June

I enjoy reading Mitch Berg's Shot in the Dark blog. I followed his bout of underemployment and his more recent success. I can relate, having been underemployed myself for a while. I responded to an Internet ad for a freelance writer with "deep technical experience" and I was selected as one of four writers on a long-term project for a well-known tech company. But there have been delays getting going. Then this morning I got a call from the ad agency where I used to work. They want a part-time copywriter to work on a quasi-technical project that will also last a few months. I can do some of the work at home. Hallelujah! When the other project starts, I can handle both, I figure.

Last Thursday through Saturday, I attended the annual conference of the American Chesterton Society, at the University of St. Thomas. It was wonderful, and I only regret not going to earlier conferences. There were interesting talks on Chesterton and Orwell, Chesteron and Sigrid Undset, Chesterton and E.F. Schumacher, to name a few. But the best thing was the great vibe: people of all ages, from high-school kids taking notes (!) at the talks, up to charming gents in their 80s, and everyone having a good time in a mellow, good-humored way. One custom I particularly enjoyed: beer and wine are free, while bottled water is $1 apiece.

Sunday, I watched the U.S. Open. It was great to see a chubby chain smoker win. The television crew seemed a little unsure of how to handle camera shots showing Angel Cabrera lighting up, but they seemed to decide to go with it, noting at one point that after a good holw, it seemed like a good time for a smoke. They also took note of pictures showing Jack Nicklaus puffing away 45 years earlier when the zopen was held at the same course. What was left unsaid was the sea change in governmental and public atitudes toward smoking that has taken place in the meantime. But they couldn't disparage one of the leaders in the tournament. It was fun to watch.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Blogs and Reading Groups

James Lileks has taken over the buzz.mn blog of the Strib. He overwhelms the other posters by sheer volume, breadth of subject matter, and wit.

The prolific bloggers like Instapundit and Lileks and Captain Ed remind me of the Victorian novelists in their productivity--lots of quality stuff all the time. Trollope, one of my favorite Victorians, wrote every day before going to work at the Post Office, cranking out five hundred words or so each time. He made the mistake of telling us about his output in his autobiography, which did not endear him to the Flaubertian school of critics. Anyway, there is a Victorian work ethic with these bloggers that is an inspiration.

I have been posting again to Dickens and Trollope reading lists on Yahoo. There is one crabby professor from George Mason who forced me off a different Trollope list that she owned because I had the temerity to quote George Will quoting Trollope. That was beyond the pale to her wway of thinking. Other than that individual, I enjoy these reading groups very much. They are mostly composed of not academic specialists, just enthusiasts.

One person I recall who also ran afoul of this crabby professor was a guy named R.J. Keefe. He has a number of blogs, and on one he reviews the book reviews in the New York Times Sunday book section. He does not appear to have or need gainful employment, signing himself R.J. Keefe, gent., of Yorkville, New York. I see that he has a link to the professor, so they must have patched up their relationship.

Posted by Finn MacCool

My Father's Oldsmobile

I noticed a Olds Bravada parked on the street yesterday, the discontinued SUV from the discontinued badge of Olds. It reminded me of the ad campaign from the 90's, "It's not your father's Oldsmobile." One of the TV ads in the campaign featured a grandson of Ernest Hemingway, and the ad somehow linked the Bravada to the novel "Across the River and Into the Trees." I loved that ad. It had a cool-looking guy (actually, he looked a lot like Papa Hemingway). It had an organic connection to offroading; you could take your Bravada across a river and into some woods, although of course almost noone really does. It made me think of the line from the novel, something like "He closed the car door quickly and well," which is a delicously appropriate parody of Hemingway's style, by the master himself. It made me think how much I liked "A Moveable Feast."

I also thought about my father's Oldsmobile. As it happens, my father actually did have an Olds. I think it was a 1955, which we had after the 1952 Buick and before the 1959 Ford wagon. With Dad at the wheel, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lip, the family took the Olds across the country in 1957, an epic journey that lives in our memory. So the ad campaign was right on target as far as we were concerned. But on the other hand, wasn't "Rocket 88" one of the early rock tunes? Wasn't that a love song to a powerful V-8 engine? How come Olds didn't come to have the cachet of, say, the '55 Chevy? Too bourgeois maybe. Too close to Buick to be cool.

Speaking of ads with literary associations, the Nissan Murano ran a series of spots featuring "on road adventures," which I thought were conceptually clever. People don't really take their SUVs off road. They buy them for safety and capacity. So the ads showed people doing cool on-road-oriented activities, e.g., buying a cello in a used-instrument shop, or hunting down a first-edition Vonnegut and having the great good fortune to run into Kurt himself, so he could autograph your new purchase. The tone of those ads was pitch-perfect. All of us boomers who grew up with Vonnegut were hit where we lived, unless we had outgrown our youthful enthusiasm, which I had. But the whole idea of flasttering the reader or viewer was great: we know you are the kind of person who hunts down great cellos and first editions. Yea, right. We know that's BS. but we love it anyway.
Posted by Finn MacCool