Sunday, June 30, 2024

Quote of the Day (Joseph Epstein, on How ‘Biography Counters Determinism’)

“Biography counters determinism, the notion of history being made chiefly, or even exclusively, by irresistible tendencies, trends, and movements. It reinforces the idea that fortune, accident, above all strong character can rise above the impersonal forces of politics, economics, and even culture to forge human destiny and change the flow of history itself. For this reason, and many more, I say, long live biography.” — American essayist and editor Joseph Epstein, “Life Within Lives,” The Weekly Standard, Apr. 11, 2016

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.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Pope John XXIII, on ‘Contempt for Truth’)

“All the evils which poison men and nations and trouble so many hearts have a single cause and a single source: ignorance of the truth — and at times even more than ignorance, a contempt for truth and a reckless rejection of it. Thus arise all manner of errors, which enter the recesses of men’s hearts and the bloodstream of human society as would a plague. These errors turn everything upside down: they menace individuals and society itself.”—St. Pope John XXIII (1881-1963), Ad Petri Cathedram (“To the Chair of Peter”), “On Faith, Unity and Peace in a Spirit of Charity,” released June 29, 1959

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. 

Saturday, June 29, 2024

Quote of the Day (Aristotle, on the Multiple Benefits of Friendship)

“Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? Or how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends? The greater it is, the more exposed is it to risk. And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. It helps the young, too, to keep from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble actions-'two going together'-for with friends men are more able both to think and to act….Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.”—Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC), Nichomachean Ethics, translated by W. D. Ross (350 BC)

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!


Friday, June 28, 2024

Quote of the Day (Alex Ross, on the Piano’s ‘History of Weirdness’)

“It has never been just about the music. The notion that performers should be faceless butlers of genius, impersonally conveying sublime messages in sound, has no basis in tradition. The bonkers antics of virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prove otherwise. Franz Liszt, whose stage costumes ranged from Magyar military garb to priestly robes, would sometimes stop between pieces to chat with admirers. The infamously acerbic Hans von Bülow, while on an American tour, became so irritated at the promotional efforts of the Chickering piano company that he took out a jackknife and scraped the brand’s name off the instrument. Vladimir de Pachmann once appeared at a recital holding a pair of socks; these, he claimed, had been knitted for Chopin by George Sand. And so on: the history of the piano is a history of weirdness.”—Music critic Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern” (a profile of pianist Yuja Wang), The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

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.”


TV Quote of the Day (‘Sanford and Son,’ As a Musical Gift Leads to Disharmony)

Fred G. Sanford [played by Redd Foxx]: “Hey, Lamont, I almost forgot about you. I got you a quadriphonic stereo!”

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

Thursday, June 27, 2024

Quote of the Day (Carl Sagan, Arguing for Scientific Literacy)

“All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.”― American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979)

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Quote of the Day (J.M. Barrie, on Kindness)

“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”— Scottish novelist-playwright J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), The Little White Bird (1902)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With a Line Made for Use Tomorrow Night)

Gandalf [played by Ian McKellen] [to Grima Wormtongue]: “Be silent. Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm.”—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 

This, folks, is an insult worthy of Shakespeare—eminently worthy of being unleased at a shameless name-caller in debate.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Quote of the Day (John Galsworthy, on the Hypocrisy of a Loveless Marriage)

“Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene [Forsyte] quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed — the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the status quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.” —Nobel Prize-winning English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy (1867-1933), The Man of Property (1906), Part I of The Forsyte Saga (1922)

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.")

Monday, June 24, 2024

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Seemingly ‘Splendid Summer Morning’)

“When Jim woke at seven in the morning, he got up and made a tour of the bedroom windows. He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien. The hills seemed to come straight out of the northern sky. From the western windows, he saw the strong sun lighting the trees on the mountains, pouring its light onto the flat water of the lake, and striking at the outbuildings of the big, old-fashioned place as commandingly as the ringing of iron bells….He…went back into the dining room and out onto the terrace. The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn.  It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Jim looked at the terrace, at the gardens, at the house, with a fatuous possessiveness. He could hear Mrs. Garrison—his widowed mother-in-law and the rightful owner of everything he saw—talking animatedly to herself in the distant cutting bed.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Common Day,” originally published in The New Yorker, July 25, 1947, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

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.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Hucksters,’ on Radio Advertising)

Victor Albee Norman [played by Clark Gable]: “Miss Hammer, take a memorandum. To Mr. Kimberly: Dear Kim, For four years I haven't been listening to the radio much. Paragraph. Kim, in that time, it's gotten worse, if possible. More irritating, more commercials per minute, more spelling out of words, as if no one in the audience had gotten past the first grade. Paragraph. I know how tough Evans is, and some of the other sponsors, but I think we make a great mistake in letting them have their own way. We're paid to advise them. Why can't we advise them that people are grateful for what free entertainment they get on the air, grateful enough to buy the product that provides good shows. But, they have some rights, Kim, it's their homes we go into, and they're not grateful to people who get one foot in the door by pretending to offer them music and drama, and then take too much time in corny sales talk. Paragraph. I want to go on record as saying that I think radio has to turn over a new leaf. We've pushed and badgered the listeners, we've sung to them and screamed at them, we've insulted them, cheated them and angered them, turned their homes into a combination grocery store, crap game and midway. Kim, someday, 50 million people are going to just reach out and turn off their radios [snaps fingers], snap, just like that—and that's the end of the gravy, for you, and me, and Evans. Sign it love and kisses, Vic.”—The Hucksters (1947), screenplay by Luther Davis, adaptation of Frederic Wakeman’s novel by Edward Chodorov and George Wells, directed by Jack Conway

TV Quote of the Day (‘Perry Mason,’ With a ‘Friendly Personal Tip’ to the Police)

Perry Mason [played by Raymond Burr]: “Tragg, I think you'll find that particular weapon has little or no significance.”

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

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Paul to the Thessalonians, on Hope Despite Grief)

“We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.

“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.

Saturday, June 22, 2024

Photo of the Day: Hackensack River, View From Oradell Avenue Veterans Memorial Bridge, Bergen County, NJ

I took the attached photo nearly two weeks ago as I was leaving an arts festival held in Oradell, a few towns from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

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.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Ellison, on the Truth)

“Few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed. Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.”—American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), Juneteenth (1999)

Friday, June 21, 2024

Quote of the Day (Ray Davies, on Why ‘It’s Critical To Be in the Now')

“You’ll never be able to be what you were. You’ll never achieve what you achieved before. It’s critical to be in the now. This is what I am, this is how I speak, this is what I write – take it or leave it. Thankfully, people have continued to take it rather than leave it.” —English rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Sir Ray Davies, on creating new material, interviewed by Andy Greene, in “The Last Word: Ray Davies,” Rolling Stone, Apr. 6, 2017

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.”)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ In Which George Connects Hopelessness With Attractiveness)

George Costanza: “I mean it's gotten to the point where I'm flirting with operators on the phone. I almost made a date with one.”

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

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Quote of the Day (Kim Ng, on Desire as Part of ‘The Typical Immigrant Story’)

“Desire is one theme you find in the typical immigrant story. It’s why people leave their families and their countries to find a better place. I’m often underestimated because of my gender, size, upbringing. All of those things have really formed and strengthened my desire.”—Former Miami Marlins general manager Kim Ng quoted in Cody Delistraty, “SOAPBOX: Rosamund Pike, Kaws and Francis Fukuyama on Desire,” WSJ. Magazine, Issue 126 (Spring 2021)

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.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Quote of the Day (Jean Stafford, on a Group of Midcentury Train Passengers)

“[A]lways on the train were the most pathetic travelers in the world….Each year there was always a group consisting of a gaunt young woman and three or four small children who ate graham crackers out of an oiled paper parcel and whined nasally. Years of hard work and bad food had given the women a canine look in the mouth and eyes; their skin was brown and old; if their teeth had been replaced, the false ones were gold, but generally there were only spaces where they had rotted and fallen out. The groups varied little, but they could not always have been the same one, for the children were the same size. The mother’s hair was always reddish brown and hung about her sunken face like dirty strings, but her children were tow-headed and their eyebrows were too light to see. Sometimes they had skin diseases or birthmarks or Hutchinson’s teeth.”—American novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford (1915-1979), The Mountain Lion: A Novel (1947)

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Quote of the Day (John Neal, on the Insurance Industry and Climate Change)

“You'll never find an insurer saying, ‘I don't believe in climate change.' The frequency and severity of weather-related losses are exponential. The US had the highest number of convective thunderstorms in 10 years last year, and it's already worse this year.”—Lloyd’s of London CEO John Neal quoted by Rana Foroohar in “Lunch With the FT: ‘You’ll Never Find an Insurer Saying ‘I Don’t Believe in Climate Change,’” The Financial Times, June 15-16, 2024

Monday, June 17, 2024

Tweet of the Day (@mommajessiec, on Her Hubby’s Tragic Error)

“Prayers for my husband who very tragically got me nothing for our anniversary when I specifically told him I wanted nothing for our anniversary.” —@mommajessiec, tweet of Sept. 27, 2020

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David James Duncan, on St. Francis of Assisi’s Love for Our Lord)

“[St.] Francis’ love for his Lord was so ecstatic, creative, physical, and contagious that even though there are things I believe I would die for, I feel, in comparison to this man, that I have hardly begun to love at all. As far as I can see, Francis had no ‘average’ or ‘everyday’ sense of things; for him every creature was a miracle, every moment a gift, every breath a prayer in God’s Presence, and if we were sitting with him tonight disbelieving in his miracles, gifts, and Presence completely, he’d go on believing in them so much more powerfully than we bums know how to disbelieve that we would have to run from the room to escape the great gravitational pull of his love.”— American novelist and essayist David James Duncan, “The French Guy,” originally published in Portland, August 2004, reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski (2005)

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).

Saturday, June 15, 2024

Quote of the Day (Aharon Appelfeld, on Franz Kafka and the Holocaust)

“[Franz] Kafka died in 1924, years before the Holocaust, yet his name is connected to it, and not only because his three sisters and Milena Jesenská, a woman he loved, perished in concentration camps. All his puzzle-ridden writing is a kind of long nightmare about what was to come. I say ‘nightmare’ and not ‘prophecy,’ because what happened in reality was much more cruel than Kafka had imagined. Kafka felt, even more strongly than Freud did, that demons lurked behind the mask of Western civilization. Fifteen years after his death, they burst out of the cellar in the form of the S.S. and other heartless abbreviations. In Kafka’s work, the demons are defense lawyers and prosecutors, and there is still an illusion of justice. Words sound as though they still have value.”— Romanian-born Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018), “The Kafka Connection,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2001

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.

Friday, June 14, 2024

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Litigation)

“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”—U.S. President—and longtime lawyer—Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), “Fragment: Notes for a Law Lecture,” July 1, 1850 [?], Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 2.

TV Quote of the Day (‘New Girl,’ on Jess’s Consumption of Reality TV)

Cece [played by Hannah Simone]: “Even Jess didn't want to hear about it, and she'll listen to Schmidt discussing Andy Cohen discussing Bethenny discussing NeNe.”—New Girl, Season 4, Episode 17, “Spiderhunt,” original air date Feb. 24, 2015, teleplay by Berkley Johnson, directed by Steve Welch

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.)

Thursday, June 13, 2024

Quote of the Day (Molly McCloskey, on How the Detroit Pistons Became ‘The Bad Boys’)

“The moniker [“The Bad Boys”] had gained traction after CBS used it during a 1988 halftime feature about the [Detroit] Pistons and it got picked up by the league for its end-of-the-season video on the team. The players embraced it. Detroiters loved the Bad Boys with a crazy love, but just about everywhere else they were reviled. I still meet men who, when they learn of my connection, hiss, ‘I hated that team.’ The Bad Boys were extremely physical—some say dirty, not averse to provoking hard fouls or provoking brawls—and were viewed by many as undeserving upstarts who brought something ugly to the sport. It wasn't just the will to win but the way the won, the emphasis on grind over dazzle….My father’s [Pistons general manager Jack McCloskey] truculence and competitiveness clearly set a tone. Years earlier, when Pat Riley accidentally broke the coach Stan Albeck’s nose during a casual three-on-three game in L.A., my father had wanted to fight him over it. At sixty-two, my father went one-on-one with [Pistons power forward Rick] Mahorn, to see if Mahorn was ready to come back after an injury. ‘I was like, this old m-r? I’ kicked his ass,’ Mahorn told me recently, laughing. ‘But he was out there playing hard.’”—Novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Molly McCloskey, “My Father’s Court,” The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

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.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on ‘Art’s Long Hazard’)

“Unfailing and exuberant all the time,
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme,
Of older coinage than his old defeat,
A debt that like himself was obsolete
In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “Caput Mortuum,” in Sonnets, 1889-1927 (1928)

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Moon, on People, ‘Messy and Mutable’)

“People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day—even hour to hour.”— American science fiction and fantasy writer Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark (2003)

The image accompanying this post, of Elizabeth Moon at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, Scotland, was taken in August 2005 by Szymon Sokol.

Monday, June 10, 2024

Photo of the Day: Oradell Arts Festival, Bergen County, NJ

Yesterday I attended the Oradell Arts Festival, about nine miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. I was promoting my new biography co-written with my friend Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer.

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.

Quote of the Day (Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, on Like-Minded Groups’ ‘Giant Feedback Loop’)

“Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”— American journalist and social commentator Bill Bishop with sociologist Robert Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart  (2008)

(The image of Bill Bishop that accompanies this post was taken at IdeaFestival2015 on May 23, 2014, by Geoff Oliver Bugbee.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ As Margaret Utters a Sweet Endearment to Frank)

Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan [played by Loretta Swit]: “Frank?”

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

Sunday, June 9, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the ‘Possibilities and Challenges Offered by the Present Moment’)

“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going.  What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.” —American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)