What Are You Reading

[LizzieMaine]

I've always thought "Caine" was specifically what kept Wouk out of the spotlight during the dark times -- if all HUAC had to go on was "Aurora Dawn," they'd perhaps have called him in for questioning, given his past associations and the decidedly anti-corporate tone of that book.

The ending of "Marjorie Morningstar" really shows him taking on a traditionalist point of view, one which I think characterized a lot of his later work. But always, no matter what he's writing, I can find some trace of that joyous young gagman living his featherbed dream in prewar Manhattan.

 

[Fading Fast]

I've always thought "Caine" was specifically what kept Wouk out of the spotlight during the dark times -- if all HUAC had to go on was "Aurora Dawn," they'd perhaps have called him in for questioning, given his past associations and the decidedly anti-corporate tone of that book.

The ending of "Marjorie Morningstar" really shows him taking on a traditionalist point of view, one which I think characterized a lot of his later work. But always, no matter what he's writing, I can find some trace of that joyous young gagman living his featherbed dream in prewar Manhattan.

It's been too long since I've reread "The Winds of War," but my now-faded memory recalls a pretty pro-military / patriotic view, but maybe I'm just forgetting more nuanced angles and (of course) the book was written in the '70s not the '50s.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Compass" by Mathias Enard

From Amazon:

Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.

With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources―nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie―and binds them together in a most magical way.​

I posted all that ⇧ because it is why I bought the book, but unfortunately, this book falls into that category of I am not smart enough to get it, so I become bored with it - which is why I just quit after 100 pages.

The overall construct - the reminisces of the author didn't work for me as I found him annoying and I never really felt engaged with his stories - he never really made me feel I was truly at the places he talked about. Also (and this is where my limited knowledge comes in), I did not know half of the writers, artists, academics, etc., that he references nor was he able to engage me with them as a strong writer would even without my being familiar with all those referenced (or maybe it's just a book written for Mid East inside-baseball fans).

I did get a bit engaged in the romantic overlay story - the above-referenced and somewhat enigmatic Sarah - but here, too, you sometimes found yourself just waiting for paragraphs to pass hoping to get reengaged later.

There is no doubt the author has talents as a writer - at times, he pulls you in, but other times, he loses you (or me, anyway) in pointless ramblings and obscure references.

Years ago, I'd have forced myself to finish the book in some vague self-discipline belief that it's "the right thing to do." Now, I give a book about a quarter of its total length and make a fish-or-cut-bate decision. Life's too short and there are way too many other good books waiting to be read.

On to "Once Upon a Town" by Bob Greene and recommended by AmateisGal and 3fingers.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The Thin Man, the next one on the list of read-alouds with Mrs. Shellhammer.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Thin Man, the next one on the list of read-alouds with Mrs. Shellhammer.

I love that you guys do that.

 

[Harp]

Do Defendants Have the Right to Make Bad Decisions?; Verdict, Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia, 12 Feb 2018, Sherry F Colb

Further review of McCoy v Louisiana and Sixth Amendment proctorship.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox," by Bill Nowlin.

Just published, this is the first full-length biography ever written on one of baseball's more enigmatic figures -- the tycoon who for forty-three years was the sole owner of one of the game's marquee franchises, and whose posthumous reputation largely boils down to a single fact: it was under his ownership that the Red Sox became the last of the original 16 major league teams to integrate.

Nowlin addresses the racial issue square on, and reaches a conclusion that's not unfamiliar to those of us who've grown up in Sox Nation: while Yawkey himself did not exhibit overtly racist beliefs or attitudes -- even an outspoken man like Reggie Smith, who was hounded out of Boston by viciously racist fans in the 70s, saw no personal racism in Yawkey -- he stood by while other, virulently racist men in his organization did all they could to block African-American players from progressing in the Sox system. Why he did this is really the big question, and Nowlin doesn't so much directly answer it as he offers a picture of a man who doesn't ever seem to have been all that aware that there even was a question in the first place.

Yawkey, the heir to a vast lumber and mining fortune, was raised as the classic "poor little rich boy," and grew up to become the prototypical callow young playboy of the 1920s. When he inherited his full fortune at the age of 30, he bought a baseball team as a hobby, the way someone else might gravitate to coins or stamps, and he ran the team for the rest of his life as a plaything. He stocked the roster and the front office with cronies -- people he could drink with -- and never really worried all that much about whether or not they were any good at their jobs. Sometimes he got lucky, but more often he got stiffed. The impression Nowlin creates is one of events swirling around Yawkey without him really doing much one way or another to influence them -- over and over again you get a sense of the man as utterly passive. He could never have been a bold innovator like Branch Rickey, a devious manipulator like Walter F. O'Malley, or even a flinty cutthroat businessman like Charles Comiskey -- he just doesn't seem to have ever had the kind of initiative that shapes events.

Even though he could have, with a single phone call, put an end to all the racial poison in the Boston organization, it would never have occured to him to do so, because he simply didn't think along those lines. He seems to have had no political awareness at all, either in terms of electoral politics or cultural politics, and he doesn't seem to have understood that personal action -- or inaction -- can have significant consequences in the larger world. He was just a rich, rather simple-minded guy who loved baseball, and it seems that's all he ever had any real ambition to be. It's hard to hate the guy on a personal level after getting to know him thru this book, but it's also hard to look back on the possibility of Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, and Ted Williams on the same team and realize why it never happened.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ For some people, it's just good their parents were born before they were.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One thing that really does leap out, though, is that in that way that Northern old money often has, Yawkey was absolutely and utterly without any sense of pretentiousness. A number of former Red Sox players of the sixties and seventies tell very similar stories of seeing a pudgy old man in a threadbare cotton windbreaker, an old sweatshirt, and shapeless baggy pants puttering around the clubhouse, and giving him a few bucks to go get them a sandwich or a clean shirt -- only to be advised from a team veteran that the pudgy old man is actually Thomas A. Yawkey, President. Yawkey would always go get the sandwich or the shirt, too, and would chuckle about it with the player when the reality of the situation was revealed. I don't think you'd ever see John Henry in a situation like that.

 

[Trenchfriend]

John Katzenbach - "In the heat of the summer/Der Reporter" (1982)

Bought the book yesterday at the railstation, started to read in the railcar and today, I'm already on page 78. Very fine to read. Nice short chapters!

EDIT:
I'm on page 95.

 

[Stanley Doble]

A book by Somerset Maugham published in 1940 giving his impressions of the outbreak of WW2 from his experiences in Italy, France, and England. Some very interesting insights by someone of no particular political or military bent. I'm sorry I don't remember the title and am surprised I can't find any mention of it online. If anyone is interested I can get the title, the book came from the local library.

Later.... the book is called Strictly Personal

 

[Harp]

A book by Somerset Maugham published in 1940 giving his impressions of the outbreak of WW2 from his experiences in Italy, France, and England. Some very interesting insights by someone of no particular political or military bent...

Up At The Villa comes immediately to mind but said is a triangular scenario of little consequence to Mars.
Maugham's The Hour Before the Dawn is set around then. Read his splendid The Moon and Sixpence paean to Gauguin if you haven't already. Love that book.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I checked at the library and the Maugham book is Strictly Personal.

 

[Just Jim]

I've been taking a crash course in jacket/coat theory and design, by reading the back posts in the Outerwear forum. I'm half done. . . and totally confused.

 

[Harp]

I checked at the library and the Maugham book is Strictly Personal.

Strictly Personal definitely seems interesting. I'll scrounge around Amazon. Maugham acquaintance during Army, college-made quite
an impression as author and individual; though my favorite, The Razor's Edge seemed somewhat akimbo as pertain mysticism
and oriental focus. His biographical Summing Up I'd like to delve into to get a better take on his mindset.
As remarked earlier, The Moon and Sixpence is a sharp focus on Paul Gauguin and an excellent psychological portrait of an artist's mid-life crisis.

__________________
District of Columbia Grand Jury INDICTMENT

Cards are now being put down. A thirty-seven page indictment that should make for an interesting train read tonite.

 

[AmateisGal]

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier. Here's the description:

By chance, John and Jean--one English, the other French--meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles - as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing.

 

[Harp]

__________________
District of Columbia Grand Jury INDICTMENT

Cards are now being put down. A thirty-seven page indictment that should make for an interesting train read tonite.

Said indictment forecloses collusion, and process crime focus is consonant with Flynn plea.
As pertain incumbent obstruction of FBI, falls within Article II scope privilege; however, stage set for possible constitutional
confrontation as Clinton vs Jones not control and Special Counsel likely to refer impeachment.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Just finished "Funny Men Don't Laugh," a brisk and entertaining memoir of the comedy-writing business by Arnold M. Auerbach.

Auerbach is more or less forgotten now -- no, he never coached the Celtics -- but in his day he was one of the top comedy writers in radio, on Broadway, and in early television, and this book is a largely a reflection on two towering figures who shaped his sense of humor, his worldview, and, in many ways, the rest of his life. One was Fred Allen, with whom he worked for five memorable years in partnership with his Columbia University sidekick Herman Wouk, and the other was one of the most unforgettable characters ever to write a gag, the legendary David Freedman.

Freedman was perhaps the first man to bring comedy into the Industrial Age -- what Henry Ford was to automobiles, Dave Freedman was to gags. A brilliant, well-educated man with a genius for advanced mathematics and a Phi Beta Kappa key in his pocket, Freedman took the vaudeville world by storm in the 1920s with his enormous, carefully-curated card file of jokes on every possible topic, culled from every possible source. Each joke was rated mathematically for its laugh potential according to a system of Freedman's own invention, and using strings of these gags tied to a central theme, he could produce a script guaranteed to get results. Comedians lined up to use his services, and by the time radio came along, he was sitting pretty, most notably as the man behind the stage, screen, and broadcast success of Eddie Cantor. It was during this period that Auerbach, fresh out of college and fancying himself a wit, got a job as one of Freedman's joke clerks -- his job being to comb the files for jokes to fit the needs of clients, and to dig thru stacks of old humor magazines, back newspaper files, and the minds of old, broken-down comedians for new material -- which would be transcribed, pasted on cards, rated for laugh potential, and filed.

If it sounds obscenely mechanical, it was. But Freedman had the instinctive knack for knowing how to use this huge comic slag heap to build and routine successions of gags in such a way that laughs could be used to generate more laughs -- he considered audiences a musical instrument that required a properly composed score if they were to be played at an expert level. Auerbach found himself in awe of Freedman's understanding, not just of jokes as jokes, but of why jokes were funny, and how they could be adjusted to fit any given situation without losing the core of their humor.

Auerbach was also in awe of Freedman as an individual -- a genius-level intellect that nonetheless was epically vulgar and profane, especially toward the very comedians whose material he wrote. Auerbach uses pseudonyms thruout the section dealing with Freedman -- Freedman himself is "Lou Jacobs," and Cantor, with whom Freedman had a toxic love-hate relationship that ended in court, is "Jerry Wilson," portrayed here as a petty, self-righteous, egotistical credit-hogging jackass. Freedman seldom referred to most of his clients by their actual names -- around the office, he'd spit out a string of bitter nicknames for each one, and part of the fun of the book is figuring out who's who. "The Incompetent Paranoid" is a rather cruel characterization of Ed Wynn, "The Twitchy-Faced Dachshund" could be no one other than Jimmy Durante, "The Chinless Cretin" is almost certainly Joe Cook, "The Obnoxious Loudmouth" is without question Milton Berle, "The Chicken-Headed Rodent might be Ken Murray, and the "Loathsome Dwarf" is most likely Bert Lahr. You get the idea.

After leaving Freedman, Auerbach and Wouk joined Fred Allen, and here the tone of the book shifts dramatically. There are no more pseudonyms -- Allen is Allen, a man of onion-like complexity, made of alternating layers of kindness and crustiness, who sits at a card table wearing a celluloid eyeshade and sleeve garters, moving a cud of chewing tobacco back and forth in his mouth -- and occasionally scoring a dinger in a nearby wastebasket -- while scrawling out his scripts on tablet paper with a stubby pencil. The relationship becomes something of a father-and-sons situation, with Auerbach and Wouk taking delight and pride in any line of theirs that makes it into the final broadcast. Many of the stories of Allen's legendary generosity to panhandlers and down-on-their-luck vaudevillians originate with Auerbach in this book, but he also acknowledges Allen's whiplash temper -- which usually erupted in the direction of any hapless network or ad agency flunky who had the ill fortune to cross him. Rather endearingly, Auerbach also seems to have something of a schoolboy crush on Allen's wife and comedy partner, Portland Hoffa, a seemingly carefree woman who would knit serenely on the stage during broadcasts while awaiting her cue.

Auerbach and Wouk broke up their partnership in 1941, and Auerbach's later work was impressive -- two successful Broadway revues, a stint writing for Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko, and columns and articles in all the better magazines into the 1960s. He senses the coming of the nostalgia boom that would create the "old time radio" movement a few years after he wrote the book, but in a way he regrets it -- because, he argues, no latter-day revival can ever equal the memories of the pleasure he had in the work he did. This is perhaps a niche book -- but if you like radio, or comedy, or fascinating character studies of unforgettable people, it's worth a read.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ I'm a touch confused, did Friedman get all his jokes from material already "out there?" Did he write any himself? If he got them from others - did he ever have to pay for the material? Or did everyone just steal everyone's work back then and that was how it was done? Today, I assume, one can't just steal other comedian's monologues - or can they?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It depends on how you define "original." Freedman was one of the best "joke switchers" who ever lived, someone who could take the basic skeleton of a joke told by Aristophanes or Joe Miller or a minstrel end-man, extract the core of the humor, and by simply updating the references, turn it into something Eddie Cantor could use to bring down the house. Freedman understood a basic truth -- there are no entirely "new" jokes, but merely twists on the same standard themes. He might have been the finest comedy *editor* who ever lived. In fact, he's the source of the breakdown of the classic "seven basic joke themes" that's still widely acknowledged today:

1. Puns
2. Insults
3. Sex
4. Domestic/marriage
5. The worm turning
6. Incongruity
7. The topical reference

It wasn't so much the jokes themselves that made a comedian's material distinctive, it was how they were routined that made the difference. Freedman understood that every comic's specific stage personality required a particular type of routining: a string of jokes that worked for Cantor might not work for Ed Wynn, even though the jokes themselves were the same. It was altering and adjusting gags to fit the client that was Freedman's greatest skill.

That said, there was a certain ruthlessness in the way he went about collecting raw material. The New York American used to run a joke page in its Sunday edition, and one of Auerbach's assignments under Freedman was to go to the NYPL and hit the bound volumes of all Sunday Americans back to 1920 to transcribe as much of this joke material as possible for the files. While doing this he ran into one of his old professors from Columbia, and tried to put him off by telling him he was doing "important research," but the prof sneaked a peek at his notebook, saw a whole page of wheezy he-and-she gags, and the game was up.

Fred Allen was one of the very few comedians Freedman respected, because he knew that Allen could switch jokes even better than he could, and in doing so give them a very distinctive linguistic style that was beyond his own capability. Allen seems to have returned the respect, and even agreed to testify as an expert witness on comedy during Freedman's breach-of-contract battle with Cantor, but Freedman died of a massive heart attack before the case came to trial.