TV Quote of the Day (‘Desperate Housewives,’ In Which Gaby Assesses Her Husband’s Life Change)

Gaby Solis [played by Eva Longoria] to her suddenly socially conscious husband: “Carlos, you help the poor and downtrodden... a group with a very flexible schedule.”— Desperate Housewives, Season 8, Episode 23, “Finishing the Hat,” original air date May 13, 2012, teleplay by Marc Cherry, Jason Ganzel, and Brian Tanen, directed by David Grossman

This Day in Military History (Afghanistan War Ends in Chaotic U.S. Withdrawal)

Aug. 30, 2021—Less than two weeks removed from the anticipated complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Taliban forces forced that timetable to be radically revised.

Army Major General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the 9/11 terrorists.

More than a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming eight months into his administration, the images of civilians clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.

Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after that.

Periodically, American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer to complete Afghan military self-reliance.

But multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001, ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:

*Failing to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.

*The Iraq War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed. The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more troops, money, and focus down the line."

*Misguided drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai) against the continuing American presence.

*Corruption in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”

*Lies and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

*Donald Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.

The public’s overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:

*American concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage. George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.

*Questions remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these connections.

*The overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.

(The image accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on Love and Worthiness)

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” —American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), “The Power and Meaning of Love,” in Disputed Questions (1960)

Quote of the Day (Mila Kunis, on Advice That Has Stuck With Her)

“Don't make permanent decisions on temporary feelings. Also, it's OK to change your mind. That's the biggest thing I wish I could go back and change about my youth. It’s all right to say, ‘You know what, I don’t like this anymore. I’m going to move on.’”— Ukrainian-American actress and model Mila Kunis, now 43, on advice given that she's found useful, quoted by Ava Mason, “My Monday Morning: Mila Kunis,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2025-January 2026

The image accompanying this post of Mila Kunis, speaking at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, CA, was taken on July 12, 2012, by Gage Skidmore of Peoria, AZ.

Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, With a Bad Guess About American Culture in the Past Decade)

“What sorts of novels, poems, films, television series, video games, paintings, music, or graphic novels will adequately reflect America’s next decade? We don’t have any idea yet. We can’t: Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Donald Trump’s interest in the arts, gauged on a scale from one to 100, is somewhere between zero and negative 10—lower than any president in the last 50 years. Some of those presidents didn’t give a hoot about the arts, but at least they found it politic to pretend. Trump won’t. In fact, he may not even notice they’re there.”—Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood, “Creative Reconstruction,” The Nation, Feb. 6/13, 2017

Margaret Atwood developed a reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.

Yet it turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture. It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”

In other words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the already vast powers of his office to crush them.

Count among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood Reporter account from earlier this week.

In implementing plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of academe.

But the algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen, writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.”

Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building down.

Even before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures, as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American figures.

Nevertheless, he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s “America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or limited-edition U.S. passports.

When late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a similar fate at ABC.

Anytime something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate either Republican or Democratic fans.)

I guess we should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say, literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential war President.

His second term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7. That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated by images from the state.

Unfortunately, this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.

But she was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.

Joke of the Day (Tina Fey, on a New Form of Plastic Surgery)

“There's a new procedure I'm doing a lot where they freeze your fat off you, then make it into a whipped dessert, and you eat it again.” — American actress and screenwriter Tina Fey, quoted by Dan Snierson, “Tina and Amy Boss Us Around (And You Love It!)”, Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 20, 2013

Song Lyric of the Day (Dolly Parton, on Her ‘Coat of Many Colors’)

“My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be.
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”—Grammy-winning country-music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton (1946-2026), title tune from her Coat of Many Colors LP (1971)
 
There’s a reason why Dolly Parton was remembered not just with respect for her talent, but even with love for her personality: she was so transparently down to earth. She never forgot where she came from: Locust Ridge, TN, in a tiny log cabin with her parents and 11 siblings, but without electricity or running water.
 
There will certainly be those who say that she achieved success through hard work. No argument from me there. But I think it’s also fair to say that, despite what some cynics say, you don’t have to step on other people’s toes to get ahead in life. Her career proved that, too, in abundance.

(The image accompanying this post, of Dolly Parton accepting the Liseberg Applause Award 2010, was created on Nov. 16, 2010, by Curtis Hilbun.)

Quote of the Day (Teresa Carpenter, on ‘Crime As Entertainment’ in the Eighties)

“It would be no exaggeration to call the ’80s the decade of Crime as Entertainment. An epoch where fascination with ‘reality’ permeated every nook and crevice of television. The first and most visible manifestation of the phenomenon was the unprecedented number of miniseries and movies-of-the-week based loosely upon true tales of mayhem. In 1981, there was Murder in Texas recreating the demise of Texas heiress and equestrian, Joan Hill. The following year brought The Executioner’s Song based upon Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the felonious life and ultimate electrocution of Gary Gilmore. Nineteen-eighty-four was a bloody year, giving us both The Burning Bed and Fatal Vision, followed close upon by the following year’s extravaganza, The Atlanta Child Murders. Nineteen-eighty-seven produced not one, but two, network miniseries on the rather minor case of Frances Schreuder, a demented Mormon heiress who induced her son to kill her father. And, of course, in the closing months of the decade were offerings fresh off the newsstands: The Preppie Murder and Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, “1980-1989: Crime as Entertainment,” The Village Voice, Jan. 2, 1990

Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer. 

That would not be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over again.

It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties. 

His mother was an Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term “preppy.”

Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown. 

In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)

What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point. 

It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.

It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred. 

But editors needed a way to convey the morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the trick.

Then Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed, and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.

The shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to “hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way to dispute his story.

Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the defendant, was responsible for her own death.

The judge in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press as a record of her encounters with other young men.  Moreover, for a New York Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.

Litman sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Then, with the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”

It was too late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.

Even after serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law. Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years ago.

Ironically, he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.

After seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.

Unfortunately, today, even after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.

In that sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"

This Day in Art History (Death of Thomas Moran, Painter of Dramatic Western Landscapes)

Aug. 25, 1926— Thomas Moran, a British emigrant whose many sweeping landscapes led him to become known as “the dean of American painting,” died at age 89 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

His most significant art resulted from his participation in Ferdinand V. Hayden's 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to the Yellowstone region in the West. When he returned east, Congress bought for inclusion in the Capitol Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (pictured) and The Chasm of the Colorado, for the then-princely sum of $10,000 each.

The sensation that these sparked created a groundswell of support for creating, within a year, Yellowstone National Park—the cornerstone of the parks system that a Ken Burns documentary called “America’s Best Idea.”

Displacement motivated the Moran family’s migrations in his childhood, an involuntary movement that he would later convert to a more positive—and lucrative—wanderlust. 

His parents, who were handloom weavers, had left Dublin, Ireland for Bolton, Lancashire, England to improve their economic prospects. But mechanization put them out of work and compelled them to move to Kensington, just outside Philadelphia, PA.

While working as an apprentice at a local wood engraving firm, Moran took up painting and drawing, until he became adept at watercolors and illustrations. Influenced by British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Moran was uninterested in “realism,” but instead aimed for “idealization.” “The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture,” he explained.

Despite his strenuous attempts to build his practice and reputation, Moran was not a logical addition to the 1871 Geological Survey Expedition, in the eyes of others or even necessarily himself. First, the very idea of having an artist dedicated solely to recording impressions of a new territory hadn’t even occurred to the normally visionary Thomas Jefferson when he authorized the Lewis and Clark Expedition nearly seven decades before.

But the rumors of wonders in the Yellowstone region—along with entrepreneurs like Jay Cooke who hoped advertisements would stir travel to this virtually unknown American interior—sparked the need for a visual record of what was encountered. 

A railroad manager and friend of Moran’s urged Hayden to hire him for this purpose, with the added inducement that the artist would pay his own way and simply hoped for a cavalry escort for protection.

It does not appear that Hayden and his associates were informed that Moran was frail and had never trekked through anything approximating the physical environment where he would go now. But he quickly impressed his counterpart in photography on the expedition, William Henry Jackson, with his “fine courage…[N]one was more untiring on the trail, or less mindful of unaccustomed food or hard bed under a little shelter tent, than he was.”

For most of the 1870s, to be closer to New York publishers who published his work in their magazines, Moran and his wife Mary (another artist) lived in Newark, NJ. In the early 1880s they relocated to East Hampton, NY, the beginning of that town’s status as an art mecca. (Today, their studio is a National Historic Landmark overseen by the East Hampton Historical Society.)

Public taste can be fickle, and Moran had to adapt to buyers no longer interested in the Far West scenes that had once caused sensations. With obvious resignation about the changing art market, Moran told a reporter, "I prefer to paint western scenes, but the Eastern people don't appreciate the grand scenery of the Rockies. They are not familiar with mountain effects and it is much easier to sell a picture of a Long Island swamp than the grandest picture of Colorado."

Even after his beloved wife died in 1900, Moran continued to travel, in the company of his daughter Ruth or his old friend and expeditionary companion Jackson. He revisited the places that initially fascinated him while adding Venice as a subject of some of his most popular paintings.

It would take seven decades before the National Gallery of Art mounted the first major retrospective of Moran’s work, coinciding with the 125^th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. 

Museumgoers were able to behold on that occasion 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs—including, most importantly, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Chasm of the Colorado, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875), which Moran and his admirers were previously unable to convince Congress to keep together as one whole.

(For an informed analysis of Moran’s technique, I urge you to read landscape painter Stapleton Kearns’s April 2011 blog post.)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)

Quote of the Day (Frances Trollope, Loathing a Most American Summer Fruit)

“The huge fruit [watermelon] is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”—English novelist and travel writer Frances Trollope (1779-1863), Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

To her infinite horror, Mrs. Trollope first came across this fruit (one I love, BTW) while visiting Cincinnati in 1830. I’m afraid that her bad opinion wouldn’t be improved by the image accompanying this post: Juliette Lewis in the 1993 film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

This Day in Theater History (Novelist Balzac Scores Stage Hit at Last, Posthumously)

Aug. 23, 1851—Honoré de Balzac might have been dead for a year and five days, but he achieved the stage triumph he’d been craving for nearly three decades at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris with the comedy Mercadet.

I am far more familiar with the novels and short stories that comprise La Comédie humaine, a wide-ranging, interwoven panorama of French life in the first half of the 19^th century, than with Balzac’s plays.

Astonishingly, he did not confine his energies to the more than 90 novels and dozens of tales for which he is best known, but also turned out six major plays, along with a verse drama from his early 20s, Cromwell, that should probably best be termed “apprentice fiction.”

(Oh, I almost forgot: in his 20s, to keep the financial wolves at bay, he churned out essays and journalistic pieces, many under pseudonyms, and at the time of his death he also left 46 works unfinished. And I thought Hemingway was bad!)

What audiences saw 175 years ago in Mercadet wasn’t Balzac’s first crack at this material. It had first emerged from his busy pen as Le Faiseur (“The Speculator”). It must have been something of a mess, because it fell to Adolphe d’Ennery to act as what we might call a “script doctor” today.

You might call d’Ennery Balzac’s counterpart for the stage, as he was sole or co-author of more than 280 plays—except with this difference: he knew how to keep and even boost the totals he made from his work. 

He certainly had a good idea of how to fix Le Faiseur, whittling it down from five to three acts, retitling it, and making it easily the biggest theater success of Balzac’s career (though even in this instance, it was only a moderate success).

Let’s give Balzac some credit instead of ridiculing him for his lack of stage success in his lifetime. First, he took great pleasure in adding drama to his fiction.

In a February 1934 French Review article with the intriguing title “Balzac Precursor of Eugene O’Neill,” the French and Italian literature scholar Hermann H. Thornton observed, “Only the most literal-minded compiler of literary manuals could fail to see in him a dramatic author of the first rank,” pointing to his tendency to demarcate scenes, to read his own work aloud, and to speak “with excellent diction.”

Moreover, he hasn’t been the only novelist who’s had trouble in turning from fiction to the footlights.

Though John O’Hara wrote the “book” portion of the classic Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, that show lopped in its initial 1940 run—and his other unproduced dramas (collected in the 1961 collection, Five Plays) have, to my knowledge, been barely remembered, never mind staged, since the pugnacious author wrote them.

Charles Dickens’ attempt at amateur theatricals led not to major London stage success but to a clandestine love affair with a teenaged actress (as I explained in this post from 18 years ago).

And I can’t neglect to mention Henry James—whose Guy Domville was such a crushing fiasco that it ended after a half-dozen attempts his desperate hope for a London stage hit, as I related in this post.

Stage flops were not the only thing that James and Balzac (worshipped as “the father of us all” by the American expatriate) had in common: they were both obsessed by what James called “the money passion.” 

It seems that, though D'Ennery streamlined the novelist’s script, he didn’t strip away its devastating satire of post-revolutionary French bankers and mountebanks who will let nothing stand in the way of profits—including a roguish, inveterate speculator of a father who is out as much for his own creature comforts as for his daughter’s dowry.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on God and Creation)

“To love God is to be grateful for the Creation and the Intelligence that keeps the universe going (while man is forever assaulting it). How odd that the first laws of science are still scriptural—that there is a world here rather than nothing."—American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on Movie Revival Houses of the Seventies)

“Revival houses in the 70s, nearly all of them shoestring operations, had their own distinct character, a creaky, lived-in, refuge-for-lost-souls wombiness that honored the passage of time and fostered sinking into reverie. It was as if the graininess of the films seeped into the worn carpets and seat cushions. The Elgin, despite its Deco exterior (preserved during its renovation and resurrection as the Joyce, home to contemporary dance), had a disreputable mise en scène, perhaps the residue of its midnight showings of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos. Architecturally, the Thalia was a true weirdo, with its reverse parabolic floor and flimsy soundproofing; ventilation didn’t seem to be a priority, either—'The air in the theater seemed left over from F.D.R.’s third term,’ one Thalia veteran recalled. (Now an adjunct to Symphony Space, the Thalia has been handsomely re-modernized and re-christened the Leonard Nimoy Thalia.) The seats at Theatre 80 St. Marks [pictured] were a stress test for the lumbar region, and the rear screen projection often made black-and-white films look bleachy, but the concession bar served Colombian coffee—singular then—and the audiences seemed more collegial than those at revival houses that attracted more solitary jaybirds. The much-traveled prints were usually far from pristine, at worst a flickering strip of scratches, blotches, missing frames, and faded colors. But there’s something to be said for encountering art in a primitive condition—it makes the synapses work a little harder.” —American essayist James Wolcott, “Revival of the Fittest,” Vanity Fair, February 2018

Though I had a chance to take a film class taught by a well-known film critic while I was an undergrad, I disdained the opportunity. It was a “gut” course—i.e., easy—I had heard, so my guilt overtook my curiosity. 

I had to wait until after I graduated in the early Eighties for my true education in classic movies to begin, in precisely the sometimes scruffy revival houses that Wolcott describes so well.

It started with a short-lived theater on Eighth Avenue in the Forties where I saw Body Heat and Gallipoli long earlier their original runs, before I advanced (or, maybe I should say, backtracked) to more vintage fare. 

At the Thalia, for instance, I saw silent films accompanied by Steve Sterner on piano (though I must say, nothing beat Lee Erwin on the mighty organ in a far different venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for The Phantom of the Opera).

I continued with Theatre 80 St. Marks, where I saw Orson Welles’ 1948 version of Macbeth and wondered if the hideous voices was due more to a poorly recorded soundtrack or the director’s disastrous decision to attempt a Scottish accent. 

(Later, I continued to attend performances at this East Village space when it became for a number of years the home of the Pearl Theatre Company.)

The Regency Theatre furthered my education in film until, after 68 years of operation, it was taken over by the chain Cineplex Odeon (which many of us felt like calling “Cineplex Odious”) in 1987, then transferred my allegiance to the Biograph Cinema.

Though it only lasted from 1988 to 1991, it continued the Regency’s tradition of running weeks of themes so you could catch up on directors and theaters quickly. 

(For instance, in the “Screen Teams” series, for one segment devoted to William Powell and Myrna Loy, I saw the eightysomething but still game Ms. Loy in the audience, waving to fans in the theater’s front seat for well-deserve applause).

By the early Nineties, the proliferation of the VCR meant the decline of the revival houses. You’ll notice that I used the word “decline” rather than “extinction.” 

If you’re in the New York metro area, you will still find theaters devoted to classic or unusual older films—notably Film Forum or the Museum of Modern Art in the city itself and (mixed with current independent films and live events) the Barrymore Film Center near me in Fort Lee, NJ.

Yes, I am a TCM fan, and against all modern trends, I prefer DVDs to streaming. But nothing beats a movie classic on the big screen. 

It’s not just widescreen epics like Lawrence of Arabia, or silent films to live musical accompaniment, that are shown to their best advantage there.

Simply put, nothing beats sharing the laughs of a great comedy with an audience, or seeing how meticulously a black-and-white film was crafted with its contrasts and shadows. 

For any of my readers who haven’t tried yet these vintage theaters that have inexplicably survived into the digital age, seek them out. This is how movies were meant to be experienced in the first place.

Quote of the Day (Brian Cashman, on His First George Steinbrenner Trauma)

“I told him [the late New York Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner, pictured], ‘This way is faster.’” [Incorrect: The “shortcut” to a haircut appointment, the Third Avenue Bridge, was closed for renovations.] “And he starts going ballistic: ‘’You effing idiot. Take me back to the effing stadium.’ He’s crushing me from the back seat. I mean, my hair was blowing forward because of his bellowing from the back. It was relentless, because that’s how he was. If somebody told me the same story and said they crawled up into the fetal position, I could understand it.”—New York Yankee General Manager Brian Cashman, on “the worst experience of my life” (with then-boss George Steinbrenner, naturally) as a summer intern in the mid-‘80s, quoted by Bruce Schoenfeld, “‘I Feel the Pain More Than I Feel the Joy,’” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 16, 2026

Good God, wasn’t George Costanza available to take The Boss around?

This incident must have been pretty bad. Now, most people would call losing a loved one “the worse experience of my life.” Maybe even losing a job.

In the case of the Yankee GM, I might plop for a divorce that exposed an extremely messy private life to tabloid and late-night talk show ridicule. Maybe even the anecdote in this September 2019 Ian O’Connor profile relating how Steinbrenner humiliated his young charge into personally collecting players' spring training rental car keys before they headed north.

But no, Brian Cashman says this incident driving The Boss around was the worst. Between the sheer physical sensations (the high-decibel insults! the hair blowing! the pushing from the backseat!) and the full-on exposure to baseball’s most impulsive, truculent owner, maybe it was.

If you listen to New York sports radio or podcasts to any extent, you might find some Yankee fans who wish that Steinbrenner was even tougher on Cashman.

Bronx Bomber fans are like Notre Dame football fans: success early in team history has only increased the fury over the lack of a title in recent years, though there’s a good excuse: the games have changed radically since the glory days of The Gipper and Babe Ruth.

So, from now until some point in mid-fall, Yankee fans are on The Cashman Watch: Will George’s son Hal stick by him, or will he be given his walking papers? Many will be venting on sports talk radio if manager Aaron Boone is let go for his squad’s underperformance but that great Houdini Cashman survives yet again.

Until then, just remember the wisdom of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham: “It's a long season and you gotta trust it.”

(The image of Brian Cashman that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 7, 2012, at the American League Divisional Series Game 1 between the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles, by Keith Allison.)

Photo of the Day: Shoe Shop, Old Economy Village, Ambridge PA

When it comes to all the subjects I could write about, too often my curiosity exceeds my time and energy. So it proved on a visit with a close relative in Pittsburgh in October 2019, when we took a day trip to Old Economy Village, 18 miles away from the Steel City in the Beaver County town of Ambridge.

Despite my intention to write about this site, other matters got in the way, such as holidays, COVID-19, disruptions in my career, and other situations. For the longest time, I had forgotten about my time there.

I doubt if many people outside Pennsylvania have heard of this National Historic Landmark, let alone visited it. But this set of buildings tells a fascinating story of how one of the many religious sects that spring into being in 19^th-century America lived and worked communally.

If you want to learn how these believers demonstrated a spirit of entrepreneurship as they sought to live according to the dictates of their faith, viewing the 18 buildings from this community is an excellent place to start.

The accompanying photo I took while there shows the shoe shop. It’s part of the Mechanics’s Building, which also housed tailors and hat makers; for a time, printing operations; and underneath, a wine cellar.

While the Society (or, as they were called, the Harmonists) made and repaired shoes for themselves, it would also do so for the public on request. The footwear would then be sold in the organization’s store.

On display here are tools of the trade, including benches; clamps; adjustable tin patterns; knives, hammers, awls, and other materials for finishing the leather; and lasts that were individually sized to a person’s feet. (Until the 19^th century, believe it or not, one last was used for both left and right feet. Imagine the discomfort!)

What fascinates me as well about the Harmony Society, a sect of German Lutheran separatists, is its place in the history of American utopian communities. One, Brook Farm, founded by Bronson Alcott (yes, Louisa’s father) in 1842, foundered quickly.

Alcott would have done well to see how Old Economy Village under its leaders, the preacher George Rapp (1757-1847) and his adopted son Frederick Rapp (1775-1834), the community’s business manager, managed to thrive for so long.

Part of it goes back to the old real estate mantra “location, location, location.” The 3,000 acres that the Rupps and other Harmony Society leaders purchased were along the Ohio River, offering plenty of opportunities for shipping their products to the established Eastern states, as well as to growing midwestern and western markets via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Moreover, the fertile soil made for excellent farming. Each household had its own garden which provided fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Families, then, were self-sufficient—and the collective abundance was so great that politicians and businessmen in the area took notice. It was a vibrant community with a diversified economy that, as the saying went, placed “the agriculturalist beside the industrialist.”

The Beaver County location was the third that the “Harmonists” created in the United States. The first, in Harmony, PA, was founded in 1804. Eleven years later they moved to New Harmony, IN. After a decade, desiring more opportunity to sell their goods east and dismayed by unfriendly neighbors they moved back to Pennsylvania to a community they named “Harmony.”

(They then sold the Indiana land for $150,000 to the Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen, whose secular, utopian community collapsed after only two years.)

The Harmonists were already attracting considerable notice in their first two decades since coming to America, not always positive. Their practice of celibacy especially came in for biting criticism, notably from the English poet Lord Byron in his mock-epic Don Juan:

When Rapp the Harmonist embargo'd marriage
In his harmonious settlement (which flourishes
Strangely enough as yet without miscarriage,
Because it breeds no more mouths than it nourishes,
Without those sad expenses which disparage
What Nature naturally most encourages)—
Why call'd he 'Harmony' a state sans wedlock?
Now here I 've got the preacher at a dead lock.
 
Because he either meant to sneer at harmony
Or marriage, by divorcing them thus oddly.
But whether reverend Rapp learn'd this in Germany
Or no, 't is said his sect is rich and godly,
Pious and pure, beyond what I can term any
Of ours, although they propagate more broadly.
My objection 's to his title, not his ritual,
Although I wonder how it grew habitual.

Nevertheless, even though the number of Harmonists had already declined to about 500 by the time they settled again in Pennsylvania, the group prospered greatly, exporting their goods not just within the United States but also, by 1825, to 10 European countries. That wealth accumulated through shrewd early investments in the nation’s emerging coal, oil, and railroad industries.

Like the Shakers, the Harmonists had no trouble sustaining themselves economically, but their strict celibacy rules led to the end of the group at its Beaver County settlement. But visitors can still see today how they worked, lived, and even played (yes, the second floor of their Feast Hall served not just for meals but for musical performances on special feast days).

Quote of the Day (Damon Linker, on a Destructive ‘Authoritarian Outlook’)

“Setting aside the question of whether an authoritarian outlook is harmful in religion, and there is a considerable religious and philosophical literature on the subject, an authoritarian outlook can certainly be destructive in politics. A nation in which such an outlook is explicitly encouraged and esteemed will be tempted to support political leaders who promise to shield us from the inherent complexity and difficulty of truth itself. This temptation is especially dangerous in liberal democratic nations, which depend on citizens informing themselves about exceedingly complicated issues, making use of alternative sources of information, doubting the assertions of public authorities, and thrashing out an inevitably tentative truth in open-ended argument and debate. This is the unavoidable price of citizenship in a free society. It is our citizenly duty to be suspicious, and to cultivate suspicion, of any and all who would rescue us from the rigors of our own freedom.”— American journalist and author Damon Linker, “Without a Doubt” (review of Richard John Neuhaus’ “Catholic Matters”), The New Republic, Apr. 3, 2006

Appreciations: Graham Greene, With a Poignant Tale of a Holiday Affair, ‘Cheap in August’

“It was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else: they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’”— British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991), “Cheap in August,” originally printed in The London Magazine, August 1964, reprinted in May We Borrow Your Husband (1967)

The exotic seaside setting might be familiar to readers of the globe-trotting Graham Greene, but the melancholy that gradually supplants the light wit in this short story? It’s a far different variety than the tortured moral dilemmas elsewhere in the Greeneland landscape in novels like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

An Englishwoman, Mary Watson, has come to a Jamaican resort: i.e., when it is “cheap in August.” At 39 years old, in a marriage to an American academic that has become increasingly lifeless, she has concocted an excuse to escape for the kind of “holiday affair” that friends her age have talked about.

She does not expect three weeks with “no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards” to her husband—a period in which she finds herself increasingly isolated from the “jolly bunches” at the resort who have abandoned any attempt to look attractive.

Nor does she expect at the end of that time to find herself being propositioned by an especially unprepossessing fellow tourist, an obese 70-year-old old enough to be her father who goes by the name of Henry Hickslaughter.

He is hardly an attractive figure: unsuccessful in business, distant from his siblings, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, lonely (“I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now”). Yet in spite of herself, she finds herself drawn to this “old shoe comfortable to wear.”

In terms of brevity or intensity of passion, what they share this night is not even a brief encounter but a temporary reprieve against the desolation encroaching on their lives. They will never see each other again, but Mary, out of pity, has alleviated the plight of “the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.”

For Greene, cinema not only provided at times a livelihood (a short-lived stint as a critic in the late 1930s) and the extra assignment (his classic screenplay for the 1949 thriller The Third Man), but an eye for telling details that reveal character.

His use of simile and metaphor is especially pronounced in “Cheap in August,” such as, in the paragraph leading off this post, “like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale”; rear ends that “lurch by like hippos on the way to the water”; and, most surprisingly (to me, anyway), “the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests.”

Collectively, these go far towards depicting the dense humidity and downscale resort in which Mary and Henry, disappointed in where they are in their lives, take stock of themselves.

Moreover, in detailing so carefully these 24 hours in a pair of lovers thrown together by subdued discouragement with life, Greene demonstrates what he meant in this passage in perhaps his best-known novel, The Power and the Glory:

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

In recent years I’ve seen several screen adaptations of Greene’s work, including Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, and, of course, The Third Man. (I would like to see the September 1975 Thames Television adaptation of “Cheap in August,” but it doesn’t look like it’s currently available on mainstream streaming services, or on DVD.)

But I haven’t read him since high school and college, when I went rapidly through The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, The Human Factor, and his second memoir, Ways of Escape. Clearly I knew to go back for more of his voluminous output, especially two of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.