How Reading Jim Harrison Could Save Your Life

Or at least lift it a little in the near-term, yes? Perhaps we ought not ask for the world at the moment ...

I promised my friend Paul on the way back from walking the boys to school that I wouldn't dawdle around worrying about world events or how much laundry there was to do still, that I wouldn't fret over burned out lightbulbs and leaves that need raking, plants that need to get brought in before it freezes tomorrow night, that I wouldn't stare at Bloomberg or diddle away my precious time on my devices and that, rather, I would sit down As Soon As I Got Home and get to work on tailoring what everyone who has read them agrees are inspired revisions to the middle of the novel that I have been working on since the waning days of the Clinton presidency, and get the goddamned thing done, once and for all.

But here I am, feeling the need to say a word about Jim Harrison before I really buckle down and get going, before I have to get to karate at noon ...

Now, one must admit we live in a time where to manage the fear and trembling over what we're as yet still reluctant to accept is an intractable state of affairs, brought on (more than we're still willing to admit, of course) by our trusting the capitalists too much, while at the same time being greedy little pigs ourselves, we have sunk to taking comfort in platitudes, in low-fat foods and promising lotions, in headlines celebrating, for instance, the second win of the season by our local professional football team, its ranks not too long ago decimated in a way no less thoroughly than a five-year-old wielding a Harry Potter wand might have, by a hooded, high-strung, thirty-something-year-old hired in equivocal times—though hardly desperate times; desperate happened after—to replace the man who won two Super Bowls and is now the current coach of the Washington Redskins, by an owner who very soon thereafter had to admit that he'd made a big mistake, the kind for which in the old days, in more noble cultures where a person was expected to do more than say something fatuous like they "took full responsibility" to manage the magnitude of the wrong, and the shame, and the embarrassment, a person might have literally fallen on his sword. Instead, we got a new high-strung, relatively short Christian quarterback who is now, after much ballyhoo, our number one man behind center not to mention our only hope left, and our team—check it out—came out of yesterday's pitched and much-viewed battle with a spectacular three-point overtime win over a team that has so far, unless I'm mistaken, not won a game this season. To add even more significance to the day, Our Man Tim—his name is Tim, lest you're completely shut out of the world we live in now—won this game against the Dolphins, in Miami, which is fairly close to if not on the same field where he played in college. "Tim-tastic!" read today's headlines—not on the sports page, but on the Front Page of the whole fucking paper! Such are the times, even here, where they are still pretty good compared to, say, Florida, especially in Louisville ...

But I digress. The point I was going to make was that, in times like these, I'd expect that roughly 80% of my readers—a good five to ten people at least, distracted with all that they are—are asking themselves about now: "Who the fuck is Jim Harrison?"

Well, I suppose you can hardly be blamed. Although the Seattle Times referred to him as "A force of nature in American letters," who the fuck reads the Seattle Times, right? Moreover, who has time to bother with American Letters, whatever the fuck those are in late September of 2011, when a person can just fiddle with his or her devices, or go for a run, or do some much needed work in the yard before it gets cold?

Nonetheless, I'm telling you that many of you would feel a whole lot better if you picked up one of his books and shoved your devices and stuff to the side and told everyone and everything in your face at the moment to fuck off and just sat someplace quiet and read for a while. That's all I'm saying. That, and that you could do worse than start with Jim Harrison, with, I'd say, the collection of novellas, Legends of the Fall, the worst of the three being the title story, in my opinion, the one they made the relatively shitty movie out of, with Brad Pitt, who has since been in better stuff, notably Moneyball, which you should go see rather than waiting to download it one day on your device, but ... whatever ... if you read "Revenge," or, especially, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and think, What was that? or, I think I'll just stick with my devices, well then, I'll leave you to your fate. Perhaps your well-diversified 401K and a shitload of Apps and skinny lattes on the fly is all you'll need for future happiness—let's hope you're right. But if you're starting to seriously wonder, and you like the novellas previously mentioned above, go down to your favorite bookstore—there still are some out there that aren't listed on the NYSE, or going broke themselves; for instance, in Louisville, there is the estimable Barbara's Book Cellar, which really isn't in a cellar, not anymore, it's right on Main Street in clear view of anyone who isn't looking down, staring at a device while heading down the street—and tell them that you want something by Jim Harrison; tell them you'll take anything they have, even his new one, The Great Leader, which you'll want in a 1st Edition, or the one before that ...

The English Major ... I'm reading it now, and I can tell you, without equivocation, that it has been a helpful tonic to my soul. It wasn't a big hit. It got okay reviews when it came out. He's not your all over NPR and Terri Gross and Charlie Rose kind of guy, though he's not Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski either. More like an aging Henry Miller who likes to fish. Who has a better way with words, and is probably wiser. Reviewers, especially the really esteemed ones who go nuts over stuff that oftentimes, when you read it, feels like someone added just the tiniest touch of drama along with some jacked syntax to a collection of thrown-together Wikipedia facts, that puts you to sleep in a way that your devices or a good book with vampires or zombies or thoughtful dogs, or even something by Shel Silverstein, never would—anyway, those people feel like they have to be careful and not too effusive about Jim Harrison, in the same way that one should be careful with certain thoughts that come to mind and not just blurt out, for instance, how someone's seventeen-year-old daughter is fucking beautiful. All to say, it's best if you're a reviewer, and want to stay esteemed, to be a little circumspect when reviewing a book by Harrison, who, himself, is not circumspect in any way that I've been able to detect, especially when it comes to the driftings of the human mind, and to human appetites generally, even the lingering ones of a sixty-year-old, who, himself, the hero of The English Major, finding that his libido has left certain parts of his anatomy raw and itching, says he has "endured rather than prevailed."

Here are the lines that follow that one: "My senior students had yawned when I tried to teach them the glories of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech. A chunky little cheerleader named Debbie who would later grow into a human bowling ball squeaked, 'I don't get it.'"

See what I mean?

Here's another one (and I'm only to about page fifty): "My AD (alcoholic doctor) friend had said at a poker game that there was a certain kind of monkey that will give up lunch to see photos of female monkey butts. AD tends to say odd things when he's trying to pull a bluff during a poker game in order to throw the rest of us off."

This meditation comes in the context of our hero, who has gone traveling around the United States in his Taurus with 250 thousand miles on it, in the wake of his beloved dog dying, and his less than beloved wife having left him—the first line of the book, the laconic and oddly affecting, "It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't."—and him running into a student from twenty-five years earlier, who is forty-three now, in a terrible marriage, thinks she might be bipolar, and finds that the state of Nebraska brings out a kind of randiness in her that our hero at first finds exciting, yet, by turns, even with a stash of Viagra and Levitra given to him by AD, is growing weary of—he's sixty, after all. The sort of guy his dad had said would end up "high-minded and low-waged" from reading to much Emerson. His girl for the moment, Marybelle, has by contrast only slowed down due to a sunburn she got along a Nebraska river, and is now wearing only one of his T-shirts as they travel onward. "A gas station attendant in Chadron was treated to a sleeping beaver shot when he washed our windshield. He smirked and blushed highlighting his troubled skin."

It isn't so much that his heroes are dirty old men as they are caught off guard by things, by images, like those seen by our gas station attendant, that can't be easily disposed of. That one can no easier avoid thinking about having seen it than, say—as Harrison does, through another character in his new book—a person can stop thinking about having seen a white horse.

Anyway, lest I keep on ... I've got to get to my novel before I have to get to karate (too late!), and then go pick up the kids before I get Ian off to hockey, and then to the karate I missed earlier, and to the homework, and eat and clean up before I get to sleep at a decent hour so I'm not tired in the morning and can write again tomorrow.

You know how it is.

And all I'm saying is, if you get tired of worrying, of thinking if you just go a little faster and stay positive that the economy and jobs and the stock market and even the Greeks and the prospects for print and literary fiction in particular will break out of it's current obdurate range, and that property will take off again and we'll all be rich if we're just patient and pray and are hopeful every day no matter what and don't raise taxes here in this difficult economy at what is surely a very brief if difficult moment brought on by trusting the wrong people and behaving like fools ourselves for many, many years ... when you finally come to terms with the fact that it's been a long, long night of partying and more kegs and whiskey and weed and all the rest at five in the morning isn't going to amount to much for very many, that we're looking at a long hangover and a big mess to clean up and possibly even a few lawsuits here and there before we get that skip back in our step again, think about picking up some Jim Harrison and doing a little correcting yourself. You just might be glad you did.

Bachman's Promise

During a President Bachman Administration, gas will drop to under two dollars again ...

"That will happen," she says.

Talk about cool!

But imagine if I—Bartleby Productions and, uh ... Ministries—could get your gas down even further, say to under $1.85/gallon ...

Before the election!

How cool would that be?

Of course, seeing through such a highly ambitious and delusional plan will require some financing. And I realize many of you are stretched, but ... ten dollars a day, all of it fully tax deductible (unlike campaign contributions), seems like a more than reasonable amount for me to try and hustle from y'all, and given the worthwhile nature of the goal, I'm sure that ...

If you really care about getting back your cheap gas, you'll have me set up the Pay-Pal—or pay me cash; actually, cash is preferred here at BP&M—as soon as possible in order to get on this bit of business right away, and not wait (and in the meantime pay double) until Prez MB and VP Ricky are sworn in.

Our operators are standing by ...

This week's poll: Will Gold hit $2000.00 before the Rapture? Give us your thoughts.

Amy and the Debt, Baby

Obscured by Amy Winehouse's "unexplained" death (the whistle-blower in the Murdock case who died last week, his death was also "unexplained"), by the further death of scores in Norway at the hand of a right-wing nutcase The Onion couldn't have dreamed up, and by, on a positive note, persons of the same sex being allowed at long last to marry in the State of New York, is another eleventh hour stand off in Washington, this time over raising the debt ceiling, something that, contrary to the noise and fuss about its being historic in nature, has been done an average of nearly once a year since the Federal Reserve was created, ostensibly to preserve the value of our currency, near the start of World War I.

Like the bailout of the banks, and the auto industry, and all the "quantitative easing" that has come down the pipe (and will continue to come down the pipe, in various costuming), this deal will get done because people with money and power will insist on it. We will not default on our debt and risk the wrath of bond-holders worldwide. Moreover, we cannot afford even slightly higher interest rates given our indebtedness (as we could the last time we were into this situation, when the Vietnam War and The Great Society got to be too much for the nation's pocketbook, back in 1980 or thereabouts); we will not risk having our debt downgraded by the ratings agencies that did such a fine job, btw, of separating the wheat from the chafe ahead of our last crisis, but never mind.

So, while our debt is a looming disaster waiting to happen, it isn't, blessedly, as looming as Europe's, or Japan's—ours, as the giant bond fund PIMCO says, is the least dirty shirt of the bunch.

We're screwed, but others, friends of ours, are screwed worse! Thankfully!

And from the point of view of any politician paying attention, there's yet a decent chance we'll get our screwing in a way where most of us won't even realize we got it, much less cast blame on who did it, and how brazenly. It'll be as though someone slipped us a mickey in a bar, and then screwed us. We won't remember a thing.

The politicians, correctly, I would say, are assuming the bit by bit screwing of, notably, savers, people on fixed income, hobbled in one way or another, possibly from serving their country in a war that didn't pan out so well in terms of booty, is preferable to draconian austerity, to bankers holding lousy debt having to actually lose money on it, to the stock and bond markets crumbling, to unemployment rates going higher still, to rioting in the streets—and I wouldn't necessarily disagree.

In any case, this is not a problem that is going to be "solved" anytime soon. We've gone way too long (at least thirty years too long) as a country, as a people at a particular time in history, doing things that history is likely to judge pretty harshly, and now, bit by bit, we're reaping the consequences, and it isn't pretty (except here in Louisville; everything is pretty in Louisville; if you want to see how a tiny part of the whole bucks the trend, come to Louisville, and bring your wallet).

Anyway, here's what I think is going to happen: Obama, through his Chief of Staff on "Meet the Press" today, says he'll veto anything that doesn't put this debt-ceiling matter to bed until 2013 (read: after the election, which, given his competition, and absent a game-changing calamity of a pretty extreme kind, he is going to win, hands down—and if you don't agree, let's put a hundred bucks on it), but, the Republicans, powerful in the way of a willful child who knows his parents will spare the rod when push comes to shove, are not going to agree to anything of the sort. They will want to keep as much crisis in the moment, or at least not far in the distance, as possible, since it is their only hope, and a slim one at that, of gaining power in 2012. They are betting that Obama, when they start with their sassing, won't grab them by the ear and haul them off to the woodshed, where, in the days of LBJ, there would be much screaming and gnashing of teeth—and they'll probably be right. And we'll get some short-term, little kick of the can deal. In spite of Obama getting in Cantor's face a few days ago, we'll get stop-gap, or something like it. And the people holding Treasuries, thinking of holding Treasuries, rating Treasuries, will wonder ... and gold will go up ... stuff like that.

To be fair, both parties know that a $4 Trillion dollar "Grand" deal isn't going to solve the problem anyway, not even close. The only people who believe that don't understand the problem, and in that scenario, a grand deal scenario, Obama wins, for shepherding a grand deal, like a good leader should, and that's no good for Republicans, who are more concerned with ideology at this stage of their history than with where their bread is actually buttered (read: not by their "base" but by the wealthy, who are tiring of these shenanigans, who can deal with a little more taxation (they're rich!), entitlements they, personally, don't need, but their customers do, will, and lots of them, soon ... whatever, so long as they know what it is and their financial people can adjust accordingly, they're good).

Obama, in short, despite his ire over the intractable opposition, will give in first. It's what a loving father does. And the child knows it.

To further understand the dynamic—given Ms. Winehouse's passing this weekend, we may as well have a tie in here—imagine the country were our daughter with, say, considerable gifts and talent, but a bad drug and alcohol problem. The Tea-Bagger wing of the Republican Party would strap her to a metal bed in the basement and have one of the better behaved, more pliable children read the Bible to her until she howled and screamed and finally straightened out—just like Ms. Winehouse might have had someone had the courage to do the right thing with her. They would lock up all the booze and drugs in the house (after they were done using them) and if the daughter wouldn't see the light she'd stay in the basement, tied up, and they wouldn't talk to her, and the well-behaved, pliable child would keep reading the Bible to her and the door would stay closed and the music turned up while she did. Clockwork Orange, Baby! Straighten up, or we just might shoot you, or read Leviticus forever.

And I say/we say, No no no!!!

Liberals would argue that the daughter needs a better job, or maybe just a job, any job, to better be able to fund her habits so that she wouldn't always have to be coming to Mommy and Daddy for help. They would try to talk to her, help her, even as she spit in their face.

Those kinds of parents, people, leaders, are always in a weak position, always getting taken advantage of. They often don't live long—at least that's what I've heard. Their consolation is that at least they're trying, and they're not crazy, at least not in a brutal way ... like the people who tie their children to metal beds and beat them like LBJ used to slap around the opposition, but he was a, well, something you don't see anymore, so ...

Stay tuned!

Sheila Bair Bids Adieu

Sheila Bair's last day at the F.D.I.C. was on Friday. There's a fine article/interview written by Joe Nocera in the NY Times Sunday Magazine—which she only agreed to under the stipulation that it wouldn't be published until she had finished her term. Nothing earth-shattering to those who have been paying any attention at all, just another reminder of who has the upper hand, and who, when push comes to shove, the Treasury and Fed are looking out for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs-exit-interview.html

Footnotes on Newt

If you're wondering just how small the world is, consider this, a question I was asked back in late 1994, possibly early 1995, by the woman I was then dating, who had gone to a small private Lutheran college in Iowa:

"Have you ever heard of Newt Gingrich?"

"Why, yes," I said. "He's soon-to-be, or perhaps already is, the Republican Speaker of the House ... "

"He is?"

"Yes. From back-bencher, bomb-thrower, to Speaker of the House. You watch, he'll try to shut the government down to make his point—"

"Anyway, my friend, Callista—"

"Callista?"

Note, reader: this was before Ally McBeal, the popular television show (1997-2002), before anyone, particularly me, had heard of Calista (one "l") Flockhart, who played Ally McBeal in the TV show, before almost anyone had heard of a Callista, or Calista ...

Her friend, named Callista, worked in Washington, as an intern. Apparently she knew Newt Gingrich. As in, biblically.

"As in, she's fucking him—"

All right, those weren't exactly her words. It was more like they were involved, in the way that politicians and interns occasionally get involved, because they feel so passionately about their country, and work so hard, and well, sometimes—

Only, according to the woman I was dating, who talked to her friend, the future Callista Gingrich on the phone, Speaker Gingrich (a purported Futurist, after all) really didn't care much about politics, or, for that matter, his then-current wife. Apparently he only kept her around for appearances sake: fund-raisers, charity balls and the like. No, he found the political world tedious; he was more the intellectual, professorial, big ideas man with gadgets type, who, it so happened, was looking to trade in his old mare for a younger one—a much younger one, someone who didn't mind being involved with someone much older (23 years) and quite a lot heavier, who called himself Newt, whose middle name was Leroy ...

"You've got a friend who's fucking Newt Gingrich?" I reiterated, just to be clear.

"You can't tell anyone!"

"Who would I tell?"

Who says a man never dumps his wife to marry his mistress? That nothing changes in Washington?

Below, and largely unrelated to the titillating, seventeen-year-old gossip above, is a fine article by Andrew Ferguson in the Sunday Times, who, seeking to find out just how intellectual a certain intellectual really is, bravely took on the entirety of the Gingrich oeuvre (21 books, give or take, all written with co-authors) and has a few things to say about it (NB: at one point a comparison is made between Callista Gingrich and Linda McCartney, photographers, both of them ... ).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/what-does-newt-gingrich-know.html

Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

Jennifer Egan's not-so-new-book anymore—I bought it for my wife at Christmas, then in its sixth printing; it has since won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—is about Time, the Goon. Time with a capital T. Time, redounding time, how it presses, and presses.

We meet Sasha, on a date with Alex, who we'll meet again, much later, at a bar in a hotel in downtown NYC not long after the Towers have been downed. She excuses herself—she's grown bored with Alex—and goes to the restroom, where she spots a woman's purse sitting casually unattended between the stalls. Succumbing to old habits—for which she is seeing a therapist, illuminating clips from the sessions seamlessly and hilariously interspersed as the scene plays out—she reaches down and slips off with the wallet inside.

Back in the restaurant, she soon discovers the woman, panicked, has a flight to catch in the morning, and is now without ID, a situation that might not have caused panic prior to 911, but certainly does now. To hell with her credit cards and money, she needs proof of who she is!

Alex, new to town, fresh, principled, not yet confused and disheartened by life and the City and to big tall growing skyscrapers blocking out his light, strikes out to help the woman. The concierge is called, and after a big fuss is made, the wallet is finally found—in the restroom, by Shasha, her nerves tingling, frayed with excitement and dread and, one suspects, the forces of transition. She returns the wallet to the woman, asks her plaintively not to say anything, tells her, candidly, that she's getting help for this problem of hers. The woman agrees to keep quiet—she has her wallet, her ID, a plane to catch in the morning. A subtle transaction has taken place. A real mess has been avoided. Sasha, whom Egan throughout the book skillfully imbues with quirky, goon-defying charms, without making her especially likable, is not one to go down with the ship.

Neither is Benny Salazar, Sasha's boss of twelve years at Sow's Ear Records (the book is full of similarly apt proper nouns). Their relationship, as hinted by the verb tense in the first chapter, has recently ended, but we are in book where time goes here and there (the book was purportedly inspired by the movie "Pulp Fiction," if only in the way the characters intersect through time), and so, in the wildly funny second chapter, we meet Benny many years earlier, a man full of energy and heart, who sprinkles flecks of gold in his coffee, a man with an immigrant's drive, unburdened by self-awareness, whose judgment and mojo appear to be slipping. A former musician of so-so talent (we will get scenes of these days as well, though not through Benny's eyes), he has been riding on his discovery, years earlier, of a band called the Conduits. Yet he continues to see possibilities where others, arguably for good reason, don't: in the "pure" (but possibly used up), even in a group of cloistered nuns (whose Mother Superior he is moved to, disastrously, try and kiss). Benny is one of those guys who can't keep it in his pants, who, pushing on in life, wonders what it might be like to "not always be wanting to fuck someone," and may be on the cusp of finding out.

Time shifts, backward. It is almost 1980. Rhea, one of the girls, the groupies, of the band The Flaming Dildos, narrates: " ... thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on the street corners all over San Francisco ... We're sick of them." We will get echoes of this sentiment later in the book, a new generation sick of an older one, scoffing at their crushed hopes and dreams, and yet ...

Rhea is friends with Jocelyn, who has already made a tragic turn that isn't fully apparent yet with a man named Lou, who has an ex-wife and six kids and knows the famous producer Bill Graham personally. He came by in a convertible one day when Jocelyn was hitchhiking and offered her a ride. Jocelyn, we find out, is the same age as Lou's son, Rolph, who, turns out, rather likes Jocelyn—and Jocelyn, in a way more befitting someone her age, feels a tenderness toward Rolph.

In the "Safari" chapter that follows, possibly the best in the book (a slightly truncated version of which appeared in the New Yorker a little over a year ago), Rolph goes on a trip to Africa with his father and sister, Charlene—Charlie, she went by, back then—and another of Lou's post-marriage girlfriends, Mindy, who is attending graduate school at Berkeley and ends up in the sack with one of the safari guides, prompting Lou to tell his son later on, after the boy unwittingly reveals to him what has happened between Mindy and the guide, that "Women are cunts." It is 1973, or thereabouts, when Lou, then about thirty-six, shares this realization with his young son, a few years, still, before the young Jocelyn falls for Lou, before she is going down on Lou by the pool, where Rolph, from his bedroom, can see.

Years later, when Lou is dying, Rhea manages, through the miracle of Facebook and email and all that, to locate the old band and the gang—all but the "magnetic" slide guitarist Scotty Hausmann, who, once upon a time, had his eyes on Jocelyn, who ultimately settled for the relatively refined Alice, who had her eyes on him, who Benny, at the time, had eyes for—to come say good-bye to Lou before he dies.

There by his pool, home, once, to all those parties, that time has now made quiet, Jocelyn, in the kind of shape one can imagine given time, finds out what happened with Rolph. Hearing it, she finally cracks and wants to kill him, imagines dumping him and his bed right in the pool. Yet, to Egan's credit, Lou isn't made out to be a total bastard. Like any good son of a bitch, his point of view is compelling at times. He smiles at Jocelyn—that old smile from another time—and tells her, "Too late."

Comes the now seemingly derelict Scotty Hausmann (we understand, rather quickly, why Rhea hasn't been able to find him on Facebook), who, in another time shift, manages to locate Benny, seemingly at his zenith as a record producer, his Sow's Ear Records having been bought for big money by a large corporation for whom he still works. Scotty catches a big fish in the East River and takes it to Benny's office, where Sasha, working out front as Benny's capable assistant, deals with him—kindly, all things considered, and with mild amusement. The two meet in Benny's office, where the view, the furniture—everything—is spectacular, prompting Scotty, who is quite possibly unhinged, to ask Benny what happened between then, when he was the star who got the girl, and now ... between A and B.

Benny and his marriage to Stephanie, living the country club life for a while. Stephanie's brother Jules Jones, out of jail after getting a little carried away during an interview with an actress named Kitty, later recruited by the former star publicist for whom Stephanie worked—La Doll—now the disgraced Dolly, to assist in PR for a mass-murdering general (one must make a living, especially when one has a precocious young daughter who will save the day in the end, and marry one of the grandchildren of one of the 19-year-old warriors Charlie, Lou's daughter, got a smile from back in the early seventies on that safari in Africa). And there is Rob, at NYU, around the time of the first election of Bill Clinton as president, who doesn't look "druggy," who Sasha, after her time as a runaway, hangs with lest her step-father's watchers spot her with someone who looks less wholesome; Rob whose father was a football coach, who doesn't like football, who may like Drew more than he likes Sasha. Drew, a strong swimmer from Wisconsin, also wholesome, it would seem, though he smokes a lot of weed. Wants to be president one day—a joke is made about him inhaling—but he and Rob end up after a night high on X going for a swim in the East River, and something happens to Rob that, oddly, perhaps, a strong swimmer like Drew isn't able to help.

There is Ted Hollander, in a chapter titled, "Goodbye, My Love"—we are back sometime between 1979 and 1992 now—coming to Naples to find Sasha, who has been MIA for some time. Ted, who has "folded" up his desire for his wife bit by bit, kept his children out of his office, so that he can focus, think about, art, who believes, worries that, he is really in Napoli, in Italy, despite being paid by his niece's step-father, for the art. He finds, in spite of all his efforts, that he is not always thinking that much of art. It is the backstory of a man who needs, just this once, to be a hero—

A long storyboard of sorts follows, told, years later—in the future, like the ending, sometime in the mid-2020s—by Sasha's daughter, who, like her peers, isn't crazy about a "wall" of words.

There has been a baby boom following two wars, and the new demographic for marketers to chase are small children, some of them quite small. "Pointers," they are called, referring to what they do with their "handsets." Communication has come to resemble the babbling of infants. People tire of talking to each other, and ask if, instead, they can "T"—text—their thoughts, even when sitting across from each other at lunch.

It is a brave new world, longing, one finds, for counterpoint, something "pure," a great concert at "The Footprint" in New York City, that comes together by means not quite pure ...

But I have already told you enough—and yet I've told you nothing. I read the excerpt in the New Yorker and had no idea, until I came upon it, that it was part of the book. Yet everything fits.

I wasn't a great fan of, say, The Keep, and nearly didn't read this effort of hers. I'm glad I changed my mind. I liked it enough that I read it twice.

A great, timely story by a great writer that in my estimation will last.

Pick it up, read it, tell your friends.

Mamet's New Groove

It's nearly always a mistake when a dramatist, particularly a good one, carries on overly about his politics. Mamet's new book appears to be a case in point.

Christopher Hitchens, the far more trenchant apostate and heretic of catholic dimension (note the small "c"), reviews ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html