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When writers as diverse as Joe Carter and The Last Psychiatrist (plus several varied acquaintances) take note of the same song, there’s some culture phenomenon afoot.
Hubbard posted this at 12:41 PM EDT on Monday, August 30th, 2010 as Belles Lettres, We're all DOOMED
The best reason to read National Review is Florence King. She has a column and a book review in this issue, making the magazine twice as good. Her review is of P.J. O’Rourke’s Driving Like Crazy, and she has this gem:
This man really does love cars, so some readers will be lost when he lapses into good-ol’-boy mode, e.g., “a hydraulic-fluid-filled device with variable pitch blades that delivered power from the 322-cubic-inch V-8 . . .” I have no idea what that means, but I can see Russia from my house.
His prose occasionally goes over the top, as in his description of the pink goo oozing from Ralph Nader’s crushed skull, but he atones for it with this: “The American automobile industry . . . will live on in some form, a Marley’s ghost dragging its corporate chains at taxpayer expense.” I forget whether that’s called a simile or a metaphor, but an English sentence never had a better tune-up. P. J. O’Rourke might be mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but he can write like an angel.
One more book for my to read list.
Hubbard posted this at 4:11 PM EDT on Friday, August 7th, 2009 as Age and Guile and P.J. O'Rourke, Belles Lettres
Roger Ebert has a must read post on the 30th anniversary of John Wayne’s death. He sums up as well as I’ve ever read what made John Wayne so great:
On screen he held so much authority so that he was not even being ironic when he explained his theory of acting: “Don’t act. React.” John Wayne, you see, could react. Others actors had to strain the limits of their craft to hold the screen with him. There is this test for an actor who, for a moment, is just standing there in a scene: Does he seem to be just standing there? Or does he, as John Wayne always did, appear to be deciding when, and why, and how to take the situation under his control?
And the Duke himself, expressing his thoughts on the greatest American art form:
But when you think about the Western–ones I’ve made, for example. ‘Stagecoach,’ ‘Red River,’ ‘The Searchers,’ a picture named ‘Hondo’ that had a little depth to it–it’s an American art form. It represents what this country is about. In ‘True Grit,’ for example, that scene where Rooster shoots the rat. That was a kind of reference to today’s problems. Oh, not that ‘True Grit’ has a message or anything. But that scene was about less accommodation, and more justice.
They keep bringing up the fact that America’s for the downtrodden. But this new thing of genuflecting to the downtrodden, I don’t go along with that. We ought to go back to praising the kids who get good grades, instead of making excuses for the ones who shoot the neighborhood grocery man. But, hell, I don’t want to get started on that
Of course, it’s Ebert, and the Duke was one of the great Hollywood right-wingers of yore, so politics can’t slip past unnoticed. Ebert’s fair enough, except for observing “I believe [Wayne] would have had contempt for the latter-day weirdos of the Right.” Yeah, right. Wayne supported Nixon and the war, he supported Reagan’s runs for governor. He was a through-and-through reactionary, and it’s impossible to imagine him any other way.
Apollo posted this at 8:33 PM EDT on Friday, June 12th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Belles Lettres, Film Rants
We’ve groused before about book titles. Ben Crair tells why the sausage is entitled thus:
Bait liberals with an insulting title and then allow their outrage to raise the book’s profile. This was the raison d’etre behind Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, and Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, all of which had titles that were roundly denounced in the liberal blogosphere.
Mark Levin may grate, but at least his Liberty and Tyranny has bucked the trend of inflammatory titles (though the book itself might be—[the royal] we haven’t read it yet).
Hubbard posted this at 10:49 AM EDT on Monday, May 4th, 2009 as Belles Lettres, Conservatism
Lytton Strachey, debunker of Victorians, once argued that “discretion is not the better part of biography.” Christo Buckley has apparently taken this to heart, airing a good chunk of dirty laundry in The New York Times about a visit from Caitlin Buckley and Kate Kennedy (granddaughters of WFB and RFK):
At some point, Mum turned to — on might be the more exact preposition — Kate, informing her that she (Mum) had been an alternate juror in the murder trial of Kate’s father’s first cousin Michael Skakel. Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, Kate’s grandmother, was (as you might be aware) the defendant in a sensational murder trial in Stamford several years before, for the 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley. Having presented this astonishing and perfectly untrue credential, Mum then proceeded to launch into a protracted lecture on the villainy of Kate’s relative.
Leave aside the issue of Skakel’s culpability, for which he is, at any rate, currently serving a 20-years-to-life sentence. Over the years, I heard Mum utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed, but this one really took the prize, in several categories, the first being Manners. Why on earth would you inflict a jeremiad on an innocent 18-year-old girl, your own granddaughter’s best friend? The mind — as Mum herself used to put it — boggles.
Over at The American Scene, Alan Jacobs admits he hasn’t finished the essay, but says, “But if we don’t go on to learn just how much—oh, how much—Mum had done for which she bloody well needed to be forgiven, and therefore learn just how gracious and forbearing her son had become, I will eat every hat I own.” Mr. Jacobs really should finish the essay. Buckely writes about excoriating his mother, to the point where she wouldn’t open his letters any more. The last words that would describe Buckley’s conduct towards his parents are “gracious” and “forbearing.” Indeed, it is quite clear that Buckley regrets not being more gracious and forbearing.
A larger point of these things is the sometimes peculiar relationships between parents and children. Even the happiest family has rocky patches, largely because families are still composed of human beings—and part of being human is making mistakes, saying the wrong thing, accidentally hurting someone, burning when one meant to singe. Biographies have two related flaws: the first is to gloss away every unpleasant aspect of a man’s life, the second is to focus on nothing but the ugly. What comes through with Chris Buckley’s piece is that yes, his parents had their flaws—but Pat Buckley was a remarkable woman who livened up most of her parties and dearly loved her son despite his flaws. WFB had his weak points, too, but he was a good man who did great things.
If there is a family trait, all three Buckleys seem a touch stuck on himself (or herself). It causes them to drive each other crazy, but they still love each other despite all this. Christo Buckley has tried his best to write an even handed family biography; the excerpt shows that he is, in ways good and bad, his parents’ son.
Hubbard posted this at 12:01 PM EDT on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 as Belles Lettres, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
It is a truth to be universally acknowledged that few pleasures in life are so exquisite as a book review hatchet job. Chesa Boudin appears to be the Communist equivalent of a Capitalist tool, as New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner observes:
Because of the interesting contradictions of his life thus far — son of militant radicals! Rhodes scholar! — you might expect Mr. Boudin to have interesting things to say about himself and perhaps even about the places he visits. If only.
His mistakes begin with his book’s epigraph. He’s chosen lines from Paul Theroux’s “Old Patagonian Express,” and they aren’t bad; they’re about how travel writers are “essentially optimists.”
But Mr. Boudin seems unaware that Mr. Theroux is, at heart, the obverse of an optimist; his writing’s baseline swat comes from its misanthropy, its cruel accuracy. And Mr. Theroux is an acid stylist, not at all the sort of writer Mr. Boudin wants to place up against his own bland sentences.
Enjoy Mr. Garner’s work, and make sure to read his conclusion.
Hubbard posted this at 12:39 AM EDT on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 as Belles Lettres, The Right Words
A Malawian judge, denying Madge’s adoption:
The issue of residence, I find, is the key upon which the question of adoption rests and it is the very bedrock of protection that our children need; it must therefore not be tampered with.
As wisely put by G K Chesterton: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”
Apollo posted this at 10:17 PM EDT on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 as Belles Lettres, Those Wacky Foreigners
Christo Buckley might not be writing for NR any more, but he can still take apart hacks as his father could. Today he shreds Joe Eszterhas and Anne Rice:
If it weren’t for Eszterhas’s bare-knuckled prose and his willingness, even eagerness, to strip himself buck naked and appear perfectly ridiculous, his book wouldn’t amount to much more than an extended bar rant — albeit without the booze, inasmuch as Eszterhas switched from gin to cranberry juice when he accepted Jesus as his personal trainer. Anne Rice is also sober, we’re told, though she went teetotal long before she returned to the fold. I doff my hat to anyone who sells 75 million books, and have no doubt that her admiring legions will cause this one to ascend to the best-selling heavens, and all power to her. But I confess — or profess — with all due humility toward and respect for a clearly good and kind and decent woman, to have found her book a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding.
Hubbard posted this at 8:08 AM EDT on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 as Belles Lettres, The Right Words
In A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present warns Scrooge, “I see a vacant seat . . . in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
The dystopian imagination of our modern Jeremiahs observes today’s shadows and projects them into the future. George Orwell, foreseeing an omnipresent bureaucracy, gave us 1984; Aldous Huxley, foreseeing life stripped of meaning through medication, gave us Brave New World. The movie WALL*E is also a dystopian fantasy, and perhaps the strongest influence on it is another dystopian view of the future, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. [Here be spoilers] Read the rest of this entry »
Hubbard posted this at 9:37 AM EDT on Monday, July 7th, 2008 as Belles Lettres, Film Rants, Philosophy
When asked how the human race should communicate to aliens, biologist Lewis Thomas said, “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”
When the Voyager spacecraft carried music representative of the earth, Bach was the most represented artist. One of the selections was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major. Interestingly, the Brandenburg Concerto was originally part of a job application on Bach’s part. From Wiki [emphasis added]:
Bach’s best-known orchestral works are the Brandenburg concertos, so named because he submitted them in the hope of gaining employment from Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721; his application was unsuccessful.
Perhaps the finest concertos in all music, and Bach was turned down. Today’s job applicants, take note: some of your interviewers may be almost as clueless as Margrave Ludwig.
Hubbard posted this at 2:32 PM EDT on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 as Belles Lettres, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser
A hero possessing Hector’s bravery, Sydney Carton’s loyalty, and Frederick Wentworth’s constancy would have virtues nearly equal the vices of Harry Flashman, Fraser’s anti-hero and a man who gives cads and cowards everywhere a bad name.
Tom posted this at 10:47 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 as Belles Lettres
Forgive the length of this post but, inspired by Amber, I am taking the 50-Book Challenge this year. I encourage a liberal interpretation of the scope and subject of this post in the comment thread.
Tom posted this at 1:36 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 as Belles Lettres
The waiter has a post up about sex that relies somewhat on your imagination:
“Ha!” Chimo says in the teasing sing song voice of a grade-schooler who knows the meaning of a sexual term before his playmates do. “You don’t know what a deluxe blowjob is.”
I’m going to be forty in a few weeks. I was getting hummers while Chimo still was crapping in his pants. I seriously doubt he knows something about oral sex that I don’t. But to humor him, I ask. “Okay, explain it.”
Chimo gives me his descriptive explanation. I won’t get into it here. Suffice to say it’s sophomoric — and sort of disgusting.
For a certain breed of humor, especially when the joke relies on creative (or disgusting) sex, letting the reader use his imagination is important, since whatever the reader imagines is apt to be more wild than anything the dedicated jokester can come up with. For example, here’s one of my favorite Catholic priest jokes:
The day after her wedding, Mary came home to her mother. Her mother couldn’t quite get what went wrong on the wedding night, and only knew that it had something to do with sex. Begging her daughter to reconsider, she took the daughter to see the village priest. The priest asked what had happened, and the daughter whispered into his ear. He turned pale, and said, “You were right to leave! For that, God destroyed Sodom.”
The mother was discouraged, but she decided to get a second opinion, and they went to see the bishop. The daughter whispered into the bishop’s ear what her husband had requested, and his beard went whiter. “Absolutely not! For that, God destroyed Gomorrah!”
Desperate, the mother decided that the third try would be the charm, so she took her daughter to see the cardinal. The daughter whispered into the cardinal’s ear what was requested on the wedding night, and the cardinal grinned and said, “Nothing wrong with that. Just try it and have fun.”
“But what about my priest and the bishop?” asked the thunderstruck daughter.
The cardinal replied, “What do those small town guys know about big city sex?”
[Incidentally, I've noticed a few different reactions---one nice, one intellectual, and one normal (that is to say, mine)---to this joke: (1) that the cardinal has heard more confessions and therefore knows more about sex than his underlings; (2) that the cardinal has a past like St. Augustine, who once prayed, "Lord, grant me chastity and continence---but not yet; (3) geez, that cardinal is a slut.]
Alas, it appears that the power of imagination is waning. After dozens of comments asking what a deluxe bj is, the urban dictionary now has a definition.
Hubbard posted this at 4:56 PM EDT on Monday, March 31st, 2008 as Belles Lettres, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Humor
The New York Times has an interesting article about Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight that dovetails our debates a few weeks ago nicely.
His Caped Crusader, Christian Bale (who also starred in Mr. Nolan’s entr’acte between the Batman films, “The Prestige”), recalls how “people would kind of laugh” when they heard that he and Mr. Nolan were taking Batman seriously. But when they finally saw the film, the same people “would say, ‘What a surprise,’ “ Mr. Bale said. “I believe that even the most popcornlike movie can be done incredibly well, and can have something that you really have to work at. That was what attracted me to doing it the first time, because I felt I’d never seen that done, and I didn’t understand why.”
It’s enough to make a marketing executive cringe, that the word “dense” pops up in conversations with Mr. Nolan and his actors. But it’s true: “The Dark Knight,” which will be released on July 18, is jammed with characters, plot and action. It picks up where “Batman Begins” left off, with Mr. Oldman’s police lieutenant, Jim Gordon, warning about the perils of escalation: that Batman’s extreme measures could invite a like response from the criminal element. And sure enough, a deadly new villain, the Joker, emerges to wreak havoc.
In a political context this would politely be called an “unintended consequence.” (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. “As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” he said. “When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.”
That dig into the Iraq War is a bit stretched but it’s a good read.
Tom posted this at 2:14 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 as Belles Lettres
I may be a biased source, but my dad just wrote the best article to be found about the future of Russia and its relationship with the U.S.:
Vladimir Putin has the heart and soul of a KGB Commissar — which, of course, he once was. He’s a thug, and he’s learned nothing from his country’s history. So he’s driving Russia into the same ditch the communists drove it into back in the twentieth century. He’s creating a one-party dictatorship in which the country’s wealth will be owned or controlled by the State. Like all dictators, he’s trying to gin up a foreign enemy — that would be us — to justify his domestic policies. And he’s embarking on a course to achieve his communist predecessors’ dream of imposing a sort of Pax Sovietica on the world.
The rigged election of Dmitri Medvedev as Russia’s president on March 2 was, of course, merely window-dressing to show that Putin is obeying his country’s constitution by limiting himself to two consecutive four-year terms. Putin himself will take the lesser post of prime minister, but there’s no doubt he’s the man in charge. The general assumption is that Putin will return to the presidency when Medvedev’s term expires, or sooner should the presidency become vacant before then. (A friendly word of advice for President Medvedev: Get yourself a food-taster, and send a flunky out each morning to start the car.)
Read the whole thing. His conclusion isn’t what I expected.
Tom posted this at 9:49 AM EST on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 as Belles Lettres, Commie Recrudescence