Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Flattery, the One Industry Unaffected by Technology)

“The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.”— “World View” columnist Simon Kuper, “How Flattery Became a Big, Beautiful Industry,” The Financial Times, Nov. 29-30, 2025

For years, the dubious honor of being the most outrageous sycophant belonged to villainous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by Roland Young (right, with Frank Lawton as the adult title character in the 1935 film adaptation) in the attached image.

But Simon Kuper is right to focus on actual, more current examples. I had always thought, from reading Cary Reich’s marvelous 1996 biography of Nelson Rockefeller, that, in his early rise as a midlevel Washington bureaucrat, the future New York governor had perfected the art of governmental brown-nosing.

Then I found out that Rocky had his own Mini-Me, albeit with a Teutonic accent, in foreign-policy adviser Henry Kissinger, who then turned around and performed the same function for Richard Nixon.

But the true horror, as Kuper notes, lies in the current group of advisers now surrounding Donald Trump. Their sole qualification for high office is not competence but absolute shamelessness in stroking their boss’s tender ego.

More than ever this week, Trump needs his own personal Uriah Heeps in the wake of public appearances on Greenland that were so unfocused, rambling and dangerous that they sparked renewed, urgent calls for invoking the 25^th Amendment to stop his insanity.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (John Heisman, on a Grave Football Sin)

“What is this?  It is a prolate spheroid, an elongated sphere in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.  Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football."—American football coach, writer, and actor John Heisman (1869-1936), in his annual preseason speech to his squads, quoted by Samuel T. Pees, “John Heisman, Football Coach,” www.OilHistory.com , 2004

After this weekend, I have concluded that pro football is proof positive that Darwin’s theory of evolution was incorrect—human beings regress rather than evolve into a higher form.

When John Heisman said that line about “a prolate spheroid” over a century ago, I wonder how many of his players knew what he was talking about?

At the start of the 1961 preseason, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was more direct than Heisman: “Gentlemen, this is a football."

Packers wide receiver Max McGee raised his hand and cracked, “Um, Coach, you’re going a little too fast!”

To their credit, Lombardi’s squad eventually absorbed this elementary lesson.

This past weekend, it looks like the survivors of the National Football League’s latest brutal season experienced the professional counterpart of the death that hyperbolic Coach Heisman warned about.

In the latest round of the playoffs, here’s how it broke down, with fumbles counted along with interceptions (which, perhaps, Heisman didn’t worry much at the start of his career, before the widespread adoption of the forward pass) and the winners in each contest listed second:

AFC:

Buffalo Bills: 5 fumbles, 2 interceptions; Denver Broncos: 1 fumble, 1 interception

Houston Texans: 2 fumbles, 4 interceptions; New England Patriots: 4 fumbles, 1 interception

NFC:

San Francisco 49ers: 2 fumbles, 1 interception; Seattle Seahawks: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Chicago Bears: 0 fumbles, 3 interceptions; Los Angeles Rams: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Notice a pattern here? The team with fewer mistakes ended up winning.

The agony in Buffalo since Saturday (exacerbated by controversial officiating) made me think that more than a few people are taking Heisman’s claim—well, almost literally. 

Quarterback Josh Allen was in tears over his subpar performance, and the team’s owner decided to part ways with head coach Sean McDermott after nine seasons, perhaps on the questionable premise that his replacement can help the Bills take the Super Bowl at last.

As for that Texans-Patriots game: well, I couldn’t believe what I was watching in that first half, with the four interceptions by Texans’ quarterback C.J. Stroud.

Players, coaches, and owners may have taken all these mistakes seriously, but I’ll tell you about another group that probably has, maybe to the point of heart attacks: those who bet on the game. 

“Prop bets” are facilitating so many more varieties of gambling than before, and anybody following the pregame odds here are likely to have lost their shirts by now.

Quote of the Day (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Non-Violence and Oppressors)

“The non-violent way does not bring about miracles in a few hours, in a few days, in a few years, for that matter. I think the first reaction of the oppressor when oppressed people rise up against the system of injustice is an attitude of bitterness. But I do believe that if the non-violent resisters continue to follow the way of non-violence, they eventually get over to the hearts and souls of the oppressors, and I think it eventually brings about that redemption that we dream of. Of course, I can’t estimate how many people we’ve touched so far; this is impossible because it’s an inner process. But I’m sure something is stirring in the minds and souls of people and I’m sure people are thinking anew on this basic problem of human relations.”—American minister, civil-rights advocate, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), “Meet the Press” appearance transcript, Apr. 17, 1960, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Injustice and Loving Our Enemies)

“To love our enemies cannot mean that we must connive with their injustice. It does mean that beyond all moral distinctions of history we must know ourselves one with our enemies not only in the bonds of common humanity but also in the bonds of common guilt by which that humanity has become corrupted.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Our Responsibilities in 1942,” Christianity and Crisis, Jan. 12, 1942

Flashback, January 1976: Massive ‘Comes Alive’ Success Nearly Undoes Frampton

Frampton Comes Alive! came charging out of the gate at the start of 1976 and maintained its momentum throughout the year, and beyond. English guitarist Peter Frampton experienced the kind of success he’d never enjoyed before, as the double-live set became the best-selling LP of the year—and, with more than 8 million copies sold in the U.S. and 11 million worldwide, it remains one of the bestselling live albums of all time.

All of it came at a price, though, that left him, in the words of screenwriter-director Cameron Crowe (a friend since interviewing him for Rolling Stone) “strapped to the nose cone of rock 'n' roll.”

It wasn’t a case of success too soon—Frampton’s lack of a commercial breakthrough after four solo LPs had left him craving more. But it was a case of too much, as the 25-year-old loathed himself for following management’s urging to follow up with an ill-conceived studio album and a film adaptation of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The lack of preparation for overwhelming success contrasted enormously with his careful buildup as a live performer. 

As the opening act for a number of more seasoned performers—Edgar Winter, J. Geils, ZZ Top, and “the best teacher” Steve Marriott—Frampton “learned something new from every act—how they got the audience going, how they built their set. I would steal stuff from everyone, watch how they would say certain things and what reaction they would get.”

The original plan was to have a single LP of his live performances. But he was persuaded to add more songs to fill out a second disk—notably, “Baby I Love Your Way” and “Show Me the Way,” which became hit singles that lifted the collection into the sales stratosphere.

“Show Me the Way” featured the distinctive sound of Frampton’s electric guitar filtered through a “Talk Box,” as did the third single, “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

The news that the album hit #1 in April initially made Frampton euphoric: “Career-wise this was the best news I could ever hear—I was in shock.” Then self-doubt began to creep in: “I couldn’t help listening to the man on my other shoulder whispering, ‘How are you going to follow this one up, buddy?’”

By the end of the road tour to promote Frampton Comes Alive!, the new rock idol was feeling utterly frazzled. In an interview this month with Christopher Scapelliti of Guitar Player, Frampton reflected, “The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

But he yielded to the advice of manager Dee Anthony that he get back into the studio and record I’m in You, even though he felt he didn’t have enough good songs at that point to put out a full disk.

The influence of Anthony—who, according to Frampton, was connected to organized crime—was malign in other ways, as perhaps indicated by his listing on this 2019 list of “Classic Rock Musicians Who Got Ripped Off by Managers and Record Labels Part 1.”

Anthony had “three rules of success” cited in Fred Goodman’s 1997 account of the business of rock ‘n’ roll, The Mansion on the Hill: “The first thing is, get the money. The second thing is to remember to get the money. The third thing…is always remember to get the money.”

His ultimate aim was to steer clients away from thinking about their finances, and he had a surefire means of doing so with Frampton, the musician remembered:

“I was kept high. If I needed weed, he [Anthony] made sure I had weed. If I needed cocaine, he made sure I had cocaine. He didn’t want me thinking about what was going on. It was criminal. I could have put him in jail.”

A 1978 car crash almost killed Frampton, and it took 20 years for him to shake his alcohol and drug addictions. The story of his rise and fall sounds like an episode of Behind the Music (and in fact, in the year 2000, it was an episode of the long-running VH-1 series).

Only that wasn’t the end for him. He rediscovered his love of music when he became lead guitarist on tour for longtime friend David Bowie in 1987; released several well-received solo albums in the 1990s; acted in Crowe’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous; and published Do You Feel Like I Do?, a memoir notable for its honesty and thoughtfulness.

In 2024, Frampton was elected to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and as I wrote in this blog post at the time, “few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude” to this honor. His 2019. Frampton disclosure that he was diagnosed with the inflammatory muscle disease Inclusion-Body Myositis left many fans wishing him nothing but the best, and glad that they could see him perform for as long as his health permits.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on a Global ‘Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate’)

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

“Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”—Soldier and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), “Military-Industrial Complex” Speech (Farewell Address to the Nation), Jan. 17, 1961

The last televised speech of Dwight Eisenhower to his countrymen, which occurred 65 years ago today, might be the most famous Presidential farewell address since George Washington left office, largely because the former Allied commander at D-Day unexpectedly cautioned about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex" that had developed in America because of World War II and the Cold War.

But, as I discovered when I read the text in full, other aspects of his speech have also proved relevant, in ways that few could have anticipated at the time.

Take scientific research, for instance. Ike not only speculated that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,” but conversely also admonished against “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”

If the second danger sounds familiar to you, it should. Keep in mind, for instance, this blog post from earlier this week from science magazine EOS:

"Academic science has been under pressure not only through the administration’s targeting of universities directly but also through its efforts to remake the federal grantmaking process, reduce the amounts and types of external research funded, and reduce budget appropriations for scientific research by more than 20% through large-scale cutbacks and reorganizations in federal science agencies. Unsurprisingly, the administration’s actions are having ripple effects for higher education, business (among companies who supply scientific products, for instance), and public health."

But the section of the speech that should receive the most renewed attention is the quote above, especially in light of Donald Trump’s refusal to rule out military force if the United States can’t purchase Greenland from Denmark.

As NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Eisenhower knew the organization’s importance in deterring the aggression of a larger power against a smaller nation. After all, two world wars in which he served began in precisely this manner.

He would be embarrassed at the thought that a later President of his own party is threatening the independence of a smaller member of NATO—and in this case, as well as in the current President’s inexplicable preference for Russia over Ukraine, is also risking the very existence of the alliance.

In a blog post from last March, David Lake, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, adeptly summarized the implications of this:

“This is the most basic rule of leadership: leaders need followers, and others will follow only if they are confident the leader is taking them where they want to go. To accept U.S. influence over their foreign policies, allies must have some confidence that Washington will be attentive to their needs. Allowing another country to exert authority over one’s policies is an awesome choice, and one made only if the ally is confident that this authority will be wielded in the common interest. In ignoring Europe, in the case of Ukraine; initiating trade wars and putting tariffs on our allies even before our geopolitical competitors; disparaging NATO; threatening to seize the Panama Canal, Greenland, and possibly Canada; and intervening in the domestic politics of our allies, Trump is flouting the basic rule of leadership."

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Breslin, on a Con Artist Who Played Reporters and ‘Financial Geniuses’ for Suckers)

“[A] famous, well-tested theory…is named after Bill Corum, who once wrote sports for the Hearst papers when they were in New York….‘Gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed.’ [I]nstead of horseplayers, the suckers who must get screwed are a combination of news reporters and financial people. It is all quite simple. Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery…He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the newspapers in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night. The financial people, who lead such dreary lives, believe what they read and see on television. Trump is larger than life. No, not Trump. Don't use that name. It's Donald! He cannot lose. The financial geniuses can't wait to rush into the glamour and lights. They want to touch Trump's arm. ‘Here, I'm from Prudential, the rock of Gibraltar. Take our $75 million to build another crap game. Can I ride on your boat?’"—Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin (1930-2017), “The Art of the Trump: Call It Corum's Law,” Newsday, June 7, 1990

Quote of the Day (David Lynch, on How ‘People Are Like Detectives’)

“People are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues. Some people wonder and look around and they take what they see and try to figure out what it all means. And they reach different conclusions. We are all like detectives, trying to figure out the meaning of life. And the same thing goes for film. You want to find a meaning – at least some people do. But now the world goes so fast. It’s just screaming on the surface loudly. And there’s not that much time for people to contemplate things and daydream and ponder.”—American film director David Lynch (1946-2025), quoted by Ross Simonini, “ ‘Daydreaming Is So Important To Me’: How David Lynch Fishes for Ideas,” Art Review, Jan. 5, 2021

The image accompanying this post, of David Lynch at a ceremony for Sissy Spacek to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was taken on Aug. 1, 2011, by Angela George. 

Quote of the Day (Anne Perry, on the Need for ‘The Voice of Dissent’)

“Let us hear the voice of dissent, because the person who asks you why you think what you do and expects you to explain is your best friend. They are clarifying your view, and if you don’t really think what you do, it’s a good time to change. And if you do think what you do, it can make you realize that, well, it’s because of so-and-so. No friend lets you walk over the cliff. They give you the voice of warning.” — British historical mystery novelist and convicted teen murderer Anne Perry (1938-2023), in conversation with Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Anne Perry,” The Strand Magazine, Issue 13 (June/September 2004)

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on Willie Nelson)

“How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never quite fit in and don’t much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn’t tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I’ve always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He’s like the invisible air. He’s high and low. He’s in harmony with nature. And that’s what makes him Willie.”—Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, on 92-year-old country-music legend Willie Nelson, quoted by Alex Abramovich, “Profiles: Last Highway: How Willie Nelson Sees America,” The New Yorker, Dec. 29, 2025 and Jan. 5, 2026 issue

(The accompanying photo of Willie Nelson getting ready to perform at Farm Aid 2009 was taken by Larry Philpot.)

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on Technology and ‘The Problems That Really Matter’)

“If the future is anything like the past, technology will continue to solve problems that are not all that pressing, while doing nothing to address the problems that really matter. Thus, while a 2-year-old may never know what Roku boxes are, he will know what massive traffic jams are. To date, technology has done nothing to improve the flow of traffic on I-95, I-25 or the 405, much less the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Desktop PCs may go the way of tape recorders and pocket calculators, but the Beltway will still be backed up halfway to Baltimore.”— Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: There Are Some Things Technology Won’t Change,” The Wall Street Journal, May 25-26, 2019

Well, for a while, during the pandemic, it looked like traffic jams were easing, including in the DC-Baltimore area that Queenan talks about—and I suppose that tech-enabled remote work facilitated that.

But, according to this report from a year ago by an NBC affiliate, more people were on the road in that area than before the pandemic, with return-to-office edicts rising. It just goes to show: technology can’t really dislodge institutions and individuals from their stuck-on-stupid mode—even if stuck-on-stupid means being caught in massive traffic jams. 

This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Faith, Hope, and Charity)

“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Heretics (1905)

Quote of the Day (Dennis Lehane, on Boston Working-Class Humor)

“To this day… I've never met a comedian half as funny as at least five people I knew growing up. In Dorchester … my dad was part of a bar culture. He used to bring me into bars all the time and pretend, telling my mother we were at a farmers’ market so he could sneak in and have a drink on a Saturday. So I grew up listening to people talk and tell stories and they were always working-class stories. The point of any working-class story is ‘I got screwed,’ right? But [also] ‘I got a little bit of vengeance,’ like ‘I keyed his car,’ ‘I slept with his sister.’ It's a tragic story: ‘I got screwed.’ But it's got a little bit of levity in it…. I think in Irish culture, personally—and that's where Dorchester is, and Savin Hill, where I grew up— that's where we get our sense of humor, [from] the Irish. They believe that God is a prankster and we're the butt of the joke, you know.  That's something that just goes into my work.”—American crime novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane interviewed by Anna Kusmer for the “Say More” podcast, Boston Globe, Jan.8, 2026 episode

The image accompanying this post, showing Dennis Lehane at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken by David Shankbone.

Tweet of the Day (‘MichaelTrying,’ on the Results of a New Year’s Exercise Program)

“I finally have the body I want after a rigorous six-month program of lowering my expectations.”--@MichaelTrying,” quoted in Eric Zorn, “Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk! A Dozen Finalists for Tweet of the Week,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 2017

Film fans may remember the fellow in the accompanying image as Dave (played by Mark Addy) in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty.

Trust me: you don’t want to see any more of him than what is revealed here. Suffice it to say, Dave really had to “lower his expectations” for the desperate but uproariously confidence-boosting act he and his friends resorted to!

Quote of the Day (James Allen, on How a Person Can Become ‘The Rightful Master of Himself’)

“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”— English philosophical writer and editor James Allen (1864-1912), As a Man Thinketh (1903)

Thanks to my friend Holly for this inspirational quote.

Quote of the Day (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on a State ‘Tempted by Self-Interest’)

“A state that finds itself tempted by self-interest to erode traditional norms may in time regret its conduct."— American politician, diplomat and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), On the Law of Nations (1990)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, Defining ‘Fine Art’)

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” —British art and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Two Paths, Lecture II: The Unity of Art, section 54 (1859)

Quote of the Day (William F. Buckley, on a Past CIA Operation)

“A dozen years ago someone remarked that the weekend’s attempted assassination of Sukarno had all the earmarks of a CIA operation: Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.”— Political commentator, editor, and conservative public intellectual William F. Buckley (1925-2008), “On the Right,” Danville Register (Va.), Dec. 23, 1972

Well, this weekend’s removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was more successful than that failed (and officially denied) hit on the Cold War Indonesian President. The story has it that the Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking Maduro’s activities since August.

But I doubt that we will find out soon whether the CIA under current head John Ratcliffe made any mistakes in this or any other activities since the beginning of Trump 2. In a larger sense, questions are already rising about even the wisdom of such covert operations as this one.

A warning to this effect was raised by none other than current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Within 24 hours of President Trump’s announcement of Maduro’s removal, people with memories longer than the 24-hour-news cycle were circulating Gabbard’s 2019 warning about such an operation:

“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States,” Gabbard, then a Democrat, said in a video. “Congress has not authorized the United States to go to war in Venezuela, and there’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”

This Day in Literary History (Death of Christopher Isherwood, ‘Cabaret’ Chronicler)

Jan. 4, 1986—Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer at age 81 in Santa Monica, CA.

Thousands of Broadway playgoers and even more movie and TV fans may have seen the Cabaret without associating it with Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories (1930) inspired the musical about decadent Weimar Germany. 

The latter came from the first decade of his writing career, when as part of the “Auden Circle” of modernist British and Irish writers, he became associated with left-wing politics and was hailed as “the hope of English fiction” by critic Cyril Connolly.

After emigrating to America with W.H. Auden as Britain was on the brink of war in 1939—a move denounced as cowardice in the face of the Nazi threat by the pair’s critics—Isherwood moved his career and lifestyle in entirely new directions—including, for that atheist, a conversion to Hinduism (and even a brief time as a monk in the 1940s) and three decades of what he cheerfully admitted was hackwork as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Most significantly, following his decision to publicly acknowledge his own sexual orientation in 1971, he emerged as a godfather figure to gay authors, including the likes of Truman Capote, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Patricia Highsmith, and Gore Vidal.

Did Isherwood deserve Vidal’s praise in a December 1976 New York Review of Books assessment as “the best prose writer in English”? I’m inclined to see that as exaggeration—or, more charitably, an expression of Vidal’s gratitude for championing his work early in his career. Even so, Isherwood is an important writer and his work contains considerable merit.

The clarity, even transparency, of his prose masked how complex his artistic vision could be, just as his much-discussed wit and charm often obscured his complicated personality.

Perhaps the most famous line in all of his work, from Berlin Stories—“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”—encourages a sense of his objectivity. That is crucial because, as an early practitioner of metafiction, Isherwood frequently created a persona explicitly named “Christopher Isherwood.”

Conversely, his memoirs, which readers would normally view as more reality-based than his fiction, employed composite characters, chronicled events out of sequence, or reshaped them differently from the actual occurrences as recorded in his diaries.

Isherwood’s style is uncluttered, concise and graceful, adding to the believability of both his fiction and nonfiction. Whether in bohemian Berlin of the interwar period or the European emigres and New Age devotees of Southern California’s postwar era, his nonjudgmental “eye” takes in all it sees.

Though influential and helpful to many people, Isherwood was not always admirable. Interviews and documentary evidence from his extensive diaries led biographers Peter Parker and Katherine Bucknell to conclude that he could also be drunken, neurotic, promiscuous (an estimated 400 lovers by age 44), and even antisemitic. 

(He told a listener that "Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals." When this young Jewish producer responded that "Hitler killed 6 million Jews," Isherwood said acidly, "What are you? In real estate?")

I find Isherwood’s relationship to Hollywood particularly fascinating. His movie and TV assignments often involved subjects he surely did not find congenial (for example, as I mentioned in this post from 17 years ago about “Silent Night” composer Franz Gruber).

But what Hollywood chronicler Tom Dardis called “Some Time in the Sun” for famous novelists-turned-screenwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald not only gave Isherwood a lifestyle far more comfortable than he had enjoyed in Britain but also fueled his creativity. 

Prater Violet (1945), for example, is still considered one of the best fictional representations of the Hollywood “dream factory.”

When it came time to adapt Cabaret from stage to screen, director Bob Fosse made an unexpectedly felicitous decision, by casting Michael York—practically a dead ringer for the young Isherwood—in the role of the author’s alter ego “Brian.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Paul to the Thessalonians, on ‘Children of the Light’)

“You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”—1 Thessalonians 5: 5-11 (New International Version)

The 1612 image accompanying this post, Apostle St. Paul, was painted by the Spanish Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect El Greco (1541-1614), and hangs in Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain.

This Day in Science History (Why Leonardo’s Flight Experiment Failed)

January 3, 1496—The restless curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci took wing literally, as the Renaissance painter tested a flying machine of his own device, a precursor of today’s helicopter. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, as he was unable to overcome the limitations of his time.

In a blog post from six years ago on Leonardo as a “Renaissance Man,” I discussed how science represented only one facet of his many interests: painting, sculpting, botany, architecture, urban planning, public spectacle and pageantry, and music.

But Leonardo’s aviation experiments, particularly on this occasion, deserve more in-depth analysis of how they foundered—and why his failure to disseminate his ideas slowed scientific progress for the next four centuries.

It took Leonardo a few more years before he realized that human beings did not have the appropriate proportion of muscles to weight that enabled flight of the birds that long fascinated him (more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight). At that point he turned his attention to gliders.

But besides this initial failure of understanding, Leonardo was handicapped by the lack of lightweight material like aluminum or strong propulsion systems like engines that later made man-made flight possible.

Science history is filled with examples of how technology trigger new ways of thinking that in turn make new inventions possible. Leonardo didn’t have trouble with concepts or imagining new realities. But the lack of necessary technology meant that his flying machine would be incapable of momentary flight, let alone the sustained kind.

The title of the podcast “The Brilliant, Groundbreaking, and Wildly Overrated Leonardo da Vinci" concisely summarizes the contrary negative view of Leonardo’s scientific achievement. To be sure, Sam Kean makes a couple of valid points: that Leonardo couldn’t concentrate enough to bring projects to fruition, and that by working in isolation he was unable to benefit from research by others that would either spark his creativity or correct his hypotheses.

However, Kean doesn’t take into account a few factors about Leonardo’s intellect and environment that may have affected how he worked.

First, why couldn’t the artist concentrate, particularly when the inability to do so severely disappointed patrons? I wondered if this might have been because he was manifesting adult ADHD, and sure enough that was strongly suggested in a 2019 study by King's College London researcher Professor Marco Catani.

The lack of collaboration requires even more context. At least as far as his painting was concerned, Leonardo did collaborate, through a common artistic practice of the Renaissance—employing young assistants who, by carrying out his instructions, could learn the craft themselves.

But when it came to science, he may have been afraid to let others know his thoughts. It was less a matter of paranoia that someone else might steal his ideas than a more justifiable fear that unconventional scientific conclusions could contradict Roman Catholic teaching and lead to heresy charges.

Consider, for instance, Copernicus (unwilling to publish his theory of a sun-centered universe until he was on the brink of death in 1543) or Galileo (who, a century after Leonardo, did attract the unfortunate attention of the Inquisition with his own astronomical studies).

Finally, Leonardo's opportunities to work with other scientists were few to far between. The first scientific society didn't start until Rome's Accademia dei Lincei (Lincean Academy) in 1601, two centuries after his speculations on flight.

In any case, posterity had no opportunity to benefit from his notes (in which the left-handed artist used "mirror writing," most likely either to prevent smudged notes or to force concentration).

Leonardo's 28,000 surviving pages, in notebooks and codices, were scattered after his death in 1519. After his papers were collated and decoded, they would not be published until  well into the 1800s, by which time most of the important early work in aerodynamics had been published.

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on a Teenaged Girl’s Winter ‘Visit of Charity’)

“It was mid-morning—a very cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.

“ ‘“I’m a Campfire Girl. ... I have to pay a visit to some old lady,’ she told the nurse at the desk.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, and photographer Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “A Visit of Charity,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983)

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ With ‘Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute’)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor] [to liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic]: “That ain't the American way, buddy. No, siree. Listen here, professor. You're the one who needs an American History lesson. You don't know nothin' about Lady Liberty standin' there in the harbor, with her torch on high, screamin' out to all the nations in the world: ‘Send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy.’ And all the nations send 'em in here, they come swarming in like ants. Your Spanish P.R.'s from the Caribboin, your Japs, your Chinamen, your Krauts, and your Hebes, and your English fags. All of 'em come in here and they're all free to live in their own separate sections where they feel safe. And they'll bust your head if you go in there. That's what makes America great, buddy.” [exits the Stivic house]

Mike Stivic [played by Rob Reiner] [to Gloria]: “I think we just heard ‘Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute.’"—All in the Family, Season 6, Episode 7, “Mike Faces Life,” original air date Oct. 27, 1975, teleplay by Mel Tolkin, Larry Rhine, and Johnny Speight, directed by Paul Bogart

I felt a shock of recognition when I heard about these lines a few weeks ago. For starters, it was Archie’s benighted view of immigration—one, with its nonstop onslaught of slurs and utter disregard for any notion of a "melting pot," that might have seemed ready to fade into the margins a half-century ago, but resurgent now, with the issue even central to the 2024 Presidential election.

But that phrase “Bicentennial Minute” also struck a chord with me. These short educational segments commemorating the American Revolution aired on CBS—the same network that ran All in the Family—from July 4, 1974, until December 31, 1976.

During that two-year period, one of my high school’s history teachers thought of including similar segments during morning announcements. I was selected to write them. 

Though I enjoyed learning about such bits of history, I came to groan each time as I watched members of my homeroom roll their eyes when the pieces were read into a microphone in the principal’s office and heard all over the school.

It’s funny how the world turns. Public television viewers were lucky to take in Ken Burns’ documentary series on the Revolutionary War, rolling out with greater depth and complexity than those “Bicentennial Minutes.”

On the other hand, the White House has announced the Salute to America 250 Task Force (“Task Force 250”). One of its early initiatives, “The Patriot Games,” doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, with a name sounding all too much like “The Hunger Games.” How much will its participants learn about the groups that heeded the call of Lady Liberty?