Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Injustice and Empire)

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?  What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.

“If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity.

“For it was a witty and truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great.  The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’  And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate; because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.’”—Catholic theologian and philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (1972)

Quote of the Day (Michael Connelly, on the Importance of Writing 15 Minutes a Day)

“Something I was taught by a professor in a creative writing class, is that if you’re going to be a writer then you’ve got to write every day. Even if it’s only for 15 minutes. He added that—‘even if it’s only for 15 minutes.’ And that is actually the cool thing. The heart of that cliché is that even if you only write for 15 minutes a day, the story never leaves your head. It’s still churning in there. And that’s what’s important, because if you have that story turning in your head all the time, you reach a point where you just want to—you need to write it down. You want to get to that laptop or whatever you write on.”—American crime novelist Michael Connelly quoted by Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview With Michael Connelly,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXVII (2025)

What Connelly writes is true, and I would add other elements that operate in my case. First, 15 minutes don’t sound like much, but if you put enough of these segments together over time, you’ll eventually have something (even if it’s only a short blog post like this one).

Second, even if you’re struggling with the right words, transitions, or information to be conveyed, you don’t want to let the piece lie there. You want to finish the darn thing.

At the same time, don’t underestimate the importance of finding the best time of the day when your mind will be sharpest and you’ll have the fewest interruptions. For me, that’s when I’m in a coffee shop, with nobody calling, staring at a computer screen.

(BTW, my guess is that the professor that Connelly was talking about here was Harry Crews. In this YouTube video interview with David Perell, the novelist mentioned that this same advice was offered by Crews, “a Southern Gothic type of writer” who was teaching in Florida. Crews, who died in 2012, could be a hell-raiser, but at his best he could be evocative, as in this passage from his 1979 essay collection, Blood and Grits when he recounts slumping over a typewriter and popping pills in shame over his heritage, until he realized: “in that moment I literally saved my life, because the next thought…was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms that I'd dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the Grit I am and will always be….Since that time I have found myself perpetually fascinating.")

(The image of Michael Connelly that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 15, 2010, by Mark Coggins from San Francisco.)

Photo of the Day: TV Series Filming in Sparkill, NY

I took the picture accompanying this post a couple of days ago, on the first day of location shooting for a Season One episode of the upcoming 8-episode Netflix series Unaccustomed Earth.

The actors and crew can be seen in the background of this photo. I didn’t want to move closer lest it aggravate production assistants who would, of course, loathe distractions on the set of this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's acclaimed short story collection. 

Why did the producers choose Sparkill, an upstate New York hamlet so small (less than 1,400 people) that if you sneeze, you’ll miss it? Beats me, except that the state must have offered quite a financial package to attract this business.

A local businesswoman warned me before I drove up from Northern New Jersey that it might be difficult to find parking near her store because of the movie out-of-towners. So it proved, but I didn’t mind walking the few extra blocks.

Movie location shooting can be tricky. Whatever publicity and dollars that might accrue to the town often don’t mean much to local businesses that have to cope with what sometimes turn out to be annoying and protracted disruptions of their normal routines. What shows up on the screen may not be worth the turmoil.

My town, Englewood, NJ, was the site of two Woody Allen movies, for instance. In Annie Hall (1977), you can see the marquee of the then-still existing theater, the Plaza, for up to a minute. Two years later, his script for Manhattan called for what was evidently a satiric take on a Nazi rally. But you’d never tell from the final cut: there’s only a scene of Woody and Tony Roberts driving back into New York as evidence of something more.

It was a more dismal outcome than another movie shot there the same year, the Peter Falk-Alan Arkin farce The In-Laws. Any time I know it’s on TV, I can’t wait for one of its maniacal car chase scenes, shot at the southern end of my block, with my longtime church clearly visible in the background.

A much different experience unfolded in autumn 1999, when Robert Redford shot many scenes for The Legend of Baggar Vance in Savannah, Ga. While on vacation, I watched him on two consecutive days directing stars-in-the-making Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron in a courthouse scene. Onlookers cheered wildly each time the actors waved at them in breaks.

Savannah was especially popular with filmmakers in the Nineties, with Forrest Gump also being shot there. But residents I talked to back then seemed to have especially fond memories of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. 

Despite what many might have thought from his Dirty Harry scowl, Clint Eastwood evidently personified geniality, posing for pictures with many star-struck locals.

We’ll see if the on-screen results and revenues in the town coffers fulfill initial expectations in Sparkill for Unaccustomed Earth. If they do, expect more of the same. If not, a lot of feathers will have to be smoothed down from now on.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ on Appropriate Terms of Admiration)

[Jerry and Elaine are talking about her new boyfriend, a conductor of a police band who insists on being called “Maestro.”]

Jerry Seinfeld [played by Jerry Seinfeld]: “So, what about the ‘Maestro’ stuff? Did he make you call him Maestro?

Elaine Benes [played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus]: “Yeah, I called him Maestro.”

Jerry: “You didn't mind?”

 
Elaine: “Well, I did at first, but actually I kind of got used to it.”
 
Jerry: “Okay, from now on I want you to call me ‘Jerry the Great.’”
 
Elaine: “I'm not calling you ‘Jerry the Great.’"
 
Jerry: “Why not? You call him ‘Maestro.’”
 
Elaine: “He is a Maestro.”
 
Jerry: “Well, I'm great.”— Seinfeld, Season 7, Episode 3, “The Maestro,” original air date Oct. 5, 1995, teleplay by Larry David, directed by Andy Ackerman

Quote of the Day (William James, on the Range of Emotions)

“There is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely, both as to their constitution and as to objects which call them forth.”— American philosopher William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on a Wrong Way of ‘Solving the Irish Question’)

“There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people.  There are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but in the New.”— Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), review of J.A. Froude’s “Two Chiefs of Dunboy, " The Pall Mall Gazette, Apr. 13, 1889

Quote of the Day (Paul McCartney, on Early Concert Mistakes)

“When we first started out, I was terrified of doing anything wrong onstage. I got to learn, though, that people don’t mind. In fact, they kind of like it. People go, ‘I was at the show where he made a mistake!’”—English composer and rock ‘n’ roll legend Sir Paul McCartney, quoted by Hardeep Phull, “Paul McCartney Plays for the Kids at Frank Sinatra School,” New York Post, Oct. 9, 2013

I wasn’t that big a fan of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles work in the Seventies, but I’m curious to see the recent documentary about that period, Man on the Run. 

It sounds like, more than half a century after he went on his own, we may be learning new, even surprising, things about one of the most significant forces in popular music in the 20^th century.