Time and Again

The word magazine comes down to us English speakers from French, which apparently appropriated it from Arabic, where it denoted a storehouse. In a more general sense, the word still denotes, in some cases, a place of storage, as in a firearms magazine, which holds ammunition. Of course, the most usual use of the word today is to denote a periodical, which, in a sense, is a storehouse for reports, essays, critiques, reviews, etc. 

The problem with the magazine as storehouse is that the reader (I speak for myself) cannot avail himself of all the goodies in the storehouse before the next issue pops into his mailbox. 

About a half century ago, I had a subscription to Punch (alas, now-defunct), a British periodical famed for its humor (or should I have written humour?), and commentary on world affairs. Weekly, the magazine would arrive in a plain brown wrapper (more suited, I thought, for hiding a porno rag). Arrive, that is, before I had an opportunity to finish the previous week’s issue—or, indeed, the issue before that one. The result was that off in a corner of my premises a pile of brown-wrapped Punch magazines steadily grew.

When work—or some more worthwhile activity—allotted me free time, I would dig into the Punch pile and randomly select an old issue to read—weeks or months after its arrival. 

What did I discover when finally read the ancient texts? The cartoons remained as funny as ever; the same too for the humorous essays. But the news . . . . I was carried back to the threats, the disasters, the terrors, and the catastrophes of the recent past. And looking back after months and months (was it ever years?), I was moved to quote the title of a book by D. H. Lawrence, “Look! We have come through!” 

We escaped from under the volcano; we were not carried away by the rushing waters of calamity. All the torment that we suffered was long gone. If only we had known . . . .

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As I have probably mentioned in a previous post or two, I have been spending a lot of time in the archives of another magazine—The New Yorker. I go historically, usually starting in 1939 or 1940 or so and continuing until I start barfing at the fashions advertised in the 70s. I am on my third tour, each time focusing (the magazine insists on focussing) on some element I neglected before. This time I had a strange sensation as I approached the 1960s. I had the feeling that I was a spectator at a play whose outcome I knew, the fates of the characters implanted in my brain. Oedipus, you will blind yourself; Hamlet, you will die. 

And so, 1960: Richard Nixon, no matter how hard you try, you will lose the election to John F. Kennedy. 

John F. Kennedy, your presidency will have some highs and some lows (the Bay of Pigs, for one) as 1961 moves on to 1962, and 1962 to 1963.  

And I sit there staring at the computer screen, and I want to shout, “You don’t know!” as the months of 1963 move inexorably to November. 

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Unlike the experience I had with my Punch magazines where I was taking advantage of my hindsight, the New Yorker experience combined hindsight with foresight. Knowing the outcome that history gave me, I shivered with terror as the magazine went unawares through the days and weeks until—like a dread fate—we reached the 22nd of November.

 

Language Follies 18 (Either Less is More--or More is More)

Phil Donahue died last month. The king of daytime talk television, he hosted a show for about three decades. I watched his show once.

At home one day, I thought I’d tune in to find out what this celebrated personage was all about. What I saw was Donahue with his microphone parading up and down the aisles of the theater, eliciting comments from the audience. Suddenly he stopped! “We have a phone call,” he proclaimed (or words to that effect). Who could be on the line to stop the action in its tracks? I wondered; surely Henry Kissinger—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. After a few seconds, a woman’s voice was piped into the studio. And the air was filled with a vicious racist rant. 

Needless to say, I turned off the set and never ventured into that moronic swamp again.

*

If Phil Donahue was a personage I never took a liking to, Eric Severeid, a grave and sober newscaster, was always worthy of my respect. However, it is now, many decades later, that I have discovered something that has made me evict Severeid from my newscaster hall of fame. I print below a complete item from The New Yorker of June 26, 1965:

OF all the recent attempts, public and private, to justify the American intervention in the Dominican Republic, none sounded more ingenious to us than a contribution by Eric Sevareid that was reprinted as a public-service advertisement in the Times by A. N. Spanel, founder and chairman of the International Latex Corporation. With admirable candor, Mr. Sevareid wrote, "I fail to understand the editorialist who points out with disdain that after all, there were only a few handfuls of communists present [in Santo Domingo]," and, under the provocative subheading “Their Lethal Numbers,” went on to argue, "In a very real sense their lack of numbers is their strength. It was because they were few that President Bosch had not bothered to deal severely with them. It was because they were few that they could act with rapidity when the explosion came." He then outlined the danger that such minuscule groups of Communists as the fifty-four Dominican conspirators identified by our government represent to other Latin-American nations. But it would seem that Mr. Sevareid is unaware of the far-ranging implications of his argument. It is not merely that we have unwittingly strengthened the hand of the Dominican Reds by helping to reduce their lethal numbers to smaller, and therefore still more lethal, numbers. There is also an increasing danger from the enemy within our own borders. If memory serves us, J. Edgar Hoover issued a report not long ago in which he stated that while the membership of the Communist Party in the United States had fallen off drastically since the Second World War, the Party's potential for mischief was greater than ever, because the remaining members were obviously the most dedicated and fanatical. Taking this Hoover-Sevareid-Spanel argument one more step, we may conclude that the ultimate danger is a Communist Party with no members at all—a peril that the United States, fortunately, has not yet had to face. 

The magazine nailed the absurdity of the argument that less is more. How Severeid could have advanced the proposition is beyond me. I also looked up A. N. Spanel, imagining him as a ultra-right-wing plutocrat, only to discover that he was quite the opposite. In fact, he sued the right-wing crank Westbrook Pegler, who called his views “pro-Red” and his editorial advertisements, including support for Roosevelt’s New Deal, ‘'Communist-inspired.'' Pegler withdrew his slanders.

*

If some people imagine that less is more when conspiring, there are others who can’t resist the siren call of “more-is-more.” Consider the movers behind the following two products:

“Ultra Max”

“Extra Super” 

Hyperbole on overdrive!

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Then there’s this:

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Let’s end on a positive note.

Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”

Blithe Spirits

 Today’s New York Times has two articles worth noting:

1) 

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together. (1)

Trump claims that what he does is the “weave.”

“You know, I do the weave,” [Trump] said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. . .”

The weave, Trump proclaimed, is rhetorical genius, admired by English professors:

“. . . it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” (2)

Now, I want to declare here—for the record—that I am not a member of Trump’s Shelley reading circle.

*

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

*

2)

The Undoing of New York Nightlife’s Lawyer King

Sal Strazzullo made a flashy career of representing minor celebrities and those in their orbit. His own affluence was a facade. (3)

Sal Strazzullo was an Italian-American boy from Brooklyn. He worked his way through law school, taking classes at night. Upon graduation, he set up his practice in a not-very-glamorous section of Brooklyn, handling mundane cases like “drunken-driving charges and a dispute between neighbors over a fig tree.” Eventually, he got a case that shoe-horned him into a different world: “the glittering world of New York’s night crawlers and minor celebrities.” 

He did so well that he “was renting a penthouse in Battery Park City for $12,000 a month.” Or so it seemed:

the custom suits and luxury cars, prosecutors said in an indictment, were a facade propped up by years of fraud.

The reality was that Strazzullo was stealing millions of dollars, even from members of his old Brooklyn neighborhood. 

Strazzullo will never be tried for his alleged crimes—he committed suicide in a car parked “behind his parents’ home in Bath Beach, Brooklyn.”

*

I have two take-aways from this story:

First—the values of Italian-Americans in Brooklyn are far superior to those of the bubble world of Manhattan’s glitterati.

Second—as a general rule, never trust your money dealings to anyone who drives a better car than yours.

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(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/us/elections/trump-speeches-weave.html

(2) What were the names of those professors again?

(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/nyregion/sal-strazzullo-brooklyn-lawyer-theft.html