I’m literally in the line of fire. I hope two hundred miles of pine forests slows things down.
After a dormant hurricane season, the Gulf has produced its first storm and decided to interrupt Game Day in Alabama. Half of my dog sitting gigs for the next two weeks were cancelled, alas, as were my plans to visit a new indie bookstore’s grand opening and drop by a Swedish fest. (A funeral may or may not still be on.) Honestly, can’t these hurricanes interrupt the workweek instead of the weekend? While at first we were thinking it wouldn’t amount to too much — it was tracking well east of my area — overnight it strengthened into a Category 3 (same as Ivan, which brutalized us in 2004) and moved west so that now we’ll be close enough to smell not only its cheap cologne but the hamburger it had for lunch. I was already getting Hurricane Zeta vibes yesterday, but now things look worse. The odds are very good that I’m going to lose power for a few days, so you may have to do without presidential biographies for bit. (I’m kidding — I’m close to finishing Forgotten Man, and in my Reagan biography I’ve only gotten him elected.) Fortunately I’ve no shortage of physical books to read, and the weather has been cooling off so we won’t be absolutely miserable.
Just for historical reference, our last hurricane experience:
A “Nine Books I’ll Never Forget” meme is going around. Considering how much I have read in the course of my life — close to three thousand books on this blog alone — that’s a daunting challenge, so consider this list only tentative. It lacks any CS Lewis, which horrifies me, and I know there are other books whose influence is so great I can’t even step back and contemplate properly.
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Probably no surprises here for people who read me often, but I’ll try to precis each:
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius introduced me to Stoicism, which has been a bedrock of my spiritual-philosophical life for nearly 20 years now.
Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs was reccommended to me on urbanism grounds, but it introduced me to the concept of emergent order and one sentence in it completely changed my life
A Life of Her Ownby Emile Carles was a pivotal part of my political evolution, though I’m sure I’d argue with it now. It’s the memoir of a teacher in a rural French village who was disillusioned by the state, religion, etc, and taught her students to think critically. We see the First and Second World Wars unfold through her eyes. This was my introduction to ‘democratic’ leftism, as I associated leftist/Marxist thought only with authoritarianism. It led to me reading deeply into the left for a few years, but at an oblique; I like to joke I went so far left I popped into right field with Ayn Rand and Russell Kirk
The Righteous Mindis a hard book to summarize, in large part because it covers so much ground. One of its core subjects is morality, which the author explores from philosophy to natural history.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is really a Neil Postman stand-in: I couldn’t decide between this and Technopoly. I remember reading Postman in the university library and copying long passages into a commonplace book & journal that I subsequently lost in a move, a loss that disappointed me so much I fell away from keeping a journal. Postman is the reason I didn’t have a smartphone until 2018, because he made me think about how technology shapes us and society
Jayber Crowwas my introduction to all things Berry, and Berrian thought is a cosmos into itself.
Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel overturned the ‘chronological snobbery’ I’d inherited from textbooks and began my interest in the Medieval epoch’s intellectual life
The Geography of Nowhere. Oh, where to begin with Jim Kunstler? Geography is a history and scathing critique of American urbanism since 1945. It made me think about why I was fascinated by cities; it gave me a vocabulary to understand why I found prewar cities fascinating and postwar cities utterly without interest; it led me to exploring more of Kunstler and starting to think about energy, food, and transportation infrastructure and policy.
Bowling Alone was one of the many books I read in that oh-so pivotal year of 2013 when my worldview was shifting from college’s ideological purity to my present conflicted mess. It gave me the concept of society as an organic thing, not simply an abstraction — and like other organic things, it needed to be fed and protected lest it wither and die.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “occupations from fiction we’d like to try”. I would like to be a member of the Idle Rich, like Bertie Wooster. I feel very strongly I was meant for a life of reading and writing and pondering the Cosmos under trees, but someone made a mistake.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Human Errors, a bit of biology; an a four-hour adapted audio drama of The Hobbit. A friend of mine reads the Lord of the Rings every autumn (appropriate for a story that ‘begins’ on September 22), and I’m trying to join him in my way. The version I found was on Audible, and it appears to have been adapted for use by NPR. Most of the accents are American, and there’s music included — including dwarvish singing. Smaug talks like he’s drooling, which made the last hour or so unpleasant.
WHAT are you reading now? Into the Planet, a cave-diver’s memoirs which will hopefully have enough science content for me to list it as Geology in the science survey; a radio drama of The Fellowship of the Ring on audiobook; TheForgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; and Reagan: The Life.
WHAT are you reading next? That question is more “Which of the items you are currently reading are you going to focus on next”, since I’m not particularly locked-in on anything. I’m reading Reagan an hour a day at lunch; Forgotten Man at home; and listening to Fellowship on drives. I’m about to start two weeks of dog-sitting at different houses (October is apparently a nice time for people to travel), so odds are I’ll get a LOT of reading done. Yesterday I stumbled onto a Civil War book that I think — my hand to General Lee — I can list as a PHYSICS TITLE. I should finish Forgotten Man before Friday, but I’m only 250+ pages into Reagan and Brands’ work on him is almost a big a door-stopper as McCullough’s Truman.
To err is human, they say, but at some point we can’t help it: we were born flawed, a conviction shared by both biology and the good book. Nathan Lents’ Human Errors looks at the frailties of the human body – quirks of our natural history that led to problems even before our own cleverness put us in environments our bodies were wholly unprepared for.
The book is truest to its title when it looks at actual glitches, errors, and ‘design flaws’ in the human body. Some of these are quirks of evolution, as it is forced to work with existing designs rather than start from scratch. So we have optic nerves punching their way through retinas that face the wrong way, and other nerves that run for miles longer than they need to, taking Moses- or Odysseus-like wanderings through the body before finally arriving at their destination. We carry a lot of baggage, detritus of the past like gobs of DNA that isn’t even ours. I am told that human cells only account for half of the cells inside the body, the rest belonging to the multitudes of bacteria that colonize our guts – but even a lot of ‘our’ DNA is actually viral material from long-gone infections that now gets replicated even if it’s inert. (Kind of metal, actually: our DNA carries the itty-bitty skulls of our foes!)
Other rough adaptations of our skeletal structure – to bipedalism – account for problems in our knees and backs. Other flaws are just sad accidents, like our inability to synthesize a lot of the vitamins other animals do simply because a mutation disabled the equipment – or almost worse, our guts creating B12 in the wrong area. Imagine a production line that tries to output directly into the garbage docks and you’ll get the idea. The body keeps the score, but sometimes it appears to be playing Calvinball.
From here we move into areas that don’t seem quite fair, because they’re less design flaws or human errors and more conflicts between the organism and our environment. We have immune systems that developed to live in a perpetual battle royale; now thrust into an increasingly sanitized world, our bodies enter an existential crisis and go to war with themselves, resulting in soaring rates of allergies and auto-immune disorders. Ditto Lents’ treatment of our brain’s large collection of heuristics: these served us well in the wild, allowing us to make inferences from past data (“That tall grass probably has a lion, avoid it”) but leads to our being terrible with money or thinking in prejudiced ways.
It’s been a while since I read a book like this, but it was just my cup of tea. It’s entertaining, informative, and varied, making me interested in some of the author’s other works that evidently include primate prostitution. While I think the title is over-expansive, all of the ground covered was great fun to learn about for the first time, or be reminded of.
Today’s TTT is about happiness, but first — the Teaseday Tuese!
We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story. – INTO THE PLANET
And now, happy books!
(1) The Call of the Wild. I am ten years old and just received this for Christmas; it is my first grown-up novel, and my grandparents’ house is warm and smells of ham on this cold winter day.
(2) Redwall. EULALIAAAAAAAA! My children’s librarian recommended this to me, and it was my first brush with fantasy. Redwall is an unusual fantasy in that there’s no overt magic, but there are talking woodland creatures who dress in medieval kit and carry around swords. I read a lot of this outside and have memories of fording a swamp (using cinder blocks, pieces of plywood, etc) to reach a ‘secluded’ area to read in peace.
(3) The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Max Shulman. On the last day of high school, I was the only senior to show up because of a bit of a contretemps between the senior class, who declared it Senior Skip Day, and the principal, who declared those who skipped could not walk. I was told to go home, so I wandered around campus that morning, saying goodbye to teachers and such. The librarian gave me a book she was being forced to discard for wear and tear; Max Shulman’s humor, and the 1940s campus setting, wow-dowed me. I mean, I was fractured. Nothing else Shulman wrote was CLOSE to Many Loves for me, and not until I read Wodehouse did I find a superior humorist.
(4) The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. Noticed this in my high school library and became obsessed with it; checked it out to use for a paper, lost it, and then on the day where I was required to pay for the book, I found it. I decided to pay for the book and give it a home on my shelves. It’s led to a lifelong obsession with WW2 aviation.
(5) The Night of the Living Trekkies. I bought this zombie apocalypse/Star Trek satire book at an indie bookstore in Las Cruces, COAS Books, and reading it later that night in the Big Chile Inn’s heavily-planted patio went a long way to redeeming a stay that had started fairly gloomily, with rain and heavy cloud cover.
(6) ANYTHING P.G. Wodehouse. When a sour mood threatens, I leg over to Wodehouse as Bertie might do to a lemon squash at the Drones.
(7) Harry Potter, books 1-3. I fell in love with the world of Harry Potter back in 2007, reading through the entire series in a couple of months (I had to wait on Deathly Hallows). Finding Harry coincided with my moving to university, and my and Harry’s delight in finding adventure and meaning were completely conjoined.
(8) Anything Sean Dietrich. Sean is a southern humorist and feel-goodist who recovered from childhood tragedy to become a storyteller, both through his real-world column and through his novels.
(9) Ditto but especially Rick Bragg. Bragg is a different kind of storyteller because he’s a journalist who tells real stories – or recounts those told to him – and does so with both affection and style.
“I remember this time, up in Rich Bundrum’s barn loft, we found this case of dynamite,” Jack said, and then he paused and shook his head, as if realizing now what he should have then: that there are no good endings to stories that begin with ‘we found this case of dynamite.’
(10) And Rachel Joyce! Her novels hinge on human connection and most everything I’ve read by her was a favorite for the year.
To Infinity and Beyond is a dramatic title for a collection of science facts organized by scale. We open with a chapter on baseballs and rockets in the atmosphere, zoom out to the solar system, where Tyson talks about how planets being in retrograde is an optical illusion, then cuts to a discussion of stories that mention other worlds, with a generous sprinkling of the “Actually, Icarus never could have flown” pedantry Tyson sometimes wanders into in the too-eager pursuit of being clever. There are a lot of sidebars that are visually ugly on Kindle (regardless of whether one uses white or black pages) and sometimes random. Why do whales suddenly appear in a discussion of the planets? And nary a Star Trek reference! (Well…NDT does mention that “Star Trek voyagers have to obey the prime directive”, so perhaps I’m too harsh.) There are three sections: Earth, Solar System, and — the rest of it. If you’re completely new to anything astronomical, I could see the book as an introductory smorgasbord: to me, though, it seemed like a bunch of random materials published elsewhere recollected here. I did find it alarming that there are ‘virtual particles’ which can apparently pop into existence anytime they feel like it. I do so miss the ol’ Newtonian universe.
(That’s Astrophysics/Cosmology down. Next up? Biology. Bam. Geology. Bam.)
Quotations
For Earth to become another Venus, we would first have to burn 10 times the quantity of fossil fuels our planet now holds. The slogan “Save the Earth,” laudable as the sentiment may be, misses the point and fails to convey the far more disturbing truth: Earth cares not a whit for us. It endured billions of years before our emergence and will continue to endure billions of years after the last Homo sapiens takes a final breath. As Dr. Ian Malcolm says in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” But “life” may not necessarily include humanity.
Clearly resolved horizontal belts interlaced with countless smaller cyclones and anticyclones also make Jupiter look like an archaeological cross section of a Big Mac, bun included.
Meet the virtual particle. No, it’s not the kind of matter you’d find in an alternate universe. Virtual particles are the real magician’s rabbits of the universe, popping into and out of existence, out of thin air—indeed, the thinnest of air, which we might instead call “thin space.” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of quantum physics forces us to accept that the space between ordinary particles seethes with virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, undetected. As a result, we cannot call that space empty.
Last month I did an experiment in which I listed TV shows I’d watched and lectures/podcasts I’d listened to. I’m continuing in that experiment this month, but it may be….too much.
Moviewatch September 2026
SEPTEMBER
Coyote vs Acme, 2026. Wile E. Coyote enlists the help of a lawyer to help him fight against the ACME Corporation, which has taken over the market in phones, consumer explosives, remote-controlled punching fists, etc, and ruined his plans to capture the Roadrunner by their inferior products. Being a Super Genius, Wile E. tricks the lawyer into filing a larger case than he’d anticipated, and said lawyer has to overcome his laziness and fear of failure to man up and fight – inspired by Wile E.’s sheer doggedness. While I did not approve of Foghorn Leghorn being turned into the villain (I say I say that’s LIBEL, son, a downright prevarication!), I thought the movie made good use of its premise – there’s lots of subtle music and references for those of us who grew up watching Looney Tunes – and that the story was generally sweet and fun to watch. The ladyfriend and I both enjoyed it.
Mean Girls, 2004. After leaving the theater for Coyote, I saw an SUV whose windows read “GET IN, LOSERS, WE’RE GRADUATING!”. This led, rather naturally, to me watching Mean Girls for the nth time. I don’t really know why I love watching this movie so much, but swapping out of context quotes from it is my niece and me’s love language. I probably watched it for the first time for Lindsay Lohan, but now it’s a serious nostalgia piece, like Scream. It’s also ridiculously quotable. So fetch. (Also, on October 3rd, he asked me what day it was. It’s October 3rd.)
McVeigh, 2023. A dismal dramatization of Timothy McVeigh’s descent into infamy, resulting in him perpetuating the OKC bombing. They take a lot of liberties – inventing a girlfriend for McVeigh, presenting him as a dead-eyed drone who somehow attracts hot blondes despite his lack of personality and chain-smoking habit, changing other characters’ backstories, etc. There’s no attempt at all to explore or explain who McVeigh was as a person, beyond “anti-government racist”: the one time Waco is mentioned, it’s Bill Clinton describing how terrible Koresh was and how he was training everyone for suicide. Zero stars.
Absolutely Anything, 2015. My old movie-watching buddy was in town for a funeral, so we got together and watched….three SEC football games and two movies. (He doesn’t even LIKE football, we were just indulging our host who offered food.) Anyway, this one has Simon Pegg as some British chap who can wave his hand and make anything happen, and also Robin Williams is his dog. John Cleese also voices an alien.
The Harder They Come, 1972. I don’t know what this movie was about. I think it was about a young musician who gets involved in crime? The ending has a lot of armed men on white sand beaches. Anyway, there was a lot of reggae and completely irrelevant side-talk about everything from Gilda Radner to whether a prominent Wendys franchisee’s bankruptcy would affect our ability to get potato wedges. (…we used to eat breakfast on Saturdays together by the river, and were especially fond of Wendy’s potato wedges.)
This was the best part of the movie, and I think they knew because they kept playing it.
Me, to movie-watching buddy: You know, since you moved to Georgia my movie-watching has gotten a lot less…..random.
Unabomber, 2026. A dramatization of the making of Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski. The movie follows two tracts: in the first, we see a young Ted Kacynski being steadily traumatized by an experiment he’s involved with at Harvard to ‘debate philosophy’; in reality, the experiment is being funded by the CIA to see how how easily it is to ‘break’ people. In the secondary track we follow an FBI agent who believes that the shared language of the Unabomber manifesto and some letters she’s been sent by a sister-in–law of a professor-turned-hermit named Ted Kaczynski indicate that Teddy K is in fact the Unabomber. Unfortunately, however sympathetic Young Ted is (to a point – his mental state leads him to verbally abusing his parents), we don’t get to see Adult Ted speak fo himself. The man was eager to speak for himself at trial, and kept writing long after he was imprisoned – hell, his publishers sent me a copy of Anti-Tech Revolution: How and Why to review.
The Unabomber in His Own Words. This is a documentary on all things Unabomber: hiss childhood, his decision to break loose from the industrial system in 1962, his retreat to Montana , and the decades-long campaign of sending bombs to seemingly random people working in universities and airlines (hence UNA) that only came to an end when he convinced newspapers to publish his manifesto and his sister-in-law recognized the style of writing. The “in his own words” part comes from audio from an interview with him being worked in, as well as bits from his coded diary in which he referred to his bombs as ‘experiments’. I’m fairly certain I’ve watched this before, but it seemed a natural follow-up to Unabomber.
TV Shows, a word which here means, “Star Trek”:
ST Voyager 5×24: “Relativity”. One of my favorite VOY episodes; it again drops us into the middle of the story….or should I say the beginning? We open on the Flying Spoon being spit-shined and polished at Utopia Planetia, the primary Starfleet shipyards. Janeway is planning her first mission, to confront the Maquis raider Jean Valjean, but – who’s that in the background? Seven of Nine, in a Starfleet Uniform? Turns out there’s time-traveling hijinks afoot, and Seven has been recruited by some mysterious agency to thwart them. So, we get to see Seven navigating her way through various VOY episodes and much fun is had by all. It’s fairly authentic: characters and their actors who have been killed off make guest appearances.
The Doctor: Next time, consult me, not the database. Me, Seven: You are the database! (I didn’t remember that line from heart, but considering the nature of the Doctor…)
Seven, discovering intruder: __________! Me: SHOOT HIM! DON’T WAIT FOR THE COMMERCIAL BREAK!
Past!Cap’nKate: Seal the breaches if you can. I’ll be on the bridge. Cap’nKate: (questions past hairstyle choices)
ST DS9 3×17: “Visionary”. O’Brien explodey-things himself and then starts popping five years into the future at random intervals. The scene where past-O’Brien and present-O’Brien stare at each other across the Promenade and each think, “Bloody hell, it’s another torture O’Brien episode” always kick it off to a great start. Klingons and Romulans show up in this one.
Future!O’Brien: But if you feel bad, and you’re my past self, shouldn’t I feel bad, too? Future!O’Brien, O’Brien, Me: “I hate temporal mechanics!”
Star Trek 3×2: “The Enterprise Incident”. Kirk is acting very grumpy and decides to take the Enterprise into Romulan space; the E is immediately surrounded by several Romulan warships and Kirk is compelled to come aboard one to meet with the Romulan commander, played by Joanne Linville. The commander is completely smitten by Spock and Kirk fakes his own death to yoink a cloaking device and we find out this was the mad plan all along. Depending on Spock seducing a Romulan commander seems a bit high-risk to me.
ST Strange New Worlds: 4×7: “LIke Chronitons through an Hourglass”. Star Trek is a soap opera now, complete with the hazy filter, dramatic facials and pauses, and occasionally pauses for detergent ads. Also, Final Frontier references.
Doctor M’Benga: You were caught in….an asteroid belt. (Narrating to someone off-screen). Good thing you are a gifted pilot. Pike, looking in direction of M’Benga’s gaze: ????
M’Benga: You have…(musical sting) Temporal Amnesia! Pike: (???) Do you hear that? Ohhh, are we back in the musical?
Chapel: He suffered severe damage to the torso. Where his heart is. To save him, I had to…..had to… Pike: HAD TO WHAT? What is with the dramatic pauses?!
Pike: Wait, I’ve seen this before. The fancy coat-god guy… Trelaney: COULD CAPTAIN PIKE PLEASE STICK TO THE SCRIPT.
Star Trek Enterprise, 4×10: “Daedalus”. On Star Trek Day, I was listening to the Icarus/Daedalus myth, and things progressed as they will. The Enterprise plays hosts to some visiting doctor who swears he’ll put Starfleet out of business with his extra-special long-distance transporter. Visiting doctor doesn’t understand the projection of force or the fact that you have to know where places are to beam to them. Also, he accidentally killed his kid while inventing the transporter and his visit to the Enterprise is really an attempt to use the ship to fetch his kid out of Transporter Land Limbo. So far my attempts to revisit Enterprise have been….really boring.
ST SNW, 4×8: “Orders of Magnitude” Crazy Admiral takes over the Enterprise. Also, Anson Mount wears skinny jeans and I am sad at Pike’s steady emasculation. We get cool Andorians, though! Jim Kirk is on the Enterprise…again. He says he’s there to get a checkup from Dr. M’Benga. Doesn’t he have his own doctor? Suuuuure, but his ship doesn’t have La’an on it. Cap’n Pike and a bunch of the women (except for La’an and Erica I Fly the Ship Ortegas) have gone into some caves on a planet, and are out of communicator range; an admiral shows up and is like “Hey yo, I have shady stuff to do” while La’an breaks from character and fangirls/squees all over the place at the prospect of having Admiral Whatever on board.
Admiral Whatever: Are you the ranking officer on board, Lieutenant Spock? Spock: No sir, Commander Kirk is. Kirk: O_O ….yes, sir, but I’m not a a member of this crew. I just stopped by. Lemony Snicket: “Stopped by”. A word which here means, “I’m just here to chat up La’an, don’t put those command decisions on me.”
Admiral Whatever: George Kirk was my first officer. He’s a good man. A good officer. We shared many pots of coffee. Do you know why he never got his own ship? Me: Eric Bana didn’t magically appear in his universe and kill Captain Robau and let him give a dramatic speech to his wife?
Admiral Whatever: Let the log show that I am implementing General Order 24. When we arrive at Argus 2, the entire surface of the planet will be destroyed. Literally everyone: O_O Surely Someone: (We have a general order for genocide? I thought we were the good guys.) (And for context: Admiral Whatever is doing this to make sure a cloaked ship somewherrreeeee on the surface is destroyed.)
After a season of gimmick episodes, this was a surprisingly sober Trek take. Also, really good Uhura episode.
ST Discovery, 2×3: Points of Light. Lookit, I’m not asleep! The Enterprise finds a Vulcan ship. Awful….KurtzKlingons do awful KutzKlingons things. I stopped watching.
ST Strange New Worlds 4×9: “Once La’an A Time”. Me, seeing screenshots: The hell is this? A sequel to that weird fantasy episode? I am not watching – ohhh, La’an. (I’m not going to describe this one, I’m just going to dump quotes and…let you sort it out. It turned into another “This is stupid, this is asnine, why do I like it” episode.
Pike, to La’an: Can we talk about our feelings? People are concerned. Me: I’m concerned about you wearing skinny jeans, my dude, not about Dark La’an’s feelings.
Spock: We see the castle. We also see….fairies. Fascinating. La’an: You have got to be kidding me.
La’an: We’re staying? Why are we staying? Pike: To find out why a magic planet full of our doppelgangers is floating through space. La’an: Magic. We’re saying magic is a real thing now, are we?
La’an: Are you suggesting that my shadow self is a pathetic damsel in distress?
La’an: I have never…..in my life….WANTED TO BE A PRINCESS. Pelia: But you have the easiest part to play! You just look nice and send princes on quests and boo-hoo-hoo…. La’an: (snaps what she was holding in half)
Pike: Ah! Yes. It is…I, Roth, with whomst thou… Fantasy M’Benga: ….”whomst” is not a word.
La’an: I mean you no harm. Swordsmen, laughing derisively: (laugh derisively) La’an: Harm it is, then. (Harms)
Pike: La’an? FantasyLa’an: (making ridiculous dog-mama noises) Spock: Not La’an.
La’an: The Queen stole my mind. I can’t remember my beloved’s…belovedness, or your bravery, or…even who Runa is. (pathetic fake crying) FantasyOrtegas (she does not fly the ship) and FantasyKirk: You don’t remember RUNA?(Runa is Christina Chong’s dog.)
La’an: “The Swamp of Infinite Death”. No subtext there at all, is there?
FantasyKirk: I accept you for who you are. For all of who you are. If only you could do the same for yourself. Me: Yeah, we’re going to need another season before La’an wrestles all her inner demons.
Kirk: We have a lot of history. Singing. Stabbing. Stunning. La’an: Can we start over? Kirk: Let’s find out. Me: Aww.
SNW 4×10: Tomorrow’s Enterprise. The Enterprise is inspecting an enormous ring light (for an enormous YouTube creator, presumably) in space. Spock thinks this ‘white hole’ could be the other side of a black hole. Well, it’s more sensible than red matter. After the Ring Light does some anomaly-type things to the Enterprise, Uhura starts hearing audio from…..the future? An alternate reality? We get to see a future version of the SNW crew, one in which Uhura and Chapel are both in their TOS kit (and hair), and Captain Kirk is on the bridge – but it ain’t our Enterprise. This episode gets a little wild but it’s Star Trek wild, not Star Trek pretending to be Casablanca or As the World Turns or Everafter wild.
Pike: We’re sitting ducks and we can’t see a thing. Una: Is it Tuesday? It feels like a Tuesday.
Captain Jim: I hate time travel. Uhura: That’s what La’an said yesterday. Captain Jim, significant face: La’an?!” Me, to writers: Do. Not. Do. Sad. Things. To. La’an. Captain Jim: (series of faces) Uhurua: Where is she? Is she here? Captain Jim: Let’s talk about you.
Chapel: What are we doing here? Captain Jim: Breaching every rule we have about time travel.
So, I ran into Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul, and I kinda had to read it. I’m not much of an angler, but I enjoy reading outdoor works like those of Robert Ruark and was curious as to what Hoover’s writing voice was like. Biographies and other works have sold me on the notion that Hoover was a dreadful writer; in this case, he must have had a good editor. While the sentence structure tends heavily toward the short and successive, rather than the long and flowy that I tend to favor, it’s perfectly entertaining. Hoover here exhibits a dry sense of humor that I cottoned to immediately. It appears to have been written rather late in his life, as he refers to his friend, the late Robert Taft, who died early during Eisenhower’s administration. Hoover’s writing plays with levity and seriousness; he muses on how important escaping the frenzy of modernity and busy-ness and getting out into nature and wiling away the day talking to the fellows and trying to reel in dinner is for a man’s mind, but he also treats it with a mock-seriousness, referring to it as being ingrained in the Constitution. He also writes on the importance of addressing pollution. These days we tend to think of any environmentalism as being born in the 1970s, but Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Hoover all played parts in conservation and environmental stewardship. He also shares a few amusing anecdotes from his time fishing. Obviously my reading project inflamed my interest in taking this one, but it’s a little work and it led me to Grover Cleveland’s Fishing and Shooting Sketches. Well, tally ho.
Mr. GC is a very different writer than Herbert Hoover; he rivals St. Paul for his love of long sentences and words whose price you may not know until you ring up at the register. I am a reader of some experience, who savors a finely-crafted sentence’s rhythms and words like the snootiest gourmand, and even I was reduced to staring in awe like a country hick who’d just seen his first train. The words just keep coming and coming, and each is grander than the last. Witness:
So, also, when people, more mistaken than malicious, have wagged their heads in pitying fashion and deprecated my indulgence in hunting and fishing frivolity, which, in high public service, I have found it easy to lament the neglect of these amiable persons to accumulate for their delectation a fund of charming sporting reminiscence; while, at the same time, I sadly reflected how their dispositions might have been sweetened and their lives made happier if they had yielded something to the particular type of frivolity which they deplored.
The entire text is like this. It’s less than a hundred pages, but reading a chapter feels like knocking off a volume of Dickens. There were times when I thought Mr. Cleveland was pulling my leg, as when he offers a few paragraphs to explain how the big ones really do get away, and why fishing stories should be believed. Unfortunately, this is the first time I’ve encountered any of Cleveland’s writing, so I have no basis for comparison. Like Hoover, he writes on the spiritual value of withdrawing from the world and communing with Nature and Nature’s God, and also draws distinctions between ‘market hunters’ — who shoot ducks or other critters indiscriminately — and True Sportsmen, who are there to glory in Nature and test their wits and spirit against the wild. Like Hoover, he also hails fishing for its ability to teach the student patience and increase the virtues overall. No man can be a fisherman without learning selflessness, he asserts, having to lend bait to comrades-on-the-bank in need who have found themselves short with fish there for the taking. Cleveland writes that despite this liberality, the true fisherman is also conservative in that he does not plunder the existing stocks, and he conducts himself at all times with honor and prudence. It’s gloriously Victorian, but this attitude is not feigned, I don’t think: Robert Ruark records his grandfather counseling him to only shoot a few quail, otherwise the covey as a whole will disappear and there’ll be no hunting next year. (Then one sees modern fishing ships with nets that rival the size of the boat and contain thousands upon thousands of fish: we are demented.) Interestingly, while he and Hoover are both aware of a hierarchy of fisher-folk — from the elite fly-fishers to the peasantry casting rods from the banks of lakes — Cleveland deplores the snobbery that drips down from those have time, money, and leisure enough to fly-fish. This little work was also connected to my present Hail to the Chief fixation, but the challenge of its prose proved to be an additional perk.
Coming up next week….science! At least two entries. Also hobbitses. Nasty, tricksy little hobbitses!
Quotations
“There is no subtle reason for this little book. Over many years in meetings of fishermen and fisherwomen, in public addresses, and in articles for magazines, I have made observations on fishing. Along came a publisher, who said to me “These meditations would make a little book of good cheer. And in the daily grind of trying to find out why the Communists get that way, it would be an expedition into relief.” (Hoover)
[Fishing] is discipline in the equality of man —for all men are equal before fish. (Hoover)
The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. More- over, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, and radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger. When all the routines and details and the human bores get on our nerves, we just yearn to go away from here to somewhere else. When you get full up of telephone bells, church bells, office boys, columnists, pieces of paper and the household chores —you get that urge to go away from here. Going fishing is the only explanation in the world that even skeptics will accept.
Life is not comprised entirely of making a living or of arguing about the future or defaming the past. It is the break of the waves in the sun, the contemplation of the eternal flow of the stream, the stretch of forest and mountain in their manifestation of the Maker —it is all these that soothe our troubles, shame our wickedness, and inspire us to esteem our fellow men —especially other fishermen. (Hoover)
Lots of people committed crimes during the year who would not have done so if they had been fishing.(Hoover)
A true fisherman is conservative, provident, not given to envy, considerate of the rights of others, and careful of his good name. He fishes many a day and returns at night to his home, hungry, tired and disappointed; but he still has faith in his methods, and is not tempted to try new and more deadly lures. On the contrary, he is willing in all circumstances to give the fish the chance for life which a liberal sporting disposition has determined to be their due; and he will bide his time under old conditions. He will not indulge his fishing propensity to the extent of the wanton destruction and waste of fish; he will not envy the superior advantages of another in the indulgence of the pastime he loves so well; he will never be known to poach upon the preserves of a fortunate neighbor; and no one will be quicker or more spirited than he in the defense of his fishing honor and character. (Cleveland.)
It is better to go home with nothing killed than to feel the weight of a mean, unsportsmanlike act. (Cleveland)
“I just don’t know what this boy is doin’. He’s read the presidents before me, he’s read the presidents after me, why won’t he read ME?”
The first time I ever applied for a job, it was at my local newspaper; I remember seeing the iMacs on the desk and thinking that if I really wanted to work in journalism, I might have to learn macOS. The paper wasn’t hiring, but I’ve always kept an eye on the world of journalism since – watching it decline, as one might an aging relative. I believe in newspapers as organs of local culture and hate seeing them wither away. Ghosting the News is a brief work on the plight of local papers and argues for their importance after attributing their decline to the rise of web news and financial upsets like the 2008 recession and COVID. Sullivan’s work focuses on papers for their journalistic potential – even with declining staffs, they still produce a greater volume of news than attractive people on TV talking briefly about goings-on in town – and the importance that has for democracy. The American republic since the Founding has prioritized newspapers, seeing the free flow of information as vital to an informed res publica: that’s why the post office made it cheaper to mail newspapers than letters! Although Sullivan’s own work demonstrates one reason so many people have disengaged from ‘mainstream news’ – the easy contempt for those on the wrong political side – I still found it engaging. I’m amazed that my own town has held on to its local paper, even if it’s become a twice-weekly rather than a daily, and this little book made me more grateful that it’s still around.
When I read the American Presidents treatment of Jimmy Carter, I knew right away I wanted more. Not because his presidency was hugely impactful, but he struck me as such an odd personality I wanted to ponder him more. I was particularly interested in his rise to power through Georgia politics, and wondered if The Outlier might fit the ticket. It doesn’t, as it focuses largely on Carter’s presidency, but still proved a useful and absorbing read.
Carter is unusual in that he was the first Southern president of the Civil Rights age. Carter brought a definite outsider perspective to Washington, surrounding himself with the “Georgia Boys”. While I was particularly interested in Carter’s early political career, there’s not a lot here on that subject: we briefly review Carter growing up in the Plains area, joining the Navy, slowly building a career there and then resigning after his father’s death to take care of the family business. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, he puts on a suit and announces he’s running for state office. Although Carter would later denounce class-based identity politics, Kai Bird offers that Carter’s edge in politics came from a class-oriented populism. He managed to pitch to both blacks and poor whites that he was on their side, telling a black official that while he might not like the way Carter ran his campaign, he would like the way he performed in office. Carter was an unusual mixture of socially liberal and fiscally conservative; there were a great many things he wanted the government to do for people, but he would not countenance runaway spending. This was especially important once he reached higher office, as Carter believed that deficit spending spurred on inflation, and that fiscal discipline was necessary. This put him increasingly at odds with New Deal and Great Society-type liberalism, which was far more comfortable with deficits and entitlement spending. (It would also put him at odds with the rising neo-cons: Reagan would reinstate the B-1 bomber program that Carter reviewed and cancelled on the grounds of being already obsolete.)
What I continue to appreciate and puzzle over is Carter the Man. He brought an informality to the White House –jeans and sweaters rather than suits – but he was definitely not some “Aw, Shucks, Rosalyn, you know they just went an’ e-lected me to the White House?” type. Bird records people who came expecting Uncle Jimmy and encountered instead Uncle June – a man who could be cold, supremely self-confident, and not at all amenable to glad-handing. Bird notes that Carter’s contempt for politics-as-usual was one of his weaknesses; he rarely went out for dinner, and when he played tennis with Congressional figures, that was all they did – play tennis. No after-match drinks, no relationship-building. Carter loved the tediousness of paperwork – he was apparently enthusiastic about reading and processing reams of briefs and notes that appeared on his desk – but not the work of slowly building relationships with lots of small talk.
The largest part of this book, as with Carter’s presidency, is consumed by foreign policy. Carter was keenly interested in negotiating peace between Israel and the Arabs, then led by Egypt; he was able to do so, though with less Israeli cooperation than he would like on the area of expanding settlements. Iran became a huge issue in the last two years of his administration, when the Shah was run out by an alliance of jihadists and leftists and the American embassy was taken by Iranian students. The new ruler of Iran, Big Beard the First, saw the captive Americans as useful leverage to get Carter to turn over the former government’s money and purchases still in the US. While Carter made steady progress getting the jihadis to the table, distractions arrived in the form of Russians invading Afghanistan and Iraq invading Iran.
Although I have issues with Bird as author (his ease in referring to Carter’s conservative antagonists as racist, for instance), he tells a compelling story about a unique man in American politics. I don’t think I’m done with Jimmy just yet, but revisiting – through his White House diary, for instance – will have to wait. There’s a large Texan glowering in the corner at me.
Quotes
In Egypt again some years later, [Carter] made a point of visiting Sadat’s widow Jehan, who after an elaborate Egyptian dinner one evening, turned to carter and explained that she had recently found a note written by Sadat shortly before his October 1981 assassination. Awkwardly clearly her throat, Jehan pulled out the note and read: “Jimmy Carter is my very best friend on Earth. He is the most honorable man I know. Brilliant and deeply religious, he has all the marvelous attributes that made him inept in dealing with the scoundrels who run the world.” Stunned for a moment, Carter then smiled and replied, “Well, maybe, but I’ll never change.”
“‘The scary part,’ noted Anatoly Chernyaev, a member of the Kremlin’s inner circle, ‘is that the final, sole decision [to invade Afghanistan] was made by someone who is completely senile…It was a terrifying sight. […] The Soviet apparatchiks knew what a disastrous mistake had been made — and yet many of Carter’s advisers were clueless about the disarray within the Kremlin.'”
