Flashback, October 1726: Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels’ Cuts English Politics—Even Humanity—Down to Size

A London bookseller may have published Gulliver’s Travels 300 years ago this month without knowing the identity of its author, but before long English intellectuals were buzzing that it was the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.

Growing up, I read a shortened version of this tale focusing on the six-inch citizens of Lilliput that was marketed as children’s literature. It wasn’t until college, when I read all four “books” in the Travels, that I realized it was far more:

*a satire of the political scene of Swift’s time;

*a parody of the “true accounts” of the travel genre so popular in the Age of Discovery;

*an early example of science fiction;

*a searing denunciation of what Mark Twain would later call “the damned human race”; and even

*an exercise in irony at the expense of narrator Lemuel Gulliver so sustained that it effectively became a forerunner of modern fiction in undercutting any notion of objective truth.

The ruse that Swift concocted in sending his manuscript to Benjamin Motte for publication paralleled the game he shortly played with readers’ expectations. 

The manuscript arrived with a cover letter from a stranger named Richard Sympson stating that he had just edited a travel narrative by his cousin Gulliver, a surgeon; that Sympson could vouch for Gulliver’s truthfulness; that Motte had three days to decide whether wished to publish it, based on the initial “Satyrical” first two books; and if the answer was yet, Motte would pay two hundred pounds upfront the subsequent two parts of Gulliver’s narrative.

Where to start with all of this?

*The names “Gulliver” and “Sympson” were pseudonyms;

*A friend, fellow satirist John Gay, wrote by hand the cover letter to disguise Swift’s authorship;

*Yet another friend (still unknown) wrote the manuscript, again with no clue that Swift was involved;

*Though the first two books might have been a bit satirical, the last two represented a political hot potato—but, per the agreement with “Sympson,” Motte would still have to pay for it.

Once readers started leafing through the book, they had to make sense of yet another letter, this time purporting to come from Gulliver to Sympson, in which the putative explorer scolds the publisher for releasing this “very loose and uncorrect account of my travels.” At this point, any reader would be bound to ask what on earth he was reading.

Starting with the first book, set in Lilliput, Swift upset readers’ notion of security by playing with notions of size and proportion. Gulliver wakes to find that six-inch people have strapped him down to the beach. This also begins his instinct for unconsciously assuming the mental habits of the strange peoples he visits—in this case, failing to see the ludicrousness of the Lilliputians’ charge that he has engaged in sexual intercourse with the treasurer’s wife in the land.

Like his title character, Swift was, to use the modern cliché, a “fish out of water”—the Anglo-Irish “Dean” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, an outsider who came to view English politics and government with the disdain he had once felt for the Irish Catholic majority in Ireland.

In Book 2, Gulliver is so self-absorbed, so much the “ugly Englishman” that he is shocked to hear the king of Brobdingnag call his countrymen “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Even in his narrative, Gulliver’s failure to make the most elementary mental connections indicates a terrible inability to understand the world—a failure that will finally prove disastrous to him.

In the final book, Swift makes horses capable of reason. Gulliver himself manifests his incredible lack of perception through his ignorance of the significance of words. Immediately after saying of the first “yahoo” (i.e., a filthy, vicious human-like creature ruled over by intelligent horses) that he never saw such an awful animal, he writes that the beast “roared” at him. Later, however, he himself roars when he’s squeezed and when the female yahoo tries to mount him.

His roaring means that Gulliver himself is a yahoo, but he glosses over this painful secret quickly, unaware that he has given a clue to his dread secret already.

Gulliver may be betrayed as a yahoo, but as the narrow of his own adventure he betrays his own mindlessness to the reader. Perhaps Swift is suggesting that, insofar as human beings shy away from and lie about the dirty little secrets confronting them, they run the risk of joining Gulliver in a circle of mindlessness.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bad Seed,’ As an Evil Adult Meets His Match in a Child)

Leroy, a house handyman [played by Henry Jones] [to eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark]:“I thought I'd seen some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest. You wanna know how I know how mean you are? 'Cause I'm mean. I'm smart and I'm mean, and you're smart and you're mean. And you never get caught and I never get caught.”— The Bad Seed (1956), screenplay by John Lee Mahin, adapted from the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March, directed by Mervyn LeRoy

This week—and month—devoted to Halloween, TV schedules are filled with all kinds of horror. Much of it is filled with obvious plot twists and onscreen gore. Few of these programs compare in subtlety and scariness to The Bad Seed, an Eisenhower-era shocker that, despite its attempts to placate Hollywood’s censorship office, can still send chills up the spine seven decades after its release.

It’s a sign of our degenerating popular taste that some online viewers actually thought this movie moved too slowly. Listen, this is hardly Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, okay? You don’t need to see knives raised or blood spilled to feel the suspense ratchet up in this thriller.

You thought that the “Mean Girls” of the Lindsay Lohan movie were bad? They only murdered reputations. Pig-tailed blonde Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Patty McCormack) is onto bigger game. Her sweet smiles mask a penchant for lying, theft...and much worse. 

The only adult who senses the monster beneath Rhoda’s placid, perfect surface is Leroy, a spiteful, leering, Uriah Heep in gardener’s garb. It takes one to know one, as they say. Yet even he doesn’t grasp just how evil she is for the longest time.

Like other characters in the film, Leroy went through a transformation from the printed page to this 1956 film version, then again into a 1985 made-for-TV remake and a 2018 cable thriller, with Blair Brown and Rob Lowe taking turns as Rhoda’s puzzled, terrified parent.

The depiction of the novel’s Leroy, an African-American in the Deep South, would strike modern readers as racist. For whatever reason, he was transformed for the stage and screen as poor white trash.

The dialogue above is as deftly acted as scripted, with Jones’s Leroy modulating from mocking and antagonizing the little girl into grasping that she really is capable of the evil he was only implying before.

In the Fifties, parents threw up their hands over how they could have given birth to and raised troubled, even delinquent, teens. The Bad Seed dared to imagine that the problem dated from the beginning—through heredity. 

To me, that’s a far more frightening explanation than the one offered in the Sixties and Seventies by Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: that it was all the fault of a devil, working black magic outside a poor, innocent darling.

Incidentally, McCormack—as remarkable a child actress as Broadway and Hollywood have ever seen—is 80 years old now. Eight years ago, in a clever bit of stunt casting in an otherwise inferior remake of this cult classic, she did a cameo as little Rhoda’s psychiatrist.

You can just imagine the writer of the teleplay, Barbara Marshall, gleefully rubbing her hands together before typing this bit of dialogue for “Dr. March” (a nod to the author who created it all): “I told Emma she reminds me of me."

Photo of the Day: Deli Skelly

Over the last three decades or so, I’ve become accustomed to Halloween décor popping up all over the place—not just lawns outside homes but also businesses. But the other day was the first time I saw this specimen on a bench outside a longtime landmark, an eatery in my hometown.

Seeing it, I was struck with a thought that I’m sure the establishment’s owners would have groaned to know about: Did this fellow assume his current state suddenly, after sampling the food inside?

Flashback, October 1966: McMurtry’s ‘Last Picture Show’ Opens Window on Stunted Texas Lives

Like Thomas Wolfe and Grace Metalious, Larry McMurtry caused a scandal in his hometown with a novel widely seen as based too closely on real events. 

Though he dedicated The Last Picture Show, published 60 years ago by Dial Press, to the residents of Archer City, Texas, many inhabitants were not thrilled by the attention they received in the first of what he called his “Thalia Trilogy,” nor with the acclaimed 1971 film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich.

David Streitfeld summarized the local reaction in a biography of McMurtry that came out earlier this year, Western Star: 

“There were roughly three camps: Those who thought Larry made it all up. Those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and he should be ashamed of himself. And those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and, well, good for him.”

Many saw the novelist himself in one of the two teenage friends at the center of the story, Sonny Crawford. He denied it (though he did own up to identifying with the later midlife struggles of Sonny’s buddy, Duane Moore).

Others said they were the originals of certain characters—notably Ceil Cleveland Footlick, who even wrote a 1997 memoir titled Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow? in which she claimed to be the inspiration for the teasing teen temptress who creates emotional havoc for Duane, Sonny, and other males in their high school.

McMurtry benefited from a legal environment in which prior obscenity legislation was being overturned, enabling him to depict multiple affairs, conducted almost as much out of boredom as anything else, in his fictional “Thalia” —a name he appropriated from another community, thereby annoying them, too.

Lacking intellectual stimulation, its residents are soon also without entertainment as the local cinema gets ready to close. Stuck, and barely aspiring to go anywhere, they find in sex an outlet to ward off frustration, cruelty, loneliness, despair, and death.

Particularly at that time in American life, readers (and, later, filmgoers) concentrated more on what seemed like McMurtry’s prurient treatment of such matters than on his poignant examination of aimless lives.

Playing the moral center of Thalia, “Sam the Lion,” veteran character actor Ben Johnson demurred over saying one line he deemed objectionable, concerned what his mother would say if she saw him the film. (Eventually Bogdanovich convinced him it was necessary, and Johnson ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.)

The seeds of the novel were evident in a McMurtry short story, “There Will Be Peace In Korea,” published in the Winter 1964 issue of Texas Quarterly and focusing on Duane and Sonny as they try to reestablish their friendship before Duane ships out to Korea. Even that was the residue of the writer’s discarded idea of interconnected short stories modeled on Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Two years after the publication of the Texas Quarterly article, McMurtry had completed a novel that, while departing from the Winesburg idea, still managed with admirable concision to depict the stunted lives of a whole spectrum of Thalia inhabitants.

Critical reaction to The Last Picture Show was mixed, ranging from dismissal (“seems derived from other novels about the sexual plight of the adolescent”—The Los Angeles Times) to enthusiastic (“perhaps the most honest, compelling and masterful novel ever written by a Texan”—The Houston Post).

McMurtry’s parents presented a more united front, in opposition, with his mother hiding the book in the closet and his father asking plaintively of college-educated Larry, “Good Lord, son, with all the words you know, couldn’t you have used some others?”

Four sequels to The Last Picture Show followed, steadily more depressing and less acclaimed: Texasville (1987), Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007), and Rhino Ranch (2009). How much of that was due to McMurtry’s eye for possible future adaptations and how much to the physical and emotional ills of the novelist’s later years is an open question.

But the achievement of the original novel—and of the exquisite film made from it—remains.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the film The Last Picture Show, featuring, from left to right, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd as Sonny, Duane, and Jacy.)

Quote of the Day (Grace Jones, on Her Chief Precautionary Measure When Pregnant)

“The first thing I did when I was pregnant was to give up quaaludes.”— Jamaican-born singer, actress, and model Grace Jones (with Paul Morley), I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (2015)

I am sure her son is most grateful for this sacrifice!

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on the Foolishness of the Simple and the Wise)

“The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.”— Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) “Masks,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Photo of the Day: Early Voting, Richard Rodda Center, Teaneck NJ

Bergen County, where I live in New Jersey, has 10 locations where early voting is held from October 24 through November 1. I cast my ballot at Richard Rodda Center in Teaneck. No matter what your party affiliation, I hope you’ll exercise this right that others before us have advocated—and even died—for before us. 

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Good and Evil)

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Four years ago, I wrote this post on Steinbeck’s flawed but compulsively compelling saga of good and evil. Now comes a Netflix adaptation penned by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the director of the 1955 film version, Elia Kazan).

Network TV mini-series of the Seventies and Eighties tend to plunge down a rabbit hole of popular memory, and unfortunately the 1981 adaptation of the novel is no exception. I have not seen the new version starring Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, but it is hard to think of her topping Jane Seymour (pictured) in the role.

I understand that Zoe Kazan has added a scene (not in Steinbeck’s novel) to explain Cathy’s villainy. I’m not against such changes if employed logically and sparingly. But in some cases, evil is so radical that it may be beyond the ability of a “science” like psychiatry to explain it.

 It’s what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in remarks about Shakespeare’s villain Iago from Othello, termed “motiveless malignity”—the most chilling kind of evil.

Quote of the Day (Ellen Glasgow, on ‘The Change From Baseball to Football’)

“I mean, he notices. He can see the color in the sky, and he knows that the change from baseball to football isn’t the only way to tell when it is autumn. Some men don’t know any more than that about seasons.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and feminist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), In This Our Life (1941)

As I write this, fans of the Tampa Bay Rays may be finally about to realize that sports transition, following a third straight loss to the Milwaukee Brewers that leaves them just one game short of elimination from the World Series. Very soon, they’ll have to start watching Tampa Bay Buccaneer contests. (With that squad at 2-5, let’s see how long they can stand watching those.)

Otherwise, the change in the seasons is not as apparent in Florida as it is up here in the Northeast. In fact, a late dear friend told me once that what she missed in her move to the Sunshine State was the turning of the leaves this time of year.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ on PowerPoint Presentations)

Dwight Schrute [played by Rainn Wilson]: “PowerPoints are the peacock of the business world: all show, no meat.”—The Office, Season 8, Episode 14, “Special Project,” original air date Feb. 9, 2012, teleplay by Amelie Gillette, directed by David Rogers

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Erasmus of Rotterdam, on Choosing a Leader)

“Statues, gold, and gems contribute no more to state government than they do to a master in steering his ship. That one idea which should concern a prince in ruling, should likewise concern the people in selecting their prince: the public weal, free from all private interests.”—Dutch Renaissance humanist, theologian, and philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), The Education of a Christian Prince, translated by Lester K. Born (1936)

One item can be added to the list of three at the start of the above quotation: monuments erected or altered by a leader, often (re)named for himself. Hmm...who could be like that?

Quote of the Day (Sam Mendes, Differentiating Melodrama and Tragedy)

“I think to make a good tragedy you have to constantly threaten melodrama. You could say melodrama is badly written tragedy, and tragedy is well-written melodrama. It’s a very, very thin line. The difference between melodrama and tragedy is in detail and insight.”—English filmmaker and stage director Sir Sam Mendes, quoted by Heidi Julavits, “An Interview With Sam Mendes,” Believer Magazine, Issue Sixty-One, 2009

The image accompanying this post, showing Sam Mendes at during the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Musical opening night at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London UK, was taken on June 25, 2013, by Richard Goldschmidt.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Mayberry Drunk Otis Makes an Unexpected Visit to Jail)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “Otis, what are you doin' here? It's only Friday afternoon!”

Otis Campbell [played by Hal Smith]: “I decided to take a long weekend because of the holiday.”

Barney: “What holiday?”

Otis: “I think it's our anniversary.”

Barney: “Why ain't you home with your wife?”

Otis: “What kind of a holiday would that be?”— The Andy Griffith Show, Season 3, Episode 15, “Barney and the Governor,” original air date Jan. 7, 1963, teleplay by Bill Freedman and Henry Sharp, directed by Bob Sweeney

Quote of the Day (Helen Hunt Jackson, on October, ‘Lavish’ and ‘Scornful’)

“The spring-time holds her white and purple dear;
October, lavish, flaunts them far and near;
The summer charily her reds doth lay
Like jewels on her costliest array;
October, scornful, burns them on a bier.”—American poet, fiction, and travel writer Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), “October,” in Verses (1888), reprinted in The Pioneer Valley Reader, edited by James C. O’Connell (1995)

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on How His Wife Saved 'Carrie'—And His Writing Career)

“[Carrie, his first book] started as a short story. It was going to be one of these stories I sold to Cavalier or Swank or one of those magazines — I had not stepped up to Penthouse at that point. I started it and saw it was going to be longer than a short story, and I threw it away. My wife [Tabitha] picked it out of the trash, smoothed out the pages that I'd written, and she said: ‘This is good. You should go on with this.’ I said, ‘I don't know anything about girls' locker rooms.’ She said, ‘I will tell you everything you need to know.’”—American horror-fiction author Stephen King quoted by Jeremy Egner, “He Is the King,” The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2026

(The image accompanying this post shows Sissy Spacek in the iconic locker-room scene in the 1976 film adaptation of Carrie.)

Quote of the Day (Patricia Highsmith, on Efforts to Solve the Mystery of the Mind)

“The eternal, unanswerable questions, the efforts to solve the mystery and the intent repeat themselves through the centuries….Psychology and psychiatry, the new sciences, are peculiar in that dealing with the mind ... they have not brought us closer to the solving of this mystery.” —American novelist and short-story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), 1961 journal entry, in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995, edited by Anna von Planta (2021)

Later this week, the psychological thriller A Talent for Murder, starring Dame Helen Mirren as Highsmith, will go into limited release here in the U.S. 

The Oscar-winning actress will be playing one of the most fiendishly complex roles of her legendary career in tackling the brilliant but racist, anti-semitic, and altogether misanthropic author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and other crime thrillers.

Quote of the Day (Jon Cryer, on the Awful Cost of Working With Charlie Sheen for So Long)

"I worked with Charlie Sheen for eight years. And if you wonder what it's like to work with Charlie Sheen for eight years, when I started, I had hair."—American Emmy-winning actor Jon Cryer, on working with Sheen on the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi (2025)

Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if ol’ Charlie had shared a little of that “tiger blood” he talked about in one of the manic interviews that “facilitated” his departure from the long-running sitcom.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on ‘Those Who Humble Themselves Before the Lord')

“Only those who humble themselves before the Lord can experience the greatness of his mercy.” — Pope Francis (1936-2025), tweet of Sept. 16, 2016

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on What ‘All Men Want’)

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ As Niles Lists His Wife Maris’s Food Restrictions)

Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce]: “Just remember that she can't have shellfish... poultry, red meat, saturated fats, nitrates, wheat, starch, sulfites, MSG, or dairy. Did I say nuts?”

Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer] [smirking]: “Oh, I think that's implied.” —Frasier, Season 1, Episode 17, “A Mid-Winter Night's Dream,” original air date Feb. 10, 1994, teleplay by Chuck Ranberg and Anne Flett-Giordano, directed by David Lee

Quote of the Day (Adam Garfinkle, on How American Politics Became Dysfunctional)

“Changes in the underlying ratio of labor and capital inputs in the American political economy, thanks to globalization and automation, have advantaged the political power of capital—especially finance capital even as they have disrupted the foundation of our politics and made all but obsolete our inherited ideological/explanatory templates.  This has happened at the same time that our political institutions have ossified from within, especially on the bureaucratic/administrative level, a development abetted in no small part by the accumulated distortions of interest-group, rentier politics in an increasingly top-heavy, unbalanced Federal system. That dysfunction, mightily exacerbated by the organized lobbying power of corporate interests, has given shape to the present wave of plutocracy washing over us. The depredations of plutocracy, in turn, double back in such a way as to render us unable to properly understand or deal with the structural economic changes we face, or to repair our political institutions. In a nutshell, that—all that together—is what’s wrong.”—American historian, political scientist, and editor Adam Garfinkle, “Broken: A Primer on American Political Disorder,” The American Interest, Winter (January/February) 2013

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How a Good History Book ‘Defeats Expectations’)

"As a historian, you're often at war with clichés, which are something similar to expectations. People have stereotyped images of the past; I seek to make them more complicated. In that sense, any good history book defeats expectations because it offers a richer tapestry, a more complicated version of what most people think happened. History can also alter how we think about the future. Although history does not provide a road map of what to expect in the future, it does tell you what kinds of situations should cause concern.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists; WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Expectations,” WSJ. Magazine, Nov. 27, 2017

The image of Anne Applebaum that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 15, 2024, by Mateusz Skwarczek.

Quote of the Day (Michael Kinsley, on Washington-Style ‘Branding’ and ‘Rebranding’)

“ ‘Branding’ as a general term for the way you present yourself to the world has become a popular usage. It implies that, if people see you for what you really are, that’s a failure on your part. Success is when people see you as what you wish you were. Or as what you need to be, or seem to be, or need to seem to be, to suit the exigencies of the moment. Of course Washington and the media didn't invent branding or rebranding. The term is imported from the commercial world. [In Washington], rebranding itself is widely tolerated, but the word ‘rebranding’ is still something a politician would not choose to have attached to his name. Bad for the brand.”— American political commentator and editor Michael Kinsley, “How Top Politicians Rebrand Themselves,” Vanity Fair, June 2014

Kinsley was correct: The notion of branding did indeed derive from the commercial world, and there were portions even there where it took a while to take root. (It was considered quite novel three decades ago when I worked for a not-for-profit organization that served the real estate industry when several developers who had just gone public began to brand their properties in an effort to increase their value.)

In mid-2014, Kinsley's peg to consider this idea was Eric Cantor, a House Majority Whip running into turbulence in his campaign to retain his Congressional seat. The Republican congressman’s attempts to brand his primary challenger a liberal—and to soften the views of constituents who felt he himself had become arrogant and was taking them for granted—both failed, in what was called one of the most stunning electoral upsets in memory.

Wouldn’t you know that it took someone from the “commercial world" to show Capitol Hill grandees the right way to “brand.” A journalist friend of mine recounted how, during an interview with Donald Trump, the then-New York developer, asked for how he had become so successful, responded, “It’s the Trump brand.” That phrase ended up repeated so often in the interview, my friend said, that he was sick of it by the time the talk was over.

Much to the astonishment of local journalists who had been following Trump’s career from its early days, he followed the path to the White House through the creation of a spurious “brand” on his “reality” show The Apprentice: a businessman so phenomenally rich that he would never be tempted to steal or grift.

Little could these non-New York voters have imagined that, once re-elected to the White House, Trump would try to rebrand several capital institutions after himself. This renaming and construction phase is so manic that he is beginning to resemble some of the more debauched, egocentric Roman emperors.

Simultaneously, Trump began to target GOP candidates, large and small, as part of his brand. What voters face now, like it or not, is an organization committed not to conservative principles as such, but to Trump.

The question that scares the GOP now, a couple of weeks before the midterm elections, is whether the President has pushed his branding campaign too aggressively: too fast, and on too many fronts.

They wonder if too many of these races have become unnecessary toss-ups, with voters resembling a work colleague of mine who said he was delighted that a property of one developer had added that company’s moniker to its own: “Great! Now I’ll know to avoid it from now on.”

Now eighty years old, Trump should not by rights be able to “rebrand” himself to skeptical voters. But like some combination of Rasputin and Count Dracula, he’s come back from the dead (or undead) too many times before to be counted out now. Democrats would be making a colossal mistake if they become overconfident of their chances.

Quote of the Day (Mike Ditka, on God, Human Anatomy, and Sports)

“If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms.”—National Football League Hall of Fame player, coach, commercial pitchman, and Chicago hero Mike Ditka (1939-2026), quoted by Jason Gay, “Mike Ditka: Da Farewell to Da Coach,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 10-11, 2026

(The image accompanying this post, of Ditka catching a pass as an end for the University of Pittsburgh football team in 1960, was originally printed in The Owl, the 1961 student yearbook of the University of Pittsburgh.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Michael Chan, on Our ‘Strange and Dangerous Age’)

“We are in a strange and dangerous age. It is an age of certainty, and we have two myths we have to choose from — triumph or transgression, glory or shame, a grand tree or a weed to be plucked out. We are told we have to pledge to one side or the other or this election will be a Flight 93 election — the plane will go down.”—Dr. Michael Chan, executive director for faith and learning at Concordia College, address at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, July 12, 2026, quoted by Mary Lee Talbot, “Quality of Our Future Depends on the Quality of Our Memory, Says Michael Chan,” The Chautauquan Daily, July 13, 2026

Quote of the Day (Benjamin Franklin, on ‘The Discontented Man’)

“The discontented Man finds no easy Chair.” —Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), “Poor Richard Improved, 1753,” Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, July 1, 1750, through June 30, 1753, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, 1961.]

This Day in Film History (Death of Andrzej Wajda, Influential Polish Director)

Oct. 9, 2016— Andrzej Wajda, a director, writer, and producer who electrified international audiences with poetic, complex treatments of life under totalitarian rule, died at age 90 in Poland from respiratory complications.

Through October 22, New York’s nonprofit cinema Film Forum is commemorating the centennial of his birth with “Andrzej Wajda 100,” co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and DI Factory and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute. 

It’s a testament to the filmmaker’s tireless productivity that the 25 movies shown during these three weeks represent less than half of his career output of full-length pictures, documentaries, shorts, and television projects.

Like Oliver Stone, Wajda was a political provocateur who examined onscreen the collective traumas his nation experienced in the 20^th century.

Several were linked by theme, if not plot: his “Three War Films” of the 1950s (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) treated ethical dilemmas of during the Nazi occupation of Poland, while two movies from a couple of decades later, Man of Marble and Man of Iron, turned to Communist domination of the nation in the postwar period.

This subject matter could be challenging in its grimness. The prologue of Kanal, for example, tells viewers immediately that none of the heroes of the Warsaw uprising in the city’s sewer system that they are about to see make it out alive.

Communist atrocities affected Wajda and his family personally. His father was among the captured officers executed in 1940 by the Russian KGB in the Katyn Forest, a massacre denied by the USSR until 1990. In the 1950s, Communist censors began to interfere with his work—notably during A Generation, when they deleted one scene that became lost forever.

Even in exile from Poland in the early 1980s, Wajda continued to comment on how Soviet-style revolutionary fervor could devolve into terror, albeit through the prism of history rather than current events. Danton (1983), financed with aid from the French government, raised hackles in that nation’s left wing.

At a time when the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand included Communists as coalition partners, an intellectual firestorm developed over the implied comparison to the USSR drawn by its title character, a onetime firebrand of the French Revolution who became one of the most prominent victims of the Reign of Terror. Warning of the excesses of his former ally, radical Maximilien Robespierre, Danton (played by Gerard Depardieu) says, “Revolutionaries, like Saturn, devour their own children.”

The daily exigencies of filmmaking led Wajda to make many critical production decisions on the fly. Sometimes this could drive his associates crazy. In a short documentary, Wajda’s “Danton,” one crew member observed the unusual demands made during that 1983 biopic:

“As one scene or a new idea occurs to him, it’s a disaster for us, because he’ll say, ‘It’s not 20 extras anymore. Tomorrow we need 70, 80, 90.’ And that’s the hardest work for us, quickly to find the people he wants, almost from one minute to the next. That’s because he always has an idea and he wants this idea immediately. He just told us that tomorrow we need 12 men who will be naked and will be thrown in a mass grave, a pit where they bury the dead. We will need 12 men who will agree to be naked and be thrown on top of each other.”

On the other hand, Wajda’s openness to spontaneity from other sources resulted in some of the most resonant performances in international cinema.

Case in point: Zbigniew Cybulski, cast in Ashes and Diamonds as Maciek, a young anti-Communist Home Army resistance fighter assigned to assassinate an incoming commissar, Stefan Szczuka.

Initially dubious about having the actor play what he conceived as a dashing romantic hero, Wajda was even more nonplussed when Cybulski wore clothes more in keeping with the current generation—notably tight-fitting jeans, a green jacket, and pepegi (Polish slang for casual canvas shoes or sneakers).

But, as recounted by Polish screenwriter and film critic Bartosz Staszczyszyn, Wajda reflected: “I let him act as he wished, and that saved me.” The actor’s combination of restless energy, humor and vulnerability led him to be regarded as “the Polish James Dean.”

(In fact, in the 1982 analysis, Running Time: Films of the Cold War, journalist and movie critic Nora Sayre preferred the European to the American, contrasting his raw, authentic portrayal of an ordinary young man caught in a life-or-death political struggle with Dean’s much lower-stakes anguish in Rebel Without a Cause.) 

The film is set at a watershed moment in Poland’s history: the last day of the war, but the first of a very uncertain peace (which, it turned out, was dominated by another foreign power, the Soviets, rather than the Nazis). “The end of the war isn't the end of our fight,” Szczuka says. “The fight for Poland and what kind of country it's to become has only just begun. Today or tomorrow or the day after, any one of us could die.”

Or, as Maciek, in more down-to-earth fashion, says, “The main thing is to find a way through this mess without being tricked or getting bored. What else is there?”

From the opening scene to the fated conclusion, that “mess” is depicted with the kind of visual brilliance that Wajda, who had studied after the war at a Krakow arts academy, brought to all his films. 

Shot through with shadows, smoke, and fog, the cinematography underscores the existential dilemma that Maciek—with his eyesight already severely damaged from too much time in Warsaw’s sewers during the Resistance—now regards as pointless. “In many ways,” according to a "Self-Styled Siren" blog post from eight years ago, the film’s atmosphere of dark cynicism made it “a gangster film, with Poland’s future on the line instead of loot.”

Wajda and Cybulski actor collaborated on three more films and on the Polish theater scene before Cybulski died in 1967 in a tragic train accident.

The director immediately influenced by Wajda was Roman Polanski, who acted in two of his films. But Wajda also had an impact on the work of the film school whiz kids who entered Hollywood in the late Sixties: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

Certainly, Wajda’s technical mastery repays frame-by-frame viewing. But his maturity, his ability to look past divisive ideologies to the complex humanity that unites all his characters, is something to be embraced but incapable of being taught.

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, With a Father and Child on an Early 20th-Century Road Trip)

“Are you lost daddy? I arsked tenderly.
 
"Shut up he explained.” —American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), “The Young Immigrunts,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 31, 1920, reprinted in Ring Lardner: Stories and Other Writings, edited by Ian Frazier (2013)
 
I don’t know if, as an American, you’ve heard of, let alone read, The Young Visiters, a 1919 novella written by an Englishwoman, Daisy Ashford, when she reportedly was only nine years old.
 
One writer who looked at it dubiously was Ring Lardner, who parodied it in The Young Immigrunts—first as a long magazine article, then as a stand-alone book.
 
I suspect, even if you’re unaware of the targets of Lardner’s satire, that you will laugh like mad at his consistently surprising and hilarious use of American slang.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on ‘A Sick Country’)

“In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on Absurdity)

“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller: Or, a Prospect of Society (1764)

I can think of at least one shameless supporter of absurdity. I’m sure you can come up with multiple examples.

Photo of the Day: Halloween Display, Central School, Glen Rock NJ

This morning, while in this Bergen County town on other business, I noticed in the distance what looked like a mass of white sheets. Coming closer, I saw a couple of long rows of ghouls, spooks, and additional otherworldly creatures associated with the end of this month.

I chuckled as I took the photo accompanying this post of these apparitions, whose diminutive size put them in the same physical category as many of the youngsters in the school—and whose expressions suggested Caspar the Friendly Ghost much more than the malevolent Poltergeist. 

But, come to think of it, kids these days are probably exposed to so much on TV and in the movies that these Hollywood depictions don’t have the power to scare them like before. No, it’s just real life that they have to be concerned with.

Quote of the Day (Michael Dobbs, on Politicians’ ‘Dangerous Phase’)

“Politicians are much like aging authors and older women. The dangerous phase in their lives is when they are no longer content with the respect of friends but demand the adulation of an audience.” —British novelist and Conservative politician Michael Dobbs, House of Cards (1989)

(The image accompanying this post shows Ian Richardson as Machiavellian politician Francis Urquhart in BBC's adaptation of Dobbs’ House of Cards: To Play the King. More than two decades later, Kevin Spacey played his American counterpart in the Netflix adaptation.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Wife,’ With Lines to Recall As We Await This Week’s Nobel Literature Announcement)

[After attending a party preceding Joe Castleman’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he and wife Joan Castleman have just entered an opulent Stockholm hotel suite.]
 
Joan Castleman [played by Glenn Close, pictured]: “Brush your teeth. Your breath is bad.”
 
Joe Castleman [played by Jonathan Pryce]: “Do you think they noticed?”
 
Joan: “No, they were too busy being awed.”—The Wife (2018), screenplay by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer, directed by Bjorn Runge