1st Australian Division
Posted: September 28, 2024 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
The 1st Australian Division was thrown in at Pozières on the Somme in mid July 1916 repeatedly to attack a high ridge. The Australians came out on September 4, having suffered 23,000 casualties. The Australian Official History could not hide its disdain and anger afterward:
To throw the several parts of an army corps, brigade after brigade … twenty times in succession against one of the strongest points in the enemy’s defence, may certainly be described as “methodical,” but the claim that it was economic is entirely unjustified.
(That’s from Eksteins, Rites of Spring.)
from Wikipedia:
Throughout the course of the war, the division suffered losses of around 15,000 men killed and 35,000 wounded, out of the 80,000 men that served in its ranks.
Frank Hurley took the above photograph, which I found at the Wiki page for 1st Australian Division. Frank Hurley was busy in the 19teens. Two years earlier he was in Antarctica taking this one, of The Endurance:
Frank Hurley also took extensive photographs in the Pacific, including Papua New Guinea:
Back to Antarctica, here is Blizzard the pup.
Slam on California
Posted: September 24, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
At the end of July 1914, Rupert Brooke, alarmed by the heightening European crisis, wrote to his friend Edward Marsh, “And I’m anxious that England may act rightly.” But what did it mean to “act rightly”? Another letter, a few days later, in which Brooke described an outing into the countryside, hinted in a general way at his own response to this question:
I’m a Warwickshire man. Don’t talk to me of Dartmoor or Snowden or the Thames or the lakes. I know the heart of England. It has a hedgy, warm bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little hills, and all the roads wiggle with pleasure. There’s a spirit of rare homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, unec-centric yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle.. Of California the other States in America have this proverb: “Flowers without scent, birds without song, men without honour, and women without virtue” — and at least three of the four sections of this proverb I know very well to be true. But Warwickshire is the exact opposite of that. Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no such larks as ours, and no such nightingales; the men pay more than they owe; and the women have very great and wonderful virtue, and that, mind you, no means through the mere absence of trial. In Warwickshire there are butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night…
Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a country!’
Aware of his sentimentality he went on to say, “This is nonsense,”
North Hollywood flooded, 1938
Posted: September 23, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
I found that here, it’s at the UCLA Digital Collection.
In the early 19th century, the river turned southwest after leaving the Glendale Narrows, where it joined Ballona Creek and discharged into Santa Monica Bay in present Marina del Rey. However, this account is challenged by Col. J. J. Warner, in his Historical Sketch of Los Angeles County:
“…until 1825 it was seldom, if in any year, that the river discharged even during the rainy season its waters into the sea. Instead of having a river way to the sea, the waters spread over the country, filling the depressions in the surface and forming lakes, ponds and marshes. The river water, if any, that reached the ocean drained off from the land at so many places, and in such small volumes, that no channel existed until the flood of 1825, which, by cutting a river way to tide water, drained the marsh land and caused the forests to disappear.”
Presidential Dad Trivia
Posted: September 21, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(source)
George W. Bush, interviewed by David Rubinstein of the Carlyle Group in his book The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency.
This is not accurate. There was Joseph Kennedy:
who outlived three of his sons. Nathaniel Fillmore lived to be 91, and saw all of son Millard’s presidency. George Harding outlived son Warren, he died in Santa Ana, California.
In his biography of Warren G. Harding, Charles L. Mee describes Tryon Harding as “a small, idle, shiftless, impractical, lazy, daydreaming, catnapping fellow whose eye was always on the main chance”.
The W. Bush interview is frustrating to those of us who think he ruined everything:
How about this:
Well, I’m glad it was nice for you. (Genuinely, I am. The guy has charm, despite the catastrophes. What does that tell us? How can we profit from knowing that a president will come along the consequences of whom are awful and we still are lured in?)
W. does seem to take some responsibility here, on the bank bailouts:
W. Bush seems like a guy who says, well, I made the best decision under the circumstances and then shrugs at the consequences. That was the vibe I got from his book, Decision Points. Just because the consequences are appalling, doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. They no doubt taught him that at Harvard Business School.
In his Miller Center interview, Karl Rove tells a story from the transition meeting with Bill Clinton:
Riley
So this was the one personal thing. Who came up with the line, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible”?
Rove
Him.
Riley
Him?
Rove
Yes. As he’s also the author—He stole the idea—of “compassionate conservatism.” When we saw Clinton after the election, he said [imitating Clinton], “When I heard you say that phrase, ‘compassionate conservatism,’ George, I knew we were in deep trouble. That’s brilliant, it was just brilliant.”
W communications guy Dan Bartlett tells another:
When they had their transition meeting, as always happens, he asked him. “How’d you get better at it?” Clinton said, “Two things. First, you’re going to give a lot of speeches, so just practice. Practice more than anything else is going to make you better. Secondly, I learned how to take my time and to pause.” He told him a trick. He said, “On every other sentence or maybe every third sentence, it was one or the other, when I hit a period I would count in my head—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—before I’d read the next sentence. It will be hard for you to pull that off, because it feels like an eternity.”
I don’t know if you’ve done public speaking. I do it now. To master the pause, which Clinton now is brilliant at. He said, “Pacing is everything in speechwriting.” So he took that to heart. He took it, but what Clinton was good at, which Bush was never good at, was that while he was not a gifted speaker, he was an authentic communicator. It was always up to us to make sure that he really believed—Clinton could make the signing of a post office bill like the Gettysburg Address. He could take anything and at a moment’s notice turn it around. You knew when Bush was mailing one in.
San Francisco (and California) Politics
Posted: September 15, 2024 Filed under: California, San Francisco, the California Condition Leave a comment
When former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa lost a campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles in June, then-Speaker Robert Hertzberg named him to the California Medical Assistance Commission, where he could earn $99,000 a year, plus benefits, working a few hours each month.
Former Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, D-Los Angeles, who served in the legislature with Senate President Pro Tem John Burton in the 1970s, was out of public office and the target of a federal corruption probe two years ago when Burton placed him on the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. His salary: $114,180 a year plus benefits.
from SF Gate, 2002.
Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.
Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year. After Harris resigned from the unemployment board last week, Brown replaced her with Philip S. Ryan, a lawyer and longtime friend and business associate.
Last week, Brown also appointed Janet Gotch, wife of retiring Assemblyman Mike Gotch of San Diego, to the $95,000-a-year Integrated Waste Management Board, which oversees garbage disposal in California.
from Los Angeles Times, 1994. In fairness sitting through those hearings is probably very boring!
The story goes that in 2015 Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, maybe encouraged by various Democratic fundraisers and power brokers, cut a deal where she would run for Senate and he would run for Governor in 2018:
The early-2015 understanding between the two San Francisco Democrats, both with campaigns managed by the same San Francisco political consulting firm, was this: To avoid a brutal fight over the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Barbara Boxer, Newsom would stay out of the 2016 Senate race and concentrate on running for governor two years later.
A LA Times article about the story that Gavin Newsom might be unhappy with subsequent developments (it’s not over yet Gavin!) led me to this 2015 article about why San Francisco has produced so many prominent state leaders. It’s a question we’ve pondered before:
There is nothing mysterious about San Francisco’s export of high-profile politicians, nothing like the alchemy of air and water that produces the distinctive tang of its signature sourdough bread.
Simply put, it’s fierce competition, at virtually every level, starting with the leadership of its political clubs and spreading to the lowliest contests for elected office on up to races for the Legislature and Congress.
Where San Diego and Los Angeles lie back, most of their residents scarcely interested in politics, San Francisco leans in: chin out, elbows wide and sharp.
“There is a culture here of fighting over just about everything in the public space,” said Eric Jaye, another of the city’s veteran political strategists, from global issues like the Middle East to protecting the neighborhood coffee shop from an onslaught of franchised beans….
from earlier in the same piece (by Mark Z. Barabak):
San Francisco is the closest thing to an East Coast enclave set along the Pacific, a place, like New York or Boston, where politics is a passion, a sport, something everyday people fuss and fight and scheme over.
As blue (politically) as San Francisco Bay, the city has 27 officially chartered Democratic Party chapters, among them the Raoul Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club, the Filipino American Democratic Club, the Black Young Democrats of San Francisco and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. That works out to roughly one party franchise every few blocks.
There are countless more neighborhood councils, civic associations, interest groups — branches of the Sierra Club, the NAACP and the like — all clamoring for their particular agendas.
“It’s a city where people have always been able to be loud and proud about who they are, not just as individuals but as a group or a community,” said Ace Smith, a Democratic strategist who has decades of experience running San Francisco campaigns.
The result is a kind of hyper-democracy and political forge that has fashioned some of California’s most powerful and enduring elected leaders, in numbers far out of proportion to the city’s relative pint size.
A very short history of California’s politics might go something like this: California wanted to get into the union without going through the territorial stage, so they sorta rushed through a constitutional convention (John Sutter himself was there). In the compromise of 1850, one of the deals involving slave and free states, California got brought in. The US wanted a lock on that gold. During the Civil War California stayed in the Union (barely). After the Civil War, the major power in the state was the railroad barons, the Big Four, who were so powerful that they provoked a progressive, democratic backlash, personified by Hiram Johnson.
(He looks like Dwight Shrute, no?)
Here’s Reagan’s guy Stuart Spencer talking about Hiram:
They didn’t do a lot of candidate work, but they did a lot of what we call proposition work in California. Under the reforms of Hiram Johnson, we were a unique state at that time. We were for years. You could put practically anything on the ballot and have it decided there instead of the legislature.
You can also read Leon Panetta, who began as a Republican but became a prominent Democrat, talking about Hiram:
I was raised in a progressive Republicanism that used to be the case in California. It began with Hiram Johnson. It was a tradition that was carried on by people like Earl Warren and Tom Kuchel, whom I worked for, and Goodwin Knight and others. Because of cross filing, because of the traditions of California.
As a result of all this balloting California politics gets pretty complicated. Our state constitution is 76,930 words long. Novel length. (Although it’s not even close to the length of the longest, which is…. can you guess it?….
Alabama, at over 402,000 words. Gotta look into how that came to be. Seems to be because it makes a lot of specific rules for specific municipalities.)
At the moment we’re a one party state, probably because the second to last Republican governor, Pete Wilson, made his big issue immigration (anti). He actually won big on that, with Proposition 187 in 1994. The voters went for that in a big way, but it then got tied up in the courts, and the next Democratic governor, Grey Davis, stopped pursuing the implementation.
Noting a rapid increase in the number of Latinos voting in California elections, some analysts cite Wilson and the Republican Party’s embrace of Proposition 187 as a cause of the subsequent failure of the party to win statewide elections.
California today is maybe 26% immigrants. The most recent Republican governor was an immigrant. He won after Grey Davis was recalled (a Hiram Johnson reform). We might be tempted to treat that election as a special circumstance, as he was famous movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, but then again another famous movie star, Ronald Reagan, had been elected governor before. And George Murphy had been elected senator. Do you need a certain glam quality to succeed in California politics?
Two Californians have become president, although only one, Nixon, was born in California. A third Californian and second native born Californian has a real good shot right now. We’re rooting for her!
Spantsa / Olive Oatman
Posted: September 14, 2024 Filed under: the American West, the California Condition Leave a comment
OTLTA is a new acronym I’d like to get going. It stands for “one thing led to another.” Here it is in context: OTLA and I’m reading about captivity narratives of the American West. Accounts by white people who were captured or taken in by native tribes.
Captivity narratives are a whole serious category of study for academic historians. I’d fear to get over my skis here. There were commercial and political incentives to make these narratives as lurid as possible. How much to trust any one account is a historical puzzle. But, we love those.
Take for example Olive Oatman. When she was fourteen she was traveling with her family, who were Brewsterites, an splinter group of Mormons. Their intended destination was Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River. On Saturday, March 8, 1851, some eighty miles east of Yuma, they encountered some Yavapai people. (Already we need a footnote: were they really Yavapai? There are papers on this topic.) Everyone in the party was killed except Olive and her younger sister Mary Ann.
The Yavapai kept them but eventually traded them to some Mohave people.
Mary Ann did not survive.
After about four years among the Mohave, the post commander at Fort Yuma, on the California side, heard about a white woman living out there and sent word that he’d like her back.
We pick up the rest from Wikipedia:
Inside the fort, Olive was surrounded by cheering people.
Olive’s childhood friend Susan Thompson, whom she befriended again at this time, stated many years later that she believed Olive was “grieving” upon her forced return because she had been married to a Mohave man and had given birth to two boys.
Olive, however, denied rumors during her lifetime that she either had been married to a Mohave or had been sexually mistreated by the Yavapai or Mohave. In Stratton’s book, she declared that “to the honor of these savages let it be said, they never offered the least unchaste abuse to me.” However, her nickname, Spantsa, may have meant “rotten womb” and implied that she was sexually active, although historians have argued that the name could have different meanings.[5]: 73–74 [19]
from Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres (University of Oklahoma Press), by Deborah and Jon Lawrence, an interview with Margot Mifflin, an associat professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York who also directs the Arts and Cultire program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism (“Her interest in tatoo art let to her work on the life of Olive Oatman.”):
History, getting towards the source, remains an engaging pastime.
I’ve been to a lot of California but I’ve never had the chance to visit Winterhaven, where we’d find the site of Fort Yuma. If I’m there I will surely check out the Museum of History in Granite:
Amazing if in four millennia the United States and the French Foreign Legion are remembered in equal proportion.
(User Kirs10 took that photo of the pyramid)
Conversations with Grant
Posted: September 7, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition, War of the Rebellion Leave a comment
After his Presidency Ulysses Grant took an around the world tour with his wife and the diplomat, librarian and scholar John Russell Young, who took notes on the trip and published them in a book.
The trip as recorded by Young is interesting but much of it was written for an audience that would never travel overseas. It was a ponderous, two-volume tome of over 1,300 pages with 800 engraved illustrations.
The good folks at Big Byte Press have taken the juiciest parts and compiled them into Conversations With Grant. (Note that this version does not include the famous conversation with Bismarck). I could spend a while with their various reprints of historical memoirs for Kindle. What a service. Here are some items we learn:
after the end of the Civil War, Grant wanted to keep going and invade Mexico:
“When our war ended,” said General Grant, “I urged upon President Johnson an immediate invasion of Mexico. I am not sure whether I wrote him or not, but I pressed the matter frequently upon Mr. Johnson and Mr. Seward [Secretary of State, William Seward]. You see, Napoleon in Mexico was really a part, and an active part, of the rebellion. His army was as much opposed to us as that of Kirby Smith. Even apart from his desire to establish a monarchy, and overthrow a friendly republic, against which every loyal American revolted, there was the active co-operation between the French and the rebels on the Rio Grande which made it an act of war. I believed then, and I believe now, that we had a just cause of war with Maximilian, and with Napoleon if he supported him—with Napoleon especially, as he was the head of the whole business. We were so placed that we were bound to fight him. I sent Sheridan off to the Rio Grande. I sent him post haste, not giving him time to participate in the farewell review. My plan was to give him a corps, have him cross the Rio Grande, join Juarez, and attack Maximilian. With his corps he could have walked over Mexico. Mr. Johnson seemed to favor my plan, but Mr. Seward was opposed, and his opposition was decisive.” The remark was made that such a move necessarily meant a war with France. “I suppose so,” said the General. “But with the army that we had on both sides at the close of the war, what did we care for Napoleon? Unless Napoleon surrendered his Mexican project, I was for fighting Napoleon. There never was a more just cause for war than what Napoleon gave us. With our army we could do as we pleased. We had a victorious army, trained in four years of war, and we had the whole South to recruit from. I had that in my mind when I proposed the advance on Mexico. I wanted to employ and occupy the Southern army. We had destroyed the career of many of them at home, and I wanted them to go to Mexico. I am not sure now that I was sound in that conclusion. I have thought that their devotion to slavery and their familiarity with the institution would have led them to introduce slavery, or something like it, into Mexico, which would have been a calamity. Still, my plan at the time was to induce the Southern troops to go to Mexico, to go as soldiers under Sheridan, and remain as settlers. I was especially anxious that Kirby Smith with his command should go over. Kirby Smith had not surrendered, and I was not sure that he would not give us trouble before surrendering. Mexico seemed an outlet for the disappointed and dangerous elements in the South, elements brave and warlike and energetic enough, and with their share of the best qualities of the Anglo-Saxon character, but irreconcilable in their hostility to the Union. As our people had saved the Union and meant to keep it, and manage it as we liked, and not as they liked, it seemed to me that the best place for our defeated friends was Mexico. It was better for them and better for us. I tried to make Lee think so when he surrendered. They would have done perhaps as great a work in Mexico as has been done in California.” It was suggested that Mr. Seward’s objection to attack Napoleon was his dread of another war. The General said: “No one dreaded war more than I did. I had more than I wanted. But the war would have been national, and we could have united both sections under one flag. The good results accruing from that would in themselves have compensated for another war, even if it had come, and such a war as it must have been under Sheridan and his army—short, quick, decisive, and assuredly triumphant. We could have marched from the Rio Grande to Mexico without a serious battle.
although he thought the first Mexican War was bad:
I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.
…The Mexicans are a good people. They live on little and work hard. They suffer from the influence of the Church, which, while I was in Mexico at least, was as bad as could be. The Mexicans were good soldiers, but badly commanded. The country is rich, and if the people could be assured a good government, they would prosper. See what we have made of Texas and California—empires. There are the same materials for new empires in Mexico.
on Napoleon:
Of course the first emperor was a great genius, but one of the most selfish and cruel men in history. Outside of his military skill I do not see a redeeming trait in his character. He abused France for his own ends, and brought incredible disasters upon his country to gratify his selfish ambition I do not think any genius can excuse a crime like that.
He never wanted to go to West Point, or be in the army at all:
was never more delighted at anything,” said the General, “than the close of the war. I never liked service in the army—not as a young officer. I did not want to go to West Point. My appointment was an accident, and my father had to use his authority to make me go. If I could have escaped West Point without bringing myself into disgrace at home, I would have done so. I remember about the time I entered the academy there were debates in Congress over a proposal to abolish West Point. I used to look over the papers, and read the Congress reports with eagerness, to see the progress the bill made, and hoping to hear that the school had been abolished, and that I could go home to my father without being in disgrace. I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm. I was always glad when a battle was over. I never want to command another army. I take no interest in armies. When the Duke of Cambridge asked me to review his troops at Aldershott I told his Royal Highness that the one thing I never wanted to see again was a military parade. When I resigned from the army and went to a farm I was happy.
The Battle of St. Louis was narrowly avoided:
there was some splendid work done in Missouri, and especially in St. Louis, in the earliest days of the war, which people have now almost forgotten. If St. Louis had been captured by the rebels it would have made a vast difference in our war. It would have been a terrible task to have recaptured St. Louis—one of the most difficult that could be given to any military man. Instead of a campaign before Vicksburg, it would have been a campaign before St. Louis.
He loved Oakland, and Yosemite:
The San Francisco that he had known in the early days had vanished, and even the aspect of nature had changed; for the resolute men who are building the metropolis of the Pacific have absorbed the waters and torn down the hills to make their way.
…
Oakland is a suburb of San Francisco, and is certainly one of the most beautiful cities I have seen in my journey around the world.
…
So much has been written about the Yosemite that I venture but one remark: that having seen most of the sights that attract travelers in India, Asia, and Europe, it stands unparalleled as a rapturous vision of beauty and splendor.
He wanted to live in California:
The only promotion that I ever rejoiced in was when I was made major-general in the regular army. I was happy over that, because it made me the junior major-general, and I hoped, when the war was over, that I could live in California. I had been yearning for the opportunity to return to California, and I saw it in that promotion. When I was given a higher command, I was sorry, because it involved a residence in Washington, which, at that time, of all places in the country I disliked, and it dissolved my hopes of a return to the Pacific coast. I came to like Washington, however, when I knew it.
He had some reservations about Lee as a general:
Lee was of a slow, conservative, cautious nature, without imagination or humor, always the same, with grave dignity. I never could see in his achievements what justifies his reputation. The illusion that nothing but heavy odds beat him will not stand the ultimate light of history. I know it is not true. Lee was a good deal of a headquarters general; a desk general, from what I can hear, and from what his officers say. He was almost too old for active service—the best service in the field. At the time of the surrender he was fifty-eight or fifty-nine and I was forty-three. His officers used to say that he posed himself, that he was retiring and exclusive, and that his headquarters were difficult of access. I remember when the commissioners came through our lines to treat, just before the surrender, that one of them remarked on the great difference between our headquarters and Lee’s. I always kept open house at head-quarters, so far as the army was concerned.
On Shiloh:
“No battle,” said General Grant on one occasion, “has been more discussed than Shiloh-none in my career. The correspondents and papers at the time all said that Shiloh was a surprise-that our men were killed over their coffee, and so on.
There was no surprise about it, except,” said the General, with a smile, “perhaps to the newspaper correspondents. We had been skirmishing for two days before we were attacked. At night, when but a small portion of Buell’s army had crossed to the west bank of the Tennessee River, I was so well satisfied with the result, and so certain that I would beat Beauregard, even without Buell’s aid, that I went in person to each division commander and ordered an advance along the line at four in the morning. Shiloh was one of the most important battles in the war. It was there that our Western soldiers first met the enemy in a pitched battle. From that day they never feared to fight the enemy, and never went into action without feeling sure they would win. Shiloh broke the prestige of the Southern Confederacy so far as our Western army was con-cerned. Sherman was the hero of Shiloh.
He really commanded two divisions-his own and McClernand’s-and proved himself to be a consummate soldier. Nothing could be finer than his work at Shiloh, and yet Shiloh was belittled by our Northern people so that many people look at it as a defeat.
Amazing things happening in the Vertigo Sucks community
Posted: September 3, 2024 Filed under: everyone's a critic, film 1 Comment
The comments coming to life on our 2013 post. To be clear, our problem isn’t so much with Vertigo itself as with film critics who overhype it, hurting rather than helping the cause of old movie appreciation.
A Farewell To Arms (1929)
Posted: August 30, 2024 Filed under: Hemingway, Switzerland Leave a comment
serves as an artifact of a bygone craft
says a quote (NY Times) on the cover of my Hemingway Library copy. I believe that’s referring to this specific edition which includes a lot of Hemingway’s revisions and alternate drafts, but can we escape the idea that maybe the novel itself is a bygone craft?
I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.
so said Fitzgerald, Hemingway frenemy and penis-measuring subject in The Crack-Up.
A Farewell To Arms was made into two different movies. I haven’t seen either of them but I’ve watched the trailers on YouTube and they both appear kinda lame, missing the essence, which comes from the point of view and the style.
This might be the most famous passage from AFTA:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Concrete names are a big feature of the book: Udine, Campoformio, Tagliamento, Cividale, Caporetto. I read the book with a map of Italy at hand but doesn’t it work without it? Near the climax when Frederick Henry must row with Catherine to Switzerland to escape the war he’s given this instruction:
Past Luino, Cannero, Cannobio, Tranzano. You aren’t in Switzerland until you come to Brissago. You have to pass Monte Tamara.
More:
“If you row all the time you ought to be there by seven o’clock in the morning.”
“Is it that far?”
“It’s thirty-five kilometres.”
“How should we go? In this rain we need a compass.”
“No. Row to Isola Bella. Then on the other side of Isola Madre with the wind. The wind will take you to Pallanza. You will see the lights. Then go up the shore.’
“Maybe the wind will change.”
“No,” he said. “This wind will blow like this for three days. It comes straight down from the Mattarone. There is a can to bail with.”
“Let me pay you something for the boat now.”
“No, I’d rather take a chance. If you get through you pay me all you can.”
“All right.”
“I don’t think you’ll get drowned.”
“That’s good.”
“Go with the wind up the lake.”
“All right.” I stepped in the boat.
“Did you leave the money for the hotel?”
“Yes. In an envelope in the room.”
“All right. Good luck, Tenente.”
“Good luck. We thank you many times.”
“You won’t thank me if you get drowned.”
On this read I considered the advice Hemingway gave to Maestro:
MICE: How can a writer train himself?
Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had. Thatʼs a five finger exercise.
Plug that into the scene where Henry gets wounded:
“This isn’t a deep dugout,” Passini said.
“That was a big trench mortar.”
“Yes, sir.”
I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine.
Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuhchuh-chuh-then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood.
In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying “Mama Mia! Oh, mama Mia!” I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed.
Much of the book mirrors Hemingway’s own experience, but in kind of a juiced up way. Hemingway was wounded in the war, but he was an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. Henry is a lieutenant in the Italian army. (Why? “I was in Italy.”) Hemingway has promoted himself. Hemingway in real life had an affair with a nurse, who then broke things off while Hemingway was back in Chicago. (An apparently close to biographical facts version of this story is told by Hemingway in “A Very Short Story.”) In the AFTA version, the nurse falls in love with Henry, escapes with him, is going to have his baby.
The most vivid part of the book is the retreat from Caporetto. Hemingway wasn’t at the retreat from Caporetto, but he’d heard about it.
In Italy when I was at the war there, for one thing that I had seen or that had happened to me, I knew many hundreds of things that had happened to other people who had been in the war in all of its phases. My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password.
I’m reminded of Mike White telling Marc Maron that he tried to make a version of himself that exaggerated his flaws, leaning into his awkward, uncomfortable self, to make Chuck & Buck. Then he saw Good Will Hunting and saw that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had made versions of themselves that were cooler, better, good with kids, getting in fights, exaggeratedly great.
There’s a part of A Farewell to Arms where Tenente Henry rates his own courage:
“They won’t get us,” I said. “Because you’re too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave.”
“They die of course.”
“But only once.”
“I don’t know. Who said that?”
“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?”
“He was probably a coward,” she said. “He knew a great deal of them perhaps.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to see inside the head of the brave”
“Yes. That’s how they keep that way.”
“You’re an authority.”
“You’re right, darling. That was deserved.”
“You’re brave.
“No,” she said. “But I would like to be.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I stand. I’ve been out long enough to know. I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better.”
“What is a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty? It’s awfully impressive.”
“It’s not. It means a mediocre hitter in baseball.”
“But still a hitter,” she prodded me.
“I guess we’re both conceited,” I said. “But you are brave.”
“No. But I hope to be.”
“We’re both brave,” I said. “And I’m very brave when I’ve had a drink.”
A funny part is how many liquor bottles Miss Van Campen finds in Henry’s hospital room:
“Miss Gage looked. They had me look in a glass. The whites of the eyes were yellow and it was the jaundice. I was sick for two weeks with it. For that reason we did not spend a convalescent leave together. We had planned to go to Pallanza on Lago Maggiore. It is nice there in the fall when the leaves turn. There are walks you can take and you can troll for trout in the lake. It would have been better than Stresa because there are fewer people at Pallanza. Stresa is so easy to get to from Milan that there are always people you know. There is a nice village at Pallanza and you can row out to the islands where the fishermen live and there is a restaurant on the biggest island. But we did not go.
One day while I was in bed with jaundice Miss Van Campen came in the room, opened the door into the armoire and saw the empty bottles there. I had sent a load of them down by the porter and I believe she must have seen them going out and come up to find some more. They were mostly vermouth bottles, marsala bottles, capri bottles, empty chianti flasks and a few cognac bottles.
The porter had carried out the large bottles, those that had held vermouth, and the straw-covered chianti flasks, and left the brandy bottles for the last. It was the brandy bottles and a bottle shaped like a bear, which had held kümmel, that Miss Van Campen found.
The bear-shaped bottle enraged her particularly. She held it up, bear was sitting up on his haunches with his paws up, there was a cork in his glass head and a few sticky crystals at the bottom. I laughed.
“It is kümmel,” I said. “The best kümmel comes in those bearshaped bottles. It comes from Russia.”
“Those are all brandy bottles, aren’t they?” Miss Van Campen asked.
“I can’t see them all,” I said. “But they probably are.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“I bought them and brought them in myself,” I said. “I have had Italian officers visit me frequently and I have kept brandy to offer them.’
“You haven’t been drinking it yourself?” she said.
“I have also drunk it myself.”
“Brandy,” she said. “Eleven empty bottles of brandy and that bear liquid.”
“Kümmel.”
“I will send for some one to take them away. Those are all the have?”
“For the moment.”
“And I was pitying you having jaundice. Pity is something that is wasted on you.”
“Thank you.”
(On this reading of the book it was clear that part of why Miss Van Campen is such a priss is she was horny for Henry and upset that he already had a girlfriend.)
Good times in Milan:
Afterward when I could get around on crutches we went to dinner at Biffi’s or the Gran Italia and sat at the tables outside on the floor of the galleria. The waiters came in and out and there were people going by and candles with shades on the tablecloths and after we decided that we liked the Gran Italia best, George, the head-waiter, saved us a table. He was a fine waiter and we let him order the meal while we looked at the people, and the great galleria in the dusk, and each other. We drank dry white capri iced in a bucket; although we tried many of the other wines, fresa, barbera and the sweet white wines. They had no wine waiter because of the war and George would smile ashamedly when I asked about wines like fresa.
“If you imagine a country that makes a wine because it tastes like strawberries,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t it?” Catherine asked. “It sounds splendid.”
“You try it, lady,” said George, “if you want to. But let me bring a little bottle of margaux for the Tenente.”
Biffi’s is still there, it’s not highly rated.
Abruzzo mentioned:
It was dark in the room and the orderly, who had sat by the foot of the bed, got up and went out with him. I liked him very much and I hoped he would get back to the Abruzzi some time. He had a rotten life in the mess and he was fine about it but I thought how he would be in his own country. At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, I had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasants all called you “Don” and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted every day and stopped to eat at the houses of peasants. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D’Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses.”
At one point in the book the narrator is literally side-tracked: his train is diverted to a side track and stopped. The term “sidetracked” I have often heard in writers’ rooms to mean “going off in a side direction,” negative connotation. In the original usage it seems to have meant going nowhere, stopped.
The reason why I reread this book, which I hadn’t looked at since high school: towards the end Henry and Catherine take refuge in Montreux, Switzerland. We were going to Montreux and I wanted to hear what Hemingway had to say about it:
Sometimes we walked down the mountain into Montreux.
There was a path went down the mountain but it was steep and so usually we took the road and walked down on the wide hard road between fields and then below between the stone walls of the vineyards and on down between the houses of the villages along the There were three villages; Chernex, Fontanivent, and the other I forget. Then along the road we passed an old square-built stone château on a ledge on the side of the mountain-side with the terraced fields of vines, each vine tied to a stick to hold it up, the vines dry and brown and the earth ready for the snow and the lake down below flat and gray as steel. The road went down a long grade below the château and then turned to the right and went down very steeply and paved with cobbles, into Montreux.
We did not know any one in Montreux. We walked along beside the lake and saw the swans and the many gulls and terns that flew you came close and screamed while they looked down at when the water. Out on the lake there were flocks of grebes, small and dark, and leaving trails in the water when they swam.
In the town we walked along the main street and looked in the windows of the shops. There were many big hotels that were closed but most of the shops were open and the people were very glad to see us. There was a fine coiffeur’s place where Catherine went to have her hair done. The woman who ran it was very cheerful and the only person we knew in Montreux. While Catherine was there I went up to a beer place and drank dark Munich beer and read the papers. I read the Corriere della Sera and the English and American papers from Paris. All the advertisements were blacked out, supposedly to prevent communication in that way with the enemy. The papers were bad reading. Everything was going very badly everywhere.
How much would Hemingway recognize today’s Montreux, the jazz festival Montreux, Deep Purple/Freddie Mercury/Russian emigre Montreux?
Maybe parts of the old town:
Here is a discussion question (contains a spoiler):
The end of the book is often presented as tragic. Catherine has died giving childbirth. Henry walks alone into the rain. But, is there a very cynical reading that this is actually a relief for Henry? From when he first met Catherine he suspected she might be “crazy.” Now the encumbrance of this woman and a baby he didn’t really want is lifted. Not only that he’s granted a pleasing tragedy to be sentimental about. Is this a male fantasy ending? All the credit, none of the work?
Recall the title of James Mellow’s biography of Hemingway: “A Life Without Consequences.” Is that the fantasy here? The only consequence is valuable experience, worldliness.
As usual with Hemingway the line between sentimental, romantic, and hardboiled, cynical is quite thin.
Reece Duca: fanatically reliant
Posted: August 27, 2024 Filed under: business Leave a commentBob Casey: You talk about the fact that there are a very small number of really exceptional companies. What do you mean by that?
Reece Duca: I rely on a study from–I believe his name’s Hendrick Bessembinder from Arizona State University– and what he did is he looked at every single public company from 1926 to 2016. So he covered a 90 year period. There were a total of 26,000 companies. And of the 26,000 companies, 25 of the 26,000 companies produced returns that are T-bill returns or less. So in other words, there was only 1000 companies that could create excess returns above risk-free T-bills returns.
Now you look at public companies, and you realize that companies can come public and because there’s a lot of incentives in the market, from whoever the constituent is, that their shareholders, their private equity holders, the investment bankers, whatever, you bring the companies public, but how many of them are exceptional companies? How many of them–and the reality is, most of them end up falling into that bucket that Professor Kay said, That’s the gray bucket. That’s the bucket of which, essentially, it’s the efficient market bucket.
And so, there’s only a tiny number of exceptional companies. And you understand that there’s some very specific things that permit exceptional companies to be sustainable decade after decade after decade. And many, many of them have to do with getting to the point where your customers are fanatically reliant, whether it’s a consumer product or whether it’s a business product, but your customers are fanatically reliant on what you deliver to them. If it’s a consumer product, it’s somebody is hooked on Coke, and they’re gonna drink coke come hell or high water. If it’s a business product, it gets locked into the workflow of the business, it’s something that your customers are ecstatic about. And that just essentially codified to us that what we needed to do, if we were going to have concentrated positions, we basically had to have super, super high confidence. And you had to find exceptional companies.
source. I was up in Santa Barbara so naturally reading about the local investment titan.
Glimpses of Robert F. Kennedy (Senior)
Posted: August 25, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon Leave a comment
(source: MO 2021.4.249 at the JFK Library)
from Herb Caen’s column, January 5, 1968:
At 12:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was standing curbside on Sacramento St. near Montgomery, dripping charisma all over the place. He was chatting with two of his henchmen (Democrats have henchmen, Republicans have aides) and his mere presence had an electrifying effect. Motorists slowed down to gape at him. A chubby, giggling Japanese waitress emerged from a coffee shop to wait, shivering, for an autograph.
An elderly Japanese in a black overcoat asked for one, too (you know how these Easterners stick together). Four men emerging from the Red Knight suddenly stopped, transfixed, to stare at him as they picked their teeth with toothpicks. The Senator glanced at them with a tentative smile. They moved on, still picking their teeth.
“Lunch,” he said, jaywalking toward Jack’s with a young henchman, Peter Edelman. We went upstairs to Private Dining Room One, a one-windowed cubicle barely big enough for three. The Senator-it’s hard to refrain from calling him “Bobby” although his friends call him “Bob” —stared at the buzzer on the wall. “To summon the girls,” I said. He looked nervous till I explained that it USED to be possible to take girls upstairs at Jack’s. “Now then,” I went on, “let’s light up cigars and nominate a Vice-President” (I forgot to tell you, I’m great fun at parties). He smiled a tiny one. The waiter whispered nervously in my ear: “How do I address him?” “Senator,” I whispered back. “Sir,” said the waiter, clearing his throat, “would you like a drink?” The Senator ordered a beer-“Coors.” …
In casual conversation, the celebrated toughness isn’t apparent. In 90 minutes, he made only one bitter remark—while talking about an Air Force decision (made over McNamara’s objec-tions) that cost us nine planes in Vietnam. He went on to the “futil-ity® of bombing North Vietnam, and recalled how, during World War II, German production had actually increased under heavy bombing. “The Air Force,” he snapped, “is never right.”…
We ordered fresh cracked crab. “This is wonderful,” he enthused.
With a glance out the window: “What a beautiful city.” Helping himself to more mayonnaise: “I could sit here all afternoon, eating cracked crab.” He asked about Joe Alioto and (a note of concern here how Eugene McCarthy is doing in California, but he wouldn’t be drawn out on the subject. Hunters Point came up and I mentioned that Eastern newsmen were always saying that our slums are garden spots compared to theirs. He nodded: “It’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York.”
“If the war is still on when your oldest son reaches the draft age,” I said, “what will you tell him?” He took evasive action. “Well, we’d talk about it, all about it, and then I guess it would be his deci-sion.” Then he told, with apparent approval, an anecdote about a friend of his who had been “a terrific hawk” before he went to Viet-ham and who is now “a terrific dove.” “He has an 18-year-old son,” Kennedy went on, “and he told me ‘If that kid doesn’t burn his draft card, I’ll do it for him!'”
***
We stepped outside and he was immediately engulfed by auto-graph-seekers. “Senator,” somebody called out, “your helicopter is waiting”— just like in the movies, and he drove away with a wave and that shy smile. Would I vote for him for President? Well, a man who likes our cracked crab and thinks it’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York …
Steve Shapiro took these photos:
They’re sometimes cited as being from RFK’s presidential campaign, but the one above is from a 1966 trip to California, where he did some campaigning with Pat Brown.
That one New York, Senate campaign.
I found them in Shapiro’s book, American Edge.
California again. That must be the Berkeley Greek Theater. Here’s how The New York Times reported on that speech (front page):
Pat Brown lost that election to Ronald Reagan.
From Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass:
(source)
from a Miller Center interview with Reagan campaign aide Stuart Spencer in November, 2001:
I did a thing at Annenberg School last week. It’s a journalism school at University of Southern California communications center. Ed Guttman is involved with it. He was one of Bobby’s guys, and he was there that night. I said to Ed, Maybe you don’t want to answer this question, but one thing that’s always in my mind: politically, why did Bobby, once he became Attorney General, decide to go after the people his father had put together to finance some of this effort? It was a lot of the hoods and Chicago guys that he’d done business with when he was a bootlegger. There’s been references to it, but did Bobby not know that this transpired? Or did Bobby say to his dad, The hell with it, this is good politics. The hell with it—I believe this—these are bad people. He went right to the heart of what thirty years before were Joe Kennedy’s business associates.
There are conspiracy theories out there that cost him his life. I don’t know if they’re true or not, but God, that’s a fascinating triangle. He wouldn’t answer the question. He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen that before in our life. It’s like you have the support of the National Rifle Association or the National Environmental Council and you get into power and you gut them. I’ve never seen that before. But he went after them tooth and toenail.
(source: https://www.loc.gov/item/98509265/ )
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Bobby Western talks to his lawyer, Kline. Kline gets going on the Kennedys (the bold is mine, long but intriguing):
You didnt have some connection with the Kennedys.
No.
I worked with Bobby in Chicago in the early sixties. Briefly. We were working with a guy named Ed Hicks who was trying to get free elections for the Chicago cabdrivers. Basically Kennedy was a mor-alist. Before long he was to have an amazing roster of enemies and he prided himself on knowing who they were and what they were up to. Which he didnt, of course. By the time his brother was shot a couple of years later they were mired up in a concatenation of plots and schemes that will never be sorted out. At the head of the list was killing Castro and if that failed actually invading Cuba. In the end I dont think that would have happened but it’s a sort of bellwether for all the trouble they were in. I always wondered if there might not have been a moment there when Kennedy realized he was dying that he didnt smile with relief. After old man Kennedy had his stroke the Kennedys for some reason felt that it would be all right to go after the Mafia. Ignoring the longstanding deal the old man had cut with them. No idea what they were thinking. All the time Jack is schtupping Sam Giancana’s girl-friend—a lady named Judith Campbell. Although in all fairness-quaint term—I think that Jack saw her first. Or one of his pimps did. Some guy named Sinatra.
What are you going to say about the Kennedys? There’s no one like them. A friend of mine was at a houseparty out on Martha’s Vineyard one evening and when he got to the house Ted Kennedy was greeting people at the door. He was dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit and he was drunk.
My friend said: That’s quite an outfit you’ve got on there, Senator. And Kennedy said yes, but I can get away with it. My friend-who’s a Washington lawyer-told me that he had never understood the Ken-nedys. He found them baffling. But he said that when he heard those words the scales fell from his eyes. He thought that they were probably engraved on the family crest. However you say it in Latin. Anyway, I’ve never understood why there is no monument anywhere to Mary Jo Kopechne. The girl Ted left to drown in his car after he drove it off a bridge. If it were not for her sacrifice that lunatic would have been President of the United States. My guess is that with the exception of Bobby they were just a pack of psychopaths. I suppose it was Bobby’s hope that he could somehow justify his family. Even though he must have known that was impossible. There wasnt a copper cent in the coffers that funded the whole enterprise that wasnt tainted. And then they all died.
Murdered, for the most part. Maybe not Shakespeare. But not bad Dostoevsky.
Castro was no part of this.
No. In the end as it turned out he wasnt.
When he took over the island he threw Santo Trafficante in jail and told him that he was going to be shot as an enemy of the people. So of course Trafficante just said:
How much? You hear different figures. Forty million. Twenty million. It was probably closer to ten. But Trafficante wasnt happy about it. The Mafia had a long history of running the casinos for Ba-tista. Castro should have treated them bet-ter. The Mafia. He’s lucky to be alive. The odd thing is that Santo ran three casinos in Cuba for another eight or ten years after that. Language is important. People forget that Trafficante’s first language is Spanish.
Anyway, he and Marcello have run the Southeast from Miami to Dallas for years.
And the net worth of this enterprise is staggering. At its height over two billion a year. Bobby Kennedy wouldnt have deported Marcello without Jack’s okay, but by now the whole business was beyond disentanglement. The CIA hated the Ken-nedys and were working at cutting themselves loose from the administration al-together, but the notion that they killed Kennedy is stupid. And if Kennedy was going to take the CIA apart piece by piece as he promised to do he’d have had to start about two administrations sooner. By his time it was way too late. The CIA hated Hoover too and Hoover in turn hated the Kennedys and people just assumed that Hoover was in bed with the Mafia but the truth was the Mafia had endless files of Hoover as a transvestite-dressed in ladies’ underwear-so that was a Mexican standoff that had been in play for years.
There’s more to it of course. But if you said that Bobby had gotten his brother-whom he adored —killed, I would have to say that was pretty much right. The CIA hauled Carlos off to the jungles of Guatemala and flew away waving back at him. Hard to imagine what they were thinking. They left him there-where he held a counterfeit passport-and his lawyer finally showed up and then the two of them were frogmarched off into the jungles of El Salvador and left to fashion new lives for them-selves. Standing there in the heat and the mud and the mosquitoes. Dressed in wool suits. They hiked some twenty miles until they came to a village. And, God be praised, a telephone. When he got back to New Orleans he called a meeting at Churchill Farms-his country place-and he was foaming at the mouth over Bobby Kennedy. He looked at the people in the room-I think there were eight of them-and he said: I’m going to whack the little bastard. And it got very quiet. Everybody knew it was a serious meeting. There was nothing on the table to drink but water.
And finally somebody said: Why dont we whack the big bastard? And that was that.
I’m not sure I understand.
If you killed Bobby then you had a really pissed off JFK to deal with. But if you killed JFK then his brother went pretty quickly from being the Attorney General of the United States to being an unemployed lawyer.
How do you know all this?
Right. The thing about the Kennedys was that they had no way to grasp the in-appeasable war-ethic of the Sicilians. The Kennedys were Irish and they thought that you won by talking. They didnt really even understand that this other thing existed. They used abstractions to make political speeches. The people. Poverty. Ask not what your country blah blah blah.
They didnt understand that there were still people alive who actually believed in things like honor. They’d never heard Joe Bonanno on the subject. That’s what makes Kennedy’s book so preposterous.
Although in all fairness there’s some question as to whether or not he ever even read it. I’m having the chicken grande.
All right.
You want to pick the wine?
Sure.
Michael Herr talking about the Kennedys in Las Vegas in The Big Room;
Because even then his kid brother was around like a mongoose on Benzedrine, watching, keeping tabs and running the connections down to their root-ends, to see exactly who was friends with who, and who to play up, or down, or chop completely. The older brother’s playground was the younger brother’s nightmare. Still, the action was invigorating. It’s possible that more of the New Frontier was inspired here at the Sands than back on the Massachusetts bedrock or looking dreaming out of the office window at the Jefferson Memorial.
One more from Brother Edward:
Eleven pages a week
Posted: August 24, 2024 Filed under: Hollywood, the California Condition, writing, writing advice from other people Leave a comment
In one of my Hollywood books I read that writers in the studio system were expected to write eleven pages a week.
Eleven pages, seems very reasonable. Especially if we are talking script pages which have a lot of white on them.
Now you may have to write thirty-three pages to produce eleven good ones, but still.
I went looking for where I found this information but I couldn’t locate it in Schatz, Genius of the System, or Friedfrich, City of Nets, or Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, or Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, or Pirie, Anatomy of the Movies, or Rosen, Hollywood, or Dardis, Some Time in the Sun, or Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory or even Solomon, William Faulkner The Screenwriter. Not to say it’s in one of those, I just couldn’t retrieve it.
Using a Google Books search I did find reference to an eleven pages expectation:
That’s in Mark Wheeler, Hollywood: Politics and Society, which I’ve never read.
Cool cover!
If you reliably produce eleven pages a week your odds at some success are high.
Eleven pages a week will be my goal when I return from vacation at the end of August.
(that Faulkner typing pic seems to be from Time-Life Getty Images, found it on Reddit).
Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency
Posted: August 18, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a comment
It’s time to revisit George Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency.
I can’t do better as a summary than this 1970 review by William C. Spragens in The Western Political Quarterly found on JSTOR:
The edition I read is updated for the Reagan administration. Some choice passages:
In talking to friends about the presidency, I have found the hardest point to explain is that setbacks often impel presidents to redouble their efforts without changing their policies. This seems to be perversity because very few of us have the opportunity to make decisions of colossal consequences. When our projects go wrong, it is not too difficult for most of us to shrug our shoulders, cut our losses, and take off on a new tack. Our egos may be bruised. But we can live with that. It is a different thing altogether when we can give orders that can lead to large-scale death and destruction or even to economic devastation. Such a situation brings into play psychological factors that are virtually unconquerable.
Suppose, for example, that a president gives the military an order that leads to the deaths of several soldiers in combat. Can any human being who did such a thing say to himself: “Those men are dead because I was a God-damned fool! Their blood is on my hands.” The likely thought is: “Those men died in a noble cau and we must see to it that their sacrifice was not in vain.”
This, of course, could well be the “right” answer. But even if it is the wrong answer, it is virtually certain to be the one that will be accepted. Therefore, more men are sent and then more and then more. Every death makes a pull out more unacceptable.
Furthermore, when a large amount of blood has been spilled, a point can be reached where popular opposition to a policy will actually spur a president to redoubled effort in its behalf. This is due to the aura of history that envelops every occupant of the Oval Office. He lives in a museum, a structure dedicated to preserving the greatness of the American past. He walks the same halls paced by Lincoln waiting feverishly for news from Gettysburg or Richmond. He dines with silver used by Woodrow Wilson as he pondered the proper response to the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. He has staring at him constantly portraits of the heroic men who faced the same excruciating problems in the past that he is facing in the present. It is only a matter of time until he feels himself a member of an exclusive community whose inhabitants never finally leave the mansion. When stories leaked out that Richard Nixon was “talking to the pictures” in the White House, it was taken by many as evidence that he was cracking up. To anyone who has had the opportunity to observe a president at close range, it is perfectly normal conduct.
(This may be a problem beyond presidents. Do we all have a tendency to double down on our most consequential decisions, even if the results are obviously disastrous?)
The life of the monarch:
As noted, an essential characteristic of monarchy is untouchability. No one touches a king unless he is specifically invited to do so. No one thrusts unpleasant thoughts upon a king unless he is ordered to do so, and even then he does so at his own peril. The response to unpleasant information has been fixed by a pattern with a long history. Every courtier recalls, either literally or instinctively, what happened to the messenger who brought Peter the Great the news of the Russian defeat by Charles XII at the Battle of Narva. The courtier was strangled by decree of the czar. A modern-day monarch-at least a monarch in the White House-cannot direct the placing of a noose around a messenger’s throat for bringing him bad news. But his frown can mean social and economic strangulation. Only a very brave or a very foolish person will suffer that frown.
Some ways in which this effect takes shape:
In retrospect, it is almost impossible to believe that John Kennedy embarked on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs venture. It was poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly executed, and undertaken with grossly inadequate knowledge. But anyone who has ever sat in on a White House council can easily deduce what happened without knowing 34 THE I any facts other than those which appeared in the public press. White House councils are not debating matches in which ideas emerge from the heated exchanges of participants. The council centers around the president, himself, to whom everyone addresses his observations.
The first strong observations to attract the favor of the president become subconsciously the thoughts of everyone in the room. The focus of attention shifts from a testing of all concepts to a groping for means of overcoming the difficulties. A thesis that could not survive an undergraduate seminar in a liberal arts college becomes accepted doctrine, and the only question is not whether it should be done but how it should be done.
Reedy on White House aides as courtiers, and how Vietnam could’ve happened (he was there!):
Unfortunately, the problem is far deeper than the machinations of courtiers. They do exist in large numbers but most of their energies are absorbed in grabbing for personal favors and building havens of retreat for the future. Generally speaking, they play the role in the White House of the court jesters of the Middle Ages and may even be useful in that they give the chief executive badly needed relaxation. Paradoxically , it is the advisers who are not sycophantic, who are not looking for snug harbors, and who do feel the heavy weight of responsibility who are the most likely to play the reinforcing role. It is precisely because they recognize the ultimacy of the office that they react the way they do.
However they feel, the burden of decision is on another man. Therefore, however much they may argue against a policy at its beginning stages, once it is set they become “good soldiers” and devote their time to making it work.
Those who disagree strongly tend to remain in the structure in the vain hope they can change it coupled with the certainty that they would become totally ineffectual if they left.
This is the bitter lesson we should have learned from Vietnam. In the early days of that conflict, it might have been possible to pull out. My most vivid memories are the meetings early in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in which his advisers (virtually all holdovers from the Kennedy administration) were looking to him for guidance on how to proceed. He, on the other hand, felt an obligation to continue the Kennedy policies and he was looking to them for indications of what steps would carry out such a course. I will always believe that someone misread a signal from the other side with the resultant commitment to full-scale fighting. After that, all the resources of the federal government were devoted to advising the president on how to do what it was thought he wanted to do.
Reedy on the White House as Versailles:
Sir Thomas Malory seems to have missed the true significance of King Arthur’s Round Table. As long as his knights ate at it every day under King Arthur’s watchful eye and lived in his palace where he could call them by shouting through the corridors, they were his to ensure that the kingdom would be ruled the way he wanted it ruled. Louis XIV did not build the Palace of Versailles as a tourist attraction but as a huge dormitory where he could keep tabs on the nobles who were disposed to become insubordinate if they spent all their time on their own estates. Peter the Great downgraded the boyars whose power rested on their distance from Moscow and brought the reins of government into his own hands by making all the top officials dependent on him. And the Turkish sultans reached the ultimate in the creation of personal force by raising young Christian boys captured in combat as Janissaries who lived solely to defend the ruler.
Reedy has a great chapter titled “What Does The President Do?”:
A president is many things. Basically, however, his functions fall into two categories. First, and perhaps most important, he is the symbol of the legitimacy and the continuity of our government. It is only through him that power can be exercised effectively-but only until opposition forces rally themselves to counter it. Second, he is the political leader of our nation. He must resolve the policy questions that will not yield to quantitative, empirical analysis and then persuade enough of his countrymen of the rightness of his decisions so that they are carried out without disrupting the fabric of society.
At the present time, neither of these functions can be carried out without the president.
He notes that the idea of the President “working” is confusing:
Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, there is far less to the presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye. The psychological burdens are heavy, even crushing, but no president ever died of overwork and it is doubtful that any ever will. The chief executive can, of course, fill his working hours with as much motion as he desires. The “crisis” days (the American hostages held in Iran or the attempted torpedoing of American navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin) keep office lights burning into the midnight hours. But in terms of actual administration, the presidency is pretty much what the president wants to make of it. He can delegate the “work” to subordinates and reserve for himself only the powers of decision as did Eisenhower, or he can insist on maintaining tight control over every minor detail, like Lyndon Johnson.
Presidents on vacation:
It is impossible to take a day and divide it with any sure sense of confidence into “working hours” and “nonworking hours.” But it is apparent from the large volume of words that have been written about presidents that in the past few decades, the only one who seemed able to relax completely was Eisenhower. He was capable of taking a vacation for the sake of enjoying himself, and he disdained any suggestion that he was acting otherwise.
Franklin Roosevelt apparently had little or no time to devote to relaxation. He was notorious for using his dinner hours as a means of lobbying bills through Congress. Once Harry Truman had made a decision he was able to put it out of his mind and proceed to another problem. Furthermore, he too disdained any pretensions of working when he wasn’t. But those who were close to him made it clear that he really didn’t know what to do with himself when he took a holiday. His favorite resort was Key West, Florida, where he would “go fishing” but he would hold a rod only if someone put it in his hands, and about all he really enjoyed was the sunshine and the opportunity to take long walks.
John Kennedy was described as a “compulsive reader” who could not pass up any written document regardless of its relevance to his problems or its contents. Many of his intimates reported that any spare time would find him restlessly prowling the White House looking for something to read. Lyndon Johnson anticipated with horror long weekends in which there was nothing to do. He usually spent Saturday afternoons in lengthy conferences with newspaper reporters who were hastily summoned from their homes to spend hours listening to Johnson expound the thesis that his days were so taken up with the nation’s business that he had no time to devote to friends.
The real misery of the average presidential day is the haunting knowledge that decisions have been made on incomplete information and inadequate counsel. Tragically, the information must always be incomplete and the counsel always inadequate, for in the arena of human activity in which a president operates there are no quantitative answers. He must deal with those problems for which the computer offers no solution, those disputes where rights and wrongs are so inextricably mixed that the righting of every wrong creates a new wrong, those divisions which arise out of differences in human desires rather than differences in the available facts, those crisis moments in which action is imperative and cannot wait upon orderly consideration. He has no guideposts other than his own philosophy and intuition, and if he is devoid of either, no one can substitute.
Reedy summarizes something Robert Caro goes into some detail about (how did an obscure Texas congressman obtain power?):
The office is at such a lonely eminence that no standard rules of the political game govern the approaches to it. Johnson told fascinating stories about the tactics he had used, while still a member of the House, to extract favors from FDR. He made a practice of driving Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, to the White House every morning. This gave him an opportunity to drop words in her ear, give her memoranda knowing she would pass them on to the “boss,” and learn personal characteristics that he could exploit at a later date. He once filed away in his memory the knowledge that Roosevelt was passionately interested in the techniques of dam construction. A few months later, he wangled his way into the White House with a series of huge photographs of dams that had been supplied to him by an architectural firm in his home district. Roosevelt became so absorbed in comparing the pictures that he absentmindedly okayed a rural electrification project that Johnson wanted but that had been held up by the Rural Electrification Administration for a couple of years.
None of this makes me very sanguine about either Presidential candidate, but over here at Helytimes we consider it better to look truth in the face, best we can, no?
Martin Anderson, a Reagan aide, endorsed the book in a Miller Center interview:
There’s a wonderful book called The Twilight of the Presidency by Reedy. You ever read that?
Young
George Reedy.Anderson
In which he says, If you try to understand the White House—most people make the mistake, they try to understand the White House like a corporation or the military and how does it look, with the hierarchy. He said, The only way to understand it, it’s like a palace court. And if you can understand a palace court, then you understand the White House. I think that’s probably pretty accurate. But those are the things that happen. So anyway, I didn’t go back. So I missed Watergate.Asher
Darn.
Paul’s Case by Willa Cather
Posted: August 17, 2024 Filed under: writing Leave a commentNew York has certainly inspired its share of coming-to-the-city adventures. One of the most striking is a short story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case,” which first appeared in The Troll Garden in 1905. Paul, a high school student in Pittsburgh, is gawky and awkward, with a “certain hysterical brilliancy” in his eyes. A fantasist and a dreamer, he is hopelessly out of sync with the life around him—but he has neither the graces nor the gifts that might enable him to escape from the constricting middle class life on suburban Cordelia Street, where he lives with his father, a widower, and there is nothing but “the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a home permeated by kitchen odours.” Paul comes alive only in the evenings, when he works as an usher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, wears a uniform that makes him feel handsome, guides elegant people to their seats, and listens to the music and experiences a “zest for life.” Paul is not exactly a music lover; it’s the enveloping glamour of the theater that holds him. He loves to visit backstage with the artists; “the stage entrance of the theater was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.”
But Paul’s father, a dim figure constantly urging on his son the example of more enterprising young men, becomes increasingly enraged by his son’s behavior. He pulls him out of the school he barely seems to be attending, forbids the theater to employ him or to let him through the door, and puts him to work at the offices of Denny & Carson. And suddenly Cather jumps forward, to Paul sitting on a train. He has stolen a thousand dollars in cash that he was supposed to deposit in the bank for his employer, and he is on his way to New York.
Arriving in the city, Paul buys expensive clothes, fine luggage, “silver mounted brushes and a scarf-pin” at Tiffany’s. He takes a luxurious suite at the Waldorf, and for a few days he exults in his sitting room, which he fills with flowers, in the perfectly appointed bathroom, in the elegance of the hotel dining room, in carriage rides up Fifth Avenue. He knows that it will only be a matter of days before his crime is discovered and he is tracked down. All over New York, the snow is falling. Paul’s “chief greediness,” Cather writes, “lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.” As soon as he “entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music,” he was “lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient.” He exults in “the glare and glitter about him.” He is cosseted in a magical world. And when he is down to his last hundred dollars, he knows the game is up. He leaves New York, lies down on a train track in New Jersey, and lets the end come.
In Cather’s story, New York is less a place that a person can actually inhabit than a kind of luxurious illusionist’s trick, centering on the Waldorf and the city avenues, and united by the snow that softens the views out the windows and carpets everything. In “Paul’s Case” New York is not a living city so much as it is a fantasy, a stage set.
from this great 2001 essay, “The Adolescent City,” by Jed Perl.
The pages in Balzac’s Lost Illusions in which the young writer Lucien Chardon comes to Paris and wanders through the overwhelming elegance of the city constitute one of the greatest descriptions in all of literature of the tidal pull of urban life, with its intoxicating strangeness. Visual artists have generally shied away from such a theme, which necessitates unfolding, multiplying revelations, though there are a few exceptions, the greatest of which is probably Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s vast City of Good Government, painted on a wall in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-1339. Here relations between the city and the country center around the gate of Siena, where elegant aristocrats going out for a day of hunting pass country yokels coming into town with their livestock.
Photo shoot
Posted: August 13, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
observed in LA
The Didion Breakfast
Posted: August 13, 2024 Filed under: food 1 Comment
source. sometimes I consume the fruit and coffee breakfast.
somewhere in an old book I read a lengthy 19th century style description of how people in the tropics need to have a languid, light breakfast of fruits and sweets for their constitutions to function properly in the climate. Do places have appropriate breakfasts?
Coach Nick Saban having two Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies for breakfast every morning (“what you do every day matters”), that’s another breakfast that sticks in the mind.
I Cover The Waterfront
Posted: August 10, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Here’s the opening:
Chapter One: The Damned and the Lost
I have been here so long that even the sea gulls must recognize me. They must pass the word along about me from generation to generation, from egg to egg.
Former friends of mine, members of my old university class, acquaintances my own age, have gone out to earn their 6000 a year. They have become managers, they have become editors, they have become artists. Yet here am I, what I was six years ago, a waterfront reporter.
True, I am called a good waterfront reporter in this city, as if the humiliation were not already great enough in itself. I shudder at the compliment, yet should feel fortunate in a way that so far I have escaped the word veteran. When I am called not only the best waterfront reporter but also the veteran waterfront reporter, then for sure all hope is dissolved. And I need look ahead then, only to that day when the company presents me with a fountain pen and a final check.
I am nearing 28, and should I by accident be invited to a home where literature is discussed, or styles, or Europe, the best I could do would be tocrawl into the backyard. There I could sit tossing pebbles into the fountain until the hostess found me out. If she compelled me to come back into the house and join the conversation, my topics would have to be of swordfishing, or of lobstering, or of hunting sardines in the dark of the moon, or of fleet gunnery practice, or of cotton shipments. The predicament has passed beyond my control. I am one of those creatures who remain permanent, who stay in one place, that successful men on returning home may see for the happiness of comparison. I am of the damned and the lost, and yet I do know more than I did six years ago when I first came here, a graduate in liberal arts.
Six thousand a year. That was 1932, using the BLS inflation calculator that’s $131,821.68 today. Further investigation into the existential mystery of San Diego led me to this one.
Max Miller was waterfront reporter for San Diego’s third best newspaper in the 1930s. He worked out of a studio above the tugboat office. He remembers meeting the passengers from the big ocean liners:
He remembers Charles Lindbergh, before he was famous:
He remembers breaking some tough news:
How that one ends:
I Cover The Waterfront became a song, and a movie apparently not really based on the book.
[Miller] lived most of his life at 5930 Camino de la Costa in La Jolla, just south of Windansea (from his hillside home, he could hear the Point Loma lighthouse foghorn).
Zillow estimates that house would now cost around $16 million.
The San Diego Reader (oxymoron?)has the gossip on Miller:
But Morgan has a different interpretation. “I Cover the Waterfront was widely said among publishers to have been rewritten by a very beautiful literary agent in New York who was in love with Max at the time,” says Morgan. “It was a nasty allegation, but it was a better book than any he wrote subsequently. I tend to believe the rumor of the publishing trade.”
It’s possible. It’s also possible he was traumatized by World War Two. His title for his book about La Jolla, The Town With The Funny Name, doesn’t seem particularly inspired (is it really that funny a name? Right here in California we have Needles, Weedpatch, etc.) Or maybe he just had one good one in him.
they work well until they catastrophically come off the rails
Posted: August 8, 2024 Filed under: business Leave a commentKEN GRIFFIN: “I don’t know what that moment will be, when there is an auction that goes awry, or when the markets become dislocated. Financial markets, generally speaking, work very well until they catastrophically come off the rails. You don’t necessarily get a lot of warning that there’s about to be a big event. The crash of ’87 is a great case study. That day, I woke up, I was in my dorm room trading then, and the stories of the day were about a small skirmish in the Middle East, of frankly no consequence, and the health of First Lady Nancy Reagan. And yet, we ended that day with the stock market down twenty-some percent, and a number of American financial institutions literally on life support or near death. It happened in one day. One day. There was no big story that morning that would make you think that that day might of been the end of the U.S. capital markets as we knew them. There was no warning. And so I worry that the debt crisis may have a similar construct. That there’ll simply be a day where a major auction fails, and then you see a panic start to brew in the Treasury market. And the question will be, how fast will the Fed intervene? What panic will that induce? Because government intervention under duress often creates more panic. And then do we see a flood of treasuries coming back into the market from holders around the world?
Bloomberg Live (YouTube) – May 14, 2024. That’s from Santangel’s Value Links.
Reminded of McMurtry on stampedes and crowd behavior.
Lyn Alden had this:
In the United States, there has been quite a big gap between haves and have-nots with this fiscal and monetary mix. Those who don’t have much assets, like mainly a house, have been largely locked out of owning assets. Meanwhile, those who have assets and who have locked in those low rates, are generally in great shape, save for the fact that many of them are now kind of “stuck” in their existing home. And since the top 50% of consumers spend a lot more than the bottom 50% of consumers, the fact that the top half is doing pretty well has been a strong engine for overall consumption.
strong engine for overall consumption.
Gats
Posted: August 4, 2024 Filed under: food, the California Condition Leave a comment
saw someone on X (formerly “Twitter”) raise the old red flag of The Great Gatsby isn’t that good actually so I took it off the shelf.
That’s how it starts. (Struck me that my edition, the one we read in school I believe, has no introduction foreward or any of that bog you down scholarly junk at the front.* Your enjoyment of classic books will improve we believe if you always skip those and plunge right in. You can always come back later.)
If you’re like me you first read this book in school. It is a great summer book. It’s even set at the seaside.
Been meaning to document some items from Sheilah Graham’s The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps now is the time. Their relationship was tumultuous:
I knew that “Portrait of a Prostitute” was also a drunken commentary. He must have written it on the photograph after the first of our two bad quarrels in 1939 when he was drinking so heavily. We had struggled for his gun, I had slapped him—the first person in his life ever to do so-and as I walked out, I had delivered a harsh exit line, “Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t raise myself from the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.”
When they met:
When I first met Scott on July 14, 1937, neither of us was looking for a relationship of such intensity. He had too many other responsibilities. I was engaged to the Marquess of Donegall-who died recently-and planning a New Year’s Eve wedding to be followed by a honeymoon cruise around the world. Part of the unwritten marriage contract was that I would give Don an heir as soon as possible, and a doctor had told him that the swaying of a ship was conducive to pregnancy.
Zelda:
To hold Scott on a string when the engagement was off and to continue to make him jealous, Zelda invented an “engagement” to the famed golfer Bobby Jones. Scott always believed that she had promised to marry Mr. Jones. He told me this with conviction. But when Andrew Turnbull was writing his biography of Scott, he questioned the golfer, who denied even knowing Zelda.
later:
I think their lives also suffered from Zelda’s increasing desperation as to what to do with herself. She had no idea of being a wife shortly after they were married Scott discovered all his dirty shirts piled up in a closet-and, although she tried in the times of sanity, still less of being a mother
Scott’s diet:
When I think now of the abuse that Scott inflicted on himself, it’s a miracle that he lived as long as he did. Aside from his drinking there was, drunk or sober, the incessant smoking and also the reliance, when not drinking, on coffee and dozens and dozens of bottles a day of Coca-Cola. He would line up the Cokes all around the walls of his office at M-G-M and announce, “I’ll drink these up, and when they’re gone I’ll go back to beer.” Dr. Richard Hoffman, who had examined him in New York, told my Beloved Infidel collaborator, Gerold Frank, that Scott drank-both the liquor and the Cokes-be-cause he had the reverse of diabetes, an insufficiency of sugar in the blood. Is this true for all who drink unwisely?
This is when they were healthy:
For the first time for both of us, we were leading average lives, working by day, reading or walking in the evening after the same dinner prepared for us every night by our shared housekeeper, a thin T-bone steak (at 35 cents a pound!), a baked potato, peas, and a grapefruit jelly.
…
I would not have wanted to examine Scott’s inside, with not only all the above but also the strange food that he ate-sometimes just fudge and crab soup, in that order. He was eating a little more in that last year, lots of cookies, candy, and cake to compensate for the sugar in the alcohol.
But there were nice times too:
lunches at the elegant Vendome Restaurant in Hollywood, at the Brown Derby in Hollywood or in Beverly Hills, and our dancing in the evenings, particularly in the first year, at the Trocadero. Scott danced the collegiate style of the time-heads close together, rears at a thirty-three-degree angle.
Looking back, I marvel at what a full, active life we had. We also went away together for weekends, especially in the first two years before Scott was so hard up—to Santa Barbara, La Jolla, Del Monte, Monterey, over the south U.S. border into Mexico, and to the San Francisco Fair. I loved those long drives with Scott, even though he drove at twenty to twenty-five miles an hour.
“Del Monte,” a resort in Monterey that now belongs to the Navy. Monterey on the old roads before the 5 is about 331 miles away. At twenty five miles an hour that trip must’ve taken like thirteen hours. And that’s if you don’t stop every hour for more Cokes.
*in writing that sentence I got to wondering what those obstacles the Germans and their various conscripts) set up on the D-Day beaches were called. You know the ones I’m talking about? Turns out they are called hedgehogs.
What is San Diego?
Posted: July 30, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
From time to time fortune takes me down the coast to the city of San Diego, and I’m always left a little stumped. What is this place? What is distinctly San Diego? If it has a bent it is slightly to the right, somewhat fratty/military. Top Gun, Navy SEALs. Retirees. IPAs (although those are everywhere now). The California burrito. What else? We’re talking about the eighth most populous city in the United States. Pleasant living is on offer for sure, sunshine and surf. The people that like it love it. But what does it have to show for itself?
Here’s the WPA guide to California on the city, as it was circa 1939:
SAN DIEGO (0-822 alt., 147,995 pop.), the oldest Spanish settlement in California, is in the extreme lower left-hand corner of the United States. Although only 16 miles north of the Mexican boundary, it is completely American. Its landlocked natural harbor is headquarters for the Eleventh Naval District, for marine and coast guard bases, and home port for a fleet of tuna clippers and fishing smacks manned by Portuguese and Italian fishermen.
The city has much of the easygoing spirit of Spanish days, and people dress and live for comfort. Life moves at a modulated pace, particularly because of the large number of retired and elderly persons.
The downtown area, dominated by a group of tall buildings, is small for a city of this size; Broadway, the main artery, runs from the waterfront due east and divides the city into distinct sections. Although liners no longer call at the port Max Miller wrote of in I Cover the Waterfront, freighters and tramp steamers dock here regularly. Tuna clippers bring in big hauls of huge fish, and sport fishing parties return with catches of yellowtail, barracuda, and swordfish. Navy shoreboats run between ships at anchor and the piers.
South of Broadway many plain buildings of the 1870’s and gingerbread structures of the 1890’s are still in use. Markets and grocery stores along Twelfth Avenue display fruit and vegetables in pyramids and cascades. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues have taverns with three-piece jazz bands, shooting galleries, inexpensive movies, hamburger stands, pawn shops, and small hotels.
Balboa Park’s giant green square begins just north of the business district. North and northwest of the park are the newer residential districts, and to the west is Middletown, a narrow segment extending from the bay to the low hills, occupied by Italian fishermen and airplane factory employees. Old Town, site of the original Spanish settlement, is northwest of Middletown. It has some fine adobe buildings, fringed with rose bushes and flowers, but most of the land is occupied by small houses and auto courts.
Most of San Diego’s inhabitants, apart from the shifting Navy personnel, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the East and Middle West. Many are retired; ten percent of all retired U. S. Navy officers live in San Diego.
In the Logan Heights district, south and east of downtown along the curved southern shore, sprawl San Diego’s Mexican and Negro communities, with Mexican restaurants vending tamales and tacos, and with chicken palaces and big ovens where Negroes barbecue meat.
About 10,000 Mexicans, most of them clinging to their own language and customs, live in this district; they are employed mainly as day laborers and cannery workers. The 4,500 Negroes are mostly manual or domestic workers. The Japanese colony, of about 1,000 persons, is in this area also; some in huts on stilts over the water. About 5,000 Portuguese fisherman, who live on the bay side of Point Loma, form a distinct group preserving its own customs. Italian fishermen mingle more generally with the community.
The site of San Diego was visited in 1539 by Father Marcos and his followers, from the desert side, in their search for the “Seven Cities of Cibola”; in 1542 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese explorer in the service of Spain, who spent six days in the harbor; and sixty years later by Sebastian Vizaíno, merchant navigator charting the coast for Spain.
In 1769 Governor Portola, with Franciscan friars and soldiers, established a mission and presidio here. The English sloop Discovery, engaged in scientific research, visited San Diego in 1793, and in 1803 the Yankee-owned Lelia Byrd, caught while smuggling otter skins, fought a cannon duel with the battery of Ballast Point.
…
During the Mexican regime, San Diego took on more color. “The beautiful señoritas danced their picturesque dances at the balls which followed bull-fights and cock-fights.” Many Spanish families, on bad terms with the Mexican governor, assisted the Americans in their conquest. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the town came peacefully under American rule.
In 1850 the present Old Town was incorporated as a city. The site of the present city was called New Town, or “Davis’s Folly” for William Heath Davis, who first built there. Alonzo E. Horton, for whom New Town was named “Horton’s Addition,” profited more than he.
From 1867 to 1872 New Town grew steadily; then a fire wiped out Old Town’s business district, and New Town became the city’s center.
In 1885 the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks into San Diego and made it a transcontinental terminus. Two years later it had 40,000 residents, but the boom collapsed, and by 1890 there were only 17,000. Since 1910 its population has doubled about every decade.
Aircraft is the only large-scale industrial plant. Fishing and canning San Diego’s 335 factories are mostly small enterprises; Consolidated are basic sources of income. A large lumber mill handles timber rafted in from the Northwest.
San Diego was an open-shop city until the strong wave of unionization in the early thirties; during the bitter “Free Speech Fight” of 1912 radical headquarters were raided and radicals ordered out of town.
Depressions have touched lightly on San Diego.
The colorful fishing fleet days are over, although there are still some 150+ commercial fishing vessels.
San Diego is a place that isn’t “certified,” to borrow from Walker Percy—there are fewer templates or cultural expectations for what your life must be like here, compared to LA or New York, for example. As Armantrout went on to say, “In my mature years I have come to appreciate the blankness of this town. When I step on the street in San Diego, I am not stepping onto a set; I am not stepping into a play, my own or anyone else’s.” In her work, the ersatz dailiness of ordinary life in San Diego—bills, television shows, illness, reading, advertisements, children—is maybe the best portrait of the city one could make, and certainly a guide for maintaining a vibrant life of the mind here.
from this piece on literary San Diego by Patrick Coleman.
Maybe (in fact certainly) I’m overthinking it. San Diego is a normie heaven, and that’s it. We need a city to absorb surplus bro energy and mellow it in the Southern California sun, which object San Diego achieves. To ponder what it might mean is very un-San Diego. Just crack a cold one or pop an edible, put on the game and vibe out.
And what are we even talking about here? New Orleans produces culture and also absurd murder rates. LA is LA but did San Diego have anything on the scale of the 1994 riots or the O.J trial? What is character but atrocity, debacle, chaos sanded by time?
In recent years my visits to San Diego have been for Comic-Con. 130,000 people descend on the San Diego Convention Center (2.6 million square feet) and surrounding blocks. This might seem fringe or marginal, it was at one time, but now we’re talking about the most popular movies in the world, billion dollar corporate products.
a fraction of a fraction of the whole, the scale is difficult to grasp. The size of it humbles the aircraft carriers docked across the bay.
Perhaps it is the very blankness of San Diego that allows the city to absorb Comic Con. You can attend Comic Con without being in “San Diego” in any real way. There’s nice weather, you’re near the water, but essentially you’re in one giant hotel without distinction.
Near the Comic Con zone is a massive Dole shipping and processing facility:
In the past I’ve been impressed with the San Diego Museum of Art, that has a possible Bosch or Bosch workshop.
This year I ventured as far as Little Italy to Vino Carta, where Jeff Fischer was pouring wines. You’re on India Street there and under the landing path of planes to San Diego’s airport, it’s kind of fun as they descend just over your head. On the rec of a local I had some very fine tacos from Tacos El Gordo, a line down the block, Bourdain kind of place. The adobada was recommended but I’m off the pork at the moment.
Recall that towards the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the kid ends up in San Diego. Here are some excerpts, which we put down towards the project of assembling a literary anthology of San Diego:
As he was crossing the plaza toward the little mud cabildo he encountered Toadvine and Webster newly released. They were wildlooking and they stank. The three of them went down to the beach and sat looking out at the long gray swells and passing Brown’s bottle among them. They’d none of them seen an ocean before. Brown walked down and held his hand to the sheet of spume that ran up the dark sand. He lifted his hand and tasted the salt on his fingers and he looked downcoast and up and then they went back up the beach toward the town. They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican. Some soldiers came in. An altercation took place. Toadvine was on his feet, swaying. A peacemaker rose from among the soldiers and soon the principals were seated again. But minutes later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider. Brown woke in a dark little cell manacled and crazed with thirst.
a bit later:
They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were directed to the alcalde’s house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap holding a candle before him. Glanton pushed him back into the parlor and sent his men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman’s screams and a few dull slaps and then silence.
…
They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde’s wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They’d been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones. Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.
A return:
It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach. Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Down-shore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.
He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach. He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Helytimes 
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