about 20 June 2020

The summer solstice sucks for anyone who thinks going to bed at night is the only good part of every day.

something about "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant

Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant, is a great read. It is about a young man, Georges, a merciless social climber in Paris circa 1885 (the year of the book's publication). Early in the book, Georges sets his sights on Madeleine, the crafty wife of his supervisor, Forestier. Forestier grows deathly ill, and Georges comes to support Madeleine in the final hours before her husband's death. Moments after Forestier dies, Georges asks Madeleine to join him out on the balcony; there, he makes his move.

"I want you to listen to what I'm going to say and try to understand me. Above all, don't be angry if I talk about such things at a moment like this, but I shall be leaving the day after tomorrow, and when you come back to Paris, it may perhaps be too late. So here goes. As you know, I'm only a poor devil with no money at all who's still making his way. But I've got determination, I think some intelligence, and I've made a start—a good start. With a successful man, you know what you're getting; with someone just beginning, you never know where he'll finish up. That may be a bad thing or it may be a good thing. Anyway, I told you one day in your home that my dearest dream would have been to marry a wife like you. And I want to say that again now. Don't try to answer me. Let me go on. I'm not making you a proposal. That would be an odious thing to do at this time and place. I'm only anxious that you shouldn't fail to know that a word from you can make me a happy man, that you can make me either your friend, your brother if you like, or else even your husband, as you will—that my heart and whole body are all yours. I don't want you to answer me now; I don't want to talk about it any more, here. When we meet again in Paris, you'll let me know what you've decided. Until then, not a word. You agree?"

He had spoken without looking at her, as if he were scattering the words in the darkness in front of him. And she seemed not to have heard him as she, too, stood motionless, staring vaguely ahead at the vast landscape under the pale light of the moon.

For many minutes they remained side by side, elbow to elbow, thinking in silence. Then she murmured: "It's a little cold," and, turning round, went back to the bed. He followed her.

As he came near, he recognized that Forestier really was beginning to smell and he moved his chair away because he would not have been unable to stand the stench for long.

That scene made an impression on me. Georges is motivated by a ravenous hunger for status, but his relationships with powerful women are complicated by his feeling of real affection toward them. That affection is never better expressed in Bel-Ami than in this scene. But the timing is obviously horrific and undermines the connection the reader wants to feel with Georges.


Note: Georges does not experience change or get redeemed. That adds to the book's novelty.

"Selected Short Stories" by Guy De Maupassant

I do not remember how or when I added the French writer, Guy De Maupassant, to my reading list, but I am thankful for the suggestion. The short stories in this collection are flirtatious and efficiently satisfying. Maupassant captured very human episodes that are water-ringed by vague taboos and unseemliness. This collection, translated with an introduction by Roger Colet, was published by Penguin Books in 1971.

From Maupassant's masterpiece, "Boule De Suif":

The others ordered wine, except for Cornudet, who demanded beer. He had his own special way of opening the bottle, giving the liquid a good head, and examining it, first tilting the glass and then holding it up between the lamp and his eyes to appreciate the colour. When he drank, his great beard, which was the colour of his favorite beverage, seemed to quiver with emotion, and he squinted so as not to lose sight of his mug; he looked as if he were performing the one function for which he had been born. It was as though he were establishing in his mind a connexion, or even an affinity, between the two ruling passions of his life—Pale Ale and Revolution—and he certainly never drank the one without thinking of the other.

I enjoyed every word of these 30 stories, but "Boule De Suif" is easily my favorite. 

Maupassant, a French writer and protégé of Gustave Flaubert, is considered a member of the naturalist school and wrote much of his work in the 1870s and 1880s. He wrote, according to Wikipedia, hundreds of short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse.

(posts) scenes from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley

about perspective

I pushed open the bathroom stall door and discovered on the toilet there a man who looked like Alex Trebek taking a shit. His gaze was locked in the thousand-yard stare—like he was seeing an invisible atrocity unfold in the distance but feeling nothing. A serious shitter. He did not maneuver his eyeballs to see who it was that walked in on his most intimate moment.

A normal man—and he was not one—would have flinched, made a motion, feigned a gesture in a futile attempt to regain agency. Would not a normal man look at the beast moving in on him, threatening the boundaries of his dignity? Amazing. He blocked me mentally; but I knew—and I think he knew—we were the same man.

something about "Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times" by Mark Leibovich

Mark Leibovich is The New York Times Magazine’s chief national correspondent. I am not a regular reader of his column, but I read his previous book, This Town, which I described as the author wallowing in the networking and social maneuverings.
 

He kids DC's political players about the unseemly side of their work but never condemns them. Leibovich paints an absurd picture and sort of shrugs it off. His easygoing prose makes a shrug seem like the natural reaction. This Town delivers the goods for political junkies—especially if you tracked national politics from 2007 to 2013. Hearing how embedded Washington correspondents are is discomfiting. But if disillusion has already set in, the disappointment in This Town lands softly.

I think the same is true of Big Game, a book about the National Football League (NFL). Leibovich rightly positions professional football as one of America's biggest cultural forces. And he attached himself to the league at a seemingly pivotal time. In 2017, the NFL was more successful than ever, but scandals, such as players protesting during the national anthem and the escalating reality that concussions are destroying players brains in real time, were threatening that success. 

Leibovich does not deny the issues that cause the league's front office anxiety. But he overplays the attention-grabbing distractions, like Deflategate and the eccentricities of the billionaire team-owner class. Leibovich never really reckons with the larger, more serious issues.

I found the book very entertaining. But I never felt like the league and the owners were being confronted with a game-changing sequence of events. I agree with Joe Nocera's assessment in The Washington Post. Nocera says Leibovich "has a book-reporting strategy that consists of attending events (Tim Russert’s funeral; an NFL owners meeting), hanging around the periphery and writing what he sees, with plenty of snark and personal asides for good measure. He’s a good enough writer to keep you from wanting to throw the book against the nearest wall. But if you look closely, you’ll realize he has nothing to say."


Notes:

• My favorite part was definitely Leibovich getting drunk on Jerry Jones's bus.

One of the drivers in Jerry's employ, an African American gentleman named Emory, opened a back cabinet stocked with $250 bottles of "Blue." No doubt Jones could afford the smooth booze, but he also mentioned a qualifier. "It's the stuff it makes you do after you've had it that you might not be able to afford," he said. I relay this by way of transparency into Jones inhibitions, which after a few more supersized pours from Emory were weakening fast.

Leibovich asks Jones which means more: the Hall of Fame jacket or another Super Bowl ring. Jones, drunk, finally admits the jacket is more important to him.

• "Are these the last days of the NFL?" by Joe Nocera, The Washington Post, 13 September 2018

something about the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election"

In the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election," a reluctant Wally Cleaver is nominated to run for sophomore class president against the oafish school bully, Lumpy Rutherford. Wally's and Lumpy's fathers, Ward and Fred, respectively, push their sons to campaign aggressively. The fathers are motivated, it turns out, by their own selfish ambitions. The episode's moral comes during Ward's confession to his sons in the final act.

Ward Cleaver: Oh, I guess its just all part of being a father, Beaver. Your boy makes the football team and you visualize him scoring touchdowns all over the place. He gets an A in mathematics, and you see him as an atomic scientist landing on the moon. Maybe you even picture him marrying the banker's daughter.

Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver: Gee, dad. I thought only kids had goofy dreams like that.

Ward: No, Beaver. Nope. Parents have their share, too. You see, as you grow older, you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true. So, you begin to dream through your children.

Wally Cleaver: You mean Mr. Rutherford dreams through Lumpy?

Ward: Of course he does. I don't guess there's a father around anywhere who doesn't want things to be a little better for his children than they were for him.

When actor Hugh Beaumont, as Ward, says, "you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true," Beaumont's delivery includes a slight, magnificent quiver. It is an efficient but effective line read—not a surprise from the ultimate and classic TV dad-actor.


Note: "Wally's Election" was the 19th episode of season 3 of the famous American TV series, Leave It to Beaver. It aired 6 February 1960.

something about "The Easter Parade" by Richard Yates

Richard Yates, sometimes my favorite American writer, drops us into the tragically ordinary lives of two sisters, Emily and Sarah Grimes. Emily is younger and somehow goes her own way; Sarah marries and disappears into a family. Sarah, whose husband is physically abusive, eventually dies of complications from alcoholism (the same fate suffered by her mother). Emily occupies most of the novella's narrative. She confesses, "I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life." Yates' fifth book, published in 1976, is characteristically poignant, uncomfortably intimate, and penetrating.

Notes:

• The Easter Parade opens with, "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."
• Still have not read Revolutionary Road, but it is a damn fine movie.
• I read The Easter Parade in the Everyman's Library edition, 2009, which includes Revolutionary Road and the short stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

something about leaving

She started feeling a little sentimental as she prepared to check out of the hotel. "I'll never be in here again." A melancholy trickled always, but, in the moments that she inventoried her stuff and looked the room over, the valve opened a tiny bit more. She thought of the city she was in and of how she was unlikely to return because life is too short and there may be other places to go. She would feel this way the times she traveled even while not ever really wanting to come back.

about how I should drive more (update of a previous post)

The 7:45 morning bus always arrives early, the 8:05 late. Someone plays her phone audio out loud on the ride. I get off at King Street metro station and wait for the yellow line to Greenbelt. After Pentagon station, the train surges out of Virginia across the Potomac—my favorite part of the commute. Looking out to see dulled light glancing off hard bridges, rough, sectarian waters, and wildly uneven expectations. I see the mild winter morning sinking the bots in their cars moving from A to B. I think of how every day I take the subway to and from work, but each time I ride, I feel like it takes me farther and farther from home.

At Len'fant Plaza station I crowd off the yellow line to catch the next train west to Capitol South. And, there, young blood marches to Congress for another day of legislating and messaging. They moved from somewhere in the top of their class down into the tunnels beneath this pyramid where they scratch walls and people, where they keep tradition alive, where everyone else can lick heels.

something about "On Writing Well," by William Zinsser

On Writing Well was American writer and teacher William Zinsser's attempt to capture the nonfiction writing course he taught at Yale. The book's most useful parts come in the first nine chapters, which need only 66 pages in my 2016 Harper edition. I very much like Zinsser's approach because I think coaching good writing (teaching good writing is usually impossible) has much, much more to do with focusing on principles rather than mechanics. Zinsser stresses the basics: simplicity, cutting words, and rewriting. In addition to principles, Zinsser relays a few anecdotes, and he quotes examples of good nonfiction writing. Among the best tips he offers are to read aloud what you write and approach writing as a process rather than a means to a product.

Zinsser calls nonfiction writing a craft; he even calls On Writing Well a craft book. I wish he had explored this claim further. He does not define craft or contrast it with art.

The latter chapters of On Writing Well mostly focus on particulars about specific forms of nonfiction writing, like the memoir, travel writing, interviews, and so on. The book's earlier chapters are not only more useful, I found them to be better written. Zinsser gets too conversational for me as the book pushes on.

Notes:

• This book reminds me of my other favorite book about writing, Writing with Style, by John Trimble.
• On Writing Well was first published in 1976; Zinsser updated the book as times and technology changed. Zinsser died in 2015 at age 92.

something about Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas (1916-2020) was a star in a generation of greats. He was more accessible than John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Charlton Heston, and he combined the complicated humanity of Henry Fonda with the versatility and authority of Burt Lancaster. He was a confident and squarely handsome man with a distinctive cleft chin. I always thought one of his greatest assets was how his grin seemed to suggest a mischievous inner life.

Now Kirk Douglas is gone. He will be remembered primarily for his role in the great Kubrick film, "Spartacus." Other favorites of mine include "Last Train From Gun Hill" and "Lonely Are the Brave." "Last Train From Gun Hill," released in 1959, co-stars the great Anthony Quinn; Douglas and Quinn are friends pitted against each other in an old West-style battle of wills. "Lonely Are the Brave," from 1962, is a great late Western, and, as Roger Ebert said of Lee Marvin's "Monte Walsh," "like a lot of recent Westerns, it's about the end of the old West."

about wearing out in the empty Providence airport

Unbothered runways press out to a deafened, mud-washed fringe of trees. Most people drive here. And away. Inside, neutral pop plays over the PA and suppresses mood. An unattended bag, a wilting plant in public space. How many rough mornings have there been at the Hampton Inn & Suites Providence Airport? Say goodbye to me and Massachusetts' shrunken head.

something about "Excellent Sheep" by William Deresiewicz

Critics of academia often mock liberal arts studies of obscure and apparently unprofitable subjects like basket weaving (does such a degree even exist?). Critics also diagnose academia with a fatal case of aloof pretentiousness. But William Deresiewicz is a fierce proponent of the value of a classical liberal arts education.
 
Deresiewicz has criticisms of his own. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life starts on the offensive, putting a harsh light on modern trends in higher education—especially at elite institutions. But then Deresiewicz quickly pivots to an impassioned defense of the university. Excellent Sheep argues for the personal and social benefits of higher education.

I used to read William Deresiewicz's weekly columns in "The Chronicle of Higher Education." A few columns stuck with me: "Get Real," published in 2012, is my favorite. My fondness for those columns steered me toward Excellent Sheep, which was published in 2015 and grew out of Deresiewicz's experience as a professor at Yale.

about waiting at the gate

The pilot pulled us up to our gate at Reagan. The old couple in the row in front of me immediately stood up. Husband had the aisle seat; wife had the middle. Deplaning is a slow process. One by one, starting in the front, the passengers stand up, gather themselves, step into the aisle, open the overhead bin, pull down luggage, check themselves one last time, and then head for the exit. So the old couple in row 14 waited.

The wife had to hunch over, as all middle-seat passengers do when they stand up. The husband, in the aisle now, stretched. And he shifted, readying himself, sort of, as if he was deplaning imminently. But the Southwest deplaning process proceeded as always: indifferently. The old husband lifted his hand to his wife's shoulder and made a rubbing motion. Then he gave her two slaps on the back as he would the Pontiac after a successful road trip. The slaps said, "You made it, and I respect that." She held steady, elbows propped on the headrest in front of her, and faithfully absorbed the wordless encouragement her husband offered. Welcome to Washington, D.C., and thank you for flying Southwest.

something about "A Gambler’s Anatomy" by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s A Gambler’s Anatomy scratches out a few ideas but steers clear of story. The novel follows Alexander Bruno, an international, handsome-but-aging playboy who engages in high-stakes backgammon games arranged by his shady, mostly absent business manager. We meet Bruno as he contemplates his faded youth and a growing blind spot in his vision. The blind spot turns out to be symptomatic of a seemingly inoperable brain tumor that forces Bruno through the German healthcare system and into the office of an eccentric surgeon in California. On his rapidly unraveling journey, Bruno, suddenly broke and alone, is warily reunited with high-school classmate Keith Stolarsky, who is a wealthy California real estate owner. Of course, a few women hang around and complicate things. Although Stolarsky and Bruno have no apparent attachment or affection for each other, Stolarsky bankrolls Bruno's surgery and convalescence. The surgery wrecks Bruno's looks, forcing him to wear a mummy-like mask; the scalpel also destroys Bruno's telepathic powers, which have no consequence whatsoever in this novel. This surrealistic series of events lends the novel a Thomas Pynchon-like quality. I did not enjoy it.

something about "A Drinking Life" by Pete Hamill

A Drinking Life is a memoir by Pete Hamill, a New York-based columnist, journalist, and author featured in publications like the New York Post and The New York Daily News. I expected a deep-dive into alcoholism, but Hamill was never your bottoming-out alcoholic. Drinking, it appears, was something he did while killing time socializing in bars; it was not a preoccupation. This memoir, published in 1995, was born 20 years after his last drink. Hamill came to view alcohol as destructive and decided to quit. His sobriety does not sound like much of a struggle, which explains why addiction and destruction do not seem to be central themes in the arguably mis-titled A Drinking Life. Hamill's life, as relayed by the author, sounds mostly fine—so I found this a little dull and want to say only that there are far more interesting and compelling memoirs out there.

a note to self

a preview

Machines begin searching Earth for materials to build more machines.

something about "The Sweet Hereafter" by Russell Banks

I am a fan of the 1997 film, Affliction. In that film, Nick Nolte and James Coburn deliver rich performances depicting stricken men. The film is based on a book, published in 1989, by Russel Banks. Seeking other works by Banks, I found The Sweet Hereafter, which was published in 1991.

The Sweet Hereafter is divided into a series of first-person narrations of a fatal school bus crash and the devastation it brings on lives in a small town in rural Upstate New York. Most of the children on the bus die, but a few survive, along with the bus driver and a father whose daily commute follows the bus route. Lawyers, news media, and deep pain visit the town in the aftermath. The narratives are focused and contained, and the stories never get entangled. A gritty, emotional realism characterized by resignation imbues the novel—a feeling that is also prominent in the film adaptation of Affliction. This was a very good read.


Notes: 

The Sweet Hereafter is loosely based on an actual bus crash in Alton, Texas.
 
The film Affliction was directed by Paul Schrader and costarred Sissy Spacek and Willem Dafoe, who, as one would expect, were also great. I have always particularly enjoyed this short exchange in the film:

Rolfe Whitehouse (Dafoe): I was always careful around Pop. I was a careful child. And I'm a careful adult. But at least I was never afflicted with that man's anger.
Wade Whitehouse (Nolte): That's what you think.