The Republicans Held Their Convention in NYC And All I Got Was A Lousy "Upright Citizens Brigade" T-Shirt
Survived NYC. And thanks for asking.
Turns out I'm not the only one who noticed the overwhelming police presence in NYC. Here's Michael Novack over on
National Review's blog, "The Corner":
Monday a.m., I got a cab to take me as close as he could to Madison Square Garden for an early interview on Tavis Smiley’s show on PBS. Close turned out to mean outside all the barricades and roadblocks at about 31st and Fifth. Not too bad. My special pass got me through every police barrier, block by block, and there were again lines of policemen, firemen, and equipment both sides of the streets. I didn’t realize that the NY police could look as much like a massed army as it does.
Here he is again on Penn Station (remember, TBC Readers, you read it here first:
Let me describe arriving aboard an absolutely fully reserved Acela train at Penn Station Sunday at noon, security all over the train and at the Newark station and in Manhattan. Greeters and policemen all over the place in Penn Station. Squads of them in places. Heavy equipment, and a few powerful looking automatic weapons. Eager and friendly greeters and cops waved the herd of us toward a contrived 7th Ave exit (not the usual one) and then when we got to the street sent us back to the 8th Ave exit, where they said there would be cabs....I pulled three bags, beginning to puff and to sweat by halfway down the block. Hot. Muggy. 33rd Street blocked off to our side. Police all the way down. A siren and other police cars racing up 8th Avenue ahead. No taxis in sight. One taxi at the corner, about 280 patrons waving. Cop says, try walking up the Avenue, maybe 35th, 36th. (“Or,” I thought, “37th of 38th.”)
Hot. Muggy. Stop to switch hands on bags. Rearrange the top bag.
Just past 39th St. I remembered that Mother Cabrini, the first New Yorker declared a saint, is the patron saint of parking places and taxicabs. Swift prayer for help.
Taxi swings around 39th corner, out of nowhere, stops and takes us in.
It was even worse on Sunday. I was lucky enough to get a cab driver who ignored virtually all of the police directions and put me right on the corner of Penn Plaza. When my cab arrived, it was practically the only vehicle on the street, and as it pulled up about a dozen people, who seemed not to have seen a cab in hours, immediately descended upon it, money and suitcases in hand. "No more fares, no more fares," the cabbie shouted. He seemed eager to get rid of me and get out of there. Who could blame him? I don't know how he got me there without the both of us ending up in a police van alongside the anarchists who got arrested earlier in the day; the ride back looked to be even tougher going. I tipped him
very well for his troubles, figuring that some of it might have to go towards bail.
Fears confirmed
Yep. The protest is happening on 7th Avenue -- right outside my door. Silly me, booking a hotel room and thinking that, by staying away from Midtown, I'd be away from the action.
Don't know how I'm going to get a taxi. Don't know if I'll even make it to Penn Station. Could be one hell of a bag-drag. Cutting short my vacation just to get home. Paid for a late checkout that I'm not even going to use.
Here's how I protested the protesters: went to Starbuck's and had a Chai Tea latte. Corporate coffee. They hate that.
On a good note: Don't know who owns or runs the St. Marks's Bookstore, on 3rd Avenue in the East Village, but they seem to have been invading my dreams. St. Mark's is is what a new-title bookstore would look like if I were running it and/or buying for it. Excellent selection in the very sections/genres that interest me. Their poetry section is the best in a new bookstore that I've ever seen. Minor quibble: no essays/belle lettres section. But hey, can't expect perfection. Plus, it's right around the corner from the St. Mark's hotel, a literary landmark, since this is where Auden lived the final years of his life, reputedly in rooms that were some of messiest most visitors had ever seen.
Sorry I'm not providing links to some of the places I've visited. On deadline. Getting ready to pack. Wish me luck.
Extra! Drudge-like Sirens! Republican National Convention Coverage courtesy of The Bloody Crossroads!
Well, not really. But that would be kind of cool, huh?
Sorry I haven't updated my blog in a couple weeks. My roommates and I have lost our internet connection. In fact, I probably won't have after-work-hours internet access for a couple of weeks. Moving to Woodley Park, and will have to connect there once I get settled. Bear with me.
In NYC -- not for the convention (as if I could get credentials) but rather for a much-needed vacation. Staying in Chelsea (why was Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning" playing in my head as I ate my eggs at the Empire Diner?). Walked around the Village and Soho today. Ate in Little Italy. Hit a number of used bookstores. Walked through Washington Square Park. Here's what I've seen so far...
Went to UCB Theater last nighth and saw "The Swarm". Long-form improv troupe. Saw them last time I was in town and had to see them again. Some of the funniest improv I've ever seen.
Saw tons of barricades, lots of uniform presense from midtown down to the Bowery, lots of Kerry supporters and people looking ready to protest something/anything, some of your usual angry-youth types. I mean lots on both ends. As I was waiting at the taxi stand at Penn Station, the woman in front of me remarked to her friend, "you can just feel the tension." Indeed. Glad I'm out of here on Sunday. Though I don't know if I'll escape unscathed -- rumor is that they're blocking off 6th and 7th Aves, precisely the aves between which my hotel is located. And apparently trying to get out of Penn Station on Sunday is going to resemble trying to get out of Saigon before the fall.
I saw ten thousand drummers whose hands were a blazin' -- wait...I didn't see that. Bob Dylan did. Or so he claims in "Hard Rain."
Anyway, that's it. Write me if you want a souveneir or something.
Been working on a lengthy post on the criticial reception that Dale Peck and James Wood's respective collections of literary essays have been receiving over the last couple months. So, yes, TBC will get back to being about the place "where literature and politics meet." But in the meantime..."woke up..it was a Chelsea morning..."
Huey Lewis And His News
So Springsteen and Mellencamp and Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Brown -- basically anyone who played a set at the "No Nukes" concert back in 1980 -- have weighed in, and Kerry's their man. Dennis Hopper, who has trouble remembering large chunks of the '60s and '70s, will, albeit surprisingly, choose Bush in 2004.
But I know what you're thinking: someone's missing. Someone has yet to publicly proclaim his support for either candidate. Someone like Huey Lewis.
Wait no more, political junkies. Huey's no longer keeping America's political machine in limbo the way Ike kept us waiting while he decided whether to be a Republican or a Democrat. According to Huey Lewis'
website, Huey's chosen Kerry.
Thanks, Huey. Thanks. Now, with this knowledge, we can all return to the heavy-lifting that is America's democratic process.
P.S. "Org?" Huey Lewis is a non-profit? Weird, isn't it?
Czeslaw Milosz Is Dead
Poet and Nobel laureate whose works were censored by Poland's communist regime, he was also the author of
The Captive Mind, a study of intellectuals under communist rule. In the book, Milosz documented how once great writers, comtemporaries of his in Poland, found themselves, to their own horror, instruments of communist propoganda. Here's the
story from the Associated Press.
Yeah, But I Like My Headline Better
John Fund of
The Wall Street Journal is going to miss Brian Lamb, too. Here's his
valentine to
Booknotes. I like my headline better, though (see below); he goes for the obvious reference -- while I go for the obscure Peter-Gabriel-era Genesis reference.
Faux Ringo
So...according to this
story, a guy acting and sounding just like Ringo Starr breezed into St. Augustine, FL, where the notion that he was in fact Ringo Starr was accepted at face value by both the citizens and the media, even though -- and this is important -- he never actually
claimed to be Ringo Starr. When peppered with questions by the local media -– none of whom thought to ask, “uh, hey, are you, like,
really Ringo Starr?” -– he simply answered “no comment,” apparently in a desire to “shun media attention.”
There are two things that should have immediately given him away. First, that “shunning media attention” crap. I mean, really – when has Ringo Starr ever under any circumstances shunned media attention? Ringo’s still peeved that Macca gets all the headlines as a brilliant songwriter and that both John and George made rather prudent career choices by dying, though George’s timing and mode of exit (Cancer? How cliché…) are worth questioning. Of course, the second thing that should have given this guy away –- as the photo accompanying the story makes clear -- is that HE DOESN’T LOOK A FUCKING THING LIKE RINGO STARR!
But maybe there’s something in the air these days. Right now there’s a guy running around the country masquerading as a Republican president, who even possesses the temerity to run for reelection as a Republican, even though he’s been spending federal money like he’s channeling the ghost of Harry Hopkins.
My First "Bleg"
I've booked a trip to NYC, specifically Greenwich Village, for the weekend of the 27th. Staying in the Chelsea district at the
Chelsea Hotel, home to a number of painters, writers, and other boho types throughout the last century. Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungeon there; Bob Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" there; Edie Sedgwick and a number of Warhol girls stayed there in the '60s. Again, I've been to the Village, but never spent a considerable amount of time there. If anyone knows of any good restaurants, used bookstores (besides
Strand Books), galleries, interesting sites, walking tours -- anything in general that I simply must see in the Village, feel free to
e-mail me. I welcome your recommendations/advice. Thanks.
A Shout Out to Tryst in Adams Morgan
By the way...these last two posts I created while using Tryst's WiFi hotspot. Thanks, guys. I plan on becoming a fixture there, since I'll soon be relocating to the Woodley Park area. That's right: going to be a DC resident (Taxation Without Representation!)
Ripping Off the Rockwellian
Check out my friend Dave Rockwell's latest post to his
blog, in which he documents getting ripped off in Ocean City, how he was hosed down for a cover charge, a two-drink minimum, and an otherwise unpleasant evening of comedy he could have spent doing something -- anything -- else.
The Lamb Lies Down On Booknotes
C-SPAN's
Booknotes is no more. Host Brian Lamb is
calling it quits after 15 years on the air.
Going to miss that show, primarily because my blog was in some limited way inspired by
Booknotes, a place where, every Sunday evening, literature and politics met. Some of my favorite writers have been guests on the program, including
- Jeffrey Meyers, author of Orwell: The Wintry Conscience of A Generation
- Robert Conquest, author of Reflections of a Ravaged Century
- William Gildea, author of Where the Game Matters Most
- Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman
- Sam Tanenhaus, who wrote a well-received biography of Whitaker Chambers (which warranted a two-part discussion on Booknotes), and who is currently the editor of The New York Times Book Review
- Andrew Sullivan, author of Virtually Normal, and who currently maintains of one of the most popular blogs on the internet
- Milton Friedman, who was a guest on the program simply for having written the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of F.A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
- Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals
I initially wondered how Gildea made it onto
Booknotes. I mean,
Where The Game Matters Most is a book close to my heart: it's about the 1996 season of open tournament high school basketball in Indiana -- the very last season in which any school of any size could potentially win the state basketball tournament. One of the smallest schools in the state, Milan High School, won the tournament back in the 1950s, and proved to be the inspiration for the movie "Hoosiers." Following that season, Indiana would, for the first time in its history, group together in tournament play and then crown three state high school basketball champions based on the school size. Gildea spent the entire basketball season that year criss-crossing the state, documenting the final season of open tournament play. So I still found myself wondering how a book about Indiana high school basketball make it all the way to
Booknotes? And then I remembered: like me, Brian Lamb's from Indiana.
According to this Wash Post
chat,
Washington Post Bookworld editor Michael Dirda would welcome the opportunity to take over for Brian Lamb. As a confirmed bibliophile, I'd welcome it, too. Most certainly would take on a decidely literary bent.
One of my favorite literary anecdotes is about an author I list above, the noted Sovietologist Robert Conquest. In the mid-Sixties Conquest published a book called
The Great Terror, which basically claimed that in the '30s Stalin's enforced famines and massacres killed about 10 million people. The leftist press at the time denounced the book, rationalizing Stalin's actions in ways that only apparatchiks can. Conquest and his book were rather viciously attacked and summarily dismissed. Of course, as history (and the Mitrokin archives) later proved, Conquest actually underestimated (by about 15 million) the number of people that Stalin killed, and on the 25th anniversary of the book Conquest's publisher decided to reprint a commemorative edition, complete with a new introduction detailing how prescient Conquest actually was. Conquest met with his publisher's rep over lunch to discuss the details. The rep thought everything they discussed sounded good, but floated the idea of coming up with a new title, or at least a subtitle to update it. Conquest took a sip of wine, thought for a moment, and then said, "How about 'I told you so, you fucking fools'?" So he did.
Hot New Fad
Cuddle parties.
Sure. But, uh, what do you do afterwards?
TBC Gets One Of Them "Shout Out" Thingies From RCOF, DPUSA
In the latest post to his
blog, my friend Rob over at Rob's Carnival of Fear laments that while TBC is "tackling issues like literary criticism and poetry," RCOF "mostly talks about bad experiences with the service at T.G.I.Fridays." Of course, this is probably why people actually read RCOF, while TBC is read about as often as, say, the liner notes for an Evanescense CD or the U.S. Constitution.
Except where Mike Martin is concerned. Apparently the sole proprieter of
Dance Party USA was so taken with my review of Auden's
Lectures on Shakespeare that he plans on picking up a copy. No doubt my recently purchased copy combined with MM's will gladden the hearts of the publishing house who sagely foresaw its huge domestic American audience, and will thereby keep it off the remainder tables for years to come. And you thought only Oprah and her so-called "book club" could make the publishing world quake with fear...
Amis fils Gets it Right
Martin Amis, from
The War Against Cliche:
You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer's [or, for our purposes, critic's] only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue. Gallingly, for the lit crit imperialists, there is no means of distinguishing the excellent from the less excellent. The most muscular literary critics on earth have no equipment of establishing that
"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears..."
is a better line than
"When all at once I saw a crowd..."
-- and, if they did, they would have to begin by saying that the former contains a dead expletive ("do") brought in to sustain the metre. Yet quotation is all we have. To idealize: writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.
Puts me in mind of what Orwell said about poetry: "There is no argument by which you can defend a poem. A poem defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible." Or course, even with this in mind, Orwell would then proceed in his attempts to defend poems.
Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare
...is one of the most stunning pieces of criticism I’ve ever read. Just plain jaw-dropping. As far as Shakespearean criticism is concerned, I place it second only to Northrop Frye’s
Notes on Shakespeare.
Back in 1947, Auden proposed a series of one-hour lectures at the New School for Social Research: he would read Shakespeare’s plays in chronologically order and then provide a lecture on each. His lectures would be free of charge and completely open to the public.
The results are just astonishing. He performs brilliantly in the requisite role of
explicator de texte. Here’s a sample, from his lecture on Othello:
Aaron, Shylock, Richard III, and Don John the Bastard are all patently villainous characters. Nobody trusts them. The moment they come on stage, we say, “This is a bad man.” Claudius, Proteus, Oliver, and Angelo are the same. They all have direct and visible motives. Claudius is possessed by ambition, Proteus by rivalry, Oliver by envy, and Angelo by jealousy of purity. But the point about Iago is that everyone must trust him. He resembles Boyet, Friar Lawrence, Puck, and Oberon, Prince Hal—Henry V, Hamlet, Pandarus, and the Duke of Vienna – all Machiavellian characters who manage people, though Iago is more like the characters in the comedies, Boyet and Puck, in that he does what he does for fun. Hal wants to rule, Hamlet to trap, Pandarus to revivify love, the Duke to make people conscious of what they are. Most Iagos onstage are impossible because they act sinister, like regular villains, so that no one will trust them. Iago must be plain and innocuous, absolutely ordinary, someone who could be chosen as a Secret Service man today, “honest” because that is what he looks like.
I love that line: "Iago [must be] someone who could be chosen as a Secret Service man." A wonderful example of a critic free of some pet theoretical orthodoxy, a man willing to let his mind confront his topic and bring all of his experience – in this case Auden’s indulges his theater-going experience as someone who actually partakes of this stuff – to bear on his conclusion.
Here’s a snippet from the opening paragraph of his lecture on
The Tempest:
People have very naturally and in a sense rightly considered the play Shakespeare’s farewell piece. Whether or not Shakespeare was conscious of it is irrelevant. I don’t believe people die until they’ve done their work, and when they have, they die. There are surprisingly few incomplete works in art. People, as a rule, die when they wish to. It’s not a shame that Mozart, Keats, Shelley died young: they’d finished their work.
Leaving aside Auden’s theories on psycho-biological determinism and the irony of literary careers, what’s shocking is what’s easily glossed over: “There are surprisingly few incomplete works of art.” I’ve never thought about the subject before, but Wystan’s absolutely right. I can think only of a few off-hand: Sydney’s
Arcadia and Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon come to mind (well, there’s also Capote’s
Answered Prayers, but it’s a mess of a book that poor Truman spent more time bragging about to reporters than writing). Not only are Auden’s lectures stocked with brilliant one-offs like the above, observations remarkable for the way they clarify and instruct, but, as the above example makes clear, Auden’s writing also has that other necessary component of great criticism: a willingness to digress, however briefly, from the topic at hand, to glance over at something else that caught his attention before returning to his task. The effect illuminates the work of art as well as the mind adjudicating it. Those of you with an analogous frame of mind might want to think about how some movie directors often have their hero notice something – an object or a vista – before beginning the arduous errand of saving the day.
Here’s another sentence that jolts one with its obvious clarity: "Art isn’t divided between the good and the bad, but between the boring and the interesting.” Right again, Wystan. And one could argue that literary art stopped being interesting when writers stopped attempting to entertain, when they began removing the interesting parts, the parts that bring pleasure (such as plot, character, rhyme, meter, etc.), and leaving only self-indulgent boredom and teased-out obscurities.
Do yourself and your critical sensibilities a favor and buy Auden’s
Lectures on Shakespeare. You’ll be rewarded with an object lesson in how criticism should be practiced, but sadly no longer is.
"Ridiculously Conservative"
Rich Lowry, editor of
National Review, posted this yesterday over on NR's weblog
The Corner:
Got back a while ago from a photo shoot for a group shot of New York conservatives for an issue of a glossy magazine to come out the week of the Republican convention. As the photographer positioned us and snapped away I thought of a paraphrase of that Ben Stiller line from Zoolander, “Sometimes I wonder if there is more to life than being ridiculously conservative.” Although the women in our group added considerably to our snazziness, it must have been the least glamorous/hip group of people to be in this downtown studio in a long time. I thought I detected a little amusement in the woman's voice at the front desk when I showed up in my conservative dark suit and conservative blue shirt and she asked, “You're here with the Republicans?”
Any ideas on which glossy?
Vanity Fair? Or have they fulfilled their conservative quota by running the Ron & Nancy cover two issues ago?
E-mail me if you have any ideas...
"I'm Dead, Bitch!"
Rick James is dead.
And let's hope all those imitations of Dave Chappelle's imitation of Rick James die with him.
Bill Buckley's "Book"? Or, Conservative Collage-ing...
Let me begin by saying that I like William F. Buckley. I really do. Met him once. Gracious and generous. Hell, it's hard not to like him. As a libertarian/liberal (in the 19th Century tradition), I know that he almost single-handedly resurrected the conservative intellectual tradition for the 20th century, infusing the modern political debate with libertarian/conservative forebears such as Edmund Burke, John Randolph, Hayek, Russell Kirk. And he's not bad with a pen, either, though he does get a bit showy with the vocab. But what the hell: a charming guy who possesses a pleasing, disarming public persona. But...
He's got this really annoying habit: he continues to cull together articles and chunks from other books and then markets the collage as a "new book." I just bought his memoir,
Miles Gone By, and it's traditional Buckley nonfiction: chunks from other books or lengthy and recently published articles attempting to stand as a series of recollections. Once again I find myself rereading things I'd already read in other books. I was hoping for a more personal perspective: his early life and education, his years at boarding school, his service in the Army and in the CIA, his Yale years, how
National Review came into existence and its early years, his recollections of the famous and infamous (he was, after all, one of the few hundred people who made it onto the guest list of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, often described as "the party of the century"). But what do we get? Some cursory beginning chapters devoted to his early life, some lengthy treatments on sailing and other recreational activities he enjoys, some pages on wine, music, and then some recollections of people that, to be honest, I've already heard him recollect on. The section on Claire Booth Luce seems to have been borrowed wholesale from
On the Firing Line, a fantastic book, to be sure, but a pretty expensive reread, under the circumstances...
Buckley has led a life from which there's plenty to mine. Why isn't he doing it?
Low Fidel-ity
A blog reader sent me this
link...though I personally don’t understand why this product is necessary when pages from
The Motorcycle Diaries will do just as nicely.
Sage Advice for All of Us, Perhaps
From
The Onion.
News Flash! Geriatric Rockers Adopt Political Stance When It’s Safe To Do So
“Please, God, give our lefty politics some street cred and revive what’s left of our soggy careers,” scream musicians, some from behind walkers.
“We’re still not done flogging that ‘working-class-hero’ bullshit," exclaim Springsteen and Mellencamp, decamping from limousines.
“Bush is evil,” claims hip-hop artist no one’s ever heard of.
Here’s the story from the
Washington Post.
A Curmudgeon of a Critic
Arts and Letters Daily is linking to an
article in The Guardian on Paul Fussell, who, along with Northrop Frye, is probably the best literary critic of the past half-century. An interesting guy -- a former frontline WW II infantry soldier who was severely wounded in France in 1944, Fussell later went on to be a professor of English literature and cultural commentator, a curmudgeon of a critic whose malcontented views are no doubt heavily informed by his frontline experiences. I've read (and reread) everything by Fussell, and even met him twice. I remember that on the first ocassion he told me to "stay out of wars." This was just after I had left the Air Force and, as an inactive reservist still obligated for service if called, had come awfully close to participating in the first Gulf War. Commenting on T.S. Eliot's influence on his intellectual development, the critic William Empson once said that it "was difficult for [him] to understand how much of [his] own mind Eliot invented." I feel the same way about Paul Fussell. Most of my assumptions about the function and role of literature and literary genres I've practically borrowed wholesale from him and his writings. And it was Fussell's book on Samuel Johnson,
Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, that first introduced me to the compelling, unforgettable life and literature of Johnson, as well as the rich though mysteriously ignored territory of late 18th century British literary nonfiction -- perhaps the greatest age of literary nonfiction we've ever seen, and will ever see.
It's always seemed to me that, of any literary critic operating today, Fussell's audience has to be the most diverse, made up of three types: the first, an academic audience interested primarily in his excavations of 18th Century literature or the literature of the Great War or British travel writing between the wars; second, the group that arrives at Fussell via his very popular
Class or
BAD: The Dumbing of America, who see him as one of the few sociologists who can actually pen a comprehensible English sentence; and finally -- and perhaps most importantly -- that group of crusty but for the most part silent veterans of the front lines of World War II (and ensuing wars) who see him as a literate, informed spokesman for their own horrific experiences -- something he's done quite well in such books as
Wartime,
The Great War and Modern Memory (winner of the National Book Award in 1975) and
Doing Battle, a memoir. One of the most provocative essays ever written has to have been Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," in which Fussell argued that the dropping of the Atomic bomb, while too violent and horrific to comprehend, was simultaneously necessary and probably saved millions of lives, his own included. I used to work for Jim Glassman, at the time an editor at
Harper's where Fussell's essay was published, who told me that Fussell's complicated understanding of the dropping of the bomb prompted more mail than any article the magazine had ever previously published.
In the Guardian article, Fussell indicates that the novel is his least favorite form, and he claims that he's lost interest in literary criticism, which he apparently views as "wholly temporary." I agree with Mr. Fussell where the novel is concerned, but hope that he's at least encouraged by the recent example of James Wood, whose books
The Broken Estate and
The Irresponsible Self are clear demonstrations that he's the best critic operating today.
