You Can't Make Enjoyment a Goal

 

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.

— Thomas à Kempis

Minus the prayer, I spend a lot of my time in retirement along the lines recommended by Thomas à Kempis, a 15th-century advocate of what today we would call mindful living.

I read, write, ruminate, and try to remain a productive citizen.

I hope in the long run to devote even more time to mindful activities, reducing to near-zero the time that I spend on mindless pursuits, such as watching TV, scrolling through social media, and worrying about the state of the world.

But no matter how I wind up spending my time, there are no guarantees.

For as I have discovered in four years of trial and error, you can't design a retirement guaranteed to produce enjoyment.

You can only try things. 

Golfing, gardening, hiking, biking, birdwatching, breadmaking, singing, sailing, painting, philanthropy, or songwriting.

Globetreking.

Tutoring schoolkids.

Or playing dominoes in the park.

Whatever floats your boat.

When they promise you that, with sufficient planning, you'll enjoy your golden years, the retirement experts are lying to you.

Yes, retirement is an opportunity to reimagine yourself.

You no longer have to react to bosses and customers, or go places and perform tasks not of your choosing.

You're free to do what you will enjoy.

The problem is, you can't decide in advance that you'll enjoy an activity.

You cannot make enjoyment a goal.

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity," said the writer Paul Goodman.

The best you can do is to test out a lot of important activities, and learn whether enjoyment follows.

While they're still working, people wonder mostly whether they'll have the money to retire. 

The smart ones make saving a goal.

But they don't give thought to whether they'll enjoy retirement.

And there's a good reason for that.

You can't make enjoyment a goal.

Packing Heat

 

A book is a loaded gun.

— Ray Bradbury

The nation's librarians are under attack, The New York Times reports.

Bent on ridding shelves of "objectionable" books, rabid Supermoms are using threats and intimidation to rout well-meaning librarians.

Even the Proud Boys have gotten involved, disrupting town and school board meetings where books are on the agenda.

Many librarians have caved under the onslaught. Some have had nervous breakdowns. Some have resigned. Some have been fired.

"As highly visible and politicized book bans have exploded across the country, librarians—accustomed to being seen as dedicated public servants in their communities—have found themselves on the front lines of an acrimonious culture war, with their careers and their personal reputations at risk," The Times writes.

The American Library Association says that book-banners have targeted nearly 1,600 titles for removal—the largest number since the association began to track book-banning two decades ago.

For their part, librarians are mortified, seeing their integrity questioned and their professional judgement discarded.

In some states, right-wing legislators are passing laws that criminalize their jobs.

If the book-banning continues, the nation's collections will soon be thinned to the works of Ayn Rand, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. 

Oh, and Mein Kampf.

But there is a solution: librarians should stand their ground. 

They should come to work packing heat.

Because the only thing that stops a bad guy against a book is a good guy with a book.

Note: Go here for my weapons of choice.

How to Rein Regret

 

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

— Sean Covey

Like his six previous books, Dan Pink's latest, The Power of Regret, bundles decades of social-science research into a subject to draw a general conclusion.

In this case, the subject is remorse, the inescapable, rearview-mirror feeling that I could have done better. And Pink's conclusion is that regret, if tamed, is a powerful propellent to self-improvement. 

I highly recommend the 200-page book.

Pink shows over and over that he has a knack for finding obscure research papers and mining clear conclusions from them, while leading his reader along a complex train of thought quickly and gracefully.

The heart of the book is Part Two, where Pink reveals the four "core regrets," which he has unearthed not from others' findings, but through his own original research among 4,500 subjects—the single largest study of regret ever conducted. 

The core regrets are not what you'd guess.

First, there are foundation regrets, what Pink describes as "failures of foresight and conscientiousness." Most of these have to do with ignoring our education, health, and savings; in other words, with goofing off and living large.

Second, there are boldness regrets, past choices to "play it safe." Most of these regrets have to do with career, romance, and travel. Boldness regrets dwell on the "roads not taken." 

Third, there are moral regrets, big and small lapses in the way you treated lovers, children, friends, enemies, employers—even animals. We tend to agonize over these.

Fourth, there are connection regrets, which form the largest category of regrets. "They arise." Pink writes, "from relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete." He tidily calls these regrets "rifts and drifts."

Pink's formula for taming regrets (Part Three of the book) comprises seven distinct elements:

• Apologize to those you harmed
• Find a silver lining in your lapse
• Admit your faux paus to others
• Develop compassion for yourself
• Accept frailty and move on
• Keep things in perspective
• Decide what you'll do differently in the future

Taking these actions, Pink says, will turn your regrets from morbid emotions into powerful goads to a better you.

My one complaint about The Power of Regret concerns an omission: Pink never once refers to "Step 9" of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Alcoholics in recovery are emperors of regrets. In order to kick the habit, Step 9 demands that they "make direct amends wherever possible, except when to do so would injure others."

By looking into AA's Step 9, Pink might have saved himself a lot of effort.

Folks have been there before.

April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here. 

Anger of Repose

Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire.

— Abbie Hoffman

After millenniums of suffering second-class citizenship, Western women can take heart in the fact they're at last on equal footing with men. 

You'd think they'd kick back and relax, at least a bit.

But, no.

A lot of Western women are still incensed and, as a result, unable to tolerate a man's literary opinion when it differs from their own.

I ran headlong into that anger yesterday when I (naively) commented on an article posted by the feminist historian Max Dashu on her popular Facebook page, "Suppressed Histories Archives."

The article, by a playwright named Sands Hall, described how Wallace Stegner plagiarized the diary of a Victorian woman, Mary Foote, when he wrote his Pulitzer-prize winning novel Angle of Repose.

Hall's contention was that Stegner stole more than a diary; he stole the diarist's life.

The unanimous tone of the steamy comments by Dashu's fans rankled me. 

I am, after all, partial to Wallace Stegner and to all novelists' right to fictionalize.

Those comments called Stegner "morally bankrupt" and "corrupt," a "colonizer," "thief" and "oppressor" who enjoyed "destroying a woman's character and reputation."

He was also compared to a rapist.

For good measure, Dashu's fans indicted other loathsome males for plagiarizing women's writings, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Jung, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Einstein and Homer.

Yes, Homer.

"I wish Stegner were still alive to be shamed, sued, and stoned," one fan wrote.

Stegner should go to the "chopping block," said another.

"A curse on the name of Wallace Stegner," added another. 

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. 

"Who do we cancel next?" I commented.

Big mistake.

For my five-word comment, I was told I was "petty," "cheeky," "hysterical," "reactionary" and "misogynistic." And I was assaulted for my age—even though Max Dashu is three years older than me.

But wait, there's more. Adding nuance, I commented further:

"Thanks for posting this article. I was not aware before of the accusations against Stegner. There is a good podcast featuring Sands Hall at the link below. She amplifies the article and related play she wrote. Calling for Stegner's posthumous stoning and the retraction of his Pulitzer is a clear-cut form of 'cancellation,' whether the word bothers you or not. Many of the comments sound like those of a frenzied mob clutching to its grievances. Sands Hall calls Stegner's ripoff of Mary Foote's journal an instance of early 'postmodernism.' But the mob wants to exhume his body, like Cromwell's, and desecrate it."

Max Dashu replied, "So according to you, no one should be outraged at him stealing a woman's work and then stomping on her reputation? He in fact canceled her!"

"In the US," I responded to Dashu, "we’re sensitive to mobs after the Salem Witch Trials."

"What 'mob?" Dashu wrote. "A woman tracked down the story of a man who massively appropriated a woman's work while smearing her life story, and you whine about 'cancellation.' He hasn't been canceled. Someone shone a light on his misdeeds."

And at that scolding, Dashu's fans started to pile on. 

"Shut up misogynist," one wrote.

"Calm down, Nancy boy," said another. 

"Robert is mad that women are pushing back," said another.

"I’m sensitive to slandering a woman since the witch trials," said another. "And I’m a witch, so don’t even fucking go there."

"It’s pathetic that you’re so testerical and worked up over this dead guy who stole women’s work," another said. "He STOLE her work and passed it off as his own. Typical male entitlement and privilege on your part to think you get to define everything around you. SHUT THE FUCK UP."

Based on my encounter with Max Dashu and her fans, I could write a play about an fiery mob rushing to judgement. 

Twelve Angry Women.

But it's been done before.

POSTSCRIPT: Learn more about Wallace Stegner's plagiarism from a new interview with Sands Hall. Great stuff!

Hurry, Wisdom

We are at a moment in time where we desperately need to accelerate wisdom.

— Elise Loehnen

With so many things so out of control—inflation, the virus, domestic terror, foreign enemies, and global warming—we are perfectly poised to elect a strongman as president in two years.

That's what fear-filled idiots do.

We need wisdom to steer us, but wisdom's in short supply right now (like a lot of things).

Amazon won't deliver it overnight.

Then again, maybe it will.

Emerson said, "If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

We should make that the first, perhaps the only, question we ask of a candidate.

Books may not be the only source of wisdom (there's the "school of hard knocks," too); but they're a primary source—and a ready one.

Ezra Pound said a book is a "ball of light in one's hands."

Hurry, wisdom.

Let there be light.

10 Books That Have Mattered to Me

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. 

They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

– Anna Quindlen

For better or worse—mostly better—every book you read becomes part of you.

Whether treasure or trash, books can furnish pivotal life lessons.

I've learned profound lessons from trivial books; enduring lessons from ephemeral books; glorious lessons from terrible books.

And, as every reader knows, some books matter more than others: the ones that change your life. 

They startle you, consume you, haunt you, and shape your world.

Here are the 10 books that did that to me:

The Nick Adams Stories. Ernest Hemingway's coming-of-age stories deeply influenced my own coming of age, although I could not be more different from his protagonist Nick Adams. Hemingway's stories showed my teenage self the dark sides of the world that were—and are—kept secret from kids. Suffering. Sacrifice. Cowardice. Ambivalence. Depression. Addiction. Suicide. Rage. Rape. And romantic betrayal.   

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Walter Kaufman's critical biography of the German thinker drew me into the world of philosophy and "philosophical anthropology." Even though my college professors later told me Nietzsche was "adolescent," I've always liked his naive truth-seeker's attitude. "There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism," he said.

Catch-22. A high school English teacher assigned our class Joseph Heller's absurdist novel the same year we had to register for the draft. If I needed convincing I was allergic to the military, I didn't need it after reading Catch-22. Only a decade later, when I was working in an ad agency, did I learn that Heller was in fact proud of his service in World War II, and was actually writing about the bizarre goings-on in New York ad agencies.       

The Sound and the Fury. Another high school reading assignment, William Faulkner's surreal novel showed me that the past is never dead; that psychic legacies—your "roots"—shape you indelibly; that racism is unquestionably America's Original Sin; and that all well-off families must eventually rot and decay. For its literary merits and insights into people, I consider this the greatest novel yet written by an American.

Sanity, Madness and the Family. More than Sigmund Freud's, psychiatrist R.D. Laing's books captivated me during my years in college. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing presented eleven case studies of patients with schizophrenia (considered incurable at the time). He concluded from his studies that the patients weren't crazy, their families were. The hospitalized patients were just trying to deal with family pressures. In other words, even insanity is intelligible, if you listen carefully enough.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I took a semester-long course on Ludwig Wittgenstein's 150-page book, the only one published during his lifetime. Beneath its gnomic sentences lies an extraordinary—and quite mystical—worldview. According to that view, it is our language (i.e., our grammar) that lures us to many nonsensical beliefs about the world. But when we confront the world directly, our language stops operating, and those beliefs lose all credibility. In other words, speaking and thinking aren't doing. Doing is clear; it's speaking and thinking about doing that are muddy. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," Wittgenstein concludes. 

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger's exhaustive tome furthered my grip on reality. His basic premise simple: being is time. To be human is to exist "temporally," to live out our short stretch between cradle and grave. Being is time and time is finite: it comes to an end with our deaths. If we hope ever to be authentic human beings, we must act not as lifeless robots but as "beings-towards-death" and carve some meaning out of our finitude.

The Centaur. John Updike's charming novel warmed my heart to others like no book I've read. The story concerns a sad-sack science teacher and his disappointed 15-year-old son. The shambling father lives two parallel lives, one as a small-town high-school teacher (a self-described "walking junk heap”) and the other as a centaur. While the teacher is hapless and unremarkable, the centaur is a mighty Olympian god (he's even in love with a goddess, who's also the girls’ gym teacher). Through overhearing townspeople praise his father, the son comes at last to accept his long-suffering father for who he is—without ever learning about his fantasy life as a god.

Meditations. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations provided the sort of "self-help" I needed when, at age 40, I finally read the 2,000-year-old book. A Stoic, Aurelius says that serenity only comes by withholding your judgements of people, places and things. Most troubles exist only in the mind, and are worsened by self-importance, overindulgence, and thoughtless drive.

American Pastoral. Philip Roth's fictional account of the precipitous decline of Newark, New Jersey hit closer to home than anything I've read (I grew up next door to the once-bucolic city). Successful Jewish glove-manufacturer "Swede" Levov's world is shattered when his daughter protests the Vietnam War by blowing up a local post office. The fall of Newark from great American city to cesspool vividly parallels Lev's fate as he searches the city for his fugitive daughter.

What books have mattered to you?

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Dan Pink for inspiring this post. I wonder whether he remembers providing a guest post for Goodly nearly 10 years ago?

Strongmen

A friend who posts reactionary memes every day on Facebook admitted to me he not only gets his jollies provoking "your kind," but secretly wishes Trump were president.

You probably know a lot of people like him.

I wish they'd all read Strongmen, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2020 account of modern authoritarianism, now out in paperback.

It's the scariest read you'll find outside a Stephen King novel.

Ben-Ghiat finds every modern strongman—including Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Amin, Pinochet, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Hussein, Orban, Putin, Modi and Trump—cut from precisely the same vile cloth.

Strongmen are all emotionally stunted weirdos who seize the levers of power because dominion over others fills an inner need to prove they're not emotionally stunted weirdos.

They're masters in the dual arts of disguise and deceit.   

"They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation's savior," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

"Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears," she continues, "strongmen present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by internal or external enemies."

Strongmen rely on distortions, myths, lies, and propaganda to build a faithful audience, banking on followers' willingness to abandon the real world in favor of the fantasy world the strongmen create.

Eventually—as in the case of my misguided friend—there's no talking to a strongman's followers.

"They believe in him because they believe in him," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

Their unshakable faith in the strongman leads them to insist you—by believing in a world where people strive to live in peace, right systemic wrongs, and work for prosperity and progress—are "drinking the Kool-Aid."

But strongmen really don't give two shits about their followers and, in fact, are openly contemptuous of them. 

All they really care about is robbing the treasury, punishing critics, controlling women and women's bodies, and pursuing vainglorious goals.

Soon—to every other citizen's detriment—chaos, bankruptcy, and warfare ensue, as strongmen lose what little is left of their ability to distinguish the difference between personal lusts and their nation's needs.

Their sick, self-aggrandizing projects invariably lead to their comeuppance and to a national apocalypse, as our parents witnessed in World War II and we're witnessing in Ukraine now.

"Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect," Ben-Ghiat writes.

Why don't Trump's followers see that?

POSTSCRIPT: Should you find the inclusion of Trump in the company of strongmen like Mussolini and Hitler far fetched, bare in mind that Trump's press secretary has acknowledged he openly admired other dictators' ruthlessness.

"I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him," Stephanie Grisham told The Hill. "He loved the people who could kill anyone."

Historian Ben-Ghiat says the "strongman's golden rule is: do whatever is necessary to stay in power."

We see Trump apply that rule every day.

Heroes

A Hero of Liberty is a person who either promoted freedom, faith, or family values.

— Heroes of Liberty website

A new publisher of kids' books hopes to combat wokeism in grade schools with a series of books that glorify so-called "Heroes of Liberty," including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Fox News has called the series, written for second grade readers, "phenomenal," failing to recognize that it's above the reading-skills of 99% of Fox News' viewers.

As right-wing Supermoms move to ban classics like Maus, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 from curriculums and school libraries nationwide, the Delaware-based publisher has released its first title in the series, John Wayne: Manhood and Honor.

House editor Bethany Mandel, formerly a staff writer at the Heritage Foundation, thinks John Wayne: Manhood and Honor can rescue kids from the wrongs of feminism.

She told Axios the book "counters the narrative that 'masculinity is toxic.'

"Boys are conditioned to behave like women," Mande said. "We wanted to give boy readers a glimpse of a positive male role model who doesn't apologize for being manly and masculine."

While she wants the "Heroes of Liberty" series placed in school libraries, Mandel also wants "inappropriate" books removed.

You can guess what those books might be.

For my part, the only heroes I want to celebrate are the sandwiches that go by that name.

I want to see them removed from federal watchlists and made a standard menu item in every school cafeteria. And I want to see September 14 made a national holiday.

Which is why I recommend Delawarean Vince Watchorn's A Meal in One: Wilmington and the Submarine Sandwich.

A Meal in One tells the story of how the foot-long gut-bomb first came about—and why. It's an enthralling book about poor immigrant laborers and the small-time entrepreneurs who kept them fed.

You want to talk about "family values?"

There are more family values packed between two halves of an Italian roll than than in all the bombast ever spewed by Wayne, Reagan, Thatcher, or Barrett.

None other than President Biden wrote, in the foreword to A Meal in One, "I frequently stop in one of Delaware’s established sub shops to pick up lunch, dinner or a late-night snack without thinking twice about the role the sub played in putting Delaware on the culinary map.

"I must give credit to the Italian-Americans who settled in Delaware’s Little Italy and developed and popularized the culinary creation Wilmingtonians simply and affectionately call the 'sub.'

"I give further credit to Vince Watchorn for publicizing this relatively little-known fact about our proud city to everyone who loves good food."

John Wayne may know a thing or two about manliness, but I prefer my heroes to come with capicola, sweet peppers, and an extra dab of mayo.

Time's Unkind to the Harried Mind

Time is unkind to the harried mind, filling it each passing day with the detritus of the moment.

— Richard Seaver

Book reading by Americans has nosedived in the past five years, according to a new Gallup poll.

While, on average, Americans read 12 books in 2021, that's three fewer than in 2016.

Pollsters attribute the drop to the ready availability of other entertainments.

Poor education doesn't factor into the decline: the steepest falloff in book reading was among college graduates.

Age doesn't either: Americans 55 and older—traditionally the most voracious book readers—read the same number of books, on average, as all other Americans.

Whether you point the finger at Netflix, Nintendo, or Facebook, the trend should worry you.

The fewer books we read, the poorer our worlds become.

The fewer books we read, the shorter our attention spans grow.

And the fewer books we read, the more hidebound we're apt to be.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who never reads lives only one," says fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin.

I get why TV, games and social media are crowding out books.

They're a fast-acting anesthesia.

Books, on the other hand, can burden you—especially if they're well written. They can tax your thought, shake your faith, wake you up, or give you nightmares.

And unlike the crap on this month's Netflix menu, there's no lack of good books to read.

Identifying good books is easy:

• Explore series. Great series abound. I love Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.
  
  
• Explore prize winners. I have never read a Pulitzer or Booker prize-winning book that wasn't great.
  
  
• Explore individual authors. Choose an exceptional author and read every book he or she has written. I've done that with William Faulkner, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford, and am doing it now with Erik Larson. You won't be disappointed.
  
  
• Explore subgenres. Pick a genre (sci-fi or history or memoir, for example) and then a subgenre (dystopian sci-fi or historical westerns or celebrity memoirs) and read the most popular book by each of the subgenre's foremost authors.   

• Explore classics. They're classics for a reason, so find out why. Just for starters, read Dracula, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Oil!, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Bleak House, Martin Eden, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Secret Agent, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Breakfast at Tiffany's, A Farewell to Arms, The Long Goodbye, Eye of the Needle, The Time Machine, Outerbridge Reach, Moby Dick, Catch-22, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Trout Fishing in America, The Moviegoer, Worlds' Fair, From the Terrace, The Wonder Boys, Nausea, White Noise, Amsterdam, Deliverance, The Killer Angels, A Flash of Green, The Razor's Edge, The Confessions of Nat Turner, On the Road, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, A River Runs Through It, Crossing to Safety, Slaughterhouse-Five, War and Remembrance, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

And good books are handy and cheap. Use your local library and check out online seller Thriftbooks.com, if you don't believe me.

Make it your goal to read at least three books every month.

Do so, and you can boast to your friends and family that you read three times more than the average American!

Above: Jug & Book by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 8 x 10 inches.

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

The Man Who Would Be Scrooge

I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.

— Charles Dickens

Just as real people inspired the creators of Sherlock Holmes, Jean Valjean, Dean Moriarity and Norman Bates, an actual man inspired Dickens' Scrooge.

John Elwes was a notorious Parliamentarian whose miserly antics entertained Londoners seven decades before Dickens lampooned him in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.

Elwes learned skinflintery from his mother, who died of starvation despite having inherited £12 million, and a maternal uncle whose fortune exceeded twice that amount.

Elwes inherited both his mother's and uncle's money upon their deaths and, to Londoners' delight, set about hoarding it.

Elwes' stinginess was the stuff of legends. 

Too cheap to pay for a coach, he walked everywhere, even in the rain and snow. When he traveled to London from his country estate, he always took the long way, to avoid turnpike tolls. He routinely ate moldy bread, rancid meat, and rotted gleanings from the harvest; refused to see doctors when he was ill; and, despite being a Member of Parliament, wore a single, ragged suit and a ratty wig he'd found in a gutter. (His fellow Members of Parliament observed that, since Elwes only had one suit, they could never accuse him of being a turncoat.)

Elwes would spend his evenings sitting beside a woodfire in his kitchen, to save on candles and coal; and would find his way to bed in the dark. He let his several townhomes fall into ruin, rather than pay for their upkeep, and relocated each time one became uninhabitable, which they all did. He quit Parliament after only 12 years, because he thought it too costly to remain a Member.

When he died in 1789, Elwes' net worth exceeded £38 million. His obit said his name would become "proverbial in the annals of avarice." But it didn't. 

Instead, the name Scrooge did.

Dickens took that name from a grave in Scotland.

During a visit to Edinburgh in 1841, the novelist spotted a headstone with "Ebenezer Scroggie" carved on it, and took mental note of the odd-sounding name.

Although the real Ebenezer Scroggie wasn't a miser—quite the opposite—Dickens made him one.

Smoke

Be sure where books are burned, people will also be burned.

— Heinrich Heine

This week I found a used copy of the famously-banned Stranger in a Strange Land on Thriftbooks and gave it to a sci-fi fan who's never read it.

Were it to grab his attention, that act would put me in the sights of right-wing ideologue Rabih Abuismail, the Virginia school board member who is calling for objectionable books to be burned.

Why book burning is the go-to act of the self-righteous is well understood.

Book burning (also known as libricide) fills the need to terrorize a mainstream culture and represents a baby step toward genocide.

Why Mr. Abuismail, a purported Christian, feels compelled to murder fellow Americans escapes me. 

But have no doubt that's where he and his mob of right-wing brothers and sisters are heading.

Where there's smoke...

Sleaze Merchants

Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free,
sleaze goes right out the window.

— Cintra Wilson

Cover by Al Rossi

My first exposure to sleaze—I was age eight—was the paperback tower at the front of our corner drug store.

 

It was six or seven feet tall—dwarfing me—and pentagonal and would rotate unsteadily on a hidden axle when you gave it a whirl. 

Top heavy from its burden of potboilers, the tower always threatened to fall on me when I spun it. At the very first squeak, my inattentive mother would glance up from her shopping and siss at me, "Robert, leave that alone."

The book tower's presence in the drug store suggested to my eight-year-old mind that its weird offerings must somehow relate to grownups' healthcare (although I would soon discover a comparable rack of sulfurous paperbacks in the confectioner's store down the street—where absolutely nothing healthy was sold).

Although I had no clue at the time, three of the artists who created the covers for many of the books on display were among the finest illustrators of the day, rivals of the famous Norman Rockwell.

They were Norman Rockwell's lurid twins.

Al Rossi was a prolific magazine illustrator and a masterful merchant of paperback sleaze. He was the original cover artist for Junkie, a 1953 novel by beat writer William Burroughs (published under the pen name William Lee). The Bronx-born Rossi was a prominent supplier to Balcourt, a New York-based stock house that provided cover art to paperback publishers in the 1950s and '60s. A professional jazz musician until World War II, when he served with the Army in Europe, Rossi was compelled after the war to try his hand at illustration to make ends meet, attending Pratt and the Arts Student League to learn the craft. Before associating with Balcourt, he worked for several publishers of pulp magazines, the forerunners to paperback books. Rossi liked to use his male neighbors and their wives as his models.

Cover by Ben Stahl

Ben Stahl was exposed to fine art in the seventh grade, thanks to a scholarship he received to attend Saturday morning lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. After high school, he landed a job at a commercial art studio in Chicago that provided illustrations almost exclusively to The Saturday Evening Post. His success as a studio artist prompted Stahl to move to New York and go freelance. There, he began illustrating paperback book covers, as well as continuing to supply artwork to The Post (he illustrated more than 750 stories for the magazine during his career). Stahl soon earned a reputation as a serious fine artist and, along with Norman Rockwell and Connecticut illustrator Albert Dorne, co-founded the Famous Artists School, a mail-order course whose graduates include Pat Boone, Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston. In 1965, as his career was reaching its zenith, Stahl painted 15 life-size pictures of the stations of the cross and opened his own museum in Sarasota, Florida, to house them. But the paintings were stolen four years later and never recovered. Stahl was left nearly penniless due to the theft.

Cover by Paul Rader

Paul Rader, at age 16, was one of the youngest artists ever to have an art museum exhibit his paintings. His early mastery of portrait painting earned him awards throughout the '20s and '30s and brought him commissions to paint wealthy judges, lawyers, and businessmen in his hometown of Detroit. Rader switched to illustrating pulp magazines after World War II, finding the work more lucrative, and moved to New York, where he became another leading supplier to Balfour. When painting paperback book covers, Rader liked using professional models and actors, supplied to him by talent agencies. One of his favorite male models, Guy Williams, went on in the mid-1960s to play Dr. John Robinson in the TV show Lost in Space. 

Whether Rossi, Stahl and Rader set the floor of our society's sleaze index, I don't know; but I do know their art depicted truths—truths most Americans, Puritans at heart, wished to deny in the 1950s.

The risks they took in defying mores and good taste and giving free reign to sleaze may not have contributed to the world's trove of art, but these three artists helped millions of Americans remain literate members of the book-buying public, which is a lot more than you can say about today's media consumers.

Above: Cover illustration for The Bump and Grind Murders by Al Rossi. Cover illustration for The Creepers also by Al Rossi.  

Character Defects

 Perhaps you are right, Watson. I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

The Wall Street Journal reports that drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% last year. 

A record 93,300 deaths occurred.

Most were due to abuse of fentanyl, the illegal opioid said to be 50 times more stimulating than heroin.

Sherlock Holmes would alarm Dr. Watson by injecting a mere seven percent solution of cocaine. 

Imagine if he'd had access to fentanyl.

Public health officials blame last year's deaths on the hardship, dislocation, and isolation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

I don't buy what the officials are peddling.

Addiction is due to character defects.

Well-meaning doctors insist otherwise, but a naïve ignorance of life explains their mistake.

They spend too much time chumming with colleagues, too little with addicts.

Dr. Watson knew better. He spent countless hours with an addict.

Watson would often scold Holmes for using a narcotic the detective called "transcendently stimulating."

"Your brain may be roused and excited," Watson would say, "but it is a pathological and morbid process. You know what a black reaction comes upon you."

Watson understood it was Holmes' raging egotism that drove him to shoot up. 

I've met enough people in recovery to know addicts' dependence stems from the drive to paper over character defects like pride, shame, hate, cowardice, and laziness.

Covid-19 didn't kill the 93,300 Americans who overdosed last year.

Neither did fentanyl.

Unresolved character defects did.

Above: Victorian syringe kit.