Just this one line makes us slightly ill

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this day in 1930. He wrote:

"If you can't make people miserable by writing, what's the point?"

   He’d set out to be a writer, once and for all. Thirty-six years old, turning over a new leaf. He’d sworn off drinking for a while. Sober, industrious as a squirrel, he didn’t answer the door. He ate soup and crackers, potpies, Spam. Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined.  --  Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

We don't want to be alone

September 23: Actor Mickey Rooney was born Sept. 23, 1920. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest career of any actor ever. He was also married eight times.

"The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married." -- Cyril Connolly.


Sept. 24: Author F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Sep. 24, 1896. He wrote:

"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."


“What could Babbitt have done that was better than he did?”

“That’s the point,” Cutterback said. “He had the resolve but not the will.”
“Maybe his better self is just a voice, telling him there’s something better. Maybe there’s not.” The girl brought more drinks.
“Gatsby thought there was something better,” Cutterback said. “The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”
“He wanted a fresh start, too. Maybe there’s no such thing. Like Fitzgerald said, no second acts.”
“I think I could be a better man,” Cutterback said, leering at the waitress, “with your help.” She scowled and moved off, and he burst into song.  --  Chapter 17, The Misforgotten.

A separate peace

Lord (Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of) Chesterfield, British statesman and wit, was born on this day in 1794. He wrote:

"The only real and lasting peace between a man and his wife is doubtless a separation."


   He didn’t say anything to her, and a couple of days later, while drinking at Irene’s after rugby practice, he’d got in a deep conversation with Rae Ann Jefferson, and had ended up going home with her. The next morning he’d got up and gone right to work, and that night he’d gone straight to Irene’s and hooked up with Rae Ann again. This time he’d gone home, in the middle of the night. Eleanor had come out of their bedroom.
   "Well, I guess this is it, isn’t it?" she’d said.
   "I saw you," he said. "I saw you with that guy."
   "He’s a friend. We sit and talk. He listens to me."
   "I don’t listen to you?"
   "No."
   Her mother was standing in her bedroom doorway, Sully surmised. At least somebody was listening.
   "Who is he?"
   "Just someone I met."
   “Do you love him?” He was trembling.
   “No.”
   “What can I do?”
   “Nothing.”
   “You spent the night with him.”
   “We talked. We sat in the parking lot and talked.”
   “What’d you find to talk about?” She looked at him sadly. “Because I can’t think of a God damn thing to talk about.”
   Three months later he and Eleanor were divorced, and Sully had moved into a two-bit apartment above a hobby shop, within walking distance of Irene’s.
                 -- Chapter 6, The Misforgotten.

The war on civilization

World War I began on this day in 1914; it ended on this date also, in 1919.


"You can't say that civilization don't advance--in every war they kill you in a new way." -- Will Rogers.

   As far as the dregs of civilization went, he’d seen it all. The whole sad spectacle of jealousy, greed, vengeance, lust. Still, he had faith. The utmost credulousness together with the perfect cynicism. Which was truly the Shakespearean way to live, as somebody had written about someone. The villains in Shakespeare, when they were front and center you believed in them completely. You were ready to cast your lot with them. Their characters were truths.  --  Chapter 33, The Misforgotten.

Still the kings

Paul McCartney was born on this day in 1942.

"The Beatles are not merely awful...They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music." -- William F. Buckley.

"Well, you know, a lot of Americans are unbalanced." -- Paul McCartney.

...Maybe he’d hang around, listen to some music for a change. Although he had to say, most of what passed for music today left him cold. No lyrics or melodies. Say what you would about some of the shit he’d grown up listening to, at least you could find a tune in there somewhere, usually. But now…what had happened?


What had happened to him, maybe that was it. Was he that old, that the music had totally changed, as if it were from some other world, far in the future? Or rather, that he was from some other world, far in the past?

Maybe the fact was simply that he’d lost interest in music altogether. He thought he ought to be interested in music, sometimes, but he wasn’t. That was one of the things he liked about the Hi-Note. No jukebox. --  Chapter 31, The Misforgotten.

Here's looking at you, if I have to

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on this day in 1910.


"I drink to make other people interesting." -- George Jean Nathan.

   Still, alcohol had played its part in some of the happiest times of his life. At least so it seemed to him. How often had he warmed himself by the fire of fellow feeling, reveled in the commingling of like minds, kindred hearts! At a particular pitch of drunkenness, all men were brothers, and the self slipped away, receded temporarily. The only immortality Sully believed in was just this, the persistence of good will, the community of souls that would outlast heaven and earth, that would live on as a rebuke to the implacable enmity of the cosmos.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Or a noisy headache in a long street

English poet (and onetime Poet Laureate) John Masefield was born on this day in 1878. He wrote:


"Life is a long headache in a noisy street."
 

   Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Sit down and be counted

Jim Thorpe, the greatest American athlete ever, was born on this day in 1888.

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who loves sports hates common sense.” – H. L. Mencken.

   “What’s your interest in football?” Sully, slumped in a chair after dinner (turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, okra, fruit salad, rolls, and then dessert), was working on his second six-pack.

   “What’s my interest in it?” Jack didn’t drink, as it turned out; he sat on the sofa with his legs crossed, hands cradling the mug of coffee in his lap.
   “Did you play football?”
   “No. I just always liked it.”
   “Why?”
   “I don’t know. I just have.”
   Sully had a theory that Americans’ lust for this idiotic game was explained by their shrinking attention span. Six seconds of actual play, sandwiched in between interminable stretches of players standing around while a crew of crazed announcers—were they on steroids, too?—told viewers what they’d just seen and what they were just about to see, was the perfect diversion, or religion in many cases.  --  Chapter 36, The Misforgotten.

Death cured him

English poet Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was the greatest poet of the 18th century and is one of the most-quoted writers ever. ("A little learning's a dangerous thing;" "An honest man's the noblest work of God;" "The proper study of Mankind is Man").

Pope was afflicted with a type of tuberculosis that affected his spine -- he never grew past 4' 6", and was a hunchback -- and which ended his life at the age of 56. Here is how he summed things up:

"This long disease, my life."
 

Let’s just let it go, he’d told him. The cancer. Let it go. Forget about it. Don’t even bring it up.
“Let it go?” Plume had said, staring.
“That’s right.”
“I’m afraid I can’t countenance that.”
“Oh, really? If it’s saving face you’re worried about…”
“You know what I mean. It’s not something I can--”
“I know.”
“Of course I can’t compel you to…”
“No, you can’t.”
“Can I ask you what your reasoning is?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“All right.” Plume almost cracked a smile. “What’s your reasoning?”
“I guess it’s just something I don’t want to go through with.”
What he’d meant by that, Sully supposed, was that no matter how it turned out, whether he lived or died, he’d be disappointed. So why go to all the trouble? Besides, Plume had told him that he wouldn’t be able to drink and undergo chemotherapy. And if he couldn’t drink he might as well die.  --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

Or even every once in a while

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was born on this day in 1804. He said:


"It destroys one's nerves to be amiable to the same human being every day."

 For a while there, for about ten years, Tolleson had been one of Sully’s best friends, maybe his best friend, for a couple of years at least. They’d played rugby together and Tolleson had lived with him for a while after his fourth arrest for DUI, sleeping in the bathtub in Sully’s tiny apartment about the time when Sully was seeing Rae Ann. They’d taken his driver’s license away and Sully had had to drive him everywhere. He was just about broke, having lost his job because of the DUIs and spent all of what he’d saved up on a lawyer to keep his ass out of jail. He didn’t have anything to do so he rode around with Sully on his route. Sully had a job setting up cigarette displays in stores, and while he shouldn’t have been riding Tolleson around, he felt sorry for him. At the very first stop every morning Tolleson would buy a couple of six-packs, and by the end of the day he’d have a sizeable buzz-on, before Sully had even started drinking.  --  Chapter 5, The Misforgotten.

Give an ear to this

Vincent Van Gogh was born on this day in 1853.

"I believe more and more," Van Gogh said, "that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of his sketches that has turned out badly."

“Saint Augustine said that our hearts are restless because this is not our true home,” Sully told the assembled Great Books devotees, who were all present and accounted for.
“Where’s not our true home?” asked Robert. “The liberry?”

“No. he meant this earth.”  --  Chapter 27, The Misforgotten.

He''ll drink a toast to your un-health

It's not too late to celebrate Doctor-Patient Trust Week! It ends tomorrow -- so take your doctor to dinner tonight!

"...we may lay it down as a Maxim, that when a nation abounds in Physicians it grows thin of people." -- Joseph Addison.

"Only a physician can commit homicide with impunity." - Pliny the Elder.
 

The doctor had told him more than a year ago, on the subject of his knees and hip, that he ought to get more exercise. Sully sat on his ass all day at work, and then when he got off he headed straight for the Note and sat on his ass there, and there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t get out and walk a little on his days off. Except that he didn’t want to. Besides, it pained him to walk very far, and if that was the case then he couldn’t see how it was doing him any good. Fuck the doctor, Sully thought. Fuck doctors. They were all quacks.  --  Chapter 5, The Misforgotten.

I'm sticking my neck out -- it's a GREAT game

Anniversary of first publicly played basketball game, in 1892.

"Nothing here but basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo." -- Ogden Nash.

He loved the game. Never before or since had he had a passion like this. Basketball had bewitched him. He did not care for anything else. His yearning was like a flower that lives for the sun. A seed had been planted, had taken hold and grown.


He loved the feel of the ball, the boom of it bouncing, its seams spinning in flight just so, then the sound—shink!—when a shot went through cleanly, the net flying up and clinging to the rim. He loved to dribble, an act of faith, the ball going down and coming up again, the simplest of things but reassuring.

He loved the games, every game a fresh start, a new quest, you pitting yourself against perfection. You could never attain it. The game was a coy mistress, with many suitors.

He loved the wooing and the courting, but above all the solitary days and nights, alone with a ball and a hoop and his thoughts. Nothing in life would ever be so pure.  --  Chapter 20, The Misforgotten.

What a character!

Sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun was born on this day in 1918. His famous remark is "Sports do not build character. They reveal it."


"I hate all sports as rabidly as a man who loves sports hates common sense." -- H. L. Mencken.

   Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

His great-great-grandson Lex feels the same way

Today is International Women's Day! 


"Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children." -- Martin Luther.
 
She’d been lonelier in marriage than out of it. She’d called on her mother, and then when her dad died she’d had to take her in, even to the detriment of her marriage. She’d weighed things in the balance, however, and that was what she’d decided to do. And she’d explained it all to him.


A woman’s heart was something he’d never get to the bottom of.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Those crazy Founding Fathers

The U. S. Constitution went into effect on this day in 1789.

"That all men are equal is a proposition to which...no sane invidual has ever given his assent." -- Aldous Huxley.

“Plato just assumes some people are better than others,” Vic said.

“Yes, he does.”
“And these will be the rulers.”
“Yes. The wisest will rule the rest.”
“But they won’t be tyrants.”
“No, they’ll be philosophers, and they’ll know what’s best for everybody, including themselves.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” Jeffrey barked.   --  Chapter 19, The Misforgotten.

Delighted you're getting married

Samuel Pepys, English diarist, was born on this day in 1633.

"Strange to say what delight we married people," Pepys wrote, "have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition."

His reverence for women hadn’t forestalled him from treating them vilely. He’d always approached the opposite sex with trepidation, if not outright terror, but once he’d made inroads he was often over-aggressive, particularly when stoked by alcohol. Even so, he was typically astounded and somewhat suspicious whenever a woman consented to have sex with him, and no matter how satisfying the experience turned out to be, he invariably came away from it with a lower opinion of his partner than he’d had before. That attitude, he realized, had foredoomed his marriage.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Ah, sweet metronome of life!

Birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, born 1892. She wrote:


"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another--it is one damn thing over and over."

One thing he knew, he’d had a genuine taste for the stuff. It hadn’t always been like that; he’d had to develop it. He loved to drink. Life was, he’d seen early on, a monotony. Drinking made things interesting, at least. Therein lay his desire for it, he supposed.  --  Chapter 36, The Misforgotten.

Giving Edison the needle

Thomas A. Edison was granted a patent on the phonograph on this day in 1878.

"Dear Mr. Edison: I am astonished and terrified at the results of this evening's experiment. Astonished at the wonderful form you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever." -- Sir Arthur Sullivan.

   Returning to his stool he relit his cigar, which had gone out. Eight o’clock, and the place was dead. They must have known it was my birthday, he thought ruefully. The band was to start at eleven, for some reason. Maybe he’d hang around, listen to some music for a change. Although he had to say, most of what passed for music today left him cold. No lyrics or melodies. Say what you would about some of the shit he’d grown up listening to, at least you could find a tune in there somewhere, usually. But now…what had happened?  --  Chapter 31, The Misforgotten.

One is sometimes too much

Henry Adams, American historian and writer (The Education of Henry Adams), was born on this day in 1838.

"One friend in a lifetime is much;" Adams wrote, "two are many; three are hardly possible."

The universal terror of relationships was at the root of it, he supposed. He’d tried not to keep people at arm’s length, but how could you help it? Not only did familiarity breed contempt, but the closer the familiarity the greater the revulsion. Intimacy was the real horror. At least it seemed so to him now. And given this, how could people be anything but ghosts?  --  Chapter 24, The Misforgotten.