Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Loneliness)

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), “God’s Lonely Man,” originally printed in The American Mercury, October 1941, reprinted in The Hills Beyond (1941)

In high school I devoured the four massive novels of Thomas Wolfe (two published in his lifetime, two cobbled together from manuscripts and published posthumously), but was unaware of this piece until the other day.

I suspect that I’m not the only one who hadn’t noticed it: millions of people who’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver undoubtedly don’t know that it was screenwriter Paul Schrader’s tip of the cap to the Wolfe piece.

Most references to “God’s Lonely Man” that I’ve found on the Internet refer to it as an essay; others, as a short story. Virtually all these sources indicate that it was autobiographical. But with Wolfe, how much wasn’t?

In any case, it seems to have been inspired by his childhood and youth in a boardinghouse run by his mother in Asheville, N.C.—in real life, “Old Kentucky Home,” but renamed “Dixieland” in the coming-of-age novel that made his reputation (even as it made him persona non grata at home), Look Homeward, Angel.

When I visited Asheville some years ago, I made it a point to stop at Old Kentucky Home, which over the years became The Thomas Wolfe Memorial. I was fascinated by the stories told about his upbringing. 

With the boy Thomas often required to give up his bedroom at night to accommodate transient visitors of all kinds, I could easily understand the restlessness and alienation—in short, the loneliness—that he wrote about in the above passage.

With all that I learned about the novelist while there, I was deeply saddened to read that, due to Hurricane Helene, this historic site will be closed “indefinitely.”

The Facebook page for the site read: “Due to the intense winds brought on by Hurricane Helene, one of the property’s maple trees has fallen against the historic house. Damage to the structure appears relatively minimal, and our priority in the coming days, as we can safely do so, is to secure the site by having the tree removed and the house thoroughly inspected."

In 1998, due to a still-unsolved act of arson, the house sustained a loss of 20% of the original structure and 15% of its artifact collection. It took nearly six years before it reopened to the public. 

One hopes that the wait won’t be as long this time for admirers of the intensely lyrical novelist that William Faulkner believed possessed ambitions so enormous that he sought to “put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin.”

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on ‘The Smallest Acts of Daily Life’)

“The fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.”— Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be,” The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2022

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Hollywood Squares,’ on Airline Security)

Peter Marshall: “True or false: Some airlines now give you a thorough frisking before permitting you to board the plane.”

Paul Lynde: “That’s the only reason I fly.”—Game-show host Peter Marshall (1926-2024) and comic actor Paul Lynde (1926-1982) quoted by Daniel E. Slotnik, “Peter Marshall, Longtime Host of ‘The Hollywood Squares,’ Dies at 98,” The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2024

Quote of the Day (Tom Wolfe, on ‘Jersey Teenagers’ When First on the Loose in NYC)

“The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.”—American “New Journalist” and novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

The term “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” is believed to have first appeared in print in a December 1977 New York Times article, quoting Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell. But a dozen years before, Tom Wolfe had analyzed, with a sociologist’s exactitude and a zest all his own, the youthful contingent of this mobile brigade.

As I read the above passage, I did some quick math. The teens that Wolfe was describing, if they are alive today, would be grandparents.

Years earlier, when they had kids of their own, they had to endure with their adolescent girls the same ritual they’d tried out with their parents: i.e., “put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you're going out with some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell her that ‘for God’s sake’ is not cursing.”

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on When Political Parties Are Strong)

“[P]olitical parties, like individual men, are only strong while they are consistent and honest, and… treachery and deception are only the sand on which political fools vainly endeavor to build.”— American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of Jimmy Carter, ‘Dasher’ From Plains)

Oct. 1, 1924— Jimmy Carter, who rose improbably from a humble speck on a map to the highest office in the land, was born in a hospital in Plains, Ga.—the first Oval Office occupant who came into the world in this formal medical institution.

Plains left its imprint on Carter in all kinds of ways. Indeed, it lies at the heart of one of the paradoxes of his life: a leader of fierce ambition who nevertheless kept coming back to a community and way of life where he could be of service.

Not that he never had the opportunity to leave for good, or that others didn’t want him to move. For instance, wife Rosalynn (a fellow Plains native) regarded it as a “monumental step backward” when he announced he was resigning from the U.S. Navy in 1953 to return to the town where his father Earl had made a difference in the life of other residents as a successful businessman who continually aided others.

When Carter’s Presidency ended after a single term in 1981, he didn’t go on the lecture circuit where he could charge exorbitant fees to business and industry groups, or hobnob on Martha’s Vineyard with fashionable culturati, but went back to Plains, where, finding the family peanut business $1 million in the red when placed in a blind trust during his President, they began to pare down their debt as they started a new life.

Trust me: It can be difficult blogging about a person or event in such a way that readers come away having learned anything new. No matter how often one may return to someone as consequential as a President, no single post, no matter how intrinsically interesting (as I believe was the case with Carter’s energy policy, recounted here), can do justice to a career.

For that reason, when I can, I try to write about something I’ve experienced directly relating to that. Fortunately, there were two such events relating to Carter.

The first involved not President Carter, but candidate Carter. Back in 1976, when he first ran for President, he had devoted much of his early resources to the Iowa Presidential caucus, effectively putting that state on the political map by placing first among the Democratic contenders. 

The code name that the Secret Service initially used for him, “Dasher,” testified to the tireless marathon campaign he subsequently conducted until his victory that fall.

The New Jersey Democratic primary, though held in June, was nothing like the afterthought it’s become in recent quadrennial cycles.

As a high school sophomore then in the first week of June, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a potential President once I learned Carter was coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

(I felt the same way in 1984, when Gary Hart came to Bergen County. I’m afraid that the candidate subsequently got into hot water when he took literally the musician warming up the crowd for him, Stephen Stills, when he performed “Love the One You’re With.”)

The 1976 Carter appearance in Englewood occurred at Galilee United Methodist Church, whose primarily African-American congregation was emblematic of one of a major component of the base he was cobbling together in a campaign that took the Democratic establishment by surprise.

Carter was introduced to the crowd by civil rights icon Andrew Young, eloquently vouching for him as an exemplar of a “New South” shedding its segregationist past at long last—a characterization all the more helpful for any in the audience who recalled the candidate’s remarks only two months before in which he used the phrase “ethnic purity” to defend the purity of white neighborhoods in cities.

(After his election, Carter appointed Young U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—then forced his resignation two years later in the fallout over an unauthorized meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

I don’t recall any policy positions that Carter enunciated that afternoon—he had carefully blurred many of them throughout the primary season—but I vividly remember, as he vigorously shook one hand after another, that grin so toothy that it became the fallback feature for cartoonists during his Presidency.

And I recollect the circumstances he faced then: Major rivals on the right (George Wallace, Henry Jackson) and the left (Morris Udall) had lost losing key primaries, leaving only Sen. Frank Church, Gov. Jerry Brown, and aging party lion Sen. Hubert Humphrey in a last-ditch “Anybody But Carter” movement.

The key takeaway of Carter’s address, then, in between his usual stump speech that he would be offering “a government as good as its people” to a country sick of Washington, was that the Democratic powers that be were united against him.

If this moment in time has any significance at all now, it’s as a foreshadowing of what happened with the Republicans 40 years later, when alarmed party leaders mounted their own effort against a candidate they feared would not make it that fall: Donald Trump.

In both campaigns, the leading candidate had built up too high a delegate candidate—and there were still too many candidates dividing the opposition to him—for the “Stop” movement to work.

The second event related to Carter that I was involved with, indirectly, came after he left office. Not only, like most 20^th century Presidents, did he want to write a memoir giving his side of the story, but, with so much debt hanging over his head from the decline of the peanut business, he wanted to do so quickly.

Still, he wanted to do a good job of it—so, as he had done before he delivered his disastrous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, he called together the best minds he could think of for their advice. One such expert was the college professor I had for a year-long seminar on the American Presidency.

So my professor polled his experts—his students—on the single subject they wanted the President to cover.

I don’t think my topic was unusual. As much as anything else, the protracted Iranian hostage crisis had conveyed an image of American impotence, and had probably crystallized for the public a growing sense of Carter as incompetent. The Iranian militants had already given signs of growing radicalism. Why, then, had Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran for cancer treatment?

Carter insisted that he’d been told that the Shah was so close to death that the treatment he required was only available in the U.S. (It turned out, as Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson reported for Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR in January 2020, that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and former shah attorney John J. McCloy exaggerated the lack of medical options available to the Shah.)

The group gathered to meet Carter in 1981 included among its luminaries Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt urged the ex-President to concentrate on creating a narrative, stressing that Carter’s was a great story that demonstrated the possibilities of America.

Published a year later, Carter’s Keeping Faith turned out to be in much the same vein as nearly all Presidential memoirs: stodgy and self-justifying, not one that most readers would enjoy reading. Maybe he just needed time to find his voice and best subject matter, though: An Hour Before Midnight, his memoir of growing up in Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

What struck me about Carter’s meeting with these historians was less what he (or they) said or did but how he appeared—or, rather, how he and Rosalynn appeared. The sofa where the two sat was quite large, my professor recalled, but the former First Couple sat so close together that it represented a casual, maybe even unconscious, indication of their comfort in each other’s company, the product of a marriage that lasted 77 years—the longest in Presidential history.

With so much of Carter’s career turning on improbabilities, maybe the greatest of all might be the final chapter going on now. The former President has been in hospice care for 19 months, a far cry from the six months that 90% of such patients undergo.

He has defied the medical odds, just as he defied the low expectations of those who met him for the first time years ago. He has outlived some of his detractors and earned the surprised respect of others (including me) who regard him as a model for a modern ex-President.

Surely, Carter regards his longevity as a blessing—but even many Americans who thought of him as ultimately a failed President are likely to see what he has served as an active private citizen as a blessing to his country

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on a Mistake Made by Young Writers)

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”—American fiction writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Preface to How to Write Short Stories (1924)

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on Postwar Hollywood)

“A primary complaint here [Hollywood] is overpopulation; old-guard natives tell me the terrain is bulging with ‘undesirable’ elements, hordes of ex-soldiers, workers who moved here during the war, and those spiritual Okies, the young and footloose; yet walking around I sometimes have the feeling of one who awakened some eerie morning into a hushed, deserted world where overnight, like sailors aboard the Marie Celeste, all souls had disappeared. There is an air of Sunday vacancy; here where no one walks cars glide in a constant shiny silent stream, my shadow, moving down the stark white street, is like the one living element of a Chirico. It is not the comfortable silence felt in small American towns, though the physical atmosphere of stoops and yards and hedges is very often the same; the difference is that in real small towns you can be pretty sure what sorts of people there are hiding beyond those numbered doors, but here, where all seems transient, ephemeral, there is no general pattern to the population, and nothing is intended—this street, that house, mushrooms of accident, and a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.” —American fiction writer and essayist Truman Capote (1924-1984), “Hollywood” (1947), republished in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (2007)

The pursuit of fame can bring the unwary to a desolate place—a lesson that Truman Capote, born 100 years ago today in New Orleans, learned firsthand but, to his loss and literature’s, managed to forget.

When I considered my choices for a post commemorating Capote’s centennial, I thought of either a quote from his own work, giving a taste of his impeccable writing style, or one from someone else about the author of In Cold Blood. Rather than choose one to the exclusion of the other, I decided to take both.

The paragraph opening this post is an example of the first option; the following, from an April 1988 Esquire essay by his Hamptons neighbor, A Separate Peace novelist John Knowles, of the second:

“Truman Capote really was alone, and he knew it. No one anywhere on earth can have looked like him, with his odd Pekingese features, or above all sounded like him when he spoke. This very short, thick-legged person with his big head and yellow, later gray bangs, speaking in a tissue-paper thin, whiny lisp, was not at all like anybody else. Clothes were not manufactured that fit him; no voice anywhere echoed his. When he would merely enter a room or utter a few words, strangers stopped short, jerked their heads around to behold him, usually—until he became so famous—with at least a tinge of mockery, or hostility.”

Few writers have so adeptly captured Capote’s oddness, vulnerability, and sense of remove better than Knowles—or how, “as a form of self-protection, Truman made himself the only writer in the world after Ernest Hemingway whom the man in the street recognized on sight.”

The name of the other author that Knowles drops in that sentence is a signal of what’s to come: a writer who, believing he wears “the invisible, protective shield of celebrity,” instead falls victim to his self-created legend.

By the mid-1960s, it was hard to miss Capote and his work, with adaptations not only of In Cold Blood but also Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and, for television, A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor. And, of course, there was the masked “Black and White Ball” that Capote ostensibly threw for Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, but which also, not so coincidentally, raised his own profile.

A decade later, something was amiss. Most observers trace Capote’s decline to his disastrous publication of the “La Côte Basque 1965” chapter of his projected roman a clef, Answered Prayers.

But the ostracism that Capote suffered at the hands of the high-society “swans” he betrayed only accelerated deterioration that had set in already, in much the same way that two plane crashes only a day apart that Hemingway survived in 1954 marked the point of no return for a creative and psychological degeneration previously in motion.

There were distractions aplenty that Capote didn’t need in the Seventies: 

*a 1978 appearance on the egregious Gong Show imitation, The Cheap Show; 

*his feature-film debut as an actor, Murder by Death, which was so disastrous that screenwriter spent virtually the entire production unsuccessfully pressing to have him replaced by "any actual member of the Screen Actors Guild";

*his frequent presence as a guest on The Tonight Show; and

*a 1978 interview with Stanley Siegel that turned so rambling, incoherent and disastrous that the morning talk-show host asked on the air if the author was "feeling all right."

As with Hemingway, while the discipline of sitting down at a typewriter remained intact for Capote, an essential creative skill had been dulled by the years of substance abuse: the creative faculty that would enable him to detect and fix what was wrong with a day’s work and push it to completion.

Nearly four decades after Capote journeyed to Hollywood, he met his end there in the home of one of its denizens: one of the few female friends not to desert him in the wake of Answered Prayers, Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne.

For most of his career, Capote’s work was a model for how to write. His death was a model for how to squander a writer’s capacity.

Or, as Knowles concluded in his poignant reminiscence: “The autopsy found the failure of various organs, but I knew that he had died because he had used up all of the things he had ever lived for.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ As Sheldon Encounters Nemesis Wil Wheaton)

“Well, well, well, if it isn't Wil Wheaton. The Green Goblin to my Spider Man. The Pope Paul V to my Galileo. The Internet Explorer to my Firefox.” —Dr. Sheldon Cooper [played by Jim Parsons], to bowling rival Will Wheaton, in The Big Bang Theory, Season 3, Episode 19, “The Wheaton Recurrence,” original air date Apr 12, 2010, teleplay by Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, and David Goetsch, directed by Mark Cendrowski

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Swift, on Conversation)

“The truest way to understand conversation, is to know the faults and errors to which it is subject, and from thence every man to form maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated, because it requireth few talents to which most men are not born, or at least may not acquire without any great genius or study. For nature hath left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are an hundred men sufficiently qualified for both, who, by a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

“I was prompted to write my thoughts upon this subject by mere indignation, to reflect that so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men’s power, should be so much neglected and abused.” — Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), “Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation,” originally published in 1709, reprinted in English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay (The Harvard Classics, 1909-1914)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edwin O’Connor, on ‘The Essential Goodness of Man’)

“[W]hile only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small, redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and the glory of man is revealed.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish-American novelist Edwin O’Connor (1918-1968), The Edge of Sadness (1961)

Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Memory)

“How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind! If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul! We are to be sure a miracle every way -- but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.”— English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park (1814)

The image accompanying this post shows Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price, the character who says the above words, in the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.

Quote of the Day (Philip Hoare, on Why ‘The Sea is Not a Kind Place’)

 

“The sea is not a kind place… A place of dark and light, day and night, storms and tides and stars; a place where you have to feel alive because it so clearly shows you the alternatives.”— British nonfiction writer, filmmaker and curator Philip Hoare, Risingtide/Fallingstar (2017)

I write this with harrowing images and sounds from Hurricane Helene in mind, and pray for all those whose homes lie in the path of the storm.

The image accompanying this post, Hurricane, Bahamas, created by American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

TV Quote of the Day (Ellen DeGeneres, on What People Think of Her)

“I used to say I don't care what people think of me. I realize now, looking back, I said that at the height of my popularity.” —Comic and former talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, “Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval,” Netflix original streaming date Sept. 24, 2025, directed by Joel Gallen

Quote of the Day (Thucydides, on the Strong and the Weak)

“You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." ―The Athenians to the Melians, quoted in Thucydides (c. 460-c. 395 BC), History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 5, translated by Richard Crawley (1910)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Socializing)

“Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) quoted by James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

That comment from Dr. Johnson should be borne in mind when we try to calculate the losses incurred by the widespread isolation in the days after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Quote of the Day (James Atlas, on Why Biography is an Art Form)

“Writing a biography resembles writing a novel in that you have to solve the problems that present themselves in writing any narrative. That is why I claim that biography is an art form, because it involves the same narrative and aesthetic questions. The only difference, I’m tempted to say, is that you're dealing with fact instead of inventing facts.”—Biographer James Atlas (1949-2019), interview with Humanities (2000), quoted by Matt Schudel, “Biographer, Publisher Was Meticulous in His Exploration of Literary Lives,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2019

After co-writing a biography myself, I’ve come to conclude that such works are, if they’re done right, products of endless toil, tears and sweat—not just for the very real aesthetic reasons of narrative and style that the late Mr. Atlas identifies, but also for the need to get the facts right.

A charitable reader might find one mistake regrettable; a less forgiving reader will feel the worm of doubt growing about the book’s accuracy. With every error after that, the whole edifice of credibility crumbles from within, and with it the reader’s trust in the author and his tale.

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on Being Considered ‘A Woman’s Novelist’)

“I've been doing this long enough that I've been 'the soccer mom novelist,' I've certainly been 'the Irish-Catholic novelist,' so to be called a ‘woman’s novelist’ is about the broadest category I've found myself in so far. Maybe if I keep it up I'll be everyone's novelist.” ― American novelist Alice McDermott quoted by Emily Bobrow, “Weekend Confidential: Alice McDermott,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28-29, 2023

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘An American in Paris,’ on Looking Beyond a Man’s Exterior)

“It's not a pretty face, I grant you, but underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.”— Adam Cook [played by pianist, actor, author, and wit Oscar Levant], in An American in Paris (1951), screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Vincente Minnelli

Quote of the Day (Jan Struther, on ‘Zest for Life’)

“Zest for life [is] …an accidental gift…impossible to acquire, and almost impossible, thank heaven, to lose.”— English journalist and poet Joyce Maxtone Graham, a.k.a. Jan Struther (1901-1953), Mrs. Miniver (1939)

The image accompanying this post shows Greer Garson in her Oscar-winning title role in the 1942 film adaptation of Mrs. Miniver.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Forgiveness)

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”—British novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1941)

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on ‘When All the Summers Have Come to an End’)

“I’ll see you in my dreams
When all the summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
We’ll meet and live and love again.” —American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “I'll See You in My Dreams,” from his CD Letter to You (2020)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘When Harry Met Sally,' With Sally’s Very Particular Dining Request)

Waitress [played by Kimberley LaMarque]: “What can I get you?”

Harry Burns [played by Billy Crystal]: “I'll have a #3.”

Sally Albright [played by Meg Ryan]: “I'd like the chef's salad, please, with the oil and vinegar on the side and the apple pie a la mode.”

Waitress [writing the order down]: “Chef and apple a la mode.”

Sally: “But I'd like the pie heated, and I don't want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side, and I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream but only if it's real. If it's out of a can, then nothing.”

Waitress: “Not even the pie?”

Sally: “No, just the pie, but then not heated.”— When Harry Met Sally...(1989), screenplay by Nora Ephron, directed by Rob Reiner

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on ‘Time’s Glory’)

“Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light;
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right.”—English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow (2002) 

Quote of the Day (George Osborne, on Why Governments Need Periodic Turnover)

“Policy mistakes grow like barnacles. Governments groan under the weight of all the things they've said in the past that no one wants to unsay. Prime ministers become surrounded by an adviser team that has only ever known them as premiers. A soft corruption sets in, where respect for the rules dissipates and every senior official has been appointed to their post by the current administration.”—Former British politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, “Past Master” (review of Tony Blair’s On Leadership), The Financial Times, Sept.7-8, 2024

In an otherwise laudatory review of Blair’s new book, Osborne really takes serious issue only with the former Prime Minister’s contention that the longer leaders stay in power, the better they become.

Much of Osborne’s argument clearly derives from his own experience as a British Cabinet official, but there remains the necessity for continuity in administration—hence, the survival of bureaucracy in the UK and the United States.

(The image accompanying this post, showing George Osborne speaking on the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2009 European Parliament elections, at Keele University, was created May 18, 2009, by M. Holland.)

This Day in Yankee History (Mantle Summons Fading Magic in Last Days of Dynasty)

Sept. 17, 1964— Mickey Mantle reached his 2,000^th career hit in the same game he recorded his 450^th home run, a 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Angels that kept momentum going in a pennant race for the proud but aging veteran core of the New York Yankees.

With a sixth-inning single to go with a double and his milestone home run, Mantle was just a triple shy of hitting for the cycle. His bat and leadership by example were proving more essential than it ever had been before, as the Bronx Bombers, in a grim portent of the future, was fending off a younger, hungrier Baltimore Orioles squad.

In third place and 4 ½ games out in mid-August—and having endured a much-publicized bus “harmonica incident” between infielder Phil Linz and manager Yogi Berra—the Yankees would go 30-13 through the rest of the season to secure their fifth straight World Series berth. But they won the pennant by only one game.

Mantle was not the only reason the team was able to survive: rookie pitcher Mel Stottlemyre, for instance, was virtually lights out when called up in October, and Roger Maris’s return to something like peak offensive form and late-season replacement for Mantle in centerfield took much of the burden off his power-hitting teammate.

But Mantle’s consistency and dominance (35 homers, 111 RBIs, .303 batting average, 1.015 OPS) throughout the season were recognized by sportswriters now in a way that finally matched how his admiring teammates had felt for years. When the season was over, he finished second in the voting for Most Valuable Player, surpassed only by Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson.

Just as the team fed off Mantle’s offensive brilliance in 1964, they collapsed when their string of injuries began to mirror his own the following season. Maris, catcher Elston Howard, shortstop Tony Kubec, and starting pitcher Jim Bouton would join Mantle on the injured list in 1965. The team would not make it back to the World Series again until 1976.

It turned out that 1964 would be the last great year for the 32-year-old Mantle. His power, batting average, and speed steadily declined over the following four seasons, only staying on because the Yankees implored him to lend his leadership to a team transitioning to youth. When he retired following the 1968 season, he was mortified that his career batting average had dipped below .300. 

Quote of the Day (Robert Henri, on How ‘Art is an Outsider’)

"Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the Earth."— American painter and teacher Robert Henri (1865-1929), The Art Spirit (1923)

This Day in Music History (Mary Travers, Golden Center of ’60s Folk Hitmakers, Dies)

Sept. 16, 2009— Mary Travers, a willowy blonde whose soaring soprano and liberal-left politics helped lift the vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary and a generation of folk music singer-songwriters onto the top of the charts and into the heart of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, died at age 72 in Danbury, CT, of side effects from chemotherapy for leukemia.

As I write this, Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris led Donald Trump first to speculate that the singer-songwriter might “pay a price for it…in the marketplace,” then to post, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social. 

In a sense, Swift is the spiritual descendant of Travers—who, like fellow trio members Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey, was an outspoken social activist—and, unlike Swift, advocated relentlessly on multiple issues.

PPM’s 1963 cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for instance, almost instantly became an anthem of the civil-rights movement, and brought his literate, serious songs to the attention of a public that at the time was buying softer pop fare like Lesley Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

This Kentucky native came to Greenwich Village as a child with her mother. A newspaper reporter and single parent, Virginia Travers had little time to spend with Mary, but left her with an important bit of advice—beware the thin line between compromise and complicity—and with an unexpected adult female role model: an African-American friend who often took Mary into her Harlem home on weekends, where the young girl developed an acute understanding of racial inequality.

Though in high school she joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger on several recordings, her initial diffidence about performing left her at loose ends on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s until Bob Dylan's aggressive manager Albert Grossman decided to manufacture his own counterpart to the all-male Kingston Trio—only with the svelte Travers to provide sex appeal in combination with the goateed Yarrow and Stookey.

Grossman had particular instructions for Travers. Perhaps to increase her mystique, she was to leave the speaking onstage to Yarrow and Stookey (a request she agreed to, given her stage fright at the time). More oddly, according to a December 2020 episode of the podcast "500 Songs" by Andrew Hickey, Grossman also insisted that Travers stay inside, lest any tan that resulted spoiled her image.

Yarrow and Stookey composed only a handful of songs themselves (“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”) and they exhibited serviceable rather than virtuoso guitar skills. But, after considerable refinement by arranger and producer Milt Okun, they learned how to blend their harmonies effortlessly with Travis.

Moreover, they proved excellent interpreters of works by others, as they exposed listeners not only to Dylan but also to the likes of Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and John Denver (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”).

Commercial success and high cultural visibility followed. Twelve hit singles came in the nine years after their formation in 1961, and the three singers appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, at the White House for the celebration of John F. Kennedy's second year in office, and at Martin Luther King's 1965 march on Selma.

The group broke up in 1970, not because of the clashes over ego, money, and creative direction that bedevil so many other musical combos, but simply because Stookey feared a heavy touring schedule would jeopardize his family life.

Travers used the next several years away from her musical partners to good effect—writing poetry, hosting her own radio show (even landing the first interview that Dylan had given in over a decade), and, by necessity, taking greater command in her solo concerts than she had done with Yarrow and Stookey.

The three singers stayed on good terms after they ceased working together in 1970, so no tensions had to be eased over when they reunited eight years later for a no-nukes benefit concert.

An album, titled, appropriately enough, Reunion, followed, and though its pop arrangements reportedly disappointed Yarrow by departing from their more folk-oriented sound, it provided a pretext for touring and reconnecting with their audience.

When I saw them in an August 1978 concert at Central Park, they were received rapturously by fans.

Peter, Paul and Mary continued to perform together, albeit less frequently, until a few months before Travers' death. But they were aware that they were fighting rather than in sync with the national zeitgeist, as they contrasted the "Us Decade" of the 1960s with the "Me Decade" of the Jimmy Carter years.

Moreover, from the 1980s on, they were often condescendingly regarded as relics of a bygone era, even the model for "The Folksmen" for the film mockumentary "A Mighty Wind," according to this January 2015 blog post by Glen Herbert. 

All of this was beside the point, as far as their musical legacy was concerned. Was the trio's sometimes-derided earnestness really any worse than other musical artists' snarkiness? 

In any case, the group still enjoyed playing for appreciative audiences, and their harmonies remained largely undimmed by the inevitable aging process. Travers herself was now more ready to challenge convention, whether in public, on US policy towards Central America in the Reagan years, or even privately with Yarrow and Stookey. 

Even in these later years, she was influencing a later generation of folksingers, according to singer-songwriter Nerissa Nields in a blog post appropriately titled "Thank You, Mary" right after Travers' death:

"The Mary we all saw in the sixties was much more complicated and interesting than the blond, leggy, silent-except-when-belting-her heart-out Greenwich Village waif we mostly got to see.... By the time [sister] Katryna and I got to watch her perform in person in the mid-80s, she was silent no longer. Au contraire: she was full of opinions. She was also significantly overweight, a fact she joked about from the stage. She was breaking all the rules, tossing out all the adjectives assigned to her. And through that singular revolution, she liberated two future folk singers." 

Now in their eighties, Yarrow and Stookey continue to perform together, but I am sure they would acknowledge that something is inevitably missing without their longtime female partner. Those yearning for that missing element can find a Peter, Paul and Mary tribute band on YouTube. But nothing compares to the charismatic blonde with the ringing alto that touched the heart.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With One of My Favorite Inspirational Scenes)

Frodo [played by Elijah Wood]: “I can't do this, Sam.”

Sam [played by Sean Astin]: “I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What are we holding onto, Sam?”

Sam: “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.”—The Two Towers [Part Two of The Lord of the Rings] (2002), screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson