Among the American journalists who covered the Second World War, the best writer was A. J. Liebling. Here is he describing his efforts to get to the airport to take a flight to Lisbon:
At that period — it sounds like talking about stagecoach days — the Clippers still left from a yacht-club setting at Port Washington, Long Island. A friend of mine named Fred Schwed … had asked to drive me out to my plane in the early morning. Passengers were supposed to be at the plane with their luggage at eight o'clock. Schwed picked me up at an hour I never had experienced while sober, at the door of the house where I was living, and headed in what I took to be the direction of Long Island because the sun was rising over it. He drove me over one bridge, which was all right, and then around a wild farming country, in which I distinctly saw a hen and on another occasion what I took to be a cow — in one jump more I figured he would have me among the coyotes and Republicans — and then over another bridge, which was all wrong because it landed us in Westchester County. By then I had only an hour or so to catch the plane, so I began to curse, which I do well. The secret of good cursing lies in cadence, emphasis, and antiphony. The basic themes are always the same. Conscious striving after variety is not to be encouraged, because it takes your mind off your cursing. By the time Schwed got me to the landing he felt what a proper swine he was for having gotten up early in the morning to take me to the plane, and if the experience had broken him of volunteering to do favors for people it would have been worth while.
And he’s Liebling, some time later, at work in rural France:
From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II: 74 years
From the end of World War II to now: 80 years
would that it were so simple
Elizabeth Bruenig: “Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.” ✝️
Molly Haskell first described the problem in 1975, in her classic study From Reverence to Rape: “Women, in the early and middle ages of film, dominated. It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls, the credits, and the romantic spotlight … back in the twenties and thirties, and to a lesser extent the forties, women were at the center.” Haskell was writing in response to the New Hollywood movement — a brief, brilliant blip in movie history when major studios let young European-inspired directors make movies about anything they wanted. Most often, they wanted to make movies about themselves, or their alter egos — at any rate, about men. I’m not knocking it. The artist-driven approach produced many great films, which also happened to be overwhelmingly male. Hollywood has changed since then, but the balance has not changed with it. The ironic truth is that it was at the height of the studio system — the great American movie factory — when women ruled the screen.
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The group examined the question: “What happens in your brain when you walk down the street?” and they concluded that urban environments are not pleasing to the human brain. The reason is the lack of fractals in modern architecture and spaces. Fractals are patterns that self-repeat at different scales, and they can be found all over nature in objects like trees, rivers, clouds and coastlines. […]
“As soon as we look at nature, it triggers a cascade of automatic responses,” Taylor explained. “Even before we’ve noticed what we’re looking at, we’re responding to it.” And the response is a positive one. Humans experience less stress and better well-being when looking at nature, and this is driven by fractals. Taylor’s research has found that fractals can reduce stress and mental fatigue for the observer by as much as 60 percent.
Taylor also points to research that showed hospitalized patients could heal faster when they had access to a window because looking outside, and at all of the natural fractals, helped patients relax their bodies and heal faster.
I wrote about authors and their handwriting.
Nah, they’re right. 100%.
Occasinally I re-post old essays and reviews of mine to my own site. Today I’ve posted my 2015 review of Adam Roberts’s extraordinary edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.
Phil Christman: “In a sufficiently torpid service — one in which the leaders are running on sheer willpower, as I often am simply in showing up — the ill-behaved kids can be the only sign of life. They are God’s simultaneous recognition of and dissent from our solemn boringness.”
Brad East says Christians are conspiracy theorists! Hmmm … I wonder who paid him to say that.
Last of the prairie photos. It was great to see dear friends and familiar places.
You find some odd things in archives, for instance: an 8 June 1943 letter to Sayers from Marshall & Snelgrove, with whom DLS had left corsets to be repaired and “made smaller” — which suggests that she, like many Brits, lost weight during the war. Surely some of her favorite foods were rationed and therefore unavailable or available only in smaller quantities.
Oh right, people are talking about “our post-literate age” again.
The Maradona shrine in Naples is something to behold. ⚽️
Americans talk right now as if everything is disappointing and life is bad. And we need to understand that as a society — not just America, but Western societies generally — we’re getting what I think is the greatest single gift in the entire history of humanity, except maybe medical care. That’s the gift of 10, 15, sometimes 20 years of additional life in the most satisfying and pro-social part of life: late-adulthood.
We’re talking about a world in which people well into their eighties will be healthy enough to work, to contribute, to mentor, to coach. We’re getting a period of fantastic personal growth and development, right at the time in life when we’re best able to exploit it.
This is an incredible thing when you think about it. In many cases, people in history didn’t live long enough to experience this upturn in life satisfaction. So the challenge is to accept this gift, not to throw it away with age discrimination or by forcing people to retire or leave the workforce because supposedly there’s no role for them in their community.