Plenty of Wander
Vernon getting writing fuel from his signature glass of Pinot Gregio.
I have no idea how this is going to evolve, much less turn out but let’s give it a shot.
Following up on my cracked rib adventure, noted two weeks ago, the ER doc gave me pain prescriptions for 600 mgs. of Ibuprofen and some Oxy.
The former helped-slowly but surely I’m getting better-and the latter-taken only twice-made me feel woozy and slow and weird and did nothing to address my discomfort. I’m not sure what the ‘charm’ of that stuff is but holds none for me.
I have a meeting today with my wonderful publicist Hannah who is very pregnant and her lunar landing is on the near horizon. We will map out plans for the coming months and her maternity leaver will, of course, take priority. It’s the end of summer and time for things to roll into some watchful lassitude for a bit before cooler temperatures stimulate reinvigorated action. A new baby, as I recall (I have three children-now allegedly ‘all grown up’) will surely stir the pots of activity.
I wonder if I will be blogging while she’s nurturing…
I have finished WAR AND PEACE. The last 500 pages were the equivalent of running in mud with snow shoes on. It was interesting for a while and then turned into sort of a teeth-grinding literary death march. But I was determined to read it and I did. Tolstoy indeed did have an enormous capacity for words and plot structure and big doses of history and battles and Napoleon and large chunks of description; he can bury you alive in the stuff and how he held all those varied story lines together is a feat in and of itself but is it one of the greatest novels of all time? Not to me. It’s overly long, convoluted, grossly repetitive and convoluted. I would wager if the manuscript were handed to a skilled and competent editor today, two-thirds of it would be shorn away onto the cutting room floor.
As my sainted Mother is prone to say, “Enough is enough and too much is too much.”
It was and is “Too Much”.
And too, in thinking about the above-mentioned Napoleon, I found in my shelves a slim and efficient and elegantly written tome of history by the masterful Paul Johnson, simply entitled NAPOLEON. It is biography at its best. I recall buying it in London many years ago. On the back, it says it cost 8 pounds. Now, that was money well-spent. After the exhausting slog of WandP, it was a delight to gobble up.
And last, for now, reading recommendations. Anything By Joan Didion. I have completed THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM and PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. I am working on WHITE ALBUM now. She was a genius at seeing ordinary and too, unusual things and recording them in ways that usually escape almost all of us. She could make the banal fascinating. She could turn over rocks and find things. She had an amazing sense of personalities and their quirks and habits. She could do dialogue. She was an observer of ‘culture’, often searing and unsparing in her evaluations.
I love the following quote of hers:
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: WRITERS ARE ALWAYS SELLING SOMEBODY OUT.”
She was a Giant.
As most of you know, I love sports and here comes football season. So much fun. I admit to enjoying a little wagering now and then and with the advent of off-shore services, there’s no more finding your local bookie and trudging to him to settle up on a regular basis. As obsolete as the buggy whip now. As long as you know your limits (and that’s a very important thing to know), you can play year round and you don’t have to play for big dollars.
For over thirty years, I was a handicapping scout for the oldest and most respected handicapping service in the country, THE GOLD SHEET. It helped me so much in my trial and courtroom work. In essence, you took a hard and objective look at the strengths and weaknesses of the two teams squaring off and figured out who was going to win and by how much. I enjoyed it greatly. After thirty plus years, I figured that was enough and stepped away. I’m just a fan now but the skills developed during that time have helped me make a little money every now and then. To me, it’s an excellent intellectual exercise.
And now one last travelogue for the summer. My friend Heather and her son Harris and I will take a few days here and there and go off some place to enjoy and explore. We always do a football game in Chapel Hill (they, like me, are big Heel fans). Last summer, we went over to Atlanta and took in some Braves and this year, because I often talk about what a neat, small city it is, we went last week to Pittsburgh. (I had big exposure to the Steel City some years ago when youngest son was at Carnegie Mellon-quickly grew to love the place. They heard me talk about it more than a little and suggested it as our destination.)
Flew out on a Wednesday and came back Friday. No airport problems anywhere along the way. Stayed at the very nice Fairmont Hotel, situated in the center of downtown. Took in some Pirates at one of the best ballparks in the country, PNC Park. Wandered about. A great architecture town. Ate at Primanti Brothers (where the French fries are in the sandwich, not next to it), toured the magnificent Phipps Conservatory-the biggest and most diverse greenhouse I’ve ever seen-many, many displays of plants and flowers of every description-one could spend a full day in there, took a Three Rivers Tour and went up and down the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio and took in the sights, ate at the wacky Mad Mex up on Highland. We didn’t really scratch the surface-there is so much to see and do- but as my friends had never been to Pittsburgh, they got a good dose.
I consider the place a wonderful ‘hidden secret’. And did you know that Pittsburgh has more bridges than Venice? True!
And to finish this piece off, some baseball trivia. Lena Blackburn Baseball Rubbing Mud, only found in one spot on the Jersey side of the Delaware River, is rubbed into every one of the 144 to 180 baseballs that are used in the regular season of 2,430 games plus playoffs. Now, that’s esoteric!
That’s enough for now. Y’all keep reading and stay safe out there!
I send my very best,
Vernon