"The speech of the American middle class is largely the attempt to impress, obfuscate, or placate. That of the streets is..."

"... in my experience, to express. For example: Middle class: 'What a nice dress.' Street: 'Hey, baby, any more at home like you?'... Iambic pentameter, five feet to the line. I was filming Heist with Gene Hackman; my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon; and Danny DeVito. Danny’s line to Gene, his rival, is, 'Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me?'... I was concerned that [Danny] would (incorrectly) accentuate the word done at the end of the phrase, which would have branded him, sadly, with a merely academic understanding of actual American idiom. But I need not have worried, as he accentuated the final fucking and all was well. Per contra, Becca was raised in Edinburgh, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the early days of our association she flatteringly strove to adopt my Chicagoan vocabulary. Our great friend, Shel Silverstein, corrected her: 'Becca, when you say motherfucker, it’s like someone is trying to fuck your mother.'"

Writes David Mamet in "Back When We Gave a Fuck" (Free Press).

I love the sudden appearance of Shel Silverstein and the use of the phrase "per contra." And I considered taking out the clarifying "[Danny]" and putting back the "he" — wasn't it obvious that Mamet meant Danny and not Gene" — because I wanted to preserve the number of syllables. I didn't want to intrude on  Mamet's rhythm. I even asked Grok to analyze the text and tell me to what extent it approached iambic pentameter. Was "per contra" chosen for the meter or because boring people begin sentences with "By contrast"/"Conversely"/"On the other hand"?  Is Shel Silverstein "Our great friend, Shel Silverstein" for the meter or because Mamet is the sort of person who wants you to know he was especially close to that celebrity he's name-dropping. 

"On Friday, the staff often hears Michaels say, 'We have nothing.' He’ll be staring tensely at the index cards on his bulletin board, which lay out each tentative segment."

"Employees a quarter of his age are amazed that, after fifty years, he can still seem scared. If things look particularly bleak, he’ll ask writers if they’ve been saving any good material for an upcoming host, telling them, 'Sometimes you have to burn the furniture.' On Saturday afternoon, in Studio 8H, there’s a run-through of the sketches. The show is often considerably too long at this point, so more sketches might be cut... Sometimes the guest host nixes a sketch. In 2015, Donald Trump was to play a tree standing next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump. The sketch ended with the Trump tree calling the Giving Tree a sucker. Trump refused to do the piece, not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat."

From "Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of 'Saturday Night Live'/He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life" (The New Yorker).

Blogging and serendipity.

It's my favorite thing about blogging, and today's occurrence was just about exactly perfect. 

Following my normal approach to blogging, I found a NYT piece about Dolly Parton and wrote about her interest in the children's book "The Little Engine That Could." I said: "It's the book she wants all kids to read. I can't imagine a left-leaning person saying that."

3 posts later, I was writing about the deceased ex-CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, whose friend declared that he was like The Giving Tree. I didn't think that was quite right: "The Giving Tree was giving — sacrificing to provide the boy with benefits. Hsieh's sacrifices did not give anyone else anything but merely pared away from the person making the sacrifices." 

These are 2 quite different children's books, but look. Shel Silverstein — author of "The Giving Tree" — wrote his own version of "The Little Engine That Could." I love when things come together like that.

You can read the text here, but he delivers a vivid reading:

Silverstein's engine goes through the same "I think I can" chant that works so well to convince kids they can achieve if they work hard and believe in themselves. You know, the right-wing ideology. The optimism. But Silverstein has a darker take. The 4th stanza inflicts reality:

He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!

He slid down and mashed into engine hash 

On the rocks below... which goes to show 

If the track is tough and the hill is rough, 

THINKING you can just ain’t enough!

AND: Less serendipitous but very interesting is this Eminem song that uses "The Little Engine That Could": 

 

The writing is plainly brilliant, but it's very dark. Lyrics here. Key line: "I think I can, I think I can/I know I can, psycho I am."

"He was entranced by fire — with a real-estate agent recalling seeing an estimated 1,000 candles in Hsieh’s Park City, Utah, home..."

"'[He] explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time'.... The quirky entrepreneur... also liked to use a heater in his girlfriend’s shed to decrease his oxygen level, sources told the media outlet. Hsieh also inhaled nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a k a whippets, to try to decrease his oxygen use.... But playing with his oxygen intake was only one part of Hsieh’s manipulation of his body. Hsieh would go on a 26-day alphabet diet, in which he would only eat foods starting with a single letter each day, such as 'a' the first 24 hours, 'b' the second, and so on, nearly fasting by the letter 'z'.... He got down to 100 pounds at one point.... Hsieh also would see how long he could go without urinating.... A pal told the Journal that Hsieh was like 'the Giving Tree' — the selfless character in the Shel Silverstein kiddie classic that gives so much of itself that it is left with nothing."

From "Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spent last hours planning to enter rehab" (NY Post).

The Giving Tree was giving — sacrificing to provide the boy with benefits. Hsieh's sacrifices did not give anyone else anything but merely pared away from the person making the sacrifices. You'll have to imagine an alternative children's book called "The Giving Up Tree." 

Even in "The Giving Tree," we question whether the tree — that is, the person represented by the tree — should have given everything. Shouldn't the boy — at some point — have learned about giving from the tree and become a giver himself? Shouldn't he have given back? 

But "The Giving Up Tree" is not going to become a children's classic. Decreasing oxygen intake, resisting peeing, eating quince and quinoa on the 17th day of a highly conceptual diet. 

Well, I admit that alphabet books are popular with children. Maybe there already is a book that begins "On the first day, X ate applesauce and angel hair pasta...." and ends "On the 27th day, he was dead."

Oh! I know where I got that line. I was given "Struwwelpeter" when I was a child, and I remember "The Story of Augustus, Who Would Not Have Any Soup":

Augustus was a chubby lad; 

Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had: 

And everybody saw with joy 

The plump and hearty, healthy boy. 

He ate and drank as he was told, 

And never let his soup get cold. 

But one day, one cold winter's day, 

He screamed out "Take the soup away! 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

Next day, now look, the picture shows 

How lank and lean Augustus grows! 

Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, 

The naughty fellow cries out still 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

The third day comes: Oh what a sin! 

To make himself so pale and thin. 

Yet, when the soup is put on table, 

He screams, as loud as he is able, 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I WON'T have any soup today."  

Look at him, now the fourth day's come! 

He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum; 

He's like a little bit of thread, 

And, on the fifth day, he was—dead! 

Go to the "Struwwelpeter" link to see the illustrations of the rapid weight loss that befalls anorexic Augustus. And look for the also-relevant "Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches":

...But Harriet would not take advice: 

She lit a match, it was so nice! 

It crackled so, it burned so clear— 

Exactly like the picture here. 

She jumped for joy and ran about 

And was too pleased to put it out....

"Struwwelpeter" is a powerfully memorable book. It was written — in German — in 1835 — by a psychiatrist.  

Would you give that to your sweet little child? Is it more or less dangerous than "The Giving Tree"? 

I wonder what books influenced Tony Hsieh. 

He, himself wrote a book, "Delivering Happiness." It was a best-seller in its time. Who will read it now? Here's a 1-star review at Amazon, written before Hsieh's untimely death:

For full transparency I only read the first third of this book before I took it to Goodwill. I just couldn't take anymore. It's written at a very low educational level which goes to show, you don't really need brains to be rich or even be a billionaire, what your really really must have is Luck and a lot of it....

Even when you have a lot of luck, you can run out. 

"Comfortable shoes and the freedom to leave are the two most important things in life."

A quote from Shel Silverstein, found in a New Yorker article from 2014, which I got to after Googling looking for criticism of the book "The Giving Tree," which Meade and I were talking about. What Silverstein said about that book is "It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes" and "It’s about a boy and a tree. It has a pretty sad ending." I'd never read the book myself. Something about hearing other people talk about how deeply meaningful it was to them closed my mind to it. And I grew up thinking about Silverstein as a Playboy guy (Playboy being a fixture, as regular readers know, in the Althouse childhood home).

Silverstein's biographer said: "Given his disgust with the me-first attitude among the folksingers and other artists in the Village who were creating art as a form of self-analysis, it almost sounds like he wrote ['The Giving Tree'] as an experiment, a reaction to their own mushiness."

Yeah, that's the vibe I caught from a distance. And I couldn't project myself into the character of the boy, who I thought of as representing a man who frequented the Playboy mansion: "[H]e bedded hundreds, if not thousands, of women... Silverstein never intended to write or draw for children. He was often impatient around kids and... Silverstein never married and never wanted to have kids. But circumstances changed the year he turned forty, when one of his former Mansion 'playmates' gave birth to a daughter; in 1982, the girl, Shoshanna, died of a brain aneurysm at age eleven, a tragedy from which Silverstein is said to have never recovered."

"First, straights came for the smooth, pretty gay look recustomized as 'the metrosexual,' and now you have come for our hairier brethren. "

"What else would you like? What else can we give you? You’ve taken it all. All our cutting asides and repartee, design expertise, gym dedication, fitted shirts, food knowledge, high and low culture snarking, gift-buying nous, and our smarts ('She’s such a drama queen')—straight culture has gobbled gay culture as ravenously as Cookie Monster atomizes baked dough. It’s fine, we’ll take the compliment, even if we are baffled that you’re now wanting a slice of performing and playing with masculinity, given the amount of homophobia and legislative discrimination you have put in our way. All that gay fear you’ve labored under and battered us with, all that crap about what men should be, and now, with the lumbersexual, the metrosexual, the use of camp, and so much more, you’ve not only come over to our side, you want in on the joke. And lumberjacks, well, you should have really trademarked your look. The lumbersexual is beards and flannel shirts, the opposite of the waxed chest, sculpted muscles, empathetic male cyborg of a few years ago: the straight man who was 'gay' apart from where he chose to place his penis. "

From a Daily Beast article by Tim Teeman subtitled "Have you met the lumbersexual: all beards, flannel shirts, and work boots? It’s the latest gay ‘look’ co-opted by straights. Have it. We have nothing left to give you."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade quotes Teeman's "We have nothing left to give you" and writes:

And after a long time the conflicted homophobic boy came back again.

"I am sorry, Conflicted Homophobic Boy," said the lumbersexual tree, "but I have nothing left to give you — My fashionable apples are gone."

"My teeth are too weak for apples," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My fitted branches are gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot swing on them —"

"I am too old to swing on branches," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My gym-toned trunk is gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot climb —"

"I am too tired to climb," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"I am sorry," sighed the lumbersexual tree.

"I wish that I could give you something... but I have nothing left. I am just an old lumbersexual stump. I am sorry..."

"I don't need very much now," said the conflicted homophobic boy, "just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired."

"Well," said the lumbersexual tree, straightening [himself] up as much as [he] could, "Well, an old lumbersexual stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Conflicted Homophobic Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest."

And the conflicted homophobic boy did.

And the lumbersexual tree was happy.

― Hugh Goldenburger, The Lumbersexual Tree 

"Say hi to forever" — the last blog post of Daul Kim.

The highly successful fashion model killed herself by hanging.

"I already accepted that I relate to nothing. The more I gain the more lonely it is ... I know I'm like a ghost."

Ah, but wait! I know she is already dead, but here is the blog: I Like to Fork Myself. It's not all depression and death. And many of the blog posts begin with the words "say hi," and it's not always in a dark or sarcastic way. Here's "say hi to insomnia put to good use." There's a charming picture of pancakes, and the text is:

making breakfast.

im going to be a good wife !!!!!!!!!!!!

She writes about her reactions to art and film and music. ("Say hi to forever" is a post with a music video.) She doesn't come across as morbidly self-absorbed. She seems intellectually alive. There's "say hi to sadist masochist" — "shel silverstein... you kinda fucked me up in a beautiful way" — about Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree." She seems to have some distance and humor about fashion: "say hi to where strange things meet" ("diiiiiioooooooooor dioooooooooooooooooooor kouttttttuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure"),  "say hi to a saturday afternoon at bianca's" ("yeah this is how i/dress when im at my friends place/i wear louis barthelemy/as you can see/i dont really care about comfort ..."). If I were a regular reader of this blog, I would have seen an interesting, complex person. I wouldn't have known I was watching a person in the final steps of a dance with death.

Who around us is taking their final steps? Would we notice?

The Giving Tree...

... is a pathetic sadsack:

[Shel] Silverstein had a dark sensibility and a wicked sense of humor. Maybe he set out to write a bleak fable about kids who selfishly milk their elders for every drop they've got. Is it possible that he finished the manuscript, looked at it with satisfaction, and said to himself, Yep, that boy sure was a bastard?