Years of Theory
Posted: October 25, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, everyone's a critic Leave a comment
Here’s an anecdote. One of Sartre’s closest friends in school was Raymond Aron, a conservative, pro-American political scientist. In those days, the French government had scholarships to various foreign countries. They started a whole French school in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss himself taught in that school and his early work is the result of that contact with Brazil. Roland Barthes taught on this scholarship in Egypt, because the French had a teaching fellowship in Cairo. There was one in Berlin, and when Aron had just gotten back he said, “There’s this thing called phenomenology. What does it mean?” He is sitting in a cafe with Sartre and Beauvoir, and Aron says, “What it means is: you can philosophize about that glass of beer.” Suddenly, the whole idea that phenomenology allowed one to think, write, and philosophize about elements of daily life transforms everything. As historically reconstructed by participants, the drink turns out to have been a crème de menthe, but that doesn’t matter too much. That’s the lesson that these people got from phenomenology, and that’s what seems to me to set off this immense period of liberation from philosophy, a liberation toward theory.
What is postmodern? Structuralist? When someone’s making a Marxist critique of like semiology, what’s happening?
Deluze. Sartre. Levi-Strauss. Lacan. Barthes. Foucault: who were these guys? what’s up here? What is the meaning of these names both as signifiers and signified and as referent?
Theory, structuralism, might not sound important. Academic stuff. Easy to dismiss. But guess what? Theory Thought has real, practical, worldly impact. These ideas are powerful.
The great sentence is not pronounced by Sartre but by Simone de Beauvoir: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” 8 You aren’t born a woman: you become a woman. You are constructed and you construct yourself as a woman.
Interrogating, politicizing, gendering, queering, these are Theory ideas. Lived experience. My truth. The fathers of both Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg were Theory-adjacent professors, does that have any meaning? And DJT? The Theorists would say of course, a media figure whose words have no meaning and every meaning? who cannot be taken literally or seriously yet must only be taken literally and seriously? who seems to break reality by his very existence? create experiences across which no translation is possible? That was exactly what we’re talking about. This was the inevitable outcome. Don’t be mad at us for calling it.
Anxiety is: you can’t be free, and you can’t really be authentic, unless you feel anxiety. The French word is angoisse, so the translator is tempted to use the word “anguish,” which is the false friend, the immediate cognate of angoisse. Anguish, that makes it too metaphysical. In French, angoisse is an everyday word. At least angoissé( e). It means, I don’t have any cigarettes—can I go out? I’m waiting for a phone call. Then you’re angoissé( e). That doesn’t mean you’re in anguish, like one of the saints. It just means you have anxiety, and anxiety is an everyday experience.
Making thoughts actions, and words tools of power. Now, Theory would argue, twas ever thus we’re just pointing it out. Language has always been a tool of power. (But Theory would say that, wouldn’t it?)
Karl Marx was a Theorist. The master Theorist. His theory infected and took over huge portions of the world. Many millions died. There are places named after Karl Marx in Cuba Vietnam Russia China etc. All that from a theory he worked out over pints at a pub after doing his reading at The British Museum.
The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought aka Postwar French Thought to the Present by Frederic Jameson may be one of the highest value books I ever bought. It is dense. But it’s less dense than Jameson’s other books, because it is transcripts of the guy talking.
If you’re very good at skipping/skimming huge parts of books, it’s fantastic. The drag may be sections where the ideas are so big, weird, vague or complicated that this reader found themself often saying “ok I’m moving on here because my mind is already blown and my circuits are fried.”
Now let’s look at this from a different point of view. We have said that each of these philosophical periods—Greece, the Germans, and now the French—are characterized by a problematic, but a changing problematic, a production of new problems. This is, in effect, Deleuze’s whole philosophy, the production of problems. But, if you put it that way, if you say philosophy’s task is the production of problems, what problems could there be if philosophy has come to an end? These problematics always end up producing a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive.
The book functions pretty well as a history of France since WW2. Jameson quotes Sartre talking about the Occupation:
Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. We were insulted to our faces every day and had to remain silent. We were deported en masse as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Everywhere—on the walls, on the movie screens, in the newspapers—we came up against the vile, insipid picture of ourselves our oppressors wanted to present to us. Because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. Because we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.
On the power and demise of the French Communist party:
The minute Mitterrand includes them in his government, they disappear. That’s the end of the Communist Party. After 1980, the Party is nothing. Of course, it is even less than nothing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There is still a Communist Party in France, of course, but its power is broken. Mitterrand’s political act here is a very cunning tactic of cooptation, which does them in as rivals to his socialist government, which itself ends up being not very socialist. But, in this period, the Party is a presence; it can irritate all these intellectuals. They revolt against it in various ways.
An idea: Theory begins for real after Camus. Camus says, man’s search for meaning? Forget it. No meaning. You’re pushing a rock up a hill. It’s absurd. Consider Sisyphus happy, live, move on.
Theory maybe says, sure ok but what even is Being? What is it that “we” (?) are experiencing? Jameson:
I’m alive in this moment when the sun is dying, or when climate change is destroying the planet, so many years from the big bang. So also with the body. I have a tendency to fat. Okay, that’s my situation. But I have to live that in some way. I have to choose that. So I keep dieting; I keep struggling against it. Or I let myself go completely. Or I become jolly like Falstaff. We are not free not to do something with this situation. Freedom is our choice of how we deal with it, but we have to deal with it, because it is us. But it’s not us in the way a thing is a thing. We are not our body. We are our body on the mode of not being it. We want people to understand that we are different, that we have a personality, that we’re not exactly what our body seems.
Here’s another one:
Everything we are we have to play at being, even if we don’t feel it that way. That’s a social function, so, of course, you have to rise to the occasion and play at being that social function.
Terry Eagleton, reviewing the book in the LRB, says:
and:
Theory was a big Yale and Duke and Brown thing. There was some of it at Harvard, but it’s not so easy to buy Theory when you remember Cotton Mather and John Adams and John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
I once interviewed an East German novelist who was quite interesting at the time, and we asked him the then-obvious question: “How much of an influence did Faulkner have on you?” As you know, after the war, all over the world, it is the example of Faulkner that sets everything going, from the Latin American boom to the newer Chinese novel. Faulkner is a seminal world influence at a certain moment. But what does that mean, “Faulkner’s influence”? So he said, “No, I never learned anything from Faulkner—except that you could write page after page of your novel in italics.”
Any time Jameson says “here’s a story for you” or “start with a bit of biography” I perk up. What would the narratologists say about that? Why are stories so addictive? So much more popular than Theory? To answer those questions would be to Theorize stories. Should you spend your time Theorizing stories? Or telling stories?
Why is this detail included in Jameson’s Wikipedia page?:
Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939 (about USD$1130 in 2024)).[12][15]
Church & state
Posted: October 23, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentFrom 1940 to 2000 — through rock ’n’ roll, through the sexual revolution — an eerily stable 70-ish per cent of Americans belonged to a church. From the millennium, that share started collapsing to what is now less than half.
Janan Ganesh in FT. He’s trying to reason through why every US election ends up 50/50.
The stabilisation of the west after 1945 is really a story of dominant parties, such as the Conservatives in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the right in France and to some extent the Democrats in the US, who ran Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. The ascendant party could afford to be magnanimous, while the other had every incentive to appeal beyond its base. Veering too far from the centre brought Goldwater-style annihilation. Competition between equals is beautiful in theory. In practice? Well, how edifying have you found the past couple of decades?
(is that true?)
Stinkards and Suns of Mississippi
Posted: October 19, 2024 Filed under: Mississippi Leave a comment
This is a description of the Natchez people, found in:
Southern Union State Junior College’s loss is my gain.
Optimal outcome: to be a hot Stinkard?
The source for this information is the Histoire de la Louisiane set down by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who had an adventurous life, including time spent among the Natchez around 1720-1728:
A dance:
Du Pratz (or Le Page’s) book was translated into English, and a copy was loaned by Benjamin Barton:
to Meriwether Lewis to take on his expedition with his bro Clark.
The Natchez people had a tough history. At the Michigan State Vincent Voice Library, there are some audio samples recorded in the 1930s of Watt Sam, one of the last native speakers of Natchez (or Natche) telling stories in the language. Regrettably these don’t seem to be available online. If anyone in the Lansing area can check it out for us, we’d be appreciative. It’s not urgent.
An intriguing aspect of the Natchez language was “cannibal speech”:
Traditionally the Natchez had certain stories that could only be told during the winter time, and many of these stories revolved around the theme of cannibalism. Protagonists in such stories would encounter cannibals, trick cannibals, marry the daughters of cannibals, kill cannibals, and be eaten by cannibals. In these stories Natchez storytellers would employ a special speech register when impersonating the cannibal characters. This register was distinct from ordinary Natchez by substituting several morphemes and words for others.
Sometimes I wonder if the linguists make too much of this stuff, when it was really just the Natchez doing spooky voices in their scary story.
Drop the Trop
Posted: October 10, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, archaeology, architecture Leave a commentThey imploded The Tropicana in Las Vegas, clearing room for a potential future stadium for the former Oakland As.
The strangeness of The Tropicana had my fascination.
Doomed for a long time, it was near vacant inside, adding to the odd effect.
On a visit to Las Vegas a couple years ago for Badlani’s birthday I took a walk through there. I was certain I’d taken a set of photos of the place, but today I couldn’t find them. The problems of archiving and curating remain, maybe even more challenging, in the age of infinite photos. What happened to them? Did I delete them as unsatisfactory? Are they lost in the cloud?
I can reconstruct some of the atmosphere from found pieces. Those above are from UK site Freedom Destinations. Here’s one from Oyster.com:
Those strange white couches. The Tropicana seemed like it had given up years ago, and yet the whites were kept close to spotless. A bleached aesthetic. The place was like a 1960s idea of the 1990s, or a 1990s idea of the 1960s. A coherent incoherence.
I find a fine set of photos of the lost Tropicana at, of course, reddit/r/LiminalSpaces:
The most times I ever heard the word “liminal” was in a debate between two professors that broke out during Sue Bell’s masters’ presentation in public art.
Strangely, for whatever reason the one photo of The Tropicana my phone seems to have preserved is this one:
The Gentleman of Elvas
Posted: October 9, 2024 Filed under: Florida Leave a comment
“Hernando de Soto was the son of an esquire of Xeréz de Badajoz, and went to the Indias of the Ocean sea, belonging to Castile, at the time Pedrárias Dávila was the Governor. He had nothing more than blade and buckler: for his courage and good qualities Pedrárias appointed him to be captain of a troop of horse, and he went by his order with Hernando Pizarro to conquer Peru.” The words are those of a Portuguese knight known only as the Gentleman of Elvas, a witness to and survivor of the long and agonizing disaster that was de Soto’s Florida enterprise.
The Gentleman of Elvas is one of several members of that expedition whose accounts have come down to us, and his was the first to be published, in 1557.
An English translation by the geographer Richard Hakluyt appeared in 1609, and there were other English editions in 1611 and 1686, as well as Spanish and French versions in the seventeenth century; so there was never any question of the work’s inaccessibility. Another account, by Luis Hernández de Biedma, remained unpublished until 1857, while that of de Soto’s secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, has never appeared except in severely abridged form. The most extensive work on the expedition, known as The Florida of the Inca, was written by a man born just a month before de Soto first set foot in Florida: Garcilaso de la Vega, known as “the Inca” because his mother, Chimpa Ocllo, had been a princess of Peru. (His father, Don Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, had seen action with the Pizarros during the Spanish conquest of Peru.) Garcilaso, an attractive and complex figure who spent most of his life in Spain but who was fiercely proud of his royal Inca ancestry, published his book on de Soto at Lisbon in 1605. His chief sources were the oral recollections of an anonymous Spaniard who had marched with de Soto, and the crude manuscripts of two other eyewitnesses, Juan Coles and Alonso de Carmona.
From these Garcilaso wove a lengthy and vivid history, long thought to be largely fantastic, but now recognized as a trustworthy if somewhat romantic narrative. Its chief concern to us is the detailed descriptions it provides of Indian mounds of the Southeast.
De Soto had served with distinction in Peru. He fought bravely against the Incas, and acted as a moderating influence against some of the worst excesses of his fellow conquerors. The darkest action of that conquest-the murder of Atahuallpa, the Inca Emperor-took place without de Soto’s knowledge and despite his advice to treat the Inca courteously. He shared in the fabulous booty of Peru and in 1537 came home to Spain as one of the wealthies men in the realm. Seeking some tract of the New World that he could govern, he applied to the Spanish king, Charles V, for the region now known as Ecuador and Colombia. But Charles offered him instead the governorship of the vaguely defined territory of “Florida,” which had lapsed upon the disappearance of Pánfilo de Narvez. By the terms of a charter drawn up on April 20, 1537, de Soto obligated himself to furnish at least 500 men and to equip and supply them for a minimum of eighteen months.
In return, he would be made Governor of Cuba, and upon the conquest of Florida would have the rank of Adelantado of Florida, with a domain covering any two hundred leagues of the coast he chose. There he hoped to carve out a principality for himself as magnificent as that obtained by Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru.
In the midst of de Soto’s preparations, Cabeza de Vaca turned up in Mexico, and at last revealed the fate of Narvez’ expedition. De Soto invited Cabeza de Vaca to join his own party, but he had had enough of North America for a while, and went toward Brazil instead. De Soto collected men, sailed to Cuba, and recruited more men there. His reputation had preceded him from Peru; he was thought to have the Midas touch, and volunteers hastened to join him. He gathered 622 men in all, including a Greek engineer, an English longbowman, two Genoese, and four “dark men” from Africa. In April of 1539 they departed for Florida.
The expedition entered Tampa Bay a month later, and on May 30 de Soto’s soldiers began going ashore. Their object was to find a new kingdom as rich at Atahuallpa’s, and it seems strange that they would have begun the quest in the same country where Narváez had found only hardship and death.
From Mound Builders of Ancient America: Archaeology of a Myth (1968) by Robert Silverberg, who writes more vividly on de Soto than many a de Soto specialist. You can read all of the Gentleman of Elvas account here, it ain’t exactly Tom Clancy. Silberberg picks up:
had de Soto been gifted with second sight, he would have sounded the order for withdrawal at that moment, put his men back on board the ships, and returned to Spain to fondle his gold for the rest of his days. Thus he would have avoided the torments of a relentless, profitless, terrible march over 350,000 square miles of unexplored territory, and would have spared himself the early grave he found by the banks of the Mississippi. This was no land for conquerors. But a stroke of bad luck, in the guise of seeming fortune, drew de Soto remorselessly onward to doom. His scouts, while fighting off the Indian ambush, had been about to strike one naked Indian dead when he began to cry in halting Spanish, “Do not kill me, cavalier! I am a Christian!” He was Juan Ortiz of Seville, a marooned member of the Narvez expedition, who, since 1528, had lived among the Indians, adopting their customs, their language, and their garb. He could barely speak Spanish now, and he found the close-fitting Spanish clothes so uncomfortable that he went about de Soto’s camp in a long, loose linen wrap. He seemed precisely what de Soto needed: an interpreter, a guide to the undiscovered country that lay ahead.
Unhappily, Ortiz knew nothing of the country more than fifty miles from his own village, and each village seemed to speak a different language.
Nevertheless, the Spaniards proceeded north along Narvez’ route, looking for golden cities. Ortiz spoke to the Indians where he could and arranged peaceful passage through their territory. Where he could not communicate with them, the Spaniards employed cruelty to win their way—a cruelty that quickly became habitual and mechanical. The Indians were terrified of the Spaniards’ horses, for they had never seen such beasts before. With the Spaniards there came also packs of huge dogs, wolfhounds of ferocious mien.
Wolfhounds of ferocious mien.
That illustration, by Herb Roe, I find on de Soto’s Wikipedia page. Here’s a Herb Roe evocation of the Kincaid Site in Illinois:
Here is Herb Roe’s website.
Tampa’s on my mind today as its about the get wrecked by Hurricane Milton.
Prayers up for the Cigar City.
Source for that map of de Soto expedition is the Florida Historical Society. Winds tracker from earth.nullschool.net.
Related matters: Cahokia.
Robert Coover
Posted: October 8, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, baseball, writing 1 Comment
The postmodernist Robert Coover died at 92. The Universal Baseball Association is the only one of his I’ve read. This is how the NYT describes it in Coover’s obituary:
Mr. Coover’s many other books included “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” (1968), about an accountant who invents a fantasy-baseball game and is driven mad by it
That’s accurate enough I guess. I loved reading the book. It’s the only one of Coover’s I read, and although it’s sort of fantastical, the plot’s kinda straightforward and the setting is vivid and lived-in. I went looking for the back cover copy that was on my old edition:
He eats delicatessen.
In new editions that’s updated to “take-out,” a mistake in my opinion. I remember Fener laughing out loud when he read that off the back cover when he found it in my office. The term “b-girl” was also dated by the time I read it, it seemed to mean something like this.
Spoiler below as I recall the plot:
Waugh is playing out a season of a dice based fantasy baseball game of his own invention. A star player, a wonderful pitcher, freakishly good emerges, and Henry comes to love him. Then one night he rolls the dice and can’t believe the outcome. The player is killed by a pitch. Henry can’t believe it. It shatters his world. It seems to be sort of a metaphor for God and Jesus (J. Henry Waugh/Yahweh).
The idea of going home to your own private world was on my mind at the time I read the book, when I was a young single man in LA, I’d leave work at 6pm or whatever and walk home to my one bedroom apartment and read or work on writing scripts or novels. It spoke to me, and what spoke to me about it wasn’t the postmodernism (in fact the metaphorical stuff kinda made me roll my eyes) but the realism, the portrait of a life, the investment and absorption into a private entertainment, the sadness and loss of having the game shattered.
So, salute to Robert Coover.
Next time I’m in Omaha
Posted: October 7, 2024 Filed under: America, the American West Leave a comment
Memphis/Atlanta
Posted: September 30, 2024 Filed under: memphis 2 Comments
Had a chance to see Memphis from 34k feet the other day on my way to Atlanta to show Common Side Effects at SCAD Animation Fest.
You can orient off the Bass Pro Pyramid there.
Spending a week living out of The Peabody Hotel in Memphis some years ago, now that was a special treat. A chopped chicken sandwich from Charlie Vergos’ Rendevous, enjoyed with a nice red wine while sitting in the lobby observing the ducks and the people? The ducks are tamer!
Well anyway after passing Memphis we flew right into the swirl of Helene.
Flying into a hurricane is a solved problem I guess, no one even fussed too much.
When the rain cleared up saw enough of Atlanta to conclude: I like it! Seems like a place where a person could just vibe.
At Videodrome took a photo of a movie I’d like to see:
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).
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