Haiku

Photo: Matt Nighswander / NBC News

Winter  Snowstorm,  New York

The snow is piled so

high on my windowsill that

I can't see if it's snowing.

The Other Trump

Not Donald Trump, but TRUMP, the glossy 1957 humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman for two issues before publisher Hugh Hefner pulled the plug on it, ostensibly for financial reasons ("I gave Harvey an unlimited budget... and he exceeded it") but also because Hef apparently had doubts about the magazine's prospects for success at the then-exorbitant price of fifty cents an issue. I just finished reading the recently published volume, THE COMPLETE TRUMP, edited and with invaluable annotations by Dennis Kitchen. I urge all fans of Kurtzman, Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, Arnold Roth and Al Jaffee to get hold of this beautiful book. I confess that while the two issues are beautifully done, with color paintings and an elegant and sophisticated layout, they're just not as funny as Kurtzman's work on the early issues of MAD. It seems that he repressed some of his anarchic humor in a possibly misguided desire to be classy and upscale. Nonetheless, there are some real gems in this volume including a hilarious spoof of DEATH OF A SALESMAN by a young Mel Brooks. 

Kitchen has included drawings and layouts intended for the unpublished issue number #3 which suggests the future direction Kurtzman was planning to take the magazine in. One can see TRUMP as a kind of bridge between MAD and NATIONAL LAMPOON --not as groundbreaking as the first and not as raunchy and political as the second, but a valiant project that sadly never had the chance to really prove itself. This long overdue collection is a steal at $20.

Meeting Tom Wolfe

On Thursday evening, October 20, I saw the legendary Tom Wolfe speak at the Book Culture store on 81st and Columbus Avenue here in Manhattan. He was there to talk about his book, The Kingdom of Speech. A truly magical evening. He was resplendent in his trademark white suit and entered the bookstore  carrying a hand-carved cane with a painted wolf's head at the top.  At 85, Wolfe is a bit frail walking, but once he was seated and talking he showed the ebullience of someone half his age.

I had the privilege to to chat with him for about four or five minutes and he was friendly, funny and kind -- a real gentleman. He signed my copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities and shared some anecdotes about the writing of the book. (He said he knew the book would be a success when his typist got upset when he didn't bring any pages for her one day; she made it clear that her annoyance wasn't due to the loss of income but her impatience to find out what happened in the story next.)

I asked him if Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and radical politics, which he discusses in his new book, are connected in some way. Wolfe didn't think so. He said that Chomsky absorbed his anarchist views politics from his Jewish grandparents, who had lived in Russia under the Tsar, who and was not very kind to the Jews, to put it mildly. Wolfe sees Chomsky's politics and linguistics concepts as entirely separate mental constructs, though he does believe both of them are entirely wrong.

It's interesting that during the Q & A following Wolfe's talk, not a single person in the educated, Upper West Side audience took issue with Wolfe's critique of evolution or Chomsky's notion of a "universal grammar" built into the brain. Perhaps they were intimidated by Wolfe or felt they were simply not knowledgable enough about either evolution or linguistics to challenge his opinion. But Wolfe made it very clear that he is not a Creationist. In fact, he admits he is not a believer at all, and is "without religion." He won't call himself an atheist, though, because he considers people who label themselves such are "putting on airs."

Just for the record, he doesn't believe in The Big Bang Theory, either.

He hinted that his next book may be about social status. Which all his books have been about to some extent, but it will be fascinating if he decides to tackle the subject head-on.

In any event, getting to see and talk to Tom Wolfe was a real kick, and now I have a signed copy of what is arguably his best book. I eagerly await the next one.

Edward Albee, R.I.P

Photo by Jerry Speier.  

I briefly met the great Edward Albee years ago when I was working at Doubleday. I knew that Albee would be showing up that day to discuss with my boss a collection of his best plays, personally selected and introduced by the playwright. I came up with some absurd excuse to walk into my boss's office and in the process say hi to Albee and then make a quick exit. (Later I had  the satisfaction of proofreading the text of  Albee's elegant introduction.)  Albee's own exit at age 88 is far too soon. He was one of the giants of the American theater.

The volume published by Doubleday's Fireside Theatre book club.

High-Water Mark

Over the weekend I saw a film I can highly recommend to everyone here: David McKenzie's vastly entertaining Hell or High Water. At first it seems like another bank robbery film, a western that substitutes cars for horses, but Taylor Sheridan's script is intelligent, witty, and always couple of steps ahead of the audience. The deft performances by Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and the always welcome Jeff Bridges help make it a film where the action is always subordinated to the characters and their emotional development.  After a summer of over-plotted plodding blockbusters it's a pleasant surprise to see a stunning film that cost only 12 million dollars to make.

Tom Wolfe Takes on Darwin and Noam Chomsky!

I read Tom Wolfe's new non-fiction book, The Kingdom of Speech, over the holiday weekend. A short but immensely entertaining and provocative volume. Wolfe spends half the book eviscerating Noam Chomsky, drawing on recent research by young linguists and anthropologists to toppple the Chomskyite notions of a "Universal Grammar" and an "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device), supposedly hardwired in the brain. Along the way Wolfe demolishes Chomsky's anarchist politics, which he sees as a sentimental hangover from Chomsky's roots in the East European shtetl as well as his boyhood crush on the Spanish anarchists who briefly took over Barcelona in the late 1930s. This contoversial book is going to upset a lot of people -- neo-Darwinists, orthodox Chomskyites, and much of the cultural and scientific establishment. But most of all it is a paean to the powers of human speech, which Wolfe sees as the most powerful and defining creation of the human race. In short, a delightful and highly stimulating way to spend Labor Day weekend. To say more would ruin your own reading pleasure.

Photo by Mark Seliger.

Donald Trump and American Mass Culture

In his column in the New York Post back on May 21, "Rat Pack vs. The Hippie," John Podhoretz astutely saw the coming presidential election as a battle between two very different cultures, each of them deriving from the 1960s, and each represented by two very different baby boomers, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  For Hillary, the radicalism she discovered in late Sixties was her golden coming of age; for Trump, the early Sixties of the Rat Pack and its white (with the notable exception of Sammy Davis, Jr.) male sense of entitlement and raucous fun, was the mecca he aspired to and created around him for the rest of his life.  Podhoretz suggests that America today may well be more nostalgic for the boozy antics of the Rat Pack (though he points out that Trump himself does not drink) than for the give-peace-a-chance potheads of the hippie movement (though whether or not Hillary was an active pot smoker or, like her husband Bill, merely inhaled, is anyone's guess).  In November the electorate will get to choose which end of the 1960s decade it wants most to return to.

Like Podhoretz, I'm not a Trump supporter (see my post from July 28, 2015), but history may be on Trump's side. More than one commentator has observed over the years that "politics is downstream from culture."  In other words, the culture introduces changes into society before the political realm picks up on them. We can see how this happened in 1960, when the country fell in love with movie-star handsome John F. Kennedy -- whose father Joe owned  a movie studio during  Hollywood's golden age -- was elected president just as the Hollywood studio system with all its glamour was already becoming an object of nostalgia.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan resoundingly won the White House to the great shock of the educated class, who were thinking still viewing elections through traditional political lenses, whereas most Americans in the economically and intellectually depressed late-1970s were voting based on a growing nostalgia for what they perceived as the more optimistic and affluent 1950s -- witness the success of such TV shows as Happy Days and films like Grease.  Reagan had been a regular presence on TV in the 1950s; he was a familiar figure in American homes and implied a return to that supposedly more innocent decade. The culture had prepared the way for his election.

Similarly, we might see the backlash against the puritanical and stifling politically correct political culture of the last 15 years represented in such shows as Mad Men and The Sopranos, as well as the bevy of coarse but compelling reality TV shows, including Trump's own reality show, The Apprentice.  While the political class still thinks a presidential candidate should be more in the mold of Adlai Stevenson (or at least Barack Obama) than a reality TV star, the rest of the country is quite possibly ready to accept the latter, which may well result in a massive case of cognitive dissonance in countless homes in Cambridge, Beverly Hills, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The chief culprits of this victory will be the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Party, who have not forthrightly stood up against the of politically correct culture, even as those leaders themselves enjoyed the outrages perpetrated by the characters of Mad Men and The Sopranos.  Trump feels no allegiance to the pieties and conventions of American politics past.  He is a creature of mass culture, and a canny purveyor of it as well. (It's no coincidence that Trump's favorite movie is Citizen Kane, a film he has evidently studied quite carefully.)

To repeat: politics follows culture. A Trump victory in November is by no means foreordained, but as the record of the past indicates, neither will it be a great surprise.

Images:  HBO (above) and Getty (top)