Famous Road Trips

 

    I am again behind in my blogging and am not really ready to begin this post. It is important, however, to share this information with you and I will try to think of an introduction as I type. The subject is "Road Trips".  A famous one was taken by Ken Kesey and the 'Merry Pranksters' in the Magic Bus pictured above.  The search for a suitable picture for this post allowed me a little more time to figure out a way to introduce it. The picture does not really have anything to do with what follows, but it is about a road trip

   Let me begin this way. In the last two weeks I read two articles that both begin with sentences about road trips. Just as there are contests and arguments over such things as the "Best First Lines in Novels", there should be some for the "Best Opening Sentences About Car Trips in Articles." Here are my two nominations. The first one is about a very short trip, the second is  much longer, but length shouldn't matter.  If anyone can come up with any that are better, they will be given a year's subscription to Mulcahy's Miscellany.

In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken.

That is from the March 22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker and the article is by Jill Lepore, ("When Constitutions Took Over the World.") While Gödel may have been nervous, his compatriots were worried that Gödel might choose to argue about the logical inconsistencies he had found in the Constitution. 

   One week later ( the March 29, 2021 issue of The New Yorker), Madeleine Schwartz begins this article, "Sybille Bedford and the Unruly Art of the Origin Story," with these sentences:

In the summer of 1940, when she was twenty-nine years old, Sybille Bedford took on an unusual assignment: driving Thomas Mann’s poodle across the United States. Bedford had known Mann, nearly forty years her senior, since her adolescence, which she spent living among German expatriates in the South of France. An aspiring but so far unprolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, she had come of age under his shadow. Now both she and Mann were refugees in another country. Mann and his family, moving from Princeton to Pacific Palisades, took the train; the country was experiencing a heat wave, and the compartments were air-conditioned. Bedford drove the writer’s car with her girlfriend and Nico, the poodle, stopping every once in a while for a bottle of Coke, which she spiked with rum.

Well, unfortunately I still haven't figured out what to say about what I have just posted, but you will have undoubtedly have enjoyed these sentences and a year's free subscription will be given to anyone else who thinks they were worth calling to your attention.

The Bonus:

I could probably find something bonus-like if I bothered to look up Jill Lepore, the author of the first article. But, without doing so I know that she writes such pieces almost weekly, teaches at Harvard and publishes books regularly. She probably also has a blog. 

Careful readers will have noticed that both trips began in Princeton in the 1940s. If you want to read about a road trip in the 1920s that has Princeton on the itinerary see this account by F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.  They left from Connecticut to visit her parents in Alabama and to search for "biscuits and peaches." Unfortunately, her parents had just left to go and visit them in Connecticut. 
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald, intro. by Paul Theroux, Hesperus Press, 2011.

Happy New Year?

     Although I am just getting around to posting for 2019, I can at least assure you that I have been more active when it comes to breaking resolutions. I will now get back into the blogging business by presenting you with a quotation which expresses my feelings about the future much better than I can.
     "Given the present outlook, only the faithful who believe in miracles from heaven, the optimistic who anticipate superwonders from science, the parochial fortunate who think they can continue to exist on islands of affluence in a sea of world poverty, and the naive who anticipate nothing, can look to the future with equanimity."
     I suppose as a welcome to the new year, you were expecting sanguine sentiments so I will leaven that quotation by letting you know that the prediction above was made fifty years ago and we are still here. Perhaps he was too negative and I should be more optimistic. I will try to be so as we move into the new year which is, I hope, a good one for all of us.

Source:
     In 1968 the Foreign Policy Association (U.S.) published a book of predictions with the title: Towards the Year 2018. In one of the essays contained in the book Philip M. Hauser, who was feeling rather Malthusian about the growing global population problem, offered the observation quoted above. I found it in a column discussing the book. See: "Comment: Unforeseen" in 'The Talk of the Town'," by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2019, p.14.

Post Script:
     I am obviously not the smiling gentleman in the photo. He is Guy Lombardo who was born here in London, Ontario.
     If you live in the area and are interested in the book of predictions from 1968, you will find three copies up in the Western Libraries.

Impeachment?

Lock Him Up?

   We gather, from way up here, that many Trump supporters chant loudly, ‘Lock Her Up’, whenever they gather. While it appears that many Americans think Hillary should be in jail, we have heard rumours that the tiny group of Trump opposers think, perhaps the President is the felonious one.  Although he recently attacked Canada, I do think we should stay north of the partisan fray and seek professional advice. Apparently that advice is found in a book that was mentioned in a recent article in the New Yorker.  The book was mentioned, however, the title was not provided. As a public service I will provide it here so you can get the book and determine the degree of his guilt for yourself.

    On the last occasion (well, one of the last) of presidential malfeasance,  “In May, 1974, John Doar, the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, called the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward into his office and asked him to figure out just how badly Presidents had behaved in the past, and how they had answered accusations against them.” In order to assess how bad Nixon was compared to his predecessors, Woodward assembled fourteen historians who “dropped everything for the project.” They completed the project quickly, but Nixon resigned and the work was not published.

     Woodward, however, decided to produce “A whole book devoted exclusively to the misconduct of American presidents and their responses to charges of misconduct”. It was published, but the political attention span being what it is, it was not much noticed. Apparently the copy in the Widener Library at Harvard has only been signed out twice since 1974.

   All of this information is offered by the historian, Jill Lepore, in the article: “Measuring Presidents’ Misdeeds: During Watergate, Historians Helped Catalogue Accusations Made Against Past Presidents; Their Findings May be Useful Again.” New Yorker, Sept. 3, 2018

   Agreeing with her that such a study would be useful, I went looking for it in the Western Libraries here in London. Since the title was not provided, I searched for the book by author (the C. is for Comer, by the way) and was pleased to find it. If you are really interested in presidential misdeeds see: Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct  (A study undertaken for the Impeachment Inquiry Staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary, with an added intro. Includes bibliographical references.)

Post Script
   The article in the print edition is found under “The Talk of the Town” on p.15. Even if you can grab it for free, you should get a subscription since Conde Nast, like most magazine publishers, is in trouble.
    The book is still in the library (in storage). Having provided the public service, I will leave it up to you to carry on from here.