"An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow..."

"... and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter. I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology, and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of 'Spare' describing Harry as 'off his royal tits' and me as going 'all Sartre or Faulkner,' so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules?"

 
From "Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter Collaborating on his memoir, 'Spare,' meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids" by J. R. Moehringer (The New Yorker).

It occurs to me that another reason not to record "the author" is that you don't need verbatim quotes. You are also the author, and the whole idea is to put it in your words as if those were the author's words. So not remembering the author's words is an advantage. Those inadequate words are lost, but you have notes on the stories, and then, to write the memoir, you must reconstruct the account and you will, naturally, use your own superior form of expression.

"[A]void books that are supposed to be 'good' for us. It isn’t necessary to read a single turgid sentence of Boring Saul Bellow..."

"... when there is a James Lee Burke to hand. Not every 'classic' is worthy of veneration: Tristram Shandy honks like John Coltrane, and is not nearly so funny. As for Midnight’s Children, it’s more fun to walk round town with a nail in your boot." 

From "Reading books is not meant to be a competitive sport" by Michael Henderson (London Times), which is mostly about not trying to read as much as possible, but that paragraph jumped out at me.

Are Americans still reading what is supposed to be good for us? Or is that a concept of the past? What's the last thing you read — or tried to read — because it was supposed to be good for you? If you wanted to force yourself to read something because you believe it's considered to be good for you, what would you pick?

On the occasion of the NYT winning a Pulitzer Prize for the history/fantasy "1619 Project," Scott Adams reveals why the Pulitzer Prize is meaningless.

And he used to want one (for his comic strip):



I've always remembered what Saul Bellow said about the Pulitzer Prize — recounted in the May 11, 1984, NYT article "PUBLISHING: PULITZER CONTROVERSIES":

For years it seemed that Saul Bellow would never win the Pulitzer, although he was often a serious contender. In addition to ''Henderson the Rain King,'' his ''Adventures of Augie March'' was a finalist in 1954, and ''Mr. Sammler's Planet'' was a 1971 finalist. Both times the board decided to forgo a fiction award.

What a kick in the head! They didn't give the award to somebody else, but to no one.

In ''Humboldt's Gift,'' published in 1972, Mr. Bellow's narrator, Charlie Citrine, is depicted as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who nevertheless agrees with Humboldt's assessment: ''The Pulitzer is for the birds - for the pullets. It's just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first word of the obituary is 'Pulitzer Prize winner passes.' ''

Reminded of that passage soon after ''Humboldt's Gift'' won in 1973, Mr. Bellow laughed and said he thought it would be best to accept the award ''in dignified silence.''

Now, when Saul Bellow died, they did not say "Pulitzer Prize winner passes." They said Nobel Prize winner passes:

Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes -- and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning -- gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died yesterday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.

If you have to be a walking billboard for some prize-bestowing outfit, it's best to be a Nobel ad.

"That’s the mistake we all make, isn’t it? Believing that being a writer means being, you know, totally and utterly uninterrupted—it means silence, it means, you know, a room of one’s own."

"No, no. That’s bullshit. That’s what we perceive a male writer to have. And that can lead to horrible solipsism and disconnection from humanity. I’m not naming names, never naming names... Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow."

Lines delivered by Tracey Ullman (as a writer named Ode Montgomery) in the "Painful Evacuation" episode of "Girls." I wish I had video of this scene — a little vignette that precedes the credits. It's all we see of Ullman, but I kept pausing and rewinding and rewatching it bit by bit. I was exclaiming: "This is the best performance I have ever seen on television." The lines were good and Lena Dunham — interviewing Ullman's character — was doing a fine supporting role, but Ullman was so funny (and dramatic) and doing so much in such a short time that I was in total awe.

I cut and pasted the line from a piece in Tablet by Miranda Cooper "On ‘Girls,’ Narcissism and Jewish Writers/Hannah gets some unexpected news, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow get name dropped, and Ray confronts his own mortality."

Excerpt:

What more could a Jewish-American-literature obsessed recapper ask for? Casting aside Amis, a self-professed philosemite, the fact that Montgomery’s list of self-centered writers is all Jewish is like manna from the HBO heavens.

Interestingly, Allen and Bellow have also been often compared to Philip Roth, who held much of last week’s episode’s attention. Allen even had a not-so-subtle cameo in the form of a photo on the wall in fictional writer Chuck Palmer’s study: a brilliant sight gag in an episode about writers abusing their fame and privilege. As with Roth, these are more than casual name drops. Girls is setting up an old guard of male Jewish American writers with whom Hannah must contend. Is being a writer as a woman really as hard as it seems, Hannah asks? Harder, Montgomery confirms.

By the way, if you don't actually watch this show, don't assume you know what it is like. The first 2 episodes of the new season have been phenomenal, and last season was great. Please don't clutter the comments with things you've been repeating about Lena Dunham for years. To do that is to flaunt that you do not know what you are talking about. Anyone who thinks the show is doctrinaire feminism and female narcissism is making it obvious that he doesn't know what he is talking about. 

"By the way Ann, is the 'ludicrous distraction' part of your cruel neutrality schtick?"

Asks walter in the comments to last night's post "Are you following the ludicrous distraction of 'John Miller' and 'John Barron'?"

First, that word: "schtick." I would have chosen the spelling "shtick." But I'm looking at the OED, which gives the main spelling as "shtik," validates both walter's and my spelling, and also accepts "schtik." So basically, you can do anything you want with "c"s in that word.

According to the OED, "shtick" (which is U.S. slang with a Yiddish origin (meaning "piece" or "play")) has 2 meanings. The first is "An act or stage routine; a joke, a ‘gag’" or "a patter, a ‘line’; a gimmick or characteristic style." Example: Saul Bellow, "Herzog" 1964, "‘Let's cut out all the shtick,’ said Gersbach. ‘Let's say you're a crumb.’"

The second meaning is less derogatory and surprisingly bland: "A particular area of activity or interest, a sphere or ‘scene.’" (Hey, nobody says "that's my scene" anymore.) Example: 1976   Publishers Weekly 15 Mar. 55/2: "A husband trying to puzzle out his woman, women-God-bless-them in general, and the whole female shtick."

So I accept "cruel neutrality schtick." It's my scene. I have to check the material under the tag to remember everything I've done with it. Here's the best recent examination of the phenomenon, from last January: "Why I quit watching the debate halfway through and woke up the next morning identifying strongly with Cruel Neutrality."

That explains a lot more than I'm in the mood to spell out now. I'll just say that those of us in the Cruel Neutrality scene are not forswearing all opinion. And it's certainly not abstention from cutting attacks. How else could it be cruel? The neutrality part is my instinctive, lifelong point of view — distanced and averse to everything political.

And yet I keep looking. I'm a rubbernecker. And part of what I'm cruelly neutral toward is the press, and my opinion of the story about the 25-year-old "John Miller" phone call was, indeed, that it was a ludicrous distraction. It takes us back to a much younger Donald Trump, prankishly putting on a reporter who figured out it was him and published her story under the title "Trump Says Goodbye Marla, Hello Carla . . . And a Mysterious PR Man Who Sounds Just Like Donald Calls to Spread the Story." The reporter, Sue Carswell first thought "It’s so weird that Donald hired someone who sounds just like him," and then she consulted the big gossip columnist of the day, Cindy Adams, who said, "Oh, that’s Donald."

These days, Carswell says: "This was so farcical, that he pretended to be his own publicist. Here was this so-called billion-dollar real estate mogul, and he can’t hire his own publicist. It also said something about the control he wanted to keep of the news cycle flowing with this story, and I can’t believe he thought he’d get away with it." But he did get away with it! He got away with it the way Andy Kaufman got away with Tony Clifton. We knew it was him but he kept doing it, and continuing, with commitment, when everyone already knows, is part of the... shtik.



From the comments at that YouTube, from 2 months ago: "Donal Triump is Tony Clifton!!!" Yeah, I know. Spelling. Back to the spelling topic. But you see my point. There is a lot of comedy happening through Donald Trump. He's been an entertainer for a long time. The extent to which the entertainment is interwoven with the love life, the real estate moguling, and the politics is a big, crazy, unfathomable mystery. The most ludicrous thing about the WaPo story is that it seems to think it's getting the better of Trump, bringing him down, but it's inflating him, blowing him up, as he's sending us up.

I mean, read the transcript. It's hilarious:

John Miller:  He was so set up with that.  You know, Madonna called and what happened -- I mean, I don’t know if you want to listen to this.

Interviewer:  No, I do.

John Miller:  Do you?  Do you have a second?

Interviewer:  Yeah, obviously.

To my ear, that's prodding the interviewer to laugh and say "Come on, Mr. Trump, I know it's you." She didn't do that, I suspect, because she was seriously interested in extracting the story, the gossip about Madonna that would serve her interest. And WaPo is telling the story to serve its interest. But the whole damned thing, going back to the 1980s, has served Donald Trump's interest. 

"Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners."

"You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the president’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."

Wrote Saul Bellow in "In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt," quoted in a Martin Amis essay about Bellow's nonfiction, collected in a new book titled "There Is Simply Too Much to Think About," which I just added to my Kindle. I can give you some more context:

"For great writers, retirement is a fairly recent career option."

"There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she announced that she was calling it quits. [Alice] Munro said she was encouraged by the example of Philip Roth, who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to turn 80. 'I put great faith in Philip Roth,' she said, adding, 'He seems so happy now.'"

"Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones."

A line from Saul Bellow's "Herzog," quoted by Joshua Rothman in a New Yorker article titled "The Impossible Decision," about deciding whether to go to grad school.

A moot court day.

I agreed to serve as one of the judges in the 2005 Evans Moot Court Competition, so I drove downtown. Here's some graffiti I happened to see:



It seems like the graffiti version of this blog.

I stopped at L'Etoile Café for some coffee and a sandwich and to read the bench memo in preparation:



Here's the coffee and the memo:



Here's the sandwich:


That's "Fountain Prairie Farm Dried Cured Beef," I'll have you know. I know that will help you think about what kind of life I live here in Madison.

I needed to walk across the state Capitol Square to get to the Dane County Courthouse, and I stopped to take a picture of myself and the Capitol in a mirrored window:



The square looked pretty:



The flag was at half-staff -- not for Saul Bellow, for the Pope:



The judges congregated in a shabby jury room. I don't need these refreshments:



I looked around the jury room and thought about all the boring hours good citizens doing their duty have had to spend here. There was some reading material for them: big piles of depressingly old magazines.



There were also two books in the room: a collection of Erma Bombeck's humor columns and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."



There were a lot of very old jigsaw puzzles, including this one, half put together:



I speculate about whether the lawyers would like to know how prospective jurors put together their jigsaw puzzles and decide that the prosecution should want the kind of people who look for the edge pieces and get the frame completed first. Another "judge" asks what other way is there, and other ways are discussed: concentrating on color areas, finding a particular object in the picture, looking at the shapes of the pieces. But the shapes are nearly identical! My grandson looks for the shapes, someone says. Use a peremptory challenge on that one, I think.

The picture on the puzzle is a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post from 1961:



That issue had an article on what Oklahoma wants from TV. I wonder what it said. I wonder if Oklahoma ever got what it wanted. Perhaps they wanted "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which debuted in 1961.

We went over to courtroom 2F, which was awfully shabby. [ADDED: A new Dane County Courthouse is under construction.]



Among the framed portraits on the wall were two garishly blown-up photographs of female judges:



I think about all the people who must have been depressed and scared and bored out of their skulls in this room. But soon enough, the arguments begin, and the room is ignored. The law students from various schools -- they aren't allowed to say which school -- launch into their arguments and we pepper them with questions and let them show their stuff. They're all great students who've prepared very hard and advanced in the competition.

They've had to learn a lot about the Establishment Clause and the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution, and we debate a lot about a school district's policy barring teachers from teaching "intelligent design" (or anything like it) when they teach evolution.

Tomorrow, the finalists will get to make their arguments in the beautiful room in the Capitol Building that houses the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Until then, I hope all the wonderful law students enjoy their visit to Madison. It's a lovely day, and it's always fun to be here on a Saturday night.

"I always said -- in answering Ravelstein's question 'What do you imagine death will be like?' -- 'The pictures will stop.'"

The pictures have stopped for Saul Bellow.

"If you dislike existence then death is your release. You can call this nihilism, if you like."

"Yes, American-style -- without the abyss," said Ravelstein. "But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world -- the world as it existed for that person."

All at once Ravelstein was annoyed with me... As if I would threaten to destroy a world -- I who lived to see the phenomena, who believe that the heart of things is shown in the surface of things. I always said -- in answering Ravelstein's question "What do you imagine death will be like?" -- "The pictures will stop." Meaning, again, that in the surface of things you saw the heart of things.

Ravelstein, page 156.

So said the novelist. And now he's gone. An entire world is lost.

UPDATE: The NYT has a nice big obit. I noticed the Wisconsin connection:

In 1933 he began college at the University of Chicago, but two years later transferred to Northwestern, because it was cheaper. He had hoped to study literature but was put off by what he saw as the tweedy anti-Semitism of the English department, and graduated in 1937 with honors in anthropology and sociology, subjects that were later to instill his novels. But he was still obsessed by fiction. While doing graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, he found that "every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story." He added: "I sometimes think the Depression was a great help. It was no use studying for any other profession."