I’m just back from a great conversation with my friend Catherine Styker about literature and the next generation during which I realized that the next generation will know nothing of the Brothers Karamazov, or Charles Dickens, or Shakespeare, or Homer, unless we act as a bridge to these great authors.

That is: unless we tell them why these  great works are worth their time and energy. they will never take the trouble to read them. Once we send them on this path, they’re clearly bright enough to understand these works, but it’s up to us to explain why they should want to.

I have always believed that the love of literature is like the rivers of the world. It leads, eventually, to the sea, wherever it happens to start. At some point the student realizes he or she has taken their place in the evolution of the life of the mind, and they see that they are the heirs of Dickens and Dostoyesky. But it is up to us to introduce them to these great authors. The educational system is not going to do it.

So if you have a favorite work of literature, write a bridge to it for the coming generation. They will probably love the work, and it’s something they will NEVER find in schools.

                          

In the introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of his short stories published twenty years earlier in pulp detective magazines, the great Raymond Chandler asks why the popular mysteries of the time, despite their gaudy covers and trashy titles, had a kind of “authentic power” that made the other fiction of the time “taste like a cup of luke-warm consummé.”

“It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt at that would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people.”

“Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery of its own destruction, and was beginning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.”

“A few unusual critics recognized this at the time, which is all one had any right to expect. The average critic never recognizes an achivement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.”

The “hard-boiled” mystery stories Chandler is talking about call into question the age-old premise that “murder will out and justice will be done.”

“As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story,” he writes , “obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done — unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. These stories were about the men who made that happen.”

Never pass up a novel or a story or a screenplay by Raymond Chandler. He couldn’t quite write like Dashiell Hammett, but nobody could write like Dashiell Hammett, even Dashiell Hammett! Chandler always knocks himself out to make sure that you, the reader, get a great read.

                          

I have now read five of the Marcus Didius Falco mysteries by Lindsey Davis, and it’s definitely like eating peanuts: you always end up wanting more. Davis has a a vast, detailed knowledge of the ancient world, and she uses it to create the backdrops for her lively, captivating books. Of course you have to have engaging characters, too, and she’s good at this as well.

Marcus Didius Falco is an informer in the time of Vespasian, not just a rat as the title might imply, but a kind of freelance imperial agent. In the first book he works as a slave in a silver mine in Britain to expose a plot against the emperor. In the second he rescues the grain fleet bringing wheat from Egypt to Rome. In another book, body parts start turning up in the water supply and he has to check out all the aqueducts.

He has a wonderful girlfriend named Helena Justina, whom he can’t marry (yet) because she’s a senator’s daughter and he doesn’t have enough money. He lives in a six-story walk-up above a laundry.

These books are a bit like the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters. We find that someone’s been murdered, but the response is: So what? We have to have a reason to find the murderer. My one quibble with Peters and Davis is that the characters are just a bit too lovable; I think if you had true to life characters from these historical periods, they would gross us out. Still, that doesn’t stop me from gobbling them up eagerly.

Davis has also written an excellent novel about Vespasian and his wife called The Course of Honor.

                          

For the last year or so, I’ve been reading Will Rogers, The Man and His Times by Richard Ketchum. This hefty tome is the definitive biography of America’s favorite cowboy who, it turns out, was an Indian, and it was written with the assistance of the staff at the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma, which I had the opportunity to visit several years ago.

In my book, Will Rogers is on a par with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Ernie Pyle as one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, and I am consistently amazed by the twists and turns of his astonishing life, his exemplary marriage, his enduring fame, his lofty ideals, which he never compromised, his legendary humor, and above all, his decency. He was a decent human being through and through.

In a way he was the original Blogger and Tweeter because he wrote a daily telegram and a weekly column that were printed in just about every US newspaper. In 1926 he sent a telegram from England, ostensibly to President Calvin Coolidge, that was printed in the New York Times: “Lady Astor is arriving on your side about now. Please ask my friend [Mayor] Jimmy Walker to have New York take good care of her. She is the only one over here who don’t throw rocks at American tourists.”

Readers clamored for more, and Rogers was glad to oblige. He wrote the daily telegram, a precursor of the tweet, and a weekly column, presursor of the blog, until his death in a plane crash in 1935, and just about everyone in America read them. Franklin D. Roosevelt said Will Rogers’ observations on the European political scene were more perceptive than most of the diplomats in the Department of State.

His early life makes an amazing story. He grew up in the Indian Territory that is now Oklahoma, the son of a prominent rancher and banker. He went to Argentina as a young man and got stranded there when he gave all his money to his buddy to pay his way home, thinking his father would send him some dough to get home himself. When that didn’t happen he scrounged around for a while and eventually got a job on a cattle boat to South Africa.

In a bar in Johannesburg, he met W.C. Fields and the two became lifelong friends. In Ladysmith, he ran into Texas Jack of Texas Jack’s Wild West Show, who was impressed by Rogers’ skills doing rope tricks. Will perfected his act in South Africa and later in Australia and New Zealand and went into vaudeville when he got back to the US.

In 1905 he was performing with a wild west show in Madison Square Garden when a longhorn steer jumped the barrier into the stadium seats — the expensive seats at that. Rogers, then known as the Cherokee Kid, lassoed the beast and forced him back into the arena.

After working in shows with other artists, the theater owners convinced Will that he was the one they wanted. His roping act was really brilliant, and he started to perfect his patter to go along with it. Eventually he was performing at the Ziegfield Follies, the pinnacle for vaudeville performers and he based his patter on the daily news. “All I know is what I read in the papers.”

The patter got so good he didn’t even have to do the rope tricks anymore. He became a wildly successful dinner speaker and eventually an A-list movie star, first in silent films and then talkies, but he never lost touch with the common man. He made millions, but never turned into an a**hole.

When the Depression hit he took whirlwind tours raising money for the poor, because President Herbert Hoover refused to help them. Hoover would only help the banks. Will Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935.

When it comes to Will Rogers, I can only scratch the surface in a single blog entry. If you want the whole story, go to Wikipedia, or get the Ketchum book for the whole story.

                          

The other day I posted a question on Twitter to which I have not received an answer, much less a satisfactory one: Why did Subaru spend millions of dollars to air an advertisement showing a guy peeing in his pants?

So I had to come up with an answer myself. I find that if I pose a question like that and set it aside, sometimes the answer comes to me in a couple of days.

Back in the day, I had lots of questions about Mr. Whipple. Remember him? He used to squeeze toilet paper. Charmin spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that campaign. Ad men spent their entire careers writing material about Mr. Whipple. I’m not sure about this, but I think it had to do with people’s subliminal desire to play with their own feces.

The point is, it worked. Companies don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns that don’t work.

But that was another era. The guy peeing his pants is aimed at another demographic altogether. I think it’s related to that weird mask the guy wears in the old Burger King ads and the ads for Farmers Insurance — we are Farmers, bump badumpa bum bum bum. We’re showing that we don’t take ourselves seriously. Psychologists call this “prophylactic self-disparagement.” We make fun of ourselves so that others cannot make fun of us.

I learned about this somewhere, but now when I Google the phrase, all I get is my own comment on my daughter’s blog entry about Phyllis Diller. Can my psychologist friends help me out here? I swear I didn’t make it up.

You can see prophylactic self-disparagement everywhere you look nowadays. I think it’s because most of the members of the younger generations cannot possibly achieve the same level of success that their parents achieved at the same age. The economic system is stacked against them. The Boomers are greedy and will not make a place for them. They live in their parents’ basements and play video games.

Why here in my own house I have sullen teens in their late twenties. And I’m sympathetic. When I started part-time at GoNOMAD, I had lots of low-wage jobs shoveling manure and working at Staples. Believe me, the market is savage. And most low-wage jobs come with a boss who wants to take his or her bad mood out on you.

Parents recall their own experience, but they lived in an era when, even in a bad economy, an enterprising person could still find a decent job. That’s just not true anymore. Young people have to resign themselves to a demeaning form of serfdom, so they have to resort to prophylactic self-disparagement.

But apparently a few of them have enough scratch to buy Subarus and car insurance and burgers.

                          

I’m having enormous fun with a book called The Five of Hearts by Patricia O’Toole. It’s about five friends who meet in Washington, D.C., in 1880: Henry and Marian ‘Clover’ Adams, John and Clara Hay, and Clarence King.

Henry Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, who was nearly president and who, as ambassador to Great Britain, famously kept that country from forming an alliance with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Marian Hooper Adams was a remarkable woman whom I blogged about here, here, here, here, and here. I’m a big fan of Clover Hooper. So was Henry James. He called her his “Voltaire in petticoats.”

John Hay was one of Abraham Lincoln’s secretaries and was later secretary of state under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Clara Stone Hay was the heiress of railroad baron Amasa Stone.

Clarence King was a geologist who surveyed the 40th parallel in advance of the transcontinental railroad and became famous for exposing the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. He later founded, and headed up, the U.S. Geological Survey. He also had four children with an African-American woman in New York, who knew him as James Todd.

The five of them used to meet at Henry and Clover’s house in Washington just across LaFayette Square from the White House, and they were all accused, at one time or another (except for Clara, who was the listener), of being the author of Democracy, an anonymous bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic which exposed the rampant corruption in American politics and was a favorite of English Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Prince of Wales.

They became such close friends that they named their little circle “The Five of Hearts,” and even had their own stationery.

I find this book delightful for five reasons: 1) each of the characters is fascinating in his or her own right; 2) it gives the reader remarkable insights into the period of history which Mark Twain labeled “The Gilded Age”; 3) the five “hearts” were so fond of one another, and shared an exquisite sense of humor that comes across in their correspondence throughout their lives; 4) O’Toole achieves such a high level of scholarship, sifting through countless volumes of sources and presenting the essence; and finally, 5) O’Toole is a great writer.

Of course the suicide of Clover Adams shatters the happiness of the hearts, but I find it an inspiration to see how they cope with the tragedy. And this book has also given me new insight into the life and character of Henry Adams, whom I had always regarded as a stodgy old coot. Turns out he was a firebrand in his youth who exposed corruption in politics until he found that nobody really cared. Then he took solace in writing history and other intellectual pursuits.

And there’s a very telling episode later in the book where he’s meeting with Cuban revolutionaries in Washington. Spain, as I learned, had brutally suppressed dissent in Cuba, herding hundreds of thousands of people into concentration camps, where more than 400,000 people died. The Cuban revolutionaries were in Washington trying to awaken the conscience of the American people to support their efforts at liberation.

Based on his experience, Henry saw that this was not the percentage play, and instead he worked to convince American capitalists that there was money to be made in Cuba once they got rid of the Spaniards. There was no trouble justifying this. After all, his grandfather John Quincy Adams was the author of the Monroe Doctrine.

As history shows, this was a truly insightful way of harnessing greed for a humanitarian purpose. And the people of Cuba were definitely better off after the war.

Henry could not have foreseen that the US would hang on to the Philippines and slaughter 100,000 people there.

                          

I have tried on numerous occasions to read the works of my grandmother’s cousin Edmund Wilson, but I  usually read a chapter or two and I have to acknowledge that I don’t have the foggiest idea what he is talking about. Throughout my life, tho, I have always found that people who are a lot smarter than I am say he is a great writer, so I keep at it.

I finally found great enjoyment reading Patriotic Gore (dumb name for a book), so I decided to try Axel’s Castle. I found an old copy for the right  price, heavily underlined by some guy named Jack Shadrian, so I’ve been taking it to the gym because I don’t have to worry about it being damaged in the sauna.

I still don’t get Cousin Bunny. He’s still over my head. But I have learned a lot about Williams Butler Yeats and Paul Valery and T.S. Eliot. And I intend to soldier on and learn more about Marcel Proust and James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I can’t quite get what he’s saying but it’s a lot easier than reading  these books for myself. Except for Yeats. He’s a wonderful easy read, whatever you pick up. I find that almost everyone I really care about has a snatch of his poetry that they keep in a special place like a locket over their heart.

I’ have also found a biography of Cousin Bunny by David Castronovo that I picked up to see if I could find a reference to my grandmother, Esther Kimball, later Esther Kimball Hartshorne Megargee, who taught me how to behave. I  haven’t found one, but there is a reference to Wilson’s first literary work, which was a collaboration with her brother Sandy.

Uncle Sandy went to Princeton with Bunny and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but after he flunked out of medical school, he tried to rape his sister, my grandmother, and kill his mother, my great-grandmother, and was institutionalized for fifty years. My Uncle Nat visited him at the loony bin back in the fifties and reported that Sandy thought Calvin Coolidge was doing a darn good job.

What you can count on from Cousin Bunny is that he will read all these long boring works for you and give you the gist, and though he’s hard to understand, it still saves you a lot of time. If only I had my college roommate Mark Webber here to explain what Wilson is talking about, I’d be all set.

                          

I’m having enormous fun with Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, a book presented to me by my cousin Max. Philbrick does just what you want a scholar to do: sort through all the historical sources and give you the gist of the story. I’m really enjoying this book, even though it is dissolving a lot of preconceived ideas I had about the settlement of New England.

For one thing, I have always seen King Philip’s War as purely an unprincipled war of extermination against the Native Americans of New England. It was that, surely, but as Philbrick makes clear, it was precipitated, as so many of these conflicts are, by circumstances unique to the situattion.

Yes, it was the greed of the douchebags in the Plymouth Colony who wanted a port on Narragansett Bay so they could be part of the Triangle Trade — Molasses to Rum to Slaves — but like all events in human history, it was more complicated than that.

Because the Native Americans of New England were human, too, and they had many internal conflicts, dating back to the time of Massasoit, Philip’s father. Massasoit, as we know, saved the Pilgrims of Plymouth from starving, and they repaid him by placing his son’s head on a pike at the entrance to their colony for 40 years. That much is well known.

But it’s hard to argue that the leaders of the Plymouth intentionally precipitated the war when they allowed Philip to sell nearly all his land and buy guns.

What Philbrick’s scholarship shows us is that there were good guys and bad guys on both sides. What most interested me was that there were veterans of the Thirty Years War in Europe who participated in the slaughter of the Pequots in 1637, when even the Indian allies of Massachusetts Bay were disgusted by the slaughter.

But in the historical records department, King Philip’s War actually exceeded the Thirty Years’ War for devastation among the civil population. The concept of slaughtering men, women, and children was brought to America. Particularly tragic was the massacre of the Narragansetts, who had done everything in their power to remain neutral.

Philbrick does a really great job telling the stories of this fascinating era of American history.

                          

I stopped watching hockey after game six of the Summit Series between the USSR and Canada in 1972. In that series, the Canadians were being trounced by the finesse play of Russian players like Valeri Kharlamov. In game six, Bobby Clarke of the Philadelphia Flyers smashed Kharlamov with his stick and broke the Russian’s ankle.

Clarke was instructed to do this by assistant coach John Ferguson, who later described the incident: “I remember that Kharlamov’s ankle was hurting pretty bad,” he said. “I called Clarke over to the bench, looked over at Kharlamov and said, ‘I think he needs a tap on the ankle.’ I didn’t think twice about it. It was Us versus Them. And Kharlamov was killing us. I mean, somebody had to do it.”

You do what you have to do to win. Clarke, who is also famous for smashing a Czech player in the face with the butt of his stick, became known as “one of the game’s great leaders,” and when he retired from active play, he went on to become general manager of the Flyers and several other teams.

So I don’t watch hockey, but I think young boys should watch hockey, because it teaches a valuable lesson: There are times when a man must abandon the laws of civilized society and lash out with violence intended to cause serious harm to other human beings.

This is a lesson young men cannot learn from watching basketball or football or tennis or volleyball or rugby or soccer or tennis or jai alai or chess. It’s true that in baseball there are times when a pitcher, if he is a real man, must throw a baseball at 90 miles an hour at the head of an opposing player, but this doesn’t happen nearly enough to be instructive.

When I see peewee hockey players throw down their gloves and start punching one another in the face, I can see that they are learning this important lesson of manhood.

Because situations arise in daily life when men, if they are real men, must step outside the law and do violent harm to other human beings. Perhaps someone in a nightclub says something you don’t like. Perhaps someone makes fun of your hat. Perhaps your wife says she is leaving you because of your excessive drinking or perhaps your mother gives more love and attention to a bunch of kindergarten kids than she gives to you!

In situations like these, real men must ignore the laws of humanity and lash out with violence and cause all the harm they possibly can. This is an important lesson that young men learn by watching hockey.

                          

I just went through a pretty serious bout of the flu, so I was in bed for a week and took the opportunity to reread Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. This brilliant book is the first of the Deptford Trilogy, but it definitely stands alone. And how! The stupid jerk we meet in the very first chapter gets his comeuppance in the very last.

Davies is a masterful writer, as the reader can tell from every single paragraph, and his story gripped me from beginning to end. There is a power to it that I cannot describe in words. Wikipedia reports that “Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create Fifth Business (1970), a novel that relies heavily on Davies’ own experiences, his love of myth and magic and his knowledge of small-town mores.”

The narrator of the work is Dunstable Ramsay, a boy who grows up in the little town of Deptford, Ontario. He loses a leg and becomes a hero in World War I and ends up teaching at a private school. When an alumnus of the school delivers a condescending tribute to him, portraying him as a lovable old duffer, he decides to tell the real story of his life, and the story of his ‘friend’ Boy Staunton, his ‘girlfriend’ Leola Cruikshank, and the magnificent Paul Dempster.

In the course of the book, each of these characters (except poor Leola) is renamed. Dunstable becomes Dunstan, Boy becomes Boyd, and Paul becomes conjurer extraordinaire Magnus Eisengrim.

It is Lisilotte Vitziputzli, Eisengrim’s manager, who explains to Dunstan his role in the drama of life:

“Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don’t know who that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe, you must have a prima donna, always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.

“So far, so good. But you cannot make the plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out,  the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of someone’s death if that is part of the plot.

“The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those that play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices.”

My brother Rob recommended this book to me many years ago, and I have to say I enjoyed it even more on a second reading. The Jungian component accorded so well with my fever dreams.