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)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ With the End of the Black Knight-Arthur Encounter)

 

[The Black Knight continues to threaten Arthur despite getting both his arms and one of his legs cut off.]

Black Knight [played by John Cleese]:” Right, I'll do you for that!”

King Arthur [played by Graham Chapman]: “You'll what?”

Black Knight: “Come here!”

King Arthur: “What are you gonna do, bleed on me?”

Black Knight: “I'm invincible!”

King Arthur: “You're a loony!”— Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), screenplay by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, based EXTREMELY loosely on Le Morte d’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

Fifty years ago today, Monty Python and the Holy Grail opened in New York City, on its way to earning $5 million in international gross and elevating the Monty Python franchise from the small to the large screen.

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had never been like this. I don’t think Sir Thomas Malory, in his wildest burst of creativity, would ever have imagined evoking galloping horses using coconut shells; a “killer rabbit” that causes unexpected mayhem; or “Galahad the Chaste” meeting “the maidens of Castle Anthrax.”

That hilarity and that robust box-office performance represented meager consolation to cast member who have grumbled in the half-century since about the miserable conditions for shooting on location, on a budget that could only please a skinflint, in Scotland. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Genesis felt so sorry for all who labored through this that the rock bands all contributed to this movie's budget.

Bad enough that they were filming in wet, damp April. But the producers also couldn’t afford decent hotel rooms for cast members, according to Jim Beckerman’s article in yesterday’s Bergen Record. The actors rushed back to the hotel each day in a mad competition to commandeer the limited number of baths and hot water.

Several years ago, John Cleese’s appearance at BergenPAC, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, included clips from the movie, as well as other highlights of his career. But I didn’t need that to recall the uproarious Black Knight-King Arthur confrontation that climaxes with the knight, with several bodily appendages progressively removed, continues to protest his readiness to continue: “’Tis only a flesh wound.’”

In case you were wondering: Graham Chapman was the only cast member to wear real chain armor. The rest made do with knitted wool, painted to look like metal.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Henri Nouwen, on Jesus and ‘Success, Popularity, and Power’)

“Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity, and power is a false identity — an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.'”—Dutch-born Catholic priest, theologian, psychologist and writer Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (1994)

Appreciations: ‘Craig’s Wife,' With Rosalind Russell, at MOMA

It’s been 20 to 30 years since I saw a film at the Museum of Modern Art. But earlier this week, one caught my eye on the institution’s Website: Craig’s Wife, a 1936 movie that is part of the series The Lady at 100: Columbia Classics from the Locarno Film Festival.

I gather that TCM has shown this at some point, but the vintage-film channel must have buried it overnight, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see it while I could. My guess is about 60 people joined me Wednesday night in the audience at MOMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2.

I became interested in this film through my exposure, via the Off-Broadway troupes the Peccadillo Theater Company and The Mint Theater, to George Kelly, a member of the famous clan of that name in Philadelphia. (Yes, he was Princess Grace’s uncle, and reportedly a major positive influence on her decision to become an actress.) 

The three Kelly plans I saw through the Mint—The Show-Off (1922), Philip Goes Goes Forth (1931), and The Fatal Weakness (1946)—convinced me that he has become an unjustly neglected playwright. If I found these plays of merit, then how could I resist the allure of Craig’s Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize after it premiered in 1925?

One aspect of Craig’s Wife may account for why it might not be revived so much these days. A conservative Catholic, Kelly held to then-traditional ideas of a wife’s subservience to her husband, and to some extent this drama reflects these mores.

Harriet Craig, the title character, living in an age when women enjoyed little to no financial independence, would certainly win greater sympathy from modern audiences than she would before the rise of feminism in the Sixties. But Kelly’s severe indictment of her materialism and strange emotional detachment registers just as strongly as before, if not more so.

The playwright, who between Broadway stints worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, was reportedly displeased by how his prize-winning work had been adapted by other hands for the big screen. But today’s viewers are likely to regard the movie as an improvement—one that “opens up” the action, while streamlining the dialogue so that the peculiar chilliness of Mrs. Craig becomes more manifest.

The three people most responsible for this successful stage-to-screen transfer were all women—all perhaps better attuned than Kelly to the psychological undercurrents of the main character.

Rosalind Russell was supposedly none too happy about MGM loaning her out to Columbia Pictures to play this unsympathetic role. Her fears proved groundless. She not only received top billing for the first time onscreen but widened her range by playing the kind of challenging female lead in which Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would soon specialize. (In fact, the latter played Mrs. Craid in the 1950 remake.)

The role was carefully crafted with input from director Dorothy Arzner and screenwriter Mary McCall, Jr.  The only female director who worked consistently in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties (and, I discovered from Ben Mankiewicz’s discussion of the film on TCM, the inventor of the “boom mic” that allowed actors greater freedom of movement), Arzner did something that male colleagues had done frequently before but might have given pause to someone in her exposed position: she fired the production designer.

Instead, she turned to former MGM star William Haines, who had forsaken his acting career to become an interior decorator. Using Kelly’s stage directions as inspiration, Haines transformed the upper-class Craig house into a virtual fortress in its own right—uninviting, even forbidding, reflecting Harriet's hauteur. With one additional, telling set of details: Greek motifs which subtly suggested that a tragedy of the protagonist’s own making was occurring inside.

With Arzner ensuring her presence on set, even enabling her to come up with alternative lines on the spot, screenwriter McCall reworked Harriet into a woman less status-conscious than intent on maintaining a hard-won measure of autonomy within marriage—breeding a fanaticism about her home that alienates everyone in it, even her besotted husband.

The script advances this conflict, with none of the leisurely exposition favored by Kelly. A prime example”: the first line and image, with Mrs. Harold crying out in alarm to her fellow housemaid, “Mazie!”—signaling to viewers immediately that the abused household staff remains on edge even without Harriet around to supervise the maintenance of her “holy of holies,” as Mrs. Harold calls it.

Equally helpful, McCall and Arzner actually showed the characters referred to but never shown onstage: the doomed Fergus and Adelaide Passmore. That provided an early opportunity for the great character actor Thomas Mitchell (Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life) to display his skill in a short but crucial role as desperate Fergus.

Though the role of Harriet’s easily manipulated husband Walter was too one-dimensional, other characters fared better under Arzner’s guidance, notably Jane Darwell (Mrs. Harold), who a few years later would the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath; Billie Burke (next-door neighbor Mrs. Frazier), best known as the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; and John Hamilton, who made his mark two decades later as editor Perry White in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman.

Later this year, I hope to write more about how Joan Crawford played this role, as well as the controversy over the years involving the play itself. But if you can’t watch the 1936 version on the big screen, as I was lucky enough to do, I urge you to catch it on YouTube.

Quote of the Day (Graydon Carter, on Bygone High-Flying Days in Magazine Journalism)

“Going from Spy and the Observer to Vanity Fair was like moving from a youth hostel to a five-star hotel….When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-air in Los Angeles…Staff members could expense their breakfasts — not a working breakfast with a writer or photographer. Just breakfast. Large dinners at home were catered. Flowers went out to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time. One staff member who was a holdover from the old regime would get so depressed at the mere thought of my being there that she would send flowers to herself just to perk up her spirits. On the company account, of course.”—Magazine editor Graydon Carter, on moving to Vanity Fair in 1992, in When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (2025)

I admit to being a sucker for anything relating the inside story of major book and magazine publishers. And so, when excerpts from Graydon Carter’s memoir appeared in The Atlantic and New York magazines, I snatched them up eagerly.

But I also must confess to reading the one in New York—a distillation of his 25 years editing the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, and Marie Brenner—more eagerly than the less gossipy one in Vanity Fair, which focused on his youthful adventures working for the Canadian National Railroad.

Part of my fascination with the New York article stemmed from seeing to what extent Carter would vent secrets from the Conde Nast empire.

He congratulates himself for making “the culture less poisonous” than the one inherited from Tina Brown, while fending off “deeply hostile and subversive” holdovers from the old regime. (Yes, Faithful Reader, he names four of the principal culprits among the latter, even briefly discussing how they practiced the black arts of office politics.)

But I was also fascinated by what I highlighted in the “Quote of the Day,” on the deep pockets once held at Vanity Fair and other magazines. Over the years, several staffers in those establishments from the Seventies through the Nineties told me about the perks once enjoyed at those organizations.

One young woman discussed how Malcolm Forbes gave company employees a holiday for his birthday, “like some medieval lord treating his serfs,” she chuckled. And a Vanity Fair article about the late Time art critic Robert Hughes was subtitled “A Tale from the Mythic Days of Magazine Expense Accounts.”

All of that has changed because of corporate takeovers that have enabled accounts to pull tighter strings, as well as, of course, the Internet, where advertisers can find a digital alternative to print media. Increasingly, publishing days of wine and roses will be recalled by writers and editors lucky to find outlets for their memories—or in oral histories.

(The image accompanying this post, of Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair kickoff part for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, was taken Apr. 21, 2009, by David Shankbone.)

Tweet of the Day (Elizabeth Hackett, on How She Expresses Annoyance With Her Hubby)

“Instead of telling my husband I'm annoyed with him, I'm just gonna put strawberries in a salad.”—Screenwriter Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett), tweet of May 24, 2020

Quote of the Day (Robert Rubin, on ‘Outsiders Arriving in Washington’)

“I…recommend that outsiders arriving in Washington recognize how much they don't know about government and how different it can be from business. The best way to make a successful transition to the public sector is to do so with humility. The alternative, in many cases, is to have humility thrust upon you."—Former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-senior partner Robert Rubin, “The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business,'” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18-19, 2025

You can put down at least one person from the private sector who failed to heed Rubin’s warning at the start of the second Trump administration: Elon Musk. 

The Tesla tycoon, having rode roughshod through the executive branch in his unelected, unconfirmed role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a “department” never authorized by Congress, by the way—now finds himself sidelined by the President he backed with all of his financial and social-media power, according to this post on the “Square” blog of the Binance Website.

Worse still, he is telling worried Tesla investors that he’s scaling back his involvement in DOGE to a day or two a week starting sometime in May. And not a moment too soon: his indiscriminate cost-cutting in service to Trump has caused such a backlash that the company’s revenue fell 9%, with auto revenue down 20%, and adjusted income plummeted 39%--increases steeper than forecast, according to Chris Isidore’s report for CNN. And profits have dropped a whopping 71% over the first three months of the year.

With any luck, the damage to Musk’s financial position will be permanent. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely after all this time that Musk, any more than the President he supported so recklessly, has learned the “humility” that Rubin urged.

More tragically, Musk’s barbaric assault on institutions built over a century will result, in one way or another, damage to Americans in virtually every corner of their lives, from Social Security to veterans’ affair.

(The accompanying image of Robert Rubin was taken May 11, 2014, by Ralph Alswang.)

Quote of the Day (Tracy Chapman, on the Importance of the Public Library Growing Up)

“I grew up across the street from a public library, and it was the only place my mom would let me go on my own. I loved books, but to be able to do anything alone when you’re a kid, you’re going to take that opportunity. It was my second home, and I read everything that I could get.”—American singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman quoted by Lindsay Zoladz, “Tracy Chapman Wants to Speak for Herself,” The New York Times, Apr. 20, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Tracy Chapman at the 2009 Cactus Festival in Bruges, Belgium, was taken July 10, 2009, by Hans Hillewaert.

Flashback, April 1925: Noel Coward’s ‘Fallen Angels’ Makes Controversial West End Debut

Noel Coward (pictured), enjoying his first burst of popularity, engaged the attention of London’s West End audiences in April 1925 with another frothy comedy, Fallen Angels—only this time he also attracted the notice of the national censorship arm.

In the prior two years, the playwright had made a splash with his West End debut, The Vortex. But it was his hit follow-up, Hay Fever, that led Anthony Prinsep of the Globe Theatre to reconsider and dust off an earlier effort, Fallen Angels.

The subject matter of this latter effort—dialogue among two female friends about premarital sex—raised the eyebrows of British censor Lord Cromer of the Lord Chamberlain office, which since 1737 had been tasked with approving all plays before they opened. 

This same year was a particularly active one for Lord Cromer, as he went on to veto Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms and an English translation of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In the end, Lord Cromer ruled that Coward’s “light and unreal and humorous” approach to the material rendered it harmless. But he recommended deleted passages in order to make the saucy lines “less objectionable” to those “who disapprove of quite unnecessary frankness of expression among women.”

The Lord Chancellor notwithstanding, one female playgoer did indeed find Coward’s irreverent send-up of two friends who find they have bedded the same man to be “objectionable.” Her outburst interrupting the second act earned her immediate ejection from the building—and the production the kind of welcome notoriety that so often gooses the box office.

The play’s producers quickly capitalized on what purported to be its naughty subject matter. “IT IS NOT A PLAY FOR CHILDREN,” they announced the following year in a flyer for a Preston, England production. “It depicts the ultra-modern young women of today, with truth and realism. They may not be lovable characters, but they are essentially amusing, and decidedly daring.”

Fallen Angels premiered at the Globe Theatre (now called the Gielgud Theatre) midway through the 1920s, a decade that, as Bruce Bawer’s September 2023 article in The New Criterion observed, “belonged to Noël Coward,” as “the quintessential exemplar of Britain’s upscale youth.” Within two months of Fallen Angels’ debut, four of his plays would be running simultaneously in London, a mark rivaled only by Somerset Maugham.

The latter, older and more established in the theater than Coward, had distressed Tallulah Bankhead so much by rejecting her for the role of prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain that, as she later related in her autobiography, she had put on the character’s costume, "gulped down 20 aspirins" and lay down after scribbling "It ain't gonna rain no more."

The day after this setback, Bankhead received a call from her friend Coward, who was experiencing a crisis of his own. The actress playing Julia, he explained, had withdrawn from the production with practically no time to spare before the opening. Could Tallulah fill in and learn the lines in the four days before the premiere?

“Four days!” the flamboyant actress drawled. “Dahling, I can do it in four hours.” Their friendship and professional association would continue for several more decades, most famously in the 1948 Broadway revival of Coward’s Private Lives.

Fallen Angels lasted a little over a month when it came to Broadway in 1928, then was revived with somewhat more success—239 performances—when it was revived on the Great White Way in 1956 with future TV stars Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., William Windom, and Nancy Walker.

Though seen more frequently in the UK, the scandal once associated with it has faded with the decades, and it has not entered the charmed circle of Coward plays like its more successful immediate follow-up, Hay Fever, not to mention Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, or Blithe Spirit.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I noticed on the Web that the Roundabout Theatre has announced it for its Spring 2026 schedule. I am not one of those people predisposed to dismiss a vintage play as “dated,” and the principals promoted for the Roundabout show—stars Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara, and director Scott Ellis—boost one’s confidence that they will wring every laugh out of Coward’s insult- and innuendo-laden dialogue.

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, Urging the World ‘To Revive Our Trust in Others’)

“What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world! How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!

“On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!”— Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis (1936-2025), “Urbi et Orbi” (“To the City and the World”) Message of His Holiness Pope Francis (Easter 2025), read in St. Peter’s Square, Apr. 20, 2025

Like Dr. Martin Luther King in his “Mountaintop” address before his assassination, Pope Francis was acutely aware that, even if his Easter message did not constitute his very last words to those who had come to listen intently to him, his time left on Earth would be short.

While too physically weak to read the message himself, Francis breathed a confidence that death was only a transition before his union—and ours—with God.

But moreover, the Resurrection meant, as he noted, that, though the evil in the world would remain to the end, “it no longer has the upper hand; it no longer has power over those who accept the grace of this day.”

Surely, he knew that many of “those in positions of political responsibility in our world” would pay little heed to his admonition “not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others.” (Indeed, the most prominent of those leaders was pursuing policies that would accomplish just that.) But he hoped to inspire citizens worldwide to move their leaders in that direction, or at least select those who would.

In his column yesterday, David French of The New York Times wrote about two kinds of churches: “Fear the World” and “Love Your Neighbor.” Against the most intense internal and external opposition (including conservative American bishops), Francis moved Roman Catholicism toward the latter—less dogmatic, more inclusive and pastoral.

He left the Church, and the world, better for having lived in it. Too bad we all can’t claim the same thing. His work is finished; ours continues.

(For a fine consideration of Francis’ magisterial teachings, see Michael Sean Winters’ article in today’s National Catholic Reporter.)

Quote of the Day (Steven Petrow, on How ‘Joy is Always Present’)

“Joy is always present—in the silver lining, in the resiliency, in our memories, in the connection to those who share your grief when it comes. It’s in the everyday world, on good days as well as bad ones. You only have to look for it, be confident that it’s there, and be open to it when you find it.”— American journalist and author Steven Petrow, The Joy You Make: Find the Silver Linings— Even on Your Darkest Days (2024)

(The image accompanying this post of Steven Petrow was taken Jan. 1, 2002.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Parks and Recreation,’ With a Bad Blunder in a Public Meeting)

Ann Perkins [played by Rashida Jones]: “I'm a nurse and frankly I don't really care for politics. [Applause] But, um, I'm here to talk about the abandoned lot on Sullivan Street.”

Leslie Knope [played by Amy Poehler]: “Excellent! That sounds like a good idea. Tell us about that.”

Ann: “No, it's a problem. It almost killed my boyfriend. Oh, yeah. There's a lot nearby my house and a developer dug out a basement for some condos and then they went bankrupt, so there's just this giant pit and it's been there for almost a year, 12 months.”

Leslie: “Yes, go on.”

Ann: “Yeah, and my boyfriend, who is a musician—actually, I support him— but anyway he fell in and broke both his legs and….”

Tom Haverford [played by Aziz Ansari, pictured] [interrupting]: “Let me speak with you for a minute. So your boyfriend fell down into this pit…”

Ann: “Right, yes.”

Tom: “And, um, this guy is pretty serious, you guys living together…”

Ann [quizzically]: “Yes.”

Tom: “Wow, uh, I’m sure this must be really tough for you. You know just this guy sounds like he didn't have a lot going on for him to start with, and now both legs broken. He's just weak, you have to take care of him ,you probably feel like you need to move on, just become more adventurous in relationships, with your body, just…”

Ann: “Are you actually hitting on me right now?”

Tom [trying to get out of this hole]: “Oh, oh God no, I'm not. I'm not hitting on you. I’m actually married. I’m just an open person and I like connecting with people. I’m, you know, very comfortable around women, attractive women. I’ve spent a lot of time with them and I just…”—Parks and Recreation, Season 1, Episode 1, “Pilot,” original air date Apr. 9, 2009, teleplay by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, directed by Greg Daniels 

Quote of the Day (Yaroslav Trofimov, on the Immediate Impact of ‘Worsening Relations Between America and Its Allies’)

“Worsening relations between America and its allies, some of which faced the stiffest tariffs under Trump's initial order, are already having a real effect. Amid tales of harassment and detention by U.S. immigration authorities, overseas arrivals at American airports slumped 11.6% in March. Universities, long a major source of America's global influence, are suffering too, just as government funding for research is being slashed. The U.S. has been losing market share in international education for years, and the Trump administration's move to suddenly cancel thousands of student visas is steering foreign applicants to more welcoming destinations, such as the U.K., Canada and Australia.”— Ukrainian-born Italian author and journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, “As the U.S. Alienates Old Friends, China Is Ready to Reap the Benefits,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 12-13, 2025

Samuel Johnson claimed that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels; the even more cynical Ambrose Bierce countered a century later that it was the first. Both opinions are wrong in our time when it concerns the current occupant of the Oval Office, for whom zenophobia is his first and last refuge.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the current Chaos President was only a Chaos Candidate when he descended from Trump Tower to launch his 2016 campaign by differentiating himself from the rest of the GOP pack with a diatribe against Mexico for sending “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Sure enough, just when some in his own party came to have buyer’s remorse about returning him to the White House because of the tariffs he imposed, Trump deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador without even a bow toward due process—an act so brazenly unlawful that even the conservative-oriented Supreme Court felt obliged to intervene.

Economists have been pointing out the costs laid on an already inflation-scarred American consumer by Trump’s tariffs. But Trofimov’s article might be the best I have seen on how the President’s domestic and foreign policies, by re-casting America as a predator nation, are combining to wreak havoc on the economy.

Trumponomics? No, more like Bullynomics, especially after Trump sneered that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!”

As part of its authoritarian appeal, Bullynomics is an economic model that can be copied and practiced at the local level.

Recently, for instance, a longtime county restaurateur related to me how she was approached on an inspection of her building. “So,” the official started out, “I understand you’re a big Democrat.”

“Oh, no,” the restaurateur answered with a straight face. “I’m five-foot-two. I’m only a little Democrat!”

Who will benefit—who is already benefiting—from Trump’s destabilization of the international monetary and diplomatic order? Two countries that, before he returned to power, were experiencing economic crises brought on by their own authoritarian rulers: Russia and China.

Russia was reeling from Ukrainian resistance to its invasion and the West’s solid opposition to its aggression mounted by the Biden administration—until Trump threw Vladimir Putin a lifeline by disgracefully dressing down Vladimir Zelensky in the now-notorious Oval Office meeting.

As for China, I was pulled up short earlier today when I came across a The New York Times story from last September headlined, “Calling ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy.”

And now? Xi Jinping is posing as an icon of stability following Trump’s stop-and-go signals on across-the-board tariffs. With its wealth of raw materials, it looks poised to withstand whatever the President throws at him.

Trump has always celebrated his “brand.” But it is obvious that now the essence of that brand is bullynomics, and that it may leave the United States as substantially weakened as Britain was after the ill-advised 1956 Suez affair.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Yaroslav Trofimov in Toronto, was taken Dec. 1, 2024, by Mykola Swarnyk.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (First Letter of St. Peter, on the ‘Living Hope’ of Easter)

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By His great mercy He has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” —1 Peter 1:3-5

The image accompanying this post, The Resurrection, was painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) around 1490.

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on ‘A Disrupting Darkness’)

“All of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.” —American novelist, essayist, editor, and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

(Photo of Toni Morrison taken at a lecture at West Point Military Academy in March, 2013. Author of photo: West Point - The U.S. Military Academy.)

Photo of the Day: Stations of the Cross, St. Cecilia Parish, Englewood NJ

I took the attached photo late this morning, when I joined hundreds of other parishioners gathered on Demarest Avenue outside St. Cecilia Church in Englewood NJ for the Stations of the Cross. 

This procession of pageantry and devotion through the streets surrounding our venerable church represented the solemn Good Friday reenactment of the last, agonized journey of Christ in atonement for our sins.

Photo of the Day: Purple Daze, Allison Park, Englewood Cliffs, NJ

For nearly four decades, I have taken advantage of the relative proximity of 2,500-acre Allison Park to my Bergen County home, to enjoy its scenic overviews of the Hudson River and New York City.

But yesterday, my eyes lit on this scene amid the rocks and winding walkways in this cliffside perch along the Palisades—just more evidence that, despite the up-and-down temperature swings so common this April, that Earth is welcoming spring, exuberantly.

Quote of the Day (Molly Jong-Fast, on Her Mom in ‘The Era of Peak Book Tour’)

“Some of my earliest memories were sitting in small, stuffy greenrooms in cities that were barely cities. I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, the era of peak book tour, when successful American writers went from bookshop to bookshop, from local television station to local television station, hawking their tomes. From Chicago to Miami, my mother would travel with a hardcover under her arm and a pen in her pocket. My mother, Erica Jong, was addicted to wine and airplanes. She did write Fear of Flying, so she had some very mixed feelings about airplanes, but Mom loved to travel. She was one of those people who get restless every two weeks and decided she needed to go somewhere to fix her problems. Luckily for her, the years she was famous were the years American publishers loved to send their authors on planes to cities to appear on local television.”— American writer, journalist, author, political commentator, and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast, “Greenroom With a View,” Vanity Fair, June 2023

Finally reading this article a couple of years after its appearance, I found myself intrigued by it for two reasons: its reminiscences of an era of book promotions that we are not likely to see again, and its cheeky view of Molly Jong-Fast’s mom, the novelist Erica Jong.

TV stations were not the only places where Ms. Jong would fly to. Some years ago, I heard through the grapevine that she had appeared at a trade association convention, during the "era of peak book tour" described by her daughter. Many attendees, shocked by her risque talk, complained to the event organizers.

I just couldn’t help shaking my head at the whole thing. Maybe the event’s organizers had hoped, not unreasonably, that Jong would lure people to this show. But they also shouldn’t have been surprised that the author of Fear of Flying might turn the air blue.

The busy schedule described above might have appealed to Ms. Jong, but perhaps not so much to her daughter, I suspect.

After all, Ms. Jong-Fast’s first book, the ironically named novel Normal Girl, is about the MAM (Madison Avenue Mafia), which she says "operates under one of the basic principles of Zen Buddhism: mindfulness. They may not be mindful of you or me but they make up for it with a self-obsession so blinding that the sun looks tame."

With considerable tongue in cheek, the narrator-heroine of this roman a clef notes that she is “further proof that children of famous people are like communism: better in concept than in practice."

I love that phrase, “the era of peak book tour,” even with its implication that such strenuous promotional swings are waning. I can’t imagine that even for bestselling authors like Ms. Jong at her commercial peak, publishers are willing to foot the bill for first-class hotels and air travel.

Additionally, COVID-19 heightened fears of contracting disease in closed environments like airplanes while providing digital alternatives: Zoom calls, podcasts, and the like. With fewer print outlets nowadays, markets are more micro than macro, increasing the necessity for more narrowly based promotions—even for authors with prior perches on the bestseller list, like Ms. Jong, never mind the rest of us.

(The image that accompanies this post, showing Erica Jong at a Barnes and Noble event in New York, was taken on Sept. 16, 2013, by Wes Washington.)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Powell, on a Midcentury Cultural Philistine)

“[Kenneth] Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St. John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.

“ ‘I don’t know about these things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don't know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me—which they do not—I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’”— English novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Volume 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time) (1960)

An opportunistic businessman early in his career, Widmerpool changes ideologies along the course of the several decades covered in Anthony Powell’s sprawling 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time.

This cultural philistine has little to no use even for reading. But he carries an extraordinary vindictiveness against those he perceives as slighting him or standing in his way that can manifest itself unexpectedly and dangerously.

Oh, yes, he's also used by an authoritarian power based in Russia to subvert the West from within.

As this recent American news story demonstrates, Widmerpool is a type present in contemporary America as well as Powell’s midcentury Britain.

(The image accompanying this post shows Simon Russell Beale as Kenneth Widmerpool in the 1997 British mini-series adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Hollywood Squares,’ on IRS Audits)

Peter Marshall: "According to the IRS, out of every 10 Americans audited, how many end up paying more taxes?"

Paul Lynde: "11."—Attributed to The Hollywood Squares (daytime series running 1965 to 1980)

I have been unable to find the exact episode in which this appeared, but no matter: Paul Lynde appeared so often (more than anyone except host Marshall and announcer Kenny Williams) on the game show during its run (usually as the “center square”), that I see little if any reason to doubt that he said this. 

Quote of the Day (Celeste Wallander, on ‘The Biggest Threat to NATO Today’)

“NATO can structure disincentives and punishments for backsliders, but only citizens can hold elected leaders accountable. Most important, the United States must rise to meet the challenge…. Americans must face the fact that the biggest threat to NATO today may be the United States itself. Regardless of political party and policy preferences, all Americans have a patriotic interest in protecting the laws, practices and institutions of U.S. liberal democracy. This is not merely a matter of domestic politics; it is also a matter of national security. Threats to democracy at home have already undermined Washington's ability to work with allies in a dangerous, uncertain, and threatening world. As the most powerful member of NATO, the United States must take the lead through a bipartisan defense of liberal institutions and values.”— Celeste Wallander, American international relations advisor and former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at the U. S. Defense Department, “NATO’s Enemies Within: How Democratic Decline Could Destroy the Alliance,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018

Since Ms. Wallander wrote this, NATO has been battered even more than what concerned her originally. The cause was the same, as indeed it has been with the tariff imbroglio: the President in charge at the time who inflicted on this country a diplomatic self-inflicted wound.

(The image of Celeste Wallander that accompanies this post was taken Feb. 22, 2022.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As a Prior Generation Deals With a Broken TV Set)

[Archie is eager to watch his "man-in-the-street" interview on "The CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite, but his TV set begins to malfunction 45 minutes before before air time.]

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor] [accusingly, to wife Edith]: “You’re wearin’ out this set with them sufferin’ soap operas.”

Edith Bunker [played by Jean Stapleton] [moving back by the sofa]: “Sometimes it clears up, Archie, if I stand right here and jump up and down a few times.” [She tries it, three times.]

Archie: “Will you cut that out? This is serious here.” [He turns back to the set. Edith jumps even higher this time. Archie points at the set.] “Hold on…we got a picture with that last jump.”

Gloria Stivic [played by Sally Struthers]: “But it’s bending in the middle.”

Archie [waving at the set ineffectually]: “It’s bending in the middle here!”

Mike Stivic [played by Rob Reiner]: “You can fix that easy just by hitting it on the side.”

[Archie pounds three times on the set, which lets out a long, low, dying cry. Archie looks at the set for a long second, then stares balefully at his son-in-law for offering this unhelpful advice.]—All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 11, “The Man in the Street,” original air date Dec. 4, 1971, teleplay by Don Nicholl, Paul Harrison, and Lennie Weinrib, directed by John Rich

Even when All in the Family didn’t resort to topical humor, it could mine comic gold from the humdrum frustrating daily situations facing American families. 

Today, younger generations used to cable TV or (more likely these days) streaming multiple station don’t understand the desperation that could ensue in households like the Bunkers’ when a favorite show (on only three networks and several syndicated channels) came on but you could hardly enjoy it because of dots or lines on your small screen.

Well, I guess what’s worse these days is if you get no picture at all—and you call the cable company for help, only to get a customer rep answering you from, say, Southeast Asia—or, worse yet, you’re told it might take hours, maybe even a day or so, before a repair techie can come to the house.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Frederica Mathewes-Green, on ‘God as Suffering Parent’)

“Maybe this crazy thing happened: God came down in a suit of skin and bones, and walked and talked, and offended people, and finally they tortured him to death. And by that death he destroyed death; he rescued us and gave life everlasting and every other good thing. Into this universe crammed with pain we say that God came down, because he loves us with the kind of love that we can only understand by thinking of how a parent loves.” —Religious author and commentator Frederica Mathewes-Green, “God as Suffering Parent,” Beliefnet, December 22, 1999, reprinted in The Best Christian Writing 2000, series editor: John Wilson (2000)

The image accompanying this post, The Crucified Christ, was created in 1610-1611 by Flemish artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on ‘A Writer’s Country’)

“A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn to such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Literary Geography” (1905), Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 10, 1905