John Isner, as Elephant, Wins Longest Match in History
Some people draw conclusions; others draw…elephants; others draw on incredible reserves of focus and stamina; others draw on pieces of paper too small to hold their elephants.
Congratulations to both players for holding up.
If they can do it, we can. Enjoy the heat!
General George McClellan
For all the talk about Lincoln keeping General George McClellan in his post as head of the Union Army despite his abuses and insubordination (at least until Lincoln finally replaced him with Grant), I don’t think Obama had any choice but to get rid of McChrystal.
It’s probably true that virtually all military top brass disdain their civilian superiors. It’s probably also true that virtually all military low brass, or below brass, disdain their military superiors. As the immortal Terry Pratchett writes of Sergeant Colon in Discworld: “-[t]he sane core of Colon was wondering if the purpose of officers wasn’t to stand between the sergeants and all this sh—this slush[i.e. paperwork], so that they could get on with sergeanting.”
When the shoe steps, floorboards squeak. But McChrystal was a general who’d expressed his disdain just too many times, too publicly, too acidly.
Frankly , it seems to me that anyone who prides himself—or at least lets people know—that he only sleeps four hours and eats only one meal every day he seems custom-made for “disdain”. McChrystal, however, having problems connecting with his soldiers as well as his superiors, is not in a position to afford such disdain.
Even if McChrystal were more successful, his actions seem calculated to make it impossible for O’s team to continue to work with him with any kind of trust and confidence. His presence would reflect a serious and continuing lapse in Obama’s authority. (I feel somehow certain that people like Karzai, while pleading for McChrystal, would also not respect Obama for keeping him.)
The timing was especially unfortunate. How could Obama let McChrystal stay, when, in the face of accusations of ineffectiveness, he has just proclaimed his ability to kick a–. (He can’t get rid of the leaking well, but he can damn well get rid of the leaking general.)
The whole situation is just too bad for all concerned.
Short-haired Rob
I suppose that today I could try to find something charitable to say about General Stanley A. McChrystal, the general who blabbed his discontent with various top level administration figures to the Rolling Stone (of all places), or, perhaps, something diplomatic about Judge Martin L.C. Feldman, the judge blocking Obama’s moratorium on deep-water drilling. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough energy to quash the cynicism, despair, and plain old irritation that each of these figures raises in me.
So instead I’m going to focus on a proper Rolling Stone subject and a cinematic (rather than environmental) vampire, and one of this blog’s traditionally favorite people – poor/lucky/hounded/sought-after Robert Pattinson.
I am responding here not to anything that Pattinson has done recently–gotten a hair cut! Awkwardly kissed Kristen Stewart on stage! Seriously—a hair cut?!–but to one of the few articles in the New York Times that isn’t seriously depressing me: “His Cross To Bear; Heartthrob Vampire.”
The article discusses Pattinson’s fatigue with all things Twilight, including (quite understandably) the fame and the fame surrounding the fame, the phenomenon and the phenomenon of the phenomenon. (Our media is so self-referential that attention is itself a huge story.)
Poor Pattinson reminds me of King Midas, except that everything he touches turns to Twilight –no, that’s not right – everything Twilight that he touches turns to gold. And everyone wants gold, right? Rob seems a bit unsure at this point.
And yet, grateful, always grateful. (Unlike some Generals we could name.)
The Twilight success has theoretically given Rob freedom to do whatever he wants, whether or not it makes sense (like some judges), but because his other projects have not, thus far, been terribly successful, they supposedly risk tying him further to Twilight, causing him to be the guy who is only deemed successful as Edward Cullen.
I, for one (smitten and non-McChrystally loyal), don’t believe that. The problem with Rob’s other projects has not been his performance, so much as a quirk in the overall project: any movie in which a Brit, an Irishman, and an Aussie, sit down to discuss the New York Yankees is going to lack a certain credibility for U.S. viewers. (Remember Me performed much better overseas.)
Still, Pattinson’s been working non-stop for the last few months. Can all the other films counterbalance his identification with handsome vampires: we’ll/I’ll see. In the meantime, there’s always Eclipse coming out on June 30th. Yes, it looks bloated, overproduced, schmaltzy, draggy, and his eyebrows are way too thick.
But at least he’s not threatening pelicans, nor talking trash.
Hey Ref! Look at Me!
When we were little and my parents were in another room, my older brother used to occasionally cry out, grinning demonically at me, “ManicDDaily, stop that! Stop hitting me!” (Well, those weren’t his exact words, but you get the gist.) In the meantime, I would just be sitting quietly, over an arm’s and leg’s length away. Even so, one of my parents would dutifully call out for me to leave my brother alone.
These were not my brother’s finest moments. They might, however, have been extremely good training if he had planned a career in FIFA soccer.
The level of “amateur theatrics” as the clipped British announcers call it, or, when it gets worse, “shamming”, has been pretty amazing in the ongoing World Cup.
Yes, we understand that the point is to get the attention of the Ref, and hopefully, substantiate a foul. Yes, we understand that it is very different than baseball where a hit by a pitcher automatically gets the batter a free walk, without his having to demonstrate how hard the ball hit him. (Almost invariably incredibly hard.) Or football, where the Refs can look at instant replays of someone ground into the dirt.
Still, the sight of all that flopping on the field, followed by shrugs and/or smirks, sometimes seems a bit much.
Yes, soccer is a tough game — people are kicked and jabbed, still…I mean… come on. It’s hard to completely respect players who whine harder than the vuvuzelas. Unfortunately, the culture of victimization seems so omnipresent that the team with the stiff upper lips might genuinely risk goal shots.
What to do?
More penalties for play-acting? Maybe the sting of that could be counterbalanced by a subcategory of awards: Best Performance on the Pitch? Best Kicked in the Shins? Best Elbowed (Not Quite) In the Nose? Best Instantaneous Whimper?
Earlier today wrote a post, which, despite the elephants, approached Father’s Day from the sociological side (sort of). My true bent is more towards the poetic, so here’s another post (draft poem) in honor of the day.
My Father (baby birds)
When he sang,
which was only in church,
my father’s voice
was deep and cragged and
reminded me of a froggie
gone a’courting.
But this was baby birds.
It was not even a person
who had died.
It was not even a particularly noble dog,
though like all of its species, it was capable
of a self-debasing attachment that could seem
Arthurian.
But after the accident, the rush,
the sad blur home,
my father’s back faced me in my room
with a sound
of birds.
It silenced all gone wrong,
turned me back into a person
who could do things in the world.
My Father Taking Me Everywhere
Father’s Day somehow carries an edge of sadness for me. I have the greatest father in the world. He is quite old (but thankfully still around) and struggles with a variety of serious illnesses. None of these ever weakens his “fatherliness”, that is, his unwavering, (crazily) uncritical, and unconditional love and support.
I’m conscious now of being very very lucky. The edge of sadness comes…well, partly memories of teenagerdom, when I was not so conscious of my good luck. (Though my father has certainly never held any of those snarly rebellions against me, I hate to think of causing him past pain.)
Then there’s the fact that, with job and immediate family demands and the geographic dispersal of modern day life, I don’t get to see my father as much as I’d like.
But part of the sadness is my sense of how unusual my luck is; how many children today don’t have the gift of a present, loving, self-sacrificing father.
The absence of a daily father is a multi-whammied loss. Apart from the absence of the particular person, there’s the additional emotional, physical and financial stress on the mother or grandmother, faced with a huge amount for one person to do alone. A successful single parent of young children, even if armed with family support, must be willing to sacrifice quite a bit of their separate personhood (the part of them that is not primarily parent) in order to fully play a solo role.
Yes, I know that even in two-parent families, there may be one primary caretaker, who may be as overwhelmed as a single parent. I also know that sometimes familial stress may be reduced by the absence of father, especially an uncommitted, or difficult, or troubled father–I’ve just finished the Steig Larsson The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, after all, in which father figures are not painted in the most flattering light. I can well understand that a house led by just one parent may have a peacefulness that is uncommon in a house run by a couple. (And I’m not making any comment, or even comparison, here about the differences of families with fathers over families with same-sex parents, etc.) I’m just sorry that so many kids today don’t have what has been so important to me personally–a Dad.
Biker Boot?
Okay, I’ll confess that one reason I’m so cranky today (see e.g. my earlier post complaining about World Cup 2010) is that in the past three days I’ve almost finished reading all of the Stieg Larsson trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, moves on to The Girl Who Played with Fire, and (I hope) finishes with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. (I do understand that there’s part of a fourth book kicking around in a computer held by the long-time companion of Mr. Larsson, who died suddenly in 2004.)
Although the books follow the same characters (more or less), Book 1 and Books 2 and 3 are quite different from each other. Book 1 is relatively self-contained, while 2 and 3 seem more like one separate, very long, book with a substantially different focus. And yet that’s not true either: Book 1 concentrates on a dysfunctional family and a corrupt and violent power structure; while Books 2 and 3 focus on a different dysfunctional family and an expanded corrupt and violent power structure.
One reason the books are so popular is the main female character of all three books, Lisbeth Salander, who, in my mind, is what results when Minnie Mouse meets Mighty Mouse meets Kevin Mitnick (world champion computer hacker), meets Bobbie Fisher, Joan Jett, Andrea Dworkin, House (the doctor on TV), and, in her teeny pair of steel tipped motorcycle boots, divides her time between tattoo parlor, boxing gym and math library. (And, of course, her seventeen inch power book.)
What makes Lisbeth so appealing is that, despite the terrible abuse she’s suffered, she remains fundamentally moral, fearless, and, even compassionate.
Also, yes, she’s very very hip.
[Spoiler Alert–sort of.] The books are good books, if not exactly great; but they do very effectively tap into that most fearful of situations in which both the “bad guys” and the “supposed good guys”—that is, the authorities—are after you, where there’s virtually no one to turn to for help, where the powers-that-be cannot be trusted. I know that’s not atypical in movie circles, but I’m not much of a movie person. So, oddly, the books they bring to my mind are “children’s books”, namely the wonderful Sally Lockhart series by Phillip Pullman, especially The Tiger In The Well, in which Sally’s property and life are taken over by a faked husband with amazing ease. (It’s Victorian England.) (Actually, the Golden Compass books also work with this theme, which is probably particularly powerful for children, given the power of authority in their lives.)
It’s strange that the latest iteration of this theme arises in Sweden, a place not pictured by most Americans as particularly venal or sadistic. (I guess it’s been a long time since Ingmar Bergman.)
U.S. player?
Sometimes one gets the feeling that the rest of the world wants to save soccer for itself. (As in, butt out, America.)
Yesterday’s arbitrary and inexplicable bad call by Referee Koman Coulibaby of Mali that cost the U.S. the U.S./Slovenia game is only the tip of an iceberg that seems almost engineered to leave many Americans cold.
Well, maybe it’s not just the tip of the iceberg; maybe that type of thing is the upper third of the iceberg. Americans don’t like to feel disliked, disrespected, and/or general dissed by smaller countries (see e.g. the U.N. and lack of popularity in the U.S. thereof.)
The problem wasn’t just Coulibaby’s seeming bias, but his initial silence as to the nature of his crucial call. Coulibaby’s speaking French was no excuse. (Frenchspeakers are plenty good at arguing.) The fact is that not explaining bad calls seems to be a traditional part of soccer culture–a major contrast from most U.S. sports in which a significant portion of the drama is provided by the openly extended carriage (or miscarriage) of justice –all those little guys walking out onto the fields with stripes and flags and rather pompous magnified voices—
Speaking of unsatisfying, what’s with all the ties, called, I believe,”draws” by soccer aficionados? I personally don’t mind ties; I hate to see people’s feelings get hurt. (BTW, congratulations Slovenia!) But I’m not sure my attitudes are typical of most American sports fans. (As both Bush and Obama have found out, coalitions are not really our style.)
And the flopping. (John Wayne/Bruce Willis do not appear to be soccer icons.) We won’t talk about that.
But I will say that those vuvuzelas are getting truly irritating. (I never thought I’d hear stadium noise that made Superbowl half-time shows sound good.)
That said, all the U.S. males I know and some of the U.S. females are following the Cup avidly. I ask them to keep the sound down.
Happy Belated Bloomsday!
I missed it yes I did an important day I don’t know where my mind was under the bed or out the window or most likely in a screen where real life and even book life can pass you by it’s not really an important day not like a birthday they made a lemon cake this year orange really out of lemons and didn’t want to drive to town moist as anything the zest of orange so sweet if anything a book holiday not bank those manicured sons of bitches O and now its too late to even talk about it much less write but Ive always been on the late side running for the train my suitcases better have strong wheels
I actually did go to Dublin years ago so grey and blue and gusty the Irish Sea like that scarf that’s been lost and found all crinkled not with huge waves but on every single inch of it pressing me to the railing the whole night long freezing over the side I was and sick as a dog while the natives kept to the warmth in the saloon of course like a parody of Irish drink and song I could hardly stand and neither they staggering out red faced morning with cheap black pants legs clumping over stuttering shoes it was so long ago and poorer then though now is not great either what with the crash me as green as sea ice even on land I was pale back then O not like now maybe get some special cream for redness wrinkles too real soda breads on the shelves lined up like little school kids I tore the pieces that’s how hungry I was when I finally got over it no knife and my fingers scrabbling among the caraway and crumbs Martello Tower what I most wanted to see the Joyce stuff most were grey toned streets but it with all its grey stones was blue that morning out by the sky and sea and Im standing there on the pavement admiring tea I can’t help thinking of tea with Martello Tower in front of me thick brown irish tea with the thick slabs of bread and butter Stephen Dedalus and Kinch his sort of friend the milk in that chapter so thick and sweet as well the whole breakfast one I dream of porridge sometimes too humble not French toast or pancakes or what do they call them crepes but those thick sweet slabs of tea in sun and cold and tower though its not all sweetness Joyce not exactly generous to his past not is the word forgiving? Art like a knife the wind then too December not June when I got closer to the tower and a woman all bare and white her flesh as creamy as the milk only with pink folds where she rubbed she had a little towel and then just undies bra and panties overflowing robust that’s what you had to call her her flesh so white and pink and flowing like the wave crests maybe a nice bit of pork I hate the way they hang those sides up in the window no not like pork everything about her lived fresh from the sea she had been swimming and her curls the only thing that didn’t glisten curly hair don’t with its frizz I wish I had it mine straight as a stick my whole life long but what I really wished for then was that glow smiling at me towel rubbing the nape of her neck below the curls.
In the movie she has curls too her dark hair spread upon the grass in Andalusia some place south and is kissed and saying yes though I’m not sure about the grass in the book itself and how do you make a movie of a book like that or any book to tell the truth I do know that she says yes though I’m sure of that even though I missed the date that’s the one thing I won’t ever miss that she says yes.
One of the great things about writing a daily blog is that it gives you something to do at night.
One of the great things about writing that daily blog in the morning is that your night is suddenly amazingly, wonderfully, free.
I don’t mean to make not writing the blog sound so great—but, yesterday, after approximately eleven months of daily posts, the prospect of a blog-free evening felt well worth the sinking anxiety that descended on me as I made my way (later even than usual) to the office.
That feeling of freedom even felt worth the shoddy speed yoga I inflicted on myself (after using up all my morning yoga time on the deficiencies of presidential desks.) (See yesterday’s post.)
When I came home last night, I told myself, gaily, that I’d make up for the shoddy yoga by going to the gym for a really good work-out. Then I might even get to bed early.
Unfortunately, staying up till 2 a.m. can be habit-forming. As is finding something to distract you at the gym. (Yes, I do understand that it is probably not optimal to lift weights with a book on your lap.)
So, instead of focusing on triceps, or sleep, I poured myself into the immensely popular Steig Larsson book that’s been sitting on my shelf several months –The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I’m not quite sure why I’ve avoided the book—maybe because a slightly pushy friend has been slightly pushing it; maybe because I’d been warned that it describes (spoiler alert) some fairly sadistic violence against women.
The violence so far (I’m about ¾ through), has been manageable. But, heeding the warnings, I forced myself to put the book down at around 2 before something so terrible happened that I would not be able to shut my eyes. (I even left time–2-2:30 – to read something else for a while, something innocuous in the sexual violence department.)
Frankly, that discipline amazed me. Even more amazing is the fact that I’m actually blogging in the A.M. again, instead of lying here in bed reading. My mind suddenly tells me that this means I’m planning to finish the book during the day somehow, and then buy the next one (the second in the trilogy by Larsson) for this evening.
Actually, I’m not sure I’d really call that discipline.
This, by the way, is one of the great things about mania—it always finds you something to do at night.
ManicDDaily 
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