A WRITER'S WIT Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that. ​Russell T. Davies Born April 27, 1963

My Book World

“Putin had once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ He was a Russian nationalist to his core. H wanted to extend Russian power, restoring its spheres of influence. He was an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies—or winning its approval” (31).
 
“But the feedback the U.S. official received was mostly about what the secret source had to say about Ukraine. That was the crisis of the moment. The secret sources’ warnings about Russia’s information warfare plans in the United States and Europe garnered little attention. ‘Anybody who had any doubt about Putin’s intentions,’ the U.S. official later said, ‘just wasn’t reading what we reported’” (54).
 
“It appeared that the DNC had been hit twice by separate teams of Russian cyber bandits. And the Russian hackers, CrowdStrike could tell, had been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—a host of DNC material, including emails and databases. Among the pilfered materials was the DNC’s entire opposition research file on Donald Trump.
     It was a complete compromise. There was no telling what the Russians had. Or what they would do with it” (76).
 
“And Trump Jr. touted Russian as a key source for profits. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets . . . certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York,’ he explained. ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’” (89).
 
“According to Source C, a senior Russian financial official, the Trump operation was part of Putin’s overall plan to sow disunity within the United States and the trans-Atlantic alliance. This source reported having heard Putin express his desire to return to the nineteenth-century style of ‘Great Power’ politics in which nations would pursue their own interests rather than an ideals-based international order” (147)

A WRITER'S WIT Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John. Boris Pasternak Born February 10, 1890

B. Pasternak

My Book World

“Hardball wants me live. I take a deep breath, stand up, put in my earpiece, and hook back into MSNBC’s live coverage.
         ‘Well, let’s go to Katy Tur. Katy, are you used to this kind of trash talk from him?’ I hear Chris Matthews but I can’t understand what he’s saying. Trump is still bellowing behind me. Chris tries again. ‘I’m trying to couch this in the most politically correct way. Are you used to the trash talk that Donald Trump threw at you tonight?’” (77).

A WRITER'S WIT I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you. Ann Richards Born September 1, 1933

A. Richards

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles—people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us? ​David Henry Hwang Born August 11, 1957

D. Hwang

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the U.S. C-SPAN is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can view any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can download and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I profile an August 7, 2017 presentation I found very compelling.

A WRITER'S WIT All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest. ​Beatrix Potter Born July 27, 1866

B. Potter

My Book World

“If every issue is always on the active agenda, if an issue that was already disposed of by a majority can be reopened whenever the side that lost regains an advantage, instability infects not just the body that made that decision but also the society that it is governed by. It is the explicit rejection of that principle by the Tea Party Republicans that contributes heavily to political gridlock. A representative or senator’s effectiveness thus is based on his or her ability to deal with a very wide range of issues, with never enough time, and with little guidance from others” (73).

“In a civilized society that needs a profit-driven private sector and a tax-funded public sector, it is all the people’s money. The task facing sensible people is to distinguish between the personal or family needs and wants best fulfilled by individual spending choices and those societal goals that can be achieved only if we pool our resources to buy collective goods” (171-2).

​“Representative government in a capitalist society involves the coexistence of two systems—an economic one, in which a person’s influence necessarily increases with his or her wealth, and a political one, in which every citizen is supposed to have an equal say. If the mechanisms of the free market are going to work, that is, if they are going to increase productivity through incentives and allocate resources efficiently, money must drive decisions. For democracy to fulfill its moral promise, everyone’s vote should have the same weight in making the rules by which we govern ourselves” (183). Hallelujah, he should be teaching civics in high school!

“Democrats will regain a fighting chance to win majority support among working- and middle-class white men only when we demonstrate the will—and capacity—to respond to the economic distress inflicted on them” (187).
 
“The NRA does what I have long begged my LGBT allies to do, at first with mixed results, and more recently with much greater success. They urge all of their adherents to get on the voting rolls. They are diligent to the point of obsession in making sure that elected officials hear from everyone in their constituencies who opposes any limits on guns, especially when a relevant measure is being considered, and they then do an extraordinary job of informing their supporters of how those officials cast their votes” (203).

A WRITER'S WIT Gay teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight ones. I wish they knew that there's nothing wrong with them; that they are just a different shade of normal. ​Jodi Picoult Born May 19, 1966

J. Picoult

My Book World

​​Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation I believe to be of interest to a broad audience.

A WRITER'S WIT When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. John Muir, Sierra Club Founder Born April 21, 1838

J. Muir

Packing It Out is Good

A WRITER'S WIT I spent a lot of time in the White House in the public areas where reporters are allowed to go, but I spoke to people about the private quarters as well. Some of the things I learned were small, novelistic details. For example, the fact that there were still pet stains on the carpets from the Bush cats when the Obamas moved in. ​Jodi Kantor, New York Times Correspondent ​Born April 21, 1975

J. Kantor

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below one presentation that recently piqued my interest.

A WRITER'S WIT We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys. The Difference Engine Bruce Sterling ​Born April 14, 1954

B. Sterling

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below two presentations that recently piqued my interest.

A WRITER'S WIT I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it's apathy. It's not giving a damn. ​Leo Buscaglia ​Born March 31, 1924

Buscaglia

My Book World

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy” (80).

“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”? (214).
 
“It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is” (215).

A WRITER'S WIT It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. ​Penelope Lively Born March 17, 1933

P. Lively

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most all cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I list a presentation I recently found interesting.

A WRITER'S WIT . . . the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre . . . ​Georges Bernanos Born February 20, 1888

G. Bernanos

Something to Think About on Presidents' Day 

For more than five years I have blogged mostly about literary issues because I find the act pleasing—from time to time veering over to other subjects that interest me, travel and the like. Today's post is decidedly political, but it is straight from the heart. On this Presidents' Day I ask you to think about #45.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

A WRITER'S WIT The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want. ​Keith Olbermann ​Born January 27, 1959

My Book World

Rory Albanese (executive producer):
“The root of every Daily Show script, like the root of any good sitcom script or any story, is a narrative arc. This is another Jon Stewart-ism: ‘The jokes are easy. We’ve got a lot of funny people. We’ll get the jokes. You know what’s hard? Why the fuck are we talking about this, and what are we saying about it? What’s the arc? What is the essay that we’re structuring?’” (59).
 
Jon Stewart (star of Daily Show):
“Can I tell you the craziest thing? Tracey and I were walking that afternoon of 9/11, or it might have been the next day, in just the quiet of it. We didn’t really know where we were going, just walking, and we walked by a building and there was a little street mouse, I don’t even think it was a rat, a little street mouse. All of a sudden a dude—I guess it was the super in the building, we hadn’t seen him—fucking clubbed it right in front of us. I remember us just both bursting into tears, and we just kind of like . . . I just remember us bursting into tears on a constant basis, as everybody was. The smell is the things that I’ll never forget, just that was . . .” (72).
 
James Dixon (Stewart’s manager):
“‘Jon Always said, ‘I don’t need to be on a broadcast network to validate myself. I’ll do what I do for basic cable, and if I do it well it won’t matter where I do it from. That will be my legacy’” (85).
 
Ben Karlin (head writer and executive producer):
“It felt like we were crazy. How could we be the only people who were recognizing this ridiculous disparity? It became one of the signature things for the show to find these quotes and have people contradicting their own words, but in the early stages it felt pretty novel to do something like that so vividly with one person” (109).
 
Rakesh Agrawal (founder, SnapStream):
“What we invented was a unit that connects to a company’s computer server. One of them can record up to ten television shows at a time. The recordings you make can be watched on the network, from any desktop inside an organization, by multiple people at the same time. But for The Daily Show, the point is not really about watching TV. We translated the TV audio into text, and made it possible to search inside shows” (259).
 
“The original notion was to stage dueling rallies, with [Stephen] Colbert leading ‘The March to Keep Fear Alive.’ Instead it was merged into a single event, ‘The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.’ What never changed was the intention that Stewart announced on The Daily Show, to put on a pageant for noncrazy, non-book-and-flag-burning, nonscreaming America: ‘Not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority.’ In other words, a plea for rationality in an increasingly irrational political and media landscape, a reminder that there’s a distinction between ‘political’ and ‘partisan.’ Plus Colbert in an Evel Knievel jumpsuit” (261).
 
Jessica Williams (correspondent, 2012-2016):
“But the first few months were really tough. The Daily Show, it had been on for a while, and I think people can be very possessive of the show. When I first started, I got . . . you know just . . . you know the negative racial comments in my inbox. You do anything that ruffles a few feathers on the show, there’s always going to be some racist dude ready to like call you a nigger, you know? I think a lot of it has to do with people just being really stupid . . . . At that time, it really bothered me a lot. Now, either I get it less or I just don’t give a shit anymore” (324).
 
“[Lewis] Black’s segments could still be wildly funny tangents about, say, artisanal crystal meth or the need for a Trump 2012 presidential campaign (‘This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life, a president who’s not afraid to tell the truth about being a lying asshole!’), but over the years many of Black’s rants were vein-bulging exclamation points to The Daily Show’s main themes” (329).
 
Jon Stewart:
“So we also did a longer piece partly about how Fox [Network] was ‘outraged’ that Ferguson [Missouri] was being cast in racial terms. And I talked about how we’d recently sent a producer, Stu Miller, who was dressed like a homeless elf with a week’s worth of five o’clock shadow, and a correspondent, Michael Che, dressed in a tailored suit, out to do an interview—and how it was Che who got stopped by security. The point being, here’s how ubiquitous racism and indignity is. To Michael, this wasn’t ‘You’re not going to fucking believe what happened.’ It came up in the course of the conversation about other things. That’s what I meant in the piece when I said, ‘You’re tired of hearing about racism? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it” (351).
 
Ramin Hedayati (studio production, field producer):
“It became the first of the three big pizza rants—the other two were about Chicago deep dish, and then Mayor [Bill] de Blasio eating pizza with a fork. And they were funny and really silly. But they were also great illustrations of the show’s process.
            Jon was all about the passion. He always said, ‘We need to make sure we’re channeling our emotions. What do we find joyous? What makes us have a strong emotional reaction? If something makes you angry, why? Bring that to the idea. If something’s just purely fun, let’s just have fun with it.’ He wants us to be writing to, and pitching to, that strong feeling. Plenty of times it’s outrage about something serious. But we don’t need to do the congressional takedown every night” (381).
 
Jon Stewart:
“And this, this, is their genius. Conservatives are not looking to make education more rigorous and informative, or science more empirical or verifiable, or voting more representative, or the government more efficient or effective. They just want all those things to reinforce their partisan, ideological, conservative viewpoint” (383).

A WRITER'S WIT
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Born July 11, 1967

My Book World

Ahead of her Time or Too Late?

Out of the Past, They Determine the Future

Schulman, Daniel. Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. New York: Grand Central, 2014. Whenever I meet others who are also from Wichita, I’m often asked where I went to high school. It is a subtle way of determining very quickly to which social class I must belong. Indeed, I grew up on the other side of several sets of tracks, certainly far from the East Thirteenth Street address, where the Koch brothers spent their early years. In fact, beyond a certain point the Koch brothers didn’t even attend Wichita public schools, but exclusive preparatory or military schools in other parts of the country. And only one of the brothers, Charles, continues to live in Wichita today. The rest of them live (given they own multiple residences) in a variety of places, including the Northeast.

A WRITER’S WIT
We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by the works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Born June 16, 1938

My Book World

“The Board Room at the pinnacle of the New York Times Building is calculated to awe. It is a huge room, with a baronial fireplace sheathed in green marble at the far end. Set against carved mahogany paneling that reaches from floor to ceiling” (3).

“It’s all there,” Betsy said. “All of us are afraid in our pocketbooks. It hurts you over your lifetime earnings, it hurts you in your pension, it hurts every way. And of course, the individual woman can do little to remedy this. She goes to her boss or to her manager and she says, ‘Look, I’m turning the same turret lathe as the guy sitting here and I’m making less.’ And he says, ‘Well you just don’t turn the turret lathe quite so well’” (13).

A WRITER'S WIT
There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure.
Victoria Glendinning
Born April 23, 1937

My Book World

"David's work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montages he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity's rough beast" (231).

"David was beginning to consciously connect his family's pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: 'And I'm feeling rage 'cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in ice-pick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it . . . blam . . . blam . . . blam'" (312).

A WRITER'S WIT
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston
Born January 7, 1891

My Book World

“One of the early priests after the conquest of Mexico, Fray Durán, knew the old tongue and listened to the old men and wrote down their tales of what their world had been and what it had meant to them. They had been very rich and feared by other nations. They told the priest of the tribute once brought to their emperor: mantles of various designs and colors, gold, feathers, jewelry, cacao, every eighty days a million Indians trudged in bearing tribute and the list was so complete that even lice and fleas were brought and offered. The tribute collectors told the emperor, ‘O powerful lord, let not our arrival disturb your powerful heart and peaceful spirit, nor shall we be the cause of some sudden alarm that might provoke an illness for you. You well know that we are you vassals and in your presence we are nothing but rubbish and dirt.’ ¶ That was half a millennium ago and yet the rich still get tribute and the people who give them tribute feel as dirt and rubbish. ¶ For years and decades, for almost a century, people have looked at this system and sensed change or noticed hopes of change. And yet they all wait for change” (67).

“In the Florentine Codex, a record of the Indians’ ways that Cortés crushed with his new empire, it is noted that men who die in war go to the house of the sun and then they become birds or butterflies and dance from flower to flower sucking honey. In the old tongue, flower is xochitl, death is miquiztli” (80).

“We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. ‘I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me’” (209).

“I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. ‘He’ll just be a bad memory one day.’ He nodded I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar” (209).