Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Nature and Each Moment)

“Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment.”—Czech-born British playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia, Vol. 2 (2002)

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, Distinguishing Between a Short Story and a Novel)

“A short story is like taking a small boat to sea and traveling along the coast. You can hear the sounds and see the lights of shore. A novel is like taking a ship straight out into the ocean until there is no land in sight.” —American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and essayist Chris Offutt quoted by Bradley Sides and Chapter16.org, “Human Drama: Q&A With Novelist Chris Offutt,” Pursuit Magazine, July 21, 2023

Movie Quote of the Day (‘8½,’ on a Director’s Initial Idea for a Film)

Writer [played by Jean Rougeul] [to Guido, on the director’s latest project]: “You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us? That ploy betrays a basic lack of poetic inspiration.”— 8½ (1963), screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, directed by Federico Fellini

I burst out laughing the first time I saw Fellini’s classic and heard these lines. I couldn’t help but think that the director heard similar advice from a scribe as he struggled with his own case of writer’s block in creating this movie.

A director struggling with writer’s block who ends up making a film about a director with the same issue. Hmm…sounds self-referential. Not unlike the felt hat that Fellini’s film stand-in, Marcello Mastroianni, wears, almost as if to say, “Guess who all this is about—kind of?”

Quote of the Day (Jay Katsir, Imagining a Notice to a Data-Breach Victim)

“Dear Data-Breach Victim: By now you are aware that you are the victim of a data breach. You assumed as much, because the only mail you receive amounts to notices of data breaches, medical bills, and solicitations to donate to a good cause (maybe with a little graphic of a snowflake or a hopeful puppy or a gallbladder around the address window), whose senders will eventually contact you about a data breach. Your mail also sometimes contains postcards from your mother, who is certainly the victim of a data breach. She probably just gave her data away after clicking on a sponsored Google result that said ‘Real Rapid Passport Renewal Easy Online.’”— Late Show head writer-producer Jay Katsir, “Shouts and Murmurs: Notice of Security Incident,” The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

Quote of the Day (Helen Czerski, on Being ‘Citizens of an Ocean World’)

“Marine heat waves and hot spots can have severe local effects, as ocean life struggles to survive the increasing temperatures or moves to find cooler water, disrupting the ecosystems in those places. But the bigger picture is that any change to the ocean engine will matter, because the way this engine hums dictates conditions for the rest of life on Earth. Living on a blue planet isn't about the color, lovely though it is. The ocean is the dominant feature of Earth, and we live in its shadow. This is about our identity as citizens of an ocean world, which is broadcast to the universe, written in blue light.”— British physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski, “The Shifting Flows of Our Overheating Oceans,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 2023

I took the image accompanying this post while on vacation in Hilton Head, S.C., in November 2014.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, on a Miracle of Rebirth)

“I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), “Renascence,” in Collected Lyrics (1969)

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen, on Aldous Huxley, ‘Perpetual Clever Nephew’)

“Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.”—Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), “Mr. Huxley’s Essays” (review of Aldous Huxley’s The Olive Tree and Other Essays), in The Spectator, Dec. 11, 1936

Aldous Huxley—born 130 years ago yesterday in Godalming, England—was certainly during his lifetime, as Elizabeth Bowen grudgingly conceded, “steadily read”—enough so that he would be nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today? Not so much. Few of his 50 books remain in print, and only one remains widely assigned and read: Brave New World, honored less for its style and characterizations than for a dystopian vision that anticipated reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning.

(He also inspired a bit of rock trivia: his book about mescaline, The Doors of Perception, led Jim Morrison to name the group he fronted “The Doors.”)

But this member of a family of famous literary and scientific luminaries (his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his stout public defense of the theory of evolution) deserves to be more widely read.

Or, as Clive James put it in a dry-eyed but also clear-eyed assessment of Huxley’s life and work in a March 2003 essay in The New Yorker:

“But the time might have arrived for Huxley’s return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us.”

A good place to start—maybe the best—might be with his Complete Essays. I was only able to get my hands on one, covering the 1930s. But these pieces are not only a fascinating glimpse into the history of his time, but also, as James indicated, a prescient warning of what still convulses our world, particularly concerning technology and totalitarianism. (He was one of the few writers of the 1930s who were enamored neither with Fascism nor Communism.)

It is easy to understand why Huxley infuriated Elizabeth Bowen: he was one of those endlessly curious people who want to know about everything, and somehow manage to assimilate a good chunk of it.

I can’t imagine that Ms. Bowen’s attitude towards Huxley softened: Within a year of her scathing takedown, the novelist-essayist had decamped for Southern California, where he became a well-paid screenwriter and center of a group of intellectuals and entertainers that included Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and Igor Stravinsky.

Out on the West Coast, Huxley, an avowed agnostic, also became increasingly fascinated with Eastern spirituality. His death, on November 22, 1963, was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy.

At six feet four inches tall, Huxley couldn’t help but make others feel small in his presence. His own reputation since his death has achieved a similar diminution, albeit one largely unmerited.

Photo of the Day: Elmwood Park Marina, Elmwood Park, NJ

I took the image accompanying this post around noontime a few days ago while I was in Elmwood Park, on the western boundary of Bergen County, NJ.

From what I gather from online reviews, I found the marina, bordering on the Passaic River, in a characteristic moment: quiet, peaceful, with an occasional fisherman and far more ducks lining the shore.

The main use of the site, of course, is as a launch point for kayaks and canoes. Picnic tables and swings are here for family use, and, for the likes of solitary passersby like myself, it’s simply a nice place to pull over off River Drive, gather one’s thoughts and reflect on a lovely day.

Flashback, July 1999: Kubrick Continues to Make Stir Beyond the Grave With ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Today, on what would have been the 96^th birthday of film director Stanley Kubrick, it’s worthwhile revisiting his last film, the widely anticipated Eyes Wide Shut, which premiered in Los Angeles 25 years ago this month.

Kubrick only made 13 features and three documentaries in nearly a half century as a filmmaker, but each reflected his perfectionism and control-freak tendencies. Eyes Wide Shut was no exception.

Everything reflected his imprint: every frame of the film, the advertising copy, even the time and place of the premiere.

It was all being orchestrated from the grave, because the legend who had created 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, and Spartacus had died four months before.

In But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct, Ken Kwapis listed several characteristics he had associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey, only to take issue with them now: Kubrick’s “cold formality, his mania for one-point perspective composition, the stultifying pace, the too-cool-for-school Nietzscheanisms.”

But all, to one degree or another, carried over to Eyes Wide Shut, despite Kubrick’s usual single-minded attempt to make each succeeding film utterly unlike anything else he had done.

The long preparation period for the movie—not to mention Kubrick’s death before it could see the light of day—led to all kinds of speculations, all kinds of stories about what went on while shooting took place in or near London.

The pre-premiere buzz about Kubrick's first film in over a decade only increased with word that some explicit scenes need to be obscured with computer-generated images to avoid a box office-killing NC-17 rating. 

Consider, for instance, the following:

*Stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman expected to be in England for six months of shooting. But, having signed open-ended contracts, they ended up staying nearly two years. Nevertheless, as Kidman told Glenn Whipp in a Los Angeles Times interview earlier this month: "I would have stayed a third year. Does that mean I'm crazy?"

*The stars were in England so long that their two children supposedly acquired English accents.

*Post-production lasted almost a year.

* Kubrick joined psychoanalysis sessions with Cruise and Kidman, urging them to open up in such a way that the line between the fictional spouses and the actors playing them began to blur.

*Speaking of therapy, that’s how Kubrick got the idea for the movie in the first place, 30 years before its release. He and star-producer Kirk Douglas clashed so much on the set of the mega-budget epic Spartacus that they went for professional counseling together, during which he learned of the novella Traumnovelle (with the title translated as both Rhapsody and Dream Story), by the Austrian modernist writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931).

*Though Schnitzler's tale was set in early 20th-century Vienna, Kubrick decided to set it in late 20th-century New York City--then mostly shot it in London, including recreating exterior Greenwich Village exteriors in Pinewood Studios.

*Kubrick would not allow Cruise and Kidman to share their notes on scenes, hoping to heighten the alienation and confusion that their characters, Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, would feel.

*One sequence alone— a 13½-minute billiard room scene between Tom Cruise and Sydney Pollack—required nearly 200 takes.

* Kubrick made Cruise do 95 takes of just walking through a door.

* Alan Cumming auditioned six times for the small role of a hotel clerk.

* Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson filled in when Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh could not do post-production work on the movie because shooting lasted so long and they had prior film commitments.

*Screenwriter Frederic Raphael caused a stir with a memoir of his collaboration with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, in which he related the director’s anger when he sent a copy of the script to his agent, as well as his own frustration over how little of his screenplay made it into the finished product: “I was there to prepare the way for him to do his stuff. Anything that was markedly mine was never the stuff he was going to do."

In mid-career, Kubrick gravitated towards low-budget filmmaking that paralleled his own reputation for parsimony. 

In the end, his attempt to hold the line on expenses for Eyes Wide Shut paid off. While costing $65 million, the movie totaled $162 million in worldwide box-office receipts, making this the director’s most successful film of his career.

At the same, the provocative nature of the material (especially a masquerade ball) caused the most controversy. 

Over a quarter century later, many now see Kubrick's last film, with its depiction of decadent and danger, as prophetic, including Rich Cohen's "Behind the Mask of Corruption" April 2020 retrospective in The Paris Review: "an exposé written in code [revealing] revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein.

Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ On Why Physics Is Like ‘Lost’)

Leonard Hofstadter [played by Johnny Galecki]: “It just turns out that physics is exactly like 'Lost.' It started out great and turns out just a big ol' waste of time.”— The Big Bang Theory, Season 11, Episode 2, “The Retraction Reaction,” original air date Oct. 2, 2017, teleplay by David Goetsch, Eric Kaplan, and Anthony Del Broccolo, directed by Mark Cendrowski

Song Lyric of the Day (The Moody Blues, on Being ‘Part of the Fire That Is Burning’)

“We're part of the fire that is burning,
And from the ashes we can build another day.”—"The Story in Your Eyes,” written by Justin Hayward, performed by The Moody Blues on their Every Good Boy Deserves Favour LP (1971) 

Quote of the Day (Wynonna Judd, With the Determination to Carry On)

“Just go to the next step. Then go two more. Sometimes that's enough."—Country music singer Wynonna Judd, quoted by Liz McNeil, “Wynonna Judd on Mom Naomi: 'With the Same Determination She Had to Live, She Was Determined to Die,'” People, Oct. 5, 2022

The image accompanying this post, of Wynonna Judd performing live in Arlington, VA, was taken Oct. 18, 2018, by Michael Dyer. 

Quote of the Day (Henry Fielding, on Slander and Praise)

“The slander of some people is as great a recommendation as the praise of others.”—English novelist-playwright Henry Fielding (1707-1754), The Temple Beau (1730)

Quote of the Day (Mike Kelly, on a Consequence of Political Violence)

“[T]wo years ago… I reported that more than 75 members of Congress routinely wore bulletproof vests to public events. America took the news in stride. So did most of our public officials. Wearing a bulletproof vest is somewhat akin to wearing an American flag pin on your lapel.”—Columnist Mike Kelly, “After Shooting, Can Americans Stop Accepting Gun Violence?”, The Record (Bergen County, NJ), July 15, 2024

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Selling One’s Soul)

Tom Wambsgans [played by Matthew Macfadyen]: “Do you want a deal with the devil?”

“Cousin Greg” Hirsch [played by Nicholas Braun]: “What am I gonna do with a soul anyways? Souls are boring! Boo, souls! Of course!” —Succession, Season 3, Episode 9, “All the Bells Say,” original air date Dec 12, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

These days, Cousin Greg is not the only one to make a Faustian bargain.

Quote of the Day (John Thornhill, on the Implications of This Weekend’s Biggest IT Outage in History)

“Much has been made of the supposed deglobalisation of the world economy as physical supply chains have been unwound and reshoring of manufacturing has become fashionable. But in the digital realm the opposite is true: the global economy has become ever more interconnected. Mainly US and Chinese software and digital services have been embedded in the operations of millions of organizations and the daily lives of billions of individuals. Globalisation may be slowing down, but e-globalisation is still accelerating. It is essential that, as far as possible, its dangers are minimised.”— Innovation editor and tech columnist John Thornhill, “Blue Screens of Death Need to Minimise Risks From E-Globalisation,” The Financial Times, July 20-21, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, With Bravery in the Face of Her Medical Condition)

“I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing. ”— Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), in a letter to poet Robert Lowell on being stricken with lupus, in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Quote of the Day (Judith Guest, on ‘The Cards You’re Dealt’ in Life)

“I think living the blessed life is the luck of the draw. You don’t get control over the cards you’re dealt—whether it’s fatal illness, death, accidents—but we do have control over how we face those odds, how we play the cards. Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they’re handed, and that seems courageous to me. That’s what interests me, more than the fate of the blessed life.”—Ordinary People novelist Judith Guest quoted by Jeannine Ouellette, “Judith Guest: Ordinary Person,” Secrets of the City (Minneapolis-St. Paul), Oct. 19, 2004

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1980 film adaptation of Ms. Guest’s Ordinary People. Judd Hirsch plays a compassionate psychiatrist and Timothy Hutton is his patient, a teenager who exemplifies the courage that the novelist pays tribute to: finding a way to come to terms with the tragedy that threatens to consume his family.

Photo of the Day: Englewood ‘Night at the Market,’ Bergen County, NJ

Last night, my hometown, Englewood, NJ, closed off a couple of portions of its downtown to hold a “block party.” This year’s gathering—a celebration of the city’s 125^th anniversary—featured live music and food vendors along East Palisade Avenue from 5 pm to 11 pm.

Relieved that the heat and humidity from earlier in the week had dissipated with the thunderstorm from the night before, I was among the residents who roamed around this stretch. I took this photo not long before twilight.

Quote of the Day (Sheryl Lee Ralph, on Busting Rocks to ‘Create My Road’)

“I had to bust rocks to create my road. And now that road is there for my kids and other people's kids to travel. They might look at those broken rocks by the side of the road and say, ‘Wait a minute. If we melt that rock, we’ll have four more lanes.’” —Emmy-winning actress-singer Sheryl Lee Ralph quoted by Harriette Cole, “Nothing But Class,” AARP: The Magazine, August/September 2023

The image accompanying this post, showing Sheryl Lee Ralph at the pre-Oscar party held by Black Enterprise, was taken Feb. 23, 2008, by eternalconceptspr.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Bob Newhart Show,’ In Which Bob Flashes an Unlikely Bit of Machismo)

Emily Hartley [played by Suzanne Pleshette]: “Bob, that boy just winked at me.”

Dr. Robert “Bob” Hartley [played by Bob Newhart]: “You want me to beat him up?”— The Bob Newhart Show, Season 2, Episode 17, “The Modernization of Emily,” original air date Jan 12, 1974, teleplay by Charlotte Brown, directed by Peter Baldwin

In the Seventies, my two favorite sitcoms were All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Whenever I happened to watch their later mainstay in CBS’ Saturday night lineup, The Bob Newhart Show, I would chuckle but not guffaw, as I did with its two powerhouse lead-ins.

Since then, I have gone back and watched episodes of this six-season series, and its gentle, understated tone has worn well with time, reflecting the sure comic instincts of its star.

After six nominations, Bob Newhart finally won an Emmy Award, at age 84, with his hilarious guest appearance as “Professor Proton,” a former science TV show host turned children's party entertainer, on The Big Bang Theory.

The entertainment industry lost one of its greats yesterday with the passing of Newhart. His comic style— deadpan, mild-mannered, without an ounce of meanness—reflected, by all accounts, the personality of this beloved star.

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on Pro Sports Teams and Their Fans)

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.” —Baseball writer and chief New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell (1920-2022), Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977)

I took the image accompanying this post at a night game at Yankee Stadium in late August 2014. That season, the Bronx Bombers finished second in the American League East, with their worst record since 1992.

But fans like me came out that night because we knew this would be one of our final opportunities to see “The Captain,” Derek Jeter, in the last of his 20 seasons as a Hall of Famer with the Yankees.

Professional sports have grown even more “commercially exploitative” in the half-century since Roger Angell wrote the above. The miracle is that they still retain such a powerful hold on their fan base.

It just goes to show that, in its imperviousness to reason, rooting for one’s favorite team is a form of faith. With baseball resuming following the All-Star break, teams still in the hunt for the postseason hope to reward those fans in their staunch belief.

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a Summer’s Night Talk)

“It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Between the Acts (1941)

Quote of the Day (Wilfrid Sheed, on Political Conventions)

“Well, you know about conventions. No matter how dull they try to make themselves, to show how America has truly come of age, they still have all the silly excitement of kids’ birthday parties. If you've happened to miss one, the next closest thing would be wandering around a county fair with a straw hat and a jug of moonshine.”— English-born American novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011), People Will Always Be Kind (1973)

For delegates at conventions, I imagine that Wilfrid Sheed’s description here still captures the giddy feeling of getting together with others of your tribe cheering for a candidate. But so much else has changed, for both attendees and television viewers.

Sheed didn’t know it back in 1973, but the central notion of conventions for the 140 years to that point—a quadrennial gathering in which a party would truly decide on its nominee and running mate—was already coming to an end.

Dismayed by the outcome of their Chicago convention in 1968, when party grandees chose a nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered a single primary, the Democrats had instituted by 1972 new rules that made primaries the principal means of selecting nominees, and limited delegates’ ability to back off pre-convention declarations of loyalty.

With party leaders’ role in choosing nominees vastly diminished, it would be all over but the shouting when delegates got to the convention and the TV cameras—which had aired for all the world to see the Democrats' disorder inside and outside the confab in '68—whirred once again.

That same year, the Republicans amplified their 1968 model for how conventions would be run—" a picture of a buttoned-down organization,” headed by "law-and-order" nominee Richard Nixon, as recalled in Don Gonyea’s August 2018 NPR retrospective.

Not only would films of the candidate now be aired in prime time, but TV networks would receive advance copies of minute-by-minute convention-night scripts already approved by party leaders.

Conventions were now becoming extended, prime-time political commercials rather than events where party futures were decided—marketing opportunities that reflected the experiences of Nixon advisers H.R. Haldeman (a longtime J. Walter Thompson executive) and Roger Ailes (whose work as the candidate’s executive producer for television was chronicled in Joe McGinniss’ The Selling of the President 1968).

This year’s GOP convention already looks like it will follow this recent model. As for the Democrats—well, we’ll see if they remain bound by the rules they instituted a half century ago, or if they will remind viewers, after so much time, of the Will Rogers wisecrack, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.” 

The image accompanying this post, showing the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, on Aug. 22, 1972, is from the Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974 series, in the White House Photo Office Collection (Nixon Administration), 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974.

Quote of the Day (Eli Amdur, on the ‘Most Important Career and Life Skills’)

“Your three most important career and life skills are critical reading, critical listening and critical thinking. When everything else is stripped away, that’s all you’ve got.”—Career coach and journalist Eli Amdur, “Parting Advice As Financial Columnist Takes a Bow,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), July 7, 2024

I agree with everything Eli Amdur wrote in the above quote except for the verb in the first sentence; I would replace “are” with “should be.”

The reality is that the business world these days stresses tech skills—many of which can be learned on the job—but doesn’t particularly care about the critical skills he mentions, which are only mastered after years of education.

All of this is part of the relative devaluation of the liberal arts that has taken place over the last several decades. The American educational system has responded to cues from the business world by de-emphasizing the liberal arts, to such a point that headlines now talk about the “crisis” in the liberal arts or even their “gutting.”

No matter what the causes of this change in educational priorities, they are inevitably rotting away our commercial and civic life. Wim Wiewel, former president of Lewis and Clark College, summed up the stakes four years ago in this New Republic article:

“The liberal arts also enable us to navigate other core challenges arising from our embattled civic order—such as climate change, inequality, mass incarceration, and immigration—while exploring broader, more inclusive conceptions of the common good.”

The “crisis” referenced by Wiewel back then was the COVID-19 pandemic. These days, it is what he called more generally “our embattled social order.”

Without the skills Amdur identified, the business world will be unable to find workers to meet unforeseen challenges; our civic institutions will crumble amid rampant, unquestioned; and even our personal lives will suffer as we fall prey to those offering easy answers to our pressing daily questions. 

TV Quote of the Day (‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ on the Station’s Unbelievable Summer Promo)

[The radio station is getting involved in a big charity promotion.]

Arthur Carlson [played by Gordon Jump] “And the theme this year...” [thumbs up] “…is Surf City, USA.”

Jennifer Marlowe [played by Loni Anderson] [incredulously]: “In Cincinnati, Ohio?” — WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 2, Episode 21, “Filthy Pictures: Part 1,” original air date Mar. 3, 1980, teleplay by Steve Marshall and Dan Guntzelman, directed by Rod Daniel

Quote of the Day (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on ‘The Ultimate Weakness of Violence’)

“Are we seeking power for power’s sake? Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live? If we seek the latter, violence can never provide the answer. The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” ― American civil-rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Why We Can't Wait (1964)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fr. Greg Boyle, on God’s Love)

“The God who loves the sound of our voices sends us into the dark house of the world confident that only love can find the way to make windows.”—American humanitarian, author, and Jesuit Fr. Greg Boyle quoted by Mary Lee Talbot, “Only Love Can Find A Way To Make Windows In A Dark World, Says Fr. Greg Boyle,” The Chautauquan Daily, June 26, 2024

The image accompanying this post shows Fr. Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, giving the keynote address on kinship at We ♥ LA: An Urban Retreat for LA's Passionate Leaders. The event was hosted by the Durfee Foundation on October 14, 2010, on its 50th anniversary. Fr Greg's address was made in tribute to the more than 300 nonprofit workers who gathered to celebrate their abiding affection for Los Angeles. The photo was taken by the Durfee Foundation.

Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on Retribution)

"Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others."— American longshoreman-turned-philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), “Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including…,” The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 25, 1971

Something to keep in mind the next time someone famous flings around the “R” word carelessly. 

Flashback, July 1924: TLS ‘Billy Budd’ Essay Further Fans Melville Revival

 

Literary critic John Middleton Murry, noting a curious addition to the recently published 16-volume Collected Works of Herman Melville, lavishly praised the novella “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” in the influential U.K. Times Literary Supplement, generating interest in this late-career return to form by the great but troubled 19^th-century American novelist.

The rise, fall, and revival of literary reputations has long fascinated me. But the case of Herman Melville (pictured) strikes me as especially compelling.

From bestselling author semi-autobiographical fiction set in the South Seas in the 1840s to more symbolic, ambitious fare that led his readers to abandon him in the 1850s, Melville had fallen into almost complete literary obscurity by the time of his death in 1891.

Yet roughly 30 years later, he would be propelled into the circle of American authors that college English majors are expected to read. Even the author with the closest similar critical and commercial trajectory that I can think of, F. Scott Fitzgerald, only had to wait less than four years after his death for a revival, when the Council on Books in Wartime handed out free copies of The Great Gatsby to American service personnel serving overseas.

At the behest of Carl Van Doren, a faculty member of Columbia University and literary editor of The Nation, Raymond Weaver—a colleague at the school—had written for the magazine an August 1919 essay coinciding with the centennial of the birth of Melville. The piece made Melville the subject of critical and biographical interest.

The boom gained further momentum stateside in 1921, as Weaver produced the first full-length biography of Melville, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, and Van Doren made the case for the novelist with a full chapter devoted to him in the critic’s influential study The American Novel.

While performing his research on Melville, Weaver had received from the novelist’s granddaughter pages from “Billy Budd” that had been stored in a family breadbox after Melville’s widow, faced with deciphering his scratch-outs, insertions, and shaky handy, had left it to others to edit.

Weaver set to work on the abandoned project. Even he sometimes lost patience with the material, making some questionable editorial decisions (believing the manuscript was essentially finished, when modern scholars have determined that Melville was still working on it) and some outright errors (e.g., rendering “innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute” as the nearly incomprehensible “innocence and infirmary, spiritual depravity and fair respite”).

When it was done, Weaver regarded it as more of a curiosity than a late-life masterpiece by one of America’s greatest authors.

Yet, flawed as Weaver’s work was, it still was enough to lead Murry to make the case for Melville as an essential American novelist.

In his TLS article, “Herman Melville’s Silence,” the English critic took note of the abrupt turn away from fiction—the “silence”—that the writer took after The Confidence-Man in 1857.

He found something infinitely poignant in the former bestselling novelist of the sea returning to maritime matter in Billy Budd. The novella constituted, he asserted, Melville’s “last will and spiritual testament.”

Murry—who was already deeply into the other critical work for which he is best remembered, securing the place of his late wife Katherine Mansfield in the critical canon—had a considerably higher estimate of “Billy Budd” than Weaver. After pondering the matter further, the American’s respect for this short work considerably improved.

With British admirers such as Murry, D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, and John Freeman’s 1926 biography of Melville (which compares “Billy Budd” to John Milton’s Paradise Regained), the renewed American appreciation for the novelist was being reinforced across the Atlantic. It has remained a classroom staple since then.

In an essay published a few months ago in IM—1776, critic Lafayette Lee predicted: “As Billy Budd is further dissected and its subtleties slowly erased, it is likely to fall out of favor with the general public and return to the shadows from whence it came.”

I am not so sure about this. Readers have found so much to ponder and muse over here (e.g., including the 1951 Benjamin Britten-E.M. Forster novel and the 1963 film starring Terrence Stamp) that they will be sounding its depths about the innocent and doomed sailor for years.

Quote of the Day (Robert Buckland, on the ‘Armageddon’ Facing UK Conservatives)

“The Conservatives are facing Armageddon. It's going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”—Former British Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland, predicting in a BBC interview a tumultuous Conservative leadership battle after the party’s landslide loss last week, quoted by Lucy Fisher, “Recriminations Begin After ‘Devastating’ Defeat,” The Financial Times, July 6-7, 2024

This official portrait of Robert Buckland was taken Jan. 12, 2020, by Richard Townshend. Notice that Buckland is smiling. That’s because this was 4½ years before he’d lose his seat in Parliament. 

If he’s smiling these days, it’s sardonically, before he launches the kind of quip that caught my eye above.

I’m sorry, folks, but as soon as I read Buckland’s sound bite above, I started laughing and haven’t stopped since.

But I’m afraid that not too many other Conservatives are in the mood for merriment these days. Except for copyright reasons, I would have used an electoral map showing a massive dash of red (associated with the Labour Party) over the U.K.

Nothing loosens tongues, and loyalties, like the prospect of losing big. The Conservatives are amid this process now, and America’s Democrats are similarly vulnerable after Joe Biden's disastrous performance in his first debate with Donald Trump.

Let’s see whether the Democratic or British “comb” turns out to be more useful in the end.