-Pony Show

An idle question from John Martin made me look up my favorite character in Dickens, the theatrical manager Crummles from Nicholas Nickleby. Crummles is a relative of the mountebank Fox and Cat in Pinocchio and the Mouse from Pogo, featured in my masthead, but I suspect they were all carved from life.

... Nicholas was prepared for something odd, but not for something quite so odd as the sight he encountered. At the upper end of the room, were a couple of boys, one of them very tall and the other very short, both
dressed as sailors--or at least as theatrical sailors, with belts, buckles, pigtails, and pistols complete--fighting what is called in play-bills a terrific combat, with two of those short broad-swords with basket hilts which are commonly used at our minor theatres. The short boy had gained a great advantage over the tall boy, who was reduced to mortal strait, and both were overlooked by a large heavy man, perched against the corner of a table, who emphatically adjured them to strike a
little more fire out of the swords, and they couldn't fail to bring the house down, on the very first night.

'Mr Vincent Crummles,' said the landlord with an air of great deference.
'This is the young gentleman.'

Mr Vincent Crummles received Nicholas with an inclination of the head,
something between the courtesy of a Roman emperor and the nod of a pot
companion; and bade the landlord shut the door and begone.

'There's a picture,' said Mr Crummles, motioning Nicholas not to advance
and spoil it. 'The little 'un has him; if the big 'un doesn't knock
under, in three seconds, he's a dead man. Do that again, boys.'

The two combatants went to work afresh, and chopped away until the
swords emitted a shower of sparks: to the great satisfaction of Mr
Crummles, who appeared to consider this a very great point indeed. The
engagement commenced with about two hundred chops administered by the
short sailor and the tall sailor alternately, without producing any
particular result, until the short sailor was chopped down on one knee;
but this was nothing to him, for he worked himself about on the one knee
with the assistance of his left hand, and fought most desperately until
the tall sailor chopped his sword out of his grasp. Now, the inference
was, that the short sailor, reduced to this extremity, would give in at
once and cry quarter, but, instead of that, he all of a sudden drew
a large pistol from his belt and presented it at the face of the tall
sailor, who was so overcome at this (not expecting it) that he let
the short sailor pick up his sword and begin again. Then, the chopping
recommenced, and a variety of fancy chops were administered on both
sides; such as chops dealt with the left hand, and under the leg, and
over the right shoulder, and over the left; and when the short sailor
made a vigorous cut at the tall sailor's legs, which would have shaved
them clean off if it had taken effect, the tall sailor jumped over the
short sailor's sword, wherefore to balance the matter, and make it all
fair, the tall sailor administered the same cut, and the short sailor
jumped over HIS sword. After this, there was a good deal of dodging
about, and hitching up of the inexpressibles in the absence of braces,
and then the short sailor (who was the moral character evidently, for he
always had the best of it) made a violent demonstration and closed with
the tall sailor, who, after a few unavailing struggles, went down,
and expired in great torture as the short sailor put his foot upon his
breast, and bored a hole in him through and through.

'That'll be a double ENCORE if you take care, boys,' said Mr Crummles.
'You had better get your wind now and change your clothes.'

Having addressed these words to the combatants, he saluted Nicholas, who
then observed that the face of Mr Crummles was quite proportionate in
size to his body; that he had a very full under-lip, a hoarse voice, as
though he were in the habit of shouting very much, and very short
black hair, shaved off nearly to the crown of his head--to admit (as
he afterwards learnt) of his more easily wearing character wigs of any
shape or pattern.

'What did you think of that, sir?' inquired Mr Crummles.

'Very good, indeed--capital,' answered Nicholas.

'You won't see such boys as those very often, I think,' said Mr
Crummles.

Nicholas assented--observing that if they were a little better match--

'Match!' cried Mr Crummles.

'I mean if they were a little more of a size,' said Nicholas, explaining
himself.

'Size!' repeated Mr Crummles; 'why, it's the essence of the combat that
there should be a foot or two between them. How are you to get up the
sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, if there isn't a
little man contending against a big one?--unless there's at least five
to one, and we haven't hands enough for that business in our company.'

'I see,' replied Nicholas. 'I beg your pardon. That didn't occur to me,
I confess.'

'It's the main point,' said Mr Crummles. 'I open at Portsmouth the day
after tomorrow. If you're going there, look into the theatre, and see
how that'll tell.'

Nicholas promised to do so, if he could, and drawing a chair near the
fire, fell into conversation with the manager at once. He was very
talkative and communicative, stimulated perhaps, not only by his natural
disposition, but by the spirits and water he sipped very plentifully, or
the snuff he took in large quantities from a piece of whitey-brown paper
in his waistcoat pocket. He laid open his affairs without the smallest
reserve, and descanted at some length upon the merits of his company,
and the acquirements of his family; of both of which, the two
broad-sword boys formed an honourable portion. There was to be
a gathering, it seemed, of the different ladies and gentlemen at
Portsmouth on the morrow, whither the father and sons were proceeding
(not for the regular season, but in the course of a wandering
speculation), after fulfilling an engagement at Guildford with the
greatest applause.

'You are going that way?' asked the manager.

'Ye-yes,' said Nicholas. 'Yes, I am.'

'Do you know the town at all?' inquired the manager, who seemed to
consider himself entitled to the same degree of confidence as he had
himself exhibited.

'No,' replied Nicholas.

'Never there?'

'Never.'

Mr Vincent Crummles gave a short dry cough, as much as to say, 'If you
won't be communicative, you won't;' and took so many pinches of snuff
from the piece of paper, one after another, that Nicholas quite wondered
where it all went to.

While he was thus engaged, Mr Crummles looked, from time to time, with
great interest at Smike, with whom he had appeared considerably struck
from the first. He had now fallen asleep, and was nodding in his chair.

'Excuse my saying so,' said the manager, leaning over to Nicholas, and
sinking his voice, 'but what a capital countenance your friend has got!'

'Poor fellow!' said Nicholas, with a half-smile, 'I wish it were a
little more plump, and less haggard.'

'Plump!' exclaimed the manager, quite horrified, 'you'd spoil it for
ever.'

'Do you think so?'

'Think so, sir! Why, as he is now,' said the manager, striking his knee
emphatically; 'without a pad upon his body, and hardly a touch of paint
upon his face, he'd make such an actor for the starved business as was
never seen in this country. Only let him be tolerably well up in the
Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, with the slightest possible dab of red
on the tip of his nose, and he'd be certain of three rounds the moment
he put his head out of the practicable door in the front grooves O.P.'

'You view him with a professional eye,' said Nicholas, laughing.

'And well I may,' rejoined the manager. 'I never saw a young fellow so
regularly cut out for that line, since I've been in the profession. And
I played the heavy children when I was eighteen months old.'

The appearance of the beef-steak pudding, which came in simultaneously
with the junior Vincent Crummleses, turned the conversation to other
matters, and indeed, for a time, stopped it altogether. These two young
gentlemen wielded their knives and forks with scarcely less address than
their broad-swords, and as the whole party were quite as sharp set as
either class of weapons, there was no time for talking until the supper
had been disposed of.

The Master Crummleses had no sooner swallowed the last procurable
morsel of food, than they evinced, by various half-suppressed yawns and
stretchings of their limbs, an obvious inclination to retire for the
night, which Smike had betrayed still more strongly: he having, in the
course of the meal, fallen asleep several times while in the very act of
eating. Nicholas therefore proposed that they should break up at
once, but the manager would by no means hear of it; vowing that he had
promised himself the pleasure of inviting his new acquaintance to
share a bowl of punch, and that if he declined, he should deem it very
unhandsome behaviour.

'Let them go,' said Mr Vincent Crummles, 'and we'll have it snugly and
cosily together by the fire.'

Nicholas was not much disposed to sleep--being in truth too anxious--so,
after a little demur, he accepted the offer, and having exchanged a
shake of the hand with the young Crummleses, and the manager having
on his part bestowed a most affectionate benediction on Smike, he sat
himself down opposite to that gentleman by the fireside to assist in
emptying the bowl, which soon afterwards appeared, steaming in a
manner which was quite exhilarating to behold, and sending forth a most
grateful and inviting fragrance.

But, despite the punch and the manager, who told a variety of stories,
and smoked tobacco from a pipe, and inhaled it in the shape of snuff,
with a most astonishing power, Nicholas was absent and dispirited. His
thoughts were in his old home, and when they reverted to his present
condition, the uncertainty of the morrow cast a gloom upon him, which
his utmost efforts were unable to dispel. His attention wandered;
although he heard the manager's voice, he was deaf to what he said; and
when Mr Vincent Crummles concluded the history of some long adventure
with a loud laugh, and an inquiry what Nicholas would have done under
the same circumstances, he was obliged to make the best apology in his
power, and to confess his entire ignorance of all he had been talking
about.

'Why, so I saw,' observed Mr Crummles. 'You're uneasy in your mind.
What's the matter?'

Nicholas could not refrain from smiling at the abruptness of the
question; but, thinking it scarcely worth while to parry it, owned that
he was under some apprehensions lest he might not succeed in the object
which had brought him to that part of the country.

'And what's that?' asked the manager.

'Getting something to do which will keep me and my poor fellow-traveller
in the common necessaries of life,' said Nicholas. 'That's the truth.
You guessed it long ago, I dare say, so I may as well have the credit of
telling it you with a good grace.'

'What's to be got to do at Portsmouth more than anywhere else?' asked Mr
Vincent Crummles, melting the sealing-wax on the stem of his pipe in the
candle, and rolling it out afresh with his little finger.

'There are many vessels leaving the port, I suppose,' replied Nicholas.
'I shall try for a berth in some ship or other. There is meat and drink
there at all events.'

'Salt meat and new rum; pease-pudding and chaff-biscuits,' said the
manager, taking a whiff at his pipe to keep it alight, and returning to
his work of embellishment.

'One may do worse than that,' said Nicholas. 'I can rough it, I believe,
as well as most young men of my age and previous habits.'

'You need be able to,' said the manager, 'if you go on board ship; but
you won't.'

'Why not?'

'Because there's not a skipper or mate that would think you worth your
salt, when he could get a practised hand,' replied the manager; 'and
they as plentiful there, as the oysters in the streets.'

'What do you mean?' asked Nicholas, alarmed by this prediction, and
the confident tone in which it had been uttered. 'Men are not born able
seamen. They must be reared, I suppose?'

Mr Vincent Crummles nodded his head. 'They must; but not at your age, or
from young gentlemen like you.'

There was a pause. The countenance of Nicholas fell, and he gazed
ruefully at the fire.

'Does no other profession occur to you, which a young man of your figure
and address could take up easily, and see the world to advantage in?'
asked the manager.

'No,' said Nicholas, shaking his head.

'Why, then, I'll tell you one,' said Mr Crummles, throwing his pipe into
the fire, and raising his voice. 'The stage.'

'The stage!' cried Nicholas, in a voice almost as loud.

'The theatrical profession,' said Mr Vincent Crummles. 'I am in the
theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession,
my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived
and died in it from a puppy; and my chaise-pony goes on, in Timour the
Tartar. I'll bring you out, and your friend too. Say the word. I want a
novelty.'

'I don't know anything about it,' rejoined Nicholas, whose breath had
been almost taken away by this sudden proposal. 'I never acted a part in
my life, except at school.'

'There's genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy
in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your laugh,' said Mr Vincent
Crummles. 'You'll do as well as if you had thought of nothing else but
the lamps, from your birth downwards.'

Nicholas thought of the small amount of small change that would remain
in his pocket after paying the tavern bill; and he hesitated.

'You can be useful to us in a hundred ways,' said Mr Crummles.
'Think what capital bills a man of your education could write for the
shop-windows.'

'Well, I think I could manage that department,' said Nicholas.

'To be sure you could,' replied Mr Crummles. '"For further particulars
see small hand-bills"--we might have half a volume in every one of
'em. Pieces too; why, you could write us a piece to bring out the whole
strength of the company, whenever we wanted one.'

'I am not quite so confident about that,' replied Nicholas. 'But I dare
say I could scribble something now and then, that would suit you.'

'We'll have a new show-piece out directly,' said the manager. 'Let
me see--peculiar resources of this establishment--new and splendid
scenery--you must manage to introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs.'

'Into the piece?' said Nicholas.

'Yes,' replied the manager. 'I bought 'em cheap, at a sale the other
day, and they'll come in admirably. That's the London plan. They look up
some dresses, and properties, and have a piece written to fit 'em. Most
of the theatres keep an author on purpose.'

'Indeed!' cried Nicholas.

'Oh, yes,' said the manager; 'a common thing. It'll look very well
in the bills in separate lines--Real pump!--Splendid tubs!--Great
attraction! You don't happen to be anything of an artist, do you?'

'That is not one of my accomplishments,' rejoined Nicholas.

'Ah! Then it can't be helped,' said the manager. 'If you had been,
we might have had a large woodcut of the last scene for the posters,
showing the whole depth of the stage, with the pump and tubs in the
middle; but, however, if you're not, it can't be helped.'

'What should I get for all this?' inquired Nicholas, after a few
moments' reflection. 'Could I live by it?'

'Live by it!' said the manager. 'Like a prince! With your own salary,
and your friend's, and your writings, you'd make--ah! you'd make a pound
a week!'

'You don't say so!'

'I do indeed, and if we had a run of good houses, nearly double the
money.'

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders; but sheer destitution was before him;
and if he could summon fortitude to undergo the extremes of want and
hardship, for what had he rescued his helpless charge if it were only to
bear as hard a fate as that from which he had wrested him? It was easy
to think of seventy miles as nothing, when he was in the same town with
the man who had treated him so ill and roused his bitterest thoughts;
but now, it seemed far enough. What if he went abroad, and his mother or
Kate were to die the while?

Without more deliberation, he hastily declared that it was a bargain,
and gave Mr Vincent Crummles his hand upon it.

As Mr Crummles had a strange four-legged animal in the inn stables,
which he called a pony, and a vehicle of unknown design, on which he
bestowed the appellation of a four-wheeled phaeton, Nicholas proceeded
on his journey next morning with greater ease than he had expected: the
manager and himself occupying the front seat: and the Master Crummleses
and Smike being packed together behind, in company with a wicker basket
defended from wet by a stout oilskin, in which were the broad-swords,
pistols, pigtails, nautical costumes, and other professional necessaries
of the aforesaid young gentlemen.

The pony took his time upon the road, and--possibly in consequence
of his theatrical education--evinced, every now and then, a strong
inclination to lie down. However, Mr Vincent Crummles kept him up pretty
well, by jerking the rein, and plying the whip; and when these means
failed, and the animal came to a stand, the elder Master Crummles got
out and kicked him. By dint of these encouragements, he was persuaded
to move from time to time, and they jogged on (as Mr Crummles truly
observed) very comfortably for all parties.

'He's a good pony at bottom,' said Mr Crummles, turning to Nicholas.

He might have been at bottom, but he certainly was not at top, seeing
that his coat was of the roughest and most ill-favoured kind. So,
Nicholas merely observed that he shouldn't wonder if he was.

'Many and many is the circuit this pony has gone,' said Mr Crummles,
flicking him skilfully on the eyelid for old acquaintance' sake. 'He is
quite one of us. His mother was on the stage.'

'Was she?' rejoined Nicholas.

'She ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years,' said the
manager; 'fired pistols, and went to bed in a nightcap; and, in short,
took the low comedy entirely. His father was a dancer.'

'Was he at all distinguished?'

'Not very,' said the manager. 'He was rather a low sort of pony. The
fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never
quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too
broad--too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.'

'The port-wine business!' cried Nicholas.

'Drinking port-wine with the clown,' said the manager; 'but he was
greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself,
so his vulgarity was the death of him at last.'

Hotsee Totsee, Another Little Nazi

"[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, [Sarah]Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. 'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. 'The librarian was aghast.' The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving 'full support' to the mayor."
(Time magazine)


And from the Anchorage Daily News:
"Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
"According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.
"Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.... In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose."

The list making the rounds that claims to be Palin's hit list is a fraud; at least two of the books on the list, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire weren't published until three years after Palin approached the librarian. Like the one false note in an otherwise true story that cost Dan Rather his position, I suspect the fake list of being a bit of Republican disinformation, an attempt to discredit the larger story with quibbling.
Circulating a falsehood is already being used by people like Michelle Malkin as a way to discredit the core truth-- Palin's attempt at banning books-- just as the one forgery in CBS' National Guard story was used to absolve Bush of going AWOL. But screw that; let's see Joe Biden ask Palin why she hates John Steinbeck and Twelfth Night.

Japan's Longest Day: Wishful Thinking, and Mass Murder from a Plane Named After the Pilot's Mother

It's the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've little to add to the library of meditation on what it all means-- except that if you've never read Japan's Longest Day the English translation of research done by Kazutoshi Hando and The Pacific War Research Society, it will remove any hope that the Japanese government would have surrendered without the bombing. Indeed, the book makes clear that the hawks in control of the Japanese government had no intention of stopping even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even when they themselves admitted that the war was lost.
The people of the United States have a knack of forgetting our own talent for mass murder while scolding other nations for their bestial habits, and it may be that shame over the treatment of Africans and the aboriginals creates a chink in our mental armor when it comes to thinking about World War Two. It's an easy hit to make Americans flinch when playing poker over the development of nuclear weapons.
It was the hope of Leo Szilard and others at the time that Japan would surrender if the power of the weapon was demonstrated on an abandoned island. Truman-- funny how he never pretended that his "advisors" were somehow responsible for anything more than advice in making his decision-- was working with the facts of what had just happened on Okinawa (more people died on Okinawa than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and appeared certain to happen on the mainland. Szilard and a generation of physicists after him moved into biology and peace activism after the bombs were dropped, and now biology and recombinant DNA are on the brink of creating an extinction-level weapon just as splitting the atom did.
This is going to call for more sophistication than the wishful thinking shown by doves and hawks, who seem to recite two extremes: that we can force everyone to love us by bombing people who don't love us, or that we make everyone love us by appealing to their higher nature even if they wish us harm. But technology outruns social evolution. "We are as gods," as Stewart Brand said, "and we might as well get good at it."

Commonplace Book: Current Reading

“If there is sin against life, it consists… in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
-- Albert Camus

“The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you,” he said. “I wasn’t an expert when I was an expert, and now that I’m not an expert, I’m an expert. It’s kind of curious.”
-- Ed Burns, on his years of teaching and police work before writing The Wire

"I’ve decided that the single worst thing about this illness is its terrible authority. I mean the way it thunders at you, 'This is the reality. This is how it is and how it’s going to be. Any memories of fun or wellness are flukes, delusions. And will never come again. Now you have 20/20 vision and see life for the dreadful mess it really is.'”
-- Dick Cavett on depression

"Mr. [Phil] Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was 'probably the most exploited worker in American history' since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the 'billions' he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell."
-- New York Times article


"...Only 8 percent [of Guantánamo detainees] were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
-- Jane Mayer in The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals

"The approach to international affairs that has dominated the American foreign affairs community for some years is called realism. The realist view of the pressure for a new international economic order in the seventies was summarized to me this way: There has always been inequality among nations, and if we ignore this flapdoodle long enough... the subject will simply fade away. Even at the height of the interest in North-South... there was a feeling that he should stop wasting his time with such issues-- that the North-South dialogue was the sort of subject that interested 'ex-hippies and women who are worried about babies with diarrhea'".
-- Calvin Trillin in Remembering Denny

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing-- tightrope walking comes to mind-- but it's a difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot. In order to take a crack at the third or fourth draft, you have to hold onto an almost insane belief-- insane in that you can't think of any rational evidence to support it-- that what you're working on, by now stupefyingly boring to you, will be of interest or value to others."
-- Calvin Trillin in Remembering Denny

"puerco araña.....puerco araña......ya nooes puerco araña ahora es puerco potterr.."

"It's a minor compulsion. I can control it if I want."

In a freakish attack of organization, I've been obsessively listing my books at Library Thing. This will lend aid and comfort to insurance types and make the development of my mind an open, well, you know, not counting the how-to books, porn stash, emotional trauma and sharp blows from behind driving my skull into the ceramic tile. Library Thing lets you search, click and list more than 200 books for free and then 10 bucks for as many as you want.
I am as nosy about what books people have on their shelves as a fetishist in an underwear drawer, so I encourage my friends and acquaintances here and abroad to check it out. The Library Thing, I mean, not the underwear drawer, unless there's been a profound change in our relationship of which I was unaware.

The London Spy by Ned Ward, Or, Italian Paste and the Power of Advertising

The best dollar I ever spent. 'Tis no shame for a book to be remaindered (unless you're a milion dollar celebrity "tell-all", robbing a hundred honest authors of their living), any more than for a cat or a dog to be in the pound. They printed more copies than they could sell, or the book languished on the shelf and never found its true reader, to take it home to cherish it and keep it by their bedside, what the bunny rescuers call a "forever home".

I found my copy of The London Spy on a sale table at the International Medieval Congress here in Kalamazoo, which might explained why it hadn't found a home, being "Ned Ward's classic account of underworld life in eighteenth century London". The book was simply out of its era. Medievalists want things that befell between 500 AD and 1500, except for the Saturday night dance, when they'll love anything. Myself, long a bringer-home of stray cats, dogs, bats and rabbits, when I saw the phrase underworld life in eighteenth century... was on that book like a duck on a junebug.

Friends of the Hogarth coffee-house, Gin Lane, and The Black Adder will want a copy of this book. With language as high-flown as anything in Dr. Johnson, this book is vulgar, scatological, cheerfully racist towards Irishmen and hilarious. Edward "Ned" Ward, author of A Trip to Jamaica (which place he immortalized as "The Dunghill of the Universe") and other works, started wandering around London between 1698 and 1700 and published what he heard, smelt and saw in eighteen parts. I keep mine on the bedside table to open at random when I haven't anything else to read, and fall asleep giggling.

In this passage at a public bath, a "rubber" (masseur) decides to reuse the still-warm bath water used by a high-born lady, to save himself the labor involved in emptying the tub and heating fresh water with wood. Just as he's showing a new customer into the scented bath, he discovers that her Ladyship left a little something in the tub-- but thinking fast, the silver-tongued yeoman turns a turd into gold:

"'At last the gentleman looking about him, saw the remains of her cleanly ladyship in his bath. "What a plague," says he, is this that is swimming amongst the herbs!" "Sir," says the rubber, "it is nothing but Italian paste, which is accounted the most excellent thing to cleanse and make smooth the skin imaginable, and it is what my mistress cannot afford to use but in an extraordinary bath which is paid for above the common rates of the house." "Prithee, friend", says the gentleman, if it be so good for the skin, rub me well with it, but egad," says he, "in my mind it looks as like a sir-reverence as ever I saw anything in my life." "Aye, sir," says the servant, "and so it does, but it is an incomparable thing to wash with, for all that it looks so nastily, and is a compound of the richest gums and best castle-soap boiled up together, that can be bought for money." "Pray," says the beau, "take a little pains with me, and rub me all over with it very well. Who is it that makes it? I'll buy some for my hands." "It is made, sir," says the rubber, "by a gentle-woman in this town, but where she lives I cannot tell. My mistress, were she within, could inform you, but she went into the City to dinner, and is not returned yet."

"'Thus my comrade that attended him, by the good management of his tongue, briught off the mischance cleverly without discovery. the perfumes and sweet herbs in the bath so overpowered the scent, that the gentleman, though he nosed it, being amongst such a mixture of effluvia, it confounded his smelling, and rendered him incapable of distinguishing a fair-lady's sir-reverence from the excrement of a civet-cat. so he rose out of his bath extremely pleased, and gave him that attended him half a crown for his extraordinary care and trouble, and so marched away with great satisfaction.'"

My copy was edited by Mr. Paul Hylands from the Fourth Edition of 1709, and was published in East Lansing (Michigan State Spartans, no doubt) by Colleagues Press, Box 4007, Michigan 48826. I regret to say that you can find it on Amazon at $99.95 for the hardcover or $69.95 for the paperback. Abebooks doesn't have any copies, and Bibliofind is owned by the monster Amazon anyway, but if you keep your eyes open in the used book stores you won't regret it. Now we know what the wine-sellers buy that's half so dear as the stuff they sell. I cannot but hope, in the name of democracy and conscientization, that Dover books would discover this treasure and bring out one of its five-dollar editions.

I'm with Stupid

The Bush White House will be hosting this year's Nobel Laureates, including Al Gore, on Thursday the 26th. This is one of those strange scenes we need a Shakespeare to record, or maybe Hunter Thompson. David Halberstam was good at this sort of fated meeting in our own War of the Roses-- see The Powers That Be for Bill Moyers asking William Paley one last time to do something of greater service to mankind than The Beverly Hillbillies, or the scene when a dying Norman Chandler sends a last message to Richard Nixon. I'm not someone who believes there would have been a golden age of Al Gore if not for Florida, but certainly we might have have been spared George Bush, our American Alcibiades.

What I'm Reading: Clive James Cultural Amnesia

Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from James' essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever.... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, who are now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

What I'm Reading: Clive James' Cultural Amnesia

Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriiced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from the essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever."

"... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

WORDS the HEDGE-PIG SANG

“He’m verminous,” the hedgehog explained regretfully, “but he’m honest.” The little hedgehog, toiling from tussock to tussock, fell into the marshy puddles with grunts, panted as he struggled with the miniature cliffs. The weary King Arthur gave him a hand at the worst places, hoisting him to a better foothold or giving him a shove behind, noticing how pathetic and defenseless his bare legs looked from behind. When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and the old man sat beside him to admire the view...

Arthur saw suddenly all the people who had accepted sacrifice: learned men who had starved for truth, poets who had refused to compound in order to achieve success, parents who had swallowed their own love in order to let their children live, doctors and holy men who had died to help, millions of crusaders, generally stupid, who had been butchered for their stupidity—but who had meant well. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, that jest of Pilate’s...

The hedgehog asked, “Shire? Dost tha mind as how us used to sing for un?”

“I minds un well,” said Arthur. “’Twas ‘Rustic Bridge’, and ‘Genevieve' and ‘Home Sweet Home’.”

“Maggie’s Tea,” the hedgehog mentioned shyly, “us gotter fresh un. Twas for thy welcome, like. Us learned it off that there Mearn.” The hedgehog stood in the moonlight, assuming the position for song. And there, upon the height of England, in a good pronunciation because he had learned it carefully from Merlyn, with his sword of twigs in on grey hand and a chariot of mouldy leaves, the hedgehog stood to build Jerusalem, and meant it:

"Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental strife,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

-- T.H. White, “The Once and Future King” (The Book of Merlyn)

Book/23/5

(Instructions passed on from Elspeth)

1. Grab the book that is closest to you.
2. Go to page 23.
3. Type in the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
{Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.}
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Tag other people to do the same.

***
SHANNON: Goddamit, I never preached an atheistical sermon in my life, and...

MISS FELLOWES: I've completed my call, which I made collect to Texas.

SHANNON: Excuse me, Miss Fellowes, for not getting out of this hammock, but I... Miss Fellowes?
***


Consider yourself tagged. You're it.