My Morning Ritual

A daily ritual is a way of saying I'm taking care of myself.

— Mariel Hemingway

Like hundreds of millions of people around the globe, I wake up every morning and perform precisely the same task.

I brew coffee.

For me, it's more a ritual than a routine.

A routine, psychologists say, is a more or less meaningless activity, while a ritual is purpose-filled.

Brewing coffee certainly is purpose-filled for me. 

I'd describe its purpose as "to start the day with elation."

Some days, I know, will deliver several moments of elation.

But some days will not.

My morning ritual compensates for that.

It's like an insurance policy that protects me from a ho-hum day.

"It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time," says alternative medicine advocate Andrew Weil.

He's right, of course.

But doesn't everyone deserve at least one dose of happiness a day, even if it's caffeine-induced?

The morning ritual is a catalyzer of happiness.

It is a homecoming, a refuge, or, in the words of the German philosopher Byung Chul Han, a "technology for housing oneself."

Life coaches and self-help gurus point to the morning ritual as the prime example of "self-care."

It gives you the feeling that you're in control, even if that's for only a few minutes of the day.

Were I more original, I'd invent my own morning ritual, as did many famous people in the past:

• Ben Franklin sat and wrote naked every morning for an hour after rising.
  
  
• John Quincy Adams (also naked) took a dip in the Charles River.
  
  
• Jane Austen woke up every morning and played the piano for an hour.
  
  
• Alexander Dumas began his mornings with a stroll beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where he would stop to eat an apple.

• Marcel Proust woke every day to smoke a bowl of opium and eat a croissant.

• Winston Churchill drank a whiskey and smoked a cigar first thing every morning.
  
  
• Marilyn Monroe drank raw egg yolks in warm milk.
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor arose to eat bacon and eggs with a mimosa.

Many contemporary celebrities have more imaginative morning routines than mine, as well. 

TV producer Simon Cowell, for example, wakes up every morning and watches Hanna-Barbera cartoons. 

Warren Buffet drinks a can of Coke and reads The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, like clockwork. 

Michelle Obama wakes up at 4:30 and works out in the gym. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wakes up and drinks water and lemon. "I try to drink it slowly and mindfully,” she told Balance the Grind.

Victoria Beckham wakes up and drinks two tablespoons of vinegar.

Morning rituals are really all about doing one thing that's important to you, no matter what the day may bring.

The hell with the rest of the world, the morning ritual pronounces: this is mine.

As journalist Jess McHugh wrote in The Washington Post in January, morning rituals "provide a feeling of freedom and a rare moment for self-determination."

What's your morning ritual?

Above: The Morning Coffee by Charles Hawthorne. Oil on canvas. 30 x 30 inches.

Are You Strong Enough?

Are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?

— Ernest Hemingway

Braveheart, move over.

Kids in Scotland today are Chickenhearts.

Or so a Scottish university thinks.

The University of the Highlands has slapped an ominous "trigger warning" on Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea: 

Warning: Contains Graphic Scenes

History and Literature students at the school are now on official notice that Hemingway's novel contains "graphic fishing scenes."

The university said trigger warnings allow students to make "informed choices."

One Hemingway biographer told The Daily Mail, "It blows my mind to think students might be encouraged to steer clear of the book."

A British history professor told the newspaper that all great literature depicts inherently violent pursuits.

"Many great works of literature have included references to farming, fishing, whaling, or hunting. Is the university seriously suggesting all this literature is ringed with warnings?"

Among many classics, the school has also flagged Beowulf, Frankenstein and Hamlet for excessive and graphic violence.

If size matters, Moby Dick will be banned by the school altogether.

Critics have bemoaned the concept of triggers for years, insisting its application advances a dangerous liberal orthodoxy.

What's goose for the gander, triggers are now in favor among far-right Super Moms, who cite them when banning books by Black and gay authors.

From my standpoint, trigger warnings are ridiculous because they retard teenagers' development into adults.

We have enough problems with cultural illiteracy.

We don't need rampant faintheartedness, too.

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?

Immersion

We are fish in a bowl, dear.

― Erin Morgenstern

Most writers research a topic by turning to experts. But some take a more direct route: they immerse themselves.

• Nellie Bly, on assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1887, faked a mental illness so that she could be committed to Blackwell’s Island, a state-run psychiatric hospital with a reputation for inmate abuse. Her resulting book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, made Bly's a household name and prompted Albany to reform New York's treatment of the insane. Bly's critics labeled her the "stunt girl," but she was a pioneer in "participatory journalism."
  
  
• Upton Sinclair worked undercover in the Chicago stockyards in 1904 while researching his novel The Jungle, an exposé of immigrant life and the ghastly meatpacking industry. Two years after its publication, Sinclair’s book resulted in nothing less than the establishment of the FDA, dedicated to protecting consumers from unscrupulous food manufacturers. "I aimed at the public’s heart and, by accident, hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair said.
  
  
• Stephen Crane donned rags, slept in homeless shelters and ate at soup kitchens while he researched "An Experiment in Misery," an 1894 short story that chronicled the seedy plight of the tramps, alcoholics and drug addicts who populated New York's Bowery District. Crane said he sought to show that the "root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice," a willingness to "be knocked flat and accept the licking."
  
  
• Jack London did the same while researching The People of the Abyss, feigning poverty for seven weeks. "In the twinkling of an eye, I had become one of them," he wrote. "My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too-respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship."
  
  
• George Orwell opted to "submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side" while researching Down and Out in Paris and London in the early 1930s. He lived as a dishwasher in Paris, then as a tramp in London. The experience highlighted the cultural difference between the two cities: in Paris, Orwell wrote, he was called "bohemian;" in London, "scum." His stint as a bum awakened Orwell to his own British snobbery. "I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant."
  
  
• John Howard Griffin darkened his skin to disguise himself as an African American in the Jim Crow South while researching his 1961 book Black Like Me. He hopped a Greyhound bus and traveled undercover through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, undergoing along the way a "personal nightmare." He'd planned to spend six weeks in disguise, but only lasted four weeks before having a nervous breakdown and returning home to Texas. Unfortunately, Griffin's White neighbors weren't forgiving of his "stunt." They sent him death threats, hanged him in effigy, and forced his family into exile in Mexico.
  
  
• George Plimpton tried out for a major league baseball team that same year, while researching Out of My League, a book Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived." Plimpton's experiment led him to immerse himself later in other sports, including professional football, hockey, tennis, golf, and boxing, in order to write books.
  
  
• Hunter S. Thompson spent a year embedded in a criminal motorcycle gang while researching his 1966 book Hell's Angels. Thompson spent so much time with the gang that he was "no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them."
  
  
• John D. MacDonald wanted his 1973 mystery novel The Scarlet Ruse, to center around a swindle involving a stamp dealer, so he immersed himself in the world of stamp trading and speculation for five years. To understand stamps' value, MacDonald studied 10 years of auction catalogs, interviewed dealers and collectors, and began bidding on pricey stamps at auction, storing the ones he bought in a safe deposit box. In the process, he made a 175% return on investment. He called his immersion "adventures in auctionland."
  
  
• Barbara Ehrenreich lived in trailer parks and residential motels and worked as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide, and a Walmart sales clerk while researching her 2011 best seller Nickel and Dimed. The experience taught Ehrenreich that no job is "unskilled" and that even the most menial ones are exhausting. She also learned that one low-wage job isn't enough, if you hope to avoid homelessness in America.

Immersion is the art of leading readers so close to a topic that they're inside it, like fish in a bowl.

For the writer, "immersion begins simply with a key question, which must be taken literally and figuratively," says journalist Patrick Walters. 

"How do I get inside?"

Short

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

—Ernest Hemingway

Some things never change.

Good writing has never changed, even though writing itself has—a lot. 

We have, for example, seen use of the subjunctive (as in, "It's necessary my boss be at the meeting") nearly cease; sentence fragments (as in, "No can do") achieve acceptance; and verb conversions (such as "impact," "onboard," and "minoritize") shake off the stench of barbarism.

But good writing remains unchanged.

Good writing is good, first and foremost, because it's short. It coveys what's essential and leaves out the rest. Readers get the writer's point, because the point is made straightaway. 

And the wisdom in brevity never changes, as Ernest Hemingway once told his editor.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.

"It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short," Hemingway said. 

"The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

The Filthiest Word in the Language

Retirement is the filthiest word in the language.

— Ernest Hemingway

Some words should be retired.

Retired is one of them.

Just as we no longer call anyone "colored" or "retarded," we shouldn't call anyone retired.

The word means, to most people, "purposeless."

Hemingway told his biographer and friend, A. E. Hotchner, that retirement was like a terrible death. 

"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is," Hemingway said. 

"Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do and what makes you what you are, is to back up into the grave."

"Retired" means purposeless: half-dead, half-gone, half-forgotten.

Over the hill. Out to pasture. Lingering about with one foot in the grave.

Retirement, indeed, is the filthiest word in the language.

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.

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Tighten Your Spigot

Be silent for the most part; or say only

what is necessary and in few words.

― Epictetus

A phone call with a salesman this week reminded me why I dislike so many salespeople.

He would not shut up.

What should have been a 10-minute call wound up an hour-long harangue.

Citing the "Golden Ratio," sales coaches advise you to "talk less, listen more." The ratio of talk should be 3:2 in favor of the customer.  

But this guy isn't buying it.

And I may not buy what he's selling—simply because I can't take another drenching.

Worse, he followed the call up with a 600-word email (not including his two attachments). I've yet to read it all.

If only he knew about Star Style.

Ernest Hemingway mastered Star Style in 1917 during a seven-month apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star. It would propel the writer to fame only nine years later.

In a 1940 interview, Hemingway recalled how the paper's city editor taught him to write by demanding adherence to 110 rules. "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said. 

Foremost among them were three: Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Eliminate every superfluous word.

Hemingway revered The Star's rules. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent can fail to write well if he abides by them."

Hemingway added to the rules one of his own, which in Death on the Afternoon he labeled the "Iceberg Theory."

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he wrote. 

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

The Greek Stoic Epictetus, 2,000 years before had urged followers to abide by comparable rules for speaking.

"Be silent for the most part; or say only what is necessary and in few words," Epictetus advised.

"Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls, and never about ordinary things—gladiators or horse races or athletes or feasts; these are vulgar topics; but above all not about men in blame or compliment or comparison. Turn the conversation, if you can, by talking about fitting subjects; but, should you be among strangers, be silent."

If you're prone to saying too much—in person or on paper—consider your audience. Show them some charity. Tighten your spigot. 

Maybe the Golden Ratio should be 9:1 in favor of the customer.

Maybe the gold in the Golden Rule is—silence.

Learning to Walk

You don't learn to walk by following rules. 

You learn by doing, and by falling over. 

— Richard Branson

I'm halfway through three months of physical therapy after shattering an ankle. I'm learning to walk again.

The therapists pester me constantly to walk, walk, walk, in order to speed my recovery. Willpower and workouts alone won't cut it, they insist. I have to "learn by doing."

Meantime, I'm tutoring an eighth grader in writing and asking the same of him.

Applying William Faulkner's advice to would-be writers—read, read, read—I've assigned him a small mountain of prose: pieces by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.B. White, Hunter S. Thompson, John D. MacDonald, George Plimpton, Martin Luther King, and a pack of lesser-knowns. I've also introduced him to speed reading and have asked him to write chapter summaries of How to Read a Book every week through July.

All this for a boy who, before we met, only read an occasional gaming magazine and hardly wrote anything at all (his public school really let him down). But I want to make the most of our tutoring sessions. If he falls over once in a while, so be it; at least he won't shatter an ankle.

POSTSCRIPT: Want to help a good cause? Go to Mighty Writers to learn more.

Lean Expression

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

— Cicero

The Kansas City Star taught 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway "the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

When Hemingway began as a copywriter at the paper in 1917, The Star's rules demanded brevity: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Eliminate every superfluous word."

With few exceptions, writers before him were masters of verbalism; but with a boost from The Star, Hemingway forged a new, vigorous and modern style of expression.

Lean expression.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about," Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Hemingway helped his reader not only by omitting superfluous words, but by chaining sensations to emotions, as in this passage from A Moveable Feast illustrates:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That's the "Hemingway style." Frill-free storytelling, uplifted by the compounding of repetition, rhyme, alliteration, stream of consciousness, Biblical and Bachian cadences, and strict avoidance of the flowery, routine and trite—no Latinate words, for example, like "mollusk;" no adjectives like "slippery;" no adverbs like "eagerly;" no clichés like "the world is your oyster;" and no mention of oysters' effect on the libido.

Eloquent, keen and lean.

POSTSCRIPT: Go here for more assessment. And treat yourself to A Moveable Feast. It's free.

Travesty

This disease controls my life.

— Dietrich Hectors

As depicted in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new documentary "Hemingway," a wartime concussion—one of five he suffered in his time—left the writer with a little-discussed condition: tinnitus. 

Even the documentary fails to discuss it. Hemingway's chronic tinnitus gets one mention in six hours of narration.

Debilitating tinnitus—not just “ringing in the ears,” but buzzing, hissing, whistling, swooshing, and clicking in the ears—afflicts 20 million Americans, according to the CDC.

Who pays attention? 

Almost no one.

But tinnitus, "the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present," drives millions of Americans to despair and leads some sufferers to suicide, even though medical researchers deny a causal connection.

Last month, Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor killed himself after Covid-19 left him with tinnitus. 

In recent years, tinnitus has led many other distinguished people to end their own lives, including rock musician Craig Gill, management consultant Robert McIndoe, graphic designer Rick Tharp, and industrial engineer Dietrich Hectors (who left a heart-wrenching "farewell letter" on Facebook).

I wouldn't suggest Hemingway's 1961 suicide stemmed from his chronic tinnitus. 

The writer suffered from a mountain of other maladies, including traumatic brain injury, hemochromatosis, and alcoholism. Medically speaking, he was an unmitigated mess. 

But tinnitus could only have worsened his torment.

According to the American Tinnitus Association, when you consider lost earnings, lost productivity, and medical outlays, tinnitus costs the nation $26 billion a year. Yet tinnitus goes unrecognized by Medicare and Medicaid, and federal funds for basic research are paltry—stifling innovation and the chance of a cure.

Last year, the feds spent only $400 million on hearing-related research. In contrast, it just spent $500 million on Covid-19 relief in St. Louis—alone.

How so atrocious an affliction can remain ignored is a travesty.

NOTE: If you suffer chronic "ringing in the ears," contact the American Tinnitus Association for help.

Thoughts and Prayers

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.

— Ernest Hemingway

Boulder, Atlanta, Springfield, Midland, Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, Virginia Beach, Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh, Annapolis.

Alongside these place names, the abstract words thoughts and prayers are indeed obscene (obscene, adjective, from the Latin ob ("in front of") + caenum ("filth")).

We're embarrassed to hear them any longer. As we should be.

Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice. We had heard them and had read them now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages."

Let's retire thoughts and prayers. Permanently. 

We have heard them now for a long time and can no longer stand to hear them. 

They're words that have become obscene.

Anthem

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

― Jill Lepore

Activists are calling for "Imagine" to replace "The Star Spangled Banner" as the national anthem, a move I can get behind, although my first choice is the ripsnorting "Born to Run."

But if we want a timeless national anthem―a tune that's perennially PC―one without lyrics makes the most sense.

In which case, my vote goes to the majestic "Fanfare for the Common Man."

With that decision, the US would be join the coterie of five other countries whose national anthem has no lyrics: Spain, Kosovo, San Marino and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

For years, Bob Dylan skipped a warm-up act and, before taking the stage, instead played a recording of "Fanfare for the Common Man" (along with other Aaron Copland favorites like "Hoe Down," "Simple Gifts," "Quiet City" and "Lincoln Portrait").

Historian Sean Wilentz was the first Dylanologist to point out that Daylan and Copland, both American Jews of Lithuanian descent, are culturally linked by way of their roots in the Popular Front.

The Popular Front was an anti-racist, anti-fascist movement in the arts promoted by the Communist party during the 1930's and '40's. 

The movement held sway over hundreds of "fellow travelers," including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Miller, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Dalton Trumbo, Rita Hayworth, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn and Mark Rothko.

Copland composed "Fanfare for the Common Man" on commission during World War II after hearing then-Vice President Henry Wallace give a speech in which he said, “The century that will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.”

It's high time to replace Francis Scott Key's ditty with something more rousing.

If it can't be "Born to Run," nothing would please me better than a song composed by an anti-racist, anti-fascist fellow traveler.

What's your pick for a replacement?

Painting "Homeland" by Bo Bartlett

Downtown

Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.

— Stephen King, from The Stand

A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand. 

On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.

I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).

And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.

My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).

I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.

Manual Therapy

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. 

— Epictetus

Nothing separates the cowardly and strong like a good pandemic.

In a pinch like today's pinch, we all want to be pillars of strength—to embody Ernest Hemingway's famous formula, "courage is grace under pressure." 

But it takes a strong foundation.

While you're home—if you're home—you can work on your foundation by reading a manual by the first century Stoic Epictetus.

It's aptly titled Manual.

Manual is a short book that's had a long life among resilient people.

And deservedly so. 

Its author was a mensch.

The son of a slave, Epictetus understood suffering. His sadistic master once purposely broke his leg, leaving him crippled for the rest of his life. When he became a freedman in his late teens, he taught philosophy on street corners in Rome, but was banished for his troubles.

Undaunted, Epictetus moved to Greece, where he founded a school that would eventually attract students from all corners of the empire. 

One of those students took shorthand notes during Epictetus' lectures—notes that became Manual.

Epictetus welcomed adversity as training for moments like ours, when courage and resilience are tested. His philosophy gave students the wisdom to "keep calm and carry on" throughout plagues, wars, fires and earthquakes. 

It also taught them to remember we're all interconnected.

It's no coincidence that when the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi shipped face masks to Italy last week, all the crates were stamped with a Stoic saying:

We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.

Did You Know Dashiell Hammett was Once a Copywriter?

Tuberculosis compelled Dashiell Hammett to quit his job as a Pinkerton detective in 1921.

Seeking less strenuous work, he enrolled in a journalism course at a business school in San Francisco, and began to write mystery stories for pulp magazines.

But by 1926 Hammett found mystery-writing couldn't earn him enough to live on, so he applied for a job as a copywriter with Samuels Jewelers. It paid a whopping $350 a month—nearly 10 times Hammett's earnings for pulp fiction.

He liked the new work; but he liked booze better. Before six months on the job Hammett was fired, after passing out in the office.

At the encouragement of a pulp magazine editor, Hammett began writing a "hard-boiled" mystery novel, Red Harvest. He mailed it—unsolicited—to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1929.

Knopf realized it had received something unprecedented: a thriller that was "real art."

With weeks of the novel's appearance, reviewers were comparing Hammett to Hemingway. 

Hammett followed Red Harvest the same year with a second novel, The Dain Curse; and in 1930 published his most famous detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.