Restaurant Clerk in Drivethrough: Now this plate will still be warm on the bottom, so be careful — Me: Thank you so much! Stephen Fry, reading The Odyssey: AND THEY THREW THE INFANT FROM THE WALLS OF THE CITY ONTO THE ROCKS BELOW Me: …have a good day! (speeds away)
A couple of years ago I read Stephen Fry’s Mythos, his attempt to bring together some of the primordial Greek mythological characters into one narrative; he followed it with Heroes, Troy, and finally Odyssey. The recent release of an Odyssey movie put the old story into my head, and I found myself listening to it through much of July. Stephen Fry’s collection is not simply a modern retelling of The Odyssey itself; following Fry’s previous syntheses, it brings together other Greek stories that are set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War. The King of Ithaca, in fact, does not arrive until halfway through. Fry’s collection, however, expands rather than diminishes the contents; and given his delivery and digressions, created an excellent product altogether
One would think that The Odyssey is about cunning Oydyse — (“Why do they always use that word? Why not imaginative, or creative?”) — is about imaginative and creative Odysseus’ journey home from Troy. This is a journey made a lot longer than it needed to be for the same reason the Hebrews spent 40 years walking around in the desert on a trip that should have taken them two weeks: contempt of the gods. Man’s relationship with the gods is a major plot engine here, beginning with the sack of a temple in Troy and escalating rapidly after Odysseus, unable to restrain his pride, tells the dread Cyclops Polyphemus who it is who blinded him: ODYSSEUS, KING OF ITHACA! The God of the Sea Poseidon doesn’t care that his boy was guilty of holding humans hostage and eating them; no, he only cares that Odysseus blinded his progeny and exposed the giant’s idiocy. (“No man has injured me! No man has tortured me!”) Similarly, Helios doesn’t care a whit if Odysseus’ men were trapped on his island for weeks at a time and ate through their stores; they did a little beach BBQ with his cows after being threatened with starvation, and that is enough to kill everyone except for Odysseus who was too busy working on the ship to eat. It is only after Odysseus learns humility — literally disguising himself as a beggar with grey-eyed Athena’s help — that he can finally come home.
While Odysseus does show up halfway through, though, Fry maintains his approach of aggregating different Greek stories and telling them together along shared narrative lines; so here, we get stories based on the aftermath of the Trojan war, like Agamemnon’s awkward family situation (“awkward” being a word which here means “Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, so now his wife and other daughter are going to throw a net around him and stab him to death in the tub”), as well as Pious Aeneas’s journey to Carthage and ensuing drama that eventually leads him to conquering Italy and all that. Amusingly, Fry shifts to Roman names for the gods during his Aeneadic sojourn, and here employs one of the digressions that make his narratives especially interesting. Fry loves to take sidebars to point out how words emerged from the gods, for instance, or to explore just what exactly the lotus flowers might’ve been that so encumbered Odysseus and his men– in the Aeneas chapter, he compares the Greek and Roman gods. The different names are not merely names: Athena falls from a place of preeminence in Greek myths to barely holding her own as a minor goddess as Minerva. Ares, however, rises so much under the Roman reign that he gets his own month — March, when the winter thaw allows armies to go to war once again.
I will admit that my appreciation of this was doubled because I was watching films and listening to podcasts based on the Odyssey at the same time, so Fry’s information supported my interpretation of them and gained value at the same time. I have not read Homer’s original Odyssey in ages — perhaps not since I read it and The Illiad to prove to a girl who praised a romantic rival as ‘sophisticated’ that I was moreso — so I can’t judge with too much accuracy how close Fry’s interpretation of the original is. I was surprised by his Odysseus being haunted by his mistakes which cost so many lives; the new Oydessy as well as The Return lean heavily into his grief, so it’s interesting that it might not be as novel an approach as I thought. At any rate, the teenage girl I pursued when I, too, was a teenager had something else in mind other than reading world literature when she said sophisticated. (It meant wearing stylish clothes and being smug/charming, I have concluded in retrospect.) Fry’s renditions of the stories were compelling, as he leaned into his excellent ability with diverse voices, and I especially enjoyed the digressions.
I am now listening to him read Troy, which again dives into backstories to dense that Fry admits at the beginning: if you have followed me, reader, then I am in awe of you. Considering how much time I’ve spent listening to Agamemnon’s genealogy, I understand.
Related: Well, my memory is rubbish. I read and reviewedThe Odyssey back in 2014. And The Illiadin 2011!
Young Washington, 2026. Watched on opening weekend with the ladyfriend, who indulged my historical asides (“That’s Thomas Gage, he’s going to be an antagonist in twenty years.”) and and the film’s violence. Young Washington is a penniless chap with a good family name and nothing else; he joins the Virginia Militia to prove his mettle and begin making a name for himself a gentleman, but runs into disaster almost immediately. You only lose if you quit, so Washington takes to the field again as the French & Indian War begins in earnest. I liked the emphasis the film put on the Virginia Militia being Virginians. Moderns really have no idea how strong state identification was in an era when you couldn’t just move on a whim.
1776, 1972. Here a Lee, and there a Lee, and everywhere a Lee, a Lee! A musical comedy about the founding of America, produced in advance for the Bicentennial. I love, love, this movie. Granted, I’m both a history nut and a lover of musicals, but it’s SO GREAT. The script is funny, sweet, dramatic…
“Fat George has declared us in rebellion! Why in bloody hell can’t [Congress]?!”
“‘Treason is a charge invented by winners for an excuse for hanging the losers.’” “I have more to do than to stand here listening to you quote yourself.” “Aw, but that was a new one.”
Mr. Hancock: The principles of independence have no greater advocate in Congress than its president. And that is why I must join those who vote for unanimity. Mr. Adams: Good God, John! What are you doing? You’ve sunk us! Mr. Hancock: Now, hear me out! Don’t you see that any colony who opposes independence will be forced to fight on the side of England? That we’ll be setting brother against brother. That our new nation will carry as its emblem the mark of Cain. I can see no other way. Either we all walk together, or together we must stay where we are.
Mr. Adams: Do you mean to say it is not yet FINISHED? Mr. Jefferson: No sir. I mean to say it has not yet begun. Mr. Adams: Good god! A whole week! The entire Earth was created in a week! Mr. Jefferson: Sometime, you must tell me how you did it.
ADAMS: Well, I’ll never appear in the history books anyway. Only you. Franklin did this, and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington – fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves. FRANKLIN: [pondering] I like it.
Adams: This is a REVOLUTION, dammit! We’re going to have to offend SOMEBODY!
Smokey and the Bandit, 1977. A charismatic wildcat trucker known as The Bandit is bet $80,000 (in 1977 money) that he can’t get a truck of Coors beer from Texarkana Tx to Atlanta within a certain time limit. Unable to resist a challenge, The Bandit hires his trucking buddy Jerry Reed (one of country music’s all-time best gee-tar pickers). Their idea is simple: The Bandit will steam along in a Trans-Am, attracting and losing police attention, while Jerry keeps moving the cargo unmolested. (said cargo is illegal: it’s Coors beer, and in 1977 that is bootlegging.) However, on the way The Bandit picks up a runaway bride, the adorable Sally Field, and her disgruntled almost-father-in-law Sheriff Buford T. Justice is determined to get her back. He therefore chases The Bandit from Texas to Georgia with great dialogue and property destruction along the way. As my trucker father told me one of the many times we watched this movie, “This movie sold many a Trans-Am.” I cannot tell you how many times this son and nephew of truckers has watched this movie, but it’s one of my all-time favorites – what a celebration of good-old fashioned entrepreneurship against government oppression! Not only is it outrageously entertaining in its own right, it introduced me to the music of Jerry Reed. One huge theme of the movie is that The Bandit is a folk-hero: people know his rig, they know his voice on the CB, and they actually help him on his way – not only telling him where cops are, but actively interfering in police operations. On an interesting note, this was filmed in ‘76 as I spied Bicentennial decor in a few of the small town filming locations.
Jerry Reed: What’s goin’ on up there? Come back, Bandit? Is she wearing….a wedding dress? Bandit, watching it fly out the open roof: She was. Jerry Reed: What’s she got on now, COME BACK?
(The Bandit, screaming along at 130 miles an hour) Sally Field: You know who I feel has really revolutionized the American theater? Stephen Sondheim.
“The fact that you are a county sheriff is not germane to the situation.” “The %@$))@ GERMANS GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!”
Like Father, Like Son, 2014. FINALLY, a return to Kore-Eda. I began watching his work at the beginning of the year and was soon distracted. I’ve been watching to go back to him. In this film, two Japanese couples are horrified to find that their sons are not their own; the boys were born on the same day, but swapped somehow in the maternity ward. This was only found out because of blood testing done as part of elementary school applications (?!), and now the families only have a few months to decide what to do. This is a very hard film, emotionally, because we witness two sets of people wrestling with the same question: what makes my son my son? What makes family, family? Adding to the tension is the fact that these are not interchangeable families: Ryota and his wife Midori are very materially successful, but their classy penthouse feels like a sterile apartment. Yudai and Yukari are working class (Yudai sells and works on home appliances), but have a very warm home life. Whereas little Keita is more or less being groomed to be a formal little salaryman like Ryota, little Ryusei is one child among several, and is used to his parents’ constant physical affection and horseplaying. The Y/Y home is very intimate – the family sleeping together – whereas R/M are more formal. That’s mostly because of Ryota, however, who we find had a father he disapproves of and who has patterned his life to rise above. This is not a case of “Malfoys bad, Weasleys good,” though, because Yudai is very materialistic in his way: as warm as he is with the kids, he’s constantly wondering how much they can sack the hospital for. When the families grudgingly try “exchanging the kids” – mostly because of Ryota – things get wrenching. One admirable thing about this is the kid-acting – acting in Kore-eda films is very quiet and understated, and even the children here radiate a lot of inner turmoil. Ultimately it ends well, but as usual with Kore-Eda you have to travel through the wringer first.
Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, 2008. Dany Boon. A French postmaster makes a judgement error and is consigned to Nord-pas-de-Calais, the boonies. He regards it with fear and trembling first, refusing to drag his wife into the frozen wastelands of the North, and when he arrives he expects to find the locals to be illiterate peasants. Although it takes him a while to adjust to their dialect, they’re marvelously friendly people and he soon finds himself much happier than in his previous big-city post – but, because his wife and friends back home expect him to be miserable, he always creates dramatic horror stories of his life up north to make it sound like he’s living in Siberia or something. As a Southerner, I found this film especially hilarious because of how moronic the urban French’s perceptions of Nord-pas-de-Calais were. I have literally been asked questions like, “So has anything changed around here since the sixties?” as if we’re still walking around in black and white. It’s definitely a comedy: in one scene, the boss goes on a route with one of his carriers to give him an example of how to say “non!” to residents who invite him in for a drink. The boss winds up very…lubricated. (“Did you see how I turned down that fifth beer, Antoine? Firm! Cordial, but firm!”) In another, the postmaster’s wife comes to visit him, and he confesses to his friends he’s been telling her stories of his living among barbarians and such, so the villagers decide to take stereotypes up to eleven. It’s hilarious, and that’s not counting the Americanesque love of gunfire.
“Why were you drunk on a bicycle?”
“Saying no to alcohol.”
Truman, 1995. Gary Sinese plays Harry Truman, a blunt haberdasher from Missoura who gits himself in politics and winds up president. I’ve been a fan of Sinese since watching Forrest Gump as a kid, so I enjoyed it. Sinese really leans into Truman’s accent. I understand this was based on David McCullough’s epic biography.
“Whenever the press quits abusing me, I know I’m in the wrong pew.”
“If Moses had waited on the polls, he’d still be in Egypt!”
“The hell kind of word is deniability? I’m just the man holding this office. If I dirty it, the dirt doesn’t leave with me, when I go, it stays and rubs off on whoever comes in after me from now on.”
I REALLY wanted to follow this up with a Sinese double feature in which he plays George C. Wallace: first in Wallace, and then again in Path to War where he plays Wallace in a film dominated by MICHAEL GAMBON AS LBJ. I have Wallace, but the first time I began watching it, I got angry over the pathetic way they portrayed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was not close; it was not close to close. A spider monkey on LSD could have come up with something closer. Anyway, now all my DVDs are in storage and I can’t find it on streaming.
Troy, 2004. All month I’ve been debating whether or not to watch The Odyssey. In the plus column: Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, who had me sold from the word go; stabbing; triremes, or in this case Viking longboats identifying as tritremes. In the minus column: extremely dodgy casting outside Matt and Anne; Viking longboats identifying as triremes; Odysseus reduced from an over-proud warrior to a dude with a case of the gloomies because he’s stabbed a lot of people. No gods, except for grey-eyed Athena who is apparently a hallucination. The Odyssey being in the news, however, I listened to a multi-part series from The Rest is History on it, and then I listened to Stephen Fry’s The Odyssey, and then I said “Well, Troy didn’t have gods and I loved it. Didn’t I?” I needed to find out. I knew, of course, that portions of this movie have seeped into my soul: Achilles and Hector’s tragic fight, Achilles “And that is why no one will remember your name,” etc. But I needed to see it. I needed to sail back into the past, when I watched this movie after my western civ professor had made me drunk with love of the great dramas of classical history – the duel between heroes here, the Greeks standing at the Gates of Fire, defying the Persians, Athens and Sparta standing back to back and then grappling like Cain and Abel in the mud. I was enthralled every moment. The part I hate about this movie is that the little worm Paris, both kills the Mighty Achilles, and lives. In the myths, of course, the wretched diaper dumpling is slain by the noble Philoctetes, but in this movie he gets off despite his unbridled lust and moral cowardice. As much as I love Eric Bana’s Hector, murdering Meleanus to save the worm’s life was poor bargain.
I enjoyed it thoroughly. Um…don’t be surprised if I rewatch 300.
“Let Achilles fight for honor, let Agamemnon fight for power, and let the gods decide who to glorify.”
“Honor the gods, love your woman, defend your country. Troy is mother to us all – FIGHT FOR HER!
“Do you know what’s waiting for us, beyond that beach? IMMORTALITY! TAKE IT! IT’s YOURS!”
“The gods envy us because we are mortal. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”
Agamemnon: You’ll be a Trojan princess, scrubbing my floors. And at night – Briseus: (stab stab stab) Me: Hey, that’s his wife’s job! Let Clytemnestra do that!
The Odyssey, 1997.
I’ve watched this 2-3 times over the years and always enjoy it: it’s the classic cinematic portrayal of Odysseus’ story. I can’t watch this without some nostalgia, because it takes me back to 9th or 10th grade world lit where we were trying to memorize the Greek and Roman pantheons and the subtle differences between them. Rewatching this made me wonder if, in high school, our teacher only showed us selections, because the Calypso scenes are a bit risque for a teacher so circumspect she used swear words like “Oh, fudge”.
I’m here to shoot suitors and eat olives, and I’m all outta olives
The Return, 2024. Cunning but foolish Odysseus has washed up on the shore of his home kingdom, Ithaca. It has been many years since he reigned here; in his days of being storm toss’d by the gods (gods not included in this movie), men have descended like locusts on his realm to eat him out of house and home and seize his wife as their own. Odysseus is a broken man; he has lost his men, been long removed from the meaning of home, and now is haunted by a war whose cruelties he was a participant in – and in the case of the Fall of Troy, the Architect of. This is not an action movie, but rather an intense psychological study of a man trying to find home again – not physical home, because he arrives there, but a deeper home. Peace. The direction is wonderful, with long focuses on characters like Oydesseus and Penelope whose barely-twitching faces testify to a war within. Warned by the shade of Agamemnon (whose wife stabbed him in the bath) to exercise caution, Odysseus practices prudence for once. Enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’ acting as always; did not expect to see his…pilum.
“Troy could never be taken, only destroyed. We burned it to the ground, and….drowned the flames in blood.”
“We didn’t know the dead were the lucky ones. We survive, but there’s nothing…left inside…”
“You know who I am; tell him.” “I know who you were.”
What’s coming up? No idea. I am much closer to being willing to watch the new Odyssey, I think. One night when I fell asleep watching the 1990s one, Amazon decided to follow it with Jason and the Argonauts (1963) which I could see if this mythic Greek mood persists. I’ll definitely be watching The Brink of War on release. I don’t think Jeff Daniels will do Reagan any justice (Quaid knocked that one out of the park), but Jared Harris as Gorby and J.K. Simmons in anything? Sign me up.
Norfolk Southern’s LADY LIBERTY engine, at my local NS trainyard
While I’ll finish The Age of Eisenhower today and could wrap up Stephen Fry’s Odyssey tomorrow,, reviews for either before August are unlikely. So, let’s wrap up July in books! We travel ever deeper into the oppressive heatsink of July, where the lows fall in the mid-70s (~24 C) and the highs….the highs do not contemplate thinking about. A friend of mine who is being wooed by the University of Alabama as a professor traveled from Colorado to Alabama recently, and found that I did not exaggerate the Great Sticky Siege. “At least you’re seeing us at our worst,” I joked, lying. August will be worse. Professionally, I kicked off the month attending the annual Alabama Mosaic / Alabama Digital Preservation Network meeting in Montgomery. It’s always nice to spend the day with fellow archivists & techies. ADPN is something of a pioneer in their network structure, which is fitting: Alabama has the nation’s oldest government archives, and that includes the National Archives. People make their jokes about Alabama, but we always have our surprises.
Challenges…
America @ 250: Another strong month, as I took down Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Dwight Eisenhower. (Thirteen dead presidents remaining!) Complete failure on Classics Club, Science Survey, etc. I got into an unexpected Greek mood at the end of the month because of Odyssey. On a brighter spot, I did finally read a supplemental text for my Bible in a Year project.
New Acquisitions
After Christendom, Michael Warren Davis. I was going to wait for used copies of this to get cheaper, or for a Kindle sale, but then someone posted an excerpt of MWD writing about smartphones as an impediment to spiritual life, and of course I went after that like a dog after a steak.
Rome and Persia, Adrian Goldsworthy. This one has been on the interest list for a while, and I spotted it on sale.
Lost in Curiosity. Some hope for the science survey! This book, oddly enough, was a $2 preorder. I’ve never seen a Kindle sale for a book that’s yet to be released.
Odyssey, written and read by Stephen Fry. Almost done with it.
Coming up in August
Sweating. Suffering. Science? I’m pondering another visit to Pensacola, or at least the Gulf, in September (Morgan Wade is playing in Mobile!), but that’s a ways off.
Non-book Commonplace Entries
Once, in the confessional at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I got into an argument with the priest hearing my confession, telling him that such-and-such was a sin, according to the Catechism. You don’t expect to have to do that. My Catholic friend Kale Zelden likes to say, ironically, “We are all Protestants now.” What he means is that nearly everybody in the modern West — Catholics and otherwise — defers to individual conscience to determine right and wrong. Is he wrong? – Rod Dreher, “Authority, Modernity, and Church Disintegration“.
Traditionally, the answer [to the cause of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction] was believed to be war. […] But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence. Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived. – “The End of Reading is Here“, Rose Horowitch
We must live in this world, and honor the best of it, as Milton himself did, while not ascribing to it anything final or consummate. The world itself will no longer honor its own best; that work of piety devolves upon us. We must preserve our sanity, not easy to do when both the content and the delivery of the news are apt to unravel the brain and wither the soul. We ought to do those sweet earthly things that the world has forgotten or traduced: to sing good songs, to play music; to fall in love, to marry, to have children; to read good books; to visit our neighbors’ houses and invite them into ours; to learn again to celebrate holy days and even to dress accordingly; to recover lost prayers; to be human. – Anthony Esolen, “Pride & Incorrigibility”, Touchstone.
If St. Thomas Aquinas engaged with opposing views as many online Catholics do today, his Summa Theologica would be about 100 pages. It would consist of lines like, “Atheists reject God only because they can’t keep their pants on” and “Anyone who disobeys the pope is a prideful loser,” after which he’d move on to the next subject. Fortunately, instead the Angelic Doctor sought to understand as deeply as possible the actual point of view of those he was debating. He wanted to be able to explain those arguments as well as he could explain his own. Only then did he refute them in detail, and always without questioning the motives of those who held opposing views. This should be our model, but sadly it’s not. – “Arguing like St. Thomas Aquinas“, Eric Sammons. Crisis magazine.
Homer’s real insight, though, is that disorder in the soul never stays private. “From Ithaca to Paradise“, Gavin Ashenden
Jordan Peterson treats religion as a technology for transmitting wisdom across generations. This is the most sophisticated version of modernity’s error: we cannot imagine that religion might be true, only that it might be useful. – Laura London
The only three things I want to grow these days are children, plants, and personal holiness. To hell with the rest of it. – Dr. Alan Harrellson, The Pipe Cottage
[T]he writing of the novel upended a lot of things, and that story was one of them. I’ve said many times that this novel felt like it wrote itself through me, in a way nothing else ever quite has. The religious aspect of the tale was one element that seemed to grow without my watering it. – Paul Kingsnorth, “The Wake: Questions and Answers“.
All of this is an application of Adam Mastroianni’s deep insight that you cannot reach the brain through the ears. Being told something, reading something in a book, hearing a lecture, is nothing like what happens to our understanding when we experience it in our own lives. – Russ Roberts, “Will We Ever Learn?”
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “My life in photos or gifs”. I’m not going to share any personal photos, but will share ten of my rotating desktop wallpapers. But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finish reading recently? Recently? Er…The Lincoln Obsession, last week. I’m the middle of two huge books.
WHAT are you reading now? The Age of Eisenhower and Crusade in Europe. Both are big ol boys. Also listening to Odyssey by Stephen Fry. I’m halfway through it: Odysseus just showed up, because we’ve been listening to stories about Aeneas’ adventures and Agamemnon’s severe family drama. (We are the House Atreus! There is no generation we do not damn, there is no moral code we do not flagrantly break!)
WHAT are you reading next? Lord knows. Let’s see what Chatgpt guesses.
Just to spite it I’m going to read a baseball romance or something.
For the record, Claude guessed Truman by David McCullough, and Gemini picked Stephen Fry’s Troy or Heroes. And now, some photos! Most of these are recently pilfered/borrowed, but the night-time Chicago one is one I found nearly twenty years ago. It’s disappeared from the intertoobs, so I’m glad I’m a data hoarder. The only one of these that could be mine, I think, is the second baseball photo….it’s Riverwalk Stadium in Montgomery, during a Biscuits game. I normally sit on the third base line, though, so it’s very possible I just yoinked these from their facebook page. (Also, the game is crazy crowded, and as a rule I go on weeknights and sit on the visitors/third base line side because I don’t want people too close to me.)
Today’s TTT is books we couldn’t wait to get and have not read. But first, The Tuesday Tease!
Odysseus openly laughed. ‘Oh my goodness, you’ve never seen such a rocky, scrubby, barren, unforgiving spot,’ he said. ‘It’s all our farmers can do to grow weeds there, let alone cereals and fruit. We have the sourest wine, the raggediest sheep, the scrawniest cattle of any island in the wide Ionian Sea. Trees and houses are blown down every year in the gales. Some years, the rain never comes, and the earth turns to sand. Other years, the whole island slops with mud. Believe me, Ithaca is no Ogygia. But it’s something else … it’s …’ His eyes now filled with tears and the word came out hoarsely, ‘… home.’ ODYSSEY, Stephen Fry.
In the last week I’ve listened to a 3-part podcast on the Odyssey by The Rest is History, as well as attached Troy and The Odyssey with Armand Assant.
So, Books I’ve Bought But Not Yet Read….
(1) GIRLS: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. The only reason I haven’t devoured this has been the presidential fixation and the fact that this is a book I really need to focus and sit with, unlike presidential biographies which are a lot more casual even when they’re thought-provoking.
(2) Lee in the Shadow of Washington, Richard McCaslin. A study of Robert E. Lee and George Washington, particularly how the life of Washington dominated Lee — both because he was married to a Washington relation, the Custis family, but because for Lee Washington was The Model Gentleman.
(3) Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa. I am reading this one. Slowly, but reading it.
(4) The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865. Ordered this at the start of the year for America @ 250 reading, but then Nixon and Kennedy took over.
(5) The Civil War: An Aerial Portrait. I could knock this out in an hour; it’s just photos of battlefields.
(6) Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Adrian Goldsworthy. I was REALLY in a Roman mood when I bought this. The mood exited stage left, pursued by a Praetorian.
(7) Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Huh, where did I put this?
(8) One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. I was reading this two weeks ago, where did I put it? It’s a big book, too, not easy to lose…
(9) Historic Pensacola (Colonial Towns and Cities of the Atlantic World). Hoping to go back to P-Cola in September; maybe I’ll read this then.
(10) The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. I bought this thinking it was kinda like Humans of New York, but it’s mostly pictures. I could knock it out in an hour, I just…haven’t.
James L. Swanson is something of a Lincoln obsessive. How obsessive? Well, he’s considered an authority for evaluating Lincoln-related artifacts and relics, and he has quite a collection himself — including a lock of Lincoln’s hair. (He can also name-drop Doris Kearns Goodwin!) Swanson was born on Lincoln’s birthday, and could visit several Lincoln-related sites in his childhood: he quickly became interested in history and was showered with Lincoln-related gifts on his birthday from toys to books. So personally attached to Lincoln is he that when he came into possession of a lock of Abe’s hair, he drove to the Petersen House in Washington D.C. and stood outside the locked doors so that he could let the history overwhelm him. This book is partially a memoir of how a man becomes intoxicated by history — by place, personalities, and stories — but also a reflection on how important material history is. Swanson emphasizes the importance of place and object to connect people to history: there is value from standing in the place where history happened, to touching a newspaper that 1860s Washingtonians clutched with disbelieving hands, that cannot be matched by computer displays and text on a page. This is why he frequently visits Ford’s Theater, the Petersen house, and other locales associated with Lincoln’s death and Booth’s attempted escape. While I was primed to enjoy this book — being a history obsessive myself, visiting sites to aid in my study of events, even so I found it a little odd for a book. One has to approach it from the fact that it’s intensely personal, at first, since it focuses on the author’s childhood and such, but then also tolerate the amount of time spent pondering Lincoln artifacts, especially “blood relics”. That was a fairly morbid section, but weirdly interesting in its own right: Swanson says that so many locks were cut from Lincoln’s head that the man was lucky to have not been buried bald, and evidently everything else connected to the death was also cut up or stolen. Sheets, pillows, women’s bloodstained dresses! As a history buff, I enjoyed listening to a fellow buff talk for 3+ hours on his pet subject, but it’s a hard book to recommend unless you also share his obsession, or at least his ability to become obsessed. As it is, now I have to read his book Manhunt, where he exhaustively traces the twelve days of Booth’s attempt to elude the Federals.
Also: Did you know JFK was buried without his brain? His brain is MISSING! (RFK probably hid it somwhere as best I can tell from going on a google brain-hunt.)
Um, I may have ordered another casual Lincoln book. But not to worry, Eisenhower is still in the driver’s seat, at least until I decide on what to read for LBJ.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is, “Books We Wish We’d Found Sooner”. I tend to think I find books when I’m meant to. I have mentioned on numerous occasions, for instance, that Death and Life of Great American Cities was a life-changing book for me. I was only a quarter of the way through it and knew I would never view politics the same way again. It would not have had that effect, though, if I’d read it 2-3 years earlier. Rather, other books had started shifting my thinking in unintended ways, and then when I read Death and Life it acted on those small alterations to create a paradigm shift. I doubt that’s always the case, but I think our reading lives are journeys, in a way, knit together — not just a random string of book titles.
1WHAT are you reading now? I’m trudging through Vendetta, about the RFK/Hoffa legal contest. I’m a couple of chapters into Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower, but that will be a peck-at-it-for-weeks project, I think. It’s an extremely detailed military history of World War 2 that has already proven interesting. Here’s a couple of quotes:
The million men who had come into the Army through the National Guard and Selective Service could not be required to serve anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere or for more than twelve months at home. In the summer of 1941, consequently, with the Germans racing across Russia and their Japanese ally unmistakably preparing for the conquest of the far Pacific, the Army could only feebly reinforce overseas garrisons.
History testifies to the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war. Allied failures have been so numerous and their inexcusable blunders so common that professional soldiers had long discounted the possibility of effective allied action unless available resources were so great as to assure victory by inundation. Even Napoleon’s reputation as a brilliant military leader suffered when students in staff colleges came to realize that he always fought against coalitions—and therefore against divided counsels and diverse political, economic, and military interests.
WHAT are you reading next? I just received a preorder, Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown; and I’m looking into The Age of Eisenhower.
I begin the first of presumably several books on LBJ by peering into his office as he made the decision to not run for office again in 1968. The door is opened by Horace Busby, a newspaperman-turned-speechwriter and confidant for LBJ, who began work on his memoirs but died with them unfinished. His son published them years after Busby’s death. This was an interesting little book, which was published in a half-complete but throroughly readable form. The partial memoir recounts how Busby came to join Johnson’s staff, and more entertainingly how he began to grow used to LBJ the man: the future president was every inch The Character when he was a representative as he later became as master of the Senate and then president. The content passes through the better part of 20 years at a very shallow cruise, and then we find ourselves with Johnson as vice president, then president, facing JFK’s death and then the prospect of running the country. LBJ’s slow decision to not run for president again in 1968 consumes the last third of the book, and it’s a decision Busby was intimately involved in. One of his roles appears to have been a counselor of sort: while Johnson’s other “boys” had definite work to do (creating policy, reaching out to allies, etc), Busby was someone for Johnson to talk to and bounce ideas off of — as well as receive honest opinions. Even when LBJ was being withdrawn and moody, he liked to ask Busby into his office to talk — and sometimes forced Busby to hang out with him until he’d fallen asleep. While readers who are unfamiliar with the late 1960s are going to be a little confused (Why is LBJ resigning?), having circled LBJ for weeks now in my 1960s history and presidential reading project, I liked starting to draw close to LBJ at last. He’s one of my least favorite presidents (rivaling only Wilson), but he was a tremendously interesting and complex man — disgusting at times, but sincere in his desire to help the least of these. This little book left me very interested to learn more despite my long disdain for him.
Quotations
Since morning, you would have been at the side of the most powerful man in the world, listening as he talked of prime ministers and kings, of senators and congressmen, of preachers and charlatans; of war and peace, of live dreams and dead hopes; of happy times past and other times ahead; and of the proper size for cuff links, of the respective merits of various hair tonics, of the price of sirloin as opposed to club steak. But when you reached your own house and your wife awakened to ask what you and the president had been doing all day, you could answer only “Nothing” and fall off to sleep. The Sunday shift was over.
“People are good,” he said. “What the average folks want is very simple: peace, a roof over their heads, food on their tables, milk for their babies, a good job at good wages, a doctor when they need him, an education for their kids, a little something to live on when they’re old, and a nice funeral when they die.”
I commented that this would be difficult to write in a campaign speech, and he shook his head in amusement. “You’re thinking like a public relations man,” he explained. “No good political speech comes out of a typewriter. It has to come from the heart.”
I had known Lyndon Baines Johnson for almost sixteen years: as congressman, senator, majority leader, and vice president. Over that span, I had liked him and disliked him; respected him and disrespected him; at times thought his public performances magnificent and at other times thought his private preoccupations monumentally boring. I had traveled with him, campaigned with him, laughed with him, worried with him, shared with him moments both of the greatest consequence and of complete unimportance. I knew him better than I wanted to know any man. But on the night of November 22, 1963, waiting for him to arrive at The Elms, I was not waiting for any man I had ever known; I was waiting for the President of the United States.
“I get the best minds in Washington together,” he went on angrily, “and what do they come up with? Vomit. Fifty pages of vomit.”
“You must never forget that fellow out in Omaha or Indianapolis or Denver. He has a wife going into the hospital for a cancer operation, a daughter he’s trying to put through school, a boy on his way to Vietnam, car payments to meet, insurance premiums due, a mortgage hanging over his head, and his mother needing to go into a nursing home. When that fellow looks at the White House, he thinks the man there has it made, has everything in the world—and he’s right. All my troubles put together aren’t as big for a president as that little fellow’s troubles are for him. We have to remember that. We have to remember that here in this house”—he slapped his palm firmly against the arm of his chair—“no man who sits here can ever afford to think of himself first.”
On most speeches I wrote slowly or, to be exact, rewrote again and again, often completing the text only minutes before it was to be read. Once, in fact, Lyndon Johnson began reading a speech to the Senate before I had completed the last pages.
A strong January wind blew his hair and the cold must have been severe, but he continued standing on the ramp, his eyes searching the horizon of a lifetime that he was leaving behind. The face on the television screens became intensely private. It was the face of another Lyndon Johnson, one whom I would never know.
Today’s TTT is ‘books that live rent free in our heads’, which is an interesting premise. But first, Teaser Tuesday Time!
RFK told the reporter that his Hoffa proposal seemed promising on paper, but he had one reservation: Who the hell had ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa and David Beck? “If you do your job right,” Mollenhoff replied, “everybody will have heard about `em — and you, too.” – VENDETTA
Top Ten Books that Live Rent Free
(1) The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler. Geography is a history of American urbanism, but written from a punchy newspaperman with a fun prose style. I attended a talk by the author on this book and its connection to the then-emerging financial crisis of 2007/2008. I am fascinated by the built environment and its impact on our lives: Kunstler argues that low-density sprawl and ticky-tacky constructs are not only unsustainable, but profoundly demoralizing.
Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.
(2) The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I’m always having to quote this book to myself, mostly so I don’t lost patience with exasperating people. (“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”)
(3) Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry. Thoughts of Jayber, Mattie, Athey, and Burley — especially good ol’ Burley — often flit through my mind. It contains one of my favorite quotes in fiction:
One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] “They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good.” There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench. It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said “‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’” Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?” I said, “Jesus Christ.” And Troy said, “Oh”. It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.
(4) The Bible. This one is kind of a gimme since I grew up in a strict Pentecostal sect that was emphatic on Bible knowledge, but even during my period when I was aggressively anti-religious, the language and stories of the Bible filled my imagination and formed my thinking. KJV phraseology is especially ‘sticky’: when I’m serving as lay reader at church I have to stop my brain from automatically ‘correcting’ RSV expressions into KJV ones.
(5) The Rainmaker and (6) The Last Juror, John Grisham. These two compete for my favorite JG novel, and it’s striking that they were both written in the first person. I have read and re-read them many times, with the consequence that there are lines that sometimes just float up from the ether. Like this, from The Rainmaker:
And just like that, this woman I met three minutes ago has reduced her husband to an alcoholic imbecile.
The Rainmaker is the story of a fresh law school grad taking on a corrupt corporation, and it’s the classic soup-to-nuts story of a lawsuit being filed and executed. The Last Juror is rather different, as it’s told from the POV of a young man who buys a small-town weekly newspaper and then experiences it throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I really owe it a re-read.
(7) Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. This is cheating a bit because it’s a mix of the book and the movie, but whenever I use a word like ‘penultimate’ or ‘denouement’ I can thank Lemony Snicket.
(8) The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. Another one to re-read: this history of WW2 aviation was immersive and inspired a continuing interest in prop-driven aviation. I’ve had the same copy since 2000 or so.
(9) Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, or (10) The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis. Not a surprise here since I continually re-read them, but the stuff that often floats up is not stuff you’d expect. In Surprised by Joy, for instance, it’s stuff like this:
At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.
“You and those Kennedys!” exclaimed the waitress at my usual lunch spot when she walked by to see me deeply invested in yet another title about the Brothers K. I must admit, becoming obsessed with the Kennedy men was not something I thought would mark the summer. While I have one more book in the Kennedy set (Vendetta, about RFK’s war against Jimmy Hoffa), reading these two Chris Matthews tributes pushes me close to feeling ‘finished’ with JFK for the time being.
I refer to these as tributes rather than biographies because the author, Chris Matthews, is definitely ‘on board’. The opening of JFK: Elusive Hero entails Matthews’ early obsession with politics, and his feeling distraught that his man Nixon had lost against this Kennedy guy. Matthews, however, soon found himself enchanted by Kennedy; he would even wind up working in JFK’s Peace Corps. Matthews himself seems to have undergone much the same transformation as another reporter he mentions, who asked to be taken off the RFK beat because, as he admitted, “I think I’m falling in love with this guy!” Their assassinations, of course, are part of their mythic legacy; we’ll never know what might’ve become of the New Frontier, and can only see the two men in a cloud of vision and what-might-have-beens.
Digging into books like these, though, has made me aware of how personally compelling both men were. While they’re remembered as liberal icons, the truth is more complex and interesting. They were, for instance, hardened cold warriors: while RFK had softened a little by 1968 (trying to talk to a young leftist group to understand them, only to be spit on), they were resolutely anti-Communist. JFK is known for his stands against Khrushchev, but RFK worked for Joe McCarthy during the red-hunter’s rise to fame and then infamy. While RFK left McCarthy’s office before the end – viewing his office as increasingly irresponsible – the Kennedys and McCarthy were close enough that RFK attended both Joe’s funeral and the burial itself.
Although I view his numerous affairs, including when his wife was heavily pregnant and in need of his support, as despicable, it was hard to not see the other sides of Jack Kennedy in Elusive Hero and other books. Kennedy took history and its lessons seriously; he loved reading history, enjoyed writing it, and when he faced off against Khrushchev he did so wanting to apply the wisdom he’d learned – like trying to understand an event from the other guy’s perspective, and anticipate what decisions his own might force the other guy to make. There was a balancing act between needing to show resolve and needing to not force Khrushchev into a corner.
Admirable, too, is Kennedy’s resilience. Before this Kennedy summer I’d heard that Kennedy had back problems; I didn’t realize that he’d spent large parts of his childhood on his sickbed from scarlet fever and other diseases, and that his ‘back pain’ was so crippling that he had to resort to crutches and even contemplate life in a wheelchair. (Matthews’ books also show the tender side of Nixon in connection to this – not only was Nixon in distress when he heard JFK was in a coma and might not live, but when he was vice president he offered JFK the use of his office in the Senate so Kennedy didn’t have to traipse across the entire building.) He came close to death several times and often worked in pain, but for whatever reason – perhaps knowing his father would never tolerate it, perhaps believing he had responsibilities that outweighed his misery – Kennedy kept on striving, not sinking into self-pity and despair. Chronic illnesses can open wide that particular door.
While my appreciation of JFK was ambiguous before the summer, my appraisal of RFK was far more hostile. This is, as I’ve admitted before, partially for stupid reasons: I was obsessed with Frank Sinatra twenty years ago, and RFK essentially ended the Kennedy-Sinatra friendship. In behalf of Ol’ Blue Eyes, I’ve nursed a grudge against RFK for years. I was also highly influenced by the movie Hoffa in which the smug richie-rich boy goes against the working-class hero Jimmy Hoffa and gets berated by Hoffa in one glorious scene. (“You don’t impress me, and yer office don’t impress me, and yer family don’t impress me. I don’t need a hundred thousand dollars and my brudder elected president to WOP YOUR –”) In my early Kennedy reading, I frequently saw this disliked RFK – who held on to grudges, who acted like a stiff-necked jerk, etc – and enjoyed the reinforcement of my own prejudices. However, real people are not caricatures, and Bobby, too, had different aspects. I kept noticing those, too, especially in Raging Spirit.
I was, of course, fascinated to learn that RFK was a hardline anti-communist, an attitude that’s always attractive to a libertarian such as myself. One prominent theme of Raging Spirit is that RFK was at his heart of hearts a moralist – a strict moralist. Unlike Kennedy, whose Catholicism was so poor his wife commented on it, RFK was very faithful and understood the world in clear, black and white lines. This is presumably why he doesn’t appear to have shared his brother and father’s proclivities for chasing anything in a dress, and why he went after Hoffa and other corrupt union bosses. RFK wasn’t born a politician: while he never got into World War 2 properly, he had the constitution of a fighting executive. He liked making decisions, liked building an organization and putting it to work, and didn’t mind if people thought he was a jerk.
It was after JFK was shot that something changed. The loss of his brother meant the loss of purpose, but it also meant that his feelings about morality no longer had to play second fiddle to the need to support Jack. RFK increasingly became marked by not moderation, but idealism – rising to criticize the ongoing waste that was the Vietnam War, and then becoming increasingly concerned with both Civil Rights and poverty. A son of privilege traveled in the ghettos, migrant camps, and Appalachian mining towns and transformed himself into a near prophet – but, as one Civil Rights activist cautioned him, ‘prophets get shot’.
I truly enjoyed reading Matthews’ books on the Kennedys, beginning with Kennedy and Nixon and this pair of biographies on the brothers. While he’s more of a journalist doing history than a full biographer, the fact that he was writing about two men whose memory had shaped his life and inspired him for decades made the story of the Kennedy brothers even more compelling. Matthews’ Kennedy and Nixon is a large part of why I became interested in Kennedy to begin with. Seeing him through the eyes of a man who had opposed him politically more than once, yet genuinely admired him, made Kennedy seem more human and interesting than mythic. Tt was fitting, then, to wrap up with Matthews.
Coming up: I’m a third of the way through One of Us (Tricky Dick is back!), and I began a Sarah Ruden title about language and beauty in the Bible. President-wise, I am trying to decide if I want to tackle Truman, Eisenhower, or LBJ next. I have books chosen for the former two but find the prospect of a proper LBJ biography daunting. All the really reputable stuff is multi-volume.
Reading Freely 