Steve Hely's Blog, page 101
October 26, 2017
Did not know
That one Jody Miller, no relation to Roger Miller, did a response to his song “King Of The Road” entitled “Queen Of The House.”
October 25, 2017
Carey
INTERVIEWER
How did you manage the historical setting?
CAREY
Well, I’m a bloody colonial, aren’t I? London is not my place and Britain is not my country. How was I going to have the authority to invent London in 1837? First I had to know something that’s different from what anybody ever thought about the period. I couldn’t steal from literature even if I wanted to—for the most part metropolitan literature takes the place for granted. So I spent a lot of time reading about people visiting London from abroad. They’re going to see things that would not occur to the Englishman. There was a German visitor to London, for instance, who spends all this time describing this weird English breakfast that turns out to be toast. That was terrific—the familiar defamiliarized. I was trying to imagine—what was it really like? We generally think of London in that period as gloomy and sooty and filthy, but in the New York Public Library I found an account by an American visitor who described London as ablaze with light. That’s not how anyone thinks of that period, but if you came from Australia or America at that time it was bright. I thought, that’s it—this story will start at night, and it will be blazing bright. That’s the first way in which I can colonize London for myself, take imaginative possession of the territory.
from the Paris Review interview with Peter Carey
October 24, 2017
On My Mind!
is underway up in Cambria.
What the hell are we doing in Niger?
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This is where four US soldiers died. Why?
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What the hell were our boys doing waiting for the damn Frogs?! The damn French Air Force has to bail out our boys? When we have the best goddamn Air Force in the world? We better anyway, we’re paying for it to the tune of $132 billion a year.
For that matter, what are the French doing in Niger? They haven’t exactly cloaked themselves in honor in the region:
Following the 1885 Berlin conference during which colonial powers outlined the division of Africa into colonial spheres, French military efforts to conquer existing African states were intensified in all French colonies including Niger. This included several military expeditions including the Voulet Chanoine Mission, which became notorious for pillaging, looting, raping and killing many local civilians on its passage. On 8 May 1899, in retaliation for the resistance of queen Sarraounia, captain Voulet and his men murdered all the inhabitants of the village of Birni-N’Konni in what is regarded as one of the worst massacres in French colonial history. French military expeditions met great resistance from several ethnic groups, especially Hausa and Tuareg groups.
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If you’re gonna be in Niger, you want to be near the river.
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Source taken by diasUndKompott.
The rest of it looks rough!
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Dinner in the desert
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Attended a fun dinner.
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Book I gave up on
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Incredible title. But what the hell is this guy talking about?[image error]
Bought it after I read this bit in Girard’s NY Times obituary:
Professor Girard’s central idea was that human motivation is based on desire. People are free, he believed, but seek things in life based on what other people want. Their imitation of those desires, which he termed mimesis, is imitated by others in turn, leading to escalating and often destructive competition.
His first work, published in French in 1961 and in English in 1965 as “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,” introduced this idea through readings of classic novels. Over time, the idea has been used to explain financial bubbles, where things of little intrinsic value are increasingly bid up in the hope of financial gain. It has also been cited to explain why people unsatisfied by high-status jobs pursue them anyway.
And:
Mr. Thiel, of PayPal, said that he was a student at Stanford when he first encountered Professor Girard’s work, and that it later inspired him to quit an unfulfilling law career in New York and go to Silicon Valley.
He gave Facebook its first $100,000 investment, he said, because he saw Professor Girard’s theories being validated in the concept of social media.
“Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic,” he said. “Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.”
Scene in Los Angeles
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A guy at the East Side Food Festival was demonstrating a machine that’s basically a Keurig for marijuana.
How Many
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copies of the Blu-Ray of Baywatch Extended Cut does Paramount expect to sell?
Xi
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From Wiki:
In May 1966, Xi’s secondary education was cut short by the Cultural Revolution, when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticise and fight their teachers.
Never forget how crazy the world is.
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Xi as a boy, left.
The President of China sent his daughter to attend Harvard. That, to me, seems like a good example of American “soft power.”
Xi’s wife is famous singer Peng Liyuan.
Excerpt
and then Bobby added the “S”
(from Vulture’s oral history of SNL’s David S. Pumpkins sketch.)
What?
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Somehow this was up on my phone when I picked it up.
Atlas
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Satisfied with my purchase of a new atlas[image error]
I’m always trying to get new views.
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October 17, 2017
Critics on critics on critics
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This review in the New York Times, by Vivan Gornick of Adam Gopnik’s “At The Strangers’ Gate” caught my attention.
Critics have taken aim on Adam Gopnik before. To which New Yorker editor David Remnick says:
‘The day any of these people write anything even remotely as fine and intelligent as Adam Gopnik will be a cold day in hell.'”
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The key to this memoir might be when the author reveals he graduated high school at age fourteen. He’s a boy genius.
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This is kind of Young Sheldon the book.
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The book has some good stories in it. Adam Gopnik tells about how a guy who came to one of his lectures on Van Gogh. This guy had an axe to grind and it was this: why did Vincent never paint his brother Theo?
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My favorite part of the book was Gopnik’s discussion of Jeff Koons. Gopnik is illuminating on the topic of Jeff Koons. Here is Koons talking to Gopnik at a party.
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(I added the potato because while it may not be strictly legal to electronically reproduce pages of books, if I include them in an original work of art, that’s gotta be allowed, right?)
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October 16, 2017
What is hidden will be exposed
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Source: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images North America
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The news and whatnot got me thinking about how a theme/promise in both the Bible and Quran is that anything hidden will be revealed. Surah 69:18 there above.
Thomas Cleary’s version goes:
On that day you will be exposed;
no secret of yours will be hidden
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Thomas Cleary. Source.
Luke 8:17:
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Luke hits us with this again in 12:2:
The time is coming when everything that is covered up will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all.
Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear!
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October 13, 2017
Blythe Intaglios
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Way out near the border to Arizona are the Blythe Intaglios, California’s answer to the Nazca lines.
You can see them easily on Google Maps.
Intaglio comes from an Italian word: to engrave.
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What was the point of these things?
Some researchers hypothesize that the intaglios are stopping points on a keruk pilgrimage or simply the practice of the keruk ceremony at various places.[13] The keruk was a mourning ceremony that was practiced by various Native Americans in southern California. The keruk included the reenactment of the creator’s death and the recognition of the people who had died since the last keruk. Warfare has been offered a possible explanation as to the spread along the Colorado River of ceremonies such as the keruk and the similar style of desert intaglios.[13]
They were first “discovered” by pilots in the ’30s.
I keep meaning to go out there and have a look but it’s like four hours away.
October 12, 2017
When you lied on your CV
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The source of that photo is Tasmanian sheep farmer Charlie Mackinnon, who said of the dog:
She was an absolute legend, worked all day.
Funny story told in Jay McInerney Paris Review interview:
MCINERNEY
I felt like I had really arrived because—well, it was The New Yorker. But it was the fact-checking department. I wanted to be in the fiction pages, but still. It actually paid pretty well, and I was seeing great writers like John McPhee and John Updike coming to visit William Shawn. J. D. Salinger was still calling on the phone. There was a terrific buzz about the place. But it was also a little depressing. There were all these unwritten rules. Like, for instance, if you were a fact-checker, you didn’t speak to an editor or writer in the hall—it just wasn’t done. Also, it turned out I wasn’t very good at it. And ten months after I got there, I was fired, and left ingloriously with my tail between my legs.
INTERVIEWER
How bad were you?
MCINERNEY
My biggest mistake was to have lied on my résumé and said that I was fluent in French, which I wasn’t. So when the time came to check a Jane Kramer piece on the French elections, it was assigned to me, and I had to call France and talk to a lot of people who didn’t speak English. That was really my downfall. And of course I couldn’t admit to anyone that I had this problem. Jane Kramer discovered factual errors just before publication. Nothing earth shattering, but you would think that I had . . .
October 10, 2017
Bellow
Bracing for Amis too is a late essay of Bellow’s, ‘Wit Irony Fun Games’ – ‘quite possibly the last thing he ever wrote’ – that insists that ‘most novels have been written by ironists, satirists, and comedians’. Amis concludes, ‘The novel is comic because life is comic.’
Readin’ that line in this review of Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump – Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, by Christian Lorentzen over on Literary Review
So I says, let’s get a copy of this late essay of Bellow’s and see what he has to say. I’ve never read much Saul Bellow.
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Sure enough it’s pretty good! Here in “Wit Irony Fun Games” he talks about Lincoln’s humor:
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This, in an essay about FDR, gives backstory I didn’t know to the story of the attempted assassination:
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In this essay, Bellow says his famously controversial comment about “who’s the Tolstoy of the Zulus” was all a misunderstanding:
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He likes Zulus, and Papuans as well:
Papuans probably have a better grasp of their myths than most educated Americans have of their own literature. But without years of study we can’t begin to understand a culture very different from our own. The fair thing,, therefore, is to make allowance for what we outsiders cannot hope to fathom in another society and grant that, as members of the same species, primitive men are as mysterious or as monstrous as any other branch of humankind.
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