Books on the nightstand: the Patrick O'Brian novels

     Boars are conservative.    
     "Deeply conservative," in fact, according to Patrick O'Brian. "Devoted to the beaten track."
     Aren't we all?  Most of us anyway. Humans as well as tusked swine.
     That perceptive observation comes near the beginning of The Nutmeg of Consolation, the 14th book of what are known as O'Brian's "Aubrey/Maturin novels," historical fiction of British naval life set 200 years ago, at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
    And yes, I've read the previous 13. Or at least listened to them on audiobooks, which is approximately the same thing.
    "Aubrey" is Captain Jack Aubrey, tall and blond, dashing, if perpetually overweight and florid, as human a hero as ever raised a cutlass. "Maturin" is his "particular friend," naval physician, natural philosopher, Irish nationalist and, let's not forget, highly effective secret agent, despite a tendency to tumble off ships and into dungeons.
     It shouldn't work. Just setting down the details above sounds trite, as if I'm describing some musty maritime cliche. But I have not only read the previous baker's dozen books, but done so almost daily, one after another, over the past six months, and as someone with a highly evolved reflex to reject fiction for being predictable, hackneyed, cliched, or just not good enough, O'Brian's books are none of these.
      The bit about the boar is an illustration why. Whatever is going on in the books, whether boars are being hunted by Maturin, shipwrecked with 156 crew mates on a deserted South China sea island, or battles being fought yardarm-to-yardarm, sails raised, legs amputated or pudding cooked, it is done so with a wealth of well-researched detail and veracity that sings off the page. I've literally never heard a false note.
     The characters are real. His pig killed, Maturin absent-mindedly wipes his hand on his white jacket, immediately fearing for the reaction of the gloriously-named servant Preserved Killick, "an awkward, slab-sided creature," a maestro of the muttered complaint, with his own distinctive way of speaking and a habit of beginning sentences with "Which."
    "Which there ain't no stern galley, sir, now we've been degraded to a sixth grade," Killick cries "with malignant triumph" in The Ionian Mission. "Stern galleries is for our betters, and I must toil and moil away in the dark."
     Yet somehow Killick, with his fetish for cleanliness and rank, is endearing, both to the readers and to his supposedly superior officers. Maturin is terrified that in gutting the boar he soiled his jacket, creating more work for the over-burdened Killick. Maturin tries to sort it out in his own mind as he heads toward his inevitable dressing down.
    "It wasn't even Killick was his servant with a servant's right," he thinks, dreading his encounter.
     "A servant's right" could support a book on it's own, and one of the series' many joys are the lesser, able-bodied seamen characters, their brief exchanges and rituals, superstitions and philosophies. Yet never does it become routine. A lesser writer, penning his 13th book, would have had Killick upbraid the doctor his characteristic "high, shrill, penetrating voice." But Killick doesn't. He looks at the doctor's mirthless light blue eyes, his general disorder from his boar hunt, and uncomplainingly goes about his business, for a change.
    O'Brian knows that human beings are not clockwork. They might have qualities, but they also diverge from them, and one of the truest things about the books are how his characters don't always behave as they're usually do. Aubrey, devoted to his Sophie, still finds himself fathering a child out of wedlock and almost two. Maturin, the man of science, nevertheless becomes an addict of laudanum, a form of opium, and his mental gymnastics rationalizing and hiding his slavery rings completely true. Diana Villiers, Maturin's love interest, is sometimes free-spirited and careless, sometimes devoted.
     Those characteristics that do endure start to develop a power. About the fifth time Aubrey describes Lord Nelson once asking him to be so kind as to pass the salt, the vignette takes on a deeper meaning, one it hadn't possessed before, speaking to the desperate way we cling to our brushes with fame.
     At some point I need to express my gratitude to my older son Ross. I had seen the movie version, "Master and Commander," with Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, and loved it extremely—like the books, it really is a disquisition in leadership. Maybe a decade ago, Ross gave me the novel as a birthday present, but I never got around to reading it until now, really just to stop him from holding that up as a lapse in paternal devotion. It took a few pages to gel, but once it did, I was hooked. Reading O'Brian has embroidered the mundane routine considerably. 
     I don't believe you should recommend a work of art while spoiling it, so I won't give away the surprises, except to say the best moment in the first 13 books comes in The Reverse of the Medal when Aubrey finds himself convicted of stock manipulation—he can be a dunce when it comes to his landward finances—and sentenced to an hour of humiliation in the pillory.  Tears in my eyes.
     The action ranges from Boston to Australia, from Sweden to the Cape of Good Hope, from Antarctica to the equator. There are schemes and traitors, alehouse whores and wheezing admirals. The exchange of letters, the constant consumption of alcohol, the crude medicine, the closeness to the natural world. Some books end in epic battles, others quietly. There is never a sense of repetition, and little crude coincidence—one almost-too-timely rescue, the in-the-nick-of-time arrival of a Polynesian outrigger in The Far Side of the World when Aubrey and Maturin were literally paddling together in the trackless ocean. Then again, it wouldn't do to have Aubrey and Maturin drown in Book 10, would it?
     I won't belabor the point. I've listened to most of the books on tape—a fine alternative to thought, to brooding on the ominous news of the day. I finally joined Audible to do it, since the library didn't carry the full 20 books—O'Brian, an enigmatic figure, died writing the 21st.  I can recommend them wholeheartedly to anyone, particularly during our own difficult days, when men of heroism and backbone, and a bit of escapism are not only welcome, but necessary. 

Rahm Emanuel, the New York Daily News, and "outrage porn"

Sculpture by Damien Hirst, (Palazzo Grassi, Venice)

     The voicemail system at the Chicago Sun-Times takes messages up to 6 minutes long. I know this because some guy phones me late at night and fills up three or four messages.
     He’s been calling for years. I used to listen. Now I dump it the moment I hear his opening sneer: “Mister Steinberg, your ‘column’ is the typical li. . . .” Some people speak so you can hear both italics — a drawl dripping sarcasm — and quote marks: an incredulous stutter-step. Delete, delete, delete.
     While I’m all for hearing other perspectives, “you stink,” isn’t exactly a road map for self-improvement.
     Then again, a guy doesn’t leave 20 minutes of grumbling abuse for my benefit, but for his. It must satisfy him somehow.
     There’s a term, “outrage porn,” that seems a handy concept for understanding much that passes for discourse lately. Like porn porn, outrage porn offers up not real life but a fun-house-mirror parody of real life. Life distorted to reflect the users’ fantasies. Outrage porn serves up pat little vignettes of indignation to get the reader excited, leading to the release of full-throated condemnation. Unlike porn porn, outrage porn is not a private vice but one you invite your friends to share.

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Deep dish

Burt's pizza

     Chicago didn't invent pizza. But it did invent deep dish pizza. In 1943, at Pizzeria Uno, supposedly—documentation is sketchy, though nobody else claims the honor.
     Uno's is still around, though I never go there unless I'm squiring somebody from out of town. The cornmeal crust at Uno's, well, I understand there are people who like it, and while I'll eat it if it's set before me, I don't go out of my way to have it set before me, if you catch my drift.
     Lou Malnati's is excellent. It's the tomato sauce; pure and perfect. Their deep dish with spinach and mushrooms, on their Buttercrust crust. When we order pizza, it's what we order, unless my wife insists on indulging her passion for thin crust, which I agree to do because fair's fair and, besides, I know I won't eat much of it.
     But Lou Malnati's, though it styles itself as "the absolute best" is not, in fact, the best deep dish pizza the city has to offer (hmm, now I'm starting to see why they don't advertise. Candor and good business sense are not friends). That distinction goes to Burt's Place, in Morton Grove. Burt's offers up a caramelized, almost burnt pizza that is beyond words.
     And if you are saying, "But Burt's closed in 2015" you are right. It did close in 2015. And Burt Katz, its quirky, not always pleasant owner of 26 years, died the next year. One interview I put off a little too long.
     But Burt's re-opened in March, without Burt And I went back there as part of a pizza fest my oldest son insisted upon before he exiled himself to the pizza wasteland of Los Angeles. We went to Chicago Pizza Oven and Grinder, where I don't even order pizza (salad, Mediterranean bread and, if I'm feeling decadent, a meatball grinder). Then Lou's, ordered in. Then Burt's.
     Third time's the charm.
     The Burt's pizza was so good it made me happy. Briefly at least. Happy to be there and eat it. Happy afterward on the way home, just that something so damn good exists and the public has access to it. Not so brief, now that I think about it. I'm still a little happy, thinking about my next visit to Burt's.
     At the old Burt's, you had to order your pizza a day ahead of time, which made going there difficult. The new Burt's has put in an extra oven, so ordering ahead on weekends is not necessary. I spoke with one of the new owners, and he seemed ... I don't want to say "struggling," so let's say, "working hard" to keep the place humming along. It's hard to run a restaurant; harder still when you are learning on the fly. Nor was it as crowded on a Friday night as the only restaurant offering the best deep dish pizza in Chicago ought to be.
      What I'm saying is, go to Burt's. And so will I. And between the two of us, we'll keep the place afloat. In the meantime, if there is a better deep dish pizza in Chicago, I'd like to hear about it though I'll tell you right now: I don't believe you. It's Burt's.

In praise of enthusiasm

   "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     It wasn't what she said so much as how she said it.
    We were walking through the passenger area at the Lime Kiln dock on Put-in-Bay, hurrying to catch the ferry back to the mainland after a long weekend with old friends. Our dog Kitty, in a burst of zeal, extreme even for her, strained forward on her leash, making emphatic, urgent noises that sounded, I swear to God, like a chimpanzee going "Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!"
     As we passed the ticket taker, she said, "I wish I was that excited to go places."
     On the page, that statement might seem a wry observation of the dog's boundless energy. But spoken, there was a flatness, almost a deadness to it that chilled me, causing me to pause and look back at the speaker. A standard issue young person, female variant. Shorts and a Miller Boat Lines shirt. The aviator sunglasses kids wear nowadays.
     Some young people are buoyant, filled with squeals of delight and flights of wonderment. Others are languid. New to the world, they measure it and find it lacking. And they don't know about the second conditional tense. It really should be, "I wish I were that excited to go places," assuming she wasn't talking about wishing she had been more excited at a specific time in the past. But we'll let that go.
      Enthusiasm is pretty much squeezed out by the time adulthood hits.  Except of course for sports. And game shows. People go nuts on game shows.
      I would never hazard whether people are generally more or less enthusiastic now than before. They certainly seemed more worked up in previous times The 19th century gave us over-the-top art forms like opera and melodrama. And other cultures seem to froth quicker than ours. Few whirling dervishes twirl in Protestant Christianity. 
     Enthusiasm shouldn't be mistaken for zeal. We have no shortage of glittery-eyed fanatics and one-note obsessives. Mania isn't excitement, though perhaps the former has given the latter a bad name.  Howard Dean let loose one guttural "Hyaaaaah!" like he was driving cattle in 2004 and his campaign fell over dead.
     I'm as much immune to enthusiasm as anybody. Times when excitement seems in order I tend to dull it with literary references. I remember, heading to Wrigley Field to watch my younger son throw out the first pitch at the Cubs/Sox game, I described myself as feeling like Willy Loman heading to the Polo Grounds to watch Biff play in the championship. I guess that was my way of saying I was thrilled.
     I'm happy to go places, to get away, to Put-in-Bay, last April to Italy and France, last year to Japan and Washington, D.C. I'm glad to get away. But excited? Gee-I-can't-wait-to-get-there excited? Not really. 
     Maybe I should be grateful not to be susceptible to ardors. Many a folly has started with a whoop, hats thrown into the air and then over the top of the trench, into the teeth of the machine guns. Enthusiasm is by definition short-lived. "There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever,” Lord Byron wrote. “Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
     Still, the choices aren't continual enthusiasm or a life of sighing torpor. Maybe that teen's remark caught me off guard because I feel the same way. "I wish I was excited to go places." But how do you get that way?

 

   

The Fourth of July: Year One of the Trump Era

     Patriotism is a wonderful feeling. Love of country, your native land. Your home and all that comes with it: baseball, mom, apple pie and Chevrolet, or Ford, if you prefer. 
     The story of its birth, of brave men resisting tyranny, marshaling high ideals and lofty words to defeat a king. The flag, bold stripes of red and white, its original circle of 13 of stars representing "a new constellation," now a mighty grid of 50, one for each of our scattered, proud and distinctive states.
     Sure, that pride would have to be tempered with sadness. To love America doesn't require that you think her perfect. Conquering the continent came at the price of slaughtering the native inhabitants. The original sin of slavery, written into our Constitution, leading to a fratricidal Civil War. More Americans died fighting the Civil War—about half a million—than died in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, combined. 
    But those sorrows were safely confined to the past, and what country did not have worse? Looking around the world, at the legacy of madness burdening other nations, of repression and poverty and horror, we had to feel pretty good about ourselves. We may have troubles, but we sure aren't them.
    Now look at us.
    How are patriotic Americans supposed to place their hands over their hearts and say the pledge with the country in its present state? Having elected a fraud, a bully and a liar, bent on systematically tearing down our Democratic traditions—respect for the electoral process, the courts, the press. Our nation as an in-gathering of immigrants? A place where science is respected, where women and minorities, gays and lesbians, enjoy equal protection under the law? 
     The first 4th of July under the Trump presidency. A buffoon king propped up by his court of cringing underlings, flattering toadies, traitors, psychopaths and henchmen. The first of four, or eight, depending on how things go. And we really have no idea how that will unfold. Are we in the lull before the true calamity starts? Is it spring 1914? August 1939? Where all the elements of disaster are in place, waiting for the spark to touch it off. Half the nation is already in lingering shock that we could have elected someone so unfit. Will the other half quickly learn the cost of their folly, when some irreparable harm is done? Will they never learn, and race off toward calamity with an enthusiastic whoop?
    Has that harm already happened? Are we on the other side of the mirror now, bouncing down the proverbial slippery slope, watching mileposts of the unimaginable, boundaries of the unacceptable, flash past as we tumble into our new world? Will we look back on Trump with nostalgia as we squirm under the boot of a true tyrant? 
     Some days I worry that we are over-dramatizing the situation. We have sunk to some truly low states, endured truly mediocre presidents. Warren G. Harding. Richard M. Nixon. And even the okay presidents have committed extraordinary blunders. Lyndon B. Johnson is generally viewed as a competent president, who battled poverty and passed the Voters Rights Act, though his reputation was tarnished by Vietnam. Some 57,000 Americans died in that war; so that's a bit more than "tarnish." Trump hasn't caused anywhere near that kind of damage. Yet.
     Sometimes it seems we are under-reacting. One shock piles upon another and before any given misstep can be reacted to we are on to another. Reeling, half the country in a narcoleptic stupor, mumbling how they wish he's stop Tweeting, as if it were the expression of the president's thoughts that is the problem, and not the thoughts themselves—infantile, combative, petty, mean, stupid, preening.
     It's odd to take comfort in America's lapses. Interning its Japanese citizens. Institutionalizing racism. Enthroning one religion over another. But remembering those helps balance the shock of the present moment. We made mistakes, we recovered. We are a great country—still, despite our electoral calamity—not because we've never erred, never blundered, never betrayed our values. But because we always manage to right ourselves when we do. The march of freedom carried on.
    At least up to now. Anyone who feels our democratic liberty is guaranteed isn't paying attention. With a conscienceless buffoon swinging a pick axe daily, if not hourly, at our institutions, nothing is certain. The battle is going on right now, today, this minute. Anyone who ever wished they could have been there at the nation's birth, a cobbler in Lexington, a baker in Concord, so he could have heard the call, set down his hammer, his bowl, taken up his flintlock and rose to the defense of our aborning country, has to be a little grateful to be alive at this moment, this 4th, when the country needs every sound head and every stout heart it can muster. Every man and woman who believes in the United States of America at its best, not at its worst. This is the gravest sort of crisis—one self-imposed, by the cowardice of our leaders, the selfishness of our electorate, the loss of faith in ourselves and in each other. People have never needed an America more, and America has never needed her people more. This 4th of July, it might be hard to feel good about what our country is now. But we certainly can celebrate what it once was, and what it might yet be again. 

Night work daily

     CATAWBA, Ohio — People seem to believe our country has become one vast undifferentiated nowhere because there are McDonald's and Walmart's in every town and, in some cities, on every corner. But the truth is, there are subtle differences, if you look for them.
    Such as here at Bergman's, a 158-year-old farm stand on the north coast of Ohio, where we always stop on our way home from Put-in-Bay to load up on peaches and sweet corn, local honey and unusual spreads such as, this visit, carrot cake jam. We also bought shortcake because, really, how often do you get the chance?  
     It was before lunch, and my eyes immediately went to the various bags of Ballreich's potato chips. As I did, a certain odd word popped out. "Marcelled." 
     Marcelled. As a lad, I had read numerous books about the 1920s, and always thought of marcelling as something done to hair. I had never seen the word applied to potato chips, though it harmonized with the bold declaration "Since 1920." (Well, I must have seen the word; I've been coming to Bergman's for years; but  I never really noticed it before). 
     I knew what they meant, yet how did the word get to potato chips, one of the last consumer food products to resist globalization. Yes, Chicago's own Jays—no possessive since there is no "Jay"—went bankrupt in 2007 and suffered the indignity of having its brand taken over by Snyder's and production moved to the barrens of Indiana. But many regional diehards remain, such as Zapp's in Louisiana and Utz in Pennsylvania.  
     As if Ballreich's, made in nearby Tiffin, expects customers to be perplexed, the bags contain this definition on the back:

     Helpful. But it did not strike me as definitive. If someone challenged your source, "I got it off the back of a bag of potato chips" is not likely to convince. Something more authoritative was in order. 
     The corporate web site mentions the word early in their history: "Ballreich's chose to call their potato chips "marcelled" (which means "wavy"), taken from the popular ladies' wavy hairstyle of the 1920's.     
     But how did "marcel" come to describe hair? That seemed easy. I like to form theories of words as I go to look them up, and marcel was likely to come from some French hairdresser, Monsieur Marcel, or some such thing. I knew exactly where to look, too. The Oxford University Press' highly-useful 2oth Century Words. Sure enough, there it was.

   marcel v (1906) to wave (hair in the 'Marcel' fashion. This was a kind of artificial wave (known as a Marcel wave) produced by using heated curling-tongs. Fashionable around the turn of the century, it was named after Francois Marcel Grateau (1852-1936), the French hairdresser who invented it.

     Too easy. It's almost disappointing to strike gold so fast, and nail it so closely ahead of time—saps the thrill of the hunt, though it was a few years earlier than I—and Ballreich's—imagined.

Marcelled hair

      Of course that definition could mask earlier meanings. Off to the full Oxford English Dictionary. No "marcel" but the very close "marcella" which is defined as "a kind of twilled cotton or linen cloth," with "twilled' meaning having a series of parallel ridges, rather like the hairdo. And "marcela" dates back to 1802, so obviously M. Grateau was casting his seed onto well-tilled and fertile ground when his name was being lent to hair waves and, eventually, potato chips. 
     I don't want to give the impression that I spent my whole time in Put-in-Bay hunting for novel words. We went for walks on the beach, got ice cream in town, watched the parade and the arrival of the Budweiser's Clydesdales. There was the uncovering of unusual cuisines. Such as Friday night, at Mossbacks—no possessive, a lapse in my view— a bar/restaurant downtown. I didn't intend on ordering a burger, but scanned the list of burgers anyway, searching for novel approaches, and boy did I find one. 
     

    "Welcome to Ohio!" my friend laughed, when I pointed out the delicacy. The waitress stopped by at that moment. 
     "How drunk do customers have to be to order the Peanut Butter and Jelly Burger?" I asked. This didn't register.
     "I sold one tonight," she said.
     "Have you tried it?" I continued.
     "Not yet." 
     I could tell from her tone and expression that this interchange was entirely puzzling to her—I could have been inquiring what exactly was Gallic about these "French fries" and whether anyone actually ordered them. I let the matter drop and we ordered.
     The six-hour drive home Monday left plenty of time for musing over signs. Just as we were passing through Port Clinton one read "Fowl Foolers" which had me craning my neck, puzzled, examining the place of business as we rushed by and wondering exactly what the establishment could possibly do: produce tofu meals disguised as chickens? Perform chicken-oriented entertainments to soothe birds on their way to slaughter? The graphic—a duck in mid-flight, just begging to be shot out of the sky—gave away the game.
     "Decoys!" I said, triumphantly. (And bird calls. And more! Their web site). 
      The last challenge was on 94, heading north. An electronic sign that read, "NIGHT WORK DAILY." It communicated its message: Every night the construction that goes on during the day will go on into the the night. But it also bothered me. something was wrong. "WORK NIGHTLY" would be shorter and convey the same meaning. Though some drivers could be confused and mistakenly believe they were being urged to labor after sundown. "DAY WORK NIGHTLY" might be better or, better still, "ROAD WORK NIGHTLY."  
     That sign entertained me for minutes. "'Night Work' has an edge to it, like 'Sex Work,' I said to my wife. "Good title for a thriller."
     Back home, happily before my iMac, I logged into Amazon. Half a dozen novels entitled "Night Work," plus "Nightwork" by Irwin Shaw. There's nothing new under the sun, as we are told in Ecclesiastes 1:9.  
     

Hey! We have one of these back home!

    The stuff in the Louvre museum is original. That's sort of the point.
     That lady smiling enigmatically? The actual Mona Lisa, not a photocopy, but really painted with actual paint by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Winged Victory of Samothrace? A bona fide 2200-year-old white marble Hellenistic sculpture discovered on the island of Samothrace. If it were white styrofoam from Cleveland, well, it just wouldn't be the same. 

     Which is why I was a little flabbergasted, during my recent visit to Paris, to turn a corner and see the 20-foot wide, 16-foot tall Assyrian winged bull of Sargon II. Which, to my knowledge was still at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Excavated in what is now Iraq by University of Chicago archeologists in 1929, it had been shipped back to Chicago and been on display there since 1931. What was the beast doing here? Had it flown the coop?

    A little on-the-scene sleuthing uncovered this clue: 

     Even my junior high school French could make sense of "Reproduction." 

     Though still a mystery. Why place, among all those actually treasures, a copy of this particular piece?  I mean, it's nice, in a brawny, blanked-eyed way. But couldn't they do without it? They had lots of other fabulous ancient stuff—the Code of Hammurabi, for instance. 

     After a few seconds of on-line sleuthing, I learned that the "M. Bourbon" on the plaque was Michel Bourbon, a Parisian artist who came to Chicago in 1991 and led a team of craftsmen to create a mold around the 40-ton, 2600-year-old sculpture. It was a difficult job. To keep the limestone from absorbing the silicon used to make the mold, they had to rub it first with a special conservation soap.

    The Louvre wanted the model because, before the Maroons plucked away the 40-ton winged bull, the French had excavated the site, Dur-Sharrukin at what is now called Khorsabad, in northern Iraq and carted off Sargon II's throne room, with the exeption of the bull. Now they wanted the whole room displayed en suite. The odds of the Oriental Institute parting with its treasure were nil, so a copy of the big guy seemed in order. Four pounds of raw potatoes were rubbled inside the mold to smooth out the silicone. 

    They also used 8,000 pounds of plaster of Paris shipped from France. Not because the French plaster was considered superior to Midwestern plaster, though I suppose it was. But rather the work was sponsored by Lafarge Copee, a large French concrete and plaster company, and part of the deal was they fronted the cash, but the conservators were required to use their stuff. The potatoes, I assume, were local. (It was a good investment, if you notice the mention of "avec le concours de Lafarge"—24 years of subtle product placement at one of the landmarks of global culture; not bad for four tons of plaster).

    The moral of the story. Whenever we talk about antiquities being removed from the ancient world, the default attitude is that it's plunder. However it was acquired, we swiped their patrimony and ought to give it back one of these days. But the truth is more complicated. This giant winged bull was found at a site not far from Mosul, where ISIS just blew up an ancient mosque. If European nations hadn't spirited it to safety, a lot of this stuff would not have survived to this day. Then all we would have are copies.