Two Books: From Sublime to Ridiculous

8/17/2016

Two Writers, National Humanities Awards, 2014

You already know who the ridiculous is. So let’s start with the sublime.

I was in the library the other day at the “New/Non-Fiction/14 Days Only” section.

On a lower shelf, I spotted a book of essays by Annie Dillard, “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.” Somehow, I had gotten to be this old without ever reading anything by Dillard, so I picked up the book, and opened it in the middle, to a chapter entitled “The Weasel”

“The weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving.”

Needless to say, I checked it out.

The weasel essay, six pages long, includes a 60-second encounter in the woods when Dillard and a weasel locked eyes. The essay also includes the tale of an eagle that tried to carry off a weasel, and got more than it expected.

The essay become an exhortation to grab life – whatever life is – with your jaws, and not let go.

That is pretty much what Dillard does in her writing, and in her life, by her own testimony. In one section, "An American Childhood,” previously published, she races through her family and her church and her boyfriends and her life.

Required reading for teen-agers.

I was knocked out by the two final essays.

One was about sand, and geology, and the Jesuit priest-paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, and love.

The final chapter by Dillard, a convert to Catholicism, was alternating segments about what she called the modern "hootenany" Mass and doomed polar explorers who went off unprepared. It ends with a fantasy of the two themes overlapping.

I am now a fan of Annie Dillard, maybe even a groupie.

* * *
The second book continues the furry, feral theme, considering the muskrat Donald Trump carries around on his head and in his head.

The book is “The Making of Donald Trump,” by Pulitzer-Prize-winning David Cay Johnston, seen often on the Web and the tube, warning us, “The Trumpites are coming! The Trumpites are coming!” The book hit No. 15 on the Times best-seller list last week.

Johnston is an investigative reporter, one of the best, and has been on the scent of Trump and the muskrat for decades.

He has put together verifiable details of the way Trump does business – the Polish immigrants who tore down a landmark building at nights, without safety precautions or attention to artwork; the vendors who got stiffed by Trump, the garish casinos in Trump’s name without his having any knowledge of how gambling works, the threats, the suits, the welching, and the lies about women he never dated.

Johnston’s book should be read – but won’t be -- by the fact-averse minority that considers Trump the great white hope.

Weasels sí, muskrat head no.

Brian Savin

8/18/2016 09:48:28 am

With our daughter visiting, yesterday we went for a hike and picnic in the beautiful Hidden Valley Preserve and stopped into Washington Depot's Hickory Stick Bookshop to pick up a copy of: "The Nordic Theory of Everything" by Anu Partanen. The three of us skipped into chapters and subject references. It doesn't take long to feel utter disgust at our nation's lack of political leadership in meeting the most basic social needs we should be discussing and acting on. The problem begins in my mind with recognizing and castigating the failure -- indeed, lack of effort or seeming interest -- on the part of this current Administration. Partanen's broad yet quite specific critique is my choice for must reading by Americans this week.

By the way, Johnston wrote his book in 27 days. What took him so long? Easy money in an election year.

George Vecsey

8/18/2016 12:54:54 pm

Brian, what about the Republicans who stalled everything for the past seven years? I see it as much about bigotry as disgraceful political maneuvering.
Johnston began writing about Trump in the 90s, working for the great Gene Roberts at the Phila. Inquirer. He had a casinos beat -- one of a kind.
In his book he explains how he had boxes of files from past Trump cases. They know each other for a quarter of a century. So this was not a cut-and-paste job...this was an updating of material familiar to Johnston, and which should be familiar to voters who are interested in details. GV

bruce

8/18/2016 11:45:53 am

el trumpo's messcapades have been pretty well documented for years.

i'm up in the great white north outside Hamilton, about a 45 minute drive from Toronto.

I look at trump the same way I looked at rob ford. there might well be some legitimate issues raised by both; however, if that's true how in god's name could they be the best people to try to solve them? serial liars in their public lives and pretty nasty in their business and personal lives it seems.

George Vecsey

8/18/2016 12:58:32 pm

Bruce, Rob Ford was funnier and clumsier. Maybe it was whatever he was ingesting. I sometimes thought he was putting us on, but maybe not. I used to think Trump was a deadpan comic. Know him from his football days. But my sources in the Trump camp said, no, he isn't kidding, that is who he really is -- cannot process information, thinks only of himself. Just wonderful.

bruce

8/18/2016 01:41:06 pm

George,

you mentioned you know him sort of second hand from your neighbourhood days. I was thinking more of whatever ideas they had/have that were worth discussion for people on the right wing or people concerned about too much guvmint. there have to be better people to represent them and to try to implement the ideas.

WhatsApp Hacker link

8/20/2016 02:31:56 am

Here the homepage for hack any whatsapp account within a minute.

Friv link

9/4/2016 04:45:21 am

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Two Books: From Sublime to Ridiculous

Categories

Buy the Book