Killer Kowalski has gone the way of all rasslin’ flesh, at age 81.
Look at the tail on Haley’s Comet!
This is a family blog, so I’m not going to quote my favorite passage from this NYPost review of Boys Will be Boys, Jeff Pearlman’s history of the Dallas Cowboys of the early ’90s. But you really need to read it, regardless of whether you like football. Trust me; you’ll laugh in shock when you get to That Paragraph.
The Deadliest Pick
I don’t venture into politics too often on this blog, but here’s my prediction for the Sarah Palin effect: it backfires on McCain because women will actually want to vote against her the more their husbands point out how hot she is.
Unrequired Reading: Aug. 29, 2008
Long weekend, dear American readers! Better fill it up with lots of oddball links! Just click more!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Aug. 29, 2008”
Dog days
Next month will be pretty hectic and I have a ton of vacation time piled up. So, since we’re not going anywhere for Labor Day weekend, and my Friday office hours are only 8am-1pm, I decided to take today off from work.
It’s been a pretty lazy day, except for going out to buy a new dishwasher and reading a dense section of Montaigne. Now (3pm) I’m just about ready for a new adventure, so I’m going to pack Rufus in the car, head out to one of the Ramapo Lake trails to see how the boy likes walking in the woods!
* * *
UPDATE: And we’re back! I took Rufus on the Macevoy trail, a half-mile stretch leading from a parking area off Skyline Drive up to the Ramapo Lake. I took my family — my brother, sister-in-law, their kids, Dad and his girlfriend — up there on July 4 last year. We had to take our time; in fact, Dad barely made it, but I was proud of him for surviving the trek.
Rufus, on the other hand, tried to make a sprint out of it, as is his wont. There’s no talking him out of that sorta thing. He made some friends on the way up, as is also his wont. A couple was walking down the trail, and the guy took Rufus’ friendliness as an opportunity to explain to his girlfriend why they need to get a big dog, not a little one like she wants. Ru did his best to sway her by leaning heavily against her. Unfortunately, I think he swayed her body more than her opinion, but she continued to coo over our boy.
I brought along two bottles of water, as well as one of his bowls, since he refuses to drink from the bottle/bowl I was considerate enough to buy for him. It’s not too hot today — around 78 — but he tends to hurry, and to stop and sniff at everydarnthing around, so by the time we reached the lake, he was panting a bit. At that point, a woman walked by with a beagle-ish dog, but she said it was pretty hyper and angry since getting into a doggie-altercation last month, and she was afraid he’d get Rufus upset. My boy was too tired to even disagree.
I got him to stand still long enough for some pix, and even got him to drink some water (after dropping half a dog-treat in the bowl), but I could see that he wasn’t happy to be out in the sun at that point. The trek back was a little more hazardous than the way in, because so much of it was downhill on rocks, but Rufus was a trooper. He tends to stay in front of me when we walk, but he paused in front of less certain paths, and waited for me to go by and show him where to step.
On the way we got back to the car, we encountered a family of incredible nordicity. I thought they’d escaped from the nearby Ikea, but it turned out that they were visiting family in the area. The parents and their 3 small kids all fawned over our boy, who wasn’t so exhausted as to reject the attention.
Back in the car, he was a panting wreck. But it’s only a 7- or 8-minute drive home, and he’s now sacked out comfortably on his bed, having drunk half a bowl of water. I walked in to see the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the bottom of the ninth. For what that’s worth.
So that’s my day off: some reading, some napping, some appliance shopping, some Yankees, and Rufus on a hiking trail. (UPDATE: and a cigar out on the deck, as I watch the sun go down.)
Click through the pic for the rest of the photoset!
“Oh, look at me! I’m doing my little French-maid-ears trick!”
Sunshine
What’s in the Arts+ section of The Official Newspaper of Gil Roth today?
- a review of two biographies of Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch forger of paintings,
- a review of Richard Todd’s essays on authenticity (nice complement/contrast to the forgery review),
- a review of a biography of Jacob Riis, the man who chronicled the horrors of tenement life in late 19th century Manhattan,
- a review of a book on the New Urban Renewal and today’s gentrification,
- Otto Penzler’s review of Anton Chekhov’s crime fiction.
Sometimes I think their editors say to each other, “Remember that thing Gil was muttering to himself about in 1997, when he thought no one was listening? We should assign an article on that topic!”
Don’t hide my rawhide!
For more than five months, Rufus has been a pretty awesome dog. Sure, he has little eccentricities, but they’re nothing compared to mine, even if I don’t treat my stuffed animals as badly as he treats his.
Anyway, last night, we gave him a new rawhide. Over the next hour, he proceeded to devour it on his livingroom bed. I noticed that he’d gnawed it down to one knot, so I tried to get it away from him. He barked at me, for the first time.
Desperate times required the desperate measure of shaking a bag of doggie-treats in another room. He spit out the rawhide and ran out to get his treat. I used it to get him downstairs and outside for his evening pee break, while Amy hid the rest of the rawhide in the kitchen.
Once we got back upstairs, Rufus was like a junkie missing his fix. He started turning things over in the living room, trying to find his rawhide. Originally, Amy hid it under some blankets on the ottoman near his bed. He buried his nose under the blankets, shoving and snuffing. He stormed up and down the hall, pawed at his bed, and otherwise evinced a panic I’d never seen in him before.
I got him another treat, and he settled down, heartbroken.
An hour or so later, we got ready for bed, and he proceeded to do something he hadn’t tried (with me around) since he joined our home in March:
That’s right: he ran into the bedroom, strode right up on our bed, stretched out, and refused to leave, snarling at me when I grabbed his collar to get him off. What else could I do? I got my camera, let him pout a minute while I took some pix, and then said, “OFF!” while giving him a good yank of the collar. He curled up on his bed, point made.
Kids. I tellya.
Life’s work
Earlier this year, I had variations of the following e-mail exchange with several NYC literary figures I know:
GIL: Just wondering: do you know Robert Caro?
AUTHOR/WRITER: By acquaintance. Why?
GIL: Would you say he’s in good health?
A/W: Not sure. What’s up? Have you heard something?
GIL: No. It’s just that, well, I loved his biography of Robert Moses, so I grabbed the first three volumes of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. But I know he’s getting up there in years and I’m afraid to start reading it until I know that he’s going to be around to finish the fourth volume.
A/W: . . . You’re a cold person.
GIL: Yeah, but do you think he’s going to finish the biography?
A/W: . . . Good question.
Caro’s own site doesn’t give info about how he’s doing and I’ve been afraid to contact his agent with such a crass question, so I’ve held off on starting the series. The first three books add up to around 2,250 pages, and winds up in 1960, as he becomes vice president under JFK. I confess that I didn’t understand Caro’s desire to devote the half his life (figuring that he started around 1976 or so) to this biography; I don’t know enough about LBJ’s presidency or his character. He’s sort of a void for me, falling between the mythologies of JFK and Nixon.
But, given Caro’s enormous achievement with The Power Broker
Still, I’d seen Caro in Ric Burns’ New York documentary
So I was happy to read that there was a Caro-related party this summer as part of the Authors’ Night benefit for the East Hampton Library (and you scoff at my devotion to Page Six!). I found out about it too late to break out my seersucker suit and crash the event, but I took it as a good sign that Caro was part of the social scene.
Yesterday, I got even more of a boost when I followed an Andrew Sullivan link to a George Packer piece in The New Yorker, where he discusses the importance of LBJ:
Whenever Democrats gather to celebrate the party, they invoke the names of their luminaries past. The list used to begin with Jefferson and Jackson. More recently, it’s been shortened to F.D.R., Truman, and J.F.K. The one Democrat with a legitimate claim to greatness who can’t be named is Lyndon Johnson. The other day I asked Robert Caro, Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and hardly a hagiographer of the man, whether he thought Johnson should be mentioned in Denver. “It would be only just to Johnson,†Caro said. “If the Democratic Party was going to honestly acknowledge how it came to the point in its history that it was about to nominate a black American for President, no speech would not mention Lyndon Johnson.†Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper—and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.â€
Looks like I have a new reading project set once this Montaigne project is over!
Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 2
Wow. This Apology for Raymond Sebond continues to flummox me. Last week, I wrote about the nature of the Apology and “covered†pages 387-435 of the Everyman’s translation
So this week’s Monday Morning Montaigne stays in the Apology, and covers the sections that translator Donald Frame calls Man’s knowledge cannot make him happy (435-446) and Man’s knowledge cannot make him good (446-449). I have about 20 pages left in Man has no knowledge (449-508), but it’s a rough slog. The bulk of that section consists of refutations of various schools of philosophy, particularly pre-christian ones, as a way of showing the futility of man’s pursuit of knowledge. With a tease like that, you’re sure to come back for more next Monday!
Man’s knowledge cannot make him happy:
[W]e have as our share inconstancy, irresolution, uncertainty, grief, superstition, worry over things to come, even after our life, ambition, avarice, jealousy, envy, unruly, frantic, and untamable appetites, war, falsehood, disloyalty, detraction, and curiosity. Indeed we have strangely overpaid for this fine reason that we glory in, and this capacity to judge and know, if we have bought it at the price of this infinite number of passions to which we are incessantly a prey.
See, instead of reason, M. contends that humility and obedience to God should be our highest values: “From obeying and yielding spring all other virtues, as from presumption all sin. . . . Do you want a man to be healthy, do you want him disciplined and firmly and securely poised? Wrap him in darkness, indleness, and dullness. We must become like animals in order to become wise, and be blinded in order to be guided.”
M. cavils a bit by letting us know that there’s a place for knowledge and some feeling — “he who would eradicate the knowledge of evil would at the same time extirpate the knowledge of pleasure, and in fine would annihilate man” — but he still contends that philosophy, reason, memory and the like are delusions. The good life, he says, seems to derive from ignorance-become-innocence. I’m just lost.
Man’s knowledge cannot make him good:
Christians have a particular knowledge of the extent to which curiosity is a natural and original evil in man. The urge to increase in wisdom and knowledge was the first downfall of the human race; it was the way by which man hurled himself into eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and his corruption; it is pride that casts man aside from the common ways, that makes him embrace novelties and perfer to be the leader of an erring troop that has strayed into the path of perdition, perfer to be a teacher and tutor of error and falsehood, rather than to be a disciple in the school of truth, led and guided by another’s hand, on the straight and beaten path.
Got that? Curiosity is an evil. I’m finding it awfully difficult to reconcile these passages with the writer who so deftly explored his own character and aspects of man’s nature throughout the preceding essays. Further, wisdom — by which M. means the choice between good and evil — has no relation to God: “What has he to do with reason and intelligence, which we use to arrive at apparent things from things obscure, seeing that there is nothing obscure to God?” And since evil cannot touch God, then wisdom comes only from man, while faith is “a pure present of another’s liberality.”
More bothersome to me than M.’s message is his sheer stridency, an “Onward Christian soldiers” mode of writing. Perhaps he was writing in this style because of the nature of the piece and its publication — a long apologia, as opposed to his typical essays — but I find it utterly off-putting. I’ll struggle through the rest of the Apology, but I’m hoping he manages to regain some of his charm as he moves away from his all-encompassing topic.
What It Is: 8/25/08
What I’m reading: I finished When Genius Failed
What I’m listening to: The Cosmic Game
What I’m watching: Finished up the fourth season of The Wire
What I’m drinking: Plymouth gin. Man, does that have a sweet botanical edge to it.
What Rufus is up to: Meeting neighbors, trying to lead me into their garages. Also, we took him up to Rusty’s Place, our local pet store, on Sunday, so he could pick out a new toy and meet more dog-lovers.
Where I’m going: I have a coworker’s wedding to attend on Saturday, down in Cranford, NJ. More importantly, I’m seeing my accountant today! Since that’ll put me in Hackensack, I may just make a side trip to White Manna for lunch.
What I’m happy about: My niece Liat (age 8) went to her first Springsteen show! And she and my brother made it up near the stage, to the videographers’ pit, where — well, here’s my brother’s description:
Bruce jumped down into the pit, held Liat’s hand and started singing ‘Girls in Their Summer Clothes’ to her. Her face was on the video screen the entire time. Minutes earlier, Clarence gave her a maraca as a gift (she couldn’t take her eyes off him the entire show when he waved to her after the first song). Needless to say, that kid now has a better childhood than either of us. I can die in peace.
What I’m sad about: Summer’s just about over, so my typically hectic September looms (big issue of the mag, plus our annual conference on 9/25-26). Also, only 10 episodes of The Wire left.
What I’m pondering: How lucky I was to be out of the country for both parties’ national conventions in 2004, and how unlucky I am to be stuck here for both of them this time around.