Sisterhood Is Powerful” Part 3

“It’s your sister again, Mr. Davis,” said Marie, feeling put upon.

“Yes, Marie. Bring me another half cup of coffee. Tell Gladys she can hold the line if she wishes. Richard, please sit up.”

“Dad, are you going to get away at all this summer?”

“Your mother and I will probably do some sailing with Chris and Anna. He was kind enough to offer.”

“He ought to be,” Diane said, slicing the last of her melon. “The Post wasn’t very nice to him.”

“Perhaps not. It’s a marvelous boat. Well, you must excuse me.”

He rose from the table and brushed his lips with his napkin. The walk from the breakfast porch to his study seemed unusually long. He sat at his desk and picked up the phone.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning to you too. Hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Why have you called?”

“To give you the good news. I’m getting married.”

“Well. Congratulations.”

©Copyright 2010 Alan Vanneman

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The strange case of Louie Freeh

I’ve been working on a novel set in Washington around the time of the 2008 primary season, and have come to do a little research on former FBI director Louis Freeh. Louie’s been back in the news, not that he wants to be, very much, representing one of his best buddies, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, probably the leading bag man in DC. Among other things, the Prince gave Mrs. General Powell a vintage Jaguar the day after the General retired, an exact duplicate of the one Mrs. Powell told the Prince she missed so much.

The Prince has been tangled up in some disputes over payoffs by an outfit called BAE Systems, one of the largest arms dealers in the world. The Justice Department has just announced a settlement with BAE. Will the Prince be involved? Don’t hold your breath. The NYT has details here. So does the Manchester Guardian.

You can read an interview with Louie Freeh explaining why the Prince’s hands are clean here. Louie recently took out Italian citizenship. I wonder why?

Afterwords
There’s remarkably little written about Freeh, who resigned from the FBI before his ten-year directorship ended, prior to 9/11. I strongly suspect that he was pushed out, exhausting the patience of his Republican overseers by his failure to destroy President Clinton, bungling any number of cases in his attempts to do so. In 2005, Freeh published My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, a monumental effort at ass-covering, written largely in response to Richard Clarke’s accurate portrayal of Freeh as a monumental incompetent. The only reviewer to take Freeh to task was I.C. Smith, here, but even Smith is in thrall to the notion that Freeh is “a moral man with strong Catholic beliefs.” In fact, Freeh was, from the very get-go, a shameless political suck-up who made the FBI the political tool of first the Clinton Administration and then the Republican Congress.* The Republicans, one guesses, had had their fill of Freeh’s promises, and, recognizing incompetence when they saw it, pushed him out.

*“Why Freeh bothered to write such an incomplete book is perplexing to me,” says Smith. If Freeh had written a “complete” one, he probably would have ended up in jail.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers—“A Night in Tunisia

Seriously rhythmic. With Wayne Shorter , Lee Morgan
Art Blakey , Jymie Merritt , and Walter Davis Jr.

Last night I had a dream

I was living with my parents on a sort of farm when a lion showed up. I ran into the house and found a .22 rifle which I loaded. Not much of a defense, but something. The lion disappeared, and then reappeared, jumping into the house through a window. As he did so, he turned into a sort of Island of Dr. Moreau type lion, walking on two feet and speaking English.

“You speak well for a lion,” I said, which is probably not the smartest thing to say to a talking lion.

“Thanks,” he smirked, clearly amused by my obvious lack of savoir faire.

After that things got fuzzy. I guess the whole thing was a riff on one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s more gnomic apothegms, “Even if a lion could talk we could not understand him,” the dream allowing me to deal Ludwig a double-down refutation—lions can talk and we can understand them!

Afterwords
What, exactly, did Wittgenstein mean with his lion crack? I guess he meant that a leonine Weltanschauung would differ in essence from ours and thus their speech would not be understandable, implying that human language cannot be reduced to a pure logic that could be comprehended by non-humans, and the same for lionspeak. Does this mean that terrestrial math could not be understood by non-terrestrials? Or maybe it means that human speech cannot be reduced to math. A lot of Wittgenstein’s late musings seemed to revolve around the idea that language was a game with arbitrary rules, with rules that aren’t really separable from the game. We watch the game and then figure out what the rules are. But how do we know what a rule is? By observing non-random behavior and deducing a rule from it? Why do soccer players always kick the ball? Because they aren’t allowed to pick it up? How do we know what a game is? How do we know when a game starts and when it stops? When behavior starts being influenced by arbitrary rules and when it stops being influenced by them? What is the opposite of a game? Reality? And how do we define that?

My own response to Wittgenstein, prior to my dream, at least, is that lions can’t talk, so it’s useless to speculate about how they would talk if they could and that lions can’t talk because lions can’t talk—they lack the physical apparatus necessary to produce speech. Parrots can talk because parrots can talk. Lions are social animals, but they aren’t that social. Sophisticated oral communication isn’t a priority with them, and so they haven’t got it. Wittgenstein, who didn’t care for anything Darwinian (too empirical), probably wouldn’t care for this.

Can apes talk? A lot of the research has been snickered at, for good reason, but The First Word, an often (though not always) interesting book by Christine Kenneally, isn’t all negative. Apes can talk, a little, she says, but only in captivity. Why? Because humans will listen, and apes won’t.

New at Bright Lights: Fred, Charlie, Tina, Thelonious, Pannonica, Norman, and Neytiri!

In the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal I have film reviews of Fred Astaire in Belle of New York, his not-that-good reunion with Vera-Ellen, as well as Tina Fey’s NBC mini-hit 30 Rock, The Jazz Baroness, the story of jazz groupie Pannonica de Koenigswarter and her main man Thelonious Monk, book reviews of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, by Simon Louvish and The Moment of Psycho by David Thomson. And, of course, Avatar. Whole issue, not terribly SFW, here.

Juan Galiardo Quartet - Blues for Dave

Joe Magnarelli, Trumpet, Dave Santoro, Bass, Andrea Michelutti, Drums, Juan Galiardo, Piano

Death of a Recluse

Poor J.D.! Did ever a man so outlive himself? It’s true that Holden Caulfield is, well, a little too Holden Caulfield, but if you haven’t got a little Holden in you, and a little time for that little, you ain’t got much heart.

I used to feel sorry for J.D. when Joyce Maynard wrote her tell-all tale of their romance, but when I learned that he made her dance the foxtrot to Tommy Dorsey, not so much. The babe suffered, grievously, for her sins.