Mondoweiss

Honey You Wrecked the Dog

As stated earlier, July 4 is rough on the one of my dogs that hates fireworks. He gets anxious and trembles all the time, he follows us around. Only now July 4 is over and he continues to follow us everywhere. I was painting a room; he moved from one side to the other as I did. My sister's a vet and I asked her how to get him out of it. She said, "Did you coddle him?" Well, yes. When the fireworks were going bigtime, my wife took the dog in her arms, etc. "You shouldn't have coddled him," my sister went on. "He likes being coddled, he wants more of that, he's a smart dog."

Now my sister's saying we can uncoddle him by playing CDs of thunder a lot, on low volume, and acting like it's normal. Also by rewarding him for being macho.

(Did I mention: We don't have kids? Oh you figured that out...)

Angleworms in a Bottle, an anti-New York Story

I spent a couple days in New York city this week, including an obligatory meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don't live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These are the people who want to get out of you a lot of the benefits of a friendship—the exchange of ideas and gossip, the warmth, the removal of loneliness—but without really paying out as a friend in any real generosity of spirit. Truly, they'd just as soon you do badly, and they even act to achieve that result. I'm not talking about friend/rivals. That's an old and honored category of friendship. Old friends know how to negotiate that (ask Gore Vidal and Truman Capote..).

Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. cause N.Y. is the writers' olympic village. As it's the olympic village for investment analysts, TV people, legal turks, advertising people, etc. I bet they have pseudofriends, too.

Here are two eminent writers holding forth on the subject. First is the late Saul Bellow, as interviewed by Philip Roth in The New Yorker:

I've thought quite a lot about the New York setting of "Seize the Day" and I'm inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of "Seize the Day" are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

Wow. Note that: Bellow never won any of his struggles in New York. (No wonder Roth lives in CT).

Now here's Hemingway in a famous passage from The Green Hills of Africa:

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle...

Yes, I'm collecting string on this subject...

My Little Brother Disagrees With Me About the Sopranos

My little brother says there were a couple things about the Sopranos finale that lifted it into greatness. 1, The characterization of Tony's power. Tony could on the one hand manipulate his men into thinking that he wanted rival boss Phil dead, then visit Phil in the hospital and squeeze his hand and urge him to get well. "So for the first time he's able to compartmentalize his ruthless mob leadership. That is so nuanced," my little brother says. 2, The line that Phil gives to his blonde maid as he brings her toward the Wire Factory to shtup her: "We need to get something straight between us." Exults my little brother: "It's the greatest line of the season. I've never encountered it in 39 years of barroom humor."

He also notes that while Howard Stern was crazy for the show, his dental hygienist and her boyfriend, who live in Edison, hated it. For the same reason my wife hated it and I wasn't crazy about it: because it falsely resolved intense conflicts with harmony, not violence.

My little brother says that even this speaks to the show's excellence. "Curb Your Enthusiasm is really smart but it has a tiny market. Sopranos is the number one show on all cable. It's done that with great writing and nuance, and managed to tow along all the guys crying out for violence."

(P.S. The blatant nepotism of this entry is, I gather, a tradition of blogging. C.f., Instapundit promoting his documentarian wife.)

Kama Sutra Position 33: I Do Better at a Dinner Party

Having vowed not to f--- up another dinner party, I said I'd report on a party last weekend, and my continuing effort to socialize myself. Herewith:

I thought I did fine. I didn't seem to make anyone uncomfortable. I probably laughed too loud at an anecdote a friend told, about a big meeting of executives in New York, to which one woman showed up late, with her neck in a brace, and to cover her lateness and the accessory, said, "Kama sutra position 33," as she found her way to a chair. I say too loud because the storyteller then explained that no one at the meeting laughed because the woman who said it had a reputation—so she wasn't going counter to type, which would have been very funny; she was merely trying to scandalize the group. But another guy at the table also laughed very hard, even more loutishly than I did, and he and I both made "Kama sutra position 33" a running joke. I think I went a little over the line on that; I had a little too much to drink.

My wife, who is well-bred, saw it somewhat differently. "Your grade is a B-. You had an easy crowd and you still made a few mistakes. There was no reason for you to make any mistakes given the ease of the group, and the fact that you didn't have any weird competitive feelings about any of them. When you're feeling weird and competitive, you do your dry drunk thing. You insist that we should all discuss Muriel Spark, and then you give us a lecture. I remember you telling me that time that you didn't feel that the group was intellectual enough and you wanted to yank it up by its bootstraps. I don't think you can yank up a social Saturday night party into an intellectual gathering.

"You get points for trying to flow with the crowd and not trying to convert anybody in that rubelike unsophisticated way. You didn't say anything weirdly sexual. You don't get points for that, but you don't get any points off for that. You get the B for actually trying to be in the situation, trying to be In Rome. You never usually do that. But the reason it's a B-, you didn't really contribute, you tried to be right on the edge with some of your announcements. Do you understand what it means to sing for your supper? That doesn't mean you stand up and perform and speechify, it means you're in the choir, and you go along with the chorus."

Huh. Good advice. Keep you posted...

I F--- Up Another Dinner Party

I don't fully understand why I reached for a 3-by-5 card from a nearby drawer, during a dinner my wife and I had for an old friend, Friday night, and scratched down a few notes at the table about the subjects we hadn't covered in the conversation I still wanted to get to. My wife was upset with me later, for speechmaking and not being in the flow of the conversation. I used to be able to think that our difference over this type of behavior was cultural, having to do with my being Jewish (unacculturated) and my wife a WASP (well-bred), but whatever the reason it feels like I've hit bottom on this, it's not working, and I better learn how to socialize (at 50—oy). My wife has been talking to me about this for years, but it's a sad truth about marriage that sometimes it takes an outsider to say something to make the light go on. My editor commented last week, when I was visiting him, that I had an adolescent relationship with my parents. For the next ten minutes we talked about other stuff and I didn't hear what he was saying, thinking about his comment, and I returned to it, and he elaborated somewhat. He's intuitive and oracular; you take what glints you get and study them later. I think that really got to me, I thought, he's right. We have another dinner party tonight, and I asked my wife, What is the standard? She said, "Be natural, but not make anyone feel uncomfortable." I'll let you know how I do.

(Regretfully) Hitchens Is Right, Cole Is Wrong

I love Professor Juan Cole's site. He's been a leading voice against the Iraq war, he knows what he's talking about and he writes with sympathy for the Arab world from the standpoint of an international American who cherishes America's best interests. I trust his judgment.

But Cole is doing himself a disservice by getting so worked up about Christopher Hitchens's quotation of his statements about Iran on a listserv, a statement Cole thought to be private. Lately Cole has published his petulant emails to Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate (who brushed him off coolly and correctly). One claim Cole makes is that he was going to publish the statement himself, and Hitchens scooped him, and illegally and unethically deprived him of the value of his work. Yes, Hitchens scooped him, but I don't buy all the violations. I give Cole great credit for the lines that Hitchens printed (and attacked). I will look forward to what Cole has to say at greater length on the question. I think a lot more people will now be tuned to Cole, a good thing indeed. And how much money was he really going to make off these ideas? He says the listserv was a "small" group. How small? And what has Cole done about the real violation, the colleague who emailed his stuff to Hitchens. Give us some facts.

I generally can't stand Hitchens. I think he masks weak and sometimes vicious arguments on the war and related issues with tangential bloviations, self-satisfied turns of phrase and a grandiosity that yes, does seem vinous. On this matter, though, he's right. Someone leaked this stuff to him, he found it interesting and important. Go with it. And no, he doesn't have to call Cole for comment, as Cole demands.

If an idea is so important to you, any journalist will tell you—keep it close to the vest. That's the bottom line here: Cole has a lot to learn more about journalism.

P.S. And another lesson, Cole sent one angry email to Weisberg at 12:31 a.m., per the date stamp. Always a bad idea.

Backscratching on Imus

On Imus in the Morning today, Howard Fineman went after Imus for failing to promote hs friend Jonathan Alter's book about the first 100 days of the Roosevelt presidency. Then as Imus came back at him, Fineman admitted that he hadn't read the book. This used to be called the Old Boy Network. Don't these guys have better things to talk about on national television?