This is one reason why I have been captivated by
biography (unlike my peers, more, even, than fantasy) since I was a child—as well
as something I kept in mind while writing a biography of my own with my friend
Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer.
Ad Petri Cathedram, released
65 years ago yesterday, was the first encyclical issued by John XXIII
after he was elected pope. Though it didn’t set out any doctrines, it did sound
what would become the pontiff’s characteristic note of pastoral concern.
I could not help but read the sentences I’ve quoted
with a shock of recognition. Pope John called on members of the media to “to
disseminate, not lies, error, and obscenity, but only the truth; they are
particularly bound to publicize what is conducive to good and virtuous conduct,
not to vice.”
Moreover, this gentle pontiff sounds downright
prophetic in warning what can happen when rulers wantonly disregard truth and
liberty:
“The harmonious unity which must be sought among peoples and nations also needs ever greater improvement among the various classes of individuals. Otherwise mutual antagonism and conflict can result, as we have already seen. And the next step brings rioting mobs, wanton destruction of property, and sometimes even bloodshed.
Is there anyone out there on Planet Earth who doesn’t
know who these friends are? Very well, then: they are Harry Potter (played by
Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and Ron Weasley (Rupert
Grint), schoolmates through eight cinematic adventures in the super-profitable "Harry Potter" franchise.
Hopefully, none of us will ever have the harrowing confrontations
with evil that this trio must endure. But friendship is indeed the balm and
refuge that Aristotle describes, as I have rediscovered in the past couple of
weeks in encounters with friends who go back with me nearly 60 years, to our
first years in elementary school.
Maybe Harry, Hermione and Ron will be so lucky!
The image accompanying this post shows the last of the
three “bonkers” piano virtuosi mentioned by Ross, Vladimir de Pachmann (1848-1933). He sure doesn’t look
crazy here, does he?
But the adjectives
that most commonly pop up in any online description of this magician of the
keyboard are “controversial,” “notorious,” “eccentric,” and, most charitably,
“florid.”
I imagine that Ross has had quite a chuckle at some of the cinematic representations of this “history of weirdness,” such as Roger Daltrey in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania and John Cleese’s mynah bird-afflicted Beethoven on “Monty Python.”
Lamont Sanford
[played by Demond Wilson]: “Hey, all right!”
[Fred hands him the headsets used on the airplane.]
Lamont: “Hey, man, you
need an airplane for these things to work.”
Fred: “No, you don't.
Put them on.”
[Lamont does, then Fred starts singing the Ink
Spots into the other end.]
Fred: “ ‘And would I
be sure...’”
Lamont [Yanks the
headsets off, then pulls the other end out of Fred's hand and he stops singing]:
“What kind of gift is this to give your son?”
Aunt Esther Anderson
[played by LaWanda Page]: “Yup, that's him.” [sounding like a bird]
“Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!”
Fred [smiling] “Hey,
listen to that. The sound of a chicken coming from a buzzard!”— Sanford
and Son, Season 4, Episode 1, “The Surprise Party,”
original air date Sept. 13, 1974, teleplay by Saul Turteltaub and Bernie
Orenstein, directed by Norman Abbott
This, folks, is an insult worthy of Shakespeare—eminently
worthy of being unleased at a shameless name-caller in debate.
With June being the month
for weddings, I felt the urge to write about marriage—but somehow, couldn’t
resist writing about the unsuccessful kind.
In literature, few are as
calamitous as the one between “man of property” Soames Forsyte and the alluring,
aloof young woman who, despite her overwhelming misgivings about their
difference in temperament, yields to his marriage proposal, Irene Heron. Their
misalliance leads to adultery, scandal, death, and even complications in the following
generation.
Every generation or so, it seems,
has to rediscover John Galsworthy and his magnum
opus about upper middle class
Britain and its conventional (and continually violated) pieties.
Even by the time of his
death, Galsworthy—who himself defied convention by conducting an affair with (and
subsequently marrying) the wife of a cousin—was coming to be regarded as out of
step with literary modernism.
That
Forsyte Woman, the 1949 MGM
adaptation of The
Man of Property with Greer
Garson as Irene and a cast-against-type Errol Flynn as the emotionally
constricted Soames, reminded a mass audience of his work.
But the 26-episode 1967 BBC
adaptation spurred sales that even exceeded what Galsworthy enjoyed in his
lifetime.
Another miniseries, from
2002, starring Damien Lewis and Gina McKee as the mismatched couple, brought
Galsworthy’s work to a wide audience yet again.
I find fascinating not only
the debates about the relative merits of the latter two adaptations, but also
in viewers’ perceptions of Irene’s responsibility for the collapse of the
marriage. Even 20 years ago, to my astonishment, many were unsympathetic to her
situation (even Soames’ assault on her when she declines his advances).
Evidently, certain notions
about keeping up appearances did not go out the late Victorian Era.
(The image accompanying this
post comes from the 1967 adaptation, with Eric Porter and Soames and Nyree Dawn
Porter as Irene. Physically, Nyree Dawn Porter—no relation, incidentally, to
Eric—is a closer fit to what Galsworthy had in mind for her character than
McKee: “The gods had given Irene dark brown eyes and golden hair, that strange
combination, provocative of men's glances. The full soft pallor of her neck and
shoulders, above a gold-colored frock, gave to her personality an alluring
strangeness.")
With summer beginning, I can think of few American
writers, other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who can summon the outward beauty and
lurking peril of summer as well as John Cheever.
Christened the “Bard of the Backyard” in this Peter
Ronguette article from Humanities, he chronicled the first wave of
suburbanites who, in flocking towards their individual Edens, inevitably found
worms at the core of their apples.
Jim Brown, the nondescript central consciousness of “The
Common Day,” is a visitor from the city who’s wary about buying a home in the
country. When he wakes up, there’s something off-putting even about “the beauty
of the country morning,” which is “violent and alien.”
One word”—“seemingly”—and two phrases—the “rightful
owner of everything he saw” and “fatuous possessiveness”—suggest more
powerfully that something will go awry by day’s end.
As I mentioned in this post from two years ago about Cheever’s later, even more famous, short story, “The Swimmer,” the writer used variants
on “seem” to imply divergence from reality. “Fatuous” is a downright scornful hint
that Jim is delusional to think the beauty he sees around him could ever belong
to him.
But the phrase describing his mother-in-law—“rightful
owner of everything he saw”—demonstrates the depth of Jim’s delusion about
making this country refuge his home.
His landlady and host, while being “indifferent to
children,” has also bred dissatisfaction among her foreign-born household staff
with her restrictions on their travel back home and her arbitrary demands to move
her lilies (“You don’t know anything but kill flowers,” her gardener Nils bursts
out).
Just how ineffectual Jim is now and will be comes
through as he watches the Irish domestic Agnes Shay with her beloved charge,
Mrs. Garrison’s granddaughter Carlotta: “He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently
to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house
without his help and he heard the door close on their voices.”
Cheever and his family had only barely survived the Great Depression, but not without the shattering of their illusions about where they belonged in American society.
His short story marked a key signpost as
American literature sought to come to terms with the class distinctions still visible
despite the New Deal and the egalitarian struggle to defeat Fascism in World
War II.
The vision of a better world was as “splendid” as the summer
morning Cheever evoked with his characteristic luminosity, but also as illusory.
Police Lt. Arthur Tragg
[played by Ray Collins]: “What do you mean by that?”
Perry: “I'm just giving
you a personal friendly tip, that's all.”
Tragg: “Well, thanks. I
could hardly hold down my job without your friendly personal tips, Perry!”—Perry
Mason, Season 3, Episode 18, “The Case of the Singing Skirt,”
original air date Mar. 12, 1960, teleplay by Jackson Gillis based on characters
created by Erle Stanley Gardner, directed by Arthur Marks
“For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
“Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.
“For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
“Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
“Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
“Therefore, console one another with these words.”—1 Thessalonians 4:
13-18
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.
The spot where this was taken, the Oradell Avenue Veterans Memorial Bridge, was built in 1904.
This two-lane road with sidewalks,
though it has carried 25,000 people every day, is now believed to be “structurally
deficient and functionally obsolete,” said Congressman Josh Gottheimer, in a
visit to the bridge 2 ½ years ago.
I’m not sure of the current status of Gottheimer’s attempt
to claw back more than $1.14 billion in investment from the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Bill— to help fix structurally deficient bridges susceptible to
collapse. Let’s hope that this one isn’t one of them.
Happy birthday to Ray Davies, born 80 years ago today in London. Unlike many other British Invasion musicians, Davies—whether fronting The Kinks or soloing—never really became relegated to a novelty act.
Part of the reason why comes from the venturesome spirit indicated by the above quote, but the rest comes from a character that, to use one word, is “complicated”—and, to use more, might be “shy,” “insecure,” “troubled,” and “turbulent.”
All those terms apply equally to how he has been viewed by his romantic partners (including fellow singer-songwriter Chrissy Hynde) and younger brother and Kinks bandmate Dave Davies.
But an equally useful word for him might be “engaged”: engaged with “the now,” and with the past—including the working-class environment in which he grew up, and its discomfort with and alienation from a rapidly changing culture.
Davies fans have their own favorites among the tunes from the musician’s long career. Mine might belong to, for want of a better term, the middle phase of The Kinks’ career—“Celluloid Heroes,” “Misfits,” and “Better Things."
They spring from a sensitivity and sense of hope that, despite a personality that he described, in a 2011 Guardian interview, as “easy to love…but impossible to live with,” remains rooted in an abiding interest in other characters.
(Unlike Colin Gawel’s August 2014 post on the “Pencil Storm” blog, I would not go so far as to
say, “Ray Davies Is the Best Songwriter.” But I thank him for bringing to my
attention the 1986 song “Working at the Factory,” in which Davies yokes his
youthful angst with his later rage against “the corporations and big combines”
who “turned musicians into factory workers on assembly lines.”)
Jerry Seinfeld:
“Oh, so there's still hope.”
George: “I don't want
hope. Hope is killing me. My dream is to become hopeless. When you're hopeless,
you don't care, and when you don't care, that indifference makes you
attractive.”
Jerry: “Oh, so
hopelessness is the key.”
George: “It's my only
hope.”— Seinfeld, Season 3,
Episode 16, “The Fix Up,” original air date Feb. 5, 1992, teleplay by Elaine
Pope and Larry Charles, directed by Tom Cherones
The image accompanying this post, showing Kim Ng and
released as part of the Ad Week article “Most Powerful Women in Sports,”
was taken Apr. 21, 2022.
The image accompanying this post, St. Francis
Preaching to the Birds, was painted from 1297 to 1299 by the Italian
Renaissance artist-architect Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337).
Franz Kafka (pictured)
died 100 years ago this month in Prague, of starvation resulting from laryngeal
tuberculosis—an ironic echo of his classic short story, “The Hunger Artist.”
But for additional reasons, I couldn’t let this anniversary pass without noting
his continuing meaning for our time.
To start with, as Susan Halstead’s blog post this month for the British Library observes, the author is among the “very few [who]
have been honoured by having their names used as the basis of adjectives
occurring in almost every language”—in this case, to denote “a creator of
bizarre worlds in which the uncanny and incongruous gradually infiltrate
humdrum surroundings to devastating effect.”
(The most hilarious parody of this tendency, I think,
came in the Mel Brooks’ film comedy The Producers, in which one
of the title characters, Max Bialystock, angling to find an epically bad
property to adapt to a musical, picks up a submission and reads aloud from The
Metamorphosis, “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been
transformed into a giant cockroach." Bialystock flings it down in disgust:
“Nah, it's too good!”)
As Appelfeld notes, as not merely a Jew but a secular
Jew within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for most of his life, Kafka was
profoundly alienated, part of a minority within a minority.
With his training as a lawyer, he also sensed how, as
in his novel The Trial, individuals could become caught up in legal
machinery they couldn’t begin to comprehend.
Nobody should be surprised that Hannah Arendt, the
influential analyst of totalitarianism, referred so often to Kafka in her
writings. The alienation that Arendt perceived as a necessary element to the
rise of totalitarianism ran like an ever-present stream in Kafka’s
comparatively slender output before he died at only age 40.
Is Jess these days listening to Andy Cohen’s reactions to the following bits of blowback to his reality TV empire:
*Former Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel’s assertion that reality TV exploits its stars?
*Former RHONJ star Caroline Manzo’s charge that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by former Beverly Hills Housewife Brandi Glanville?
*Former RHNYC Housewife Leah McSweeney’s lawsuit claiming that Bravo and Cohen encouraged substance abuse?
How will Cohen keep all his courtroom dates and uncomfortable media interviews straight? And how will I ever manage to write a sentence about the personalities in Cohen’s reality TV franchise without using the word “former” in connection with them?
(This
post is for a friend of mine—AND
HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!—who is
quite the fan of Zooey Deschanel, the actress who played Jess, in the image
accompanying this post.)
Thirty-five years ago today, hampered by injuries to
Magic Johnson and Byron Scott and with 42-year-old center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
playing what proved to be his final game, the “Showtime” era, for all intents
and purposes, came to an end, as the Los Angeles Lakers were swept in the NBA finals.
The upstarts who dethroned them, the Detroit Pistons, were genuinely talented, with stars like Isaiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and Dennis Rodman displaying enough skill to end up in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Molly McCloskey insists in her short New Yorker memoir of her father, Jack McCloskey.
But I admit that I am among the tribe who
would have told the author, “I hated that team,” for its on-court mayhem.
I had no idea of the role played by “Trader Jack” McCloskey (he got the nickname through 30 transactions in 13 years that
built the team’s nucleus) in creating the two-time champions until I read his
daughter’s article. I had even less idea of the cost to his and her personal
lives—a sense of distance and ambivalence surely shared by other children of
sports legends whose attention is continually diverted from their homes.
Mark Kreidler of ESPN.com has estimated that the divorce rate among professional athletes ranges from 60 to 80 percent. I imagine
that it’s similarly high for sports executives, many of whom are, like
Jack McCloskey, former pro athletes themselves.
Extensive time away from families and infidelity loom
as major dangers in these marriages. Children end up collateral damage in these
situations.
Jack McCloskey (who died seven years ago, at age 91,
of Alzheimer’s Disease) was an absentee father during, and especially after,
his divorce, Molly makes plain. On the infrequent occasions when he did appear
in her life post-divorce, what he told her tended to be more gruff exhortations
to fix her own basketball game than expressions of love.
Understandably, then, Molly was bewildered by, even
resented, the tight bond that her father developed with the players he built
into champions. The online version of this article states that the Pistons were
Jack’s “Second Family,” but I couldn’t help feeling that they were his substitute
family.
Only after Jack left professional sports, and as he
gradually descended into the mental darkness of Alzheimer’s, did he and Molly
draw closer.
With her clear-eyed, unsentimental reminiscence, the
daughter shows that she is as expert in assembling the pieces of a complicated
relationship into a fascinating whole as her father was in putting together disparate
athletes like Thomas, Dumars, Rodman, Mahorn, and Bill Laimbeer into a
rough-and-tumble band of brothers.
The image accompanying this post, of Elizabeth Moon at
Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, Scotland, was taken in August 2005 by Szymon Sokol.
The event was filled with artists showing their wares
in booths like the ones I photographed here, dancers, and a “writers’ corner”
for scribers like me.
My thanks to my friend Dianne for helping me secure a
table to hold copies of the book, along with relatives and other friends who
showed up to lend moral support.
(The image of Bill Bishop
that accompanies this post was taken at IdeaFestival2015 on May 23, 2014, by Geoff Oliver Bugbee.)
Maj. Frank Marion “Ferret Face” Burns:
“Yes, dear?”
Margaret: “For a moment
there, you looked like you had a chin.”
—M*A*S*H, Season 4, Episode 1, “Welcome to Korea,” original
air date Sept. 12, 1975, teleplay by Everett Greenbaum, Jim Fritzell, and Larry
Gelbart, directed by Gene Reynolds
