Even if in the whole of my life I had known only one moment of hope, I would have waged this fight. Even if I am to lose it, for others will win it. All others. —Paul Eluard
Greetings from the far left coast where I am getting back into the routine after a brief but delightful sojourn in Tulsa highlighted by the Tulsa Runner 20th anniversary celebration, visits to the Bob Dylan Center and the Greenwood Rising Black Wall St. History Center, some Tulsa Tough bicycle racing, wonderful dining, catching up with Tulsa friends, and hanging out with Trani, Candace, and Holly the D-O-G. Links to Livin' on Tulsa Time posts at Substack are below in the usual place.
The Tulsa trip was good for more than just the pleasure of it. Maybe it knocked me out of a rut I had been in for some time. My spirit is lighter. The days are more satisfying. For the moment "the heavy and weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened" (Wordsworth, "Lines Compose a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
We lost a fine writer with the death of Cormac McCarthy on Tuesday at the age of 89. McCarthy's early novels passed under radar of the wider reading public. That changed when All the Pretty Horses (the first in his acclaimed Border Trilogy, followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) racked up the 1992 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was awarded the Pulitizer Prize in 2007 for The Road. The Coen Bros' film of No Country for Old Men (2005) was named best picture at the 2007 Academy Awards.
Blood Meridian (1985) is in a class by itself. Harold Bloom, a go-to resource on literary matters, called the novel "a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting."
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate his Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.
My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. (Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy, True Heir to Melville and Faulkner, Literary Hub, October 16, 2019)
I have not yet read The Passenger and Stella Maris, a pair of related novels published in October and December, respectively, 2022. Trani says both are good. If memory serves, he told me a while back that Stella Maris is his favorite of the two. High praise, since his notes in his reading log, relayed to me this morning, describe The Passenger as "beautifully written, if hard to keep track of." They are on the reading list in the priority category.
"'I have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages,' Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris." (Christian Lorentzen, I was there to inflict death, London Review of Books, January 5, 2023). Another good review: Michael Gorra, Language, Destroyer of Worlds, The New York Review, December 22, 2022 issue)
Indictment. Retired general Mark Hertling, former Commanding General of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army, speaks for high-ranking military and intelligence officials who take Trump's crimes personally:
Yes, the President has declassification authority. But that requires a process that then protects a LOT of people. Anyone who says otherwise is a moron. And anyone who says someone can do it after leaving their leadership role is even more moronic.
There's a reason I reacted viscerally to the "my papers" statement. To claim they are "his"—as if they've been given to him for personal use or vanity just like the WWE belt, the NY Post clippings, or any other trinket or memento found in these boxes—is horrid.
Yes, military & intel officials are pissed. They know the power of these documents that were treated cavalierly. All Americans should be equally pissed. But it seems many are not because of how some in government are treating this case. We need to treat this seriously. (quoted by Charlie Sykes, The Arrest of Donald J. Trump, The Bulwark, June 14, 2023)
Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark offers no quarter to slippery Republicans who grudgingly concede that "if that gobsmacking federal indictment is true, even fractionally, he just might be careless—even a teensy bit reckless—about how he handles top national security secrets" while in the next breath "pivoting, shifting, or threading some needle between telling the truth about Trump and protecting their own ambitions."
The problem is that the concession is wrapped in lies at least as dangerous as Trump’s alleged actions themselves—lies that, like Trump’s Big Lie that he won the presidency in 2020, are designed to sow mistrust in American elections, institutions, and rule of law. Most GOP leaders are offering hedged concerns about Trump accompanied by fevered falsehoods about a two-tiered justice system weaponized by President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, and the FBI to go after, well, Donald Trump.
It’s enough to make you want to require critical race theory classes in every junior high school in America. Because, yes, kids, there is a legacy of systemic bias in this country, whether in housing, health care, education, or the criminal justice system, and it is not bias against rich white guys who used to be president. Or the supporters who have broken the law for them.
The bottom line: "Trump is unfit for office, and more prominent Republicans should be saying that flat out without burying it in baseless assaults on the pillars of U.S. democracy" ("Threading the Needle" on Trump Is a Dangerous Game, June 15, 2023). No breath should be held waiting for this to happen.
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
Livin' on Tulsa Time: Day 1, June 8, 2023. Yesterday’s flight to Tulsa was my first since Christmas 2019. At the beginning wariness about the pandemic kept me out of the air. These days it has more to do with neuroticism about flying. Not so much the actual flight part as anxiety about getting to the airport on time, nightmarish herds of my fellow Americans, unwittingly setting off alarms at security.…read more>>
Livin' on Tulsa Time: ...and Down in South Florida: Indictment, June 10, 2023. Thursday evening was a time for celebration with the Tulsa Runner 20th Anniversary fête at The Cape Brewing Company across the river in Jenks and the indictment of the criminal Trump filed in federal court in Miami…read more>>
Livin' on Tulsa Time: Greenwood Rising, Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa Tough, June 11, 2023. The Greenwood Rising Black Wall St. History Center is a place for visitors to
explore the history of Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District and connect to the spirit of its Black citizens through an immersive journey that uses projection mapping, holographic effect, and environmental media…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
