Quote of the Day (Filmmaker Nancy Meyers, on Boys and Girls Growing Up in the Oprah Era)

“When my daughters were growing up, Oprah was on TV every day at three o’clock pushing girls forward. Meanwhile, boys fell in love with video games. These boys turned into men who wear hoodies and don’t shave. I think there is a reluctance to embrace adulthood.” —Film director-screenwriter (What Women Want) Nancy Meyers interviewed by Eliana Dockterman for “7 Questions: Nancy Meyers,” Time Magazine, October 5, 2015

The image accompanying this post, showing Nancy Meyers at the Screenwriting Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center hosted by Creative Screenwriting magazine, was taken Nov. 16, 2008, by thedemonhog.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ on Public Subsidies for the Arts)

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington, left]: “Why should the rest of the country subsidize the pleasures of the middle-class few? Theater, opera, ballet—subsidizing art in this country is nothing more than a middle-class rip-off!”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne, right]: “Oh, minister—how can you say such a thing? Subsidy is about education preserving the pinnacles of our civilization, or haven't you noticed?”

Hacker: Don't patronize me, Humphrey. I believe in education, too. I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, may I remind you?”

Humphrey: “Well, I'm glad to learn that even the LSE is not totally opposed to education!”—Yes, Minister, Season 3, Episode 7, “The Middle-Class Rip-Off,” original air date Dec 23, 1982, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Peter Whitmore

Photo of the Day: The Flames of Autumn, Overpeck County Park, NJ

The other day, when I stepped out the door of my house, I couldn’t believe how fast and so much the leaves on a nearby tree were coming down.

Further confirmation that autumn was here at last came as I walked around Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. The tree you see here had not really changed since summer, but the sudden change I noticed on Wednesday led me to take this photograph.

Quote of the Day (Sidney Lanier, on ‘Tolerance, That Can Kiss and Disagree’)

“Bring Tolerance, that can kiss and disagree,—
Bring Virtue, Honor, Truth, and Loyalty,—
Bring Faith that sees with undissembling eyes,—
Bring all large Loves and heavenly Charities,—
Till man seem less a riddle unto man
And fair Utopia less Utopian.”—Southern poet, musician, literary critic, and academic Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), “Ode to the Johns Hopkins University (Read on the Fourth Commemoration Day, February 1880),” in Poems of Sidney Lanier (1885)

I found these lines while tracking down the source of a quotation from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: specifically, that phrase “large Loves and heavenly Charities.” That led me to this poem and Sidney Lanier, who preached here a message of idealism and charity—and who was himself a casualty of a society that had lost that capacity.

Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Lanier ended up disregarding his father’s wish that he practice the law and took up poetry—which, along with his skill in playing the violin, flute, piano, banjo and guitar, evidenced his inclination towards the arts.

Most photos of Lanier show him bearded, in his later years. I prefer this one, from age 15, where you can see him in all his youthful promise.

But the poet-musician’s life was transformed—and, eventually, curtailed—by the Civil War. Leaving an offer as a tutor at Georgia’s Oglethorpe College, he joined the Confederate Army.  In 1864, after transferring to a blockade runner seized by the Union, he was imprisoned and contracted tuberculosis—the disease that killed him at age 39.

I first came across Lanier’s name in a high school English anthology from the late 1960s. Even then, he was considered old-fashioned for exhibiting the influence of Anglo-Saxon and Romantic poets.

“In Lanier,” Edmund Wilson wrote in his influential 1962 overview of the literature generated by the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, “the chivalric romance of the South was to merge with German romanticism and to become inflated and irised, made to drip with the dews of idealism.”

Critical disdain only gathered force in the years afterward because Lanier’s style, unlike Walt Whitman’s or Emily Dickinson’s, was not original for his time; he was crowded out of “best of” poetry collections by 20^th-century giants like the “beat” and “confessional” poets; and some of his verses, written in African-American dialect, are dated.

Though not a slave trader or slave owner himself, or even a veteran of combat (according to this 2020 Montgomery Independent article, he only led his unit’s band and never fired a shot), Lanier, like many white male southerners of his time, served in the Confederacy’s armed forces and in the Reconstruction Era wrote verses critical of civil rights for freedmen. That put him in the crosshairs of the movement to rename southern schools to remove vestiges of the slavery and Jim Crow eras.

After some heated debate, the Austin (TX) school named in Lanier’s honor was changed in 2019 to commemorate Juan Navarro, a 2007 graduate who died in Afghanistan five years later from an explosive device.

In reading about Lanier’s life and character, I couldn’t help but think of Gone With the Wind’s Ashley Wilkes—another bookish, sensitive scion of the Old South who, out of loyalty to his state, marched off to a war that ends with his life “permanently shattered once the North wins the war,” as Marc Eliot Stein (aka Levi Asher) noted in this 2015 post from his blog “Literary Kicks.”

Stein’s characterization of Wilkes’ genteel racism, born of a “fear of invasion” (in this case, Northerners out to destroy slavery and, with it, the antebellum plantocracy), applies just as readily to Lanier—who, in one of the first examples of what might be termed “Lost Cause literature,” memorialized one of the fallen heroes of the defeated South in “The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.”

It was deeply tragic that a multi-talented artist and intellectual like Lanier had his life cut short before he could achieve even more. It was also tragic that he could never see beyond the closed circle of his society and imagine a life of opportunity for freedmen.

These days, for the first time in my lifetime, the American political atmosphere has been inflamed by talk of civil war. We would do well to follow the high ideals that Lanier advocated in the verses I quoted above, rather than commit to the lack of a broader vision that wrecked his world and his life.

Quote of the Day (W.E.B. DuBois, on the Need To ‘Distinguish Between Fact and Desire’)

“If we are going, in the future,… to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got clearly to distinguish between fact and desire.

“In the first place, somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world. Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts; but the historian has no right, posing as scientist, to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over.”— American sociologist, historian, editor, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)

Quote of the Day (William Hazlitt, on Tyranny)

“Tyranny, in a word, is a farce got up for the entertainment of poor human nature; and it might pass very well, if it did not so often turn into a tragedy.” —English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830), “On the Spirit of Monarchy," originally printed in 1823, reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (1904)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Designing Women,’ on the REAL ‘Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia’)

[Sugarbaker family nemesis Marjorie Lee Winnick, having just made catty comments about Suzanne, a former beauty contest contestant, thinks incorrectly that she’s now the only one in the room.]

Julia Sugarbaker [played by Dixie Carter]: “I’m Julia Sugarbaker, Suzanne Sugarbaker’s sister. I couldn’t help over hearing part of your conversation.”

Marjorie Lee Winnick [played by Pamela Bowen]: “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”

Julia: “Yes, and I gather from your comments there are a couple of other things you don't know, Marjorie. For example, you probably didn't know that Suzanne was the only contestant in Georgia pageant history to sweep every category except congeniality, and that is not something the women in my family aspire to anyway. Or that when she walked down the runway in her swimsuit, five contestants quit on the spot. Or that when she emerged from the isolation booth to answer the question, ‘What would you do to prevent war?’ she spoke so eloquently of patriotism, battlefields and diamond tiaras, grown men wept. And you probably didn't know, Marjorie, that Suzanne was not just any Miss Georgia, she was the Miss Georgia. She didn't twirl just a baton, that baton was on fire. And when she threw that baton into the air, it flew higher, further, faster than any baton has ever flown before, hitting a transformer and showering the darkened arena with sparks! And when it finally did come down, Marjorie, my sister caught that baton, and 12,000 people jumped to their feet for sixteen and one-half minutes of uninterrupted thunderous ovation, as flames illuminated her tear-stained face! And that, Marjorie—just so you will know—and your children will someday know—is the night the lights went out in Georgia!”— Designing Women, Season 1, Episode 2, “The Beauty Contest,” original air date Oct. 6, 1986, teleplay by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, directed by Jack Shea

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on ‘Anxious Apprehensions’)

"Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security."—Anglo-Irish statesman and conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quote of the Day (James Madison, on Voting for ‘Men of Virtue and Wisdom’)

“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” —Founding Father and 4^th President of the United States James Madison (1752-1836), “Judicial Powers of the National Government,” June 20, 1788, Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 11, 7 March 1788–1 March 1789, ed. Robert A. Rutland and Charles F. Hobson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977, pp. 158–165.]

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the Christian Subject to Misinformation and Demagoguery)

“The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press, on the radio or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to society, to the Church and to himself. With sincere intentions of serving the cause of Christ he may cooperate in follies and injustices of disastrous magnitude.” — American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Life and Holiness (1963)

Quote of the Day (Eve Babitz, on Two Sisters and a Friend)

“Just then, Haily arrived, Kate's best friend who nobody but Kate could stand. Haily was the kind of woman who took people's boyfriends when they weren't looking and then wanted you to feel sorry for her because she had no friends. Except for Kate. Haily was even more in love with Kate than everyone else, and attempted to look just like her, dying her own dishwater brown hair dark red like Kate's was naturally, even though Kate was so nonchalant about her beautiful hair that that day she just wore it in a long braid down her slender back. Kate was so otherworldly in her beauty that it was hard for me to believe her sister Vicky looked just like her except that the things Kate did to accentuate her beauty, Vicky refused to even consider. Kate, for example, used silvery eye shadow to bring out the silvery lime of her eyes; she often let her hair cascade down her back in a darkened red cloud, whereas Vicky chopped hers off at chin length and shoved it off her face in a bandanna…. [W]hile Vicky always wore either loafers or tennis shoes or else terrible low-heeled black scuffed pumps if she was really backed into a corner and had to go to a dinner party, Kate's shoes were all silver, including the boots she wore that day with her Moroccan pants. Haily looked like a smudged charcoal drawing of Kate done by someone with no talent.”— American artist, author and muse Eve Babitz (1943-2021), “Expensive Regrets,” in Black Swans: Stories (1993)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Best Man,’ on a Candidate’s Missing Wife)

Sue Ellen Gamadge [played by Ann Sothern, far right]: [to William Russell, played by Henry Fonda, center] “We want to see a lot more of your wife—a great deal more. You know, there are still people who don't trust the English.”

Dick Jensen [played by Kevin McCarthy]: “Mrs. Russell was sick during the primaries.”

Sue Ellen: “Yes, yes, yes. I know. But she has to be at your side at all times. She must seem to be advising you. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm not having a wife and trying to be funny all at the same time, too. Great harm.”— The Best Man (1964), screenplay by Gore Vidal, based on his play, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Gore Vidal’s political satire has lost little if any of its sting, six decades after he wrote it. The setting—the smoked-fill rooms at a convention that will determine a party’s candidate—may have lost its importance, but his Broadway play and adaptation are at heart about power and its use in smashmouth politics.

And, even though we now—courtesy of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump— have Presidents who’ve been divorced, voters are still awfully curious about candidates’ spouses.

Which brings us to William Russell’s wife Alice in The Best Man.

The actress who played Alice on Broadway, Leora Dana, was American, as were the actresses who took on the role in 21^st century revivals: Michael Learned, Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd. So perhaps that line about “the English” above was made to account for the casting of the admittedly marvelous Margaret Leighton (pictured far left) when the play became a movie.

But, as a student of history, Vidal would probably have been struck by the irony of a foreign-born First Lady. For the first two and a quarter centuries after the founding of the republic, there had only been one such spouse: Louisa Johnson Adams, born in—yes, England.

Then came Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s second wife from Eastern Europe. (Perhaps he might want to reconsider his position on imports?)

For the longest time, I thought Louisa Adams underwent some of the worst experiences of any First Lady as the marital and political partner of John Quincy Adams, a notably frosty fellow who suffered bouts of depression.

After being largely ignored in the White House by her husband, Louisa became something of a recluse and worked on an unpublished autobiography whose title signals her misery: Adventures of a Nobody.

But I’m afraid that the Slovenian-born Melania has—well, trumped her. Ms. Trump has been largely AWOL as her husband plotted his return to the White House (her appearance with him at the Al Smith Dinner being a curious and rare exception), and her memoir, Melania, has just been published.

There is one line from The Best Man, flung out by Leighton, that First Ladies Adams and Trump wish they could have said to their husbands, I’m sure: “I’ve had twenty years of nonsense, of being a good sport.”

At least Mrs. Adams, however, never had to read about her husband’s affair with an adult-film actress conducted during her own pregnancy, sexual misconduct accusations by dozens of other women, and even a civil court jury finding that he’d sexually abused and defamed one of them.

What does the Slovenian Sphinx think of all this? Publicly, nothing. Privately, if she’s ever had a chance to watch The Best Man, I bet she snorts at Ann Sothern’s line about “seeming to advise” the candidate—but nods vigorously at Leighton’s “twenty years of nonsense.”

Quote of the Day (Jacob Silverman, on the New ‘Authoritarian-Curious’ Tech Elite)

“The tech elite once limited themselves mostly to preaching crypto, artificial intelligence, and life extension to a public that mostly wants messaging apps, free health care, and cheap rent. But now, they seem to be possessed by a grievance-driven groupthink, intolerant of criticism. Living the cloistered, easy lives of the Burning Man set, microdosing on ego worship, this authoritarian-curious crew has helped frame the online discourse around—and lead the backlash against—criminal justice reform, urban homelessness, immigration policies, and transgender rights.”— American journalist and author Jacob Silverman, “The Tech Elite Swerve Right,” The New Republic, October 2024

The image accompanying this post, showing the tech entrepreneur, investor, engineer, and all-around nuisance Elon Musk, was taken July 13, 2018, by Duncan Hull and comes from The Royal Society.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a Dismal Autumn Twilight in Czarist Russia)

“A crowd of coach-men and pilgrims was sitting in Uncle Tikhon's tavern. An autumn downpour with raging wet winds that lashed across their faces had driven them to seek refuge there. The tired, drenched travelers sat listening to the wind, dozing on benches by the wall….

“Outside the tavern door splashes of rain flew around the dim, grimy lantern. The wind howled like a wolf, yelping, as if to tear itself away from its tether by the door. From the yard came the sound of horses snorting and hoofs thudding in the mud. It was dank and cold.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “In Autumn,” originally printed in 1883, reprinted in The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine (1999)

Well, with this kind of terrible weather—not to mention life under the Czars (and later, under the Communists, then under Putin)—you can understand that the tavern patrons are a miserable, even sodden, bunch.

But one in particular—a man of about 40, wearing “a wrinkled summer coat covered with mud, calico pants, and rubber galoshes without shoes”—has his own personal reasons for begging Uncle Tikhon for a drink.

This was not one of the stories that Chekhov had collected in his life. But already you can see, from this short description, how he was learning to write concisely but vividly. A year away from earning his medical degree, he had also learned to observe the outward signs that pointed to a human being’s physical and mental condition.

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, on Ichabod Crane)

“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” — American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider (1975)

The image accompanying this post shows Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane and Lois Meredith as Katrina Van Tassel, in the 1922 silent film The Headless Horseman.

At five feet 11 inches, Rogers was not the beanpole imagined by Irving. But the lovable humorist was already well launched on a career that would make him one of Hollywood’s most highly paid stars before dying in a plane crash in 1935, so that made him a box-office draw.

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Song Lyric of the Day (Kris Kristofferson, on Love, ‘The Last Thing to Go’)

“Love is the last thing to go…
And it bought us the freedom
to fall into grace
On our way
to our place in the sun.”—Country music singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024), “The Last Thing to Go," from his This Old Road CD (2006)

The image accompanying this post of Kris Kristofferson, live at Roskilde Festival 2013, was taken July 6, 2013, by Morten Jensen.

Quote of the Day (Lena Dunham, Defining ‘Brat’)

“Brat is walking down the street with headphones on and eyes closed, knocking over passersby and refusing to say you're sorry.”— American writer and director Lena Dunham, “Shouts and Murmurs: A Guide to Brat Summer,” The New Yorker, Sept. 2, 2024

When I was a youngster, if I heard my father refer to me as a “brat,” the last thing I would do was revel in the term.

But this year—and specifically, around mid-to-late summer—“brat” had acquired far different connotations than that of a rotten little kid who needed discipline.

Now, according to Russell Falcon of the Los Angeles TV station KTLA, a “brat summer” “encourages enjoying life as much as you can in spite of the struggles you’re facing.” Or, put another way, according to another online dictionary site: It means “confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant.”

Heck, in the groundswell of euphoria following Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, the Veep was being described as “brat.”

Well, baby boomers are likely to react to this new bit of slang with the same impatience voiced by Regina George to one of her breathless hangers-on in Mean Girls: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”

“Brat” has been hard-wired into boomer consciousness for so long that dislodging it is probably out of the question now. Maybe that is partly why the 50-64 and 65+ age cohorts are also the most immune to the candidacy of Ms. Harris.

I’m afraid for many of these older voters, “brat” is going to fall as flat as “phat.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Lena Dunham at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of The Russian Winter, was taken Apr. 20, 2012, by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on Faith)

“Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Oktoberfest, A ‘Paradise of Cram and Gorge’)

“Everyone was eating; everyone was drinking. A ravenous hunger—an insane hunger that knew no appeasement, that wished to glut itself on all the roasted ox flesh, all the sausages, all the salt fish in the world, seized me and held me in its teeth. In all the world there was nothing but Food—glorious Food. And beer—October beer. The world was one enormous Belly—there was no higher heaven than the paradise of Cram and Gorge. All of the agony of the mind was here forgotten. What did these people know about books? What did they know about pictures? What did they know about the million tumults of the soul, the conflict and the agony of the spirit, the hopes, fears, hatreds, failures, and ambitions, the whole fevered complex of modern life? These people lived for nothing but to eat and drink—and they were right.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1937), “Oktoberfest,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, June 1937, reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp (1987)

The first Oktoberfest began in Munich, Germany, on this day in 1810. Since then, according to this brief history from Oktoberfest Tours, the celebration of this bacchanal has been moved to late September and ending in early October to allow for better weather conditions in the changeable local climate. Most similar observances of this festival around the world, including in the U.S., have followed suit.

But there are some American cities—including one I heard about this morning—that are still marking the occasion even as I write this. So, seizing on this slender occasion, I am writing this post.

The “parade of Cram and Gorge” that Thomas Wolfe described in the above passage occurred in 1928—one of a half-dozen visits he made to Germany from 1926 to 1936.  

His participation in that celebration might have been a little too vigorous, according to Ellen Apperson Brown’s April 2020 essay on Wolfe’s short story on the Website of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: The aspiring novelist, after downing eight liters of beer, got into a drunken brawl that left him with “a concussion of the brain, 4 scalp wounds, and a broken nose,” along with trips to a police station and hospital, he confessed to his lover of the time, the American set designer Aline Bernstein.

At one point in the short story, Wolfe’s narrator, amid all the “powerful bodies” packed together in this hall, senses that “nothing on earth could resist them—that they must smash anything they came against”—a disturbing premonition of the violence that Germany would unleash under the Nazi regime in the 1930s. But, caught up in the tumult and friendship of those around him, he eventually relegates his unease to the back of his consciousness.

Wolfe would feel even more enthusiastic about the nation in 1935, when he was feted as a major literary figure—an unambiguous embrace of his work that he was not experiencing in the U.S. at the time.

But to his credit, as journalist Andrew Nagorski chronicled in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, Wolfe came to see the error of his ways in the summer of 1936 during the Munich Olympics, when a German acquaintance laid out for him the mounting economic pressures and violence perpetrated on Jews by the Nazis.

Wolfe’s subsequent dramatic denunciation of the Nazis in the long “I Have a Thing to Tell You” chapter of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again led to his books being banned by the regime.

Most celebrations of Oktoberfest here in the U.S. will be closer to the feeling of “imminent and impending happiness” that Wolfe felt as he walked the streets back from this night. But here’s hoping that those who don’t know how to control their appetites will refrain from this festival of food and drink.

(The image accompanying this post, of Oktoberfest 2013 held in Munich, was taken Sept. 21, 2013, by Heribert Pohl.)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Engel, on Why ‘A Successful Public Transport System is a National Benefit’)

“A successful public transport system is a national benefit. Japan, China and most of western Europe accept it explicitly. For much of the world, the past 40 years have indeed been the second age of the train. British politicians get the point implicitly but execute policy furtively and cack-handedly; only American Republicans are visceral and obstructive deniers.”— British journalist Matthew Engel, “Slow Train Coming,” The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015

It escaped my attention a few weeks ago until I noticed Leo Lewis’ excellent recent retrospective in The Financial Times: late last month, Japan celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the first bullet train. Since that event, the nation has steadily improved its high-speed railroad system, the shinkansen, with the fastest train, the Hayabusa, now reaching 320 km/h.

In contrast, the fastest train in the US, Amtrak’s Acela—currently running at 150 miles per hour—will, even with a new model announced for 2024 but still with no set date at this point in the year, only reach 160 mph/h, or 258 km/h.

For several reasons, within the lifetimes of older baby boomers, the U.S. railroad system has declined in importance even as the automobile and the airplane become more entrenched. has declined. For the sake of a diversified transportation system and healthy economy, more needs to be done to revive the industry. It should be beyond partisan politics.

Continued decline or even stagnation of the industry is not inevitable. A high-functioning rail system can be not just a signal of industrial innovation but even a point of national pride, as Lewis points out in noticing that the Tokyo-to-Osaka line opened just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, making the two events “symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection.”

But upgrading a rail system will not only require a can-do spirit but eternal vigilance. As Lewis observes:

“Despite the appearance of effortless service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).”

(The image accompanying this post, the Shinkansen N700A Series Set G13 high speed train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station—an image captured with a line-scan camera using strip photography—was taken Aug. 19, 2017, by Dllu.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again,’ As Inspector Clouseau Excuses a Disastrous Mishap)

[Inspector Clouseau has accidentally reduced a piano to a pile of splinters.]

Mrs. Leverlilly [played by Vanda Godsell]: “You've ruined that piano!”

Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers]: “What is the price of one piano compared to the terrible crime that's been committed here?”

Mrs. Leverlilly: “But that's a priceless Steinway!”

Clouseau: “Not anymore!”— The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), screenplay by Frank Waldman and Blake Edwards, directed by Blake Edwards

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on Art and Time)

“Art controls time, it always has. From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Quote of the Day (Steve Tesich, on ‘A Time of Post-Truth and Post-Art’)

“This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being.”—Oscar-winning Serbian-born American screenwriter (Breaking Away), playwright, and novelist Steve Tesich (1942-1996), interviewed by Dejan Stojanovic, “A Few Moments with Steve Tesich,” Views, April 1992

The image of Steve Tesich accompanying this post was taken in front of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, 1991, by Marko Rakocevic.

Quote of the Day (Douglas Coupland, on College Teaching as a Nerve-Racking Form of Public Speaking)

“One form of public speaking not usually recognized as such is teaching. I’ve had a few experiences in educational situations and they’ve been worse than flies crawling over my face. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough to do what they do. Having been in their shoes, even briefly, has converted me into an education advocate. Double all teaching salaries now.”— Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist Douglas Coupland, “Observations: Getting Off the Stage,” originally printed in The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015, reprinted in Bit Rot: Bit Rot: Stories + Essays (2017)

The image of Douglas Coupland that accompanies this post was taken Mar. 17, 2022, in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, by the Wylie Agency of New York City.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Little Chickadee,’ As Mae West Teaches Math Her Way)

(An out-of-town gold digger in the West vows to tame a class of rowdy adolescent boys who have driven the local schoolmarm into a nervous breakdown.)

Schoolboy [uncredited]: “We was doin' arithmetic on the blackboard when Miss Foster took sick.”

Flower Belle Lee [played by Mae West]: “Oh, arithmetic... I was always pretty good at figures myself.”— My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (George Meredith, on The Plight of Those ‘Hot for Certainties’)

"Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!—
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!"—English poet-novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), Modern Love (1862)

The image accompanying this post shows Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the 1942 film adaptation of Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, In This Our Life—a title taken, as seen in the passage above, from this George Meredith poem.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Speeches ‘That Comfort Cruel Men’)

"From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!”—English man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “A Hymn: O God of Earth and Altar” (1914) 

Flashback, October 1959: Serling’s ‘Twilight Zone’ Takes Viewers to ‘Another Dimension’

With three Emmy Awards for writing already to his credit, Rod Serling began to air in October 1959 the first episodes of the series that not only consolidated his status as one of the pioneers of quality television but also established him as a legend of the science fiction and fantasy genre: The Twilight Zone.

Even with endless imitations, parodies, and revivals at the hands of others, it’s easy to lose sight of just how different The Twilight Zone was from what might be termed “alternative futures” at that time.

Serling would have none of the little green men invading Earth, mad scientists, and assorted other creatures that reflected American paranoia about the Red Scare in the 1950s. The quotidian existence of his characters was one that his mass audience could relate to, only for these everyday figures to be launched, as one of the show’s famous intros put it, into “another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”

The themes that Serling consistently explored were alienation, prejudice, loneliness, colonialism, climate change, domestic abuse, and war—a subject that its creator knew all too much about, having seen action in the Pacific Theater in WWII. (This summer, a Serling short story believed to have been lost for 70 years and based on his wartime experiences, “First Squad, First Platoon,” was published in The Strand Magazine.)

The series first saw light as “The Time Element,” a Serling script deep-sixed by CBS until it was resurrected and run as an episode of “Desilu Playhouse.”

The network, realizing its mistake in burying the project, now gave the green light to what turned out to be the pilot proper for the show, “Where Is Everybody?”

The Twilight Zone arrived on TV in the heyday of the anthology series, a genre that also gave rise to such acclaimed shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, The Naked City, and Thriller (which I discussed in this prior post).  

Serling wrote or adapted 92 of the 156 episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, but as time went on he also enlisted the services of Charles Beaumont (who wrote another 22), Richard Matheson (16) and the future creator of The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr. (8).

So much of The Twilight Show has passed into legend: from the eerie theme composed by Marius Constant, twist endings a la O. Henry, and Serling’s onscreen lit cigarette (the product of a three-pack-a-day addiction dating back to his wartime experiences).

Serling’s deep voice and staccato delivery of the introductions and conclusions made him as indelible a narrator as Alfred Hitchcock. But he was nobody’s original idea as host.

According to Josh Weiss’ post from March of this year on the SyFi Wire blog, the services of Westbrook Van Voorhis, famous as the narrator of The March of Time radio program, were engaged—until hearing his voice on the pilot left network execs feeling he was too “pompous-sounding.”

The idea of Orson Welles was then floated, and though that voice was certainly memorable, it would have come at a cost that would have ballooned the show’s budget. Finally, Serling suggested that he try it. To everyone’s delight, it worked out wonderfully.

For years, the creepy nature of the show left me a bit leery about viewing it. In the last few years, however, I’ve relented, and have developed some favorites among the episodes:

·         “Nightmare at 20,000 Square Feet,” with William Shatner as the airplane passenger convinced that a monster only he can see is out to wreck his flight;

·         “The Jungle,” with John Dehner as an engineer back from a hydroelectric power project in Africa, increasingly discomfited by signs that a witch doctor’s curse may be coming home to roost;

·         “Eye of the Beholder,” about a young woman undergoing a surgical procedure meant to make her look “normal”;

·         “Time Enough at Last,” on a bookworm finding himself with no distractions from his reading after a nuclear attack; and

·         “What's in the Box,” with William Demarest and Joan Blondell as an unhappy couple feuding after his TV set shows him quarreling with and killing her.

If The Twilight Zone made Serling, it could also be said to have unmade him. The non-stop demands on his time as executive producer, host, and chief writer—and of battling the show’s advertisers (McCann-Erickson) and network censors over tone and content—left him running on empty in the fourth and fifth seasons. “You can't retain quality,” he lamented. “You start borrowing from yourself, making your own cliches.”

They also left him craving adulation from the public and critics he had achieved with his on-air presence, leading to short-lived lucrative but creatively unsatisfying 1960s ventures as a game-show host, documentary narrator, and commercial pitchman for Schlitz Beer and Famous Writer’s Correspondence School.

When he did return to his typewriter, he flailed in a new entertainment landscape where his ideas were downgraded, disregarded or sidelined.

His screenplay for Planet of the Apes, for instance, was revised by Michael Wilson (the famous ending, involving the Statue of Liberty, was his major surviving contribution), and on the early 1970s series Night Gallery, he possessed no creative control, leading to complaints that it was a low-grade knockoff of The Twilight Zone.

His constant smoking and stress caught up with him, and death came to Serling in 1975 at the age of 50 amid heart surgery. A decade after its cancellation, the series that he helmed—more of a success d’estime than a commercial hit in its original network run—was already a cult favorite in syndication.

Over the years it’s influenced the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jordan Peele (who would become the showrunner and host for a 2019-2020 remake of the series on CBS All Access.