Happy Thanksgiving!

Your humble and lovable underdog will be back after the holiday weekend. A gracious and grand Thanksgiving to you and yours.--Joseph

Tendentious and sectarian, again

Why I still read old Gore Vidal book reviews with as much enthusiasm as I do new ones is exhibited in Stephen King's review of a new Carver biography and collection of short stories.

For five hundred words, we find out little more than the fact that Carver was a bad man, and King wants to remind of of everything awful about him. On the biography, King writes:

Although Sklenicka exhibits something like awe for Carver the writer, and clearly understands the warping influence alcohol had on his life, she is almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband. She quotes the novelist Diane Smith (“Letters From Yellowstone”) as saying, “That was a bad generation of men,” and pretty much leaves it at that.

And?

I am glad I typed this two years back, when Mailer died, as it makes it easy for me to reference it. Vidal, again:

The politics, sex, class of the author are all-important while the book at hand is simply an excuse to discuss, say, the anti-Semitism of Pound, the homosexuality of Whitman, the social climbing of James. Since the American character is especially tendentious and sectarian, the American critic must decide in advance whether or not the writer he is writing about is a Good Person; that is, one who accepts implicitly all the going superstitions (a.k.a values [sic]) of the middle class of the day. If the writer is a Good Person, then what he writes is apt to be good. If he is a Bad Person, forget it.

I have forgotten Stephen King long ago. Lish nearly, though he still seems to grate. I still peek at Carver---only peek, I say---and Mailer too. But mostly, I stick with biographies, not reviewers of them.

Rose & Wall

JM, Rose & Wall, Tracy, 11.19.09

PW, Noted

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Number five on the latest Publisher's Weekly bestseller list, and number six:

5. "A Simple Christmas" Mike Huckabee (Sentinel)

6. "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance" by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow)

Sidewalk: abstract concrete

JM, Sidewalk: abstract concrete, Glendale Blvd., Atwater, 11.13.09

Mops

JM, Mops on Louise, Glendale, 11.11.09

Spent some time wandering Glendale yesterday. The sandwiches at Mario's Italian Deli on Broadway are decent but overpriced: a meatball is $8.23, and the clerk asked me for those three pennies when I laid down a mere $8.20. I guess Dave's is still Dave's, eagerly providing a paper plate for said meatball; the pool table games didn't last for far beyond five minutes; new felt for old sharks.

Down the road in Atwater, a Legionnaire wandered into the Tam O'Shanter for lunch and was duly saluted.

Spent some time on Brunswick trying to catch a photo of a falling leaf, as an American Sweetgum (which you may know as a sticker-ball tree) was letting loose; this is the closest I got. There is an elan to a falling leaf.

In my opinion, Philip Gourevitch is too pretty to leave the Paris Review for real places, and to do so for the sake of focusing on a book on Rwanda only makes him even prettier. But he is leaving, Leon writes. I don't know where I'm going to send my Tarot poems to now.

Instructive piece on battles with bottles at Pop Matters.

When I wrote that post yesterday about the way people on happy meds never seem to apologize for anything, I got a few correspondences: "You're not talking about me, are you?" The people who wrote: no, I wasn't. The people who never apologize for anything would never bother responding to such a charge.