Quote of the Day (Stephen Colbert, on Cynicism, ‘A Self-Imposed Blindness’)

“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.”—American comic and late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert, Commencement Address at Knox College, Galesburg, IL, June 3, 2006

The traditional commencement exercises that had been scheduled for yesterday by my alma mater were cancelled a few days ago.

I’m not going to retrace the words and actions that led to this decision. But I thought I would offer for students there and elsewhere in this tumultuous year a replacement of sorts, a throwback to another commencement address, from Stephen Colbert nearly two decades ago.

Extreme idealism—demands expected be fulfilled immediately—is also blindness. But the deformed moral vision that Colbert identified is more deadly in the long run, because it withers the soul day by day.

If you want to know something close to my philosophy on change, I can think of few lines better than these, from Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Fixer:

“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer—he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.”

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on ‘The Form of Government Which Prevails’)

“[T]he form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.”— American philosopher, essayist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Politics” (1844)

Quote of the Day (Henry Ward Beecher, on What Really Makes Someone Rich)

“No man can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.”— U.S. abolitionist/minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), quoted by Thomas Wallace Knox, Life and Work of Henry Ward Beecher: An Authentic, Impartial and Complete History of His Public Career and Private Life (1887)

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on John McLaughlin, ‘A Legend’ Among Rotten DC Bosses)

“In a city famous for tyrannical bosses, from congressmen crazed with drink to bureau chiefs aflame with illicit desire, [John] McLaughlin had become a legend. You heard stories of volcanic rages, unimaginable flights of egomania. Least among his eccentricities was his requirement that all staffers refer to him as ‘Dr. McLaughlin,’ because he had once earned a Ph.D. in communications or some other of the lesser academic disciplines….

“The McLaughlin legend, I quickly discovered, had shortchanged the McLaughlin reality. When I opened the door to his production company’s suite, the first words I heard came roaring up in the famous Rhode Island drawl: ‘This is s–! Unadulterated s–!’ From the shadows of a darkened office, behind a desk as vast as the deck of an aircraft carrier, McLaughlin would bellow at his staff through an intercom. His voice ricocheted down hallways, and the epithets burst like ack-ack above the dim cubicles where his assistants cowered and trembled. The abuse was astonishing, unpredictable, and, in several instances, cruel. A single tirade could last for an hour.”—Conservative commentator Andrew Ferguson, “The Man Who Started It All,” The Weekly Standard, Dec. 24, 2007, reprinted in The Washington Examiner, Dec. 24, 2007

Since death took him eight years ago, fewer and fewer people will remember what all the commotion was about each week on The McLaughlin Group.

But nobody who heard the stentorian voice of the founder and host of that current affairs show, John McLaughlin, could ever forget it—least of all, judging from Andrew Ferguson’s profile, the staffers unlucky enough to work for him.

A high decibel level was only one aspect of his impact on employees, however. As writer and TV personality John Leonard noted in a June 2000 article for The Nation, McLaughlin “settl[ed] one sexual-harassment suit out of court, facing the prospect of at least two more–and nevertheless permitting himself to savage Anita Hill on his McLaughlin Group.”

In addition, on a scale of 1 to 10—a popular measure that the host used to rate and dismiss issues or legislation—McLaughlin, a former Jesuit who appeared to display precious little humility or piety in any part of his life, rated a “10” for his impact on the level or content of political discourse over the last 40 years. He has a fair claim to being the godfather of the cable shout-fests that have raised the nation’s emotional temperature during that time.

Did McLaughlin improve the environment around him by what he said or did—the choice that ultimately all of us face and are graded by? To quote the Beltway blowhard’s frequent response on other matters during his show’s long run: “WRONG!!!”

(The image of John McLaughlin accompanying this post was taken by Karl H. Schumacher on May 3, 1974, when the future pundit still worked at the White House as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon—whom he hailed, extremely prematurely and utterly preposterously, as “the greatest moral leader in the last third of this century.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Christ From Birth to Ascension)

"But our very Life came down to earth and bore our death, and slew it with the very abundance of his own life. And, thundering, he called us to return to him into that secret place from which he came forth to us—coming first into the virginal womb, where the human creature, our mortal flesh, was joined to him that it might not be forever mortal—and came ‘as a bridegroom coming out his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race.’ For he did not delay, but ran through the world, crying out by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension—crying aloud to us to return to him.  And he departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find him there. For he left us, and behold, he is here.  He could not be with us long, yet he did not leave us.” —St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Confessions of St. Augustine (401 AD), translated by Albert C. Outler (1955)

The image accompanying this post, The Ascension, was created in 1801 by the British-American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820).

Quote of the Day (Richard Carlson, on Why You Should ‘Listen With a Quieter Mind’)

“When you listen with a quieter mind to your loved ones, coworkers, educators, or anyone else with whom it's crucial that you really hear what's being said, both you and the person you're listening to will sense a world of difference.”— American author, psychotherapist, and motivational speaker Richard Carlson (1961-2006), Easier Than You Think...Because Life Doesn't Have to be So Hard (2005)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,’ Showing How English Usage Has Changed in Academe)

[In the first class of his English course, freshman Dobie Gillis has said “Everyone has their,” only to be reprimanded by his professor that it should be “Everybody has his.”]

Dobie Gillis [played by Bobby Van, pictured with Debbie Reynolds]: “Gee, I don't know, sir. I think the way the people use a language is the right way and if the rule says no, then the rule ought to be changed.”

Professor Amos Pomfritt [played by Hans Conried]: “In the 25 years that I have devoted to this underpaid profession of teaching, I have heard many an asinine outburst but never one so asinine as yours. I can only assume that your recent passage through puberty has affected your mind, for you, sir, are a presumptuous driveler, a cretinous barbarian, a thick-tongued oaf, an ill-bred churl, and in the future, you will be good enough to keep your mindless opinions to yourself!”— The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), screenplay by Max Shulman, directed by Don Weis

Seven decades ago, when this musical was released, audiences would have looked at the accompanying picture of Bobby Van with Debbie Reynolds and smiled indulgently. No wonder poor Dobie couldn’t keep his mind on grammar! 

Professor Pomfritt was being hard indeed with that line about how “puberty has affected your mind.” A little remedial English—perhaps with an instructor whose looks wouldn’t distract Dobie—would be just what the young man needed to learn these rules.

Back in the Seventies, a debate opened up about the point of contention between Dobie and his prof. Edwin Newman, with his bestseller Strictly Speaking, could be counted on to take Pomfritt’s part, though there were others like linguist Geoffrey Nunberg who disagreed vehemently.

Nowadays, in many, many corners of academe—and a growing segment of the business world—it’s Professor Pomfritt and other grammar purists who would be in trouble. The prof could, in fact, trigger complaints by students who prefer gender-neutral pronouns.

The resulting academic board of inquiry might then charge him with being “an ill-bred churl” for showing insensitivity.

This is one of many examples of how films from the past might strike contemporary audiences in ways that its creators could never have remotely imagined.

If the movie is good enough—or, in the case of The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, a harmless waste of a couple of hours—a viewer will just chuckle, without needing a “trigger warning” from the well-meaning.

Quote of the Day (Roxane Gay, on the Trouble With Complaining)

“Complaining allows us to acknowledge the imperfect without having to take action—it lets us luxuriate in inertia. We all have grand ideas about what life would be like if only we had this, or did that, or lived there. Perhaps complaining helps bridge the vast yawn between these fantasy selves and reality.” — American fiction writer, essayist, editor, and social commentator Roxane Gay, “Why I Stopped Whining,” Reader’s Digest, May 2015

The image accompanying this post of Roxane Gay was taken Oct. 22, 2015, by Eva Blue in Montreal, Canada during an interview by Rachel Zellars.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Swift, With Advice for an Aspiring Poet)

“Consult yourself; and if you find
    A powerful Impulse urge your mind,
     Impartial judge within your Breast
     What Subject you can manage best;
     Whether your Genius most inclines
     To satire, praise, or hum’rous Lines,
     To Elegies in mournful Tone,
     Or Prologue sent from Hand unknown.
     Then, rising with Aurora's Light,
     The Muse invok’d, sit down to write;
     Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
     Enlarge, diminish, interline;
     Be mindful, when Invention fails,
     To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.”—Anglo-Irish minister and satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “On Poetry: A Rapsody,” in Restoration and Augustan Poets: Milton to Goldsmith, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (1965)

Quote of the Day (Celeste Ng, on Fiction and Grace)

“Fiction makes you aware of complications. I'm interested in the times that things go wrong, but I'm also interested in trying to make some kind of meaning from that. Fiction should show you more dimensions. When you start to connect with other people, that's when that kind of humility that allows you to have grace comes in. Grace is something that you do after you've tripped: You're catching yourself and taking something that could have been a negative or a wrongdoing or a shortcoming and moving past it. Grace is about how you handle things when you are wrong or when you have done wrong. It's admitting that everyone, including you, is fallible.”—Author Celeste Ng quoted in “Soapbox—The Columnists; WSJ Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic; This Month: Grace,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2019/January 2020

The image accompanying this post, showing Celeste Ng at the 2018 National Book Festival, was taken Sept. 1, 2018, by Avery Jensen.

This Day in Confederate History (Judah Benjamin, Sole Jewish Member of Davis Cabinet, Dies)

May 6, 1884— Judah Benjamin, who served close friend Jefferson Davis in three different Cabinet positions in the short-lived Confederacy, died at age 72 years old in Paris, thousands of miles and two decades removed from the slaveocracy in which he made his fortune and to which he devoted his considerable bureaucratic talents.

Few figures of the Civil War are as little known and mysterious as Benjamin. Much of that owed to his anomalous position as a Jew in a region of the country that was not merely Christian, but even overwhelmingly Protestant. 

But some of the obscurity that clings to his name derives from his actions rather than his character.

Like Aaron Burr, another enormously able politician and lawyer often perceived as traitorous, Benjamin put precious little to paper, even confessing that he had “never kept a diary or retained a copy of a letter written by me,” all aimed at frustrating attempts to ferret out the truth of his life by subsequent biographers.

In this effort he was only partly successful. While leaving little in his own hand, he couldn’t stop other people from writing about him.

And, as someone who served successively as the South’s Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, he couldn’t evade their judgments—more often than not, negative.

“Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century,” wrote biographer James Traub last year. “He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention.”

Had Benjamin done anything other than commit himself to the “peculiar institution,” he would have long since been acclaimed a great American success story. A native of British-owned St. Croix, he emigrated with his family first to North Carolina, then Charleston, SC.

At age 14, his brilliance shone so brightly that one of the city’s leading Jewish merchants offered to pay his tuition to Yale.

Even a dismissal from the university on mysterious grounds only slowed his progress rather than stopping it, for he simply relocated to New Orleans, where he transformed himself into an attorney with a thriving practice—and, courtesy of an advantageous marriage to the Catholic Natalie St. Martin, the owner of more than 100 slaves.

In 1852, Benjamin became the first Jew not to have converted to Christianity to win election to the U.S. Senate. Only a year later, he turned down another distinction—nomination as the first Jew to the Supreme Court—probably because the high court hadn't achieved the status it came to enjoy in the 20th century.

On the other hand, serving in the Davis Cabinet was an important but thankless job:

*As Attorney General, he soon discovered he didn’t have courts to speak off:

*Later, when Davis transferred him to the War Department, he had to laugh off taunts that he was the “clerk” of his strong-willed President, only to incur the wrath of the populace when, despite his flair for paperwork, armies in the field were missing vital supplies;

*Finally, after Benjamin accepted responsibility for a problem that really his, a grateful Davis moved him over to the State Department. Here, his exploitation of cotton’s commercial value in attempting to win diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France was “a luminous failure,” according to historian Frank Vandiver’s Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970).

In Richmond as in New Orleans, the short, plump, but witty Secretary of State cut quite a figure on the social circuit, leading to a late-20th century description of him as "the Confederate Henry Kissinger." 

Mrs. Harrison Burton recalled in a 1911 memoir that Benjamin brought to the home of a Richmond hostess “his charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books.”

All to little or no avail. Benjamin not only remained what Vandiver called “the most disliked man in Richmond,” but one who, despite considerable administrative skill and his failure to practice the faith into which he was born, elicited the latent anti-Semitism of much of the populace.

Most, if not all, of the criticism that came his way was unfair. As I noted in this prior post, the War Department may have been the most unstable of all the positions in Davis' rickety Cabinet, buckling under the Confederate President's touchiness and micromanagement, not to mention its disadvantages in materials and organizing a new government from scratch.

In the waning days of the war, Benjamin was nothing if not grimly realistic, advocating manumission in exchange for any slaves who joined the Confederate Army.

Then, as Ulysses Grant broke through the defenses surrounding Richmond in early April 1865, Benjamin refused to entertain the pipe dream that the government could somehow slip out of the city and reconstitute itself further west, where surrender was not yet an actuality.

In the war’s final days, Benjamin made one of the most daring escapes of any of the Confederates, resorting to one disguise after another—and even surviving more than one shipwreck—to make his way first to Florida, then to Great Britain, to which his birth in St. Croix entitled him to citizenship.

Benjamin had much more to fear from capture than his Cabinet counterparts: according to a June 2023 article in The Tablet by Jay Solomon and Jane Singer, his creation of a spy ring starting in the North and stretching into Canada led Union investigators to tie him to the assassination plot that killed Abraham Lincoln and nearly did the same to Secretary of State William Seward, an adversary dating back to their days in the Senate.

The U.S. extradition effort was no more successful than Benjamin’s wartime campaign for “Cotton Diplomacy.” His legal skills now allowed him to flourish in Britain, where he lived out much of the remainder of his life, building a prosperous practice, even reputation for brilliance, to rival what he achieved in New Orleans.

Though the former Southern politician entertained Davis on the few times his old boss came to England, Benjamin otherwise never looked back on his old life and never returned to the United States.

Unfortunately, success at the bar seems not to have brought happiness to the domestic sphere for Benjamin. 

Though he destroyed most of the documentation about his life, enough remained to show that he subsidized separate quarters in Paris for his wife, who had long provoked gossip with her spendthrift ways and extramarital affairs.

In one of the most heated Senate debates in the late 1850s, Benjamin dismissed an abolitionist’s jibe that, as the descendant of a people who had suffered at the hands of the Pharoah, he was being hypocritical in defending slavery—that he was, in effect, “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.”

Posterity has not shrugged off that charge so easily, complicating any attempt to come to grips with why this most brilliant of attorneys could be so blind to the foremost human rights question of his time.

(For a fascinating comparison of Benjamin with a Jewish appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court who served for years, see this August 2019 blog post from The Times of Israel by Tzemach Yehudah Richter.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ on the Recent Student Protests)

[Three concerned parents are featured on a “NY1” segment about students participating in protests about the Gaza war.]

Alphonse [played by Kenan Thompson]: “It’s wonderful. Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight for what they believe in.”

Host Ryan Abernathy [played by Michael Longfellow]: “Wow, that’s very encouraging. Alfonse, your daughter must feel so supported when she’s out there.”

Alphonse Roberts: “What’s that, now? When whose daughter is out there?”

Abernathy: “At the protest.”

Alphonse: “No, no, no, man. You buggin! Alexis Vanessa Roberts better have her butt in class. Let me find out she’s in one of them damn tents instead of the dorm room I pay for.”

Doug Hoving [played by Mikey Day]: “I thought you were in favor of the student protests.”

Alphonse: “Brother man, I am supportive of y’all’s kids protesting, not my kids. Shoot! Alexis Vanessa ain’t crazy.”

Abernathy: “Your daughter attends Columbia. What do you think of the students who took over Hamilton Hall?”

Alphonse: “That’s good for y’all’s kids, but they ain’t mine. You feel me, Ryan?”

Abernathy: “Yes, I feel you, Alphonse. But tell me, with the rise in attendance in this protest, how does it make you feel about the police presence?”

Sarah Himes [played by Mikey Day]: “One of my worst fears is my daughter getting thrown behind bars.”

Alphonse: “I ain’t worried about Five-O—that is not my business. My business is Alexis Vanessa Roberts. OK? She ain’t talking about no free this, free that, because I tell you what ain’t free: Columbia. Do you all know that they got the nerve to want $68,000 a year?”—Saturday Night Live, Season 49, Episode 18, “Cold Open” segment, original air date May 4, 2024, directed by Greg Scarnici

Quote of the Day (Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, on National Stories and International Quarrels)

“No two countries tell the same story, even when describing the same events. One country’s glory is another country’s grievance. One’s founding myth is another’s crowning shame. In international relations, such dissonance is dangerous. Governments quarrel over what history makes rightfully theirs. Resentment over old offenses overrides powerful incentives to cooperate. Interests, threats, pride, justice—determinants of war and peace are defined by stories that never overlap exactly and often clash catastrophically. The past is never dead; it is kindling for future conflict.”—Foreign Affairs editor, diplomatic historian and George Marshall biographer Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, “The Clash of Victimizations” (review of Howard French’s “Everything Under the Heavens”), Washington Monthly, June/July/August 2017

Quote of the Day (Margaret MacMillan, on How History Cautions Us)

“History should not be asked to provide validation for political arguments in the present, or clear guidance for the future, but what it can do is caution us about taking too simple a view of the past.”— Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, “2016 and All That,” Financial Times, July 9-10, 2016

Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Milton, on the Archangel Raphael)

“At once on the eastern cliff of Paradise
He lights, and to his proper shape returns
A Seraph winged:  Six wings he wore, to shade
His lineaments divine; the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling o’er his breast
With regal ornament; the middle pair
Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round
Skirted his loits and thighs with downy gold
And colours dipt in Heaven; the third his feet
Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail,
Sky-tinctured grain.  Like Maia’s son he stood,
And shook his plumes, that heavenly fragrance filled
The circuit wide.”—English poet John Milton (1608-1674), on the archangel Raphael dispatched to check on Eden, in Paradise Lost (1674)
 
The image accompanying this post, St. Raphael, was created by the Spanish Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682).

Photo of the Day: A Product of ‘Long'd for May’)

“Now doe a quire of chirping Minstrels bring
In tryumph to the world, the youthfull Spring.
The Vallies, hills, and woods, in rich araye,
Welcome the comming of the long'd for May.”—English poet Thomas Carew (1595?-1639?), “The Spring,” in Restoration and Augustan Poets: Milton to Goldsmith, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (1965)
 
It might be hard to believe, but I came across this blooming bit of flora outside a building in a bustling Bergen County, NJ suburb this week.
 
It was a far different environment from the one in which Thomas Carew wrote his poem. 

When he wasn’t busy serving as ”sewer in ordinary” (i.e., the guy who tasted the royal food first before passing it on, thus preventing the possibility of poison) to King Charles I or leading the “Cavalier poets” who supported the monarch in the tumult leading up to and through the English Civil War, he was also pursuing a variety of ladies.
 
And so, lest you think that “The Spring” is some sort of ancestor of Wordsworth in its ecstatic embrace of Nature, it is really Carew’s attempt to woo a woman keeping him at bay—a lady with “June in her eyes, in her heart January.”

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on How Speculative Fiction Is Actually About the Present)

“People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t…What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and What Science Fiction Is and Does,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

Gaiman references Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in his essay, but perhaps a better example of the speculative fiction genre is 1984. (In fact, George Orwell came up with the title by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel: 1948.)

The image accompanying this post comes from the movie adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian vision, released in, appropriately enough, 1984, starring John Hurt (pictured here) as Winston Smith.

The key to Orwell’s nightmare comes from this quotation from the novel: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ on the Supreme Court and Presidential Politics)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “What the Supreme Court says ain't got nothing to do with the law. They okayed busing too 'til President Nixon give 'em the old one-two.” —All in the Family, Season 3, Episode 1, “Archie and the Editorial,” original air date Sept. 16, 1972, teleplay by George Arthur Bloom and Don Nicholl, directed by Norman Campbell

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Just substitute an issue currently on the Supreme Court’s docket and the name “Trump” for “Nixon” and this line fits as well today as it did in 1972.

Or, as the great Irish-American satirist Finley Peter Dunne wrote in his “Mr. Dooley” column back in the early 20^th century: “No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' Supreme Court follows th' iliction returns.”

Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on Dixie in The City That Never Sleeps)

“While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was ‘Dixie,’ and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.

“It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the ‘rebel’ air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long–shot winners at the New Orleans race–track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a ‘fad’ in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.

“When ‘Dixie’ was being played a dark–haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft–brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.”—American short-story writer William Sidney Porter, aka “O. Henry” (1862-1910), "A Cosmopolite in a Café," in The Four Million (1906)

Recently, I have taken to dipping into more of the short stories of the writer we know as “O. Henry.” I don’t know how much the younger generation has been exposed to him in high school or college, but when I was growing up he was nearly inescapable, cropping up constantly in anthologies (especially his Christmas tale “The Gift of the Magi,” which I discussed in this post from over 13 years ago).

As a matter of fact, more certainly than the presence of a New Yorker-style short story, there is an O. Henry one: i.e., one featuring an ironic, usually witty, reversal.

Those surprise endings became a trademark for the writer. The problem, such as it is, boils down to this: When read in bulk, the novelty wears off.

And when I write “bulk,” I mean bulk. The collection I’m reading now is called 100 Selected Stories. This paperback is substantial, totaling more than 700 pages.

But even here, it only begins to tap the writer’s astonishing output. Estimates of the number of his short stories that I’ve seen on the Internet range from 300 to “more than 600”—all collected in nine volumes published from 1904 to 1909, the year before his death.

So yes, after reading one of these stories after another in rapid succession, you are so sure a surprise is coming that it ceases to be surprising.

But, as I’ve been discovering by reading him in a collection as well as in viewing a DVD of a largely forgotten 1957 TV series, The O. Henry Playhouse, starring the great character actor Thomas Mitchell, other traits of the author besides the surprise twist come to the fore.

The quotation at the start of this current post, for instance, brought me up short. It highlights one of his less remarked upon but equally rare skills, as a social historian.

While plying his trade as a short-story writer in the early 1900s, O. Henry set many of his tales where he lived, in Manhattan—or, as he put it, “Bagdad-on-the Subway.”

The city was coming into its own as an international melting pot, and the writer was there to chronicle it all, from society swells in elegant restaurants and hotels to fleabag dumps on the Bowery.

O. Henry depicted all these characters without snobbery. He would have felt himself the least inclined of anybody to judge: After all, he carried with him the secret stigma of serving three years for embezzling from a bank in Austin, Texas, in the 1890s.

One last point: this passage also reveals O. Henry as a Southern writer. Such fiction is more than just novels and short stories written by and/or about people who live below the Mason-Dixon line, or in the states comprising the vanished Confederacy. The other quintessential element of such works is storytelling.

O. Henry’s yarns came from sitting around listening wherever he went. But, as a longtime resident of Texas who started using his pseudonym in New Orleans while briefly on the lam for his crime, he also had an affinity for Southerners.

Being too young to have fought in the Civil War for his native state of Ohio, he would not have heard the “Mosby rebel yell” emitted by the “dark-haired young man” with a shudder, but with curiosity, and maybe even affection.

(For more on O. Henry as a social historian with a Southern affinity, I urge you to read David Madden’s August 2014 article in the Citizen-Times of Asheville, NC—the city, incidentally, where O. Henry is buried, near his second wife and daughter from his first marriage.)

Quote of the Day (Peter Frampton, on Musicians With Longevity)

“People who have longevity in music are usually the ones who never think they’re that special, so they keep pushing the envelope, listening, and learning more. I'll never be as good as I want to be, because the goal posts are always moving. If a player ever starts to think they're hot s—t and stops trying to improve themselves, it's curtains, or stagnation at the very least. But my friend and yours, B. B. King, was the most humble man, till the day he died.”— English-American rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and singer-songwriter Peter Frampton with Alan Light, Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir (2020)

B.B. King would find a kindred spirit, I firmly believe, in Peter Frampton. Few entertainers have known his level of fame as a teen idol after the release of his multiplatinum album Frampton Comes Alive in the mid-Seventies. 

But few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude after his richly deserved election to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame last month.

There was a time when I would have gagged on that phrase “richly deserved.” I had purchased and enjoyed Frampton Comes Alive, but been deeply disappointed with his solo follow, I’m in You, as well as with his participation in a film project I still regard as sacrilegious, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

To his credit, Frampton has acknowledged these creative mistakes, along with the substance abuse that put his career and life at risk for a long time. He rededicated himself to his work and reminded listeners why, ever since his days with Humble Pie, he became one of the elite rock ‘n’ roll guitarists.

Memoirs can be a fraught genre, filled at times with artful trimming and deception, but Frampton’s strikes me as one written by a musician who takes pride in his work and the friends he’s made along the way without yielding to overweening ego. In short, he seems as likable as they come.

Fans naturally value skill in performers, but honesty, humility and thankfulness can be in far shorter supply. These latter qualities shine as brightly with Frampton as the prowess with the “talk box” that made him a music-industry phenomenon nearly a half-century ago.

(For further information on the inflammatory muscle disease through which Frampton has persevered over the last half-dozen years, inclusion body myositis (IBM), see this July 2020 post from the Myositis Association blog.)

(Photo of Frampton performing at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, FL, taken on Sept. 26, 2006, by Carl Lender)

Quote of the Day (Vivian Gornick, on Persisting at Writing)

“It's terrible, not to be able to work every day, but every day, in my long writing life, to come up against the fog in the head. The inability to think, to write another sentence. There are many days when I don't write anything. But I always sit down at the desk. Absolutely. Every morning, religiously.”— American feminist literary critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist Vivian Gornick quoted by Alexandra Schwartz, “Look Again,” The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2020

(Photograph of Vivian Gornick taken Oct. 4, 2018, through YouTube by librairie mollat.)

Quote of the Day (Michael Oakeshott, on Conversation)

“Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.”— English philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (1959)

TV Quote of the Day (Jerry Seinfeld, on Pain-Relieving Ingredients)

“Then they tell you about the pain-relieving ingredient. There's always gotta be a lotta that. Nobody wants anything less than 'extra-strength. 'Extra-strength' is the absolute minimum. You can’t even get 'strength.' Strength' is out now. It's all 'extra-strength.' Some people are not satisfied with 'extra,' they want 'maximum.’ Give me the 'maximum-strength.’ ‘Give me the maximum allowable human dosage.’ ‘Figure out what will kill me and then back it off a little bit.’"—Stand-up comedian and sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld, “Jerry Seinfeld: ‘I’m Telling You for the Last Time’”, original air date Aug. 9, 1998, written by Jerry Seinfeld, directed by Marty Callner

Happy 70^th birthday to Jerry Seinfeld!

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoevsky, on ‘The Man Who Lies to Himself’)

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.”— Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1880), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Constance Garnett

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Moses Mendelssohn, Urging ‘The Right to Be Different’)

“Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it, as long he does not disturb public felicity and acts honestly toward the civil laws, toward you and his fellow citizens. Let no one in your states be a searcher of hearts and a judge of thoughts.”— German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), “The Right to Be Different” (1783), in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, Second Edition, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (1995)

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on Hatred)

“A man’s hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.” —Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist and poet George Santayana (1863-1952), Reason in Common Sense (Vol. 1 of “The Life of Reason”) (1905)

This Day in Yankee History (Peterson, Chambliss Swapped in ‘Friday Night Massacre’)

Apr. 26, 1974—In a multi-player trade derided at the time as “The Friday Night Massacre,” the New York Yankees sent a former All-Star pitcher who had deeply embarrassed the club to the Cleveland Indians for a quiet first baseman who helped return them to glory after 12 years away from the postseason.

The reports two weeks ago that Fritz Peterson died last October reminded me of the scandal that engulfed the pitcher a half-century ago—then, after a few minutes’ reflection, of the subsequent trade involving him that became one of the building blocks in the revived Yankee dynasty of the Seventies.

If you thought you saw a pun in the headline for this post, you are correct.  The Bronx Bombers had sat stony and red-faced when veteran lefty Peterson and younger starter Mike Kekich admitted in separate March 1973 press conferences that they had swapped wives and children the prior summer.

Three months after the scandal exploded, the Yankees had no compunctions in unloading Kekich, who had seldom mastered the requisite control to go with his fastball. But it was another matter for Peterson, who won 20 games in 1970 and, if he could overcome a back injury incurred in spring training in 1974, could have returned to form.

In a 2015 interview for the “Bleeding Yankee Blue” blog, Peterson recalled that he had told Yankee President and General Manager Gabe Paul that he wouldn’t mind if he ended up being traded, as long as it wasn’t to the Philadelphia Phillies or the Cleveland Indians. The executive assured him he had nothing to worry about.

So much for promises, especially those made in baseball’s pre-free agent era. 

Paul wound up dealing Peterson to the Indians along with righthanded starter Steve Kline and relievers Fred Beene and Tom Buskey. In return, the Yankees received righthanders Cecil Upshaw and Dick Tidrow, as well as the trade's linchpin, Chris Chambliss (pictured).

(Perhaps Paul's only concession to Peterson's feelings was that the trade occurred one month after Cleveland bid goodbye to Kekich, which meant that any clubhouse awkwardness with the onetime great friends would be eliminated.)

No matter how much about Peterson’s role in the wife-swapping scandal may have angered the Yankee brass, he remained a favorite in the clubhouse, which valued his on-field pinpoint control and delighted in his off-field pranks.

Most of all, teammates like Thurman Munson, Bobby Murcer, and Mel Stottlemyre wondered publicly about the wisdom of getting rid of 40% of the pitching staff during a transition year for the team—its first since 1964 without manager Ralph Houk.

With Richard Nixon’s abrupt firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox still on the minds of many, the farewell to Peterson and the three other Yankee pitchers inevitably became known as “The Friday Night Massacre.”

The 1971 American League Rookie of the Year, Chambliss had followed up with a combined .281 his next two seasons. 

But, with a subpar .243 BA with the Yankees in that first season after the trade—and with Buskey performing creditably coming out of the Indians’ bullpen—it looked like the Yankees had gotten the worst of the transaction. There was no telling how long he’d last with impulsive owner George Steinbrenner calling the shots.

Within a couple of years, all these concerns would fall by the wayside. If the trade wasn’t as lopsided as, say, the St. Louis Cardinals receiving Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio, it still, in the long run, decisively benefited the Yankees.

After two seasons with the Indians, Peterson would be traded to Texas in 1976, then retire. The careers of Kline and Beene would also flame out.

As their stars fell, the long-term advantage of the deal for the Yankees became more apparent. Although Upshaw would be traded after his 1-5 season, Tidrow—whose nickname “Dirt” mirrored his blue-collar grit—became a dependable long reliever and spot starter.

Chambliss was even better, rebounding in 1975 with a .304 batting average. Through the end of the 1970s, he proved a model of consistency, with his BA ranging from .274 to .293.

Although Reggie Jackson, the slugger who replaced Chambliss in the cleanup role in 1977, may have been the self-styled “straw that stirs the drink” for the Yankees, Chambliss helped cement the team being cobbled together by Paul.

In the field, Chambliss was smooth, earning a Gold Glove in 1978. At the plate, if he did not hit prodigious home runs in batches, he rarely slumped, laying off bad pitches enough to wear down opposing pitchers and easing the way for the rest of the lineup. (He would successfully preach the same gospel of plate discipline as the Yankees’ hitting coach in the 1990s.) 

In a clubhouse that became increasingly dominated by large egos, Chambliss presented an unassuming but necessary contrast.

But this quietest of men became known for one particularly loud at bat: his dramatic, ninth-inning walk-off homer in the 1976 American League Championship Series off Kansas City Royals reliever Mark Littell—sending the Yankees on to the World Series for the first time since 1964.

When Paul pulled off another trade that brought rookie second baseman Willie Randolph to the Yankees from the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Bombers had solidified the right side of their infield with intelligent, consistent players who, by rarely making mistakes, contributed mightily to their late Seventies dynasty.