Keep Trump safe so he can lose Nov. 5 and go to prison

Portrait of Napoleon (Rijksmuseum)

      Nah, I don't believe these feeble assassination attempts — two and counting — are deliberately staged by Donald Trump to distract from whatever shitshow he's neck deep in at the moment. He isn't cunning enough. Rather they are convenient occurrences that can be immediately capitalized on, dialing up the fundraising, self-pity, distraction, and of course blame-shifting.
     "The constant drumbeat of hate directed toward Donald Trump by liberal Democratic media, entertainers and politicians is yielding results," reader Thomas Murray wrote Monday. "The hysterical dog whistle to the demented has resulted in two assassination attempts ... so far. This is the real 'death of democracy!'"
     Of course there is no "drumbeat of hate" directed at Trump. Maybe he means news reportage. Or moral horror at his swan dive into racism and white supremacy. Blaming the media for reflecting his vile statements is like blaming the mirror because you're ugly.

     I can't speak for the entire media, but I made it clear almost half a dozen years ago that I absolutely do not hate Trump. How could you hate someone so broken and pathetic? No liberal wants Trump dead; we want him to live, be crushed by Kamala Harris Nov. 5, and then go to prison. He can't do that if he's killed. Frankly, I can't imagine a worse punishment that can be inflicted on Donald Trump than for him to wake up and be forced to be himself for another day.
     No, Republicans just see the assassination attempts, even though both have been done by Trump supporters, as a way to ascribe something bad to people they don't like. It's strange. After an assassination attempt, they worry that calling Trump a would-be dictator, a liar, bully, fraud, felon and traitor might trigger some disturbed individual with a gun. Otherwise, they don't seem to worry at all that he is being called a would-be dictator, liar, bully, fraud, felon and traitor because he IS a would-be dictator, liar, bully, fraud, felon and traitor. That doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.    

     I was tempted to write Murray back, asking he pretend that instead of a disturbed Trump voter being discovered with a gun and never even getting a shot off — never even being within sight of Trump — it was half a dozen elementary school kids murdered. Then he could demand that nobody politicize the unavoidable tragedy, and I could mentally project my thoughts and prayers in his direction.

In search of black licorice

    I've never met anyone who didn't like chocolate. Who waved off a proffered square of Ghirardelli with, "I'm sorry; not a big chocolate fan."    

     Licorice is different. Some people cringe from licorice. It is an acquired taste. An adult taste. Not a lot of 9-year-olds pine for licorice.

    There's also a connoisseurship to licorice. While chocolate certainly has a range — from the best, L.A. Burdick, to the semi-best, See's, down through Fannie May, all the way down to Snickers. Like the barnyard denizens of "Animal Farm," some chocolate is better than others. 

    That said, I'll still shrug and eat a Hershey's bar. Any port in a storm....

    That isn't true for licorice. Those strawberry whips? I'd rather eat the packaging. I not only want licorice, but I want really good licorice, and by really good licorice, I mean Kookaburra Australian licorice. Other types of black licorice aren't as strong, or as soft, or as fresh. They're also rans, not worth the effort of chewing.

     Okay, that's not entirely true. In Copenhagen I made a point of visiting the Lakrids by Bulow outlet in the basement of the Magasin department store — samples of licorice, perfect spheres were handed out with a tongs by a pair of lovely shop clerks. The place resembled a jewelry store and the candy cost about as much. Salt licorice is a thing in Denmark, and we had to be careful, because some varieties tasted like congealed Morton salt. But we bought slabs that were so good they never made it out of the country.

    Later, in Amerstam, we tracked down the Het Oud-Hollandsch Snoepwinkeltje — "The Old Dutch Candy Store" — and bought a paper cone filled with licorice. Some very chewy, the some almost as good as the Kookaburra I could buy at Sunset Foods back home in Northbrook.
     Only that was about to change. Had I known what was coming, I'd have shipped a crate home. I've have cleaned the shelves of Kookaburra, disappeared from Sunset, replaced by lesser brands. I tried a few. Pheh. Plastic. Bland. Heck, I tried Good & Plenty. Like a man dying of thirst sucking on stones. I was that desperate. I bought a pack of Chuckles for the black piece.
    The Kookaburra web site is there, the company based in Washington State. But it was out of licorice. Months went by. Out of stock. I sent them an inquiring email. I phoned. Nothing. Which is not surprising — during COVID, Coca Cola wouldn't tell me what happened to Fresca without weeks of hammering. Corporations can suck that way.
   But persistence is my superpower. I circled back. Tried again.  finally tracked down a Kookaburra employee. She said that the two owners of Kookaburra are fighting and the company has ground to a halt.
     So it's in limbo?
     "Very much in limbo," she replied, explaining that the two are nearing retirement, and questions of transition have hobbled them. "I don't know what's happening with them. I've tried to figure it out. In the meantime, we're just stopped."
     While I had her on the phone, I had to ask: why is Kookaburra so much better than other licorices?
     "It's batch cooking," she said.
     "Like Graeter's ice cream?" I replied. "They make French pot ice cream in small batches."
     "Like a brownie. Other stuff is cooked more continuously, and it gets rubbery."

     I told her that I had been able to buy a tub of licorice that claimed to be Kookaburra at a high end supermarket in Boston in May, and she said that other companies use their factory, and directed me to Nuts.com. I hurried there, immediately ordered a pound of "Black Australian Licorice, made by the manufacturers of Kookaburra." I ordered some English All-Sorts while I was at it.
     That was Thursday at noon. Within 24 hours, a box was sitting on our front stairs, its cheery, chatty branded packaging carrying over from the box to the bright blue bags inside.

    Through supreme will, I resisted tearing open the bags on the spot and finding out. First, lunch.  Then I parceled out a serving of the licorice, which was appropriately sticky. I tried some. This was it. My wife concurred. "This is very good licorice!" she enthused.    

     If the moral of this story doesn't leap out, I'll spell it out: we have these fantastic online commercial systems, these websites and delivery chains. But you sometimes need that ghost in the machine — the living Kookaburra employee — to birddog a solution. 

     A business only works as well as the people running it work, and it was a little heartbreaking to contrast the leaping efficiency of Nuts.com — which sold me a pound of Kookaburra-quality licorice for $8.99 — to the we're-so-conflicted-we-can't-operate collapse of Kookaburra itself.  They should put something on their website. Licorice is important; how much would an explanation cost?

     Thank you Nuts.com for picking up the dropped ball. As for the Kookaburra owners — c'mon guys, people are depending on you. Figure it out. Because otherwise the world will march on without you. At least put something on your website. Don't your customers deserve that respect?

     I remembered a song from elementary school — an Australian nursery rhyme written in 1932 — and found it quite apt:

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Eating all the gumdrops he can see
Stop, Kookaburra, Stop, Kookaburra
Leave some there for me.

     I assume those are licorice gumdrops.

Flashback 2007: Found in translation —The sexy side of 'Georgics'

     I'm still on vacation — lots of accumulated days to burn through. Here is the companion review to yesterday's look at Virgil's "Aeneid." I enjoyed reading "Georgics" probably more than a person should — if farming isn't your thing, you might prefer to read the 2014 piece of about the Gaza War written exactly 10 years ago. The more things change ... 

      Though "Georgics" is worth a glance. Or more. I can't believe I didn't mention that Virgil has different hives of bees battling each other in a parody of The Iliad. I like to quote his line about bees being stout warriors in their waxen kingdoms whenever the subject of bees come up. Judge me harshly if you must.

Fiction
Virgil's Georgics
A New Verse Translation
By Janet Lembke
Yale, 114 pages, $15 (paper)

     'Georgics" means "farming" in Greek and no, Virgil isn't tackling an original subject here, either. There was a lost poem by Nicander of the same title, and maybe others the great Latin poet knew about.

"The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics
and Aeneis," 1697 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     No matter. We modern readers are so removed from the mechanics of food production, there is fresh joy in this ode to the bounty of the earth. At heart it is a practical guide — when to plant, how to handle livestock, the proper care of bees — and a celebration.
     "I'd have my ox groan as he pulls the plow deep and my plowshare glisten, polished by the furrow," Virgil writes.
     Despite the specific subject, there is no lack of universality.
     "Every last species on earth, man and beast alike, the vast schools of the sea, the cattle and bright-colored birds fall helpless into passion's fire," begins a famous passage that holds as true for humans as horses.
     Lembke's translation is fresh and readable, almost sexual in parts, such as when "in spring, Earth swells moistly and begs for bursting seed."
     She wisely modernizes some of the more obscure references — "Parthenope" becomes "Naples" and "Chaonian acorns" become "wild acorns."
     Sometimes the result is jarring, as when Bacchus becomes "The Body Relaxer," which makes the wine god sound like a device hawked on cable TV.
     Still, she generally improves on past translations — Virgil describes bees as stout-hearted warriors in "their waxen kingdoms," a phrase lovely enough to send me skipping back to my Loeb Classical Library translation by H.R. Fairclough, where "waxen realms" just isn't as nice.
     Lembke's translation delivers Virgil's salute to agrarian life hay-scented and bleating at your doorstep. Pour a draught of wine — there is also a memorable tribute to winemaking here — and enjoy.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2007

Flashback 2007: What's old is new: Homer translator takes a whack at Virgil's 'The Aeneid'

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, London, 1654 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The Sun-Times once had a book editor, and an excellent one: Henry Kisor, who not only reviewed books, but wrote them, also excellent. One of my favorite titles of all time is attached to his memoir about growing up with deafness: "What's that Pig Outdoors?" Henry's retired to the Upper Peninsula, but writes in from time to time, and it's always a pleasure to hear from him.

     If a melancholy one. We once had a book editor, heck, we once had an assistant book editor, and an entire book section. All long gone.

     Occasionally, I'd draw a plum assignment — or heck, knowing me, maybe I volunteered, I don't recall — such as reviewing a new translation of "Aeneid." To show you how sincere this review was, I later read it a second time, out loud to my older son. Tomorrow I'll post the sidebar, a review of Virgil's "Georgics," his book about farming and so much more.

Fiction
The Aeneid
By Virgil
Translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, 486 pages, $40

     It takes guts to recast a classic. The rewards are great -- a guaranteed audience, a familiar tale. The perils are also great.
     Sometimes the experiment works: Gregory Maguire's Wicked was a commercial success and ended up on Broadway. Sometimes it doesn't: The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's slave's-eye view of Gone With the Wind, is interesting only for its legal woes.
     Homer's The Iliad, an epic of Achilles and the Trojan War, and The Odyssey, about the homeward agonies of Ulysses, would seem beyond adaptation. Honed by centuries of re-telling, speckled with familiar tropes — the long black ships, the wine dark sea — revisiting it would seem an act of hubris. A challenge nevertheless taken up by Roman poet Publius Virgilius Maro, whose new book, The Aeneid, takes the story of the fall of Troy and tells it from the perspective of a vanquished Trojan, Aeneas, adding moments that Homer left out — the sack of the city, the creation of a giant wooden horse — turning the epic into a tale of the creation of Italy.
     OK, The Aeneid is not a new book —Virgil penned it in the decade before his death in 19 B.C. But its benefits and problems are the same as those of any other adaptation.
     The first question is why anyone who doesn't fear getting his knuckles rapped by nuns would even contemplate reading The Aeneid.
     The answer is because it is newly translated by Princeton scholar Robert Fagles, whose translation of The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996) were surprise bestsellers. Readers who savored those works are eager to see what he does with Virgil.
     How well does Fagles do? Look at the death of Priam, the aged king of Troy who, as the city falls, throws himself at his son's killer and is slain. Here's how John Dryden, the 17th century poet, describes the scene:

Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire,
Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire,
(The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,)
Haul'd from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound,
And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground.
Thus Priam fell ...

     Fagles puffs away the dust:

Now — die!'
That said, he drags the old man
straight to the altar, quaking, slithering on through
slicks of his son's blood, his right hand sweeping forth his sword —
a flash of steel — he buries it hilt-deep in the king's flank
Such was the fate of Priam...

     Fagles loses a strong image — the killer's hand, twisting in the old man's hair — but the passage is a third shorter, and falls more harmoniously on modern ears.
     Despite Fagles' best efforts, Aeneas is not the most appealing hero. Virgil was considered a proto-Christian — that's why Dante chose him as his guide in his Inferno, and there is something very Ned Flanders about Aeneas — he's a heroic goof, not nearly as complex as Achilles, and lacking the ingenuity of Odysseus, not to mention the good plot line.
     Which is the second problem. Rather than returning home after 10 years, Aeneas is leaving it forever, off to found Italy. He does so with such brio that you expect The Aeneid to be underwritten by the Italian Tourist Board, which in a sense it was; Virgil was commissioned to write it by the Roman emperor. It was as if George Bush hired Maya Angelou to rewrite Moby Dick with an eye toward promoting New England tourism.
     So why read The Aeneid? There is no question that reading it is work, if only to keep skipping back to the nearly 1,000-name glossary to find out who Penthesilia is or where Crustumerium might be located. The ancient Romans were haunted by the fear they were merely pale imitators of the Greeks, and to compare Virgil to Homer, you see why.
     The bottom line is, if you're unfamiliar with Fagles' work, yet want to dive into the classics for their poetry, their power, their eternal themes and deathless imagery, then you'd do better starting at his The Iliad and The Odyssey. They're superior works. If you've already read Homer, then you're probably ready for The Aeneid.
     Yes, there are long eat-your-peas stretches to trudge through — you'll never want to read about another unblemished white ox being slaughtered again. But there also are moments of drama and heartbreak — Queen Dido bewailing her doomed love — plus a queasy familiarity as you read about a previous costly, ill-conceived war.
     You'll be reading a book that enthralled the great minds of our culture. The Aeneid inspired Dante to write his masterpiece.
     "It is from you alone that I have taken/The lofty style for which men honor me," Dante gushes when he meets Virgil in The Inferno.
     Shakespeare, too, was a fan of the book, and that is not true of every best seller thumping down upon the tables at Borders this month.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 7, 2007

"I saw it on television"

 

      I'm on vacation all this week, since coming back from New York on Monday. It's been nice. In fact, I don't remember enjoying just being at home quite so much. Doing whatever I feel like doing.
     I've pretty much stepped away from social media — that alone made the week pleasant. Surprisingly so. I didn't realize what a pain in the ass it was, just how much Twitter is the death of a thousand cuts, and what a time sink Facebook can be. I'm going to try to dial back my presence there permanently. Let the groundlings have at each other without me.
     I did dip my toe back into Twitter Thursday, and noticed the above, which I had reposted. It's the sort of dry wit that can redeems social media, sorta. Not a criticism of The Economist, I rush to add. I like to tell people that reading The Economist is like having an extra brain. But a reminder that when one writes something, there is always, or often, an aspect that is not considered. In this case, the hard right have previously guided Germany, into the greatest catastrophe and bloodletting of the 20th century.
     Odd that they would flirt with it again. Then again, there's a lot of oddness going around. It's odd that nearly half of all Americans would stand solidly behind the clown we saw on rampant display at the presidential debate Tuesday night. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets." What an imbecile. And then, when challenged, for him to say, "I saw it on television." What a moron. I have a hard time understanding how even one person can vote for this guy. Then again, as I've said before, once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matter. 

     Speaking of ignoring stuff, I think I'll wrap up here. No law says these posts have to go on and on. One may be brief.

Met Notes #1: "Reframing history."

Visible Storage at the Met

     We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday and popped into what it calls "Visible Storage" in its Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. A jumble of paintings and sculptures, empty frames and stacked china, silver, tables and chairs, hundreds of linear feet of treasures jammed together with almost no note or explanation.  It's like the best flea market of all time, except nothing's for sale.  

     Once, years ago, I was pleasantly startled to turn a corner in Visible Storage and come face-to-face with John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" hanging from a slotted metal wall as if the famed painting were just another art print in somebody's closet.

     "Madame X" was back in her usual place in a public gallery Monday — the sitter was an American creole socialite from New Orleans, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau; Sargent concealed her name so as to avoid scandal over both her suggestive pose and her skimpy dress (originally, one strap had slipped down, but Sargent later quailed and repainted it in place.

          The Sun-Times reported Wednesday that The Art Institute received a $75 million gift to expand how it presents its modern art. That's welcome news, as museums struggle to stay relevant and show off their collections in creative ways. 

     Of course, you don't need to construct a new building to shake up how artwork is presented. Museums lately have been vigorously trying to expand the contours of Western art. A current fashion is juxtaposition — placing contemporary works by underrepresented artists alongside greats of the Western canon. For instance, the Met decided to hang Elizabeth Colomba's 1997 "Armelle" immediately to the left of Sargent's masterpiece.

"Armelle" by Elizabeth Colomba

     "The parallel between Armelle and Madame X is caustic and ironic," Colomba notes on an explanatory card. "Both are creoles: X descends from a colonialist family; Armelle from one that would have been in bondage. Bestowing the same pose on my model, I challenge stereotypes, reframing history to apply a different narrative for the character."
    The standard circle-the-wagons response would be to howl that a portrait from an artist born in 1976 has been allowed to invade a gallery of Sargent portraits. The same see-no-evil approach that has Red States purging their libraries of books that offer clear-eyed views of the nation's racist history. That's fear. And timidity. The presence of Colomba's work made me linger over Madame X longer than I would otherwise, certainly when it is hung without comment in Visible Storage.   

     Not far from the Sargent hall was a painting that demonstrates this trend even more eloquently: "Belizaire and the Frey Children." Painted in the 1830s, this portrait is of "an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his enslavers," the aforementioned Belizaire seen at the upper right, in a beige frock coat, arms crossed, rather dubiously regarding his charges.   

      Sometime around the year 1900 the descendents of the children had their caretaker painted out, in the fine tradition of erasing Black people from historical memory. But in 2022, careful conservation returned the figure, and transformed what was otherwise a muddy and unexceptional family portrait of three long-dead children into a touchstone of one of today's most pressing social issues, at least in Red states. In Blue states, we just call it history and don't get bent out of shape studying it, perhaps because we don't sympathize with the Confederate losers in the bottom of our cold dead hearts.

     You probably wouldn't notice it on the scale reproduced here, and nothing in the materials suggested this point. But I looked at Belizaire's eyes, and the eyes of the Frey children, and noticed a certain similarity. Slave-owning men did have a habit of contributing to their own stock of chattel, and Belizaire might have been depicted among the Frey children because he was one of the Frey children. A half sibling anyway. You can see why those attracted to white supremacy would want this to continue being swept under the rug, as their forefathers routinely did. And why that urge must be assiduously squelched. Me, I like a little history served up with my artwork. Otherwise, museums are just big halls lined with pretty pictures.

    

  

Sept. 11, 2024

 

     The New York City subway and the commuter Path line both stop at Cortland Street, and the weird white Oculus mall/hub. So it was natural to meet at the 9/11 Memorial Sunday morning to begin our day. We didn't think ahead of what it would be like to wait there.

     The power of the place hits you instantly. What happened there, 23 years ago today.
     The rendezvous, my wife and I from our hotel near Madison Park, and our daughter-in-law from her home in Jersey City, the sort of small happy life event forever stolen from the people who died that day, and from their friends and loved ones. Stolen forever.
    My wife and I got there early, and did what you are supposed to do — pause, fall silent, reflect, remember that day. Gazing at the names, the cascading water, the new One World Trade Center looming above. 
     I'd been to the memorial before, several times, and found the design completely apt — if you haven't visited, you should. The memorial consists of a pair of square pits that outline the original footprint of the fallen twin towers, bordered with the names of those who perished in the attacks, cut into smooth brass. The letters cut just wide enough to insert a flower stem. 
     Inside, water cascades down the walls, and disappears into a smaller pit whose bottom is too deep to see. Beyond our ability to perceive, like the carnage itself. The memorial itself is huge; standing by one square, you can't see the other. Its size, like the Vietnam Memorial, suited to the enormity it is intended to commemorate.
     If you want to read something about 9/11, I wrote a more indepth reflection three years ago, at the height of COVID. Honestly, I don't have anything to add today. Fly the flag, try to dial back the hate that is the root of such disasters. Other than that, who can contemplate the unimaginable for long? I took off my cap and bowed my head. Our daughter-in-law arrived, and we proceeded to a much happier place, the South Street Seaport, alive with life and food and commerce.  The two sites only a few minute walk apart, one frozen in the unalterable and tragic past, forever fixed on the echoing void caused by the bloodiest day on American soil since the Civil War. All those names, all those precious lives were snuffed out by bitter hatreds. The other, particularly Jean-Georges Tin Building, is sort of an anti-9/11 Memorial. Not that it is against it, but that it represents a completely contradictory set of emotions. Coffee and muffins, commerce and seafaring. We drank our coffee and ate our sandwiches and looked out at another perfect September day, another clear blue sky, just like the one torn asunder on Sept. 11, 2001. 

One World Trade Center towers above the memorial site. At 1776 feet, it is the tallest building in the Western Hempisphere, and was designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The building marks its 10th anniversary next month.