Photo of the Day: Grotto, Church of Notre Dame, Morningside Heights, NYC

A couple of weeks ago, at lunch with three college friends, I heard about the Church of Notre Dame. With most of my activities confined to the cluster of buildings around the central quadrangle of Columbia University in my college days decades ago, I never had occasion to see what this Roman Catholic Church just off the campus was like.

So, 46 years after coming to Morningside Heights, I decided to rectify the omission. At the time of the day when I passed by, the church was closed, but I was able to take this photo of its picturesque grotto.

The grotto began life as a chapel in 1910. The architectural firm Dans and Otto developed both the chapel and a replica of the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette of Lourdes in France in 1858.

Soon, a larger church needed to be built—an expansion carried out by another architectural firm, Cross and Cross. But the grotto remains standing behind the church’s main altar, a continuing reminder of the first altar and chapel at the Church of Notre Dame.

Quote of the Day (Emily Nussbaum, on Reality Shows)

“For these viewers [of reality shows], there was no controversy — any qualms about the medium had faded, long ago. The most successful reality show had it all: a titillating flash of the authentic, framed by the dark glitter of the fake, like a dash of salt in dark chocolate. No taste was harder to resist.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV (2024)

The image accompanying this post shows Teresa Giudice from Real Housewives of New Jersey: Reunion. A question: with all the catfights, real or manufactured, that this and other reality shows have inspired, why would their “stars” want to get together for reunions?

A second question: Why did Bravo want to bring my state into further disrepute by creating a whole niche in its wildly successful franchise here? 

If you want to know the truth (a slippery element when dealing with this genre, I grant you), I don’t watch reality shows for the same reasons that I don’t watch wrestling on TV: they’re fake and they convey an awful impression of this country to the rest of the world. Had they been around before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we would have lost the Cold War for sure.

I see that, from 2017 to 2022, U.S. exports grew by $489 billion. But why do I get the queasy feeling that so much of this increase came from franchises of these fake shows marketed abroad?

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ on the Eternal Dilemma Facing Parents)

Sheriff Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith]: “You can't let a young’n decide for himself. He'll grab at the first flashy thing with shiny ribbons on it. Then, when he finds out there's a hook in it, it's too late. Wrong ideas come packaged with so much glitter that it's hard to convince ‘em that other things might be better in the long run. All a parent can do is say 'wait' and 'trust me' and try to keep temptation away."—The Andy Griffith Show, Season 2, Episode 6, “Opie's Hobo Friend,” original air date Nov. 13, 1961, teleplay by Harvey Bullock, directed by Bob Sweeney

There’s a reason why The Andy Griffith Show has aged so well. It’s not just because the sitcom treated its quirky characters with humor and humanity. It’s also because, in his down-home manner, Andy Griffith slipped in common sense and wisdom that viewers from all walks of life could appreciate.

Six decades ago, Andy Taylor had to contend with a homeless person showing son Opie how conniving and thieving could get what one wanted without having a job. Now, the presence of electronics (smartphones, TikTok, you name it—even penetrating a small town like Mayberry—makes it a million times more difficult for parents to “keep temptation away.”

In the early postwar period, they turned to Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care as their bible for raising kids. But the pace of life these days is so rapid that revisions to these and other child-rearing manuals are obsolete as soon as they are printed.

This school year, parents will have to be extra careful to watch out for how “the first flashy thing with shiny ribbons on it” can affect their children. As a matter of fact, they will have to exercise the same vigilance towards themselves lest they fall for consumer—or political—scams.

Quote of the Day (Anthony Burgess, on Laughing and Snoring)

“Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.”— British novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), Inside Mr. Enderby (1963)

Flashback, August 1984: Jay McInerney’s Bestseller on the Darkness Behind ‘Bright Lights’

Acclaimed for its unusual second-person narration and its seriocomic take on a coke-addled literary wannabe, Bright Lights, Big City kick-started Random House’s high-quality paperback line, Vintage Contemporaries, when it was released in August 1984.

It also changed the life of its 29-year-old author, Jay McInerney, who was trying to make ends meet as a part-time clerk in a liquor-store while still a year and a half into a Ph.D. program in English literature at Syracuse University.

The success of the novel—700,000 copies sold in its first year, and tens of thousands annually in the years since—enabled the author’s Williams College classmate and best friend Gary Fisketjon to bring a host of acclaimed other authors under his Vintage Contemporaries imprint, including McInerney’s mentor and grad school teacher Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Don DeLillo, Peter Matthiessen, and Thomas McGuane.

But early fame also left McInerney with the kind of question that, for instance, John O’Hara had to deal with because of his debut, Appointment in Samarra: What do you do for an encore when many people consider your first book your best?

Or, just as telling: how do you keep from succumbing to the distractions and temptations of fame and success?

By McInerney’s own admission, none of his later works came as easily as Bright Lights, Big City. Its first line (“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning”) originated from a scrap of paper he’d written after returning from a nightclub at about four in the morning, when, with closing time night, he couldn’t find his cocaine, money, the girl he was pursuing, or his best friend.

Staying up all night, McInerney cranked out a short story, “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” that ended up accepted by Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

Thereafter, the plot for a full novel seemed to flow organically from that morning-after voice, he said in a 2020 Paris Review interview with Lucas Wittman—finished in six weeks.

Like the Jimmy Reed song that provided its title, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the allures and dangers of urban life, and the personal losses and desperate need for help they occasion.

At the time, reviewers knew enough about McInerney’s life to know that it mirrored events and people in his debut novel, particularly in the unnamed protagonist’s job (soon lost) as a fact-checker at a New Yorker-style magazine:

·         “The Druid,” the publication’s editor-in-chief, is near-sighted, formal, and famously elusive, such that “While you have never actually seen a Victorian clerk, you believe this is what one would look like"—all of which sounds an awful lot like The New Yorker’s William Shawn.

·         “The Ghost,” a longtime staff member with an epic case of writer’s block, resembles Joseph Mitchell, who visited the offices daily for 30 years before his death without producing anything.

·        The narrator gets into trouble when his bosses discover that he lied on his resume about knowing French—just as McInerney did when, forced to check facts in a Jane Kramer piece about the French elections, he failed to catch major errors.

When I saw McInerney lecture at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in the 1990s, he said he had not frankly admitted when the book came out that, like his narrator, he had taken cocaine. In the 1980s, he explained, a stigma still existed towards users.

I’m not sure that this initial coyness really mattered, however. So much else seemed to fit the facts of his life—to ring with a kind of special knowledge, put another way—that I believe nearly every reader assumed that McInerney was writing directly from experience.

Looking for a catch-all title for young writers with an urban sensibility, New York Magazine resorted to a trick it had used to (mis)classify up-and-coming actors. The “Literary Brat Pack” of McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Donna Tartt didn’t care for that label any more than Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald had enjoyed being called “The Brat Pack.” 

It might have done McInerney more good if, in the several years immediately following Bright Lights, Big City, he had avoided further exploration of New York’s nightlife. He made himself an obvious target for critics more inclined to review who he was dating (e.g., after his second divorce, model Marla Hanson) or dining with (Ellis).

Brightness Falls (1992) furnished McInerney with the opportunity to take a more wide-angle view of the Reagan years by concentrating on a couple who were the envy of their friends. For a frank admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparisons to Tender Is the Night inevitably followed.

At the FDU lecture and book-signing, McInerney identified Brightness Falls as his favorite book. I don’t believe this was simply an author’s feeling that he had put all he had learned into what he had just finished, because McInerney has returned to his couple Russell and Corinne Calloway in two subsequent novels that examined how his generation coped with the necessary compromises involved with work, intimacy, and maturity: The Good Life (2006) and Bright Precious Days (2016).

Nevertheless, it remains the case that he remains overwhelmingly tied to his first book. In 2006, Time Magazine listed Bright Lights, Big City as one of nine generation-defining novels of the 20^th century.

It’s not because of the plot, which falls into a recognizable genre: a Bildungsroman (or “coming-of-age” tale) about a young person hitting rock bottom in a compressed period, like J.D. Salinger’s’ The Catcher in the Rye, or a cocaine equivalent of Charles Jackson’s pioneering tale of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend.

What made the novel distinctive was its voice—certainly the second-person narration, but not limited to that. Readers also took to the rich vein of comic irony referring to the “comet trail of white powder,” “Bolivian Marching Powder,” and the confusion inside the narrator’s head (“You are a republic of voices. Unfortunately, the republic is Italy”).

That tone is more subdued in his more expansive, ambitious later work. Critics continue to become caught up in McInerney’s personal life (his fourth and latest wife is the heiress Ann Hearst), and his two collections of wine essays, no matter how well written they might be, surely lead some observers to wonder if his attention and energy haven’t been diverted.

These critics might practice a bit more charity. Writing even one book is no easy feat. McInerney has written eight novels and one collection of short stories. Others have produced far less.

With that being said, I hope we see more of his work soon. Hard-won maturity may, in the long run, be better than being a “voice of a generation.” 

Quote of the Day (Lorrie Moore, on a Woman Divorcing a Cheating Husband)

“Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat."— American fiction writer, critic, and essayist Lorrie Moore, "Paper Losses," in Bark (2014)

The image accompanying this post of Lorrie Moore was taken Nov. 11, 2014, by Zane Williams

This Day in Film History (John Ford’s Silent ‘Iron Horse’ Makes Loud Noise at Box Offices)

August 28, 1924— John Ford might have exhibited contempt for studio bosses, but they just had to grin and bear it—especially when they saw the results for his silent western The Iron Horse, which premiered in New York City on this day.

Over the next four decades, whenever the western as a genre looked licked with audiences or critics, Ford came riding to the rescue, like one of his pistol-packing heroes. It even happened a mere 20 years after American cinema, for all intents and purposes, began with The Great Train Robbery, as audiences were already beginning to tire of the form.

Critics were turning up their noses at innumerable William Hart and Tom Mix shoot-‘em-ups when Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (1923) took a different tone: patriotic, focused on the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Fox Film Corp. decided to one-up its rival with a movie about the transcontinental railroad, to be made by its rising in-house filmmaker.

The Iron Horse not only was the movie that effectively made Ford an A-list director by virtue of making the top-grossing film of the year, but also the one that established his template for the rest of his career: dragging cast and crew hundreds of miles from studio bean-counters and nay-sayers, out on location, where he could act as a combination of general and summer camp director.

The 29-year-old was already carving out a niche as a cranky, go-my-own way helmsman, having been called back to a movie he’d been removed from, Straight Shooting (1917), after Universal head Carl Laemmle realized that, even with his penchant for breaking rules, Ford was a talented moviemaker.

Over the next six years, Ford would make for Universal and the studio he then moved to, Fox, more than 30 movies.

But Ford was entrusted with an especially heavy responsibility at the end of that period with this new assignment. This, he understood, was going to be an epic, 2½ hours long.

The first thing he did was haul the 300 cast and crew members on circus trains out to Dodge, Nevada, more than 270 miles from Los Angeles. The location shooting would not only lend a greater sense of realism but, more important from Ford’s perspective, remove him from day-to-day scrutiny from Fox.

Not that the studio didn’t try. At one point, Ford read a message from Fox, urging him to shoot faster to stay within the budget. By way of a response, he held the message aloft and asked a sharpshooter to shoot a hole in it, sending the note back where it came from.

By starting location shooting right after the new year, Ford and his army of film professionals were also going to get some sense of the privation that 19^th-century pioneers had experienced.

“There was real suffering on that picture,” property man Lefty Hough recalled. “It was hard, tough, awfully primitive conditions. Christ, it was cold.”

They arrived just as a “baby blizzard” blew in. Temperatures dropped so low that crew members slept in the warm army uniforms the studio provided. (That didn’t prevent a dining car steward from dying from pneumonia he had contracted three weeks into shooting.)

(See Linda Laban's article this week in The Guardian for more details on the harrowing shoot.)

One morning, everyone awoke to find a fresh snowfall had blown in overnight. The shooting schedule had called for the ground to be barren of snow, so everyone set to work, successfully shoveling out within an hour.

What could have made matters worse was that there was no finished script as shooting began. That, in a way, suited Ford just fine: It made everybody on set even more dependent on him to finish the picture.

While the cameras were rolling, Ford could be crusty, even bullying and abusive. When they stopped for the day, he acted more like a benevolent dictator.  In the evenings, the small temporary city he had set up enjoyed dancing, songs (often featuring the mariachi musicians he loved), and even a bootlegger.

(Ben Mankiewicz's recent multi-episode entry in his "The Plot Thickens" podcast has great details on the fun after-hours set on this and other movies directed by "Pappy" Ford.)

The film’s young star, George O’Brien, would epitomize another aspect of Ford’s career: tapping a character actor with just a few credits for a career-making turn. Fifteen years later, Ford would do the same, with more lasting results, for John Wayne in Stagecoach.

But O’Brien shared some traits with Ford that The Duke couldn’t, including Irish-American ancestry and fierce pride in his naval service. Even when O’Brien’s career faded after WWII, Ford made room for him in his “stock company” of actors, including Fort Apache (1948) and the director’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

(More than a half-century after O’Brien and Ford worked together on The Iron Horse, the actor’s son Darcy O’Brien gave a starring role to his father and a supporting one to “Pappy” in his roman a clef about growing up a prince of Hollywood, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.)

When Ford was finished, he had miraculously brought The Iron Horse in under the $280,000 budget set by Fox (which itself was a bargain compared with the $500,000 allotted by Paramount for The Covered Wagon). It grossed $1.5 million, propelling him to the forefront of American filmmakers.

Ironically, of his four Oscar victories for Best Director, not one came from any of the 56 westerns he made throughout his career as Hollywood’s most honored filmmaker.

Quote of the Day (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on Nature and Art)

“Nature, it seems, must always clash with Art,
And yet, before we know it, both are one;
I too have learned: Their enmity is none,
Since each compels me, and in equal part.”— German man of letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), “Nature and Art” (c. 1800; published 1807), translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, in Selected Works (Everyman’s Library, 2000)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—born 275 years ago today in Frankfurt, Germany—was to German literature what William Shakespeare was to England’s and Alexander Pushkin to Russia’s—a titanic figure who decisively influenced its language and literary standing around the world.

But, because of his attitude to nature and art, he was so much more. I think that Goethe might have been the last of the Enlightenment figures who were able to make their marks in multiple fields.

Had he confined his endeavors to literature, Goethe still would have been acclaimed for his versatility in multiple genres: the novel (The Sorrows of Young Werther, a bestseller in 1774), travelogues (Italian Journey), drama (Faust), and assorted poems eventually set to music.

Like Thomas Jefferson—born only six years before—Goethe trained in the law before dabbling in science (he formulated the concept of morphology, a kind of forerunner to Darwin’s theory of evolution) and practicing statecraft (as an aide to Duke Carl August, who later became Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach).

I mentioned that he was an Enlightenment figure, but in another sense, he harked back to the Renaissance who could excel at multiple areas of endeavor. Besides the above activities, Goethe was also a skilled painter and, well into middle age, an enthusiastic athlete.

(For more on Goethe as Renaissance man, see this August 2020 post from the Sarkologist blog.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, using Goethe as a representative of “The Writer” type in his seven lectures on Representative Men (1850), saw him as someone who “in conversation, in calamity…finds new materials” 

Such was his capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command,—he wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer,—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live.

Quote of the Day (Pamela Paul, on Why She’s ‘Not Summer People’)

“The 1 percent of the 1 percent don’t need to plan summer because they have it built in. They have a place on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons. They belong to a club where everyone speaks golf and there’s a long waiting list even for those who can afford it. Summer is when the maw of income inequality gapes wide open and only people who summer are allowed in.

“I am not summer people, something hard to admit because summer is also the pushiest season, the most insistent that it be reveled in publicly.”—Opinion columnist Pamela Paul, “My Favorite Part of Summer? The End,” The New York Times, Aug. 16, 2024

I’m “not summer people” either, Ms. Paul. I not only share your lack of membership in these exclusive clubs, but also your physical discomfort with the heat, humidity, and pests that come with the season—issues that have gathered in importance with me over the years not only because of my own aging, but also because of climate change.

So yes, my favorite part of summer is also the end—though I also savor, while it lasts, something I’ve come to think of as “false fall”: the several days, maybe even a week, from in the third or fourth weeks of August when the temperatures abate, you don’t have to turn on the air conditioning, and, if you’re in mountains or the northern end of the country, maybe even don a light jacket in the evening.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Pamela Paul at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 26, 2019, by Larry D. Moore.)

Quote of the Day (Soprano Barbara Bonney, on How Mastering a Text Helps With Stage Fright)

"When you start to sing it after all this preparation, you have that wonderful deep memory; it’s like you’ve implanted it in the soles of your feet. So when you’re in a concert, let’s say you’re distracted by something and the words fly out of your head, there’s so much memory inside of you that you can quickly get back into it when you are about to completely fall apart. When I teach I find usually the first thing that goes when kids get nervous is their text; because they haven’t learnt the text—they’ve learnt the music and then sort of got the words along with it; that’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s much more fascinating and much more useful in life to have the words, because let’s say you’re driving along a country lane and all of a sudden the passage—not just the music, but the words—will come to you, and you make a connection in life as a poet would, and it’s so much more rich than just knowing words and knowing music, and performing them.” —American soprano Barbara Bonney quoted by Daniel Jaffe, “The Intimate Art of Barbara Bonney,” Classic CD, May 1999

Movie Quote of the Day (The Bowery Boys’ ‘Slip’ Mahoney, With One of Many Contributions to the English Language)

Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney [played by Leo Gorcey] [hanging by his fingernails off the edge of a high New York building, with sidekick “Sach” Jones]: “This is what I call a serious dillemania.”— Bowery to Bagdad (1954), story by Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds, directed by Edward Bernds

As a child nearly 60 years ago, I seldom missed a chance to see on Saturdays on local station Channel 5 a seemingly inexhaustible set of serials produced over 20 years, featuring the kind of young New York roughnecks my family had left behind in our movie to New Jersey.

This Thursday, as part of its “Summer Under the Stars” festival, TCM will devote 24 hours of its schedule to Leo Gorcey (1913-1969), the center of the group of actors who, whether known as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids, or, as I came to know them, the Bowery Boys, appeared in 69 movies.

The Dead End Kids took their name from the stage and film in which they first featured as supporting players, Sidney Kingsley’s drama Dead End. The playwright furnished them with material about as funny as a heart attack.

From A list dramas at Warner Brothers, the Dead End Kids morphed into B-list comedies cranked out under the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures (later, Allied Artists Pictures Corp.) umbrella. No matter what the nature of the material, though, audiences were always wondering what the increasingly aging “youngsters” in these flicks would be up to next.

Whenever I watched these slapstick adventures that started in Louie Dumbrowski’s soda shop before radiating out to who knows what in interchangeable, forgettable plots (featuring boxers, gangsters, ghosts—even, as in Bowery to Bagdad, a genie), I chuckled at the stratagems the gang would use to get out of their latest mess—“Routine…,” followed by a number, as if it came from a playbook.

Channel surfing several months ago, however, when I came upon this late entry in the series, I was reminded of how inventively Gorcey’s ringleader, Slip Mahoney, could fracture the English language. Evidently, the actor took special care in crafting these malapropisms.

Offscreen, and especially after the death of his father Bernard (who played Louie) in 1955, Gorcey’s life was anything but funny: married five times, dead in 1969 at age 51 from liver failure –a consequence of years of heavy drinking.

Quote of the Day (Kate McKean, on the Changing Roles and Situations of Book Editors)

“Editors now play marketer, therapist, social media manager, and money minder.  They have to bring in the talent…, create a profit-and-loss statement that miraculously makes the finances work out, negotiate a deal that wins the day but saves some money, guide the writer through the revision process, guide the book through production and sales, cheerlead for it ceaselessly, and, oh yeah, edit it. Even as publishers release more titles, the number of employees at any given house is unlikely to have gone up in recent years. Everyone is doing more with less. What does that mean for editors? They aren’t editing at their desk but rather in off-hours, at nights and on weekends. Say ‘editors don’t edit anymore’ and you’d better be prepared to duck.”—Literary agent and author Kate McKean, “Publishing Myths—‘Editors Don’t Edit Anymore—Do They?”, Poets and Writers, March-April 2024

Well, it might be better for those people (especially inexperienced, prospective authors) who claim “editors don’t edit anymore" to say that there is more of a division of roles for editors.

I can’t speak for trade publishing, but at university presses, the types of editors that Ms. McKean has in mind are more like acquisition editors who secure and protect titles. They may make helpful and significant general comments about the content of a manuscript, but more rigorous critiques are likely to be performed by outside reviewers—academics with special knowledge of a subject.

Other types of editors go through the manuscript line by line. If these are not in-house production editors, then they are hired independently.

As a first-time author, I have no complaints about the editors who eventually signed my book and saw it through production. (Nor, Ms. McKean will be pleased to know, with our agent, a knowledgeable and tireless cheerleader for our book.)

I just wish there were more editors out there who had seen the value of the original proposal by me and my co-author.

I would also agree with Ms. McKean on this point—editors have their work cut out for them these days—but for different reasons: a public with a falling attention span—and less time to read anything, let alone books; and fewer book review outlets with less space.

In this changing environment, authors who hope for decent sales of their books can’t expect to sit on the sidelines and let the publisher do all the promotional work. They have to pitch in, too, by making appearances, talking it up among friends, spreading the word on social media, writing op-ed pieces, going on podcasts, lecturing at local libraries, and the like.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Carl Gustav Jung, on Rationalism and Values)

“Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’ He has freed himself from ‘superstition’ (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.” — Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Man and His Symbols (1964)

Quote of the Day (Robert Kennedy, on ‘Common Qualities of Conscience and Indignation’)

"There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are different evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.”— U.S. Attorney General, Senator from New York, and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), “Speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Day of Affirmation,” June 6, 1966

In his eulogy two years after this address, Ted Kennedy told the mourners in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that his murdered brother “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.” 

At least to some extent, the documentary record about Camelot and the cries of scandal-mongers alike ensured for our skeptical age that Robert Kennedy would indeed escape this fate. He could be the most complicated mixture imaginable of idealism and steely-eyed, brass-knuckle determination in pursuit of a goal.

Even so, and despite realizing that a yawning gap frequently exists between words and performance, I couldn’t read the above excerpt from his Capetown address (also known as the “Ripple of Hope” speech) without feeling that something immense was lost when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary for President.

At some level, the words of politicians do matter. Even when using talented speechwriters, what they choose to say (or not) conveys what they regard as important and indicates some measure of their character.

Kennedy’s words in particular reflect an elevated tone befitting the magnitude of worldwide issues, a responsibility for alleviating “the imperfections of human justice.”

That gravitas, I’m sorry to say, is missing in today’s discourse. You can call this diminished rhetoric a casualty of a Sixties decade that didn’t achieve its lofty goals, of more than a half century of advertising sound bites that left listeners unable to absorb sustained arguments, or of the countless casual cruelties and callousness of Donald Trump.

But it was gone at both parties’ conventions this summer. Forget about that “When they go low, we go high” cry of the Democrats eight years ago. Just think of Barack Obama’s hand gesture to simulate Trump’s obsession with crowd size.

My sadness increased when I heard today that Robert Kennedy Jr. would be suspending his independent campaign and backing Trump for President. It would take a psychiatrist to plumb all the depths and traumas that led the son of the martyred Democratic candidate of the late Sixties to this decisive point in his own misbegotten Presidential race.

But it only takes an ordinary moral sensibility to know that the candidate who won his endorsement not only did not measure up to the job that Robert Sr. sought and Jack Kennedy achieved, but that he corroded the dignity of the Oval Office, widened the gap between rich and poor, and encouraged the forces of evil at home and abroad.

Robert Sr.’s Capetown address—one of the most famous in his short career—inspired inhabitants of Africa—a continent that Trump has dubbed, together with Haiti and El Salvador, as “s—thole countries.”

It is even more astonishing to realize that the crusade that Robert Jr. conducted so fervently these last couple of decades—conservation—was abandoned and utterly forgotten in his support for a former President whose administration took 74 actions that weakened environmental protection, according to an August 2020 Brookings Institution study.

Twenty years ago this month, Robert Jr. published Crimes Against Nature, a polemic with the most pointed of subtitles: “How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.” If he felt this way about Dubya, then what on earth did he think Trump was doing in his term in office?

In bowing out, he noted that Trump had “asked to enlist me in his administration.” Assume that he does get tapped for such a position. How long do you think before, like so many others who agreed to serve the Former Guy, he awakens one morning to find via X that he’s been fired?

Robert Kennedy Sr. brought conscience with his indignation to the problems of the world and his country. His namesake forgot the conscience part.

His latest choice has dismayed members of his immediate family, who issued a statement rightly denouncing his endorsement as “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They understood better than their brother that their father appealed to the best instincts of humanity in general and his countrymen in particular, while Trump has never missed a chance to call forth the ugliest of both. 

But RFK Jr. has also disappointed the millions of Americans who like Robert Sr. have hoped to “wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.” Those sufferings will only increase because of the side with which he's thrown in his lot.

Quote of the Day (Bill Ervolino, on Rising Concession Costs at the Movies)

“The last time I ordered a large popcorn and two bottled waters in a movie theater, it came to $27. I didn’t spend that much on my first car.”—Humor columnist and comedian Bill Ervolino, “Some Movies Are Just Meant for Popcorn. Others Are Not,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), Aug. 4, 2024

The shock is multiplied when, as has happened since the start of COVID-19, regular moviegoing is no longer automatic; many smaller theaters have closed, leaving only multiplexes that maximize concession sales even more than normal; and inflation has baked in higher costs.

The only thing worse might be concession stands at baseball games.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Holdovers,’ on History as ‘An Explanation of the Present’)

Paul Hunham [played by Paul Giamatti] [on a “field trip” through a Boston museum with a student]: “There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”—The Holdovers (2023), screenplay by David Hemingson, directed by Alexander Payne

Quote of the Day (Marilynne Robinson, on ‘Unhappy Societies’)

“Unhappy societies tend to blame and punish the weakest among them.” — Novelist-essayist Marilynne Robinson, “Modern Victorians,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1995

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Being Yourself)

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,
Who finds himself, loses his misery!"—English critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “Self-Dependence,” in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (1897)

Quote of the Day (Sir James MacMillan, on Music and Sacrifice)

“Music can transform our lives. We all have favourite musics, or even music that takes us by surprise, that we can in retrospect see as a crucial, defining moment in our lives, which has changed us in some way. But in order for music to do that, I think the human soul has to be ready to sacrifice something, sacrifice a certain amount of our time; something of our attention, something of our active listening. Music’s not something which can just wash over us. It needs us to sacrifice something of ourselves to meet it, and it’s very difficult sometimes to do that, especially the whole culture we’re in. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice – certainly sacrificing your time – is not valued anymore.”—Scottish classical composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan, “High Priest of Music,” Classic CD, May 1999

The image accompanying this post of Sir James MacMillan was taken Aug. 9, 2012, at "Meet the Composers," a panel discussion hosted by Music Director Marin Alsop, at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and provided by CTV Santa Cruz County.

Quote of the Day (Godfrey Hodgson, on Presidents As Traders in Political Capital)

“Every modern president is a trader, entering office with a stock of political capital. If he were to sit back and attempt to live on the income from it, he would soon starve. So he must venture into the political market and trade. He proposes legislation, handles crises, applies leadership where required, and tries to avoid damaging associations. His record is observed and evaluated by Washington insiders and, in turn, transmitted to the wider public by the media. At the same time, polls recycle public opinion back to Washington, increasing or decreasing the president’s political capital.”— English journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson (1934-2021), “What Makes a Great President?”, The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2000

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Annie,’ As Miss Hannigan Laments Her Missed Show-Biz Chances)

“I haven’t told you how I was almost one of Hootie’s Blowfish.”— Miss Hannigan (played by Cameron Diaz), in the remake of Annie (2014), screenplay by Will Gluck and Aline Brosh McKenna, directed by Will Gluck

Quote of the Day (Peter Robinson, on ‘Summer Rain’)

“The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot.

“[Detective Inspector Alan] Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

“Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.”—British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson (1950-2022), “Summer Rain,” in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories (2004)

Looks like in my part of the Northeast, we’re in for another day or so of “summer rain.” The sky has been darkening and rumbling over the last couple of hours. I will be glad that when it’s all over, the landscape won’t resemble what Inspector Banks encounters…

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 73, on the Wicked)

 “They mock and speak with malice,
   from on high they speak out oppression.
They put their mouth up to the heavens,
   and their tongue goes over the earth.
 
“Thus the people turn back to them,
   and they lap up their words.
And they say, ‘How could God know, and is there knowledge with the most high?’
   Look, such are the wicked.”—American hebraist and critic Robert Alter, "Psalm 73," in The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2009)

 
In the Bible, God’s ultimate response to wicked people might be the devastation wreaked on Sodom and Gomorrah. That scene is the subject of the image accompanying this post, the 1852 painting The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by English artist John Martin (1789-1854).

Photo of the Day: Late Summer, Morningside Drive, NYC

This past weekend, I met with three great friends from my days at Columbia University for a wonderful afternoon of catching up.

With an incoming class only two weeks from Freshman Orientation (or, as some of us came to think of it, Disorientation), our thoughts drifted back to our experience with that same process 46 years ago, when the school—still dealing with the fallout of the ’68 demonstrations, amid a city still in long-term deterioration—was hardly the most fashionable of the Ivies.

At one point, we recalled, students speaking at one session gave us what sounded like an ironclad tip about survival in the neighborhood: “If the IRT gets diverted from the Broadway and 116^th Street station, do not get off by Morningside Park. Go to the next stop and walk back to Broadway.”

Forewarned meant forearmed about the potential for crime in the area. I made countless trips as a commuting student to the campus, but in the handful of times that the #1 train didn’t make its regular stop, I followed the above advice—and so did other students I knew then.

Fast forward decades later. New York City has stepped back from the fiscal brink, and “Seinfeld” and “Friends” have even made it fun and even hip. Columbia has benefited from this change in the atmosphere, and so has Morningside Drive and Park.

Back in 2006, New York City began a $390,000 renovation project for two ballfields in the park—part of a larger long-term reclamation that also saw new sidewalks from West 116^th Street to West 122^nd Street, an upgraded security booth at 116th Street, bush and growth removal projects along the upper paths, and perimeter lighting upgrades. More improvements have followed since then.

Volunteers associated with The Friends of Morningside Park have done their part, too, with monthly cleanups.

Five years ago, a Barnard student was murdered in the park, briefly reviving fears from decades ago. Even so, a columnist for The Fordham Ram felt confident enough in the surroundings to write last October that the park was “the perfect place to grab a coffee and read a book. You won’t be distracted and will only be inspired by the tranquility of the park.”

This past Sunday, after getting together with my friends, I felt curious enough to venture over to Morningside Drive. It was late in the afternoon and I had to get home, and yes, old concerns about safety still prevented me from walking farther into the park.

But, as you can see from this accompanying photo I took, the vista was pleasant enough to make me think that this stretch was closer to what Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had in mind when they designed what they hoped would be another urban oasis north of their Central Park in the late 19^th century.

Quote of the Day (Ray Bradbury, on a Carnival on a Hot Summer Night)

“Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.”—American science fiction/fantasy fiction writer and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “The Dwarf,” in The October Country (1955)