“Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?” [Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney]
“No, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a Democrat.”
Truth Detector: Drive-By Hysterics Over Cheney Interview.
In fact, I was saying that very thing just the other day . . .
* The cigarette was brushed out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s hand for an exhibition in 2005. Sartre smoked, but not in the commemorative picture years after he died. He was also one of the great sexual athletes of history. So was his lifelong love, Simone de Beauvoir, a switch-hitter whose girl friends captured Sartre’s fancy now and again. One of these resisted his advances and near broke his haunted heart, however. It was not easy being a king of sex, so uneasy lies the head wearing that crown.
— from Jean-Pierre Boule’s review of TETE-A-TETE: The lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley (Chatto and Windus) in TLS 3/17/06
* We hear complaints about senseless acts of violence, but never praise for sensible ones. Is this wise?
* At Bread Kitchen during Xmas week, “Tum te tum tum” (Drummer Boy) overhead for the thousandth time this season is bad enough. But what of the woman at the next table picking up on it and humming along lightly?
* Comedian Shelley Berman had a shtick where he spoke of dropping ashes in his lap while driving. Parked at a light on a busy street, he brushed furiously at his lap, looked up and there was an elderly female bus passenger looking at him censoriously. Likewise, I looked down while on a Bread K stool and saw that my belt was undone and my fly was unzipped. Oh boy.
* Old joke, but in view of recent highly publicized developments, is it time to revive “Crook County” as replacement name? No? Whatever.
* U.S. southern novelist Walker Percy was a medical doctor.
* Longfellow is the most put to music of English-language poets.
(Items from Times [of London] Literary Supplement, hereafter TLS)
* The idiosyncrasy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry may be explained by the “constraint” of Jesuit life. Toeing the line in all else, he broke out in his verse. (You could say he sprang out with his rhythm.) Indeed, the tension he experienced — conflict between vocation and creativity — may have been productive. (Simon Humphries, “A Eunuch for God,” TLS 12/22&29/06)
* In Honor: a History (Encounter), James Bowman (no relation) displays “a propensity to be judgemental and didactic.” (Ditto Harvey C. Mansfield in Manliness [Yale].) Thus reviewer George Feaver, retired poly sci prof at U. of British Columbia and this year at UT-Austin, who was left with “nagging suspicions” about Bowman’s judgment of U.S. military decisions, having read to the end of his “dense, discursive account of the alleged ‘decline and fall’ of Western honour.”
In this and other matters, Bowman offers a “gloomy reading” of history, “overly selective” in Feaver’s view, as in its ignoring the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s and “real-life heroes” such as Martin Luther King and the New York firefighters on 9/11. Feaver closes with commendation of both books, “despite their shortcomings [for reminding us] of the importance of remembering the past, and standing up for beliefs central to the achievement of our civilization.” (“Limp Responses,” TLS 12/22&29/06)
* Reviewing Patrick Wyse Jackson’s The Chronologer’s Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge), John North says J. has “useful things to say,” albeit with “a weakness for discursive irrelevance.”
Whether J. displayed this weakness or not, I do not know, nor do I know if other reviewers’ comments are well-aimed, but I do find that phrase helpful. May writing teachers and editors everywhere hold discursive irrelevance to be a weakness not a strength. (TLS 1/12/07)
Blithe Spirit 