Category Archives: Books

Loonie prices

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Bookprice

Just yesterday, the exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars came up in conversation, and I wondered aloud whether a book could now be purchased for fewer loonies.

Think about it: Where do you usually see the greenback and the loonie compared? Right — on the cover of books in the bookstore. For instance, the copy of Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day I just plucked off my shelf as an example retailed for $16 U.S., but $21.50 Canadian — in monetary terms, as far apart as Juno and Utah beaches.

Within an hour or so after wondering about that, lo and behold, The Economist explained the situation in just those terms. Seems folks in the Great White North are pretty ticked off now if they can’t get a book at a south-of-the-border price:

CHRIS SMITH, co-owner of a small bookshop in Ottawa called Collected Works, assumed his customers would remain loyal even as the rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar against its American counterpart made a mockery of the gap between the twin prices printed on the covers of American books. But when Mr Smith asked a few regulars, he was shocked to find that they were going online to buy American books from retailers south of the border. In an effort to keep his existing trade, he now uses the much lower American figure as the Canadian price, even though this means selling American books at a loss. (In the case of Alan Greenspan’s book “The Age of Turbulence”, for example, the prices on the jacket are $35 and C$43.95.)

I sympathize with those shoppers. I’ve always felt a little bad for Canadians whenever I perused book prices: If you’re an American it costs this much, but if your a Canadian, you pay this much. It always seemed a little unfair, even when it wasn’t. Now that it is unfair, I don’t blame Canadian shoppers a bit for griping if they don’t get the lower price.

Granfalloons

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Back in a comment on this post, I referred to the Kurt Vonnegut term "granfalloon." Let’s examine it further.

I was never that big a fan of Vonnegut back in the day, when so many of my friends were into him. I disliked anything that smacked of nihilism, and Cat’s Cradle in particular seemed to preach the message, "Why try? Everything is pointless." There is something in me that rebels fiercely against that. I remember writing an essay in high school comparing it unfavorably to Catch-22. Yossarian seemed trapped in malignant absurdity, too, but at the end (warning! plot spoiler coming!), there is a life-affirming burst of hope when he learns that Orr had paddled all the way to Sweden, whereas at the end of Cat’s Cradle, the protagonist is contemplating tasting ice-nine.

Maybe I would feel better about it if I read him now; I don’t know. Maybe I could accept fatalism more favorably coming from a soldier of the ill-fated 106th Infantry Division (which may not qualify as a granfalloon, since so many of its members, such as my own father-in-law, indeed shared a similar fate, which might make it a true karass). But having granfalloon pop into my head while typing that earlier response at least causes me to have greater respect for him for having invented that term.

It’s an important word to have, because it explains why the politics of identity leave me cold. I simply don’t ever feel the impulse to identify with, or stick up for, a person who simply has the same color skin that I do, or is the same gender, or believes in the same religion (even though Catholicism for me is a choice, rather than an accident of birth). Assuming a kinship with someone over such things seems every bit as absurd as the shared association of being Hoosiers, to cite one of Vonnegut’s examples.

Sometimes in the past, I’ve tried to express the thing I object to in terms of "teams." I apply this in particular to the political parties — another form of voluntary association (even though, once people have joined them, they seem to act as though they were born into them and are congenitally incapable of contradicting the party line). Since I don’t see either Democrats or Republicans as embracing coherent, rational philosophies, but being coagulations of people with unconnected goals who have decided to band together, I think of them as having formed teams for purely pragmatic reasons — safety in numbers, pooling resources for organizational purposes, etc.

And teams are not a thing I’m into. The importance that some people attach to identification with, say, the Gamecocks seems to me suggestive of something far uglier. I know that’s ridiculous; it’s generally innocent, but such massive demonstrations of pointless solidarity put me off.

Anyway, now that I’ve retrieved it from my memory banks, I should use "granfalloon" more often.

A bird-brained theory about society

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While I’m on the subject of various spectra of political thought, let’s examine for a moment the communitarian-libertarian divide, with a side trip to Monty Python.

On the one side we have the communitarian notion that "We live through institutions," the organizing assertion around which Robert Bellah et al. built their book, The Good Society. "Institutions" is understood here as anything from you and somebody you just shook hands with, to the family, to the Church, or your town council.

And in this corner, we have the libertarian notion of "the Virtue of Selfishness," which has been on my mind the last few days for two reasons: The buzz about the new book from former Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, and my having run across and reread her mini-novel Anthem. It’s a philosophy that might be summed up as "We don’ need no stinkin’ institutions."

All of which brings me to the obituary in this week’s edition of The Economist — a proudly libertarian publication that nevertheless chose, as the most interesting/important death of the week, the tale of "an ex-parrot" name of Alex.

I say nevertheless because the success of Alex — who had learned to speak with apparent meaning, not merely to "parrot" sounds — was based in a theory that the factor that promotes intelligence in animals is their social arrangements. In other words, "meaning" in the sense of intelligible communication, derives from one’s society — in other words, to the extent that we live as intelligently, we live through institutions:

The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey,
is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living
promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to
function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more intelligence.
If Dr Humphrey is right, only social animals can be intelligent—and so
far he has been borne out.

Flocks of, say, starlings or herds of wildebeest do not count as
real societies. They are just protective agglomerations in which
individuals do not have complex social relations with each other. But
parrots such as Alex live in societies in the wild, in the way that
monkeys and apes do, and thus Dr Pepperberg reasoned, Alex might have
evolved advanced cognitive abilities. Also like primates, parrots live
long enough to make the time-consuming process of learning worthwhile.
Combined with his ability to speak (or at least “vocalise”) words, Alex
looked a promising experimental subject.

Interesting, I thought.

Here are two froods who really know where their towels are

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This is wonderful. These two guys have come up with a way to unify our fractured country, and everybody can take part:

    It seemed to them that the nation was more divided than ever over the war and politics, not to mention immigration, race and abortion. So the two of them — Bruce Johnson, a former disc jockey who delivers local fruit and vegetables, and John Maielli, who has a silk-screening and painting business — came up with a wildly ambitious plan for national reconciliation.
    What the country needs, they thought, was a unifying, rally-like event that would be free from politics and in which everyone could participate. Waving a towel seemed perfect…. "A certain amount of energy is released when you wave a towel," explains Mr. Johnson. It’s democratic. It doesn’t require skill or money. Wavers feel kinship with fellow wavers.
    As the event was envisioned, millions of Americans across the country would participate in a National Wave, simultaneously twirling above their heads a red, white and blue towel called the "Official Uniting Towel of America." Organizers picked Friday, July 4, 2008, when people are more inclined to feel patriotic. It would take place at 9 p.m. Eastern time, before most local fireworks go off on the East Coast and at a decent hour in the West. To give enough time for stragglers to join in, the National Wave would last 15 minutes.

It’s simple, to the point that one could easily call it stupid. But its very simplicity, its utter lack of inherent meaning, makes it a blank slate upon which we can all write our hopes and dreams for the country, and most of all express our desire for brotherhood in spite of all our bitter differences.

I’ve got my towel, and I know where it is, and I’m more than ready to use it as a means of reuniting my country. With your help, I hope to keep track of this growing movement, and promote it as the chance arises.

Bruce Johnson and John Maielli — now there’s a couple of froods who really know where their towels are.

Tom Clancy’s back in business

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We hear more and more about the return of the bad old days in Putin’s Russia. And now we have a Cold War scenario that reads like a passage from the first few hundred pages of Red Storm Rising. It came this morning via e-mail from International Media Intelligence Analysis, an alert service of Réalité EU. It’s based originally on a Reuters story:

The RAF scrambled four Tornado jets on Thursday to intercept eight Russian long-range bombers, the Ministry of Defence said. The ministry said the Russian aircraft had not entered British airspace. "In the early hours of this morning four RAF Tornado F3 aircraft from RAF Leeming and RAF Waddington were launched to intercept eight Russian "bear" aircraft which had not entered UK airspace," it said in a statement. Russia’s defence ministry published a statement earlier on Thursday which said 14 Russian strategic bombers had started long-range routine patrol operations on Wednesday evening over the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic. The statement said six planes had already returned to base and that the other eight were still in the air. "The planes flew only over neutral water and did not approach the airspace of a foreign state," the statement said. "Practically all the planes were accompanied by fighters from NATO countries." Sky News said the Russian aircraft were heading towards British airspace and did a U-turn when approached by the British fighters. It is at least the second time in recent months that Britain has scrambled jets to intercept Russian bombers.

And so, having collected intel on Britain’s air defense capabilities, they turned toward home. And we are left to wonder why there are Bears, strategic bombers, still conducting — or is it, "once again conducting"? —  anything that could be characterized as  "long-range routine patrol operations." That’s pure Cold-War, finger-on-the-Doomsday-trigger stuff. And what sort of armament were they carrying?

And of course, Mr. Putin wants us thinking things like that.

The Clock Also Ticks

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Regular readers know that I struggle to manage my time, and in keeping with that, whenever I file a comment, or answer an e-mail, with anything more than a "thanks for writing" or "you got that right," I try to turn it into a separate post. And so it is that I pull out my evasive response to Randy’s good-faith question:

Brad,

with the vacations on the sand, dining at the CCC and writing an article each week where do you find time to maintain a blog?

Kidding aside, what is a typical day like for you?

Lousy. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t consider chucking the blog entirely, but I simply don’t have time for it. No sane person with even rudimentary time-management skills would ever start one.

But wait… I’m not supposed to be frank about such things. I’ve always tried to hold to the ethic that Hemingway wrote of in The Sun Also Rises:

    "Come on down-stairs and have a drink."
    "Aren’t you working?"
    "No," I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: "Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables," and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. "This is a good place," he said.
    "There’s a lot of liquor," I agreed.
    "Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar. "Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"
    "Yes, every once in a while."
    "Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?"
    "What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell."
    "I’m serious."
    "It’s one thing I don’t worry about," I said.
    "You ought to."

So I hope you’ll excuse me now, but I have to go get off some cables…

Her Majesty’s Consul General

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Every four years or so, a British diplomat will pass through Columbia, and want to talk politics — mainly
presidential, but they have some interest in knowing what’s happening on the state level.

For instance, when Martin Rickerd, Her Majesty’s Consul General out ofHmg3_002 Atlanta, came by last week, he had been asking some local folks about our governor. But mostly he was curious about what the presidential candidates were saying when they visited here — Georgia being somewhat less favored in the primary schedule than S.C.

Of course, I did my usual joke about who was he really, collecting political intelligence this way — SIS? That allowed me to segue to John LeCarre novels, which he also enjoys (although he hasn’t read The Night Manager, and he should), and in other ways avoid serious talk as long as I could, which is my strategy in most meetings. But I eventually shared some thoughts with him that I hope were helpful.

In return, he provided an update on how things are faring politically over on his side — which I found helpful because, let’s face it, I’ve been less interested in following such things since Tony checked out.

Here are some video snippets you may or may not find interesting:

One ping only, Vasily…

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"Dirty, rotten commies!," one of my colleagues has been muttering since yesterday. "The only thing worse than a commie is one with oil!" He refers to this news:

   CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – Venezuela is studying buying Russian submarines that would transform the South American country into the top naval force in the region, a military adviser to President Hugo Chavez said Thursday.
   Gen. Alberto Muller, responding to a Russian newspaper report that Chavez plans to sign a deal for five diesel submarines, said the government is "analyzing the possibilities" but that the money has not yet been set aside.
   Oil-rich Venezuela has already purchased some $3 billion worth of arms from Russia, including 53 military helicopters, 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 24 SU-30 Sukhoi fighter jets and other weapons.

But he misses the silver lining: Now we can crank out those nifty new Seawolf-class attack subs. We’ve got the excuse now! We’ve got Russian boats to track and kill again! Right here in River City! "Top naval force in the region?" In our hemisphere? Shades of the missiles of October…

Just let those peace-dividenders stop us now! They can take their little Virginia-class toys and shove them where … but I must restrain myself. We readers of too many Tom Clancy novels must be magnanimous in our triumph.

I wonder if we can get Bart Mancuso and Jonesy to come out of retirement for this?

Hayden as top spook? Are we mad?

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Hayden? We’re actually considering Haydon to head our secret intelligence service? No way!

Sure, there was none better at humint, and we need that sort of thing these days. But what is that beside the fact that we’ve known ever since the ’70s that Haydon was the mole Gerald, the mostHayden famous double-crossing traitor in spy literature?

Are we to supposed to think it’s someone else because of a slight change in the spelling of his name?

George Smiley, sure. Toby Esterhase, maybe. Even that pipe-smoking Alleline would be more trustworthy, though he’s an idiot. Peter Guillam probably has the seniority by now.

But Hayden? What kind of Circus are we running around here?

Mau-Mauing the Flak-Throwers

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My post earlier today linking to something in The Wall Street Journal reminded me of another piece that I never shared with you. It was in that paper (and yes, I do read other things) a week ago today: An interview with one of my all-time favorites, Tom Wolfe.

Have you ever wondered about the politics of the man who wrote Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flaked, Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff, and other brilliant, thoroughly enjoyable works of journalism/social criticism before he turned into a somewhat-painful-to-read novelist? Well, if you read The Guardian, you wouldn’t wonder.

That’s all right; I don’t read The Guardian, either. But thanks to what he’s written in the past, there were no surprises for me in this passage from the WSJ:

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of
"what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the New York Times
called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of
the "Charlotte Simmons" book. "I just assumed it was the dazzling
quality of the writing," he says. In the course of the reporting,
however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. "The
reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was
as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell
you, I’m a child molester.’" For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing
an American flag pin, "and it was as if I was holding up a cross to
werewolves."

George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his
"great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business
of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would
say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other
Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say —
‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves,
‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the
American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’ So they just kind
of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this
kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don’t go
across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United
States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states.
They’re usually called blue states — they’re not blue states, the
states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states — the entire country
lies in between."

The wonderful thing about this is the way Wolfe catches modern "liberals" out in their own lack of self-awareness so neatly: He sneaks up on them. Just, as Wolfe chronicled, Ken Kesey took the steam out of an anti-war rally with a harmonica and a couple of verses of "Home on the Range," the King of Coolwrite sneaks up on liberals by being an artist and intellectual. They think they are among their own, and then "… UHHH … Ohmigod! YOU voted for BUSH?" Once his prey is paralyzed, he slices and dices it. He makes jullienne fries out of ’em.

I’d love to see him do the same to modern "conservatives," but dressed the way he is, they’re liable to spook before he gets close enough.

What do I have against both of these groups? They quit thinking. They bought their values off the shelf years ago as a complete set; they’re completely unprepared for anything that doesn’t fit in their little boxes. The Wolfe scene above reminds me of a passage in Bridget Jones’s Diary (yeah, I read it; I wanted to know what the women in my family were going on about). I mean the bit in which Bridget has already fallen for Mark Darcy, and they’ve gotten together and are dating (actually, maybe this happened in the second book), and she finds out quite inadvertently that he votes Tory. She is aghast: How could he? When he asks what’s wrong with being a Tory, she is unable to come up with a coherent answer. Why? Because she hasn’t really thought about it, ever. It’s just that everyone she knows takes it as gospel that all decent, caring people vote Labour. What is this? Mark’s a human rights lawyer, for goodness’ sake…

Between Bridget and Wolfe, I prefer Wolfe, who by contrast told The Guardian:

"I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world.
They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There
is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not
one of them."

There’s a character flaw in there somewhere (one that I’m afraid comes out in his novels), but he’s so refreshing, I’m willing to overlook it.

Dances with Pretension

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Yes, Mark, of course we despise "Dances With Wolves!" It’s pretentious, silly, boring, condescending, tedious and intellectually offensive. The worst thing about it was that Hollywood thought it was profound, and that just confirms so much about Hollywood, doesn’t it?

You see, this "epic" — which I believe lasted about 14 hours, but it may have been longer — was intended to teach Deep Lessons to us hicks out here in Flyover Land all about the Noble Red Man. It seems that Hollywood had just discovered the American Indian, and learned that he was treated badly by the white man, and was going to teach all of us about it, because of COURSE we couldn’t have heard about it out here.

Never mind that the theme of the Noble Savage had been done to death in the early 19th century by James Fenimore Cooper, as any literate person (a category that, as near as I can tell, does not involve anyone in Hollywood) would know.

Or that the theme had become so passe that Mark Twain brutally satirized it later in the century. And remember, Twain was a very liberal, free-thinking sort, but he could not abide pretension.

Or that Hollywood — John Ford, no less — had decades previously given the subject serious, respectable treatment, in a way that might make even John Wayne feel guilty about the white man’s role.

Or that Hollywood, in a more thoughtful era, had even satirized that. In fact, let’s consider "Little Big Man" for a moment. It had fun with almost every Western cliche you can think of, including that of the noble, mystical Red Man (and yes, that was, is, and always will be a cliche, which is my point here — the people making "Dances with Wolves" were not sophisticated enough to know that; they actually thought they were breaking new ground, and that is what is so embarrassing and offensive about it).

"Little Big Man" paid the American Indian the compliment of treating him as a human being, rather than as a stereotype, positive or negative. Director Arthur Penn had the good sense to give his Indians — who, appropriately enough, referred to themselves collectively as "the Human Beings" — the full range of human attributes. They were brave, silly, wise, stupid, tragic, comic and so forth.

The best bit in the whole movie was when Chief Dan George, the wise, earthy Grandfather, decided it was "a good day to die," and went out and lay down to do just that. Of course, the viewer thinks, "Wow, Indians can really do that? I guess it’s because they’re just so much more attuned to the universe than we are." A few moments later, raindrops hit his apparently lifeless face. He opens his eyes and asks Dustin Hoffman whether he is dead yet. A relieved Hoffman says no, so Grandfather gets up with the younger man’s help, shrugs and says something to the effect of, well, maybe some other day would be a better day to die. Or so I remember; I don’t have it at hand to check.

It was so down-to-earth, real, fallible and human. And for those reasons, Grandfather actually is noble — unlike the cardboard cutouts of "Dances With Wolves."

Do you see what I’m saying?

As for "Apocalypse Now" — I’ll deal with that, at least in passing, in my next post. As it happens, my thoughts on it are sort of the opposite of Dave’s.

A legitimate civil liberties issue?

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It’s not often I look at a "civil liberties" issue and see any merit in the libertarian position. To me, the constitution — properly and conservatively understood — does an excellent job of protecting all the personal rights we need, and I tend to be impatient with people who either see a "slippery slope" threat to those freedoms in everything government does, or want to invent entirely new "rights" (as the U.S. Supreme Court did in Griswold and its extension, Roe).

But I have to say that in this case, I can see some legitimate worries. Forcing people who may do a bad thing in the future — but haven’t done a thing yet — to take antipsychotic drugs is disturbing. For those who have trouble getting the link, I’ll explain that the WSJ story is about a "national trend," pushed by a "maverick psychiatrist" named E. Fuller Torrey, to pass laws that force psychotics to take their medicine or have the police come take them away to lock them up in the not-so-funny farm.

The thing is, his main argument is that he believes this helps "prevent crime," and here’s how he has sold the idea:

Dr. Torrey keeps an online database with hundreds of grisly anecdotes about mentally ill people who killed the innocent. They include a jobless drifter who pushed an aspiring screenwriter in front of a subway train and a farmer who shot a 19-year-old receptionist to death. Influenced by such stories, Michigan, New York, Florida and California are among the states that have toughened their mental-health treatment laws since 1998, when Dr. Torrey formed the Treatment Advocacy Center to lobby for forced care.

We have here shades of "Minority Report" and A Clockwork Orange (what with the idea of letting the rozzes lovet a poor bezoomy malchick so some veck can mess with his gulliver rather than letting him make up his rassoodock by his oddy-knocky).

So am I convinced this is a bad idea? No, but I’m willing to concede that I’m not sure either way. Both the libertarian point of view (how can you arrest people who’ve done nothing wrong?) and the societal protection consideration paired with the argument that opponents "want to preserve a person’s right to be psychotic" seem to have merit.

I present this to you folks out there for debate. But first, here are some pros and cons I see. I’ll start with the pros:

  • People with untreated mental illnesses are one of South Carolina’s great challenges. It’s a huge factor in homelessness, overcrowded jails and hospital emergency rooms, a lack of proper care (since jailers, for instance, know little of looking after the mentally ill), and yes, crime.
  • Medication has been developed that can effect remarkable results with these brain diseases. But one manifestation of mental illness may be that the patient won’t take his meds on his own. In such a situation, when the choice is between someone wandering the streets out of his head and a functioning member of society, maybe the state should step in to act in loco parentis, so to speak, and require him to do what’s good for him — and what’s good for the others affected and potentially affected by his sickness.
  • I’ve seen a lot of harm done by overconcern for mental patient’s rights — excessive deinstitutionalization, for one. Why not just act to fix the problem?

And now some cons:

  • Suppose the police do haul them in. We don’t have the psych wards to put them in. Taken a step further, we could go a long way toward fixing the problem of the mentally ill wandering the streets by simply properly funding both insitutionalized and community-based care.
  • We don’t really understand the brain, and while there’s a plethora of "miracle drugs" out there, they don’t always have the expected effect. Based on my own experience with anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, depending upon your dosage and other, metabolic, factors, you can have side effects that make you feel even worse, or create whole new problems. I’ve known too many people have to take one psychiatric drug after another, until their shrink manages to help them by trial and error (or they just quit taking anything, which under the circumstances may not be an irrational reaction).
  • Whose standards do we use to define "what’s good for him: Big Nurse‘s or R.P McMurphy’s?

OK, what are your thoughts?

New category! Top five lists

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So I was reading our special section last week on this year’s "20 Under 40," and thinking what a fine, upstanding groups of youngsters this was, when I got sidetracked — I started checking out what they listed as their "favorite movie," and suddenly the popular-culture snob in me came out for a romp, and I started looking only at that criterion, and began to judge them much more harshly.

Note that I realize full well that what this illustrates is shallowness and misplaced priorities on my part, rather than reflecting negatively upon our 20 honorees. Obviously, these folks spend their time and energy on more serious matters. This is why they are on a "20 Under 40" list, and I never was.

But indulge me here (which, come to think of it, is something you do every time you waste valuable time reading this blog). I mean, don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed "Red Dawn." I’m not one of those left-wingers who dismiss it as mere right-wing Cold War paranoid propaganda. (Of course, it was right-wing Cold War paranoid propaganda, but that was part of its charm; it wasn’t afraid to be what it was.) But favorite movie of all time? I don’t think so. Still, this young gentleman should get points for taking a risk with his pick (something I utterly fail to do with my own list below, I’ll admit), and that’s worth something. But risky choices need to be defensible.

Far more impressive was Mary Pat Baldauf‘s esoteric selection of "A Face in the Crowd." Now there’s a film buff. I mean, even though I’ve heard great things about it, I haven’t even seen it myself (although I just got it from Netflix and hope to watch it this weekend), but it’s got great snob appeal. Think about it — Andy Griffith, before he was famous, shining in a serious, dark role. And don’t forget it’s got Patricia Neal in it. So way to go there, Ms. Baldauf. And please note, she dared to list "old movies (especially from the 1950s and 1960s)" as a personal passion, which raised the bar on the discriminating reader’s expectations. So this was quite a high-wire act, and she pulled it off beautifully.

I would applaud Cynthia Blair‘s choice of "The Usual Suspects" (although, being more obvious, it’s not as cool as Ms. Baldauf’s), but it’s listed as "last movie," rather than "favorite," which just doesn’t count for as much.

So where am I headed with this? Well, as an ardent admirer of Nick Hornby‘s masterful High Fidelity — and as one who also thoroughly enjoyed the film adaptation (in spite of their having moved the setting from London to Chicago, it was rescued by a stellar cast, with Jack Black turning in a mind-blowing performance as Barry) — I have been tempted for some time to start a "top five" category on this blog.

What’s stopped me? Well, fear, I suppose — fear of being savaged by the real pop culture snobs, because I know my own tastes are fairly pedestrian, truth be told. There are an awful lot of Barrys out there ready to tear into my picks the way the original Barry dissed Rob’s and Dick’s. But ultimately, as a reader-participation exercise, this could be fun. So let’s do it.

I had wanted to start this with something less obvious, such as "top five movie endings," or "top five cover songs that feature the original artist singing backup," or some such. But since I just got on the under-40 crowd about favorite movies, let’s start with that very vanilla sort of list:

1. "It’s a Wonderful Life."
2. "The Godfather."
3. "Casablanca."
4. "The Graduate."
5. "High Noon."

Or maybe number four or five should have been "Saving Private Ryan" or …

Yes, I know. I’m stretching the concept of "vanilla" until it screams. Barry would call that list "very …". Well, never mind what Barry would call it, since this is a family blog. But hey — the best movies of all time are obvious, if they’re really the best. I could have thrown in "Life is Beautiful" or "36 Hours" or "Office Space" or something that had a little individuality to it. But I had to be honest.

I promise to do something a little more intriguing the next time I visit this category.

Meanwhile, I’m anxious to know what y’all think — not only your own "top five movies," which I’m sure will put mine to shame. I’d also like your suggestions for future lists.

Assuming, of course, that you dare…

The Caffeine Also Rises

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This is blogging. This is the true blogging, el blogando verdadero, con afición, the kind a man wants if he is a man. The kind that Jake and Lady Brett might have done, if they’d had wi-fi hotspots in the Montparnasse.

What brings this on is that I am writing standing up, Hemingway-style, at the counter in a cafe. But there is nothing romantic about this, which the old man would appreciate. Sort of. This isn’t his kind of cafe. It’s not a cafe he could ever have dreamed of. It’s a Starbucks in the middle of a Barnes and Noble (sorry, Rhett, but I’m out of town today, and there’s no Happy Bookseller here). About the one good and true thing that can be said in favor of being in this place at this time is that there is basically no chance of running into Gertrude Stein here. Or Alice, either.

I’m standing because there are no electrical outlets near the tables, just here at the counter. And trying to sit on one of these high stools and type kills my shoulders. No, it’s not my wound from the Great War, just middle age.

So that puts me in mind of Papa. No, excuse me: I once had lunch with Mary Welsh Hemingway (wife number four) at a hotel down by the river (the Mississippi, not the Seine). It was 1976. She drank a Bloody Mary; I had one of those crisp, cold Dutch beers in the green bottle. It was good, and it did not mount to the head as those things sometimes do. We were standing in line at the buffet when I started to ask her something about "your husband," and I stopped myself to say, "It seems silly to keep saying ‘your husband’ as though he had no name. Is it, uh, is it OK if I just call him ‘Papa‘?"

No, she said. That was just for family.

Good for her.

Anyway, this line of thought got started partly because of the writing-standing-up thing, and partly because I’m standing under that mural they have around the cafe area in Barnes & Nobles, with all the famous writers sitting in a real cafe looking intellectual and bohemian, and Hemingway is up there with Joyce and Faulkner and Neruda and …

Well actually, no, he isn’t. I’ve stepped away and walked around the area three times now, probably drawing stares at such odd, peripatetic behavior, and he’s not up there. But he is on the one on Harbison, isn’t he? I remember it because it bugged me that they showed him smoking a pipe. At least, I think they did. I’m not in a position to check. Anyway, I’ve never seen a photograph of Hemingway smoking a pipe. Not the kind of thing he would do. I’ve got a certain stereotype of pipe smokers in my head, and he doesn’t fit it. Of course, I could be wrong about him.

I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does. I’m going to walk around again to see for sure if he’s up there…

Nope.

You know, the coffee here is a lot stronger than I expected. She warned me that it was really hot and really full (too full for me to stir in my six packets of Sugar in the Raw without spilling), but she didn’t say it was this strong. It’s enough to make a man start babbling about nothing. Nada y nada y pues nada.

We are all a lost generation.

Who said that? Oh, no — she is here…

The Longest Day

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Today is the day of days — at least it was, 61 years ago. Our modern-day Agincourt, when men who lay a-bed in America might hold their manhoods cheap in later years, for not having been there to launch the assault on Hitler’s Fortress Europa.

Of course, the men who were there would have snorted at such flowery, high-flown rhetoric. They were just there to do a job that they didn’t want to have to do, and were pretty ticked off at the Germans for keeping them from being able to lay a-bed back home.

And unlike at Agincourt, there were plenty of men on our side that day. About 175,000 were flung into the headlong, all-or-nothing effort — on that first day alone. The war in the West, and and perhaps in the East as well, depended on the establishment of a beachhead on this day, in spite of everything Field Marshall Erwin Rommel had done to make it impossible. And he had done all he could.

By this time of day, the battle was well joined. Paratroopers had been on the ground since midnight — early evening on June 5 back home. They had been scattered all over the place by C-47 pilots who had been totally unprepared for the volume of anti-aircraft fire they had flown into — dropped too fast, too low and almost always in the wrong locations. Plenty else had gone wrong. So many things had gone wrong that Iraq looks seamless by comparison. At midmorning, Omaha had looked hopeless — to the generals. But individual sergeants and lieutenants here and there didn’t know that, and went ahead to get the job done.

How, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine. All any of us who were born later can know is what we read in books and see in films. Steven Spielberg has done his best to try to depict the experience, in one epic film and on television, and for many of us, that constitutes our entire understanding of that momentous day.

To help connect us a little more to the reality, I provide links to sites dedicated to two of the real men who were there — Bill Guarnere and David Kenyon Webster. One of them still lives, the other is long gone. Their names — particularly Sgt. Guarnere’s — are well known to those who watched Mr. Spielberg’s "Band of Brothers." Both were members of Company E of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Mr. Webster’s letters home (he was an aspiring writer who had left Harvard to join the Airborne) were a critical source for Stephen Ambrose when he wrote the book upon which the series was based.

Go to the sites. Mr. Guarnere’s is worth it for the intro alone. Mr. Webster’s contains excerpts from his letters. Their words provide a better, and more fitting, tribute to what they and so many thousands of others accomplished than anything further I could say.

How about here, Bob?

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Bob Gahagan tells me via e-mail that he has a book he’d like to recommend on this blog, but he couldn’t figure out where to place his comment.

Seeing as how the book in question is Tom Friedman‘s latest, and seeing also as how I was recently presented with a copy of it and have not had a chance to open it yet, and considering that I am one of Mr. Friedman’s biggest fans, I’m particularly interested to see what Bob and others who’ve read it have to say about it.

So how about here? The discussion thread begins now…