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While everybody else was laughing or jeering, I was fretting. I had an awful feeling that we'd miss Harriet Miers. She seemed so preposterous as a nominee; now, with "Scalito" up for the seat, who - aside from the crabby quarter of the nation that wants to erase civil rights - who does not wish that we could bring the toady back?
As faithful readers know, I, who used to be quite firm in his dismissal of the whole going-to-the-movies thing, have buckled and surrendered. In the past five weeks, I have seen: Capote; The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio; Good Night, and Good Luck; Dreamer; and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. That's a lot of great movies.
Kathleen had been complaining for years about my unwillingness to show up at a theatre at an odd time. It wouldn't have been such a problem if the movies were like live entertainment in New York, which, with certain exceptions, always starts at eight o'clock. Now that I had five good films to chatter about, however, I knew that Kathleen would have to be taken to the movies as soon as she spent enough time away from Two Wall.
I wanted her to see two of the movies that I've seen. Capote, especially. It's a movie about writing! (It really is - the first.) And Good Night, and Good Luck. It's a movie about television! (Boo! Hiss!) I was even willing to see In Her Shoes, because I'd heard that one of my favorites, Toni Collette, walks away with the film. (A film that also stars Shirley MacLaine, no less. Poor Cameron! Didn't know what hit her!) But Kathleen wanted to see North Country. I tried to talk her out of this choice in a way that was brilliantly consonant with the movie itself. I put forth a subtle and arresting argument: "I don't want to see that movie. It's grim."
By yesterday, when it was clear that we were going to the movies this weekend come hell or high water, I had awakened to the inner cretinitude of my position. This afternoon, after lunch (chiens chauds - mais à la gourmandise!) I announced the showtimes of North Country, which is playing across the street, indeed, at the same theatre as Friday's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. From being an untutored rube, I have progressed to connoisseurship as regards the career of Michelle Monaghan, who is in both pictures. "I thought you didn't want to see North Country," said the princess of whom I am not worthy. I spared her the conversion experience.
I had "legitimately" been worried that the sexism of North Country would bring Kathleen down. In fact, it put all of her current problems in perspective and made her feel, in every pore, that she is a very lucky Wall Street lawyer who only takes shit from one or two richly-billable certifiables. As you must know, North Country is the new Norma Rae. That movie, starring Sally Field, was about oppressed women workers standing up for themselves. North Country is about women standing up for their right to do men's jobs. I hope that the young women of today will learn from it how unripely recent their opportunities are. (It was great to see Linda Emond, an actor whom we've encountered at MTC, playing the corporate lawyer who tries to talk her client out of being stupid - to no avail.)
While Kathleen was doing fine-to-great, it was I who walked out of the theatre trembling. That collective male power - God, how I fear it. Tall and bright but different, I may never have been in a fight but I know the deadening power of men in a last ditch. Deadening. There's a lovely guy in North Country, a supporting character with the name of Ricky (I think), who would love to stand up for the heroine but just can't, not against the tsunami of patriarchal contempt in which he must accommodate himself. Eventually, he does get to stand up, better late than never. He, in a way, was the hero of the movie for me, because I knew how he suffered. I was very glad that he was not the one to suffer Woody Harrelson's yellow ice/red ice harangue.
I haven't said a word about Charlize Theron - but there's no need. She's better, as always, than you thought she would be. It was fun to hear her on Leonard Lopate the other day, discussing her accent (she never spoke English in her native South Africa, and so had no accent to overcome) and her career as a dancer (try to tell me that she has no regrets about being too big - too tall - for a career in dance). It is always wonderful to see a woman "open" a film. Ms Theron's costars are mighty and puissant - Sissy Spacek and Frances McDormand are the other leading women - but Ms Theron's name also precedes those of Mr Harrelson and Sean Bean, no strangers to top billing. Am I the only person who thinks of Jane Fonda when Ms Theron is doing her thing? I certainly did in the union-hall speech that was happily commandeered by her character's father, played by Richard Jenkins. Mr Jenkins is one of those character actors whom only the attentive know about, no matter how many times they've seen him, because he's never the star. On the shoulders of such toilers Hollywood - and Bois-le-Gaumont - depend.
See the movie just to see Sean Bean and Frances McDormand as a loving married couple. That she carries it off is no surprise. That he does puts him back on my list, which he has been off ever since Stormy Monday.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
There's a special selection of recent books on the subject of our misadventure in Iraq. James Traub reviews a pair of compilations, one of essays by writers on the right, The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, edited Gary Rosen, the other, from the left, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, edited by Thomas Cushman. Neither of these books is on my list, because the question of just war simply doesn't arise in connection with the mess that we've made. The war that was beginning when the Mission was proclaimed to be Accomplished was not supposed to take place, because no war was foreseen. We would "cakewalk" to Baghdad and establish a democracy. Just like that. The question that did arise in connection with Iraq was this: how did a suit like Rummy overrule Pentagon experience by throwing out its exhaustive logistic procedures, the TPFDL. (If you will take the time to read Seymour M Hersh's reporting on the "tip fiddle" in The New Yorker, you'll be excused from reading the rest of this entry.) Reporter Michael Goldfarb has written a book that reviewer Dexter Filkins finds very moving: Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq, a biography of sorts of his late translator, a lecturer in anatomy who struggled for democracy only to be cut down by reactionary insurgents. According to Mr Filkins, Ahmad Shawkat's tragedy is anything but isolated.
And now, today, many of these Iraqis, if not most of them, are dead. They have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown in ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq's political class explains the difficulties of the country's rebirth. The good guys are dead.
Nice work, Rummy. George Packer has collected his reportage in The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer. Fareed Zakaria joins Mr Packer in bemoaning the consequences of going to war on the cheap. In Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadows of America's War, Anthony Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, writes of the impact of the war on ordinary Iraqis. In the words of reviewer Ben Macintyre, "Night Draws Near is a tormented human collage, a portrait of the grinding, quotidian conflict endured by ordinary Iraqis, struggled to make sense of the senseless. Finally, in the Essay at the back of the review, "The Reporter's Library," reporter Robert F Worth tells us what the pros are reading for background material. He gives pride of place to Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands (1959), but he notes the preeminent importance of David Fromkin's The Peace to End All Peace.
In other non-fiction, Jessica Hendra gets back at her funny-man father, Tony Hendra - who gave us an earnest testimonial to the spiritual guidance of "Father Joe," a Benedictine monk who helped him through a rough patch - in How to Cook Your Daughter: A Memoir (with Blake Morrison). If there is one thing that I don't want to read about, it's children's claims of parental abuse, but it would seem that Mr Hendra has all but asked for his daughter's. Reviewer Jeanne Safer finds that How to Cook Your Daughter "barely rises above pedestrian reportage." In Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, Nate Blakeslee recounts the horrific outburst of racism that led to the arrest of almost fifty black Texans in a small Panhandle town. The charges of drug-running were completely spurious, and it took teams of lawyers and activists to free the innocents. Sara Mosle gives the book an A. (Readers of Bob Herbert's column will remember Tulia well.) Reviewer Jim Windolf likes Ken Emerson's Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era. This may prove to be a must-read, and I'm marking for future acquisition. "Brill Building" is a useful collective name for the folks who wrote the songs between the peak of Elvis and the arrival of the Beatles.
Until this book, the story of these interrelated songwriters had been told in piecemeal fashion, via memoirs, magazine articles and four separate documentaries for the A&E network's "Biography" series. Here we get the whole tale in a single entertaining passage
In Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa, filmmaker Karin Muller writes about her search for harmony while shooting a documentary. Lesley Downes finds the book charming, but she does not persuade me to override my disinclination to go culture-hopping, which is what Ms Muller seems to do. The most interesting thing about Toni Bentley's review of Women's Letters: America From the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J Adler, is Ms Bentley's opening report:
"Unless a man is taking out my garbage or making love to me," I recently overheard a wife and mother remark, "I'm not really interested in his company. Women are simply more interesting."
I'm not sure how to take this. Is it a restatement of traditional views shared by both sexes since the dawn of time? Or does it mean that women are now interesting ways that men are, only more so? I would read American Letters if someone were to give it to me. I would not read Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption, by Christopher Kennedy Lawford, under any circumstances. What a tribe of louts the Kennedys turned out to be! From the other side of the last century's most fascinating union, we have What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwill, the widow of Ms Onassis' nephew, Anthony. Jodi Kantor has good things to say about the latter book, but I remain untempted. Nor am I tempted by two books reviewed by Buzz Bissinger, The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant, by Allen Burra, and The Lion in Autumn: A Season with Joe Paterno and Penn State Football, by Frank Fitzpatrick. I might have been tempted by Dylan Jones's iPod, Therefore I Am: Thinking Inside the White Box, but Dave Itzkoff's impatient review took care of that.
As for fiction, three novels get full- or half-page treatment while five are rewarded with capsules. Only one is on my list: Alison Lurie's Truth and Consequences. This book has garnered interesting reviews all round, and Alice Truax's is no exception. I wish I could read it right now, but it will have to take its place in the flight queue, which already stretches from here to Boston. Katharine Weber and Bruce Bawer make negative cases for the books under their review, respectively Pigtopia, by Kitty Fitzgerald, and Fallen, by David Maine. Pigtopia? Are you kidding? As for Fallen, it's a novelization of that old Cain-and-Abel story, that in Mr Bawer's view, fails by taking for granted emotions and concepts that were, er, new at the time and presumably nameless. Show, don't tell - isn't that how it goes?
According to Douglas Wolk's capsule review, Wolf Point, by Edward Falco, might make an interesting read - after Truth and Consequences - bien sûr! "Falco's prose is cold and brisk, with occasional flashes of hard-boiled eloquence, and the story hurtles like brakeless truck toward its bloody denouement." Diary of a Married Call Girl, by Tracy Quan, sounds as objectionable as Mr Lawford's memoir. In The Monsters of Gramercy Park, Danny Leigh "sometimes promises depth he can't deliver." Sniper, by Pavel Hak, appears to have been translated by the author too directly from its French original, while still managing to sound flat and affectless. Finally, there's Faith For Beginniners, by Aaron Hamburger, which according Mr Wolk is marred by a sour tone.
According to a note, opening chapters of The Assassins' Gate and What Remains are available at nytimes.com/books.
My old friend George is still cooler than I'll ever be. He has just been up in a helicopter and down in a cave. You wouldn't want to be with me on either expedition. Are we alive yet?
If I were a respected theatre critic, I would just bellow, "Drop everything and order tickets to Souvenir right now. Don't even think of thinking about it. Just do it." And you would do as you were told.
I humbly acknowledge that I must work from a more gently persuasive angle. Let me begin by saying that Souvenir, the new play-with-music by Stephen Temperley that began previews last night at the Lyceum Theatre, may not be to everybody's taste. People who don't find it funny ought to be deported to somewhere else, although I can't think of any part of the globe that deserves such an affliction.
Take one great big helping of the funniest Carol Burnett skit that you can remember (Went With The Wind, perhaps), and another of the best stand-up comedy that you've ever seen, and top it off with the poignance of a good-to-great play starring Cherry Jones, and you'll have Souvenir.
Continue reading about Souvenir at Portico.
Ben Brantley's review of The Odd Couple, appearing in today's Times, seems desperate to find negative things to say about the new production that, because the ticket buying public rightly expected Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick to do pretty much what they're doing with Neil Simon's famous comedy, has been sold out for ages. Never, perhaps, has a show been more critic-proof. But if Mr Brantley took the opportunity to say some unkind things on the understanding that they couldn't harm, I must say that he miscalculated gravely. Consider the following:
The humor of "The Odd Couple" is rooted in watching ordinary guys, equipped with an extraordinary arsenal of zingers, turn each other into irreconcilable caricatures of themselves, the way people do in bad marriages.
"Ordinary guys"? I don't think so. Oscar Madison is an extraordinary guy. As a sportswriter, he's a professional guy. Guyitude is second nature to him. He leaves messes all over his apartment the way dogs pee on fire hydrants, to prove that he was there. As everyone knows, Felix is of the opposite persuasion: leaving proof of his passing gives the enemy an advantage. Felix cannot cover his tracks quickly enough. He can't do small talk because small talk is necessarily unguarded. He requires a controlled environment. Oscar needs to show that he can survive in any environment. I don't think that either one of them is an ordinary guy - not, at least, for the purposes of this comedy. You could say that The Odd Couple is about Jewish mothers, offstage but waging their warfare through proxies. their sons do indeed seem more than a little bewildered by the turbulence.
I wasn't going to write about The Odd Couple, which is directed by Joe Mantello. I'm not a Neil Simon fan, and I have a limited interest in one-liners other than my own (which I immediately forget - you had to be there). The play was fun, and I'm glad I saw it, and really didn't seem to be much more to say. (I said it Wednesday.) But Mr Brantley's review seems too perverse to let stand unchallenged. The beautiful point of the production is to show that abandonment has hit these guys really hard. United in having wives who can no longer stand them, Oscar and Felix dig in to their respective foibles, and the impatience with one another is really their displaced rage. How could my wife not love me? each asks, only to answer the question with unalloyed and unenlightened male "wisdom," by doing what he did - what in fact irritated his spouse - only, doing it twice as hard.
So Oscar is volcanic, and Felix is - in Mr Brantley's word - "robotic." That's not a bad word to use of a shell-shocked man who clings to sanity in terms of routine. The Odd Couple is a comedy of discomfort, possibly the oldest kind of comedy there is. It is at least as physical a comedy as it is a verbal one. Mr Lane and Mr Broderick have developed a theatrical duo of amazing brio and finesse. They are just a bit funnier together than they are apart. Each can catch the other's leaps. It might be better to consider the high moments of this Odd Couple as a ballet written for two male dancers and laughter.
What a movie! Meta, meta, meta! (Whatever that means.) For all the violence - and the corpses do pile up toward the end - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a funny movie, with lots of LOL moments. It works by spoofing the clichés of detective movies, not at the level of the action so much as in its presentation. Val Kilmer, for example, plays the part of a gay detective straight; gay mannerisms are on a short to nonexistent leash. The spoof is in having cast Val Kilmer in the part to begin with. Having come up with a linebacker-sized gay detective, filmmaker Shane Black keeps the joke fresh by making sure that you never know where he's going to go with it.
Robert Downey, Jr has played more interesting parts - such as Joe Werbsha in Good Night, and Good Luck, which is also in theatres. But Harry Lockhart, like Blake Allen in Two Girls and a Guy, is a role that Mr Downey was born to play. A scamp on the spot, his Harry has eyes that careen more or less constantly in search of emergency exits. He has a good heart, though, and we're root for him all the way. We feel his pain, however, only to an extent, because his predicaments are too funny. And their arrangement, their sequence play with your expectations. Consider the history of one of his fingertips. Not now, but after you've seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Michelle Monaghan has been in a few movies that I've seen, such as The Bourne Supremacy, but I can't say that I've noticed her before. The simplest description would be: the new Sandra Bullock. I could not make up my mind whether her part would have benefited from deeper inflection, greater archness. As it is, she sends up the corn fed all-American girl who goes to Hollywood to be a slut. Well, not really, but close. The spoof is that it hasn't spoiled her.
There are several bold forays into serious drama. They're momentary, but they break the prevailing mood. The miracle is that Mr Black can snap it back on the minute he wants to. There are also quite a few loose ends, but these don't occur to you until after the show is over. I will be interested to see how this movie plays after three or four viewings. But it's great fun the first time around.
Nothing interesting was showing at the Storage Unit Theatre (nothing that I hadn't seen, that is), and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was showing across the street. To even things up, I came home for lunch - a bowl of minestrone, and read "The Truman Show," Daniel Mendelsohn's glowing review of Capote, the The New York Review of Books. I hope that you've had a chance to see that by now.
Can't wait to own it. It's an amusement park ride of the first order. Almost impossible to describe. Very, very meta, but never confusing. Robert Downey Jr was his usual self (his role in Good Night, and Good Luck is a more interesting part, but there's no down side to watching an actor doing what comes naturally.) I never made up my mind about his costars, Val Kilmer as a gay detective, and Michelle Monaghan as the girl from the past. But it really doesn't matter. The ride's too much fun. Despite all the shooting and some moments of real suspense, this is a good-time picture.
After months of dithering, I finally got round to adding a new feature to the Daily Blague yesterday. It's the "Tune de la semaine," if you'll pardon my Franglais. You will find the link on the sidebar, below the portrait of the artist. As long as you've got RealPlayer on your machine, all you have to do is to click and hold on a sec. If you want to know what you're listening to, click on "about." Direct further enquiries to me. The inaugural song is "Hold Tight," sung not by the Andrews Sisters but by Fats Waller. Fododo-de-yacka saki! (So that's how you spell it!)
In August of 1453, King Henry VI of England ceased even to appear to be a competent monarch. He fell into a mysterious catatonia that lasted about eighteen months, and emerged with an irremediably tarnished reputation. In May of 1455, at St Albans, forces led by the Duke of York defeated the royal army, and the Wars of the Roses began. When, thirty years later, Henry Tudor defeated Richard III, English government was on a new footing. The transition from Henry VI to Henry VII is arguably the most interesting in English history. In 1453, England was unmistakably medieval. It was something else in 1485.
For what it's worth, the cause of Henry VI's illness was genetic. His grandfather, Charles VI of France, spent most of his long life running in and out of madness. Royal unsteadiness, in both cases, created a power vacuum. In France, the king's powerful brothers fought to control access to royal power. In England, where Henry VI came to the throne as a child without siblings, the factions that would eventually launch a string of short-lived civil wars gathered around the king's cousins, descendants of the prolific Edward III and his equally philoprogenitive son, John of Gaunt.
"Lancastrian" and "Yorkist" are anachronistic terms that nobody used in the fifteenth century. "Lancastrian," in fact, meant little more than "anti-Yorkist." The Yorkist party gathered round Richard, Duke of York, descended from Edward III via two different ancestors. York would die at the threshold of victory, in 1460, fallen in the battle of Wakefield. In the following year, his eldest son would climb the throne as Edward IV. Edward turned out to be a good king in that he used his strength to introduce many streamlining innovations to the functioning of government, most notably in the field of fiscal management.
The Lancastrian party was led by Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's queen. Margaret was vilified from the start as a transgressive woman who rejected her rightful role (submissive spouse) to interfere with Yorkist control of government. Even when her husband regained his health, he failed to demonstrate any monarchical backbone whatsoever. Margaret rallied the Lancastrian cause largely to protect the interests and claims of her son, Prince Edward. As a woman, however, she could claim no authority of her own. It was only as the representative of her husband and her son that she could act. An interesting recent book by Helen E Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Boydell, 2003) strips away the myths about Margaret and replaces them with a carefully reconstructed context, in which Margaret's position is shown to have been untenable.
I have never read a history book quite like this. Professor Maurer scrupulously presents her evidence as it would have been seen by its actors - without foreknowledge.
Continue reading about Margaret of Anjou at Portico.
It's very nice to be healthy. At least in one department.
Happiness is... never having taken Harriet Miers to be a serious nominee for the Supreme Court. Never having gotten worked up about her inadequacies. Never having quite tuned in.
Happiness is not... wondering who the serious contender, whether in the running all along or settled on during the Miers silliness, might be. There are plenty of badass women on the District Court bench, and whichever one Team Dubya chooses, she'll be ridiculously more qualified than the president's toady.
This update gets its own entry.
Despite everything - and everything is a supersized miscellany here, ranging from arthritis to splashers (watch for my post on splashers) - despite supersonic adversity, albeit supersonic adversity that had somewhat faded away, Kathleen and I got to the Met this evening so that she could see the van Gogh drawings. We arrived at eight-fifteen. The invitation read "Six to Nine." In Gotham, we write our numbers out.
At eight-thirty, I was seized by the conviction that anybody who showed up at 8:59 would be allowed to enter - only to be told a minute later to leave. So I began hustling Kathleen through the show (which I had already seen). She was docility itself. I learned from her leisurely study of the early, Dutch-subject rooms that her natural pace contemplated a ten-o'clock departure. And while the early stuff is very good. the later stuff is IMMORTAL. So I hustled. When we entered a new room, I led Kathleen straight to what I thought was important. This is what Miss G means by my telling Kathleen what to do, I suppose, but in fact we had seen nearly all the drawings - but only "nearly" - when a guard announced, not that the galleries would close in fifteen minutes, which is what I'd expected, but simply that "these galleries are closed." You can imagine the insurance issues that the museum faces with members' previews. For the record, there was no search of bags. A delicate balancing act meant that some unscrupulous thief-of-an-invitation (there was none of the new swiping* of membership cards) could have blown the joint up.
But this entry is really about dinner, at Caffe Grazie. Caffe Grazie is a boîte that advertises itself as a cheap Italian place. And it's cheaper than many other Italian places on the Upper East Side. But I want to know if $135 for two (including generous tip) is really to be thought of as "cheap." I don't think so, myself. But it was good. The food was fine-to-great, where "great" is "just what I wanted." And the service was great, too, where great means "how long for the next martini?." And the eavesdropping - well, the eavesdropping was world class.
The guys we were eavesdropping on came from Minnesota or Wisconsin. Or perhaps Nebraska. One of the Wholesome States. They were old friends who live here now. Accents aside, they spoke like naturalized New Yorkers, and one of them was married to a denizen of Queens. But they were obviously corn-fed. My own family, after all, moved here from the Midwest in the Thirties. I Know What It Sounds Like.
The conversation was riveting - possibly because it was conducted at a volume that New York natives avoid. A Nebraska, we're-all-friends-here volume. Not that anybody was loud exactly. But the two old friends from out West were speaking with a complete disregard for the dangers of being overheard. Correspondingly, they said nothing, absolutely nothing, that was indiscreet. Except that one was gay and wanted to talk about Fernando Ferrer vs Michael Bloomberg vis-à-vis "the Community." I should have loved to know his opinion, but officious waiters kept interrupting with dessert choices. And Kathleen actually thought that the entire table was for Bush. (It WASN'T!).
The married couple asked the gay guy when his apartment on Seventh Avenue would be renovated. The usual tale of delayed kitchen cabinets followed.
And I could have thought: out-of-towners. Sure. I was born here, and Kathleen was being tortured in 96th Street about proper diction at the age of five. ("We don't say 'sneakers'; we say 'tennis shoes'.") Kathleen and I are the locals. But New York is different from Paris and London and Rome and Tokyo and everywhere else. Here in New York, you can become a Genuine New Yorker within your own lifetime. You will be welcomed as a native, under certain circumstances, even if you're not one.
I broached my new theory to Kathleen. She said, "What about the Book?." It's true that the Social Register remains a vitally important source of other people's information for certain New Yorkers. It is equally the case that neither Kathleen nor I appears in its pages. But we know enough people who do to know that New York has moved on to a new social register. It's the one that includes Martha Stewart and Donald Trump. Even if we're not in the Book, we didn't go to school with Martha Stewart and Donald Trump. On the other hand, we did go to school with George Bush. So we're ready for a new set of distinctions.
The people from a town in the Midwest that would probably embarrass me by its civic excellence if I knew what it was - they're New Yorkers.
When you think how often a day passes without my even leaving the eighteenth floor of this building, much less the building itself, my schedule for the day is a hoot.
¶ 9:45: Routine colonoscopy. I'm an "at risk" sort of guy, so checkups are frequent. So far so good. During my first colonoscopy, back in the Eighties, I was so high on Demerol that I had to fight the urge to ask the physician, "Do you like what you do?", a remark that I found screamingly funny. The doctor asked me if I wanted to watch what he was doing on the monitor. I declined. Years later, I lazily opened my eyes in the middle of a procedure, and and there it was, my squeaky-clean interior.
¶ 2 PM: The Odd Couple, with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. How did this happen? We will never really understand how Kathleen, ordering tickets from the office with her gold card, wound up with matinee seats for what promises to be the hit of the season. Except it's not really a hit in the usual sense, because it's already sold out. "Presold." It doesn't matter what anybody thinks about the production, from the producers' point of view. Did I say "producers"? As it happens, Kathleen faces a million deadlines today - of the kind that popped up yesterdday - and really oughtn't to be spending her afternoon on Broadway. I hope that she'll be able to make the third item on the calendar, which is
¶ 6 to 9 PM: A members' preview of Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. Attentive readers will know that I have already seen this spectacular exhibition, and they will also have inferred that Kathleen hasn't. At 5"1', she needs to see this show, which is spectacular in a quietly intense way, like slow-motion fireworks, in preview.
Crazy, huh?
Vincent van Vincent van Gogh, Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1888)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Update: the colonoscopy was completely uneventful. Everything's fine. Thanks for the good wishes! If I didn't have to dash off to the theatre, I'd share some pictures with you, and try to describe the effects of Propofol. Difficult to do, because the drug induces conscious oblivion.
Update: The Odd Couple is amazing, and for precisely the reason that Kathleen and I expected it to be: the astonishing fluency, the ballet-quality athleticism, the gift for physical comedy that made The Producers a hit four years ago. Nathan and Lane and Matthew Broderick are unsurpassable comedians, not just because of the great shtick - Mr Lane with the baseball bat, Mr Broderick with the air-freshener - but because they pull you into the sadness of two abandoned husbands. Mr Broderick's Felix Ungar is a lot stranger - a lot stranger - than Tony Randall's was. It's a role as far from his normal work for film as Truman Capote is from Philip Seymour Hoffman's.
We still can't figure out how she wound up with matinée seats.
From the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, it was a short and delightful stroll, mainly along Fiftieth Street, to Kathleen's firm's midtown office, high atop a glorious art-deco building, 570 Lexington Avenue (the GE Building that General Electric actually built). The views are great, but I wasn't carrying a camera. Hoping that Kathleen will be able to come home before going to the Met tonight - she doesn't want to go through security with her backpack - but suspecting that we may indeed meet at the museum, I left Kathleen in a borrowed office rolling up her sleeves and getting ready to put out fires. On the subway, I realized that for the first time in nearly twenty years I was using the subway at both of the same day's rush hours.
It is Jell-O Day. Nothing but Lemon and Island Pineapple from now until tomorrow morning. Not to mention four liters of "lavage" - a substance that has been greatly improved in the past ten years. I've never had a problem with the procedure. The gastroenterologists used to be generous with the Demerol; now their anestheticians administer a drug that blocks short-term memory. It's over before you know it.
But fasting has never been my style. Not being able to do something ordinary has always fixed my attention upon the momentarily impossible. Until now. I'm not saying that a day of Jell-O will be fun. But I'll be fine. I'll run over to the Video Room and rent a pile of videos. I'll wantonly waste hours surfing the Net.
A few years ago, the doctor discovered an adenotemous tumor. Had it remained undetected, it might have killed me by now. The tumor was "sessile" - more a puddle than a projection - and the doctor couldn't remove it. I had to go to a specialist, a surgeon who had taken time off to master fiberoptics. He got it out. Until recently, this was my number-one "lucky I'm alive today and not X years ago" story. Now it's my number-two.
You're reading the number-one.
Even if your grasp of musicology is slim, even if you can't read music, take a a few minutes to read concert pianist Jeremy Denk's exploration, at Think Denk, of "Memphis Skyline," a song from Rufus Wainwright's Want Two. I don't know the album very well (yet), but I have certainly gotten to know "Memphis Skyline" a lot better in the past twenty-four hours. Mr Denk renews my faith in serious writing about music: while it never reproduces the magic, it shows you where to look.
Friday night's Parthenia recital brought a clutch of firsts: Parthenia itself, the ensemble of viole da gamba; Corpus Christi Church - the most New Englandy Catholic church that I've ever set foot in; lutenist Andy Rutherford; the music of Tobias Hume (1569-1645); and, not least, the sound of baritone Thomas Meglioranza's speaking voice. Overcoming my ingrained reluctance to horn in on performers after concerts, I stood at the edge of a small crowd until Tom directed his attention at me. We shook hands. "Hi, Tom, I'm RJ," said I. "I know," said he. Now I can say that I have met a fellow blogger.
So much for "disinterested observer" status.
Tobias Hume, as you can see from his dates, might be considered Elizabethan, but I root him in the seventeenth century. He published two books of music, in 1605 and 1607, in furtherance of his enthusiasm for the viola da gamba. This instrument, which at first glance resembles a miniature cello, is also played upright, but its base is nestled between the players thighs. There are three registers: treble, tenor, and bass. The instrument's sound is warm and not quite as focused as that of a modern stringed instrument. Perhaps because of its deep chest, the viola da gamba not only looks like a little cello but sound like one, too. It does not sound like the instrument that Ms G used to play.
Continue reading about Parthenia at Portico.
As the Daily Blague approaches its first anniversary, and I consider the different kinds of Web logs that different people maintain, I wonder whether the future holds more variety or less. How many bloggers have passed the "let's see what this thing is all about" stage? How many will continue to post once they do? When will the blogosphere cease to be dominated by IT workers?
That blogging began as a way of keeping friends up to date about new developments on the Internet makes perfect sense, but it's just as obvious that this robust format would proliferate in every direction. I detect a note among some veterans, Jason Kottke among them, of rededication to Foundational Blogging (my term), of distaste for long written entries, which seem to be associated with punditry. Mr Kottke remarked the other day that something he'd just come across reminded him of an article about blogging written by Julian Dibbell and published at Feed (an online magazine) in 2000. The article is still worth reading.
A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid -- the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.
This is very apt, and I'm glad to have it. But I've found that the Wunderkammer opened up by the Daily Blague has been a network of associations running from things happening in the world through my brain and out to other things that I'm reminded of. Only some of those externalities are situated on the Internet.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
Who is Scarlet Thomas? I don't believe that I've registered her name before - possibly because of the "Scarlet" thing. That may change. Dee Mondschein's review of Ms Thomas's PopCo sounds very interesting. So does Fatema Ahmed's review of Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a collection of stories on Chinese and Chinese-American themes. Otherwise, there's no fiction of interest this week. Two silly-sounding books about growing up privileged, The Inheritance, by Annabel Dilke (reviewed by Sarah Ferguson), and Nothing Serious, by Justine Lévy (translated by Charlotte Mandell and reviewed by Judith Warner), share page 18. Mary Gaitskell's Veronica is a book about fashion victims and their predators that, according to Meghan O'Rourke, "constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around." But I read and disliked Bad Behavior, the author's first book, and Ms Gaitskell is no longer on my list. Salman Rushdie is not on my list, either. I read The Satanic Verses in a state of boggled cluelessness: why was this book being talked about? In case I have not said so lately, I'll repeat that I loathe "magic realism." I loathe it the way patriarchs loathe their wives' infidelity, and for much the same reasons. Consorting in public with the imaginable but the impossible is disgusting. So I rather guiltily enjoyed Laura Miller's quietly savage review of Mr Rushdie's latest novel, Shalimar the Clown. Even if I were open to the opportunities of Mr Rushdie's fiction, I might well be put off by the following cracks:
(A novel that affects to gossip worshipfully about its own characters is a tiresome thing indeed.)
Rushdie has no gift for pastoralism and he evokes the fabled natural beauties of Kashmir as if he were a man who knew them primarily through the medium of embroidery motifs.
Perhaps this thinness results from Rushdie's being essentially a comic writer, directed to less congenial themes by history of ambition, a commedia dell'arte player cast in a tragedy. The invention of grand or profound characters doesn't come naturally to him....
While I was reading this, I was musing on the fact that Shalimar hadn't followed in the footsteps of other novels by Mr Rushdie, in storming the Book Review's front page. What we have on the front page instead is Times columnist Nicholas D Kristof's review of Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The authors, who are married, have devoted their work to the cause of completely demythologizing Mao Zedong. Even Mr Kristof thinks that they might have gone too far! That's the funny part. For split thinking, compare
And Mao says some remarkable things about the peasants he was supposed to be championing. When they were starving in the 1950's, he instructed: "Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel. The State should try its hardest ... to prevent peasants eating too much." In Moscow, he offered to sacrifice the lives of 300 million Chinese, half of the population at the time, and in 1958 he blithely declared of the overworked population: "Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die."
with
I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao's legacy is not all bad. Land reform... [blah blah blah]
"That side"? Can monsters have "good sides"? I think not. I doubt that I'll read this book, simply because I have already arrived at the authors' conclusions by other means, but I do recommend it.
Two new books about Shakespeare are reviewed by John Simon, perhaps our most acerbic critic. He likes them both, though. Of Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography and James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, he writes,
Needless to say, there is a good deal of overlapping, as there must be, but nobody who has read the one will fail to find pleasure and profit in the other.
But all I could think while reading the review was that surely its more important to read Shakespeare than to read about him. There ought to be a rule: for every hour that you spend on books about the Bard, you must spend ten actually reading what he actually wrote himself. In the late Spalding Gray's Life Interrupted: The Unifinished Monologue, you get to do both, authorwise; according to Charles Isherwood, this posthumous publication includes essays by friends of the noted storyteller as well as a draft of the monologue that he was working on when he died. Gray's suicide, sadly, was not a surprise; the surprise is that Abraham Lincoln didn't throw himself off the Staten Island Ferry in the middle of winter. According Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, this country's number-two president was inspired by a mental disorder to achieve greatness. Reviewer Patricia Cohen isn't convinced, and neither am I.
And while depressives may be politically acute, creative and spiritual, they don't have a monopoly on these attributes.
There are two books about ancient history. One is poet Robert Pinsky's The Life of David. Reviewer William Deresiewicz writes,
That David was himself a poetry turns out to be secondary. In fact, disappointingly, Pinsky spends little time on his subject's poetic achievement. Instead, he uses the biblical account, supplemented in places by legendary and rabbinic material, to make David present to the reader in a way the Bible cannot do.
The wrongheadedness of this exercise amazes me. It's not unlike reading about Shakespeare instead of reading Shakespeare himself. Whatever the real King David was like - if there was such a man - the Bible severely distorts his career for tendentious purposes that were conceived long after his death. To use such "materials" to compose a snapshot analysis of an historical figure is preposterous. I'm reminded that Israeli archeologists have disappointed their compatriots, not for lack of trying, by failing to produce the slightest evidentiary support for the grand things that Scripture says about David and Solomon.
The other history book, while rather more reality-based, seems even more determined to make a case. Paul Johnson writes that Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War is aimed squarely at believers in American superpowers. Mr Johnson wants all of us to read the book, because
Americans, fortunate in their power and prosperity, have many unavoidable responsibilities in the world, and in discharging them should study the past, even the remote past, to find any guidance it has to offer.
I feel a choice coming on. Either I can let that stand, or I can burst in a shower of arguably unpatriotic remarks. Perhaps I can simply say that the guidance that Mr Johnson seeks for Americans is not going to come from case studies.
Part of me would really like to read Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by Lisa Randall. Tim Folger's review makes this daunting title appear to be very approachable. If I were younger, I'd take it on. And I may take it on yet. But not on the strength of coverage in the Book Review. My life already has too many dimensions.
The concluding essay really deserves a separate entry. Elizabeth Royte's "Publish and Perish," a sort of twelve-step guide to the agonies of a newly-published author. It concludes with a remark by writer John Seabrook.
"The beginning of acceptance," Seabrook said, "is when you realize that the reason your book isn't in bookstores isn't because it's sold out. It's not there because the store never ordered it in the first place."
Oucharoonies!
Don't miss Ben Stein's chin-stroking questions about the meaning of his alumni gifts to Yale. The size of Yale's endowment - and that of several other famous universities - allows it to participate in hugely profitable deals that most of Yale's wealthiest graduates can't buy into, and this occasions some interesting resentment on the part of the writer.
I love Yale, and I am deeply grateful to Yale. It is a star in my sky every day and night. But at this point, is it an investment bank or a school? I am really not sure, and this troubles me. I would love to be shown that I am wrong, but I am not certain that I am.
Well, duh. It's an investment bank with a little University of Phoenix thingy running on the side. At schools like Carleton, Grinnell, Coe and Bowdoin, in contrast, undergraduates are taught by real professors, not exploited graduate students. How much longer is this Harvard madness going to continue?
The other day, Ms NOLA offered the temptation of seeing The Squid and the Whale with her yesterday afternoon, but I was a good boy and decided on something showing at the Storage Unit Theatre - Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. An unlikely choice, I know, but something about AO Scott's very favorable writeup in today's Times convinced me that I wouldn't hate it. And I didn't. I loved it. Kurt Russell, Kris Kristofferson, Elizabeth Shue, David Morse, and Luis Guzmán were every bit as good as I thought they be - Mr Russell a bit better than that, even - while the two stars whom I'd not seen before, Dakota Fanning and Freddy Rodrìguez were very pleasant surprises. Writer-director John Gatins clearly knows what he's doing, and, not incidentally, he uses the bluegrass landscape astutely.
Dreamer is being marketed as a family movie, and there were plenty of kids at the theatre, but, frankly, there was a great deal of grown-up tension between the characters, and the world of thoroughbred racing was not romanticized. The nuts and bolts were given much more articulate treatment than they were in Seabiscuit. Which is not to criticize the great Seabiscuit, but just to wonder how much of Dreamer will fly over kids' heads. Kurt Russell has always been good at playing wounded men, but here he's something more, a wounded man who decides to get over his way of getting over his wound. He takes off the bandages and resumes trying to live a full life. The pain of disappointment is always visible on his face until, eventually, it's replaced by hope and then contentment.
At the beginning of Dreamer, the Crane family lives on a horse farm with no horses. Dad is distant from his daughter Cale, and Dad's father, Pop, lives in his own house to one side, incommunicado. Dad's jockey no longer races, and he has a pronounced pot. You know that all these things will change, and at the end you are grateful that you've been spared most of the financial aspects of this transformation. The Cranes are living hand-to-mouth, but they manage, and financial hardship never occludes the horse story at the forefront.
As for the horse story, it's enough to say that a fine-looking animal that is almost put down at the beginning of the film goes on to more glorious achievement. The role is played by an animal named Sacrifice. Speaking of roles, the actress who plays the small role of Cale Crane's school teacher, Karen (I thought I saw "Kayren" on the screen) Butler really caught my eye. This is apparently her first film. I don't think that it will be her last.
It turns out that Harriet Miers is not entirely the woman of no accomplishment that she is made out to be. Even allowing for slant, Molly McDonough's piece for the American Bar Association's Web site, "Harriet Miers' 'Unknown' Story," ticks off a list of achievements - all related to the Bar.
Miers focused most of her career in behind-the-scenes trial practice. Colleagues say her penchant for being discreet won her the trust of her clients, including Microsoft, Walt Disney & Co. and, eventually, then-Gov. George W. Bush.
When she did take center stage, it was through bar activities. At the ABA, Miers served for nine years on the ABA Journal Board of Editors, and from 1995 to 1998 she served as chair. She also served in the ABA as chair of the Commission on Multijurisdictional Practice, chair of the House of Delegates’ Rules and Calendar Committee, and co-chair of the Section of Litigation’s Business Torts Litigation Committee. She also was a longtime member of the ABA Consortium on Legal Services and the Public, and is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Ms McDonough writes that Ms Miers is "well-known" for not making an issue of her string of "gender-barrier breakthroughs." That may be genuine modesty, or it may be the character trait that made her attractive to Texan patriarchs, Uncle-Tom style. After all, the law firm that hired her as its first female associate did so in 1972.
In the end, this article confirms, once and for all, my sense that Harriet Miers is a first-class crony. The Delegates' Rules and Calendar Committee? Bingo.
After lunch yesterday, I put on Topper and got to work on the icebox. (Amazing that such a word should survive into the twenty-first century, but that's what both my parents, born 1914 and 1918, called it.) Its condition was, to use the term a plumber once applied to my sink, "neglected." A sticky brown goo had spread over the bottom shelf, and getting rid off it tore my sponge to pieces. But I prevailed. The refrigerator is much cleaner. More important, it's emptier. The challenge will be to keep it that way.
Because of my non-moving back, I would be much happier with the sort of refrigerator that is mounted over, not beneath, the freezer, but nobody manufactures such an appliance for the space available in my kitchen. As a result, I'm faced with the choice of knocking things over because I can't see them or getting down on my knees. A third alternative, and real solution, occurred to me a while ago: everything is either in bins or on sturdy trays. This makes cleaning the glass shelves very simple. But I don't always load the bins and trays properly. That's why I want greatly reduced load. Ideally, I'd have a "bachelor's box" - beer and a few condiments. It will never be that spare. For one thing, I have jillions of condiments. Jams and jellies too - something of a problem because I don't have a sweet tooth and Kathleen is avoiding carbs these days and has never been a bread-eater.
It killed me to throw away all the chocolate. But it was unusable. And what do I do with two small bottles of Medaglia d'Oro instant espresso (essential for many desserts)? How about "brewing" a cup? I wonder what that would taste like now, in the age of Starbucks.
There's still too much in the freezer, even though I threw much of what was in it away. At least I reclaimed the ice bucket.
Topper was great fun. It's possibly the most Archie Leach of Cary Grant's movies. Constance Bennett and Roland Young are perfect, although I always think of Leo G Carroll in the title role, thanks to the Fifties TV show. And while we're making comparisons, Billie Burke's Clara is a lot less amusing than Lee Patrick's Henrietta (why the name change, I wonder). But the supporting cast sparkles with such luminaries as Alan Mowbray (as the butler) and Eugene Pallette (as the house detective). Hedda Hopper has one of her socialite moments, and Hoagie Carmichael plays himself. In the end, Roland Young's Topper carries the movie - which is as it should be.
Back in August, I posted an entry about Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from a gentleman who is participating in an urban-planning project for the Ile-de-France, the region of which Paris is the heart. My new correspondent concluded his most recent letter with a request.
I would be curious to know if, outside the town-planning community and specialised circles, there is any kind of public debate going on in the US on similar issues. What kind of look does the educated general public have on US cities today? I don’t know how interested you are in these issues of urban forms in relation to social and environmental issues, but I would love to know if by chance you have come across anything worth reading on these topics.
Today, I finally got round to responding.
Thanks for sharing your perspective on the Paris-banlieue divide.
Much of my admiration for Paris proper is a response to the complete lack of intelligent planning here in the United States. I believe that I understand certain special reasons for this (my hypothesis can be found here), and in any case there is a strong anti-dirigiste trend in the American psychology. How much longer we'll be abandoned to laissez-faire is anyone's guess. The educated American public does not seem to have thought beyond "the need to reduce energy consumption." It's a perfectly empty gesture, since turning out the lights and reducing the temperature a few degrees in winter barely a cosmetic "solution." I daresay very, very few Americans understand that rising oil prices will eventually make many plastics applications too expensive, a development that will have innumerable effects (packaging is the area I think about most). Our exurban sprawl is manifestly untenable in the mid-term, but nobody wants to hear that. We are, you might say, too busy being "productive." We have, if anything, taken too much to heart Voltaire's suggestion about the cultivation of gardens.
As you may know, American public education is financed largely by local property taxes. This not only explains why the quality of education in this country is so wildly uneven, but it also works against any regional spirit.
As for New York, I can only tell you that it is on the verge of falling apart. In fact it is falling apart, constantly, and being repaired on an ad hoc basis. But the plant itself is too old, and needs to replaced (I'm thinking of water mains and subways in particular). There is no political will for such projects. It doesn't help that our society has been so polarized by political manipulators.
In my haste to answer, I neglected to answer the gentleman's request for books on the subject. David Owen's fantastic article in The New Yorker last October, "Green Manhattan," certainly deserves mention (I didn't know that it was online!). And the work of James Howard Kunstler. Do any of you have further suggestions? I'd be grateful, as would my friend in Paris.
¶ The August entry on Colin Jones's Paris.
18 October 2005: The new season began with an elegant program, beautifully executed. The principal works were Mozart's first important piano concerto (Nº 9 in E-Flat, K 271, the "Jeunehomme" - named for blind pianist Barbara Jeunehomme to play on her tour stop in Salzburg) and Beethoven's first important piano concerto (Nº 3 in g, Op 37). Each was preceded by a roughly contemporary overture by a less exalted composer. JC Bach's Sinfonia in B-Flat, Op 18 Nº 2 opened the concert, while the overture to Luigi Cherubini's Faniska followed the intermission. Both "minor" composers were at least popular as Mozart and Beethoven in their day; neither was nearly as demanding.
This is not to say that the Sinfonia was as trivial as I was afraid it might be. "London" Bach, the youngest of Johann Sebastian's two broods, was, even during his father's last years, the most famous Bach in music. Instead of following in JS's footsteps, as his elder brother Karl Philipp Emanuel did - JC aimed at worldly success and achieved it. His operas have disappeared entirely, but their overtures, collected in his declining years as "symphonies" still serve as perfect indicators of the state of music that Mozart grew up with. Orpheus chose what was originally the overture to Bach's setting of Lucio Silla. Lively but focused, the outer movements were rhythmic riffs on attractive but unmemorable motifs. The inner movement sang a lovely song for the oboe, somewhat reminiscent of the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. The whole work gave the orchestra an enthusiastic warmup.
Written in 1777, the "Jeunehomme" concerto is scored for the standard Salzburg orchestra: two oboes, two French horns, and strings.
Continue reading about this concert at Portico.
Jason Kottke writes today about - not writing. Well, writing less. "The further away from punditry I can get, the better it will be for all of us," he concludes, having already revealed that writing does not rank very high on his list of pleasures. What he proposes to do instead is to steer kottke.org in the direction of "tumblelogs." To see what one of these looks like, visit Anarchaia. We will not, I think, be heading in that direction here in the Porticomplex.
But who wants to sound like a pundit - besides pundits? I try very hard not to sound like one, but to some extent, I'm sure, in vain. What I've discovered is that the Web log does not have to be a hurry-up what's-new medium. I still recommend readers to print the longer entries and read them at leisure, but I've also done what I can to keep the look of Portico, where everything on the blogs is destined to wind up, as crisp and uncluttered as possible. I've also cut back on what I call self-evident links. There's no reason for me to interrupt my text - and every link is a bit of an interruption - with a link to Amazon or Google that you, gentle reader, can easily fashion for yourself simply by copying, say, the title of a book into the search window.
As I write, I'm hearing a previously unopened 1973 recording of Radu Lupu, with the London Symphony Orchestra under André Previn, performing the wonderful slow movement of Grieg's Piano Concerto in a. I once told a music teacher that I hoped, some day, to have an entire summer like this music; it seemed a sophisticated thing to say and I meant it. I also mean this: it's nice to have arrived at a point where blogging is no longer cool. All right, not cool, but coolio.
George Saunders's new book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead, 2005), is a parable, but a parable about what? In the Book Review a few Sundays back, Eric Weinberger took it to be a no-longer-necessary warning against Hitler types. Sometimes, you'd think that Hitler invented genocide!
The genocide in Reign of Phil doesn't get very far, because there aren't very many people to work with. But let's not be silly. The tenor of this parable is every good writer's Topic A: language.
Did I say something about "people"? There aren't any people in Reign of Phil. There are creatures, sort of - amalgams of organic tissue and machinery. The author does not begin to describe them coherently, and that's part of the fun. (I do wonder about the sinister illustrations that don't appear to be credited to any artist. Does this mean that Mr Saunders has a sideline?) Phil, the bad guy, has a problem with his brain: it slides, from time to time, off of its "tremendous sliding rack." And when it does, Phil's manner of speech changes from bullying but understated sarcasm to blaring Victorian oratory. Here's Phil with his brain in place:
"You know what?" said Phil. "After spending some time with you folks, I am tempted, in terms of our most important National Virtue, to replace 'Generosity' with 'Remarkable Intelligence'."
This self-congratulatory nonsense is amusing because even ordinary intelligence is barely in evidence. Here's Phil with his brain in a ditch:
"I'll tell you something else about which I've been lately thinking!" he bellowed in a suddenly stentorian voice. "I've been thinking about our beautiful country! Who gave it to us? I've been thinking about how God the Almighty gave us this beautiful sprawling land as a reward for how wonderful we are. We're big, we're energetic, we're generous, which is reflected in all our myths, which are so very populated with large high-energy folks who give away all they have! If we have a National Virtue, it is that we are generous, if we have a National Defect, it is that we are too generous! Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a small crappy land? I think not! God Almighty gave them that small crappy land for reasons of His own. It is not my place to start cross-examining God the Almighty, asking why He gave them such a small crappy land, my place is to simply enjoy and protect the big beautiful land God the Almighty gave us!"
Suddenly Phil didn't seem like quite so much of a nobody to the other Outer Hornerites. What kind of nobody was so vehement, and used so many confusing phrases with such certainty, and was so completely accurate about how wonderful and generous and under-appreciated they were?
Note "under-appreciated." Phil's political advance in the notional land of Outer Horner owes almost entirely to his willingness to appreciate the dickens out of his compatriots. Reign of Phil is at the same time a hornbook of demagogic language and a critique of it. Mr Saunders's ear for the unconsidered language of ordinary people is equally pitch-perfect.
Not too long ago, I wrote about Harry Frankfurt's little treatise, On Bullshit. I admired Professor Frankfurt's argument that the liar is more interested in the truth than the bullshitter is. The bullshitter speaks...
Continue reading about The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil at Portico.