Category Archives: Books

My (successful) Quest for George Smiley

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Outside Smiley's house on Bywater Street. No need to knock. George knows I'm here. And where's he going to go? It's a cul de sac. It's over, old friend.

I’d been holding this back for when the movie comes out, but now that it’s passed me by (although I look forward to its being at the Nickelodeon next month), I am much embittered and have decided to go public with the whole story — the Official Secrets Act be damned. See how they like it when it’s all laid out in the papers. Perhaps I’ll go with The Guardian; that should sting. Let Parliament launch an inquiry. Let them connect me to the notorious Rebekah Brooks, for all I care. (After all, I’ve done a freelance job for that same outfit, in the time since they cast me out.) I’ve been a good soldier, put in my time, watched and waited. All for naught. Here’s my story…

As you know, I went to the UK a year ago, ostensibly as a tourist. That wouldn’t fool a real professional, of course, but one keeps as low a profile as one can. I have my own tradecraft for this sort of thing — I make a big splash, publicize my whereabouts… what spy would do that?

It’s worked so far.

My mission — to find the Circus, and more importantly, George Smiley himself.

It was quite a challenge. George hasn’t been seen since 1982. And the original location of the Circus, now that MI6 has the River House (all mod cons, as Bill Haydon would say), is shrouded in service legend. It’s not something you’d assign to some probationer straight out of Sarratt.

First, we spent a couple of days settling in, establishing patterns. One assumes that tiny Toby Esterhase‘s lamplighters are everywhere, so you need to paint them a picture, let them get complacent. This we did — from Heathrow to Swiss Cottage (the very spot where General Vladimir would have been picked up as a fallback, had he not been killed on Hampstead Heath), then all over the city on the Tube, aimlessly. Trafalgar Square, St. James’s, Fortnum’s, Buckingham, the Globe, the Tate, the Cabinet War Rooms, the Tower, hither and yon in the City.

Finally, at the end of our third full day, after night had fallen, we ambled up Charing Cross Road, affecting to be interested in bookshops. We almost missed it, but then there it was — the Circus itself. There was the Fifth Floor, and even Haydon’s little hexagonal pepperpot office overlooking New Compton Street and Charing Cross. Quick, I said, get the picture. It took a couple of tries, the way these things do when you need to hurry. Thank heavens for our “tourist” cover; it excuses all sorts of odd behavior. Then on up the street, and an hour or so of browsing at Foyles to check our backs. Found a couple of decent-looking biographies of Lord Cochrane, but didn’t buy one. (They had shelf after shelf of naval history; it went on and on.) Then we wandered about in the West End, to clean our backs as much as possible, before heading back to Swiss Cottage.

One thing down. Hardest part to come.

By this time, I had decided not to risk the actual modern HQ of the SIS. Mix fact with fiction like that, and it’s like mixing matter and antimatter. Could blow you clear across the universe, or at least to Brixton, and who wants to go there, really? That’s why they put Scalphunters there.

We played tourist for another day. Then another. The Sherlock Holmes museum. A side trip to Greenwich, to stand astride the Meridian, and see the coat Nelson wore at the Nile. Back into town for the British Museum.

Then, it was our last day in London. Had to go to Oxford the next day, and check on Connie. Connie is high-maintenance. So it was do-or-die time. We opted to do.

We thought that twilight would be the best time to descend on George. Vigilance is low. Everyone’s tired then; time for tea and meet the wife. So we went to that general part of town. Spent several hours at the Victoria and Albert. Loads of statues and the like.

We took the Tube to Sloan Square, a good half-kilometer from Bywater Street, and went the rest of the way on foot. We entered the cul de sac as night descended (which it does before 4 p.m. at that time of year). There wasn’t a soul on the narrow street. Everything went smoothly. When we got to the part where Smiley lives, I tried to throw the watchers off by shooting pictures of houses other than his. In a way, though, they were all relevant. George lives at No. 9, of course. But the 1979 TV series was shot at No. 10. And No. 11 has a Banham security system, which the book describes as being on George’s house. No. 9 has an ADT system.

Anyway, after doing what I could to distract any lamplighters in the vicinity, I had J (her workname — best watcher in the outfit, is J) quickly shoot a happy snap of me in front of No. 9. She was a bit nervous, because there were lights in the basement-level windows. She said people who lived there would wonder what we were doing. I muttered no, they wouldn’t: “They know exactly what we’re doing.” The thing was to get it over with quickly, so we did. Given the hurry we were in, I’m struck, as I look at the image, by how placid and dispassionate and, well, Smileyesque I look in the image. Like I was channeling him in that moment.

Then, it was back out to King’s Road and back to the Underground as fast as our legs would carry us, trying not to show that our hearts were pounding like Peter Guillam’s when he stole the Testify file from Registry that time. I was getting too old for this, I knew. As I looked up at the Christmas lights in the trees on Sloane Square, they were as blurry as the stars in a Van Gogh.

I can hardly remember the next couple of hours, but I can’t forget the stroke of luck that befell us later. Nothing short of a miracle, it was.

We had decided to case Victoria Station and its environs, because we knew we had to catch a coach there for the trip to Oxford next morning, and it’s good tradecraft to reconnoiter these things ahead of time. We got a bit turned-around there, and ended up touring the whole station before we discovered that the coach station was on the next block. On one aimless pass through the vicinity of the ticket windows, I looked up and there he was. George himself. Right out of the first paragraph of this passage:

He returned to the railway station… There were two ticket counters and two short queues. At the first, an intelligent girl attended him and he bought a second-class single ticket to Hamburg. But it was a deliberately laboured purchase, full of indecision and nervousness, and when he had made it he insisted on writing down times of departure and arrival: also on borrowing her ball-point and a pad of paper.

In the men’s room, having first transferred the contents of his pockets, beginning with the treasured piece of postcard from Leipzig’s boat, he changed into the linen jacket and straw hat, then went to the second ticket counter where, with a minimum of fuss, he bought a ticket on the stopping train to Kretzchmar’s town. To do this, he avoided looking at the attendant at all, concentrating instead on the ticket and his change, from under the brim of his loud straw hat…

Apparently, our appearance at Bywater Street had sent him on the run, but we had stumbled into him anyway. I left him alone, except for grabbing this picture. You doubt that’s George Smiley? Look at this picture, and this one and this one, and then tell me that. ‘Course it was him. Stuck out a mile.

But now that I’d found him, what was the point? He was just my old friend George. I could hear Toby’s triumphant voice in my ear: “Brad! All your life! Fantastic!” But I ignored him. I got the picture, and moved on. I didn’t even look to see whether he had left Ann’s lighter on the floor.

My mission had been accomplished, and then some… Why did I not exult? All I felt was the urge to polish my glasses with the lining of my tie. But I wasn’t wearing a tie…

Gimme my Tinker, Tailor! Right now!

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To my considerable outrage, I just realized that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will NOT be opening tonight at a theater near me.

I’ve been waiting for this thing for a year — it’s the only movie I’ve been eager to see in much longer than that — and the release date has been put off again and again, and I was all ready for it to finally come out on Dec. 9… and it can’t be found.

I read that it was released in the UK three months ago. This is insane. I mean, I’d love to go back to England and see it, but that’s not really an option for me at the moment. I don’t hop the pond that often. It’s sort of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. So far. (I saw “The King’s Speech” at a theater in Oxford the night it opened in England — which, weirdly, was a week or so after it opened back in the States.)

Oh, well… in lieu of that, I’ll share with you this note I wrote today to my friend Hal Stevenson, before I realized the movie wasn’t being released here. Hal recently told me that he had read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold recently, and wanted to know more about le Carre and his work. Since I’m a huge fan (of his early work, anyway), I promised to share some thoughts on what else he might want to read. It’s not brilliant, original literary criticism (I call le Carre’s most acclaimed novel “awesome,” dude), but it gives you an idea to what extent I have been thinking about and eagerly anticipating this non-event.

So I share this now with you as well, as I contemplate going home and watching the original BBC series of “Tinker, Tailor,” which I own on DVD. So there, Hollywood…

Hal,

I haven’t forgotten to write to you about John le Carre..

It’s fitting that I do so today, since the new movie, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” comes out tonight.

I believe you said you had read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Well, that was an awesome book. As literature, it’s pure and clean and complete. If you’ve read that, you’ve read THE quintessential Cold War novel. You could stop there, if you wanted to. But who would want to?

I don’t think le Carre has written anything technically better than that novel. But he’s written stuff I enjoyed more.

The Alec Leamas novel is cold, and hard. It’s like a diamond. I can find no fault with it. But while I think it speaks profoundly to the human condition, some of his other novels are… warmer. They let you care about the characters more, get into them more.

For instance, George Smiley appears in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but as a peripheral character. And he comes across as a sort of reluctant agent of the cold pragmatism of Control, who duplicitously sent Leamas on this suicidal errand.

After that, le Carre decided to be more generous to Smiley. He had already been the protagonist of le Carre’s two books before The Spy Who Came In From the Cold — Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality. Those were short murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie mold. That Smiley worked in intelligence was almost incidental.

But Smiley comes to full-blown life in the trilogy that begins with Tinker, Tailor. That’s the start of what has come to be known as “The Quest for Karla.” Here are some brief thoughts on the three books:

  1. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – At the outset of this novel, George is already in retirement, against his will. He and the head of “the Circus” (le Carre’s euphemism for MI6, based in its supposed location near Cambridge Circus in London), known only as Control, were both canned after an operation blew up disastrously. But a Foreign Office official comes to George with evidence that Control was done in by a mole (this novel is responsible for that term entering the language) who had insinuated himself to the very top of the Circus, and was actually running the whole show now on behalf of Moscow. Smiley begins a process of backtracking through his own life and career and former colleagues as he sets a trap for the mole, unofficially, from the outside. The mole, it is known, is the agent of Karla, a mysterious figure who sort of runs his own show deep within the KGB. Karla is Smiley’s lifelong nemesis, sort of his Moby Dick. Smiley doesn’t know who the traitor is until the end – beyond the fact that it will be one of his closest associates, someone he’s known and trusted his whole adult life. The novel is about these relationships, and what they mean to Smiley, as much as it is about spies. That’s a hallmark of le Carre’s work.
  2. The Honourable Schoolboy – This second novel in the trilogy is very different from the other two. It’s sweeping, and adventurous and cinematic. The ironic thing about it is that it’s the only one that hasn’t been made into a movie (or, more accurately, TV series), even though it reads most like a movie script. It takes place after Smiley has exposed the mole, and turned the Circus inside out. George has been brought back officially into service to head the new, demoralized Circus. Trying to build the agency back up and get some decent intelligence coming in, Smiley pursues a trail of money that should lead to a top Soviet agent – another of Karla’s hand-picked people – in Hong Kong. Lacking professionals on staff he can trust, he sends an old freelance hand – a journalist named Jerry Westerby, who is sort of a half-amateur gentleman spy – to track down this second Karla agent. Westerby does so against the background of exotic locales. You get the sense that le Carre was trying to be a sort of Hollywood version of Joseph Conrad here. There is action, to an extent that is unlike le Carre, who tends to be more cerebral. On the whole, the novel isn’t as satisfying, since it’s more about Westerby and his conflicts than it is about Smiley and the characters you’ve come to care about in Tinker, Tailor.
  3. Smiley’s People – This one is everything The Honourable Schoolboy wasn’t. It’s like a reunion from the first book, and is the climactic act in Smiley’s lifelong contest with Karla. At the outset, George is in exile again from the service after the fiasco in Hong Kong. But an old Russian general, who had spied for Britain in Moscow, has been murdered in London. The Circus doesn’t want to be caught within miles of the general or his old émigré friends, and asks George to come in quietly, unofficially, and lay the general’s affairs to rest – tie up loose ends, pour oil on the waters. George discovers that the general was killed because he had possessed a secret that could be Karla’s undoing. And he spends the rest of the novel making the rounds of old friends, pulling together the strands of a noose around Karla’s neck. But as he gets closer, he comes to doubt whether that’s even what he wants to do.

Moral ambiguity is Smiley’s constant companion. He’s a good and decent man who finds himself doing abhorrent things in the service of his ideals. That is a theme in everything le Carre writes, even when Smiley doesn’t appear.

And he does NOT appear in subsequent novels, except in retrospect in The Secret Pilgrim. That was OK (as were A Perfect Spy and The Constant Gardener), but here are what I think are the best of le Carre’s post-Smiley novels:

  • The Russia House – The protagonist is so much like Jerry Westerby that it’s like le Carre saw this novel as a do-over, an attempt to get that character right this time. An amateur is recruited to act on behalf of British intelligence to make contact with a source at the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapons program – a source that insists upon dealing with no one else. But can the agent himself be trusted? And is the source for real?
  • The Night Manager – This is one you can read and enjoy without having read any other le Carre novel. It stands alone, like “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” but its tone is the opposite. There’s nothing cold about it. It’s very human. The protagonist is an ex-commando who, for very personal reasons, offers his services to the government to get close to, and bring down, “the worst man in the world” – a billionaire British arms dealer who sells to anyone with the right price. Not to be a plot spoiler, but it’s more of a feel-good book than almost anything else le Carre has written – sort of the opposite of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in that regard.

I probably like those because I have pedestrian tastes. They’re not as dark as some of le Carre’s critically acclaimed work — certainly not as dark as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. By comparison, these are sentimental, but I like them.

Well, that’s an overview. I hope you’ll read some of these; I’d enjoy discussing them with you…

Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Is Gary Oldman as good? WHO KNOWS? YOU CAN'T TELL BY ME!!!!

No, we can’t ship you that item, Mr. Yossarian…

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Maj. Major: Sergeant, from now on, I don’t want anyone to come in and see me while I’m in my office. Is that clear?
First Sgt. Towser: Yes, sir? What do I say to people who want to come in and see you while you’re gone?
Maj. Major: Tell them I’m in and ask them to wait.
First Sgt. Towser: For how long?
Maj. Major: Until I’ve left.
First Sgt. Towser: And then what do I do with them?
Maj. Major: I don’t care.
First Sgt. Towser: May I send people in to see you after you’ve left?
Maj. Major: Yes.
First Sgt. Towser: You won’t be here then, will you?
Maj. Major: No.
First Sgt. Towser: I see, sir. Will that be all?
— Catch-22

To begin with, I tried to do it the old-fashioned way. I asked my Dad if he’d like to ride out to Harbison with me, and he said sure, so I picked him up in the truck and we went out there. We went into the store with me clutching the ad that showed the item on sale. After my usual thing — wandering about the store looking for it without asking for help — didn’t work, my Dad asked someone.

This led, indirectly (I’m giving you the short version here) to someone going to the back and searching for about 20 minutes before informing me that they were out of the item. They offered to order one for me, but I said, don’t bother, I’ll order it online from home. I thought I’d read that shipping was free, and I figured I’d save myself another trip to the store.

So I got home, and I went online, and there was the item, so I put one in my cart, and went to check out. Where I found that instead of $69.99, it would cost me $111.40. Turns out I would have to order another 40 bucks worth of merchandise from that store to get the free shipping.

OK, so I clicked on the “store pickup” radio button, and presto!, the shipping charges disappeared. Seemed fair enough to me… they put it on a truck that would be going there anyway, and I drive a few miles out of my way, and I pick up the item. Fine.

One more step, though: I had to click on the link that said “select a store.” Fine. I went there, and filled in my zip code, and was shown the two stores in my area.

Then came trouble: I couldn’t click on either store. They were grayed out, because the item was “Out of stock (or not carried) at this store.”

Well, duh. Otherwise I would not be placing an order from it and opting for “store pickup.”

Well, obviously there was a malfunction in the software, so I called the store to go back to Option A, which was to get them to order it for me.

I just needed to deal with a human being, thereby placing me back in the land of sweet reason.

So I called, and after listening to some singularly bad muzak (it was country, and I think it was intended to be patriotic, but it was extremely off-putting), a man came on the line.

Of course, sir, I’ll be happy to help you sir. What’s the item you were trying to order? I give him the stock number, and he keeps me waiting a brief while before politely informing me that they couldn’t order that particular item for me, because it wasn’t in the store already. If it were in the store, I could have store pickup, but not if it wasn’t already in stock.

But… they had offered to order it from me when I was there, I insisted, my voice rising a bit.

They must have meant they would order it for home delivery, he said, beginning to sound a bit put out with me.

But… if we did that, the cost of the item to me would almost double.

Yes, sir. Unfortunately, however, the store could not place the order for me unless the store already had it. Unless I’d like to have it delivered to my house for $50 more, a transaction I could easily have managed without involving him at all.

I was beginning to feel a bit panicky, like Yossarian in the nose of his B-26, surrounded by glass, with flak exploding around him so thick it looked like you could walk on it…

And as he sensed my disorder, the man tried to placate me a bit by admitting that yes, perhaps, the way it is worded, as “store pickup,” implying an item being ordered from elsewhere when it was already there, was a bit misleading, nevertheless…

Fortunately, I calmed down enough to ask him whether… by any chance… this item, which had just been advertised as being at his store today… might be coming in on a subsequent shipment without my having to place an order.

He said that was possible. And he had a truck coming in tonight. Perhaps, if I called first thing in the morning, the item would be there and I could place my order.

So I resolved to do that. But I must confess, there’s this paranoid little voice at the back of my head that tells me that by that time tomorrow morning, Colonel Cathcart will have raised the number of missions on me once again…

Yossarian, screaming: "But why would they have to ship you one if you already HAVE one?!?!"

Finally, my important discovery is recognized

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For a second there, I almost deleted the comment and reported it as spam. Usually, when someone comments on a really old post, that’s what it is.

But I hesitated, and followed the link provided, and was happy to find that finally, an authoritative source had confirmed the validity of my important discovery of the actual site of the fictional Championship Vinyl.

You have to read High Fidelity to fully understand the importance of my discovery. Watching the movie is OK, but since it transports the shop to Chicago, no serious Hornbyologist would give it the time of day as a source of valid information.

I’m the one who crossed the ocean, left my wife asleep at our hotel in Swiss Cottage, crossed London in the Underground and searched the vast reaches of Islington alone, without a guide beyond the cryptic words of the novel itself, and found the hallowed spot.

And no one has fully recognized me until now, as DellaMirandola writes:

Thank you for this important discovery. I’ve just written about it here:http://thehornseyroad.blogspot.com/2011/11/championship-vinyl.html

Yes, there’s a bit of tail-chasing solipsism or some other fancy word going on here, in that the site in question is citing me as the source of truth without reference to the external world, and I’m citing him in return as the confirmation, but let’s leave that to the nitpickers. The bottom line is, what could be more expert on the validity of a find on the Hornsey Road than a website called The Hornsey Road? I ask you…

And that worthy author could hardly have been more definite:

In High Fidelity, Rob Fleming’s record shop is just off the Seven Sisters Road
This proves conclusively that it’s on the southern stretch of the Hornsey Road.

I am covered in glory. I don’t even care if there’s any money attached.

So now, I have another thing to be thankful for today.

Then they came for the people with good taste…

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I really like this treatment, in The New York Times, of the silly-sounding new film, “Anonymous:”

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious…

No, I haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to. I mean, I saw “The Da Vinci Code,” and I’d like to have that time back. I also read Foucault’s Pendulum, which was essentially the same thing (grand, paranoid conspiracy, involving the Knights Templar, reaching back into ancient times). That one really disappointed me, because I had enjoyed The Name of the Rose.

Bottom line, what does it matter who wrote those plays and poems? Whoever it was was probably the most brilliant writer of English ever, largely responsible for the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere. But so what if it was Will Shakespeare or Joe Blow down the street? What’s in a name, yadda, yadda? It’s not like the actual person can enjoy our adulation today. We can’t shake him by the hand or anything. He can’t make any money out of it. Having that name, and that visage, associated with the works suits fine. And since no one will ever know that it was someone else — even if we found a document with a royal seal attesting to it, that could be a fraud itself — what’s the point?

Would it matter that Julius Caesar was actually someone else using that name? No. Gallia would still have been divisa in partes tres. (Latin scholars, help me out — I suspect that “divisa” is wrong with “would have been.” And to me, that matters.)

It remains most likely that

They may have come for Opus Dei and gotten away with it, but they’re not coming for me, not again.

Listening to hunterherring.com, right now

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Listening right now to my fellow granddad at hunterherring.com.

The picture above shows Hunter with our youngest granddaughter (his daughter’s, my son’s) at a Lunch Money concert in front of the Columbia Museum of Art several months ago. (Hunter’s wife works with us at ADCO, and Lunch Money’s drummer is with ADCO interactive, and the cameraman for “The Brad Show.” How’s that for cross-promotion? Back off, Jack — I’m a professional…)

Right now, Hunter’s playing Mary Wells singing “You Beat Me to the Punch.”

Listening to Hunter’s web station is like experiencing Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” in real life. I’m pretty sure that most of the songs on the fictional Rob’s Top Five lists would eventually be played on hunterherring.com.

The diminishment of creativity over time

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Lately, in my truck, I’ve been listening to “The Union,” a CD put out by Leon Russell and Elton John. Speaking of gifts, my brother gave it to me last Christmas, but I only broke it out recently.

I’ve enjoyed it. It’s quite good. I’ve kept it in the player for weeks. I’ve even caught some of the tunes going through my head during the day. They worked well together, although their styles remain quite distinct. When you hear the opening piano chords, you know which voice you’re about to hear.

But… there’s this sadness I associate with it. Good as it is, it’s simply nothing like what both of them were producing in 1970 and ’71, and for a short time after that. I really enjoyed John’s work, from “Your Song” through “Tiny Dancer” on “Madman Across the Water.” As for the Master of Space and Time, I doubt that he had any bigger fan than I, back during the “Shelter People” period. “Stranger in a Strange Land,” for instance, remains an all-time favorite. And who else could have pulled off his show-stealing performance at the Concert for Bangladesh?

On that subject, Leon put on the most awesome show I saw live in the early ’70s, if ever. It was in Memphis. The opening: All the Shelter People were on stage, without Leon. There were two grand pianos. At one of them sat a black guy (who really music aficionados can probably name, although I cannot) rocking out in a gospel style (or so it sounded to my untrained ear), and the Shelter People — or whatever they were called at this point, essentially a “hippie commune bonafied” on tour — were energetically jamming along with him. The music built, and built, still without Leon. It had been going on about 10 minutes, it seemed, and everybody was pumped, and then… Leon stolled out on stage. He was wearing a white suit, with a white top hat, and playing a white Stratocaster. He ambled, back and forth, playing lead over the music… then he climbed up onto the second piano, and stood there with the guitar, rocking away. Finally, he climbed down, put down the Strat, and got serious. He sat at the second piano, and he and other pianist duelled away, with the other dozen or so other people on stage rocking along with them…

It was amazing. What a showman.

People get older. Their powers diminish. Certainly, their energies do. One great thing about being a musician, though, is that you generally retain the ability to make something beautiful, even if it lacks the power of what you did that made you a star, if you were a star.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I saw a Tweet leading me to a thing about Kevin’s Smith’s movies, ranked from Worst to Best. There were 10 of them. Fortunately, it was not called a Top Ten list. You couldn’t even honestly come up with a Top Five from this guy’s work, not if you had taste. Basically, he had a Top One — “Clerks.” Some of you who think me a prig would be surprised that I even liked that, but it was really well done. The pottymouthed script was inventive, clever, as were the acting and the direction. Not even Jay and Silent Bob wore thin, for as long as the film lasted. It made you want to see more from this guy.

And then you did see more, and you wished you hadn’t. It’s probably a good thing he’s decided to desert his oeuvre and turn to more pedestrian, formula comedy (“Cop Out,” which this list placed last, but which was at least mildly amusing).

Kevin Smith is only 41. He was born when Elton John and Leon Russell were at their peak. But he peaked with one film.

That happens, with creativity. It’s a tragedy, when it deserts the young. Look at the Beatles. Of course, the Beatles were so amazingly improbable to begin with. How could anyone, so naturalistically, produce so much material that was that diverse, from year to year, and that appealing? It was inhuman. It was the sort of thing that in a different cultural context gives rise to dark mutterings about clandestine meetings at the Crossroads at midnight.

But it didn’t last. As they broke up, it looked as though it would. Lennon produced “Instant Karma;” McCartney gave us “Maybe I’m Amazed.” George Harrison seemed to explode, having been repressed, with “All Things Must Pass.”

And that was it. They faded. Mozart died, but they lived to see their talents fade. The wonderful thing about Paul McCartney is that he appreciated that his fans loved the old stuff. So did he. (If you’d made John Lennon stand on stage and play Beatles songs, he’d have shot himself before that other guy did.) I saw him at Williams-Brice, and loved it. But, as I noted the other day, it’s sad to see him dyeing his hair, still trying to be the Cute One. That time is past, Paul.

Of course, one looks for such fading in oneself. Fortunately for me, I never hit the heights that these guys did. I was a decent writer by local standards, impressive to some people. Just enough people, in my book. It’s nice to have strangers come up and say kind things occasionally, but it’s also good to be able to walk down the street anonymously 99 percent of the time.

And as we age, things fade. First, one is no longer indefatigable. Gone are the days when, as a reporter, I could work all day, all night, and through the next morning before taking a nap (something I did frequently, back in the day).

But if you don’t rise too far, you don’t have as far to fall. I never wrote the Great American Novel (not yet, anyway), so I didn’t have to publicly struggle to replicate that for the rest of my life, while everyone scoffed. When one muddles along, one can continue more easily.

I look back at stuff I wrote 30 years ago when I find it moldering in a box, and it’s good. It has a spark, one that I lament. But it’s strange how one’s appreciation of one’s own work morphs. At any time in my adult life, I’ve thought the stuff I’d written six months earlier SO much better than what I was writing currently. Then, six months later, I’d think THAT stuff was the best I’d ever written. That has continued through my blogging years. (My old blog was SO much better-written than this one — even though it wasn’t nearly as well-read. And the stuff I wrote on this blog a year ago is amazingly better than this tripe I’m churning out now.)

What I’m writing now is the worst stuff I’ve ever written. (In my opinion, which is what counts, since I’m an introvert.) But it has always been thus. Aside from its lack of creativity, it’s shot through with typos and incomplete thoughts, mangled sentences. Because I don’t read back over it, and don’t have an editor — and everybody needs one. But I look forward, ever hopeful, to enjoying it later.

When I don’t do that any more, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Relax, I expect.

What about y’all, in what you do? As critics, do you disappoint yourselves? If so, take heart. Perhaps it will look better later. And even if it doesn’t, the stuff Leon and Elton are putting out is still quite good…

I love one of his children, but not the other

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My sons gave me birthday gift cards for Barnes and Noble, my favorite place for hanging out aimlessly and browsing, and I’m there now, contemplating a dilemma.

A couple of days ago, I saw the review in the WSJ about this new biography of James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, and they have it here. Since college — when I took so many electives (to some extent concentrating on that period) that I ended up getting a second major in history when I hadn’t planned to — I’ve been drawn to that period, and the Founders. Particularly the Framers.

But do I really want to use one of my cards for that? The publisher overpriced it a bit, for a book with such large type and so few pages. Nowhere near the heft of McCullough’s John Adams. I could get several paperbacks for this price.

Also… I’m still reading, and fascinated by, Charles Mann’s exploration of the Americas and the world pre- and post-1492.

Do I really want to delve into my mixed attitudes toward Madison right now (I inadvertently typed “Jefferson” just then, a pre-Freudian slip)?

The thing is, I revere the man as the Father of our Constitution, a political achievement I honor as much as any in human history.

But… he’s also the father (note the lower case) of a bastard child — American partisan politics. Or one of the main fathers, anyway (the mother was indiscriminate). Certainly the most successful one. The Federalists (which, if I had to pick a party, would have been my preference then) faded away, but Madison’s Democratic Republicans remain vital, although in different form, under truncated name. (And no, for those who don’t follow such things, it’s not the Republicans, a later invention.)

I love one of his children, but the other is the bane of my life as a political writer.

Another reason to hesitate, and wait until this, too, is marked down or in paperback… I have yet to read the book about his chief rival, the one by Ron Chernow, that Fritz Hollings recommended to me several years ago. Fritz thought it was great, and I asked one of my kids for it for birthday or Christmas, and it sits on my shelf yet.

Of course, if anything, my attitudes toward Hamilton lean even more toward the jaded. Despite my Federalist leanings (which is really more of a reaction to the Democratic Republicans than a love of the Federalists), and despite my great admiration for the role that he, too, played in the Constitution, there’s that nasty partisanship thing.

While Adams and Jefferson were conducting themselves more or less above the fray, Hamilton and Madison were carrying out the nastiest sort of partisan warfare in their behalfs. But at least Madison served Jefferson well in so doing. One thing I respect about Adams is that he truly hated party politics, as much as I do, and his own party worked against him perhaps more than it supported him (to name but one example, there’s the way they blackened his legacy with the Alien and Sedition Acts). Jefferson was more affected in his nonpartisanship, and carried it off well, while Madison more smoothly conducted his dirty work.

As for my decision — oh, I’ll have to read the book at some point. I just haven’t decided whether to get it now. I’ll browse a bit more first…

Happy real Columbus Day

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OK, I need to run to a meeting, but I can’t let today pass without acknowledging Columbus Day. Partly to defy political correctness… earlier this week, Kathryn said “Celebrating Columbus is a bit like flying the Confederate flag,” and martin sort of disputed her, and I responded:

Indeed. It’s foolish to get mad at Columbus. If he hadn’t been the one, it would have been the next doofus who thought the world was that much smaller than it was (or perhaps, some Portuguese captain who got blown off course on the way down the coast of Africa, which, if you’re out far enough to start with, can easily carry you to the coast of Brazil)…

Somebody was going to make the voyage that changed the world more profoundly than any other voyage in the history of the world. The one that started the continuous travel between Europe and America, as opposed to the Vikings and St. Brendan and the like. It just happened to be Columbus, because he was so stubborn about his wrong idea, and managed to persuade Isabela to part with some dough.

But there’s another reason. I’m very much looking forward to reading 1493, by Charles C. Mann. I got it for my birthday. And though I have not read it yet, I’m familiar with his thesis, because he summed it up in this remarkable piece in the WSJ recently. An excerpt:

Some 250 million years ago, the Earth contained a single landmass known as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, forever splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals.

Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, only a few venturesome land creatures, mostly insects and birds, had crossed the oceans and established themselves. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Columbus’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of the historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

And he means that culturally, certainly. And politically, a concept we’re all familiar with. But also horticulturally, zoologically, economically, genetically, and just about any other way you want to look at it, with the exception of geologically.

Before Columbus, the world was one way. After, it was another way, in realm after realm of human, animal and plant life. The more you dig into it, the more astounding it is.

So… it doesn’t matter whether Columbus was a nice guy, or beastly to the native peoples, or a lousy geographer, or whatever. At least, no matter which of those things is true, the achievement is singular and world-shaking. That one voyage changed the world more than any other voyage, ever. Certainly infinitely more than the previous aborted connections between the continents, by Vikings, and possibly Polynesians, Africans, and Chinese. Because the connection he made was not severed, but followed up on — by quite a host of rather appalling opportunists in many cases, but as I say, this is not about the moral judgments.

It’s about what a big deal this was. And worth marking every year. (Although maybe not worth the Post Office getting a day off when I don’t.)

By the way, Mann is not about shortchanging the Indians. I’m now reading his prequel, 1491, which is about the millennia before Columbus came here. In short, it’s about all the recent research that tells us that there were many more people here than we supposed for most of our history, that they were here far longer, and that their societies were more sophisticated than even the greatest denouncers of eurocentrism would suppose. And other fascinating stuff.

A passage that sort of illustrates the paradigm-busting approach of this book (and, I assume, the new one):

Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

Worth reading.

Can you tell the sex of the writer?

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I’ve given you nothing so far today, so perhaps even this, insubstantial as it is, will seem like something.

Among many things I did today instead of blogging was try to continue cleaning out my inbox, which a day or two ago was up to about 500. That happens because there are things that I don’t have time to deal with at a given moment, but that I want to do something with, so I leave them where I found them rather than filing them away, where I’ll never see them. And of course the next day another hundred and something come in, and I try to winnow those, but there are always a few more that end up staying there for the same reasons, and so on. Then, there are days I don’t really have time to cull at all, and things just get deeper and deeper.

No, it’s not a good system, but it is mine.

Anyway, I managed to dig today all the way down (I only have 211 left, mostly old stuff) to something I saved on June 3. It was this Tweet, which I had emailed to myself hoping to blog about:

Slate @Slate
Can you tell if this paragraph was written by a man or a woman? V.S. Naipaul says he can: http://slate.me/lWMWfg

Yes, I took the test provided by The Guardian — the one designed to determine whether I could do what Naipaul claimed HE could do, which was quickly tell whether something was written by a man or a woman.

And of course, I failed — I got 4 out of 10 right. Which is what the person who devised the test had intended. It’s easy enough to pick passages by men that sound like they are in the voice of a woman, and vice versa. To make it hard (or, in this case, to prove Naipaul is a sexist pig, which seemed to be the point — which he deserved, since he was being ungentlemanly).

Often, when I start out thinking, for whatever reason (say, an ambiguous byline such as “Pat,” or “Leslie”) that I’m reading something by a man or a woman and I’m wrong, at some point in the reading I go, “Wait a minute…” because something doesn’t seem right. And then I realize — the man is a woman, or vice-versa. Since, as an editor, I’ve had to critically read thousands of pieces from strangers, this has happened enough for me to note a trend.

Sometimes I’m wrong about my realization, though. I suspect, based on observations over the past thirty or forty years, that men and women (especially younger ones) are writing more and more like each other. Just as in other areas the genders are crossing paths. For instance… I’ve been driving for more than 40 years. For the last 25-30 years, I’ve noticed that young women are driving a lot more like young men than they did the first 10-15 — more aggressive, more likely to cut you off, more stupid in general, just like young guys.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a number of trends among young guys that combine to make it harder to determine the presence of a Y chromosome in superficial behavior. OK, guys still do more stupid stuff than women do, since testosterone still exists in them, but it seems that some of them try harder and harder, and often succeed, to express themselves like women. I won’t go into detail because one of them might punch me. Not very hard, of course, the wussies, but I still would find it inconvenient.

Anyway, take the test if you like. I’ll bet you flunk it. I certainly did. I knew I would, so I played along. When I thought the deviser of the test was trying to lead me to answer a certain way, I did.

I think I could probably devise a test you could pass along these lines. (The way to do it would be to choose paragraphs that are characteristically masculine or feminine in tone. In other words, stack the deck toward being easy rather than hard. If you chose paragraphs at random, everyone would flunk that, too. Most paragraphs provide few clues.) But you know what? I think my not having time to do that is why this post idea has sat here for almost three months…

Saw “The Help” last night…

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I don’t get to the actual movie theater anymore. Even though I’ve largely cut off the firehose flow of entertainment into my house, between Netflix and the DVDs I own (most recent acquisition: a Blu-Ray of “True Grit”), I’ve got more movies to watch than I really have time for — without paying those ridiculous ticket and concession prices.

But I have seen five movies this summer, which is unusual for me. Here they are, in order:

  1. “Thor“
  2. “X-Men: First Class“
  3. “Green Lantern“
  4. “Captain America“
  5. “The Help“

Oops, did I give you whiplash there? Did you think you knew where you were going and then, WANG!, a sudden change of direction.

Well, I went to the first four with my son, because of our shared interests in comic books, and the last one was my wife’s idea. We went to see it for our anniversary last night.

I went thinking, “This is my anniversary present, because this is a chick flick,” but I enjoyed it. And not just because of the views of that social outcast “Celia.” It was just a well-told, real-life story about people. Of course, I guess a lot of things would look like that after the other four movies I saw before it. (Best of the bunch? “Captain America.” But I expected that. The one that most exceeded my expectations? “Thor.”)

Something that struck me at the end, though: During the credits, I got up and looked around, and noticed two things. Most of the audience was female, which I had expected. And most of the audience was white. I found myself wanting to interview the audience, to get their impressions, and ask how it spoke to them and their lives. Did it match their memories? How do they think life has changed since then, and how stay the same?

More than that, I wanted to ask black folks who weren’t there: Why not? I can guess some reasons why not, but I’d probably be off-base. Then again, this audience, while numerous, may not have been representative. This was out at Harbison. Demographics would have been different somewhere else. Probably.

But I didn’t bother anybody with questions. It was our anniversary.

Last anniversary, we went to a bourbon tasting at the Capital City Club. That is to say, we went out to dinner at the club for our anniversary, and before that there was this bourbon tasting that was free to members (I think I’m remembering that right), so I managed to talk my wife into attending. It was fascinating. The speaker was a great-grandon of Jim Beam, and a very colorful and knowledgeable guy.

This year, we decided on a more low-key celebration. And “The Help” served the purpose well. It was particularly meaningful because the central character has the same last name as my wife’s maiden name. OK, that’s just a coincidence, of no interest to you, but we found it interesting… sort of like the family in “Driving Miss Daisy” being named “Werthan.”

A horrorshow comparison, oh, my brothers!

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That Stan Dubinsky veck, being the sort with a large gulliver, has drawn a comparison, oh, my brothers, between the rioters in England and your own Humble Narrator’s loyal droogs.

There may be a slight resemblance to one’s glazzies at first glance, but note that those grahzny bratchnies are not dressed in the heighth of fashion; they do not wear our platties of the night! Consider that before thou dost make up thy rasoodocks.

One thing is true: There aren’t enough millicents to put their rookers on them all, much less put them in the staja where they belong…

OK, I’ll stop now. I’m just sort of randomly grabbing stuff from the Nadsat dictionary.

Says Stan (Dubinsky, not Kubrick):

Those whose attention is on the London riots of 2011 might recall that Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick anticipated all this 50 and 40 years ago, respectively.  Time to dig out your copy of A Clockwork Orange, and read or watch it again.

It’s available for streaming on Netflix, by the way. But the book’s better.

What McCain had to say about the “hobbits” who are precipitating this crisis

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You may have heard about John McCain’s speech excoriating the likes of the South Carolina delegation, and the Tea Party in general. Here’s the full text. Here’s an excerpt:

I will take a backseat to none in my support of the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I have voted for it 13 times. I will vote for it tomorrow. What is amazing about this is, some Members are believing we can pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in this body with its present representation, and that is foolish. That is worse than foolish. That is deceiving many of our constituents by telling them that just because the majority leader tabled the balanced budget amendment legislation that, through amending and debate, we could somehow convince the majority on the other side of the aisle to go along with a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That is not fair. That is not fair to the American people to hold out and say we will not agree to raising the debt limit until we pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It is unfair. It is bizarro. Maybe some people who have only been in this body for 6 or 7 months or so believe that. Others know better. Others know better.

I especially like the way he ended it:

It is time we listened to the markets. It is time we listened to our constituents. Most of all, it is time we listened to the American people and sit down and seriously negotiate something before we face a situation where we are depriving the American people of the fundamental right of having a government that doesn’t deprive them of the essential services, goods, and entitlements which they have earned.

Oh, and in case you wondered where the “hobbits” part come in. That was from when McCain was quoting from this piece in the WSJ. An excerpt from that:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

You can still find good stuff in the NYT

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After a bunch of y’all piled on with me as I criticized The New York Times for that Haley piece, I felt a little bad for the Gray Lady. Especially since I know they do have good writing in the paper still. Or at least in the magazine. I enjoyed this passage from a piece by Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard:

Gingrich’s inattention to detail is one reason his speakership was so chaotic, as readers of a certain age will recall, and the primary reason he was shunned by his own party after four years with the gavel. “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,” released months before his defenestration, is a more conventional memoir than anything else Gingrich has written, and it was supposed to serve as a mea culpa for his mistakes as Speaker, as well as a bid to regain the loyalty of members who had grown tired of his boyish exuberance. It didn’t work.

Admitting mistakes comes easily to no public man — as memoirs from figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld demonstrate — but in “Lessons Learned,” Gingrich gave it the old West Georgia College try. This didn’t work, either. There’s lots of mea in “Lessons Learned,” but the culpa is all on the other side.

Early in the book, he offers an account of the drafting of the Interstate Transportation Bill of 1997. Most readers, he admits, might think such a story uninteresting. “But in this case most readers would be wrong.” In fact, in this case most readers would be right. The point of the story, though, is that Gingrich handled the transportation bill pretty damn well. Indeed, he handled nearly all his duties pretty well — except for when he worked too hard or cared too deeply or thought too much or trusted too many of the wrong people.

I only shared that for the play on mea and culpa. Good stroke, that.

I also appreciated the next paragraph:

Democrats, for instance. One lesson Gingrich claimed to learn the hard way was, as a chapter title has it, “Don’t Underestimate the Liberals.” As speaker, Gingrich discovered that Republicans are too good for their own — um, good. “The difference between the well-thought-out, unending and no-holds-barred hostility of the left,” he wrote, “and the acquiescent, friendship-seeking nature of many of my Republican colleagues never ceases to amaze me.” Democrats flatter themselves with the mirror image of this fantasy, of course, pretending to be envious of the robotic efficiency of Republicans and the freedom of action allowed them by their utter lack of conscience or shame. Self-awareness is not listed in the catalog of traits required for faithful partisanship. About the true nature of their enemies, however, if about nothing else, professional Republicans and Democrats are both exactly right.

I like it when partisans are described just as they are.

“South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile… ” well, I can’t argue with THAT part

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Before we leave this subject entirely…

The governor’s memoir is one thing. We don’t expect much from it, and we probably won’t be disappointed. But there was a time when I expected something from the nation’s leading newspapers. I still do, from some. But it looks like The New York Times has fallen down on the job. Big-time.

I thought that maybe, after all the hagiographic, fawning coverage the national media had given our governor during the election campaign last year (“She’s a woman! An Indian-American woman! In the South! And she’s a reformer — she said so!”), that maybe the NYT was starting to get it when they subtitled a piece awhile back, with this bitter truism: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

But over the weekend, the Times came out with a piece that was worse, shallower, more sycophantic, than anything we saw last year. The lede:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.

It gets worse from there. Get this:

She has built a governorship on aggressive budget cutting, a relentless pursuit of job growth and a cheerleader’s enthusiasm for a state that often finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health.

“We are now what every state is going to want to look like,” Ms. Haley said in an interview in her office almost six months into her administration.

I don’t even know what it means. Does it mean that she cheers for the fact that her state “finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health,” and that she thinks other states envy us because of that? The first part may be accurate, but could even Nikki Haley think the second part?

Check this:

She has repeatedly said she is not interested in being a vice-presidential running mate on the 2012 Republican ticket, but her name is already etched into the list of future party leaders.

And etched in our hearts, as well. And this:

Back home, legislators say her administration is a refreshing change from the tumultuous days of her predecessor, Mark Sanford, whose uncooperative relations with elected officials is legend around the Statehouse. She has also received good marks for fighting to lowerMedicaid costs and for many of her cabinet appointments.

No really, it actually says that. Whom did they talk to? Which legislators said she was a “refreshing change,” or any kind of a change?

Who wrote this? Rob Godfrey?

It ends with this standard from her stump speech:

“You can feel the energy. You can feel the buzz,” she said. “It’s because people are incredibly excited about their government and elected officials are incredibly scared and it’s a beautiful thing.”

And that’s really the way she thinks. So that part was right. It didn’t tell us anything new, but it was accurate.

Can’t Is Not a Contraction (and other options)

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Some of y’all, being a hard-to-please bunch, were apparently less than impressed by the planned title of our governor’s long awaited memoir, “Can’t is Not An Option.” As Tim said:

“Can’t is Not An Option”. I guess her editor and publisher don’t not believe in double negatives. Essentially the title means “Can is an Option.” More Sarah Palindromisms, inventing the language as you speak…

OK, so let’s see if we can do better. Here are some, for want of a better word, options:

  • Failure Is Not An Option — The original, as spoken by Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in “Apollo 13,” works a lot better. More compelling. Better use of the English language. Of course, it doesn’t work for Nikki Haley. In fact, it’s about as wildly inappropriate as you can get. The phrase epitomizes the can-do spirit of a man leading a bunch of government employees determined to work together to accomplish something remarkable. No way Nikki would want any part of that. In Kranz’ place, she would have insisted that NASA was the problem, not the solution, and would be going on about how the space agency needed to be run like a business as the spacecraft ran out of oxygen.
  • Can’t Is Not a Doctrine — I like it, but I think she would disagree.
  • Can’t Do Cooperation
  • Can’t is Not a Contraction
  • Can I Have a Conniption?
  • Canned Heat, Fried Hockey Boogie
  • Can It, Knothead Unction

OK, so I’m running out of actual ideas here, although I don’t see that necessarily as a disqualification.

What do y’all have?

I’m just trying to pass the time here. It’s SO hard waiting until January, when the book comes out.

Can’t is not an option — except, of course, when you just can’t…

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I’m going to be on Pub Politics tonight (my sixth time!), and one of several topics the guys want to talk about is Nikki Haley’s book deal — which is a bit of trivia I had missed (I knew she was writing a memoir, but nothing about a “deal”), so I had to go look it up:

NEW YORK (AP) — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has a book deal.

Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group (USA), announced Wednesday that Haley’s “Can’t is Not an Option” will come out in January.

Haley, a Republican and tea party favorite, was elected last year. At 39, she is the country’s youngest governor and only the second Indian-American governor.

In an interview in March with The Associated Press, Haley said writing had been “therapeutic” and that she would cover everything from growing up in rural South Carolina to her contentious 2010 campaign, when she faced — and denied — allegations of infidelity…

I wonder whether anyone at her publisher’s will pick up, between now and the pub date, on just how unsuccessful Gov. Haley has been in achieving her goals, aside from the goal of getting elected. And when they do, will they push for a title change?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trailer

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Just thought I’d share this, so that if there’s anyone among you who is as big a George Smiley fan as I, you, too, can start being frustrated waiting for this movie to come out in November. (Why does it take so long? If they’ve got it edited enough to put out a trailer…)

I was putting off posting this, after Mike Fitts brought it to my attention, until I could write a longer post I’ve been meaning to write ever since January, about my own successful Quest for Smiley (yes, Circus fans, that is an allusion to the Quest for Karla). But until I do that, here’s a picture of me standing in front of George’s actual house in London. Sort of a blog trailer, if you will. I think the picture captures a Le Carre kind of feel, doesn’t it? It was taken at dusk in winter, which is appropriate. Very Cold War.

Remember I said, in a post sent from the airport in Detroit, that I was going to look for signs of Smiley in London? Well, I did. More about that later…

Coming soon: The Alvin Green graphic novel

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OK, now I’m feeling bad about an idea I let slide awhile back.

Corey Hutchins of the Free Times brings this to my attention:

Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.

Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.

“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”

Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.

In order to secure funding for the project, they’re using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to attract backers. As of this writing, the team is halfway towards reaching their goal of $1,000.

That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.

You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.

I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…

The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…

Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)

It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”

But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.

But it would have been good.

Talk about being Ms. Bossypants…

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One of the women in my household took it back to the library, so I didn’t get far enough in Tina Fey’s Bossypants to find out what happened after she hit puberty, but that’s cool. The part I did read was pretty funny.

What is not funny is the Gov. Bossypants we have over at the State House, who did this today:

Gov. Nikki Haley ordered lawmakers back to Columbia next week after they failed to pass a key piece of her legislative agenda on the legislative session’s last day, sparking dissention among legislative Republicans and howls from Democrats.

Haley wants lawmakers to return at 10 a.m. Tuesday to consider bills creating a Department of Administration, allowing the governor and lieutenant governor to run as a ticket, allow the governor to appoint the secretary of education and a bill merging the Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole into the Department of Corrections.

“Pick any two,” Haley said, asking lawmakers to voluntarily forfeit the $250 daily pay they are due, a total of $42,500 a day….

In other words, Do my will, and don’t get paid for doing it.

What a supreme mix of autocratic egoism and faux populism. The perfect Tea Party mix, steeped so as to make the maximum Palin-style impression.

Of course, she did allow them to pick two out of four, which I suppose Her Bossiness would consider to be magnanimity.

Here’s the problem with that: I would gladly vote for three out of the four (if her Bossiness could deign to condescend to do so, I would, were I a lawmaker, have to ask her to explain the virtues of combining the D of PP&P with Corrections). You know why? Because I am one of South Carolina’s most monotonously persistent advocates of giving the executive branch the ability to effectively administer the executive branch and be accountable for it.

But this kind of presumption of dictating to the legislative branch plays straight into the hands of those lawmakers who want to mischaracterize such proposals as a case of executive overreaching: See? She’s trying to FORCE lawmakers to pass the laws she wants. She should advocate strenuously for her positions, but there is a world of difference between advocating that a coequal branch of government do something, and using the power of one’s own branch to FORCE an issue that is the prerogative of that other branch.

The latter is not cool. Which, to turn full circle, brings us back to Tina Fey — a standing prop of her comedy is that she is not cool, not by a long shot.

But when Gov. Haley does the Bossypants routine, it’s just not as funny.