"Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last/ Next year we may all be living in the past."

The original lyric to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which I learned about after happening to catch the tail end of "Meet Me in St. Louis" while channel surfing last night. We happened to drop in just as Judy Garland was about to sing the much-loved Christmas tune, which might have been less-loved if Judy hadn't pushed for happier lyrics. The line, revised, is "Let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."



What Judy and Margaret O'Brien are so sad about there is moving to New York. They love St. Louis.

Judy's version, in turn, was insufficiently happy for Frank Sinatra, who got the line "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" changed to "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." Here's Frank. I think "muddle through" would have suited him — that edge of sadness. And "bough" is a silly word.

There's another place in the song with alternate lyrics: "Through the years, we all will be together if the fates allow," was originally "if the Lord allows." Judy sang "the fates," but returning to "the Lord" is something you can always do.

Dogged journalist grills a guy who looks like Bono.

Makes a big deal out of it before it's figured out that they guy was not Bono.

Pavel “Bonodouble” Sfera showed up [at some big music event] in his Bono-impersonation garb. ”I went there as a spoof,” says Sfera....

[Jason Mattera, editor at large at Human Events] "started asking questions about why I had taken money out of Ireland and moved it to Holland for a lower tax base,” recalls Sfera....

Sfera says he was “waiting” for Mattera to figure out that he wasn’t really Bono. That moment didn’t come, and Sfera decided not to help his interlocutor. “I let him go,” says Sfera. “I didn’t think he was being legitimate and fair.”

Ha ha. Did I ever tell you that circa 1960, my father looked like Frank Sinatra? He'd get asked for his autograph, and he gave it. Frank Sinatra. My other story like that is that one time — in the 1970s — I was in a restaurant in NYC with my brother and his friend who just happened to resemble Bruce Springsteen. Some young woman rushed up and began hugging him and raving about how she loved all his songs. We didn't know what the hell was happening. I figured it out later, but the lady must believe, to this day, that she got close to Bruce.

What is wrong with people?! I'm never sure I recognize someone!

Oh, that's not the right way to begin Christmas Eve Day!

That first post. False internet trash. Let me start over with this, which Meade just IM'd me.

ADDED: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is perhaps the last song Christians should embrace. Not only is it bereft of every reference to Christianity short of the word "Christmas," it refers to goddesses from another religion: "through the years, we all will be together if The Fates allow."

The Moirae, Moerae or Moirai (in Greek Μοῖραι – the "apportioners", often called The Fates), in Greek mythology, were the white-robed incarnations of destiny... They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal from birth to death, and it was impossible for anyone to act over his own destiny....

Supposedly, the original lyric actually was "if the Lord allows," and "The Fates" were swapped in to make it secular... which is offensive to anyone who believes in the religion of the ancient Greeks.

If someone broke his boundaries, thus getting more than his ordained part, then he would be punished. By extension moira was one's portion or part in destiny which consisted of good and bad moments as it was predetermined by the Moirae (Fates) and it was impossible for anyone to get more than his ordained part.

Are you trying to get more than your pre-ordained allotment? If so, you will be punished. Perhaps some Americans today really do believe in that ancient dogma... without the goddess imagery to make it feel profound and scarily beautiful.

"Perhaps it was Zeppo’s ardent pursuit with dinner invitations and flowers or the new Thunderbird convertible he bought for me."

"Or was it the time he stood behind a group of strangers in an elevator and pulled faces until I was laughing so hard I had to get off? Not only did Zeppo have the caustic wit of the Marx Brothers but he made fun of himself rather than of those around him. I think that may have been why he was always given the role of romantic lead while his brothers insulted him."

Am I the only person who bought Barbara Sinatra's "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" because I wanted to read what she has to say about about Zeppo Marx?

ADDED: After Chico Marx's funeral:

Crammed into the living room with scores of mourners, I noticed a strange woman staring at me. Zeppo noticed too and asked someone who she was. It was his first wife, Marion, a former Ziegfield girl he’d divorced seven years earlier, five years before he’d married me. A week later, I was playing tennis with Dinah Shore at the Racquet Club when I spotted Marion watching me in the same eerie way. I asked Dinah to introduce us. Marion was a little strange, but I think she just wanted to check me out. I felt sorry for her. She’d raised their adopted sons alone, and Zeppo showed little or no interest in them or her, it seemed. What really bothered me though was that he hadn’t even recognized the woman he’d been married to for twenty-seven years. 

"... Sinatra was a singularly fluorescent vocal phenomenon."

No, of course that's not what the NYT review of that new book about Frank Sinatra says. It says "Sinatra was a singularly incandescent vocal phenomenon."

Do you see my point? Incandescent means something. There is feeling and beauty in the concept that is missing — to the point of comedy — in the word "fluorescent."

Or maybe you are on the extreme end of the spectrum that has feeling and sensitivity to aesthetic details at one end and whatever it is you are on the other — logical, medicinal, remorseless. Maybe you are like those people who want to take away my incandescent light bulbs. What will it take to convince you that your perceptions are not the same as everybody else's?

***

Bonus literary reference:

Look, Mother, do you think I’m crazy about the warehouse? You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - - celotex interior! with -- fluorescent tubes?! Honest to God, I’d rather somebody picked up a crow-bar and battered out my brains -- than go back mornings! But I go! Every time you come in yelling that Rise and Shine! Rise and shine!! I think how lucky dead people are! But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever!

After Harry Connick night (AKA Frank Sinatra night) all of the Idol contestants are at risk.

And with only one female left in the group of 5, I bet the producers are desperately regretting that they tucked Crystal Bowersox in the center of the lineup and the judges all went so negative on her. Simon thought her lovely version of "Summer Wind" was too much like something you'd hear in a jazz club. He said that with a sneer so we'd understand what a bad thing that is.

She was criticized for sleepiness and lack of urgency. They want more of a strenuous demonstration that you really want this thing — which is the grotesque way most of the contestants act. Now, Lee Dewyze has also had a shy style, but somehow they've decided he's the one they want to win — or at least he's the one they want to provide competition for Crystal, who has long seemed like the predestined winner.

But what if, in trying to make Lee into her worthy competitor, they've let her slip through the cracks? If she goes home tonight, there will be 4 left, all male, and all pretty boring. Do you really want to tune in and not to be able to see any females? It will be grim! There was once a season that became all male when there were 3 left, and there were 2 more with a male final 2.  If Crystal goes... ratings disaster.

Anyway... Harry Connick Jr. was the best mentor guest they've ever had on the show. He didn't just listen to the contestants and give them some advice. He did the arrangements and played on stage with them. And he's so charming. Lee is lucky he kinda looks like Harry. It gave him a sexiness boost to be seen with Harry. I was thinking, yeah, he could be like that.

And here's Lee DeWyze singing his Sinatra song: "That's Life." Are you an obsessive enough reader of this blog to remember that I wrote about this song — back in 2008 in a post with photographs of a foggy cemetery?

As I drove into the cemetery, just by chance, on the radio's "Sinatra" channel, Van Morrison was singing "That's Life." I can't find the Van Morrison version, but here's Frank Sinatra. Lyrics (by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon):

I said that's life, and as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks,
Stompin' on a dream
But I don't let it, let it get me down,
'Cause this fine ol' world it keeps spinning around...

That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out
But my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die

What a crazy song! It's all life affirming and then, impetuously, suicidal.

So I was excited that Lee was singing that song. How would he do the crazy big-ball-and-die climax? Answer: He didn't. It was arranged to end with "this fine ol' world it keeps spinning around." Life affirming. Blah. It's "American Idol" and any possible sharp edges must be dulled.

What word in what Frank Sinatra song would Siobvan Magnus have magnificently shrieked?

She got sent home last night, so it's alternate reality speculation. But look at the song list — after the jump — it's real. "American Idol" will do Sinatra next week. (Via Throwing Things, where Adam realizes he can't understand America's taste.)

Which of the 5 that are left will do best with this sort of material, and what do you want to hear each one sing?

Here are the songs — all painfully better than any of the Shania Twain stuff they did this week:

• All or Nothing At All
• All the Way
• Anything Goes
• As Time Goes By
• Blue Moon
• Blue Skies
• Come Dance with Me
• Come Fly With Me
• Come Rain or Come Shine
• Fly Me to The Moon (In Other Words)
• I Get A Kick Out of You
• I Love Paris
• I Only Have Eyes For You
• I’ve Got a Crush On You
• I’ve Got the World on a String
• I’ve Got You Under My Skin
• In The Still of the Night
• In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning
• It Had to Be You
• It Was a Very Good Year
• Just One of Those Things
• Love and Marriage
• Love is Here to Stay
• Love Walked In
• My Funny Valentine
• My Kind of Town
• My Way
• New York, New York (From “On the Town”)
• Night and Day
• One For My Baby
• Pennies From Heaven
• Put Your Dreams Away
• Someone to Watch Over Me
• Somethin’ Stupid
• Strangers in the Night
• Street of Dreams
• Summer Wind
• That’s All
• That’s Life
• The Best is Yet to Come
• The Good Life
• The Lady is a Tramp
• The Way You Look Tonight
• They Can’t Take that Away From Me
• What Is This Thing Called Love
• Witchcraft
• You Do Something To Me
• You Make Me Feel So Young
• You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me
• Young at Heart

I hope no one thinks it's a good idea to do "My Way" or "New York, New York." I love "Someone to Watch Over Me" as sung by Sinatra, but it's a dangerous song for a man to sing without sounding like a pussy — or a little lamb that's lost in the woods. I would advise Aaron not to sing "You Make Me Feel So Young." (He's 17.) "One For My Baby" is also a dangerous song — very heavy on the drinking and driving.

"The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling 'My Way' in karaoke bars..."

"... over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the 'My Way Killings.'"

"Frank Sinatra is downright fascinating — or what the youngsters would probably call 'cool'..."

"... He is beautifully casual with a bottle, bullseye-sharp with a gag and shockingly frank and impertinent in making passes at dames."

From the 1959 NYT review, written by Bosley Crowther, of the movie "Some Came Running," which is playing here in Madison tonight, and on the list of things we might do. Here's the 50s-era disrespect for the stuff I assume is the reason the cinemaphiles want to screen the film today:

[The story is] so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end. And Vincente Minnelli, the director, who has kept it flowing naturally to this point, has to hoke it up with grotesque action and phantasmagoric stuff with colored lights. This isn't consistent with the foregoing excellence of design in color and Cinema-Scope, but it is not surprising in this mixed-up pattern.

Phantasmagoric colored lights and Frank Sinatra making passes at dames? What more do you need?

... Arthur Kennedy does a crisp and trenchant job of opening the shirt-front of a Babbitt and exposing a measly and rather pathetic boob inside.

The youngsters would probably call that a moob.

UPDATE: Movie seen and reasonably well enjoyed. Unlike Bosley Crowther, I loved Shirley MacLaine and thought Arthur Kennedy was awesomely bad. I laughed quite a lot at Kennedy though. He was bad and delivering bad lines that were supposed to be funny, and, by some strange math, that ended up funny.

A big religion-themed dorm for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It will be a private dorm, part of Pres House, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, so we are not dealing with the constitutional problem of tax money flowing into a religious organization. Still, the Freedom From Religion Foundation — which is based here in Madison — expresses concern, through its president Annie Laurie Gaylor:

"It creates walls between students, this idea that they need to be protected from the real world and cocooned together... Is that really why you come to a university, to be with people like yourself?"

Kelsey Wolff, a member of the student ministry at the Pres House, said it wasn't that simple. Wolff, who will be a senior this fall, said she had a hard time in the "party dorm" she was assigned as an underclassman and would have appreciated a faith-based option.

And Wolff said the idea of a separate dorm for students who wish to focus on religious issues didn't mean those students had to segregate themselves from campus life. Students in the new dorm, she said, will take classes, go to ball games, explore State Street and join campus organizations, just like any other student.

"They're still going to get all of that exposure, but at the end of the day they're going to be able to come home," she said. "They'll just have their space where they're away from that."

The university already has "specialized dorms or floors within dorms where like-minded students can live together, including those with a foreign language immersion or a math and science focus." Is there something wrong with these specialized dorms — or with some types of specialized dorms? Is it wrong for students to want a home base that's somewhat cocoony? But not all students who choose themed dorms are trying to replicate their childhood homes. Some seek the challenge of adapting to a new environment. Consider the foreign language dorms. Sometimes it's part of trying to excel in your studies: They want to be near people who are taking the same courses.

But the religious dorm creates the impression that the students are trying to live among less sinful people — or at least among people who will feel guilty about sinning. Is there something wrong with that? But is that what's going on with the new UW dorm?

Pres House board member Tom Schwei said the new dorm would be open to students from any and all faiths, not just Christian ones. Residents won't be required to take part in any of the planned programs -- such as informal discussions about religion, mission trips on academic breaks or weekly church services -- but they should expect to have them offered, Schwei said.

Well, then, what is it all about? The dorm is looks as though it will really nice, and the location is fabulous.  And what are Presbyterians going to do to you, anyway?

"It's not going to be a high pressure environment," he said. "But people shouldn't be too fooled. There is a Presbyterian church sitting right next door. They're going to hear some Presbyterian singing. We are going to continue to grow."

Ha ha. Presbyterian singing.  Look out. I remember it from my youth, when my family went to Presbyterian church. My father was a terrible singer — despite the fact that he looked like Frank Sinatra — and he sang very loud. I thought good singing was loud singing. Imagine how embarrassed I was when I found out that was not the case — and that I too was a bad singer!

Anyway, the Presbyterian days ended when I was about 10 years old, and we moved to a new neighborhood where there was a new church, an Episcopalian church, with a young vicar who befriended everyone including my parents. He was convivial, so we became Episcopalians.

Schwei said the "core" of the new dorm experience would be "personal discovery."

"Being in college is a period of self-exploration and learning and discovery," he said. "We would like to facilitate that for people who are really interested in doing that seriously."

That's awfully nice. I appreciate the super-nice religious sects. And I'm glad the students are getting a nice new option among all the many Madison options.

We're talking about Michael Jackson, and suddenly Bob Wright goes off on Frank Sinatra.

[Link, replacing embedded video.]

So let's watch young Michael Jackson do his Frank Sinatra routine:

"Read Bono's column and, in 20 words or less, explain its theme."

Says Dan Drezner, who thinks the column is insufferable nonsense, and enters his own contest with: "Did you know that I knew Frank Sinatra?"

I'll enter the contest: Art is in the moment.

***

Here is yesterday's post on the Bono column.

Bono is "struck by the one quality [Frank Sinatra's] voice lacks: Sentimentality."

Quaff a pint glass of the velvety blackness of the rock star's prose.

***

Things Frank said to Bono:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill White says:

Sinatra's voice was the most selfish I've heard, which makes his Christmas songs hilarious or unlistenable depending on your mood.

And Original George links to this movie clip of Sinatra singing "Someone to Watch Over Me" — which has that line "I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood," which is surprisingly unmasculine, and in fact, the song was written for a woman:

Wedding photographs of the "Bride and Groom" are being taken, and Kay, still disguised as a maid, tries to convince Jimmy she would be a better wife than fussy Constance. She tells her rag doll that she needs "Someone to Watch Over Me."

Now, I think the song is sentimental when a woman sings it, so how can a man sing it — especially with that "lamb" line? Yet, the song is better sung by Sinatra. It's a mystery. Does it have to do with selfishness?

We're also talking about lambs this morning over on the "Macho Jesus for men" post: "Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs." We're exploring masculinity today, and I propose reconciling the macho with the lamb.

Winter fog... cemetery...

The suddenly warm temperature on top of deep snow raised a lush fog. Last night, driving on a narrow road next to the lake, I said, "This is what death looks like in the movies. Driving into nothing." All the familiar landmarks had become invisible, and I felt lost even when I knew exactly where I was.

The fog remained, but it was easier to see things in the morning. I remembered the photographs I'd taken in the graveyards last December -- here and here -- so I went back to that place to see what the fog was doing to it this year -- and to do some things to it myself with the fisheye lens.

As I drove into the cemetery, just by chance, on the radio's "Sinatra" channel, Van Morrison was singing "That's Life." I can't find the Van Morrison version, but here's Frank Sinatra. Lyrics (by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon):

I said that's life, and as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks,
Stompin' on a dream
But I don't let it, let it get me down,
'Cause this fine ol' world it keeps spinning around...

That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out
But my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die

What a crazy song! It's all life affirming and then, impetuously, suicidal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Original George says:

Keep On the Sunny Side...

William says:

I like the Jewish custom of leaving a pebble by the tombstone -- a pittance of memory by the eternity of death. Even if you could find them, a few bright flowers on a day like today would be overwhelmed by the bleakness of nature. Sad that the Irish custom of taking a whizz on the most elaborate tombstone has fallen into disuse. A few yellow streaks against the mausoleum of some forgotten notable reminds us of the transience of life and the abiding value of malice and envy in human affairs.

Sir Archy -- our favorite ghost! -- says:

I know, Madam, that Entertainments of the Nature of a Turn through a Graveyard, such as you have taken, are apt to raise dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations; but, for my own Part, because of my Sanguine Nature, I do not know what 'tis to be Melancholy; and can, therefore, take a View of Nature in her deep and solemn Scenes, with the same Pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones, especially when contemplating such Pictures as you have made upon this Occasion.

Dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations... I have these sometimes. But I must say that this morning, I wasn't the slightest bit spooked by the thought of all the dead bodies as I stalked about looking for the oldest headstones and the most gnarled trees. The winter cemetery is more evocative of death than the green one, which I have also photographed, but in winter, I work more efficiently. I'm not here for meditation. I'm here for art. I concentrate on that and on not stepping in snowbanks higher than my boots.

George says:

You can get van morrison's version at amazon as an mp3 or on the album 'The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3', on rhapsody, and on itunes...

Ah, yes. Good point. Done, with iTunes. Now, I'm listening to it on infinite repeat as I write this.

So everyone hated Rosie O'Donnell's attempt at bringing back the old-fashioned variety show.

I can tell from all the links about it on Drudge. Is it that people just don't like Rosie anymore, that no one wants variety shows anymore, or is it just the combination of Rosie and variety that's poison? Writing the headline to this post, I typo'd "old-fashioned variety sow," which seemed like a clue from my not-very-nice subconscious.

Only 5 million tuned in at all, so the problem can't have been the actual content of the show:

Segments included Kathy Griffin impersonating Nancy Grace, Alec Baldwin hitting Conan O'Brian with a pie, O'Donnell singing "City Lights" with Liza Minnelli and Jane Krakowski doing a product-placement-themed striptease for White Castle burgers and Crest Whitestrips.

Critics were not kind. The NY Times described it as "hokey comedy with an enemies list." TV Guide called it a "ghastly ego trip." And the LA Times asked, "Rosie, what on earth were you thinking?"

That NYT review -- from Alessandra Stanley -- came after the show aired. So it seems the concept was off-putting enough to people, but if hadn't been, they'd have found the execution deadly. Per Stanley:

In between skits, celebrity cameos and hokey novelty acts, the legendarily thin-skinned Ms. O'Donnell found time to take potshots at some of her favorite targets, including Donald Trump, Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly....

Ms. O'Donnell's self-referential swats at detractors were light, but they clashed with the context, lending a hard, contemporary edge to what was intended to be a corny, heartfelt homage to variety shows of yesteryear, like "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" and "The Carol Burnett Show."...

It's not easy to be the brilliant Ms. Burnett, and you should never, never underestimate what constitutes the greatness that is Cher.

From the L.A. Times:

For weeks now NBC has seduced and tantalized with the promise of a cross between Carol Burnett and “Sonny and Cher.” And this is what we get? Rosie in a glitter top having Baldwin speak into her cleavage and making jokes about her weight? Someone get a hold of Tim Conaway, stat.

Tim Conaway? I guess the L.A. Times doesn't really spend much time reminiscing about the old Carol Burnett show.

Joe Gandelman blogs:

If you’re a student of show biz history, there are books that detail the careers of Burnett, Sullivan, and Martin that chronicle the thought and care that went into the preparation of their shows and what they were trying to do on them....

But what you don’t read as much about are the many variety shows that hideously flopped over the past 50 years and the performers who either hit a dead end and didn’t do as well on weekly TV series as they did in other venues: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. Jerry Lewis and a host of other. Every attempt at a variety show didn’t click: a huge number of shows noisily bombed....

So the variety show format isn’t dead. It could still be revived– with the right performer who isn’t controversial, with careful thought, and with packaging and production values more akin to a Vegas or cruise style variety show than a celebrity vanity production with a bunch of celebrities instead of high-powered talent of its era.

Any ideas as to who could fit that role? Celebrities are so awful these days. Who wants to see how they behave presenting other celebrities?

We'd rather watch another season of "American Idol," with third-rate music and annoying youngsters who only want to become the celebrities who have become too loathsome to watch. At least we get to see "American Idol" contestants judged and insulted for thinking they are much good. Maybe the old variety format could live again with a panel of judges or some sort of on-screen vote tally as we phone in and tell them they're nowhere near as good as they think they are.

The food carts of Madison.

I'm back in New York City, after arriving in the wee small hours of the morning. But I'm still dragging Madison photographs out of the camera. Look, there's a new food cart:



It's for men, apparently. Men who identify with Frank Sinatra, John Belushi, and Bozo, it seems. Fine Italian. (Enlarge.)

A cart that looks like it's made of brick. Why not?

Nevertheless, the old food carts are much more popular, at least for now:





Good luck to Fib's and to everyone trying to get a sandwich or a bowl of stew and to everyone breaking out the flip-flops and shorts.

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm told it must be written: FIB's.

It's Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, the first since his death.

So let's read this 1992 Playboy Interview with him and Joseph Heller, who is also dead. There's some talk of Norman Mailer, and he's dead now too.

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?...

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It's in Something Happened: ''I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.''

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what--five divorces now?...

PLAYBOY: Do either of you read any contemporary writers?

VONNEGUT: Well, it's not like the medical profession where you have to find out the latest treatments. I've been reading Nietzsche.

HELLER: And I've been reading Thomas Mann....

PLAYBOY: What about Norman Mailer's?

VONNEGUT: That's none of your business. Norman's a friend of mine.

HELLER: I intend to read it at one sitting....

PLAYBOY: Why don't you guys write more explicitly about sex and its emotional trappings?

HELLER: More explicitly than what? You keep projecting. You keep attaching emotional reactions to sexual reactions. Earlier you used the words ''love'' and ''sex'' and now you're suggesting emotional reactions to sex. By emotional I'm sure you mean something different from the sensory responses.

PLAYBOY: Well, emotions are different from senses.

HELLER: I don't think there is a necessary correlation between emotional responses and sex.

PLAYBOY: Didn't D. H. Lawrence write about emotions?

HELLER: That was the content of his artistic or literary consciousness. I don't think writers have a choice, by the way. I think we discover a field in which we can be proficient and that's our imagination. My imagination cannot work like Kurt's and I don't think his can work like mine. Neither of us could write like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. I know John Updike has a lot of tales of the sexual encounter. And I suppose there are writers who can do it and will do it and want to do it.

PLAYBOY: Henry Miller?

HELLER: What you get there is the raw activity.... I must say, for me, it doesn't normally make good literature. Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress--or even the alleged responses to it--does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so....

VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.

VONNEGUT: I will give you all the money that's left after the divorce if you can get me a film clip of Frank Sinatra making it with Nancy Reagan. I think that is the funniest damn thing.

PLAYBOY: In the White House?

VONNEGUT: I don't care where. Those two scrawny people....

The Unacceptable Tomato.

Don't put that thing on that thing on the plate!

This was served in New York City. So you New Yorkers, if you find yourself out in Middle America at some roadside diner or suburban strip mall, don't be saying that they'd never serve that in New York City. They serve crap like this in New York City all the time. Even in places like DUMBO where people have plenty of money and show off their good taste.

That tomato is saying Screw you! We don't care and we don't mind making it obvious! You don't have to look any closer. You don't have to detect that the red onion is dried out, that the roasted potato is shriveled, that the poached egg is nearly hard cooked, and that part of the egg looks exactly like a thick piece of cotton string.

I won't mention that the "live jazz" they were playing was an overmiked crooner singing America's Most Loved Pop Songs — "My Girl," "What a Wonderful World," etc. — while a football game played right next to him with the sound on. At one point it sounded like bobby soxers squealing over Frank Sinatra, but the squealing came from cheerleaders at the football game and "Frank" was having a bad day.

"Giuliani and Race."

The NYT provides access to its archive of articles on Giuliani and race, beginning with Todd S. Purdum's "Giuliani Has Taunt for Dinkins: He's a 'Jesse Jackson Democrat'" (from September 26, 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor of NYC).

Responding to his opponent's repeated taunt that he is a ''Ronald Reagan Republican,'' Rudolph W. Giuliani said after an appearance at an Orthodox Jewish private school yesterday that he could just as easily call David N. Dinkins a ''Jesse Jackson Democrat.''

So Dinkins tried to portray Giuliani as too conservative for NYC and Giuliani shot back with a parallel epithet.

Purdum again in 1993: "Rudolph Giuliani and the Color of Politics in New York":

But is Giuliani the right man to save [the city]? Can a hopscotch candidate, a purebred product of the tidy world of St. Joseph's, win and govern a hip-hop city?

Though he is just 49 years old, Giuliani often seems a striking throwback in New York City's anything-goes atmosphere. It's as if his cultural and psychic sensibilites froze about 1961, the year he left the tutelage of the Christian Brothers at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn. This is a man so square that he started an opera club in high school and still refers to his old high-school classmates as "other youngsters"; so corny that he proposed to his current wife at Disney World; so accepting of authority that he says the nuns and brothers who taught him were right to smack him around, because he often deserved it. He says that he simply "missed" the convulsions of the 60's, that the dilemmas of long hair or inhaling "never came up." Pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth hang on his office wall; David Dinkins displays photographs of Nelson Mandela and Jennifer Capriati.

Giuliani can be so awkward in public -- with hunched shoulders and a tremulous voice -- that his best friends fret constantly that New Yorkers will never know Rudy like they know Rudy. That Giuliani is the warm father who can't imagine spanking his 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, the man who lives in the same Upper East Side building as his elderly mother and who on New Year's Eve dances alone with his wife to Frank Sinatra records in their apartment.

Giuliani's Wonder Bread image carries risks in a polyglot city where no single racial or ethnic group predominates, and no topic will be trickier for him than race.

In sum, he was the squarest guy in the world back then, and that was connected to race.

THE TWIST IN GIULIANI'S nostalgic pitch is that he is making it just as New York stands poised for a new political order, made inevitable by demographic shifts in a city where non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority. In a profound sense, this son of the 50's is running against history. Even if he wins, he may be the last white man for years to lead his city.

"I've got to get this city to stop thinking in categories, to stop thinking in terms of black and white and Hispanic, and gay and heterosexual, and get us to start thinking about people," Giuliani told a group of working-class Hispanic parents in Sunset Park this spring, in an almost plaintive declaration he makes often. "I've got to get New York to stop thinking about all this symbolism."

While that may sound disingenuous to some, Giuliani is undoubtedly sincere. Far more than Dinkins, he needs to keep overt references to race out of the campaign. Dinkins's race, which helped elect him in the first place as a nonthreatening healer, remains one of his greatest assets. What Giuliani really means is that he must be free to talk about race and ethnicity on his terms, and to attack the Mayor's record, without being seen as racist.

We see that 15 years ago, the NYT portrayed him as a throwback, but the old article shows its age with the assumption that only the old fashioned think about transcending racial divisions. (Or else Barack Obama is a throwback.)

Here's today's front page article on Giuliani and race, "In a Volatile City, a Stern Line on Race and Politics," by Michael Powers:

Mr. Giuliani, aides say, found a city in the early 1990s where most of the departments affecting the lives of black New Yorkers from schools to welfare to public safety were dysfunctional. Too many citizens expected government to coddle them, and too many black leaders, said Peter Powers, one of Mr. Giuliani’s oldest friends and his first deputy mayor, were afraid to work publicly with a white Republican mayor.

Much more in the article, which details a particular time and place -- NYC in the 1990s.

How do the volatile racial politics of that time relate to the current presidential campaign?

Save for immigration, Mr. Giuliani rarely fields questions about race on the campaign trail. Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have clamored to hear about 9/11 and terror....

Well, it seems that the NYT is keen on bringing race forward in the discussion of the 2008 campaign. I doubt if it helps Giuliani to sort through the painful incidents of the 1990s, though it can't hurt to repeat the amazing statistic that he reduced crime by 60 percent.

Unwinding.

Here's the lobby of my hotel. Does it look familiar? Have you been here?



There's a nice fire over there in the fireplace. Isn't that what you want, a roaring fire on the last day of July?

I drove the Great Basin Highway today. I'd never been in Idaho before, and now I've crossed over into Wyoming.

The West is absorbing me, it seems, as I started lingering on the XM radio channel called America, where I felt utterly charmed by Willie Nelson singing "Don't Fence Me In" followed by Johnny Cash singing (talking) "Ragged Old Flag," a song I'm sure I and everyone I knew mocked when it came out. Further on down the road, I was on the channel Frank's Place, and I laughed at Frank Sinatra singing "Gentle on My Mind" -- because who can picture Sinatra in a sleeping bag or in a train yard or with his "beard a roughning coal pile" or with a "dirty hat pulled low across my face" and his hands cupped around a tin can full of soup? In the thin drizzle, the brilliant talk-singing of Fred Astaire made a lot more sense -- "Isn't This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain?" -- and it moved me to tears.

UPDATE: There's a 3-year-old boy here with his parents, and the guitarist goes and sits with him and engages him with "The People on the Bus." The boy is laughing with delight.