Quote of the Day (Anna Quindlen, on Old Friends)

“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life (2012)

The image accompanying this post of Anna Quindlen, Barnard College ’74, was taken Jan. 29, 2008 (when she was head of the school’s board of trustees) by Angela Radulescu.

Tweet of the Day (meghan@deloisivete, on Faxing)

“My mom asked what my office does for faxing since we're completely remote, so I had to tell her we're actually located in 2024.”— meghan@deloisivete, tweet of July 2, 2024

The image accompanying this post—a Panasonic Thermotransfer Fax KX-F90 with integrated answering machine and telephone, beginning of 1990s—was taken Jan. 14, 2006, by Pittigrilli.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Faith, Hope, and Love)

“When, then, we believe that good is about to come, this is nothing else but to hope for it. Now what shall I say of love? Without it, faith profits nothing; and in its absence, hope cannot exist. The Apostle James says: ‘The devils also believe, and tremble.’ — that is, they, having neither hope nor love, but believing that what we love and hope for is about to come, are in terror. And so the Apostle Paul approves and commends ‘the faith that works by love’; and this certainly cannot exist without hope. Wherefore there is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.”— Roman Catholic memoirist, theologian, and bishop St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), The Enchiridion: Being a Treatise on Faith, Hope and Love, translated by Professor J. F. Shaw (1883)

Quote of the Day (Emily Dickinson, on a ‘Helpless’ Personal Victory)

“When I am not at work in the kitchen, I sit by the side of mother, provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her. I ought to be glad, and grateful that I can do anything now, but I do feel so very lonely, and so anxious to have her cured. I hav'nt repined but once, and you shall know all the why. While I washed dishes at noon in that little ‘sink-room’ of our's, I heard a well-known rap, and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet-still woods, and I wanted to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed—he wanted me very much—then the tears came into my eyes, tho' I tried to choke them back, and he said I could, and should go, and it seemed to me unjust. Oh I struggled with great temptation, and it cost me much of denial, but I think in the end I conquered, not a glorious victory Abiah, where you hear the rolling drum, but a kind of a helpless victory, where triumph would come of itself, faintest music, weary soldiers, nor a waving flag, nor a long-loud shout. I had read of Christ's temptations, and how they were like our own, only he did'nt sin; I wondered if one was like mine, and whether it made him angry—I couldnt make up my mind; do you think he ever did?”—American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), May 7, 1850 letter to friend Abiah Root

Robert Frost wrote of the impact of personal choices in “The Road Not Taken.” One hundred and seventy-five years ago this week, as the above passage indicates, an earlier New England poet, Emily Dickinson, found herself at a threshold she couldn’t cross.

In American literature, few figures are more enigmatic than “The Belle of Amherst.” I have been particularly interested in her since a visit to the Dickinson Homestead in town nearly 20 years ago (which I discussed in this 2008 blog post).

Though 1,000 of her letters survive, her younger sister Lavinia, at her request, destroyed the rest of her correspondence. So the secret chambers of her heart remain locked, despite the curiosity of residents in her Pioneer Valley community during her lifetime and of biographers and literary critics in the nearly 140 years after her death.

Maybe I should have inserted “largely” before “locked” in the last sentence. After coming home from Mount Holyoke Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College) in her teens, she engaged in a brief period of social activity until age 24 in her family’s original home on North Pleasant Street: going to dances, calling on friends, and attending book club readings and concerts.

It was during this time—before her family repurchased and moved back into the home her grandfather lost to bankruptcy, the one we now know as the Dickinson Homestead—that she confided in her close Amherst Academy friend Abiah Root about the “great temptation” she avoided.

Why didn’t Dickinson join the male friend who “who asked me to ride in the woods,” despite wanting “to exceedingly”? 

Could she have suspected his intentions, even as she felt drawn to him, because of his strenuous importuning (“he said I could, and should go")? 

Despite her refusal to join others in Amherst in the “Second Great Awakening” sweeping New England in the antebellum period, did she still feel the restraints of religion that urged pre-marital chastity?

I suspect another cause, hinted at in the very first sentence: the obligations of family, in this case her mother.

Emily Norcross Dickinson, already 45 years old at this point, was a chronic invalid who suffered from postpartum depression. She went on to live another 32 years—only three years before her daughter. 

But her condition worsened in time, until a stroke in 1874 necessitated even more constant care, far beyond her daughter’s earnest initial attempts to “provide for her little wants—and try to cheer, and encourage her.”

Alfred Habegger’s 2001 biography of the poet, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, discusses her midlife deep attachment to Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly jurist and friend of her father whose marriage proposal she seriously considered.

But I can’t help wondering if the point of no return for her came years earlier, when she decided to resist a tug on her heart by a far younger man—whose identity, all these years later, has never been established. 

In 1856, while Abiah Root was urging her to come visit and meet her husband, Dickinson was resisting not just the responsibilities of marriage but even the freedom to step outside the Dickinson Homestead.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Get Smart,’ With a Desperate Moment for Max and Company)

Hathaway, the villain with an eyepatch [played by Eric Brotherson] [pointing a gun at Max, the Chief and 99]: “Only one question remains: who goes first?”

Maxwell Smart [played by Don Adams]: “Eh, you haven't volunteered for anything lately, Chief...”— Get Smart, Season 3, Episode 10, “That Old Gang of Mine,” original air date Dec/ 2, 1967, teleplay by Phil Hahn and Jack Hanrahan, directed by Norman Abbott

Quote of the Day (P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, on the ‘Sheer Variety’ of Popes Throughout History)

“Seventy-eight [popes] have been declared saints as well as, oddly enough, two antipopes; eight have been pronounced ‘Blessed.’ There have been seventy-seven Roman popes, one hundred Italian, fourteen French, eleven Greek, six German, six Syrian, two Sardinian, two Spanish, two African, one English, one Dutch, one Portuguese, and one Polish. Fifteen have been monks, four friars, two laymen, and one a hermit. Four have abdicated, five have been imprisoned, four murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed, and one subjected to a public flogging. One died of wounds he received in the midst of battle, and another after a ceiling collapsed and fell on him. The sheet variety of the ways they began and ended is riveting in itself."— Scottish historian P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy Over 2000 Years (1997)

Well, there is some limit to the variety of pontiffs, which you can see immediately in the accompanying composite photo: all aging white men.

Still, Maxwell-Stuart’s overall point is well-taken. Here are some updates on the helpful statistics above, as of yesterday:

*five popes have abdicated;

*83 have been declared saints;

*seven were German;

*one was Argentine;

*one is American.

Like his predecessors, Pope Leo XIV—the former Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost—will face immense challenges preaching the Gospel in a world increasingly hostile to its message of brotherhood, preserving the unity of the Church, and reaching out to other religions. He deserves our prayers, even as he prays for us.

One thing is for sure: he is likely to confound expectations, just as his predecessors back to and including Pope John XXIII did.

Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.

Quote of the Day (Matthew Aucoin, Redefining ‘Classical Music’)

“Western classical music is an unusual case. The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven's symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same scores. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage…. If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of ‘classical’ music.”—American conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin, “What Is Classical Music?”, The Atlantic, May 2025

The image of Matthew Aucoin accompanying this post was taken Apr. 22, 2022, by Beehivesspaghetti.

Quote of the Day (Conrad Aiken, on Seeking an Elusive Word or Name)

“You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
     A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
     Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
     Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
     Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
     Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
     You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
     And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.”— American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, short-story writer, novelist, and critic Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), The House of Dust: A Symphony (1920)

Quote of the Day (Anna Akhmatova, on How ‘Something Miraculous Burns in Music’)

“Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.”—Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), “Music (For Dmitri Shostakovich),” in The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt (2006)

Media Blowing Smoke About Papal White Smoke

“It is a familiar saying around the Vatican that ‘he who goes into a conclave a pope comes out a cardinal.’ It is considered bad form to openly promote a papal candidate, even worse to appear to be campaigning for the job. Traditionally, to be considered a front-runner is almost a guarantee of failure. Yet that has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabili—cardinals considered to be ‘popeable.’ The current lists are heavily dominated by Italians.

“No Americans are among the papabile. Modern popes generally have come from countries with little political or military power. If an American were elected, says [Jesuit priest and author Thomas] Reese, ‘people would think the election was fixed by Wall Street or the CIA.’”— Jeffery L. Sheler and Eleni Dimmler, “The Next Pope,” US News and World Report, May 11, 1998

As I’ve gotten older, I have increasingly delighted in coming across past analytical journalism to see how well they predict what will come to pass. For all the hours these scribes devoted to their beats, you’d be surprised how many flunk this basic test.

This US News and World Report article from a quarter-century ago is a good case in point. It took another seven years after its publication before Pope John Paul II died. In that time, he appointed several dozen cardinals. Just as important, several were of such an advanced age that they were no longer considered papabile by the end of his pontificate. Some were even too old even to vote by this time.

Few fields lend themselves less to such thumb-sucking exercises as papabili prognostication. Reporters look at the Roman Catholic Church, see an institution whose dogma has changed little, all things considered, over the centuries, and believe that they can scope out which cardinal will ascend the throne of St. Peter.

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been blowing smoke about the white smoke at the end of these conclaves for years. Somehow, though, it feels worse with the one that will start on May 7 to replace Pope Francis.

I chuckled when I read the line in the above quote about how the trail of unsuccessful front-runners “has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabile.” Precisely—the US News and World Report piece was doing just that!

My question: have Vatican insiders been compiling these to guide their personal selections for the next pope—or to amuse themselves as they take languid lunches with journalists desperate to please their bosses back home?

In many respects, I part company with the neoconservative author George Weigel and his brand of ultra-traditional Catholicism. He notes, for instance, that notwithstanding efforts by Francis to broaden Church governance, he was “the most autocratic pontiff in centuries.” Really? While Weigel might not be guilty of heresy, he certainly is of hyperbole—so much so that you couldn’t even get a devil’s advocate to argue his case convincingly.

Even so, I must agree with three points he makes in his Wall Street Journal analysis from a week ago about the upcoming conclave:

*“The cardinal-electors don't really know each other”;

*Popes, even with their appointment of many cardinals, can’t control the election of their successors;

* “Every conclave is a unique micro-environment, psychologically and spiritually.”

Considering these three points, why are so many people foolhardy enough to think they’ll know what will happen?

The speculation about the winner at the conclave has become ridiculous. A combined $17 million have changed hands on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, according to Alexander Osipovich’s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Complicating all of this even further is the misleading lens through which the media interprets the factions within the Church in general and the conclave in particular. Whatever divisions exist in the hierarchy—and they are real—they don’t neatly align with Democratic and Republican policies.

For all their orthodoxy on sexual issues, for instance, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were largely indistinguishable from Pope Francis on matters of war and peace and their deep skepticism of unrestrained capitalism.

So there is a strong possibility that whoever is selected at the end of this process will fulfill neither the greatest hopes nor worst fears of those watching the proceedings with burning interest.

I hope—no, I pray—that the cardinals conclude their deliberations swiftly. I just don’t think I can take much more of this ill-informed silly season.

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on How He’s Using His Time Not Watching the 76ers in the Playoffs)

“The time I haven't wasted watching the NBA has allowed me to start taking piano lessons and to polish off the first volume of Shelby Foote’s epic ‘The Civil War.’ I am already up to Antietam and pretty much in control of the A major chord. I know that Robert E. Lee wasn’t much of a strategist, that McClellan was a little old scaredy-cat and that everybody persistently underestimated Honest Abe. What’s more, I can now play ‘Shall We Gather by the River?’"—Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: The Joy of My Team Missing the NBA Playoffs,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 26-27, 2025

Houston Rocket fans will undoubtedly want to employ the same strategy—and, unless a huge upset is pulled off in this coming round against the Boston Celtics, so will the Knick faithful like myself.

Photo of the Day: St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

Over a month ago, I happened to be walking in Long Island City when I spotted from afar the spire, 150 feet high, of what turned out to be St. Raphael Catholic Church.

Though the parish was founded in 1865, it wasn’t until 20 years later that the current brick-and-sandstone structure was completed. The demographics of the parish—largely Irish and German immigrants in its early years—have changed markedly. Estimates for language speakers are one-third each now for English, Spanish, and Korean.

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Earnest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Pagan Ethos and ‘The Callous Tolerance of Cruelty’)

“The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function.”—Columnist David Brooks, “How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact,” The New York Times, May 2, 2025

Even without David Brooks naming Donald Trump within the first few paragraphs of this article, one would have guessed that the attributes that the columnist lists for “the pagan ethos”—"power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess”—have been projected by the President. All of these are the exact antithesis of the humility and charity that Pope Francis practiced daily.

All the more infuriating, then, that Trump posted to Truth Social an AI-generated meme of himself depicted as the pope. The act was so outrageous, even for him, that many social media users, even those who loathe him, refused to credit it at first, demanding proof.

By now, it’s hopeless to expect the President to recognize that this image has needlessly offended thousands of people, let alone apologize for it. As former GOP National Committee chairman Michael Steele has noted, the post just demonstrates “how unserious and incapable [Trump] is”—a 78-year-old acting like a 10-year-old.

No, my disappointment is with fellow Catholics, like Vice President J.D. Vance, who pass this episode off as a joke, handing Trump a moral get-out-of-jail-card they never would have provided Barack Obama and Joe Biden if they had pulled a similar stunt.

To its credit, the New York State Catholic Conference swiftly and correctly condemned the post, disputing that there could be anything “clever or funny about this image.”

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis,” the statement continued, “and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.”

I would not be surprised, however, if Cardinal Timothy Dolan stays silent, preferring to hide behind this institutional statement and the need to prepare for the upcoming conclave. As I noted in this prior post, he never came to the defense of The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde when Trump tweeted that she was “nasty” for urging him in January to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

My guess is that, like prominent lawyers and universities that have knuckled under to Trump’s legal threats, Cardinal Dolan will fear the President’s “retribution”—as un-Christian a behavior as one can imagine.

Quote of the Day (Laurie R. King, on Persistence, ‘The Most Common Characteristic of a Successful Writer’)

“Persistence is the most common characteristic of a successful writer; the refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. But also, keep learning. Keep reading other writers, to see how they do things. Keep thinking about the craft, and how you might do things better. Keep writing for the joy of the thing, not for what you're being told the market wants. But mostly, keep at it.”—American crime and science-fiction novelist and short-story writer Laurie R. King, asked for advice for aspiring writers, quoted by Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Laurie R. King,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXII (2024)

Photo of the Day: ‘Jean-Marc’ Statue, New York City

A little over a week ago, heading toward a film at the Museum of Modern Art, I was struck by this image—a permanent sculpture at the northeast corner of 53^rd Street and Avenue of the Americas.

Jean-Marc was created in 2012 by the Parisian artist Xavier Veilhan. For this, his first permanent outdoor work in the US, he used stainless steel and polyurethane paint to create this unusual image of fellow French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Andy Introduces a Farmer to Modern Medicine)

[Local farmer Rafe Hollister is refusing to take his tetanus shot, so Sheriff Andy accompanies the county nurse to change his mind.]

Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith] [showing Rafe different medical tools]: “That's a stethoscope. Know what it does?”

Rafe Hollister [played by Jack Prince]: “No.”

Andy: “Lets you hear your heartbeat. Wanna hear your heartbeat, Rafe?”

Rafe: “What for? I know my heart's beatin'!”

Andy: “Well, yeah...”

Rafe: “I'm alive, ain't I?”

Andy: “Well, yeah...”

Rafe: “Well, then my heart's beatin'!”

Andy: “Well, listen to it beat, Rafe. Here, put these two ends in your ear there. Stick 'em right in there. They won't hurt ya. That's right. Go ahead. Stick 'em right in there. All right? Now, now, listen. Listen.”

[puts the stethoscope eartips on Rafe's ears and the chest-piece to his heart]

Andy: “Huh? How 'bout that? Listen to mine.”

[moves the chest-piece to his own chest]

Andy: “Huh? Whadda ya think of that, Rafe?”

Rafe: “All right. Now we know we're both alive!”—The Andy Griffith Show, Season 2, Episode 24, “The County Nurse,” original air date Mar. 19, 1962, teleplay by Jack Elinson and Charles Stewart, directed by Bob Sweeney

Quote of the Day (Mario Vargas Llosa, on ‘The Enthronement…of a Monstrous Lie’)

“He couldn’t remember how it began, the first doubts, conjectures, discrepancies that led him to wonder if everything really was going so well, or if, behind the facade of a country that under the severe but inspired leadership of an extraordinary statesman was moving ahead at a quickstep, lay a grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived, the enthronement, through propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie.”—Peruvian novelist, Nobel Literature laureate, and politician Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025), The Feast of the Goat, translated by Edith Grossman (2000)

Over the course of his long career, Mario Vargas Llosa disappointed a number of his readers with his gradual drift from leftist politics to something more like free-market conservatism. But unlike so many in the MAGA movement in the United States, he drew the line at Donald Trump.

In 2016, he denounced the then-candidate as a “clown” and a “racist.” In an interview two years later with the Argentine daily Clarin (reprinted online following his death two weeks ago, in Worldcrunch), he was even more emphatic:

“Nobody had managed before to vote in a populist, a philistine and a demagogue like Trump. What does that show us? That no society, not even the most advanced ones in terms of legality and democracy, is immune to populism and nationalism. Trump’s legacy for the United States will end up being very negative.”

Over 1,100 anti-Trump protests are expected today. That’s a paltry number compared to the size of the challenge he poses now to the American republic, but it’s a start. Otherwise, we risk seeing the “grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived” that Llosa warned about in the rise of Latin American authoritarian regimes.

Quote of the Day (Tim O’Brien, on the Vietnam War and Remembrance)

“[T]he [Vietnam] war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”— American novelist Tim O’Brien, “Spin,” in The Things They Carried (1990)

Fifty years ago today, within 24 hours of a massive airlift operation evacuating 6,500 people, including nearly 900 Americans, Saigon fell to the Communist forces that had already overtaken the rest of Vietnam. The governmental seizure concluded a conflict that had preoccupied the United States, the USSR, and Red China for more than a generation in the Cold War.

Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who died in the war vary widely, with one official 1995 count putting the total as high as 3 million. Unfortunately, their stories are largely unknown half a world way here in the United States.

Naturally, the focus in our country has been on the more than 58,000 Americans who perished in Vietnam—names now inscribed on the wall in the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. But these are only part of the casualty rate of the conflict. They don’t reflect the wounded—physically or, in the case of Tim O’Brien, psychologically.

The Things They Carried was published 35 years ago this spring, a full generation after O’Brien’s service in Southeast Asia, and I was lucky enough to hear him read from and discuss the book in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University at the time. But he needed to come to terms with his memories repeatedly through the act of storytelling: not just in this acclaimed group of interconnected semi-autobiographical short stories but also in a memoir (If I Die in a Combat Zone) and a novel (Going After Cacciato).

Even from reading The Things They Carried and hearing him speaking, I had no idea of the intensity of his memories—so painful that they required extensive and expensive use of the anti-anxiety prescription medication Oxazepam, I discovered in a 1994 essay he wrote for The New York Times about a return visit to Vietnam.

But O’Brien has survived to tell about the hell that he and his brothers in arms endured, their grief over fallen comrades, and the postwar adjustment in a nation with civilians who could never begin to understand what they had gone through.

Or, as O’Brien wrote in another short story in The Things They Carried, “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

This Day in Yankee History (Impulsive ‘Boss’ Fires Livid Yogi)

Apr. 29, 1985—After promising as late as spring training that he would let Yogi Berra manage the New York Yankees for the entire season, principal owner George Steinbrenner abruptly fired him before the first month had even ended.

The cause was not misconduct, a breakdown in relations with players, or defiance of the man the media had nicknamed “The Boss,” but a 6-10 record following an 87-75, second-place 1984 finish.

Berra’s replacement, Billy Martin—hired for the fourth time—didn’t produce the desired result, either, going 91-54, good for an overall 97-64 season—leaving the Bronx Bombers second once again in the American League East division. Forget about a pennant, the minimum that the Boss expected: Martin couldn’t even get the team into the playoffs.

Though Berra did not express anger initially (“He’s the boss, he can do what he wants”), at some point his dismissal began to gnaw at him. It wasn’t until years later that his grievance was aired: after 30 years with the organization, he felt that Steinbrenner owed it to him to deliver the bad news himself rather than to entrust the dirty job to General Manager Clyde King.

And so, the Yankee great—a Hall of Fame catcher, coach, and manager beloved by teammates, players, and fans—vowed to boycott all Yankee-related functions for as long as Steinbrenner remained in charge of the organization.

Fourteen years passed before Berra relented. In the process, he accomplished something remarkable: He became perhaps the only employee in the Steinbrenner Era to get the better of the Boss.

With each passing year—even with the team winning World Series again after a decade without even being in the playoffs—Steinbrenner suffered a public-relations embarrassment for his cavalier treatment of the most visible remaining link to the DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty.

At last, with Yankee radio announcer Suzyn Waldman as a diplomatic go-between, the standoff concluded with Steinbrenner showing up at the opening of the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Montclair, NJ. All the way over from the Bronx to the museum, the owner had never looked so nervous, an associate recalled later, according to this 2015 article by the New York Times’ Harvey Araton.

But in a short meeting behind closed doors, Berra got what he wanted: an apology.

Think of it: a powerful man forced to travel abjectly to the turf of the one who had brought him to heel. How often does that happen?

Quite apart from the shabby treatment of the lovable Berra, was his removal warranted? Did the results justify it? To both questions, I would answer no, for these reasons:

*The three most important Yankees that year—Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, and Rickey Henderson—were, at that point, still not at full strength because of injuries. In other words, this team had not yet started to fire on all cylinders, but it would do so shortly—if only Steinbrenner had given it a chance. In short order, they were about to become an offensive powerhouse this season.

*One complaint that Steinbrenner had voiced about the squad in the past few weeks—a “lack of discipline” on the field—was spurious. In addition to the three players mentioned previously, this Yankee team featured veterans like Don Baylor, Ken Griffey Sr., Ron Guidry, and Phil Niekro. Motivation and self-discipline were not problems for this group.

*The removal continued to destabilize a team in desperate need of a calming influence. This was the 12^th managerial change since Steinbrenner had taken over the club in 1973. The players liked and got along with Yogi.

*Speaking of “destabilizing,” Martin was about to fall into familiar habits. Martin favored a fast, aggressive style of play that had become known as “Billy Ball.” But sometimes his non-traditional style of play could backfire. That’s what happened late in the year, when he sent third baseman Mike Pagliarulo to the plate to bat right-handed, late in a crucial September game against the Detroit Tigers—even though “Pags” was not a righty, or even a switch-hitter. The move failed. Worse, as Steinbrenner’s carping predictably picked up again, the alcoholic Martin got into one of the barroom fights that had come to mark his career as player and manager, this time with his own pitcher, Ed Whitson. While Martin ended up with a broken ulnar bone in his right arm, his inconsistent but high-priced starter came away with a broken rib and fractured hand.

*If Martin was overrated as a manager, Berra was underrated. Martin’s insistence on complete games by his starters effectively killed on the best young rotations in baseball when he managed the Oakland A’s following the 1981 season. He might have produced immediate improvements for the teams he managed, but the gains were temporary, as he exhausted the patience of owners and players alike. On the other hand, Berra had already managed two pennant-winning teams that probably shouldn’t have even made it that far. In 1964, he had managed a proud but aging team of Yankee sluggers to the seventh game of the World Series before they fell to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1973, with Rusty Staub—a productive but not traditional cleanup hitter—batting fourth, he took the Mets to the World Series, too—even knocking off the powerful Cincinnati Reds in the playoffs before falling to the Oakland A’s in the Fall Classic.

With his 10 championship rings, Berra had long been loved by Yankee fans not just as an important contributor to the team’s success but also as a colorful character famous for malapropisms—sometimes real, sometimes invented by others—that became known as “Yogisms.” His often basic, awkward communication skills led sportswriters particularly to underestimate his knowledge of pitchers and feel for the game.

But the long cold war with Steinbrenner enhanced the respect with which he was held. For years, it had been the pugnacious Martin who had garnered sympathy for his fights with the owner, even though it had often been manifested in boorish, self-defeating antics.

But, by standing stubbornly on principle without acting out, it was now Berra who had become an object of sympathy, as well as a stand-in for anyone who had to endure a bumptious, bullying boss. When the dust had settled, though no longer working on baseball, he had become the beloved elder statesman of the Yankees, a position he retained until his death 10 years ago.

(The image accompanying this post, of Yogi Berra in 1984, was made available by the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)

Quote of the Day (Sir Max Beerbohm, on the Vanity of Great Artists)

“Great artists are always vain. To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. Any great artist is far too perceptive and too exigent to be satisfied with that effect, and hence in vanity he seeks solace.” —British essayist-caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm (1871-1956), “Quia Imperfectum,” originally published in 1918, republished in The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm, edited by Phillip Lopate (2015)