Journals 1952 - 2000

Five things you didn't know about recent U.S. history:

1- Arthur Schlesinger's first journal entry, in 1952, describes a conversation among Democratic Party bigwigs about the possibility of General Dwight Eisenhower running for President against Harry Truman. His last, in 2000, centres on the Al Gore/George W. Bush/Hanging Chad thing (you might just recall it).  His final line describes Bush making a speech while "looking like a frightened ventriloquist's dummy." 

2- Disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon bought a house immediately adjacent to one of his foremost political adversaries in Schlesinger. The two did not make friendly neighbours - Nixon complained about Schlesinger's kids climbing the fence, and Schlesinger mocked Nixon's wardrobe. Sounds petty and more than a little nosey, I know - but seriously, who naps outdoors on a chaise while wearing a suit?

3- The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an even bigger fuckup than given credit for today, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment. The CIA and Kennedy Administration signed off on a plan that sent 1,200 lightly-armed men against a battle-tested professional army of 200,000, with zero air or naval support. (Spoiler alert: the Cubans won.)

4 Arthur Schlesinger didn't commit too many gaffes, but his gravest public misstep was among his last. During the height (depth?) of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Schlesinger attempted to defend Bill Clinton by saying "only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs." That didn't help. At all.

Probably three martinis deep

5-There really isn't a single quote or reference to back me up (and it's a 1,000-page book, so cut me some slack), so you'll just have to take my word for it: people drank a LOT more booze in the 1950s. By modern equivalents, enough to anesthetize a rhinoceros - and then  happily driving home.  A different world.



Context is amazing.

It's one thing to read a history - necessarily written after the fact, with the benefit of hindsight. But to read what was actually going on at the time is quite another.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had the unique privilege of being around Democratic Presidents from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.  Not merely "around," but actually and sometimes decisively influential. He was a speechwriter, adviser, and sometimes official Cabinet member. Between administrations, he was sometimes a kingmaker.

Not pictured: Orville Redenbacher. I swear!

This alone would make his journals worth reading.  I mean, he was there. For events like the murders of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Vietnam, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Grenada, Oliver North, the first Gulf War, and the Hanging Chad fiasco. 

There is a tradeoff, however. Schlesinger is an astonishingly tribal partisan. That doesn't just mean he's a Democrat and tends to disagree with Republicans - heretical Democrats earn just as much of his ire.  If not more, really. Schlesinger never has much time for Jimmy Carter, for instance, and bends over backwards to avoid saying even one remotely positive thing about, say, Ronald Reagan.

Maybe closer to the truth than we remember

Where the book suffers most is Schlesinger's uncompromising man-crush on the Kennedys. He is simply incapable of viewing them as anything other than demigods, sent down to walk among us and die for our sins.  (Interestingly, Schlesinger was an atheist.)  They've been made into legends and martyrs, but JFK wasn't exactly universally effective and wise at the helm. Even more forgotten today is just how divisive Robert Kennedy was, even and especially in his own party.

Schlesinger will occasionally hint at it ("I can't understand how much hatred there is for RFK...") but never gets to the heart of the matter.  Namely, that even vast swaths of his own party saw the Kennedys almost exactly how their descendants are seen today: unreliable, gaffe-prone, and not to be taken seriously.

All this is forgivable - he was good friends with both men (Teddy less so) and nobody is expected to be completely objective about murdered friends and colleagues.

That said, Journals is sometimes most fascinating for the little events - especially that reveal the changing times. Schlesinger's later years are filled with astonishment at the younger generation's fondness for wine (or worse, Perrier) instead of hard liquor at lunch. He refers to all couples as "the Joe Smiths" instead of Joe and Jane Smith. He cannot believe the maid would raise such a fuss about a harmless fondle.

Okay, that last one isn't true - but he was mystified that the intern would raise such a fuss about an innocent blowjob.

Cosmopolis

Five things you didn't know about limousines:

1- According to the infallible wisdom of Wikipedia, the word limousine is "derived from the name of the French region Limousin, because this covered compartment physically resembled the cloak hood worn by the shepherds there."

2- At 70 feet long, with room for 40 people and requiring a crew of three, the world's largest limousine might just plausibly be the Midnight Rider.

3- The "First Limo," or the car used to ferry President Barack Obama, isn't far behind.  It's a 2009 Cadillac "Presidential Limousine," with five-inch armor plating.

4- Heart of a Lion, Wings of a Bat is one of the signature anthems of Limozeen, a mostly fake hair metal band created by the Chapman Brothers, the guys behind Homestar Runner. 

5- I know I've ridden (rode? rided?) in a limo before...but I have absolutely zero memory of it. Weird, huh?


Books are funny.

No. Just no.

They're not (usually) very time-sensitive things, especially if, like me, you spend your time sifting through dozens of smelly used bookstores. 

But once in a while, they'll surprise you.  Just last week, I finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.  The very next day, I happened to be in Victoria's Bay Centre food court - absolutely NOT having any A&W, how dare you suggest such a thing - when I glanced up at the Entertainment News. 

Yup, the book I just read is going to be a movie. Interesting. 

Starring this guy over there. To the right. Yeah, him. 

Yeah, I know.

Sigh.

Right, the book.  Cosmopolis, unlike DeLillo's previous work, met with reviews best called "mixed."  Reaction ranged from "not his best" down to "fucking awful."  (Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.) 

Whatever your reaction, it's certainly an ambitious attempt. Just as every actor deeply and badly wants to play Hamlet, most writers have a secret little altar dedicated to James Joyce's Ulysses...which they believe to be a great novel. The fact that precious few can be bothered to get through the whole thing is part of the appeal; it's a badge of honour thing. Or maybe just pure snobbery.  It's tough to tell.

Eric Packer's Universe. Not pictured: rectal probe

Like Ulysses, Cosmopolis takes place in a single day.  Eric Packer is a multi-millionaire asset manager, but he seems even richer than that. Money literally has zero meaning to him.  He spends the day being driven across New York in search of lost time a haircut. He stops along the way to meet a bizarre collection of characters, and have some fleeting and often quite nasty sex. 

(How nasty? He propositions an employee while having a doctor examine his prostate. That's as much detail as you need.)

The problem? Well, there are several. Packer is completely alien, and not in a good, interesting way. He's not fully realized - you never get a sense of who he is. It's more like DeLillo decided to make his main character always turn left when every other human being would turn right - even (spoiler alert) if turning left meant certain ruin and violent death.

There's special, and then there's different for the sake of being difficult. And that's Packer.

You wish, buddy.

The characrter is most like is probably either Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, or Camus' Outsider.  In other words, an existentialist. But again, merely being a distant asshole (possibly a sociopath) does not an existentialist make.

The other, bigger problem?  The book is a sprint, and it doesn't really need to be. We're fleetingly introduced to Packer's killer, who used to work for him, and for whom killing Packer is Super Meaningful. And stuff. But he's just kind of there because DeLillo wanted to kill off his half-formed creation with a Super Meaningful Death. But it's not meaningful just because you say it's meaningful. 

Am I interested to see the movie?  Well, you know how they say the book is always better than the movie?  In this case, the book...well, it's not very good.


So, no.  Even if Robert Pattinson dies.

Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants

Five brave defences of some of Herodotus' wilder claims:

Just ignore the legs.

1- Snakes with Wings sound far-fetched, yes. But only if you want to be all modern and nitpicky. There are several varieties of winged and flying lizards, which look pretty snakelike to my eyes. 

2- Wait, there's more. Some snakes fly - such as (you guessed it) the Flying Snake.  (Or, if you're feeling snooty, Chrysopelea.) It glides by using its ridge scales along its belly, pushing against rough bark surface of tree trunks, allowing it to move vertically up a tree. From there, it "leaps" and glides diagonally down wherever it wants to go.

3- Okay, I can't find any basis for gold-digging ants. But Heordotus is far from the only writer to talk about them, and they appeared in bestiaries well into the middle ages. 

4- Okay, so did Cyclops, the Phoenix and Griffins. But still.

5- Herodotus also described some pretty weird people, too.  Like the Gyzantes, all of whom paint themselves red and eat monkeys.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4th Century BCE growth industry

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants is basically two books: the first section is a first-person travelogue.  Herodotus had been exiled from Halicarnassus after supporting the worst kind of coup d'etat - an unsuccessful one.  His subsequent travels and observations, mostly of Egypt, give us the world's first real travel literature. 

Unless you want to be cute and count The Odyssey, or even Exodus.  And I don't. 

Herodotus is a marvelous travel writer. He notices a lot, from accurate descriptions of animals strange to him but familiar to us, from the plover up to the mighty hippo and crocodile.  He's also a keen observer of people.  His depictions of Egypt's many and varied religious practices are fascinating, but better still are his detailed observations of mummification.  Not merely the process(es), which we still don't completely comprehend today, but the culture of mummification.

As any 19th century Egyptologist could tell you, the Egyptians mummified everything.  Pharaohs, priests, common people, pets, parts of pets - you name it, someone wanted it embalmed.  Once you decide that (a) life continues after death, and (b) you need your body and possessions afterward; (c) embalming everything but the kitchen sink is a natural conclusion. 

Like anything else, this became a class and status issue. The wealthy could afford more and better and more comprehensive procedures, and got them. The poor had to make do with just enough to keep them from revolting. 

"The peasants are always revolting...in odour! Ha ha ha! Old jokes are the best, no?"

The second is very different. It's wholehearted hearsay and rumour-mongering.  That's not really a criticism; after all, Herodotus is admirably honest:

"Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own observation and research...but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves."

That's good to know, because some of what you read after that point is fucking terrifying.  Consider the titular creatures themselves, the Gold-digging ants.

Not pictured: gold.

Eastward of India lies a desert of sand…. There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size—bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog…. These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just as our own ants throw up the earth…. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this is what the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert…. When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill the bags they have brought with them with sand and start for home again as fast as they can go; for if the ants—if we can believe the Persians’ story—smell them, they at once give chase.




Sorry, what?  Ants the size of FOXES?  That GIVE CHASE?  No way, man.  I saw that movie.

Pharsalia

Five things you didn't know about Nero:

1- His name is synonymous with egotism and debauchery - but this might be (somewhat) unfair. No contemporary sources have survived.

2- That said, did Nero fiddle while Rome burned? Nope. The fiddle hadn't been invented yet.

3- Okay, that's nitpicky. Nero was accused of fiddling while the city burned because he was widely accused of starting it. This is probably unknowable (Nero rushed to blame Christians, a sect previous Emperors mostly ignored) but Nero definitely took advantage of the fire, seizing the opportunity to build a massive palace, the infamous Domus Aurea (Golden House.)

4- Nero's economic policy has been compared to that of recent United States presidents - large-scale public works projects intended to create jobs. In short, Nero believed in the stimulus package.

5- Nero was the last of the "Julio-Claudian" Emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and then Nero.

Lucan made this face a lot. It got him killed. Progress is good.

Like a lot of classics, most translations were wooden and sound archaic.

It's one thing to read Shakespeare in his original words, but Lucan wrote in Latin (duh) and for a very contemporary audience - first-century hipsters. He was trying to be the Jon Stewart of his day - avant garde, satirical, and where the worldly types got their news. (You know, instead of the Fair and Balanced loud guy in the Forum.)

Of course, Nero's secret (and not-so-secret) police didn't look too kindly on tame economic criticisms, much less incitement to revolt and assassination.  Lucan's solution was to compose an epic poem about the civil wars between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, some 100 years prior. (Pharsalus, in Greece, was the site of the decisive battle.)

Lucan blamed the current political situation on Caesar's victory; an oversimplification, but really not too far off. While the Republic wasn't quite in living memory anymore, it certainly wasn't the distant past, either. Lucan's retelling is a tragedy for the lost Republic and having to endure Emperors.

Nero was an easy Emperor to roll your eyes at (in private.) He ruled Antistius, a top public official, should be put to death for speaking ill of his Emperor at a party. Antistius was far from alone. Nero also rode chariots, sang and danced for literally captive audiences.

Not even the Emperor could make this fashionable

So Lucan was a patriot? Well...maybe. His uncle Seneca had been Nero's tutor and desperately tried to steer the promising young Emperor towards sensible policies before giving up in despair. But Lucan had recently been a favourite of the Emperor's, winning an award at the Neronian Festival (there's that reputation for egomania) for extemporaneous speaking.

The two had a falling out. By some accounts, Nero simply tired of Lucan and moved onto new pets. By others, Nero grew insanely jealous of Lucan (he saw himself as a transcendent artist) and effectively proscribed his best work.

Robert Graves, who wrote I, Claudius (my all-time favourite book) was a man who knew his classical Latin and how to make it relatable, but still authentic. This is a rare skill. Like anything else, language and idiom ages - sometimes, not so well. (When was the last time you called anything groovy? Or tubular?)

This happened a lot under Nero. Also, above and around him.

Graves doesn't put words in Lucan's mouth, but keeps him from sounding like a bad parody of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

Pharsalia is essentially a historical novel - well, historical epic poem, anyway - so there's no worries about spoilers: Caesar wins, the Republic falls, stuff happens, and Emperor Nero makes his citizens applaud his mad dance skills. 

In another sense, though, Pharsalia has a different, depressingly predictable ending - it doesn't. 

It was never completed. Lucan was forced to commit suicide.

In 2010, 105 journalists were killed worldwide. Some things, sadly, have not changed.