Sunday, May 31, 2015

BUCKLEY AND MAILER.

Shortly before announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York, an esteemed American author proposed a plan for the city: he would give tax breaks to “neighborhoods that developed self-financed patrols”; legalize drugs and gambling; and abolish all commercial vehicle loading between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Once declared, he advocated charging fees on drivers from out of town, building a “Disneyland East” on Queens’ old World’s Fair grounds, and “cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane, twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”

Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”

Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.

But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.

Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.

Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”

But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.

To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.

Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
The anti-war people never really found a doctrine after the argument ran dry that we should continue with the sanctions. Some still hang in there with the cry, “We won’t die for oil!” but that moral-geopolitical analysis is also tending to run dry as the perception widens that “oil” is simply the convenient symbol of the kind of worldwide aggression that Saddam Hussein had in mind where he overran Kuwait and dealt with it in ways that remind old-timers of the Rape of Nanking (we hanged the Japanese general who supervised that operation).
Once a hippie-puncher, always a hippie-puncher. As for Mailer, his return to fiction and its hybrids was a return to form; his energy was as great as Buckley’s, but his skill visibly sharpened and his capacity for empathy remained and deepened and stood well his cause -- that is, his talent and literature. Along with some duds he had great artistic successes, most notably The Excecutioner’s Song. Schultz acknowledges that book’s power but, perhaps to brace up the parallel lives structure, insists that the book "was not, as Alfred Kazin had described Mailer's work a decade earlier, a mirror to the nation." Really? The story of a criminal famous for insisting on and getting the death penalty was no kind of national mirror? It might be argued that the best thing about The Excecutioner’s Song was Mailer’s evocation of the hard country that birthed and shaped Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker.

There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.

But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).

201 comments:

  1. AGoodQuestion11:43 PM

    I have to confess that I've never had a great interest in Mailer and while Buckley was affable enough on a personal basis, his writing could grate over time. So your piquing my interest in a book about both was not an easy task.

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  2. Whoa, hold on. I gotta read this.

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  3. Compulsory free love is an oxymoron.

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  4. Also, wasn't the whole "free love" thing developed by dudes who had a hard time getting laid in the dating market?

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  5. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person12:24 AM

    their mutually glorious verbal skills

    "I'll sock you, and you'll stay socked!"
    Oh, be still my beating heart...

    I used to watch Buckley, and Kupcinet and Susskind and Ross on Chicago TV. It was either that or the rassles. Over time, the rassles won out.

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  6. AGoodQuestion1:02 AM

    Lack of clarity on the concept was seen as a feature, not a bug.

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  7. One might think the triumph of the free market would thrill right wing intellectuals. But even the most revered conservative patriarchs worry that the market alone cannot sustain the flagging energies of the movement...The market's logic glorifies private initiative, individual action, the brilliance of the unplanned and random. Against that backdrop, it is difficult to think about politics at all--much less political transformation William F. Buckley Jr. tells me, "The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex."


    [snip]


    At the end of our interview, I ask Buckley to imagine a younger version of himself, an aspiring political enfant terrible graduating from college in 2000, bringing to today's political world the same insurgent spirit that Buckley brought to his. What kind of politics would this youthful Buckley embrace? "I'd be a socialist," he replies. "A Mike Harrington socialist." He pauses. "I'd even say a communist."



    ---The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin

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  8. tl;dr: fuck that old hustler

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  9. Wrangler1:26 AM

    Bill and Norm's Excellent Adventure, huh? As usual Roy, your review somehow makes this sound interesting. But I never know how to read histories without feeling like little more than a gossip.


    Ultimately I'm not sure how interesting these guys are to me. From what I know of him, Buckley's most conspicuous trait is his frivilousness (I think in an earlier time people would have labelled him a dandy); while Mailer was attached to some kind of tail-chasing Nietzschean tragic vision of the world (but with a lot more fucking). Seems like both were motivated by a hatred of boredom. I can appreciate that.


    Nice review, but I think I'll pass on the book.

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  10. bjkeefe1:40 AM

    That was a superb critical review, Roy. Many thanks for the effort.

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  11. bjkeefe1:43 AM

    One line I always liked from Mailer (not relevant to this discussion, perhaps) went something like this: There is nothing more terrifying than a highly-trained eighteen-year-old.

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  12. Wrangler1:46 AM

    The hilarious thing about that Buckley-Vidal clip to me isn't the verbal throw down at the end, it's the pair of weird, hypnotic monologues that come before that. On the one hand, if I remember correctly, you have Buckley ridiculing nihilism or some shit and accusing it of making everyone unhappy; on the other hand you have Vidal practically chanting about how doomed we all are.

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  13. montag26:18 AM

    As a speaker, Buckley battered his Firing Line guests with his vocabulary. As a child, I thought it a remarkable talent. As I grew older, and began to auto-elide the nonsense and get down to his underlying ideas, it was easy to see that Buckley really didn't have many at all. And he wasn't much of a writer.

    Mailer, on the other hand, produced some genuinely good books, and I still think that "Of a Fire on the Moon" is one of the best short pieces ever written--Tom Wolfe couldn't do in 300 pages of The Right Stuff what Mailer does in about fifteen.

    The Deer Park was one of the better books about Hollywood to come along (although Nathanael West was more spare, hard and, ultimately, put fanatic back into fan, whereas Mailer was sly and insiderish), and whole careers in perspective, Mailer's worst book was still better than the best that Buckley could produce. Maybe their common ground was that they were both moral scolds, although they were coming at it from entirely different directions. Still and all, Buckley was a propagandist with a marginal folliowing, while Mailer was genuinely a writer, read widely and translated liberally, although he worked a bit too hard at being a force of nature, and it showed.

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  14. Wow! A book about two loathsome people, both of whom I dislike as writers. I can't wait to not read it! In fact, I think I'll start not reading it right now!

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  15. montag26:27 AM

    I think he was referring to soldiers.

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  16. I think you have to be wearing a Nehru jacket and blue-tinted spectacles before this starts making sense.

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  17. I think it means "free" as in you don't have to pay for it--government subsidized.


    fucking socialist

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  18. Or socialist fucking, I suppose.

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  19. 2 Many Creeps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqn-1z-B4CM
    ~

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  20. BigHank537:59 AM

    ...who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?

    Funny--I thought about this and realized I'd never heard or read anything from Jonathan Franzen that wasn't bitching about something.

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  21. chuckling8:25 AM

    Nice review, thanks. Hard to believe a time like the sixties existed, a time when it seemed that ideas actually mattered and could possibly mean something in the real world.

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  22. coozledad8:39 AM

    The term "free love" was also used to disparage protofeminist and abolitionist groups in the nineteenth century.


    I guess it was to distinguish it from the slave love or cash love practiced in the south, or the cotton ports of the north.

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  23. coozledad8:41 AM

    Norman mailer's poodle will kick your dog's ass!

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  24. coozledad8:43 AM

    Tru could be funny.

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  25. coozledad8:45 AM

    I'd like to get to know this comment.

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  26. Truman noticed them staring at us, and he said, "Watch out! They'll be coming over for autographs!" And a few minutes later, one of the women at the table got up and came over, carrying a menu. She asked Truman to autograph the menu. He did. She left, and a few minutes later her husband came to our table and glared at Truman.

    "Are you Truman Capote?" And Truman said, "I was this morning!" And the man unzipped his pants, and pulled out his cock. He said, holding it in the palm of his hand, "Can you put your signature on this? And Truman looked down at the cock, and up again, and he said. "I don't know about my signature. But I can initial it!"


    Via

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  27. BigHank539:18 AM

    Capote could get over himself, which strikes me as a prerequisite for humor. Franzen's as big a reactionary sulkmonster as Rod Dreher.

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  28. coozledad9:20 AM

    My question is, which one fantasized hardest over that "worldwide aggression", Saddam or Buckley? They both wanted it to happen, I'm sure, but neither was smart--or self-honest enough--to admit that it could never happen.



    Saddam probably figured the Bush family would never violate the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact they'd inked with him during the Iran War.


    He didn't even have Richard Sorge telling him what was about to happen.

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  29. The other expression was "the community of women" which meant that women were property still, but held in common by all the men. They "practice the community of women" is somehow ascribed to Marx if you google it but I associate it as well with Engles and theories of early matriarchy. Free love meant that women and men were free to choose for themselves, and not merely once and for all time through marriage. My grandparents were both raised on an anarchist commune that practiced free love. Lots of people didn't get married at all in a revolt against the role of the state in chaining women and men to marriages that didn't work, or to property rights they didnt approve of.

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  30. coozledad9:31 AM

    In other words, agency.


    It pisses them off.

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  31. M. Krebs9:43 AM

    Likewise, it's hard to believe a time like the seventies existed. Then the eighties came along and, well, we know how that turned out.

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  32. This is one biting comment.

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  33. Halloween_Jack9:52 AM

    Elevated bike path? Well, I guess it's true that no one's completely awful.

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  34. Wow, David Susskind--a name I haven't heard in decades. Way back in the distant midst of time, my then-girlfriend's grandmother cupped my chin, gazed into my eyes and pronounced, "You're just like David Susskind."

    Something like that sticks with a fella.

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  35. Eh, there were ideas that mattered. It's just that the ideas really sucked, so everyone decided to lose themselves in sex, music (first rock, then disco), and drugs (first pot, then coke). By the time 1980 rolled around, too many people had become so addled that Reagan sounded like he was making sense.

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  36. (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?)Well, it would depend on whether I was in the mood for canapés or popcorn.

    “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really?I could sort-of see this. I mean, if the counterculture hadn't existed, his shtick would have required him to invent it, instead of just being a mendacious shitbag about it.

    “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line…Yeah, laissez faire, racism, sexism, and lip service to "traditional" Christianity were all so far outside the political mainstream back then.

    "… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, ConnecticutYeah, I hear Arthur Getz once fainted dead away on the sidewalk because he saw two people riding on one motorcycle at the same time.

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  37. Duncan10:16 AM

    First prize, Norman Mailer won't speak to you for two years. Second prize, he won't speak to you for one year.

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  38. NB: you don't "tow" a passenger on a motorcycle. Or not if you want them to still be friends at the end of the trip.

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  39. I'm just putting this here because I don't want to put it under Chuckling's post and start an argument. Lots of people have the illusion that the time in their lives when they were young "really mattered" or that the time in their lives when the country was at war and in a convulsion about it "really had ideas." This is more about the feeling that people have always had, after terrible upheavals like war, plague, or frustrated youth, that the rest of life's dull, diurnal, round just isn't as meaningful or as intense.


    People feel things more intensely at certain times in their lives, citizens feel things more intensly at certain times in their community or their country's "life." That doesn't mean that there were ideas and then there weren't. Just that the intensity of the moment has gone.

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  40. JennOfArk10:35 AM

    (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?)



    Or, on the other side - who'd you rather hear bitch - William F. Buckley or Jonah Goldberg (or Ben Shapiro, or ........?).


    There isn't really any literary voice in this country occupying either side of the debate these days.

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  41. dstatton10:47 AM

    So true. You should have heard my father talk about the Great Depression.

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  42. Maybe the passenger in question was a hippie whose anger and frustration he was trying to understand.

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  43. coozledad10:55 AM

    My coevals felt that intensity of the moment thing so strongly there are shit tons of classic rock stations to satiate their continuing appetite for Zep, Boston, and Foreigner.


    I liked it better when the goth kids came around with their Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. They weren't as fucking stupid. At least they weren't deaf.

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  44. Buckley: thug with a thesaurus

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  45. M. Krebs10:56 AM

    You left out Studs Terkel.

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  46. philadelphialawyer10:59 AM

    Mailer actually had some good, or at least interesting ideas...like New York City statehood, and de centralization of police authority to the neighborhoods...And the campaign buttons were great..."Throw the Rascals IN" being my favorite. Although "No More Bullshit" was pretty good too.
    For an insider account of the campaign, check out Joe Flaherty's "Managing Mailer."
    Breslin, who was running for City Council President, steals the show, and actually out polled Mailer in the election. Mailer comes across as a jerk, and, yeah, his Village Gate speech pretty much washed up whatever real chance he had.

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  47. BigHank5310:59 AM

    Ah, the eighties. When was the exact moment you realized you were living in somebody else's hangover?

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  48. We wanted up skirt views, so awful even when he wasn't awful.

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  49. Magatha11:04 AM

    Yeah, in the SDS, "smashing monogamy" was mainly a political action that guys celebrated.

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  50. Magatha11:07 AM

    Good work, Roy, but I'm with Derelict.

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  51. lawguy11:18 AM

    Time to review that clip, since that isn't at all what I remember. I remember some very acrimonious back and forth concerning the specifics of the police riots during the democratic convention.

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  52. M. Krebs11:34 AM

    It's easy to overstate the "importance" of the sixties. I like to think of the JFK assassination and Nixon's resignation as bookends. In between, wow. It was fucking amazing just in terms of the sheer volume of insane shit that happened.

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  53. mrstilton11:37 AM

    Robin's book is well worth reading. In particular, it has great insight into why the conservative truism that "today's conservatives are the radicals of a hundred years ago", even when true (it certainly is not true for the current century), is irrelevant.

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  54. LA Julian11:40 AM

    a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting

    I must take issue with this statement: experts assure us constantly that past generations of writers did not feud in public (What, never? No, never!), due to it being a time of decency and standards, and that any personal conflicts today are solely the result of the internet.

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  55. mrstilton11:41 AM

    Zeppelin? It's a rare day I'd put one of their "platters" onto the "Hi-Fi" myself, but I can see that.

    Boston? Well, Tom Scholz did have some interesting techncial ideas, I guess.

    But Foreigner? Seriously? WTF? I mean, WT fucking F?

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  56. mrstilton11:41 AM

    These days I'm more of an Yma Sumac fan, myself.

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  57. Lots of people have the illusion that the time in their lives when they were young "really mattered" or that the time in their lives when the country was at war and in a convulsion about it "really had ideas." This is more about the feeling that people have always had, after terrible upheavals like war, plague, or frustrated youth, that the rest of life's dull, diurnal, round just isn't as meaningful or as intense.


    Very true. You can see this expressed in extreme form by talking with veterans. It's become cliché that "war is a force that gives us meaning," but for many combat veterans, war was a time when they faced life, death, and the randomness of intentional violence--and they have never felt as alive since then.


    People feel things more intensely at certain times in their lives, citizens feel things more intensly at certain times in their community or their country's "life." That doesn't mean that there were ideas and then there weren't. Just that the intensity of the moment has gone.

    Part of what contributes to this today is the instantaneousness of communication. We're constantly flooded with information about events great and small, (mostly) horrific and amazing. Every day is a new adventure in things you can feel intensely about. Some react by tuning out; some react with great empathy; some react by becoming angry, paranoid, and reactionary.

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  58. LA Julian11:43 AM

    Also grosses them out -- implicit in the use of "practised the community of women" is the same mindset that regards a woman who has had sex with another man as a used tissue/licked lollypop...

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  59. mrstilton11:44 AM

    Yeah, but without the 1980s, we'd never have had this.

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  60. LA Julian11:45 AM

    I hear he's written a novel or two...

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  61. Ellis_Weiner11:45 AM

    You guys...this saddens me. Reading Mailer at 15 was what made me want to be a writer. Yes, he published a lot of awful stuff, awful in the way that only an interesting mind can be awful (Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost).

    But I don't see how you can read The Armies of the Night, or his capsule history of Miami in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, or The Executioner's Song (in which he suppressed his entire style, like Peter Sellers transforming from Dr. Strangelove into Chauncey Gardener), and not get a buzz.

    As a novelist he was terrible--you wanted to tell him, "Just because you write something as fiction doesn't mean it's true." His sexism was self-parodying. But as a writerly mind reacting to America (and from the Cold War through Viet Nam, already), as a describer of real people, and as an architect of roller-coaster sentences, he was superb.

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  62. LA Julian11:48 AM

    My impression may be mistaken, but I always had the notion that Mailer wanted to have been Ernest Hemingway.

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  63. Right. This is a topic that is covered from the psychological/neuroscience end in The Body Keeps the Score where the relationship between adrenaline flow, memory formation, and emotional highs and lows are described. People literally put down their most intense memories at the moments when their bodies are flooded with adrenaline. High excitement, the unusual, the painful, the terrifying--these are all moments in the life of our sentience that help us put down and retain specific memories, memories which we then can't escape and which we can then choose to use to isolate us from everyone else (no one else has suffered like I have) or to link us to people with similar experiences.


    Now that I'm thinking about it I suppose I think this is why the Fox News generation has gotten more and more paranoid and isolationist as they have gotten older. The experiences which they saw as shared and meaningful have, over time, become somethign that everyone doesn't share, or not in the same way, so naturally they retreat into rage and a feeling of being dispossesed and disregarded.

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  64. All I know about Yma Sumac is that she/he/it was mentioned by Spike in one episode of BuffyTVS.

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  65. Arguing music taste is like trying to persuade someone that broccoli tastes good even though that person gags at the sight of broccoli.

    Duke Ellington was once asked what good music is. His response: "If you like it, it's good music." And I think that's the truth whether you listen to Zep, Zappa, or the Yazoo City Kazoo Orchestra.

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  66. I have a friend who's 96 years old. He once told me that the hardest thing about getting old was feeling useless.

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  67. Magatha11:59 AM

    I did read The Executioner's Song, and was moved and impressed by it. I might just read Armies of the Night based on your recommendation alone. But I do not want to read a bio of Mailer/Buckley. (I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it.)

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  68. It's another one of those taste things: Mailer's style is most definitely not to my taste. I've tried reading him and I just can't get very far before I'm wondering what else there is to do. I tried really hard to read Executioner's Song, but had the same experience.

    As the kids say, YMMV.

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  69. mrstilton12:00 PM

    Yeah, I take your point, Der. (Can I call you Der?) It's all subjective. After all, my own definition of "Deadhead" is "somebody who has more versions of 'The Eleven' than I do".

    But still, Foreigner?!

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  70. You can't convince me Brussels sprouts taste good, and you can't convince me that Foreigner sounds good.

    Call me Der?!?! If we were in Germany, that would be Her Der. Either way, it's a bit too close to "derp," thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  71. coozledad12:12 PM

    What's even worse is being in a copy band and having to commit that shit to memory. Steve Miller. Eddie Money. Foghat.


    They took my childhood.

    ReplyDelete
  72. Ellis_Weiner12:26 PM

    He wanted to win what had been Hemingway's stature (as "the greatest writer of his generation") without the limitations of Hemingway's personality or fears. I think, now that we mention it, Franzen is sort of the same: he's pissed that no one, any more, is a Great Writer. My sense is, Franzen grew up (as I did) with the figures of Mailer, Updike, Roth, Bellow, etc., occupying the role of The Artist as Important Social Figure, and now bitterly thinks he should qualify, for a title that no longer exists.

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  73. coozledad12:41 PM

    Franzen has the misfortune of living at the same time as Hilary Mantel. Not just a great writer about great things, but a natural writer about any damn thing.
    He should just shut up and be awed.

    ReplyDelete
  74. We have a 99 year old neighbor--or 98--you'd think I'd remember since we were just at her birthday party and the heat of the candles nearly melted my eyebrows--people do become isolated and the TV becomes their friend. Mercifully my friend doesn't watch any tv, just listens to a little music, so she never tells me any fox news crap. And my parents, who are in their eighties, get their information largely from left wing and science/impartial sources so they remain current without changing their politics. But it can be hard to stay focused and mentally active and sceptical without being depressed at that age just because your social network of equals or of stimulating new people just shrinks and shrinks.

    ReplyDelete
  75. Affable? Sure. Affable enough? I'd set "Not being an openly misogynist bigoted bullying asshole who repeatedly threatens to physically assault people" as a reasonable minimum. His affability could disappear at the drop of a KKK hood.

    ReplyDelete
  76. "Well, I've seen some damn' funny things in the last two days. A six-hundred-pound Chirago demon making like Yma Sumac, that one will stay with
    you."

    ReplyDelete
  77. Her name was used by Sophie in one episode of Leverage (didn't fool the mark, though).

    ReplyDelete
  78. oh, yes, I remember that episode too!

    ReplyDelete
  79. Of all the mysteries of the internet the fact that two strangers, with avatars from Moominworld, can come together over a shared love of snark and BTVS is one of the greatest. Truly: there is a god.

    ReplyDelete
  80. Or, on the other side - who'd you rather hear bitch - William F. Buckley or Jonah Goldberg (or Ben Shapiro, or ........?).


    Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt! Too late--both Jonah and Virgin Ben bitch and whine incessantly. And they do so in semi-literate incoherent ways--a lose-loser sandwich.

    There isn't really any literary voice in this country occupying either side of the debate these days. . . >br>
    For what it's worth, Steven King has been speaking out against Maine governor Paul LePage (AKA "The Human Bowling Jacket") and all of Maine's fuck-the-poor programs (and pogroms). There are and have been other literary voices speaking out from the left, but they get ignored by the media and/or drowned out by the rightwing Wurlitzer

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  81. bekabot2:09 PM

    Buckley didn't understand that certain types of things have to be done in order — for example, you read the dictionary first and then you read the thesaurus. Buckley read the thesaurus first and was so bowled over that he never read the dictionary at all.

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  82. Gromet2:10 PM

    Hear, hear, Ellis_. There's Mailer novels I simply can't get through, but when he is on fire with ideas, oh man. I discovered him when I was 21 (it was "The White Negro") and spent the next 5 years pulling his books off shelves. Even now you can probably draw a line, crooked but unbroken, from Advertisements For Myself to the patterns and strategies of my daily internal monologue.

    ReplyDelete
  83. Gromet2:18 PM

    This smacks of hyperbole.

    ReplyDelete
  84. BigHank532:18 PM

    John Grisham has spoken up for more than a few Democratic causes.

    ReplyDelete
  85. Chris Anderson2:51 PM

    No, one can't just drop acid.
    "Uh, are you on something?"
    "Just some LSD, why do you ask?"

    ReplyDelete
  86. Gromet2:52 PM

    I haven't read her but seems to me there's room for more than one Great Writer at a time. Hemingway shared his era with Faulkner, after all, and some people would also count Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.

    ReplyDelete
  87. 8:00-9:30: Mandatory breakfast buffet



    9:00-11:00: Compulsory free love



    11:00-11:10: Obligatory shower



    11:10-12:00: Rigorously enforced nap


    12:00-13:00: No-exceptions lunch



    13:00-14:00: Required gay marrying


    14:00-15:00: Compulsory free love II


    15:00-15:10: Obligatory shower II


    15:10-16:00: Rigorously enforced nap II


    16:10-18:00: Non-optional gay abortions


    18:00-19:00: De rigeur cocktail hour


    19:00-21:00: Inescapable dinner banquet


    21:00-21:30: Compulsory free love III


    21:30-21:40: Obligatory shower III


    21:40-22:00: Necessary anti-inflammatory ointment session


    22:00-23:00: Parcheesi at gunpoint


    23:00: Inflexible lights out

    ReplyDelete
  88. parsec3:02 PM

    Then too, I spent almost my entire teenage with the Beatles. Month after month, the hits just kept comin'. When I first heard "I wanna hold your hand" I knew there was a new world on the way.

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  89. I recall reading that many Americans just want to be famous. They would skip being rich and didn't really want to be powerful--they just want to be famous.

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  90. redoubtagain3:06 PM

    (Actually, to Buckley the thesaurus was the dictionary.)

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  91. Halloween_Jack3:06 PM

    See, I didn't even think of that.

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  92. Man, I really can't see that. I can see wanting to be rich, and I can see wanting to be powerful, but I can't see wanting to be famous. How unbearably tedious.

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  93. Halloween_Jack3:09 PM

    I can't remember where I saw this or who wrote it--Sebastian Junger, maybe?--but someone did a post about the dirty secret that some vets have; they loved going to war; war wasn't hell for them, but kind of the opposite, Valhalla maybe.

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  94. redoubtagain3:10 PM

    Yup. "Greatest Living Writer" is about as relevant as "World's Heavyweight Champion" these days. . .

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  95. Halloween_Jack3:10 PM

    Funny, I'd just read about The Body Keeps the Score from somewhere (maybe you'd mentioned it here or at LGM?), and it's on the reading list.

    ReplyDelete
  96. redoubtagain3:12 PM

    Keep in mind--you and Kim Kardashian are both citizens.

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  97. Bitter Scribe3:13 PM

    I liked Executioner's Song too, but if you read Armies of the Night, be prepared for Mailer, Mailer and more Mailer. In that book the entire universe revolves around him, to the point of self-parody. He spent one night in a federal lockup and makes it sound like four years in a concentration camp.

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  98. Bitter Scribe3:17 PM

    I'd never heard or read anything from Jonathan Franzen that wasn't bitching about something.


    Usually something stupid, like complaining about Oprah Winfrey putting The Replacements in her book club because "I consider myself in the high-art literary tradition" and Oprah's fans weren't refined enough for him. The man clearly does not know when to shut up.

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  99. Oh, there's all kinds of really weird psychological shit that happens to men in combat. That's why you get men who keep signing up for new tours. And those guys tend to become completely non-functional outside of a combat zone.

    I have read about soldiers seeing their buddies get wounded or killed while they remain unscathed, and some of those survivors develop a fascination with tempting death. They'll jump out in front of a machinegun nest, or charge a cluster of foxholes, or just casually stick their heads up in a firezone. They're trying to understand what it was that kept them from getting zapped when others around them got hit.

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  100. Really. Ask any one of us who has made a living with the pen: Do we really care what kind of person is buying our books or reading our articles? No. Just cut me the fucking check already. I don't care if the reader is slugging his third beer of the morning while lounging in a filthy bathrobe, or if he's squeezing in a couple of pages before rushing off to groom his polo pony.

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  101. M. Krebs3:24 PM

    Heh,. I was a huge fan of Gene Loves Jezebel for a while. https://youtu.be/yqlZvfVWvGA (Nothing much like the 4AD crew, but still.)

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  102. Chris Anderson3:25 PM

    Acid baby scares me ... kid's trippin' balls and his balls haven't even dropped ...


    What qualifies as a chill-out room when you live in a nursery? How do you talk this guy down? Or him, you?

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  103. Don't know if "tedious" is the word I'd use. Perhaps "exhausting" fits better. Whatever it is you become famous for, being famous means people know and recognize you in public. That's flattering for about 15 minutes. Then it becomes a real pain in the ass because you can't go out in public without being recognized. I think it was Paul Newman who began refusing to sign autographs when a fan pestered him for one while he was standing at a urinal.

    And, of course, these days you never know when that "fan" might turn out to be someone with several screws coming loose.

    I'll stay private citizen Derelict, thanks--just leading my life of quiet satisfaction.

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  104. M. Krebs3:35 PM

    Welcome to Jamaica. Have a nice day.

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  105. coozledad3:44 PM

    You might want to start with the novels that aren't history novels. She understands a lot more about human motivation than most. It's almost creepy.


    Vacant Possession is a beautiful, frightening book.


    if anyone could write an intelligent porno, it'd be her.

    ReplyDelete
  106. coozledad3:46 PM

    ... John Lennon trying to escape to the anonymity of New York.

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  107. coozledad3:53 PM

    It took me a while to realize what I wanted was to be able to wander out in my yard naked at two in the morning and piss up the side of a black walnut tree without the neighbors phoning the cops. It costs money to live in your own state park, but it's money we didn't spend on cars or currently fashionable clothing.
    It was surprisingly cheap, really.

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  108. coozledad4:00 PM

    I worked a couple of blocks down from The Record Bar in Chapel Hill when they were big. All the kids had that hair. They got me listening to The Durutti Column and Chameleons UK.

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  109. Gromet4:08 PM

    David Foster Wallace got the closest of anyone in the past 20 years. I can't think of another who could lay as solid a claim to it. Franzen wants the post; Toni Morrison flirted with it 20 years ago -- but it's the siege perilous, really, and it's been empty for a while.

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  110. Ellis_Weiner4:12 PM

    Richard Burton told ___ on 60 Minutes that he'd have preferred "a writer's fame"--it can get you a good table at a restaurant, but most people don't know who you are, and leave you alone.

    ReplyDelete
  111. M. Krebs4:35 PM

    I saw GLJ at the Brewery in Raleigh (very small room) and then followed them up to Richmond. The Raleigh show killed; in Richmond not so much.

    ReplyDelete
  112. the public is fairly atomized, with every demographic adhering to its own "facts."

    Which is one of the projects the Right has been working on for decades, and it's going swimmingly.

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  113. coozledad5:23 PM

    I've heard that from some guys who were in the navy during the closing months of WWII, who didn't see much action besides failed kamikaze attacks (and those were against other ships).


    And that's what Hitler's fellow soldiers seemed to agree on. He was the only one who didn't want to go home.

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  114. bekabot6:06 PM

    That's what happens when you know the words but not their definitions. If he'd read the dictionary first (the way he should have) he'd have known better.

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  115. Harold Persing6:51 PM

    I typically associate this with the Eagles, frankly.

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  116. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person7:12 PM

    Disclaimer: I'm tired. But I read that as "smashing mahogany", and was all, man, the flashbacks finally got here...

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  117. Yes, the average of Kim Kardashian and myself is truly a monster.

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  118. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person7:36 PM

    "Things are looking up" has a different meaning for some folks...

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  119. marindenver7:40 PM

    We saw Truman Capote at the Paramount Theater here several years ago. He was hilarious - very dry delivery & very witty. This sounds just like him. OT but if anyone ever gets a chance to go see David Sedaris don't pass it up. Very, very funny and a lot more ribald than his essays.

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  120. montag27:53 PM

    "Something like that sticks with haunts a fella."

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  121. M. Krebs8:04 PM

    Yeah, neither side seems to have a real public intellectual at the moment.


    Well, there is Krugman.

    ReplyDelete
  122. M. Krebs8:06 PM

    I was six years old then. So I spent the next seven years thinking it was normal.

    ReplyDelete
  123. montag28:06 PM

    Unless you're just a green vegetable hater in general, Brussels sprouts can be very good, if prepared properly. Just boiling them whole leaves them bitter.

    I suspect the same can be said for Foreigner.

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  124. M. Krebs8:08 PM

    Ich liebe Rosenkohl! Steamed, roasted, or raw.

    ReplyDelete
  125. montag28:27 PM

    The experts seem to have forgotten, um, the Algonquin Round Table, or the rather public battles Mark Twain engaged in because of his anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-racist stances, not to mention the intellectual warfare between various Greek and Roman playwrights. Shit, there must have weeks on end when Euripides didn't want to open the front door.

    And, a case can be made that Oscar Wilde pissed off so many public intellectuals that he was put in jail for it.

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  126. montag28:45 PM

    it was probably a greater deficiency in Buckley than most realize. One of my all-time favorite unintentional exposures of Buckley's brand of thinking came in a (IIRC) 1971 interview of him in Playboy, in which he defended his pro-drug war views, even though they conflicted with his stances on individual liberty. He was asked, approximately, "how can you be sure of this when you haven't tried any drugs?" And Buckley proceeds to shove both of his giant wing-tips into his mouth. "Oh, I have. I just prefer scotch to marijuana." "So, you have tried it? When?"

    "On my sailboat."

    "So, although just for the sake of experimentation, you do admit to breaking the law? After all, that's a prime example of why the laws need changing."

    "Oh, no, I didn't break the law. I went out beyond the three-mile limit before I tried it."

    Now, since the law is against not use, but possession, unless he had it helicoptered in from a neutral country with no mutual treaties on drug interdiction, he did, indeed, break the law (and his thesis also probably ignores that the limit is 200 miles for certain fishing, piracy, and criminal purposes), but to his mind, he'd done nothing wrong. His definitions were wrong, but, in his mind, he was absolutely right.

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  127. I'm not sure there's any other way to prepare Foreigner except boiling.

    ReplyDelete
  128. His definitions were wrong, but, in his mind, he was absolutely right.

    So, Jonah is simply carrying on the Buckley tradition when he writes Liberal Fascism.

    ReplyDelete
  129. Would that average be a mean?

    ReplyDelete
  130. montag29:57 PM

    Yes, he's a worthy successor, and not just in the "first as tragedy, next as farce" sense.

    ReplyDelete
  131. montag210:00 PM

    Her claim to fame--apart from her rather unusual name--was that her singing voice could flawlessly span five octaves.

    ReplyDelete
  132. Magatha10:23 PM

    I love you guys. I was about to mention the Chirago demon, but luckily I scrolled down a little more first.

    ReplyDelete
  133. Tehanu10:57 PM

    I've always called him T. Cockamamie Boyle. I guess "Tom C. Boyle" wasn't cool enough. Can't stand him, either as a person -- that is, a public persona, I don't know him personally -- or a writer, but to be fair, Hubby Dearest admires his writing a lot.

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  134. Chris Anderson11:05 PM

    Brussels sprouts are good, but you lost me at Foreigner.

    ReplyDelete
  135. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:10 PM

    At least there is no Broccoli Mandate

    ReplyDelete
  136. mortimer200011:15 PM

    Terrific review, makes me want to steer clear of the book while triggering memories of the Mailer/Breslin 51st State campaign. It also produced an urge to seek out some Breslin to read on the subject. I found this, not one of his best, but it's still got enough of him to evince a big dose of nostalgia for the Good Old Days.

    ReplyDelete
  137. I have a chiffarobe that needs busting up.

    ReplyDelete
  138. JennOfArk12:45 AM

    Well, it's not like they're sadists or anything.

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  139. JennOfArk1:13 AM

    Sadly, the most influential/known writers in the US these days are probably that woman who wrote that Twilight twaddle, and the person who wrote 50 Shades of Gray. But by the same token, you look back at the 60's and you could probably say the same about Jacqueline Susann. There are many great authors living and writing now (or recently deceased) who occupy this space as public intellectuals; they just aren't American, and the Twilight/50 Shades crowd wouldn't recognize their names, much less pick up one of their books. Which is a real shame, because not only have Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Naipul, Grass, Rushdie, etc occupied that space of public intellectual, their work itself stakes out their positions on politics, ethics and all the big questions so succinctly that they have no need of Mailer/Buckley hijinx, though we hear their thoughts from time to time.


    As to American writers, there are many fine ones working now, just not in that same space. Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, Edward P. Jones, even John Irving who disappoints me regularly but who I'll continue to read on the off chance he might come up with another Garp or Owen Meany.


    We might never again have Artists as Important Social Figures here in the US; a country where a solid third of the populace considers knowing your ass from a hole in the ground to be intellectual elitism isn't the most fertile ground. So while the rest of the world produces its Garcia Marquezes, we'll match them 10 to 1 with Kardashians.

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  140. LookWhosInTheFreezer1:14 AM

    Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried (among other of his novels that all center around Vietnam/PTSD etc.) touched on this, iirc.

    ReplyDelete
  141. montag21:24 AM

    I don't believe this for one fucking second. That choice was always available to Buckley, and he chose instead to hove to the interests of his class. It wasn't out of any desire for distinction by being an iconoclast, which he implies here. it was because he saw himself as the defender of America's aristocracy, of which he was--and saw himself--a part.

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  142. montag22:04 AM

    Part of this certainly is due to the corporatization of publishing, and with that trend, so too have gone not only proofreaders, but editors with an understanding of the craft (and I would include the young Bennett Cerf in that category). Today, editing has become much more pedestrian, and much less appreciated. Another side effect is that there's much less inclination to pay for the sort of top-flight translators that bringing foreign work to this country required (Avon Books did this well in `60s and `70s--I probably never would have heard of Jorge Amado if not for their translations of his books).

    I think there has always been the publishing phenomenon of the blockbuster, but, in the past, those books were used to subsidize the publication of more interesting work, whereas in contemporary times, the money from them is just pocketed.

    I think, too, as the unions abandoned their radical evening education courses of the `30s and `40s, reading among the general populace declined. There was definitely a sense in those classes that knowledge is power, and its recipients were voracious readers.

    I can't attest to the accuracy of the statistics, but, if true, these might explain the effects of those corporate publishing policies:

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  143. mrstilton4:14 AM

    Well, I am in Germany. But if it'll make you more comfortable, I'll call you The instead.

    ReplyDelete
  144. Now that's the kind of respect I admire and deserve!

    Thanks for starting my day off with a laugh!

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  145. Some small part of this is due to the forced-march nature of how reading is taught in American schools. But a bigger chunk is due to the fact that humans are undergoing a fundamental shift in the way our brains work.

    Before moveable type, people had amazing memories. They could memorize thousands of lines of text--typically after only hearing it once or twice. This is how epic works like The Iliad got passed down, and how local oral histories were used to settle legal disputes. But once books became widespread and affordable, we as a species began losing that amazing memory because we no longer needed it--everything was written down. The process took hundreds of years, but by the 1900s, it was definitely completed.

    At the moment, we're undergoing a similar change. Constant instant access to the internet combined with the steady transition of knowledge into purely visual forms (videos and graphics) is eroding our need and desire for printed words.

    Where this ends up, I have no idea. But it is happening right before our eyes, and I find it both fascinating and horrifying.

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  146. I'd guess it would be more Medean.

    Not that Kim has served Kanye a helping of North stew yet.

    ReplyDelete
  147. Speaking of food, did you get the email I sent you last week?

    ReplyDelete
  148. coozledad7:40 AM

    I've always had poor memory skills. I think anxiety disrupts the way it's supposed to work. The web is a good crutch.


    I'd spring for a brain implant, as long as I could get some guarantee they wouldn't rent it to non-disinterested content providers.

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  149. The pop-up ads for Viagra could lead to priapism.

    ReplyDelete
  150. coozledad7:50 AM

    It would be the capitalist dream. A nation of zombies muttering "I will buy that. Gimme two."

    ReplyDelete
  151. Jill Lepore? But I suppose a public intellectual has to be promoted by the papers and the media of the day and one of the problems we have is that there is no liberal Fox news equivalent putting on talking heads from the liberal side every hour of every day.

    ReplyDelete
  152. I, too, remember listening to the Beatles rapturously, at that age.

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  153. They could memorize thousands of lines of text--typically after only hearing it once or twice.
    There's some evidence that what they memorized was the story together with some "kennings" or epithets. Sometime between the world wars (I think) a philologist from Harvard took one of those huge wire-recorders into the wilds of Albania, and recorded the local pre-literate populations' epic poems about Scanderbeg and similar folk heroes, poems that had been passed on for nearly a thousand years (a good approximation of how long the Hellenes might have passed on the Iliad before Greek literacy got well-established). Fifty or sixty years later, someone else went back (now equipped with a tape recorder) and taped the same stuff from later, still barely literate, generations' mouths. There was a lot of divergence in the literal "lines of text".



    Of course, I'm just repeating the story as I remember it.


    And, yes, I did get your e-mail; I've had no response from efg, but will try again today.

    ReplyDelete
  154. "Even Homer nods, if I remember correctly."

    ReplyDelete
  155. BigHank538:48 AM

    Ta-Nehisi Coates.

    ReplyDelete
  156. BigHank539:18 AM

    corporatization of publishing

    A factor but not the only one. There's only twenty-four hours in the day, and now there are a hell of a lot more things competing for everyone's attention. In the sixties how many places would give you an opportunity to catch up on Ingmar Bergman's older films if you had the impulse--New York, Boston, and LA? For the last two decades it's been everywhere. TV used to be four networks' worth of 99% garbage. It's still 99% garbage but hundreds of channels means there's a lot more good stuff out there now. It was easier for a novelist to stand on top of a pile of culture when the pile was smaller.

    Novels as an art form had a head start of a couple centuries, too, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the competition is, well, actually competing.

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  157. montag210:16 AM

    Certainly didn't mean to imply that. Both you and Derelict are correct that there are other factors--what the full extent of influence of each, I couldn't guess, though.

    There are more distractions today, agreed. But, in the past, there were other distractions, too, and some rather hard physical labor for a good part of the day.

    Generally, yes, like most cultural problems, the causes are more complicated than they appear.

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  158. he defended his pro-drug war views, even though they conflicted with his stances on individual liberty.In fairness, later in life he was a proponent of legalization via "government drugstores." That his solution even involved direct big government participation in the marketplace to minimize any black market due to profiteering was magnificently Morissettian.

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  159. I don't care if the reader is slugging his third beer of the morning
    while lounging in a filthy bathrobe, or if he's squeezing in a couple of
    pages before rushing off to groom his polo pony.Oh, come on, this isn't a particularly realistic set of scenarios. Owners of polo ponies have people to do their reading for them.

    ReplyDelete
  160. Try pan-roasted with maple syrup AND Dijon. And maybe a little bacon for good measure.

    ReplyDelete
  161. Kevin M. Schultz11:00 AM

    Just a quick note to say thanks for the thoughtful review. The book tries to understand the transformations of the Sixties through these two larger-than-life, sometimes despicable, always engaging figures. But it's really the changes of the time that form the center of the book, and whatever you might think about their politics or writing, in their letters to each other they were funny, humane, and fully engaged with the times. I appreciate your efforts to point that out. Every author loves a good, critical review (well, maybe not Mailer...).

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  162. And those guys tend to become completely non-functional outside of a combat zone.Hingeless in Valhalla: The Tom Cotton Story

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  163. DocAmazing11:08 AM

    See also Storm of Steel, by Ernst Junger, recounting the author's experience in WW1. tl,dr: it was a rush.

    ReplyDelete
  164. Magatha11:20 AM

    Whoa. This comment scares me. I like you.

    ReplyDelete
  165. Magatha11:21 AM

    In mitigation, I believe broccoli is included in the Call Any Vegetable Option.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Magatha11:24 AM

    Yikes. This sounds weirdly like hurt/comfort slash fic, with a "hold the comfort" twist. I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'd prefer Kirk/Spock.

    ReplyDelete
  167. Magatha11:36 AM

    Ooh. This is inspiring. Before I read it (so I don't get influenced stylistically) I should write my own harrowing story: a poor simple spinster lady, who ekes out a modest living in the heart of one of the wealthiest counties in the state, tries desperately to find a small affordable dwelling of her own. I could make it sound like Syria!

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  168. Magatha11:42 AM

    Yeah, the train of history was running at full speed through tortuous terrain. I fell off in early 1970 and have kind of been wandering around ever since. At first I tried to walk off the shock, and even catch up, but that never worked and I've been living in an unexpected but oddly pleasant landscape ever since.

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  169. Magatha11:48 AM

    Aimai, have you read a book titled The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
    by David J. Morris? It's pretty new, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015. I thought it was fascinating, but I'd be interested in your take on it. Which reminds me: do you have a Goodreads or LibraryThing account to note your reading, and if so, might I have permission to lurk to see what you're reading?

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  170. Magatha11:55 AM

    I adore Stephen King. I haven't read all or even most of his novels, but the guy is a genius and a mensch. But I am a big fan of what's been called genre fiction. Ian Tregillis, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyer, Tad Williams, Nevada Barr....

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  171. I read World's End last year, my one foray into TC's work. I was underwhelmed. He completely gave up on his hero at the end and left me wondering, Why did I read this fucking thing? TC's got one more chance. I might try one of his more recent books, but not today.

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  172. Magatha, I heard the writer interviewed on NPR--very good interview, btw, and the book sounds fascinating. Thats the former soldier who studied himself, right? Its kind of on my list. I don't have a goodreads or librarything account but I've thought about blogging my reading more (which is to say starting) and maybe keeping a running tab down the side of my blog. I write stuff I don't post and book reviews are something I would like to keep current with. So maybe I'll try to start up again.

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  173. realinterrobang1:29 PM

    I dunno, man, I worry about something I wrote turning up on someone's shelf right beside The Turner Diaries after said someone commits a "lone wolf" attack and gets himself suicided by cop. The item in question, although written by a European-style social democrat (that these folks would probably call an out-and-out Communist) seems to have some inexplicable appeal to right-wing paranoids. I didn't do it on purpose, I swear!

    (The reason I worry is because it'll make me look bad, and ew, argh!, and I don't want the police sniffing around me because I've incited terrorism or something. Like the good Charles Johnson, and notably unlike Pam Geller, I would have a sense of shame about being cited by Anders Behring Breivik.)

    Other than that, though, you're right on the money. Or the money's right on you, depending on whether or not I actually am an out-and-out Communist. :D

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  174. realinterrobang1:30 PM

    Call any vegetable! Ford any stream! Follow any rainbow! Until you... uh, never mind...

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  175. realinterrobang1:36 PM

    I completely agree with this.

    Not only that, but he's the first writer I know of who's ever written about writing, as in how to write, without coming off as insufferable, full of himself, or generalising wildly and beyond the point of sanity about his own experiences, and I had to read a lot of literary theory in my BA and MA courses. "Mensch" hardly even begins to cover it.


    Oh, and if you haven't yet read Joyland, run, don't walk, and grab a copy. IMO it's the best thing he's ever written.

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  176. edroso1:51 PM

    Thanks, Kevin. I enjoyed the book and I hope that came across too.

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  177. the passage makes sense in the context of robin's thesis: i'm mostly paraphrasing here, but---in the name of preserving the old order, conservatives undertake a revolution; burke and his contemporaries lauded the jacobin spirit for their undertaking, and called for jacobinite purges of the catholic hierarchy which had become degenerate and too worldly.


    here, you see a similar spirit animating movement conservatism; there's a great history about early 20th century conservatism that i just don't want to bother googling right now that pointed out despite the rhetoric of mccarthyism or cold war conservatives, their concerns were never elsewhere, and indeed were never very sophisticated inre to global politics, but always *here.* always the traitor at home.


    but perhaps speaking most directly to the above quote was that robin found was that it's the *fight* that conservatives glory in, as a means in and of itseld---it's an intensely romantic (in both the literary and figurative senses of the word) feeling for being at war with an enemy (i think this is best illustrated in glenn beck's paperback fictions---critics miss this for all the goofy plotting and dimwit characters, but what they speak to is a yearning for the fight. we laugh here about the constant bitching and complaining about persecution, *but therein lies the genesis for fighting*).


    thus in buckley's eyes, the most romantic fight, the one where the glorious battle would never end, would be as a "mike harrington socialist" at the height of the neoliberal era.

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  178. JennOfArk3:05 PM

    Nothing wrong with genres outside of what would be called "literary fiction" and Stephen King is a helluva good writer (as well as a mensch). I stopped reading him years ago after dreaming about that damn clown from It; I think this is the same "with age comes fear" thing that happened with heights. I give the guy his full due, but wouldn't group him with the other authors I named upthread. That's not a statement about his ability but rather of his subject matter. I'd say the same of Grisham, but wouldn't even group him with King.


    I'd put it this way: King's work speaks primarily to a particular universal human attribute. The other writers I mentioned speak more to both the universal and to multiple human attributes. King's goal in most of his work is to scare you out of your wits and he succeeds admirably. My examples from upthread have differing goals in their work, but the common thread in all is something like "this is the way the world works/how people work/what life is, told through this story." More big-picture.


    Grisham as far as I can tell isn't really trying to work out any universal truth/attribute. He's an entertaining storyteller, but his focus seems to be more on "this is an entertaining story" than "let me explain something about life through this story." Again, that's not to take away from his talent - he's good at what he does but his purpose isn't the same as someone like Garcia Marquez.

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  179. also, fuck him.

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  180. stepped pyramids3:28 PM

    This is my favorite kind of alicublog post, Roy.

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  181. They are all my favorites--except reviews of shows I'm not watching.

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  182. StringOnAStick4:52 PM

    Heh. That's why I only cover obscure stuff or GASB.

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  183. Chris Anderson8:47 PM

    Thanks. "He thought he could walk [not fly]", get it? My joke is good.

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  184. Magatha9:42 AM

    Sounds like an ethos.

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  185. Magatha10:04 AM

    I don't disagree with you at all. King once said that his goal is to terrify you, and if he can't do that, he'll try to horrify you, and if he can't do that, he'll settle for grossing you out.


    One of the things I appreciate about King is that he loves his characters, each and every one of them, even the horrible ones that he smites down grotesquely. Did you ever see that bad movie (that I <>loved), Dogma? It stars Ben Affleck, Chris Rock, Linda Fiorintino, and Alannis Morrisette as God?


    Spoiler alert: bad Angel Affleck gets smote down by God. He looks into Her eyes, begins to weep, whispers "I'm sorry". She looks at him with love and compassion, nods, forgives, then opens Her mouth in a mighty Godly roar and Angel Affleck explodes. It was very moving.

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  186. Magatha10:06 AM

    I'm really liking John Oliver. He is one of the "sharp, engaged comedians", but on his show, he takes one topic and goes at it more intensely than on his counterparts' shows.

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  187. ?!

    You want to keep an eye out for Orwell's "Diaries." They fit the model you assign to King above.
    Agreed on King: I've liked the couple of his books I've read, and he is clearly one ver-ree bright and decent human being.

    -dlj.

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  188. Buckley had two ideas: Pope Pius and his daddy. And the good taste to find a very fine wife.

    Just goes to warn us: good style is awfully dangerous.

    -dlj.

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  189. Beka,



    Good try, but I'm sorry, I just don't think what you say is true. I certainly never caught Buckley in a solecism, malapropism or goof.



    And here's as good a place as any for me to dump my favourite whine. "Oxymoron" does not mean "contradiction." Amusingly, it means the opposite. An oxymoron is a word or phrase made up of apparently or actually contradictory elements which is itself *not* contradictory. (And lagniappe does not mean freebie in English, though its Quechua root "yapay" did.. You gotta pay for them. Would people please figger out what imply and infer mean before trying them out?)



    -dlj.

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  190. "black market due to profiteering "

    Hunh?

    Buckley's socialized drugstores was bad enough, but what the bibblegrubble is " black market due to profiteering" supposed to mean?

    -dlj.

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  191. I once tried to put together a panel discussion on "Objectivity in The News" or some such send up, to which I invited Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Hedley Donovan.

    Mailer was the only one who got back to me, phoning back several times from the Hamptons until he got me in person: was he the only one of the three who got the joke?

    -dlj.

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  192. bekabot3:39 PM

    "I certainly never caught Buckley in a solecism, malapropism or goof."



    No doubt that's true in its way. Buckley was like a guy who nabs or buys a grecian urn and then fills it up with barbiturate Kool-Aid which he serves to all his guests. There's nothing wrong with the urn. Not only that, but (since nobody ever notices Buckley sampling his own drinks — or notices that he doesn't) no one can figure (or "figger") out why it is that people are never quite the same after they've been out drinking with him. So the knot remains inextricable, until finally, decades later, an expert appears with proof of the provenance of the urn, which he pronounces to be faultless.


    Know what? I agree with you — we'll never get to the bottom of it now.


    (Short version: "I'm sure you didn't mean to infer what I didn't intend to imply.")

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  193. If you have any kind of licensing and regulation of private-sector drugstores, you'll have profiteering via rent-seeking, which would encourage a larger black market than a direct government distribution system would. The public good resulting from having cheaply-available high-quality recreational drugs available would hypothetically outweigh the crushing loss of liberty due to the stores' socialized nature. Now, there would be less chance of rent-seeking if there were no licensing or regulation of the recreational drug market whatsoever, with market dominance going to those participants who could offer the lowest-cost merchandise that wasn't also fifty percent drain cleaner by weight, as determined by the death toll posted on Yelp or something. But perhaps Buckley concerned himself with the (barely) possible in this particular case.

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  194. I certainly never caught Buckley in a solecism, malapropism or goof.Oh, well, then, that settles it.

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  195. mds,
    Thanks. Gotcha.
    You're quite right, and I was asleep at the switch.

    -dlj.

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