Quote of the Day (John Irving, on Free Time and Writing)

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” —American novelist and screenwriter John Irving quoted by R.Z. Sheppard, “Life into Art: Novelist John Irving,” Time Magazine, Aug. 31, 1981

The image accompanying this post, John Irving in the Netherlands, was taken on May 2, 1989, by Rob Bogaerts (ANEFO).

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on the Past)

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), My Antonia (1918)

This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (NY-Inspired Billy Joel Scores With ‘Turnstiles’)

May 19, 1976—Though Billy Joel did not achieve the chart-topping LP that executives desired on his fourth studio album, he staked out the sound that paved the way for later success—and created what many feel was a high-water mark in his career as a singer-songwriter—with Turnstiles.

A week or so ago, The New York Times created a hornet’s nest with a list of the 30 greatest living songwriters that some (like critic Ted Gioia) derided as methodologically suspect. Predictably, even more readers complained that their choices didn’t make the roundup, with Joel among the most glaring omissions. 

(See this podcast with the Times critics debating this egregious exclusion and others, in a manner that YouTube respondents variously assailed as “smug,” “insufferable,” “oblivious,” and “unbelievable.”)

I know that the Piano Man’s output has, for some reason, not always won critical acclaim. You can count me among his longtime fans. It’s not just that his concerts have been electrifying, but his recordings display to the utmost his skills as a lyricist and musician. Turnstiles is a prime example.

This album also represented his attempt to wrest creative control of his material in the most decisive fashion. His label, Columbia Records, suggested that he work with James William Guercio. This producer, manager, and songwriter, through such acts as Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Buckinghams, was at the time an influential proponent of jazz rock—or, as I noted in this prior blog post, “brass rock,” characterized by a driving horn section.

At the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado, Guercio was exerting tighter control over his productions. In Joel’s case, the producer pushed for studio musicians, including from Elton John’s backup band.

After listening to these sessions, Joel decided that, though this studio hires might have benefited the English superstar, it wasn’t what he wanted. He called the sessions off, and pressed his case with Columbia for a backup group of his own to work on his next album.

To make doubly sure that he got what he wanted, Joel took over the producer’s chores as well. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. He may have come closer to the sound he wanted, but, as he recalled in a 2009 Billboard interview, “I’m not a producer. I’m a good partnering producer when I work with somebody like Phil Ramone or Mick Jones; I have a lot of ideas. But I don’t know technically always what I should be going for.”

The real benefit came from the comfort level he felt from working with what became the “Billy Joel Band”: bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, guitarists Russell Javors and Howie Emerson, and saxophonist Richie Cannata. It was like what another up-and-coming Columbia artist, Bruce Springsteen, had wanted and gotten, with the now-legendary E Street Band.

Because he permanently parted ways with those backup musicians a couple of decades later, Joel didn’t achieve the longevity and camaraderie that The Boss gained with his “Band of Brothers.” But for the time they played together, there was a drive and cohesion to his sound.

Equally important for Joel, after three years of feeling lost in Los Angeles, the longtime Long Island resident moved back east. The title of this new collection, Turnstiles, was a celebration of that decision.

(Incidentally, the cover of the album was shot in an actual abandoned subway station. The assorted non-Joel figures in the photograph were meant to suggest people associated with different songs, so the teenaged girl with the headphones, for instance, represents “All You Wanna Do Is Dance.”)

Joel’s move back home also was something of an act of defiance against anti-New York sentiment in the nation. The singer-songwriter decided it was time for a change when he saw the notorious 1975 New York Daily News headline at the height of the bankruptcy crisis: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.”

On vinyl, Joel reacted with a dystopian piece of science fiction, "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)." After 9/11, it became an unexpected anthem of resilience for the metropolis. Now, we are almost a decade after the future that he imagined.

If "Miami 2017” seemed tailor-made for arena rock, “New York State of Mind” felt more like its natural setting was a small jazz club. Indeed, it has become something of a pop standard, covered by the likes of Tony Bennett, Carmen McRae, Mel Torme, Barbara Streisand, Shirley Bassey, and Diane Schuur with Stan Getz.

I embraced two other songs because in some ways they reminded me of the work of two cultural figures I was just beginning to enjoy.

With backup singers, castanets, strings, and especially an opening drumbeat reminiscent of “Be My Baby,” “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” was Joel’s tribute to “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector and then-wife Ronnie. (In fact, the latter released her own estimable cover version a year later, noting in interviews that she identified with the song’s theme of a break from California following her divorce.)

The other cultural figure I thought of was F. Scott Fitzgerald, on “I’ve Loved These Days.” So many of the images and themes evoked here—spending beyond one’s means, pearls, caviar, foreign cars, champagne, and cocaine—could have been drawn from the pages and life of the author of “The Great Gatsby.”

One other tune deserves special attention, as Joel would return to its main concern later in his career: “Summer, Highland Falls.” Named for the upstate New York town where Joel stayed upon his return from the West Coast, the song functioned as an emotional taking stock and recalibration.

He has been frank in admitting that lines like “It’s either sadness or euphoria” recognized the manic depression with which he has battled through much of his life, even at the height of his success—a condition he explored later in “I Go to Extremes” and “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”.

Though the album only peaked at #122 on the U.S. Billboard chart on its release, songs from Turnstiles helped solidify his growing acclaim as a top-notch live performer, as exemplified from several from the LP being included on his first live collection, Songs in the Attic (1981). Eventually it reached platinum status.

Joel did not produce another LP until 1993 with River of Dreams. Like Turnstiles, that marked a watershed of sorts, as it turned out to be his last collection of original pop tunes. 

His concert partner Elton John admonished him to sit down and write some more, but if Joel felt his creative well had run dry, it’s hard to take issue with his decision to take this turn in his career. It would only have invited more critical derision than he’d experienced already.

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Innocent and the Beautiful’)

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” originally published in 1927, reprinted in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran (1989)

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on Baseball)

"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.”—American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Lardner on Baseball (2003)

This Day in Baseball History (Death of Harmon Killebrew, Unassuming But Feared Slugger)

May 17, 2011— Harmon Killebrew, as eager-to-please a personality as ever to step onto a baseball diamond, yet so feared for his home run prowess that he earned the nickname “Killer”—died at age 74 of esophageal cancer at his Scottsdale, AZ home.

For most of two decades, it was Killebrew’s misfortune to play—first in Washington, DC, then in Minnesota—for owner Calvin Griffith, who low-balled him at salary time. 

After he retired, misfortune often took a more dire financial form: car dealership and car leasing firms whose failure ultimately, despite his healthy sums from sports memorabilia appearances, pushed him towards bankruptcy in 1993.

Killebrew was honest enough to admit feeling stressed by all of this, but he soldiered on, demonstrating why he was liked and respected not just by fellow baseball players but by sportswriters, who finally elected him to Cooperstown, after three missed tries, in 1984.

Though nothing like the versatile “five-tool player” (hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, arm strength, fielding ability) held up as the beau ideal of everyday players, Killebrew possessed one skill in abundance: slugging home runs.

The 573 round-trippers he amassed at the end of his 22-season career ranked fifth at the time of his retirement. Even that statistic doesn’t indicate the frequency, consistency and force with which he punished the ball.

Starting with the Washington Senators, then moving when the team became the Minnesota Twins before closing out his career after one season with the Kanas City Royals, Killebrew recorded eight 40-home run seasons and 44 multiple home run games. He led the AL in home runs six times, walks four times and RBI three times. 

Named to 13 All-Star teams, he was selected Most Valuable Player for the American League in 1969, when he led the Twins to the American League West Division championship.

Ossie Bluege, the farm system director who scouted and signed him for the Washington Senators, observed: "He hit line drives that put the opposition in jeopardy. And I don't mean infielders, I mean outfielders." 

Griffith took note of these tape-measure homers: “He would hit the ball so blooming high in the sky, they were like a rocket ship going up in the air.”

That bat was what kept Killebrew in the lineup game after game, year after year, despite a glove that most observers of the game thought was suspect. But in his defense, he never spent enough time at one position to master it. 

According to Mark Armour’s post shortly after Killebrew’s death, “he was repeatedly shifted between three defensive positions throughout his career, getting 44% of his starts at first base, 33% at third base, and 22% in left field.”

Off the field, Killebrew’s benevolence sprang from a belief that “The most important reason that we're here on Earth is to love and help one another.” To that end, he became involved in several charitable activities, including:

*helping to establish, in Sun Valley, ID, the Danny Thompson Memorial Golf Tournament (named after a Twins teammate who died of leukemia);

*creating the Harmon Killebrew Signature Classic Golf Tournament to benefit the American Red Cross; and,

*starting the Harmon Killebrew Foundation, a fund-raising charity.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Francis de Sales, on the Need to ‘Keep a Calm, Restful Spirit’)

“Anxiety arises from an unregulated desire to be delivered from any pressing evil, or to obtain some hoped-for good.…Therefore, whensoever you urgently desire to be delivered from any evil, or to attain some good thing, strive above all else to keep a calm, restful spirit, steady your judgement and will, and then go quietly and easily after your object, taking all fitting means to attain thereto. By easily, I do not mean carelessly, but without eagerness, disquietude, or anxiety.” —St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church (1567-1622), Introduction to the Devout Life (1609)

Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on Exclusivity and ‘The Life of the Few’)

“Don't let your fellow humans be alien to you, and as you get older and perhaps a little less open than you are now, don’t assume that exclusive always and everywhere means better. It may only mean lonelier. There will always be folks hard selling you the life of the few: the private schools, private planes, private islands, private life. They are trying to convince you that hell is other people. Don't believe it. We are far more frequently each other's shelter and correction, the antidote to solipsism, and so many windows on this world.” — Novelist-essayist Zadie Smith, Commencement Speech at the New School, New York, May 23, 2014

This week, we are reading the comments of some university commencement speakers, and it will continue like this for several days or so.

But Ms. Smith’s reminder from a dozen years ago bears keeping in mind, perhaps now more than ever. Barriers of class, ethnicity, race, religion, and politics should not be as rigid as physical structures in blocking access to each other.

The image accompanying this post, of Zadie Smith announcing the five 2010 National Book Critics Circle finalists in fiction, was taken on Jan. 22, 2011, by David Shankbone.

Quote of the Day (W. H. Auden, on Propaganda)

“Propaganda is a monologue which seeks not a response but an echo.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning English-born American poet-critic W. H. Auden (1907-1973), “A Short Defense of Poetry,” originally delivered at the International PEN Conference in Budapest, October 1967, printed in The New York Review of Books, Jan. 30, 1986

Over two days in Beijing this week, two 24/7 practitioners of propaganda, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, met. These leaders of America and China, so used to employing this “monologue” on their countrymen, wielded it on their foreign counterpart.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that these efforts were aimed at establishing their countries as superpowers. Rather, in their blatant legacy-building, these septuagenarian strongmen were engaged in the final rites of their own cults of personality.

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ Imagining ‘Tucker Carlson’ on Maine)

“Tucker Carlson” [played by Jeremy Culhane] [after criticizing stars at the recent Met costume gala]: “What are we doing? What’s going on? Is this the New York we want to live in, Colin?”

Colin Jost: “Don't you live in, like, Maine?”

“Carlson”: “Yes. And let's talk about Maine. M-a-i-n...e? Huh! Really? The ‘e’ is silent. But who silenced it and why?”

Jost: “What the hell are you talking about? You're talking about the silent ‘e’ in Maine now?”

“Carlson”: “I'm glad you brought it up, Colin.”

Jost: “I didn't.”

“Carlson”: “And what does that ‘e’ stand for? Oh, I know. ‘Euphoria.’” [A poster for the HBO series “Euphoria” flashes on the screen.]

Jost: “No!”

“Carlson”: “Oh, yes. ‘Euphoria.’ And no, I'm not talking about the feeling I get when I press ‘1’ for ‘English.’” [High-pitched, self-satisfied cackling.]—“Weekly Update” segment, Saturday Night Live, Season 51, Episode 18, original air date May 2, 2026

Tucker Carlson has been lampooned before on SNL, but it was almost inevitable that the show would return to him recently, especially considering his podcast apology for past support of Donald Trump.

But his interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times following his much-publicized break with Trump over the Iranian invasion deserved scorn that the show's writers ignored.  It’s astonishing: he can sound sincere, even logical, and before you know it Carlson’s spewing the most bigoted, conspiratorial nonsense.

All this shoots from his mouth with such glib rapidity that he can’t keep track of what he says. So he denied to Garcia-Navarro, for instance, about ever wondering if Trump might be the anti-Christ, even though he said it only a few weeks ago on a readily available recording.

I love how in his devastating impression, Jeremy Culhane captured how what Carlson wants to be a chuckle turns into a cackle. Only I wish he had included one of this demagogue’s most weaselly statements whenever he discusses matters like COVID vaccines: “I’m just asking questions.”

Quote of the Day (Thomas Paine, on ‘The Irresistible Nature of Truth’)

“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks—and all it wants—is the liberty of appearing.”—English-born American pamphleteer and patriot Thomas Paine (1737-1809), The Rights of Man (1791)

Flashback, May 1926: General Strike Paralyzes Great Britain

A century ago this month, more than two million British workers walked off their jobs, either miners or unions in solidarity with them, over conditions already desperate and dangerous underground and only worsened by mine owners and the Conservative government. 

After nine days, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was forced to call off the General Strike, yielding their demands but not bitterness over what one striker called “the boil that needed lancing.”

I first became aware of this tumultuous event in British labor history while reading the first volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, often considered the second most powerful figure in His Majesty’s government, Churchill was heavily responsible for hardening opposition to the TUC in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and, once the work stoppage began, mounting the government’s propaganda effort against it.

For the rest of his career, union workers and their sympathizers did not regard this as Churchill’s finest hour, to say the least. In the immediate aftermath, for instance, an editorial in the progressive political and cultural magazine The New Statesman was titled, “Should We Hang Mr. Churchill or Not?”

What animated Churchill and other Conservatives in Baldwin’s Cabinet was a British equivalent of the Russian Revolution of nine years before. They feared the tumult similar to that resulting from the Bolshevik takeover: property owners dispossessed, churches closed, the royal family executed, and even the overthrow of the new, more liberal government of Alexander Kerensky.

Britain represented an even more tempting target for Communists bent on international expansion. Churchill had engaged in a poorly planned, unsuccessful 1919 Allied effort to invade Russia to, as he put it, “strangle Bolshevism at its birth," but he was determined not to allow chaos to metastasize at home.

Mining was a particular pressure point for British employment and the economy. With coal required to fuel the ships, power stations, coke ovens, home use and industry to make munitions, the government nationalized the industry during World War I. After the armistice, the Mine workers union wanted to keep the 18.5% wage increase they won during the conflict.

But in March 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George returned the mines to private owners. By spring 1926, they had locked one million of their employees—a tenth of the British male workforce—out of their workplaces, demanding longer hours but less money.

Even many of the Conservatives in Parliament and Baldwin’s Cabinet felt that the mine owners dealt unjustly with the workers; it’s just that they feared the Marxist bogeyman more.

In the latest issue of the British publication The Literary Review, Richard Vinen explained why another issue—safety—only added to workers’ grievances:

“About a thousand a year died in accidents. Of the three most important leaders of the miners in 1926, two had lost their fathers in accidents underground. There were many injuries. [Historian Jonathan] Schneer cites the case of Thomas Baker of Sheffield, who received ten shillings a week as compensation for having lost a leg at the age of seventeen….The life of a miner was unimaginable to most people. Driving trains or buses might, for a time, seem amusing – which is why so many young men volunteered to do it in 1926. No one would have volunteered to be a miner, which is why men had to be conscripted to dig coal during the Second World War.”

Altogether it was, according to the late Welsh actor and film producer Stanley Baker, whose father lost a leg in a cave-in, “a place where death and poverty are daily threats.”

In back of it all was the restoration of the gold standard that Churchill pushed through in 1925. The result, explains Lawrence Reed, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, in June 2023, was “a series of destructive results. British export industries suffered hugely, especially coal, leading to strikes and slowdowns.” John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of just this eventuality, in The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, went unheeded.

As the miners union felt increasingly pushed towards striking, they were joined by workers from other sectors walking out in sympathy, including transport and dock employees, as well as those employed in gas and electricity, printing, iron, steel and chemical jobs.

But the owners and the government were making their own preparations months in advance to stave off what Baldwin called “the road to anarchy and ruin.” A nine-month subsidy to owners to keep wages stable gave him time to:

* coordinate food and fuel availability through the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies;

* use the Emergency Powers Act of 1920 to issue regulations maintaining order; and

* establish a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel, which issued a report that, though critical of the mine owners, also recommended the reduction of miners’ wages.

Central to the effort, exactly where he wanted to be, was Churchill, who throughout the strike edited a four-page daily newspaper, the British Gazette. A blatant tool of government propaganda, it falsely assailed the TUC for attacking the constitution and threatening order while simultaneously jeering that the effort was for nought.

More crucial, Baldwin had also mobilized the army and volunteers to protect transportation services. Many volunteers who assumed the strikers’ roles may have felt they were engaging in what the American philosopher William James called “the moral equivalent of war”—the discipline engendered by armed conflict. Keeping Britain functioning called for reserves of idealism that the past brutal conflict had vastly reduced.

Considering the bitter emotions involved, it was surprising that casualties were comparatively limited during the strike: 41 people treated for injuries at the hands of baton-wielding mounted police. But it would be a mistake to say there was no damage.

Several train crashes occurred, with nonprofessional drivers—volunteers to fill vacancies left by those out in sympathy with the strikers—at the helm. One such accident at the Edinburgh Waverley station—a train hitting wagons in the tunnel—left three people dead.

Though Baldwin called for no reprisals—and the General Strike was over in little more than a week, with no concessions won by the strikers—the miners whose desperate plight sparked this epic owner-union capitalist tried to tough it out for another half year, when they were forced to yield to their bosses’ implacable demand: longer hours, less pay.

The hard heel on their necks was reinforced by government action in 1927 in the form of the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, which outlawed sympathy strikes—legislation so seemingly successful that to this day, Britain has experienced no other general strike. 

By 1928, TUC membership had plummeted to half a million, and to maintain future electoral viability, the Labour Party felt forced—at least for a while—to moderate its more militant elements.

It took more than a decade, but British sympathy for the strikers increased markedly by the end of World War II, as reflected in the books (and film adaptations) The Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin and How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.

Quote of the Day (The Knicks’ Mike Brown, on Being ‘Linus’ to Jalen Brunson’s ‘Blanket’)

“What's the dude's name on Snoopy? Linus? He’s got a blanket. I'm Linus, and Jalen [Brunson] is my blanket. He helps me relax throughout the course of a game. That’s what great players do. They keep you poised, they make the game easier for everyone else and they help you get through a stretch.”—New York Knicks coach Mike Brown, on star guard and team sparkplug Jalen Brunson, quoted by James L. Edwards III, “With Brunson Leading the Knicks, The Good Old Days Are Here Now,” The New York Times, May 12, 2026

No less an authority than Walt Frazier has called Jalen Brunson “sagacious” and “tenacious,” even likening him to teammate and fellow Basketball Hall of Famer Willis Reed in his team-first orientation and heart.

Frazier and sportscaster Stephen A. Smith have even gone on record as saying that, if Brunson leads his team to the NBA Championship that has eluded the New York Knicks for a half century, he will rank among the all-time great franchise players.

If you’re like me, you groan when you read statements like this. First, let’s get through these final two rounds of the playoffs (which have become so long that they should be called “tournaments” instead), where potential obstacles loom in the form of injuries (will OG Anunoby be himself again after that right hamstring strain?) and the eventual champion of the NBA West.

Even so, long-suffering fans can applaud what Brunson has done to date: a thoroughgoing demolition of the Philadelphia 76ers (not just a sweep, some wags had it, but a “deep clean”), and long term, making Madison Square Garden a place of relevance and electricity again after years in the doldrums.

Edwards cites important numbers to put it all in perspective:

“Since Brunson came to New York, the Knicks have won at least 45 games every season, including 50-plus wins the last three campaigns. The Knicks won 45 games in a season just one time between 2002 and Brunson’s arrival. New York has reached the second round of the playoffs every year since Brunson donned the blue-and-orange. The Knicks made it out of the first round just once between 2001 and 2022.”

Brunson creates space with his movement off the ball, makes few mistakes, and is positively deadly in the clutch. Moreover, he’s done all of this while standing a mere 6 ft. 2 inches—undersize among the NBA’s behemoths, but a beacon of hope for us normal-size people.

(The image of Jalen Brunson accompanying this post was taken on Apr. 26, 2023 by Erik Drost.)

Quote of the Day (Tim Wu, on Company ‘Convenience Cocoons’)

“The ideal business model for a company now is to create a space where almost everything a consumer wants is available so that person never has to leave. Amazon is perhaps the clearest example of this. Of course, it’s not impossible to leave Amazon’s cocoon and to buy things elsewhere, but the small frictions — like typing in credit-card numbers or creating new accounts — make a huge difference….[T]he careful cultivation of monopoly power tends to keep us inside the system once we’re in.”— Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu quoted by Josie Cox, “Escaping the Convenience Cocoon," Columbia Magazine, Winter 2025-26

The image accompanying this post, of Tim Wu at a 2018 “Curse of Bigness” event, was taken on Dec. 4, 2018, by New America.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Parks and Recreation,’ on a Pivotal Moment in a Beauty Pageant)

[Serving as a judge in the Miss Pawnee Beauty Pageant, Leslie hopes to weed out one contestant whose lack of cranial matter is cheerfully overlooked by the male-dominated panel.]

Leslie Knope [played by Amy Poehler]: “Trish, Alexis de Tocqueville called America ‘The Great Experiment.’ What can we do, as citizens, to improve on that experiment?”

Trish Ianetta [played by April Eden]: “Uh, well, uh, I think America is the land of the free, which is a wonderful thing, and also the brave, where people can live. And nobody can ever take that away from you, and it never gives up. But the high birthing rate of immigrants frightens me! No offense to anyone out there, but if it were up to me and my family, I would actually call it our America, and not their America! Thank you.”

[The audience applauds enthusiastically.]

Leslie: “Don't applaud that. She didn't—she didn't answer my question.”— Parks and Recreation, Season 2, Episode 3, “Beauty Pageant,” original air date Oct. 1, 2009, teleplay by Katie Dippold and Harris Wittels, directed by Jason Woliner

This is a scene in which the full vacuity of a character can only be conveyed by watching an actor rather than by reading the admittedly clever dialogue.

In a few years, it sounds like Trish and her family would be among the original, hard-core MAGA contingent.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Why Christ Came)

“Before all else, Christ came so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this so that they would catch fire with love for Him who first loved them, and so that they would also love their neighbor as He commanded and showed by His example—He who made Himself their neighbor by loving them when they were not close to Him but were wandering far from Him.” —“Doctor of the Church” St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), On Catechizing the Uninstructed (400 AD)

Flashback, May 1966: Floundering NY Yankees Replace Keane With Houk

Only a year and a half from managing the St. Louis Cardinals to a seven-game World Series championship over the New York Yankees, then resigning to take over the team he defeated, Johnny Keane (pictured) was fired 60 years ago this month after enduring a sixth-place finish in the American League in 1965 and a 4-16 start to the next season.

The Bronx Bombers may have felt confident that replacement Ralph Houk—who had managed the squad to three straight pennants and two world championships before becoming general manager for two seasons—would turn the club around. Indeed, the team proceeded to win 13 of the first 17 games after the return of “The Major” (a reference to his World War II service).

It was all a mirage, however. By the end of the year, the team had fallen into last place—a finish predicted by fading slugger Mickey Mantle in a private conversation with a reporter in spring training—and the first time the team had sunk to this level since 1912.

That ugly denouement was in keeping with the way the team’s top brass terminated Keane (not to mention his predecessor, beloved icon Yogi Berra, dropped after losing the 1964 World Series). 

It happened on a Friday—within 24 hours of now-minority owner Dan Topping scorning the rumors of the skipper’s departure as ridiculous—and, following a loss in Anaheim, Calif., conveniently timed so that most fans would not hear the bad news until they opened their Sunday papers.

Nobody realized that the team’s precipitous slide was not a temporary blip but the start of a decade in the wilderness before it returned to the postseason.

The days when the team’s fans could rely on seeing their team in October—when fans in other cities would grumble that cheering for them was like rooting for U.S. Steel—were long gone. “A sequence of historic events and bad decisions in 1964 changed the course of baseball history, ending four decades of Yankee dominance,” wrote sportswriter Leonard Koppett.

Those multiple, interlocking forces included:

*A bad managerial fit: In his memoir Uppity, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman (and future Yankee broadcaster) Bill White bluntly stated that Keane, the former manager he had come to admire, “tried to apply a National League hard-work ethic to an American League team of complacent, aging superstars and was resented for it.” The Yankees saw what White and others recognized—that he demanded much from players—and missed, beneath his strait-lacked, religious exterior, what they well knew: that he respected and rewarded effort. The team was particularly incensed when Keane fined clubhouse leader Mantle for showing up to a game hung over. Despite the players’ pro-forma statements to the press after Keane’s termination that they felt their underperformance had let him down, they admitted years later that he’d effectively lost control of the locker room.

*Injuries: It was bad enough that the team’s cornerstones in pitching (Whitey Ford, blocked artery in his pitching arm) and the plate (Mantle, hurt shoulder and pulled hamstring; Roger Maris, broken right hand) were sidelined for much of 1965 and still adversely affected in 1966. But the squad was also reeling from ailments that debilitated shortstop Tony Kubek, starting pitcher Jim Bouton, and catcher Elston Howard—and the team was on notice that second baseman Bobby Richardson, though still young at 31, would retire by the end of the season.

*A lost advantage in the new amateur draft system: The draft gave underperforming teams a better chance at picking prized prospects, undercounting powerhouse franchises like the Yankees.

*New ownership in the Kansas City Athletics: In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Yankees and A’s engaged in several trades that were so lopsided in the Bombers’ favor that many observers suspected something nefarious, even charging that the Midwestern team was, in effect, a “farm team” for the Bombers, giving them key players like Maris, Ralph Terry, and Clete Boyer. Whatever the truth of the arrangement, new A’s owner Charles O. Finley was so annoyed by what he heard that, in February 1961, he had a “Shuttle Bus to Yankee Stadium” burned as a not-so-subtle indication that the old ways were over.

*New ownership in the Yankees: In 1964, owners Dan Topping and Del Webb sold an 80% share in the Yankees to CBS. The transaction, shifting control of the club to the number-one television network, signaled a shift from a sportsman model of ownership to one owned by a conglomerate. (David Halberstam’s October 1964 is especially good at explaining the shock this represented to the baseball establishment.) As it happened, CBS had not done as much due diligence as they should have into the problems associated with the most famous franchise in sports.

*Corporate disinvestment in baseball operations: In trying to maximize the worth of the ball club in the late 1950s in preparation for an eventual sale, Topping and Webb had been told that, to stay on top, the team had spent heavily in several areas. The partners then cut their expenses in areas such as the farm system, scouting, and roving instructors. After a year or two, the realization dawned on CBS that Topping and Webb that, with their top stars aging—and even younger ones unexpectedly hurt—they had few options coming up who could replace them.

The nadir of the Bombers came on September 22, when only 413 fans showed up at Yankee Stadium for a drizzly weekly makeup game with the Chicago White Sox. Announcer Red Barber lost his job for highlighting the empty stands during the game.

The visual impact of all of this might have been embarrassing, but not any more so than the Yankees’ fall from contention and grace. The team would not appear in the postseason again until two more seismic forces appeared in the Seventies: free agency and the new owner who exploited it, George Steinbrenner.

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on a ‘Contrarian’ Approach to Writing Historical Fiction)

“I think many of us who write fiction are contrarians at heart. You know, the world says, ‘This is the this is the way the world is’ and we say, ‘Oh, no. No, we're going to make up our own world, even if it feels like the real world. We're going to correct it. We're going to tell it better. We're going to tell the story of history in a more interesting way.”—American novelist Alice McDermott, in conversation with David Rubenstein on “America’s Book Club,” C-SPAN, original air date Apr 19, 2026

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,’ on a Source of Opera Funding)

[Longfellow Deeds, suddenly inheriting $20 million from his uncle, finds himself besieged by the opera board of directors.]

Longfellow Deeds [played by Gary Cooper]: “Gee, I'm busy. Do the opera people always come here for their meetings?”

Cornelius Cobb [played by Lionel Stander]: “Uu-hum.”

Deeds: “That's funny. Why is that?”

Cobb: “Why do mice go where there's cheese?”—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), screenplay by Robert Riskin and Clarence Budington Kelland, directed by Frank Capra

In the last few weeks, at least as far as the Metropolitan Opera is concerned, the cheese moved. The agreement that the Met announced last fall for the Saudi Arabian government to provide more than $800 million over eight years came unraveled, just one more casualty of the Iranian War and the resulting Strait of Hormuz standoff.

What will the Met do now? Even looking to a misogynistic, authoritarian Mideast regime to keep it afloat was…a stretch. Now, the longtime cultural institution might be hearing more variants on this sharp rejoinder from Mr. Deeds: “I personally wouldn't care to be the head of a business that kept losing money! That wouldn't be common sense.”

Song Lyric of the Day (The Rolling Stones, on a Line of Cars, ‘All Painted Black’)

“I see a line of cars and they're all painted black
With flowers and my love, both never to come back.”—English rock ‘n’ rollers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Paint It Black,” from the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath LP (1966)

Sixty years ago today, “Paint It Black,” was released as a single in the U.S., eventually spending two weeks at number one during the summer and serving as the lead song of their fourth studio album, Aftermath.

Among the early hits of the Rolling Stones, this one remains distinctive to me. With “Satisfaction” in 1965, Mick Jagger was already well-launched on the misogyny that characterized so many of his subsequent lyrics, and he stayed stuck in the same mental groove in in two songs from this new collection, “Under My Thumb" and "Stupid Girl."

But “Paint It Black” gave evidence of something larger than dissatisfaction with “the birds” that so obsessed the Stones’ lead singer. It’s far more than the sweet, strings-laden melancholy of “Yesterday” by their compatriots in the British Invasion, the Beatles.

From Brian Jones’ unusual, even unnerving sitar opening, the Stones were evoking a severe depression with the potential to throw you off your axis, even locating it in something specific: grief (that “line of cars” suggesting a funeral procession).

“ ‘Paint It Black’—I wrote the melody, he [Jagger] wrote the lyrics,” Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “It’s not that you can say in one phrase he wrote that and he did that. But the musical riff is mostly coming from me. I’m the riff master.”

According to Simon Harper’s May 2025 account, the March 1966 recording session for the tune in RCA’s Los Angeles studio wasn’t jelling. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham had decided that, if no movement occurred in 10 minutes, they’d move on.

Just then, bassist Bill Wyman suggested Hammond organ pedals, with Jones—tiring of his normal six-string guitar and becoming the band’s de facto multi-instrumentalist—tried out sitar chords he’d been strumming, the byproduct of tutelage under virtuoso Harihar Rao.

The song had evolved into something far more mesmerizing and disturbing than what everyone in the studio had been hearing originally. The other Stones supposedly felt that their collective improvisational input entitled them to share songwriting credit on the band’s sixth single with Jagger and Richards.

In the end, it may not have mattered that much. In the early 1970s, to free themselves from their early, pugnacious manager Allen Klein, the Stones signed away rights to this and others up to 1971.

And that would be enough fill most ordinary people with the kind of depression associated with “Paint It Black”—except that the Stones have made so much more money, and been even more savvy about saving it, since then.

Oh, by the way: some audiophiles have their recordings of the song with a comma in the title: “Paint It, Black,” as seen in the image accompanying this post. Why?

Years later, Richards confirmed that it was the band’s intention not to include the comma. It was a mistake on the part of their record company, Decca, that produced the errant punctuation mark.

This reminds me of what happened with one of my favorite Supremes songs, “Stoned Love.” Writer Kenny Thomas had written it as “Stone Love,” intending to evoke the strength of amour with the lyrics. Yet when it came back from the Motown warehouse, the letter “d” had been tacked onto the first word of the title.

I couldn’t help but think that someone at the record plant had been stoned when he made that mistake—and that similarly, a mind-altering substance led someone at Decca to insert that idiotic, confusing, useless comma. If that was the case, it’s too bad that the Rolling Stones didn’t take the cue and quit drugs cold turkey.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on ‘Golden Moments in the Stream of Life’)

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”—English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quote of the Day (Idris Elba, on Bad Guys’ Appeal to Audiences, Actors, and Authors)

“These people get to say things that we only think in the deepest, darkest recesses of our brains. They say horrible things and scream horrible things and get to be completely socially unacceptable. As an actor, that’s sometimes a gift, sometimes a bit of therapy. These characters tend to be well-written. When you see a really interesting bad guy, you’re going to think about the actor, but think about the writer. It’s the writer who’s dark. You’ve got to give him or her a hug.”— British actor-director Idris Elba, on playing villains, quoted by Lane Florsheim, “My Monday Morning: Idris Elba on 4 A.M. Workouts and the Best Part of Playing a Bad Guy,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8-9, 2024

The image accompanying this post, of Idris Elba at the Berlinale 2018, was taken on Feb. 22, 2018, by Harald Krichel.

Flashback, May 1926: Miffed Sinclair Lewis Nixes Pulitzer for ‘Arrowsmith’

After bypassing Sinclair Lewis twice in the past half-dozen years, the Pulitzer Prize board –whether in recognition of present merit or compensation for past mistakes—awarded him the fiction prize for Arrowsmith in early May 1926.

Whether out of genuine principle or annoyance over his Main Street being passed over in 1920 for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or, in 1922, his Babbitt for Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Lewis rejected the citation. It may have been the most resounding rebuke of a cultural institution before George C. Scott and Marlon Brando refused to accept their Best Actor Oscars in the early 1970s.

Privately, Lewis told publisher Alfred Harcourt that he intended to turn it down because of “the Main Street burglary.” While some observers suspected peevishness on his part, Lewis gave a more high-minded public justification.

The terms of the Pulitzer called for the award to go to work that represented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood”—precisely the grounds on which Main Street and Babbitt, with their withering satire, had been bypassed before.

Those terms, Lewis wrote in his letter of rejection, “would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

With three bestselling, highly acclaimed novels to his credit, Lewis wielded a great deal of credibility, particularly when he framed his rejection in the context of his also declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His refusal of the Pulitzer and the $1,000 that went with it earned front-page notice in The New York Times.

As there always are in such cases, cynics wondered if there was more to the situation than Lewis explained, and their case was bolstered four years later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature—particularly because, in turning down the Pulitzer, he had stated that “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous.” [emphasis added]

Arrowsmith may have been the most universally appealing of Lewis’ novels to this point, featuring a protagonist who, though flawed, was an idealistic, science-oriented doctor dedicated wholly to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

While not dispensing with the author’s gift for satire (in this case, targeting medical quackery, public-health bureaucrats, and doctors who shamelessly pursuit financial success at the expense of patients), it gave readers a chance to admire a major character unreservedly.

As the son and brother of doctors, Lewis came by his interest in the medical profession naturally. But what many critics and ordinary readers may not have realized at the time is that the career of Martin Arrowsmith drew on Lewis’ recent friendship with 35-year-old microbiologist and pathologist Paul De Kruif—one that became so close that it evolved into a genuine working collaboration.

As James Tobin explains in this blog post, Lewis even suggested to De Kruif that he be listed as co-author, with the two splitting royalties 50-50. The doctor, as much stunned by the generous offer as aware that Lewis’ name constituted the proposed project’s main selling point, thought that the split should be 75% to 25% in Lewis’ favor.

In the end, either Lewis’s publisher or the author himself rejected the microbiologist’s request for a single line on the title page: “In collaboration with Paul De Kruif.”

Instead, Lewis set out his debt to De Kruif in a different fashion, acknowledging his help “not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his suggestions in the planning of the fable itself  – for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist.”

In the end, it wasn’t insufficient acknowledgement of his creative input that fractured De Kruif’s relationship with Lewis, but at least several incidents of the latter’s erratic, often alcohol-fueled misbehavior that at last couldn’t be ignored.

Nevertheless, his association with the now-prizing author benefited De Kruif enough that he came to write a bestselling nonfiction account of medicine later that year, Microbe Hunters, launching a second career for him as a popular writer of medical histories, biographies, and public-health advocacy.

After winning the Nobel Prize, as his alcoholism worsened, most critics agreed that the quality of Lewis’ work suffered, and his reputation took a further hit with Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography. But periodically, readers who have returned to the novels written at his peak discover their continuing relevance, and Arrowsmith is no exception.

As I mentioned in this post from late last year, though not read as widely as two other novels published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, it shared with them a searing criticism of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties.

More than a few 21^st-century patients will nod appreciatively at how, in med school, Arrowsmith listens to a professor who extols the value of salesmanship to his students—including the value of convincing patients of the need for dubious small but money-making operations.

They will also detect the early baleful influence of Big Pharma in the Hunziker Company’s harassment of Arrowsmith’s mentor, the German scientist Max Gottlieb, for his reluctance to market an antitoxin he’s developed until he’s absolutely certain of its effectiveness—and, since COVID-19, they will shudder on the enormous pressures and responsibilities felt by Arrowsmith as he battles the outbreak of bubonic plague on an island in the West Indies.