News today:
1) I've decided to just go ahead and finish my long-gestating, all-over-the-place novel. If I can't take one hour out of my day and work on a novel, one in which I more or less know how it starts and ends, then that is just sad. Who cares about what happens to it at that point? I just want to finish the dumb thing so I don't have to think about it anymore.
2) No Pulitzer Prize was awarded this year for Best Fiction, the first time since 1977 that no novel was given this highest of literary prizes. Why? The board, led by novelist Michael Cunningham, evidently felt nothing was "worthy" enough, whatever that means, although there were three finalists: Denis Johnson's Train Dreams; Karen Russell's Swamplandia!; and The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace. This seems insulting, the phrase "not worthy" both arrogant and goofy.
TV
- Nurse Jackie is really cooking early on in its fourth season. I missed all of Season Three, but this is an easy show to get right back into. All hail Edie Falco as the harried title character, a pill-popping, adulterous hot mess, but the whole cast is wicked fun playing a gallery of frenzied, conceited goofs. This is a unique show, with a unique tone - sophomoric and chippy, turbulent, fast-paced, occasionally dead-panned.
- In another life, I would be writing for Mad Men. Last night's episode was incredible, strangely hilarious, with Jared Harris' Lane and Vincent Kartheiser's Lane actually putting up their dukes and boxing each other. This is a show in which even a pitied, pitiful character like the one so deeply, hypnotically etched by Kartheiser, through great writing, can be granted deep pathos. There has never been anything on TV like it.
- Scandal is a pretty good show. Kerry Washington is fabulous as always as a damage control-specialist with her pulse on the Beltway, leading a colorfully crack team of lawyers in this product of Grey's Anatomy creation Shonda Rhimes. The first two episodes have been fine, fast and snappy, with an intriguing subplot in which Washington's Olivia Pope shares an ensnaring, heated romantic backstory with the president of the United States; he's played by Tony Goldwyn, so you know's he's up to his eyeballs in his insinuating, snaky sleaze.
Book Review
William Boyd's Restless (2006) refers to the way Sally Gilmartin has spent the second half of her life - always watchful, always paranoid, never content. You see, Sally, as she tells the story to her shocked daughter Ruth, wasn't always the shy, greenthumbing rural Oxford granny she is now. In fact, she was born in Russia and, after the mysterious death of her brother, recruited by a British spy service. During World War II, she was one of England's finest, resourceful spies, working at an AP-like office planting false stories over the wire in order to draw America into the war.
The book jumps back and forth between Sally's time during the war and Ruth's life in a small college town as a single mother teaching ESL to foreign grad students. The novel builds tension as Sally entreats Ruth to help her track down her boss in the service, a charming, possibly traitorous man named Lucas Romer, who was Sally's lover. Lucas is still very much alive and on the hunt for Ruth.
I wanted to love this book because I thought it had an irresistible premise. I didn't... But I liked it a lot. The pace almost never lags, and there's plenty of detail and one nerve-shredding scene in which Sally jabs a Mexican policeman through the eye with a pencil. The plot moves cleanly, the writing is sharp. It's a very efficient, polished effort - not one of Boyd's more personal efforts but a perfectly enjoyable, satisfying piece of work.
(****)
History Today:
Bernard Baruch utters a popular phrase
Baruch, born in South Carolina in 1870, was a millionaire, stock financier, stock-speculator, and one of the country's most respected political advisers. From 1919 through the 1940s he advised presidents on economic and foreign policy issues.
In 1947, a portrait of Baruch was to be hung in South Carolina's House of Representatives building, and Baruch was present for the unveiling. He gave a speech in which he lambasted the country's industrial labor problems. He encouraged unity between labor and management. He stated:
Let us not be deceived -we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.
Hence, the phrase "cold war" came into being. Newspapers jumped on it. The phrase still recalls to even those generations removed from the Bay of Pigs the tensions between Russia and the U.S.
Thanks: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bernard-baruch-coins-the-term-cold-war
What do I think of when I think of the "Cold War" in terms of its usage and implications in pop culture?
- The Manchurian Candidate, the novel by Richard Condon, and the Frank Sinatra-Laurence Harvey film by John Frankenheimer
- Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 comedy classic
- The Hunt For Red October, by Tom Clancy - and the 1990 film version with Sean Connery
- Thirteen Days, Roger Donaldson's exciting 2000 film about the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Kevin Costner and Bruce Greenwood.
- John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- pretty much most of James Bond
- Of course...
- George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck
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