Shadows from My Past

Two shadows from my past crossed my bow this weekend--and from portions of my past that had nothing to do with each other.

One, Harry McAlpin, honored in memory as the first black correspondent ever to cover a White House press conference.

Say again, Harry McAlpin?  Yes, Harry McAlpin.  I knew him in my own newspaper days, in the 60s in Louisville as the executive--CEO?--as a black insurance company.  These were the years of civil rights turmoil and Louisville had its own share of the action, albeit nothing like, say, Birmingham.  The McAlpin I knew (I wouldn't have thought of calling him Harry) was self-contained, carefully put together, always correct in his public presentation.  He wasn't a barricades kind of guy.  But you quickly learned he was somebody you wanted on your radar; somebody who knew and understood the deep structure of the movement and might, if treated with proper respect, be gracious enough to explain.

Among many other things, I owe him for the gift of an important insight about the ways of politics.  As with so many other southern states, understanding the white response to racism in Kentucky required understanding at least two seemingly incompatible constituencies.  One was the silk-stocking liberals in the city, exemplified not least by my employer, Barry Bingham, the publisher of the Louisville newspapers (and a man who enjoyed having people utter his name in hushed tones).  The other was the bumptious, rabble-rousing populist streak, exemplified (and well, too) by the bumptious rabble-rousing A.B. "Happy" Chandler.

I think I had already figured out at that point that Happy, for all his cornpone manner, was purposeful, smart, funny (really funny) and imbued with a deep-seated streak of generosity, not least about blacks.  McAlpin confirmed my view. He let me understand that he liked Happy too, perhaps rather better than he liked his silk-stocking neighbors (who could also be fair weather friends).  McAlpin recalled the kerfuffle over integrating the pubic schools in Sturgis, KY in 1956, when Happy was governor.  "He sent the tanks into Sturgis," McAlpin said.  That was enough for him.  Point taken.

So far, so good, but here's the odd thing. I have absolutely no memory of having known about his White-House correspondent years.  "You're a reporter?" people will always say. "I used to be a reporter"--citing their time doing the social notes for their high school yearbook (I admit I have played this card myself from time to time).   You'd think I must have known--I once wrote a long profile about his career (it's in a box in the shed--maybe I'll fish it out later).   Or maybe--it would have been in keeping with his character--it just wasn't something he was going to talk about.

We turn next to the obituary column of the New York Times this morning,  and its report on the passing of Rabbi Myer Kripke of Omaha, whose main claim to fame in the eyes of the Times copy desk is that he invested early with his bridge-buddy Warren Buffett, and took home some $25 millions for his troubles.   "Took home" is metaphorical here since if I read this right, Rabbi Kripke drove an old Chevvie, lived in a rented apartment, and gave most of the money away.  I'd come across his name last  year in this magnificent piece of long form journalism about his daughter, who shares the queen-sized bed in her Greenwich Village apartment with one of the world's greatest collection of dictionaries.  I learned about papa there; I learned also about his son, her brother Saul, the philosopher.

I never knew the rabbi, the daughter or the philosopher (nor Buffett either, come to that).  But it crossed my mind as I read the obit--could it be? And sure enough, just a moment's Googling makes it clear that Rabbi Myer was the brother of Homer Kripke, who just might have been the smartest lawyer I ever knew.    Well: there's smart and there's smart and I'm sure there are plenty of lawyerly skills that Homer wasn't particularly adept at.  But as a book-lawyer, as a student of bankruptcy and commercial law, Homer had no master.  He came to academia only late, after long years in practice.  I can't think of anybody (well, yes I can, just one) who better married the street with the academy.

Early in my career, Homer invited me to go on one of his course books as co author.  I was flattered beyond imagining.  In the end I turned him down; I came to suspect he wanted an assistant, more than a a partner, and I wasn't disposed to do that. But also, I doubted that I would be able to keep up with the pace and acuity of his understanding.

We crossed paths from time to time in later  years, of which I remember one instance particular.   About quarter of eight one autumn morning  in the 70s, I was in my office at the law firm  when the phone rang.  "This  is Homer Kripke  You published xxx in the yy Law Review. On page nnn, there's a footnote.  It says: etc.  This is incorrect. Actually, our reasoning was just the other way around.  So the solution is not unwise, as you say.  The solution is just what it should be [click]." 

I was about to say "of course he was right," although I'm not so sure.  Fact is, I was enough diverted by the whole presentation that I don't suppose I can make an effective judgment as to whether he was right or not.   

Harry McAlpin.  Homer Kripke.  I wonder if they ever met.  Probably not.  But I met them both, and am the richer for it.

Catching Up

I learn that an old acquaintance died last month. Not “friend” precisely; in fact I don't think we had actually spoken together for 20 years or more. But we had been on and off each others' radar since we were 18. We'd exchanged any number of small courtesies and he had done me some modest favors. At 18 I held him in awe, tinged with fear; my attitude matured into great respect later.  Although we hadn't been on the same track lately, he was enough of a public person that I had been able to follow his life pretty much until the end.  By all accounts he had loved ones, achievements, recognition.   A life well lived, I can report, and did I mention that he died of a stroke on a cruise ship? So, lucky in his living; also lucky in his dying as people of my age and stage are increasingly likely to note.

So, why am I surprised? Hard to say: perhaps because we hadn't been much in each other's company since 1979-80 and I still picture him in the full vigor of his 45-ness. You say that was 33 years ago? Let me check my watch. Oh dear...

Death Watch

Two deaths worth noting this week.

One: Donald Richie.   I don't think I had ever heard of Richie until just after the return from my first trip to Japan in 2006, when my friend Suzanne did me the courtesy  of taking it for granted that I knew Ritchie's inimitable travel memoir, The Inland Sea.  Don't go telling Suzanne but I did not, and I do now, and I am the richer for it.  

And aside from the book--I don't think I had seen any Japanese movies before 2006 either, save only two or three Kurusowas.  Inspired by our travels, Mrs. Buce began to stock the Netflix queue with Japanese offerings-Tokyo Story and Ugetsu and some lovely animated offerings.  It was only on reading his obituaries that I came to understand that I owe all this to Richie too: apparently aside from (or more important than) his role as a writer, he apparently made it his project to help Westerners understand this treasure trove of culture.  Interesting to learn also that he was never that great at spoken or written Japanese--only conversation.  Maybe that is why he fell so naturally into work with film.

And two: Armen Alchian.  My friend Ed and I once amused ourselves with a thought game in which we considered what would happen if the charity solicitor tried to cadge funds from any of three great free-market economics.  We agreed that X would probably throw him out and call the cops.  Y would say, "well, it's against my principles, but if you won't tell, here's $50."  And Alchian would say: "no, my friend, you are a nice man, thank you for asking, but no."

A factoid that will scandalize some: Armen Alchian was my teacher.  No, not in school, exactly, rather in the notorious "economics boot camp," where law professors (and others) imbibe free market doctrine science at the hands of an expert.  There are those who say that Armen and his co-conspirators tainted out minds, the same way the guards did in the North Korean prison camps.  These critics are, I suspect, not entirely wrong: I came from boot camp believing some things I had never believed before, and disbelieving some things I have never believed since.  I don't think I ever drank the full beaker of Libertarian Kool-Ade (indeed there are a lot of ways in which I think the presuppositions of free-market economics are pathetically naive).  Still on the whole, I think I am the better for the experience and so I am in his debt.

As a classroom presence, Armen was a virtuoso--relaxed and informal in manner, yet always clear-headed and never at a loss as to where he wanted to go and what he wanted to say.  He brought the same of easy mastery to his legendary coursebook (with William A. Allen), University Economics, and I half regret the fact that I let my copy go in a cull.

In his manner, I found him somewhat like what I tried to capture with Ed in  our thought experiment, above: clear-headed, purposeful, civil but perhaps just a tad robotic, seemingly a bit too indifferent to the suffering of others.  Still I have to say I enjoyed his company (he flattered me by seeming to remember after a hiatus of 20 years).   I don' suppose it would be easy to find any two men more unlike than Richie and Alchian, but on the whole I'd say the planet is a better place for having enjoyed their presence.

Undocumented extra:  thanks to Larry for the epitaph of the week: "... he was not afraid to mingle with the wives of other musicians."  Link.

Aunt Edith

Underbelly regular Ken Houghton has a great story to tell.  I suppose it is proper to offer condolences, but really, it sounds like a life worth living, or  having lived.

Ed Koch

I ran into Ed Koch only once in my life, or more precisely, he ran into me.   For a brief moment we shared the same airspace in the doorway at Japonica, the Japanese restaurant on University Place in Greenwich Village, except that "shared" offers  not quite the right nuance.  He was incoming at a much higher velocity than I, departing, had yet achieved and had I not then still been swift of foot, we might have ended in a major pileup.

That's it, no more story except this: until I saw him approaching at great speed, towering over me, I had thought Ed Koch was short.  My New York friends (who have probably exited more Greenwich Village Japanese restaurants than I) are wont to sneer: of course he was a big guy, he filled the space.  But that's the thing: he filled the space the way a little guy fills the space.  Napoleon, for example.  Or the parakeet in Herb Gardner's Thousand Clowns who says "stand back, I'm an eagle."  Now that I think of it, the only  other time I can remember laying eyes on Koch was while he was still a Congressman and I was a reporter: he was on the rostrum of a committee room, peering down at some hapless witness like a gargoyle gazing balefully down at the tourists from the parapet of some ancient cathedral.  There, too, it was easy to mistake him for short.

Aaron Swartz, and Suicide Among the Young

Aaron Swartz was little more than a name to me until this morning, when it seemed that everyone in my aggregator was responding to the news that he had committed suicide yesterday, at the age of 26.

I've already conceded that I know exactly nothing (aside from this morning's news) about Aaron's case, but let's generalize for a moment here. First, let's stipulate that not every suicide is a "tragedy" or even a calamaty. Some are the sad and sadly comprehensible response to the burden of living.

But the suicide of one so young and (seemingly) so talented is almost by definition just wretchedly wrong--not "wrong" in the sense of the actor's "fault" but wrong in the sense of "something dreadfully out of kilter in the universe." For more, you must link over and read Cory Doctorow's breathtaking memorial (apparently composed on the instant), and in particular this:

I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Link. I have nothing to add.

Hirschman and Rosen

Maybe it's just me but I find a certain unhappy congruence in the deaths of Albert O. Hirschman and Charles Rosen.   "Titans in their field" is tempting but too easy.  For one thing, each had a way of reconceptualizing the subject of his inquiry, so the "field" was never again what it looked like before his inquiries began.  Of each,  admirers speak in hushed tones that seem to say "I never saw X the same way again after I  read Y."

Here's a good obituary of Rosen.  I first heard of Hirschman's death in a tweet from Dani Rodrik. See also link, link. A quick Google turns up the death of his wife, Sara, just last winter.   Apparently they were married some 70 years.

Warren Rudman

It's probably an exaggeration to call Warren Rudman "the last of the sane Republicans," but he was surely one of the last and one of the sanest.  Serious liberals may have trouble forgiving him for his fiscal conservatism--the attitude that impelled him to collaborate with Pete Peterson in the creation of the fiscally hawkish Concord Coalition; or perhaps worse, for consorting with the likes of Senator Phil Gramm.  But even the unsympathetic will have to credit him with two remarkable virtues not in wide availability today: one, an openness to evidence (when did this become a rarity?); and the other, an almost obsessive eagerness to believe that "we can work things out."

Rudman, then, was a  "moderate," but not precisely a centrist.  He maintained a commitment to arithmetic and to budgets that made sense, and a corresponding aversion to nostrums of all sorts.  From another perspective, you'd have to say that he was a moderate but not squishy.   He'd done a bit of boxing and he liked to tell people how in childhood he had made his way on the street with his fists (he carried himself like a kinder, gentler version of James Caan in Las Vegas).

Rudman's resume displayed at least two bullet points notable for their absence in more recent conservative resumes. One, bona fide military service (he won a bronze star in Korea); and two, a bit of genuine have-you--met a payroll business experience (he spent his early years as operations manager for a family furniture company). 

In another respect, Rudman displayed himself as more dramatically out of step with what passes for conservatism today: his profound lack of sympathy for theocracy.  This might be partly a New Hampshire thing: New Hampshire conservatism has always coupled pennypinching with secularism.  But whatever the source, it appears that Rudman was entirely sincere in his conviction that the Republicans had nothing to gain from cozying up to the religious right.

Rudman died yesterday at 82.  There is much more, including an account of what Rudman counted as his most important achievement, in Adam Clymers' appreciative New York Times obituary here.  An obituary from his hometown newspaper is here, together with some interesting links.

Thomas Szasz

"That dreadful Hungarian, was he there?"  says Mrs. Pierce in My Fair Lady.  Higgins answers:  "Yes he was there allright and up to his old tricks."

Just for the record, I never thought Thomas Szasz a "blaggard" in the same category as the infamous Zoltan Karpathy of Broadway musical fame.   But look at that impish wisp of a grin in his New York Times obituary this morning and you can't help but suspect that he wouldn't have minded the "dreadful" part.  In any event, he certainly put his stamp on the world, as one of the leading critics of the psychiatric establishment. 

He built his career on his book, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961),    As the Times suggests, his timing was exquisite.  The cornices where just beginning to crumble on the Freudian edifice and Szasz found himself in the front line of a broad-based attack against the conventional psychiatric wisdom.  But he had his own spin.  Careless observers would bracket him with "left critics" like R. D. Laing whose view, in crude caricature, was that we're all crazy and that crazy people need to be taken more seriously.    Szasz' point was that nobody is crazy, so suck it  up.

Szasz' enthusiasm seems never to have flagged,  and he seems to have thrived on adversity.  He lost his principal teaching forum in the 60s, but continued to speak, write, see private patients--and argue--until the end of his life.  His zest for confrontation led him into some, ahem, memorable company.  At times he consorted with Scientologists, Misean libertarians and assorted nutcakes.    But you got the sense he didn't care: he was sure enough of his own rightness that he seemed to figure that he would enrich their world more than they would sully his.

It's an interesting question what, if anything, Szasz accomplished with all his muck-stirring. The Times quotes an historian of psychiatry saying that a Szaszian attack "had some merit in the 1950s ... but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches."  Really? For the moment, let's just note that "more scientific" has done nothing to prevent psychiatric "mission creep," as the scope of psychiatry seems to get ever larger.

 I haven't kept up, but I suspect that Szasz took it all in stride. Self-pity was never part of his tool kit.  Much more fun to have a good scrap than to worry too much about winning.   For the momenet, here are some temperate insights into the Szaszian career:  go here and here.

Jack Shafer wins the Nil Nisi Bonum Award

Can't say I was that-all crazy about Alexander Cockburn, which makes me all the more desirous that Jack Shafer writes my obituary.

Plays Well with Others: Remembering Doc Watson

I've read that Doc Watson, the country guitarist who died yesterday at 89, was blind from birth.  Apparently this is a slight stretch. The better sources say he was blinded at two--of an infection-- but in any event, it's a detail.  Either way he was consigned to what could have been,  without extraordinary serendipity, a life of isolation. Your first thought would naturally to be that what saved him was his music and you'd be partly right.  But it seems that before the music there was a family--his own family,  who helped him find a place in the world. even to help with the chores. It was only later that his father gave him a start at music, making a banjo, according to Doc's own story, from the skin of a dead cat.

Doc Watson was never as dynamic or riveting riveting a performer as, say, Earl Scruggs who died just a few weeks ago, which may explain why he never made a show-stopping record. On the flat-picking guitar (which became his signature instrument) he had was thoughtless enough to make it look easy, which it certainly wasn't (if it was, how com we nobody else ever picked a guitar with such fluency?).   But that was his  way: he made everything seem accessible.  Which didn't mean that he was shallow or facile.  But it did mean you had to listen up to realize just how good he was.

Childhood blindness  might seem to be enough a misfortune for one life.   Doc had a second his beloved son Merle died in 1985--killed in a tractor action, so it says.  Euripides declared  that no parent should ever outlive a child and he was surely right but Merle was  more than just a a son: he was a traveling companion and a  fellow artist.  One is tempted to say that Doc never recovered.  In a sense that was probably true but Doc did do what a sensible person would do: he got on with his life, not necessarily "accepting" it and certainly not forgetting it, but taking  it as  Something that Happens, and recognizing that there is really no percentage in paralysis.

What seems to have saved him this time was that he appears genuinely to have enjoyed performing in collaboration with others.  And "collaboration" was genuinely the magic word here.  You never get the sense (as you do with, say, Sidney Bechet) that it's a matter of us versus them.  Doc never let his ego get in the way; he enjoyed what he was doing and enjoyed it  more when others enjoyed it too.  Correspondingly while Doc probably got his greatest notoriety playing with Earl Scruggs, he was never really a "Bluegrass" performer.  His style, even when he was playing with more innovative performers, stayed in touch with his traditional mountain roots.

If I had to name just one, I suppose I'd remember the work he did with my beloved Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, perhaps particularly his collaboration with Mother Maybelle Carter and others on "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"  But here's Doc with his beloved Merle:

James Q.Wilson: More than Broken Windows

It was clear-eyed of the New York Times to put the obit of James Q.Wilson on the front page, except that it wasn't really an obit; it was a story about "fixing broken windows," designed to give New Yorkers one more chance to look and try to make sense out of the tumultuous Lindsey/Beame/Dinkins/Giuliani years (and for some, a chance to congratulate themselves once again that they picked up a West Side apartment when they were going for $35,000).

"Fixing broken windows" is a remarkable story, and Wilson deserves s lot of credit for propogating this once-innovative mode of policing.  But Wilson did a lot more: his masterpiece is probably his one-volume study, Bureaucracy, probably the best introduction to organizational behavior outside of the BBC's Yes, Minister.  Trace back from that to City Politics, his early collaboration with his friend and mentor Ed Banfield and you find an intellect that was fertile and path-breaking from the very beginning.

Everybody is busy describing Wilson as a "conservative," and he certainly would have accepted the characterization but--particularly considering how much the term has been vulgarized and travestied in recent decades--I suspect it doesn't really catch the flavor.   The thing about Wilson is the sheer granularity of his work: his curiosity about, and concern for, ordinary people and how they go about making sense of ordinary lives.  It is, indeed, a "conservative" stance to the extent that it respects good order and stability and distrusts grand solutions and grand theory.  But it was a compassionate conservativism in a way that more ambitious political uses of the term never captured.  Wilson was extraordinarily open to experience and remarkably free of received stereotypes.  Social science looks almost unimaginably different today from what it looked like when he started his work. It is a career for which he had--and his loved ones have--every right to be proud.   

Suggestion: in lieu of the Times piece, go take a look at this far more imaginative appreciation by one of his intellectual legatees.

Anthony Shadid

I can show an unbecoming indifference to the death of public persons I do not know but I have to admit the passing of Anthony Shadid rather wrong-footed me.  He seems to have been everything  you want in a foreign correspondent: patient, courageous, fully briefed,  infinitely inquisitive, and with the indispensable capacity not to confuse himself with the story.  Here he is doing a book talk.

People Are Dying Now who Never Died Before

When Irving Berlin died in 1989 at 101, I remember Herb Caen saying how it used to be that people famous for being old were never famous for anything else.  Wasn't true of Berlin (which was Caen's point) and these days, it isn't true at all.  Consider Frederica Sagor-Maas, the Hollywood silent-movie script writer whose obit is up at the NYT this morning; she was 111, by one credible account the 44th oldest person in the world.

An outlier, but not by much.  Survey the other recent obits still up at the Times:   Here's ceramic artist Eva Zeisel (105).  Here's photographer Eve Arnold (99).  Here's population geneticist James F. Crow (95); Macedonian president Kiro Gligorov (94); desegregation strategist Robert Carter (94)  and half a dozen or so until you come down to   Jerzy Kluger, Pope John Paul II's childhood buddy and  Judge Joel J. Tyler, who gagged on "Deep Throat" both 90.  Shame to think of them snuffed out in their prime.

Epitaph

My favorite grave encomium. I've never actually seen it, but Emily Vermeule, in Aspectcs of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, reports that it can (could?) be found on a hewn oak monument in a cemetery in St. Helena, California:

To Dan from his friends in the circus 1860.

Here's a rendition of Keith Douglas' "Simplify Me When I'm Dead."

I Mean, It's Not as if he was Mother Teresa

Excepting only the Cuban Missile Crisis, I  wonder if there was a time when Western Christendom felt itself more surely on the precipice of extinction than it did in the autumn/winter of 1241 when the Mongol horde stood "at the gates of Vienna" (as the saying goes)--scouting, skirmishing and otherwise scaring the bejabbers out of a populace that  feared it might prove itself powerless against a force that had swept so much before it.

And then as if by a miracle, the Mongols vanished--as another saying goes, "folded their tents and slipped away"  (although it appears they took some Hungarian tents with them).  It was some time before the locals grasped what had saved them, but we know now: Ogodei, third son, favorite and successor to the great Genghis Khan, had died.  From every corner of the Eurasian land mass, the troops raced home for the funeral.

I thought of the Mongol horde this morning as my Google Reader overflowed with tributes and remembrances to the great panjandrum of the feuilliton circuit, Christopher Hitchens, dead at 62.   Grant that the comparison is not exact. The  Mongols race home not just for the ceremony but to contend for the successorship (it took them 10 years, during which time their once-and-future victims enjoyed an uneasy surcease).   In the case of Hitchens, I don't suppose there will be a succession battle precisely--the intertubes are clogged with voices will tell you that he broke the mold.    But as an instance of tribal solidarity, I should say the analogy is compelling. Think of it: forget Lady Gaga, forget Vladimir Putin, forget Ron Paul. If ever you wanted to commit a great public crime or folly, today would be the day to do it.  You are Vienna;  the chatterati are the Mongol horde.  Today every laptop is clicking in memory of the ghost of the departed Christopher. Indeed I can't think of anything that could demonstrate more clearly (as if the point needed demonstration) that we have a chatterati elite in the Anglosphere, as self-protecting and self-admiring as in any phenom since Baby Jessica fell down a well.

Which is not to say that everyone loved Hitchens--"love"  is a bit of a stretch with reference to a man who, among his other virtues, was after all a mean old drunk.. Many professed to admire his style, his fecundity, his (I really think this is a closer issue--see infr) his courage/independence/integrity.  Some of his admirers  also betray   more than a glint of fear, as if they'd forgotten he was dead and so unable to take vengeance on them.     Whatever: it is hard to name a journo-celebrity of greater than B-minus status who hasn't in the last 24 hours gone to lengths to prove that s/he and Hitchens were smoking and drinking buds who'd spend every Hallowe'en out soaping windows together.  This is the moment, guys; this is the time I get to prove that I am in the club, or as Judge Harry used to say, "my name was on the list."

I'd have to admit that the outpouring is not entirely without intrinsic justification.   Hitchens' chops as a feuilletonist  were pretty well honed, though hardly, I think,  much better than (say) Christopher Buckley or P. J. O'Rourke or perhaps even Joe Queenan.  Hitchens could be acerb, witty, sometimes surprising--all estimable qualities in his trade, even rare, albeit not unique.

Which brings me back to the issue of his integrity/independence/courage. I'll grant that he did die well, which takes courage of a high order.  And I woudn't go so far as to say he was a trimmer of Mitt Romney proportions.  But I think a lot of the aura of of gritty independence was illusory. Example, seeking to document his courage, his defenders will naturally leap to his slasher-attack on Mother Teresa.  Sure, fine.  But consider: one way to make your reputation in any field of inquiry is to take an idea that "everybody" knows it is true, and show that it is false.  If you were trying to think of an icon that needed taking down in just that way, I suspect that Mother Teresa might well be your first choice--or at any rate, would have been before Hitchens did it.

His defense of the Iraq War stands on a slightly different footing.  I suspect that his animus against Islamic illiberalism was probably sincere (and not without some merit, let us agree).    But I suspect he may have come to regret his decision as the absurdity of it all became increasingly apparent.  Yet even so, by the time of Iraq, Hitchens was well enough established as a brand that he could afford to experiment with it without serious risk of impairing it.

His other instances of supposed "courage" seem to me far more trifling.  Lately he wrote a book called Why Orwell Matters.  Oh, give me a break.  In the first place, everybody already knows why Orwell matters--everybody in Hitchens' circle, certainly.  Defending  Orwell for this crowd would be a lot like a good Catholic defending--well, like defending mother Teresa.  Quite the contrary: I think the Orwell brand offered much more to the Hitchens brand than vice versa (idle thought: a slasher-attack on George Orwell--now that would dtake courage). Moreover, if ever there was a writer who displayed courage--along with modesty, compassion, and a gritty indifference to what powerful people thought of him--Orwell was, of course, the ticket (I probably digress here; I suspect I am ticked off at the NYT for invoking an Orwell comparison in its Hitchens obit).

No: where Hitchens really added the oak leaf clusters to a merit badge was under the one for his skill at self-promotion, at networking, at making sure he had a good death.    Whatever else he did with his life, he made sure that he was in everybody's Rolodex and they his.  And tonight we see where that-all gets you.  Read the obits if you like: some of them are touching and affectionate, many witty, or in the way of being witty, a very few even arresting.   If you want just one, I'd strongly recommend the memorial from his brother, who shows the candor and integrity not to gloss over the difficulties of their own, shall we say, complicated, relationship.  The brother is one guy who has something to say beyond the ordinary pieties and wit of Christopher's homies in the chattering class.  


Update:  I see that Mother Teresa's order is praying for him.  Heh.

He'd Walk through Fields of 'em, Barefooted

 “Good bosom men were considered experts and I got lots of work. I could hold up a sagging bust line with the best of them.”

Joe Simon, the creator of  Captain America, on his early career as a retoucher of celebrity cleavage.  Quoted in his obit in the NYT.  And while you are at the Times obit page, encounter the equally wonderful career of Stephen Schlossberg, a top adviser to Walter Reuther who became a deputy secretary of labor under Ronald Reagan.

Christopher Logue

A few years back I took a stab at learning some Classical Greek.  I didn't cover myself with glory: my purpose was to read Thucydides and I found out only after I had embarked that Thucydides is hard, some of the toughest Greek going, perhaps deliberately and perversely so.    I never really have conquered him (though I  can put in a good word Blaise Nagy's excellent student reader).  But perhaps unexpectedly, I found that Homer wasn't that-all hard: the vocabulary is huge but the grammar is relatively simple and so much of the presentation is formulaic that once you make yourself at home with the formulae, things begin to go smoothly.

And here is another undocumented feature.  I developed a new ear for translation, particularly the translations of the great age in English literature--North, Chapman, Dryden, Golding and so forth who did so much to discover who we are.   And the moderns: learning to read bits of Homer helped me to see that Lattimore (for example) though perhaps a bit pedestrian as a poet, is actually a pretty conscientious trot.  And Fitzgerald: they say there is too much Fitzgerald in Fitzgerald's Homer.  For the Iliad, this is probably true.  But I'd say that Fitzgerald's slightly off-kilter sensibility catches the slightly off-kilter sensibility of the Odyssey pretty well--but then, for my taste, I'd say the prose translation of Walter  Shewring works even better.   Fact is, I haven't ever read a translation of the Iliad, however rewarding, that catches (what I take to be) the flavor of the original quite so well as Shewring or even Fitzgerald does for the Odyssey.

All of which is a long way to a short point: the extraordinary, unmatchable work of Christopher Logue, the British poet who produced what is to my mind (and I am hardly alone) they most convincing rendition of the Iliad in English.  Logue (who died last week at 85) called his work an "account;" others might call it an "homage," like what Ezra Pound did with the Chinese.  The NYT says that Logue's work "loosed the wrath of scholastic purists and some critics," but I'd take that with a large grain of salt.   In the next breath, the Times says "it was overwhelmingly lauded — even by classicists — for the combined power of its luminous language, cinematic imagery and hurtling pace."

I was going to reprint a sample here.  But I don't think I can improve on the sample provided with the Times obit here.  Go to the left-hand-column; read the comparative samples from Fitzgerald, Fagles and Logue.  I think you'll agree that the Fitzgerald and the Fagles are straightforward, workmanlike exposition, and that the Logue is in a class by itself.  

I'm Still Big; It's the Chop Suey that got Small

Forget about Chun King Chow Mein:  what Jeno Paulucci did that really deserves our gratitude was to invent the "Divider Pak," which keeps the food separate from the sauce.  But if Paulucci (who died yesterday at 93) was so rich, why was he still living in Duluth?

Sadly, one thing I cannot find on line is a YouTube link to Stan Freberg's "Chun Kingston Trio."  But there's this:

Afterthought:  The Wichita bureau and I are engaged in an amiable inquiry over whether the stuff was actually any good or not.  My guess is that it probably tasted okay by the standards of the 50s, but that our palates have changed enough that these days if we fed it to the dog, he'd call PETA.

It's Not What You Know But Who You Know

 They say the reason to go to Harvard or Yale is to develop a fancy address book.  Maybe, but perhaps it works also at the University of Illinois.  This from the New York Times death notice of Hal Bruno, late Director of Election Coverage for ABC:

He graduated from the University of Illinois, where he was a sportswriter for The Daily Illini, an experience he recalled in a 2008 speech as he was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame.

“My classmates on the Illini sports staff included Hugh Hough and Bud Karmin, who went on to win Pulitzer Prizes,” he said, “and Robert Novak, who proudly became famous as ‘the Prince of Darkness.’ Our sports editor was Gene Shalit, and we had occasional cartoons by Shel Silverstein — my wild and multitalented fraternity brother — who also drew for the campus humor magazine. It was called Shaft, and the editor was Hugh Hefner, an ex-G.I. from Chicago.”

Link (But hey, Buce, that headline is a lazy cheap shot.  Bruno may have had connections; he may or may not have used them.  But the real bottom line is that he was an immensely well-informed journalist who built up his knowledge base by his own hard work.).