What Are Blogs For If Not to Rant?

It looks like we now get to add the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano to the list of folks who in the pursuit of fame or something like it choose to fudge or embellish, to create a fiction and call it fact. That people do this is not so astonishing, that people continue to be taken seriously after they do it is astonishing -- to me at least.

It has astonished me since about 1982 or so when I bought my first and only John Cougar album and on it found a song in which Mr. Cougar complained on disc about the record company making him change his name. "Making him?" The only time you have to do something you are told, I remember reading once, is when someone is holding a gun to your head. So Mr. Cougar was not forced to change his name; he chose to agree to have his name changed. I suppose so that he could pursue fame and fortune in the music industry. Fine, that's a legitimate choice, but it's a choice he -- a free man and an adult -- made. Nobody made him sign a record contract. And bit by bit of course, that fame and fortune arrived and bit by bit he reclaimed his name, first John Cougar Mellencamp and then John Mellencamp.

How about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, purporting to be non-fiction and in fact full of conjectures, imagined conversations and impossible to ascertain "facts." This is a work of fiction, yet for years it is listed and still sold as non-fiction. The book contributed to the concept in "non-fiction" today of composite characters -- people who don't really exist, but are put down on the written page with characteristics drawn from several different people for the sole purpose of enabling the author to make a point. There is another word for this practice, a more accurate one -- straw men.

And then there is flat out lying. Oprah got famously fooled, but what about Joe Klein, today an apparently respected political pundit. Some years ago when asked if he wrote Primary Colors, originally billed as by Anonymous, he baldly lied and said, "No." A few days later of course he was unveiled as the author -- how can someone who lies, plain and simple, ever be accorded trust again for anything he writes. A mystery to me.

But it goes on. Just a month or so ago, the non-fiction Holocaust memoir -- oops, it's fiction. No worries, we'll just repackage it and publish it anyway.

And now Bolano who, it turns out, was apparently not in Chile when Pinochet overthrew Allende, let alone detained. He may also have invented a drug habit. His supporters say, "oh, part of his artistry was blurring fact and fiction." Fine, but call it for what it is -- fiction and let the reader guess what fact is woven in.

In a world of great sadnesses, it's too bad -- although just a small sadness -- that instead of art having an impact on the inveiglers of the world, those purveyors of the inflated resume, the fake academic credentials, the official misinformation, their miasmic tendencies spread into art.

Channeling Forrest

How to get enough exercise -- when the weather is unusually cold for January, often with a harsh wind off the Hudson, when I'm on jury duty, when I've got a lifelong aversion to treadmills. And then the solution hit yesterday. Run everywhere. Get the exercise blocks at a time to add up at the end of the day instead of trying to wedge in a chunk of time to do it.

And so that is what I have done for the last two days. Yesterday from the apartment to the subway, from the Chambers Street station to the courthouse and back at the end of the day, to and from the sandwich shop during court lunch recess, and then -- getting into it -- taking the express as far as 96th at the end of the court day and running the rest of the way home. Today again to the subway station, from 79th to the museum, to the post office after the info desk shift, from the museum to Chess and Checkers in the Park to pick up the survey materials, from C and C to the 66th Street station.

In any other place it might be a sight, a backpacker in street clothes running the sidewalks, in NYC, hey, it's New York. It will probably end with today because tomorrow we are due for 2-5 inches of snow, sure treachery, not to mention too wet for tennis shoes. But here's what I found out channeling Forrest -- pretty quickly it feels like anytime you step out of the apartment you should be running, not walking.

What to Do on a Bitterly Cold January Saturday in NYC

1) Get up just before 8, snuggle Sam into his sweater and take him out for his morning walk as the temp reads 6 degrees.

2) Walk next door to the bakery and buy a croissant, warm it up at home.

3) Head to the New York Historical Society to catch "Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings" from the Society's collection. Two depict the Great Fire of 1835, when temperatures of -17 rendered water hoses useless, contributing to the devastation. New York got paid firefighters the next year. Nearby, in the large Hudson River School Hall, one wall space was nearly bare, occupied only by a small announcement that this painting, View of Yosemite Valley from the School by Thomas Hill, will be behind newly inaugurated President Obama when he sits down for the traditional lunch with Congress tomorrow.



The NYHS and, across Central Park and further uptown, the Museum of the City of New York are our hometown museums, filled with exhibits and stories of the city's past, complementing the world collections of the AMNH, the Met, MoMA among others.

4) Head back out into the weather, now up to 15 degrees or so, and to La Vela, an unassuming neighborhood Italian place on Amsterdam for a late lunch, including a delicious appetizer I don't remember seeing before, polenta and sausage in a light gorgonzola sauce.

5) Get a history lesson of a sorts from Tom Cruise, looking ludicrous in an eye patch and carrying around a glass eye to be popped in whenever he's in proximity to Hitler, in Valkyrie. Mostly accurate in its depiction of the failed assassination attempt by a clutch of German officers, not convinced that the accompanying storyline of a nearly successful follow-on action to seize control of Berlin and therefore overthrow the Reich is so accurate. A bit like when the 4th period history teacher announces a film instead of a class, a diversion and a pretty good teaching tool.

6) Take the 1 line and then, at 14th Street, wait forever for the notorious F line to go to Bowery Ballroom for the Glasgow band Frightened Rabbit. The best rock concert I've seen in months, and -- like the National -- a band still peaking, but already confident enough of its power that it can bury perhaps its best-known song, Heads Roll Off, deep in the middle of a hard-working and raucous set. The song begins with the arresting couplet, "Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name/How come one man got so much fame." (Jesus was also on the mind of the opening act, but much more banally -- Jesus and the Devil are one and the same, duh, there's an original thought.) In their songs, romance doesn't go very well for -- as Bianca calls them -- Scared Bunny, but judging by the clutching and kissing couples to the music, I'm guessing a couple new residents for the planet got their start under warm blankets later that night.

7) Come home, complete February bookings for Hawaii vacation.

Lost

Season five begins next Wednesday. Time for me yet again to paraphrase Peter O'Toole in Beckett, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome doctor?" Couldn't Black Smokey just rip out of the jungle once and carry Jack away forever? Am I the only one who finds the beef-and-dairy cake triangle endlessly tedious? At least Sawyer is amusing, but, aside from their perfect cheekbones, is there anything on the planet less interesting than Jack and Kate? Give me Locke, give me Sayid, give me Sun and Jin, give me Desmond and Penny, give me Widmore, anything but JandK over and over again. But most of all give me Ben, who -- we discover from a Lost website sneak peek -- packs a fine suitcase among his many other talents.

Yelling at the Giants...

is something I've been doing for most of my life. (Not at the above kind) Generally, it's been the baseball Giants. In fact, my wife would probably think their official name is the San Francisco Stupid Giants. At least I've never sunk to the depths of a Giants fan I read about while in Paris in the early 70s -- so angered at some typical idiocy of the G'men against Houston, he reached for his shotgun and blasted out the TV set. But this past Sunday -- and most deservedly -- the yelling was directed at the erstwhile Super Bowl champions. I wrote on and off while yelling and, reading afterwards, it seemed like a pretty good account of a New York week. Here's a condensed version:

Parked in front of the set, with a gin con gin -- drink dating back to the Confiteria Tuninetti after a day in the campo -- in hand, Westie in lap, licking happily, and the first play I see the Giants have two penalties, the second play Eli Manning throws an interception, on the third play the Giants get flagged for pass interference, and on the fifth play the Eagles score a touchdown, and right there the inevitable pattern of the afternoon is set that quickly. Otherwise, it has been a pretty good week. Monday night we went to the museum to hear from volunteers who had gone on dinosaur dig expeditions to very remote locations in the US -- North Dakota in one case, Utah in the second. Would we want to do it? Probably. Utah would be the place, many more fossils. One thing that struck me was how big this country is. They were serious hours from any even medium sized population centers, hundreds of miles from an airport with scheduled service. They spoke about their awe at being the first to find a specimen, an animal that had lived on earth and buried unseen for all the millions of years since its death until they uncovered the fossilized bone. Tuesday we went to see La Boheme at the Met -- we got wet, as we always seem to do this season at the Met and in fact (Manning continues to throw poorly and Carney, who had not missed a FG all year except for two blocks until he missed a very makeable one in Minnesota, misses an even more makeable one here. 7-5 Eagles.) this storm went on heavily for the next 24 hours. La Boheme may not be in the top tier of my favorites, but it was very good. The same Zefferelli production has been mounted since 1981. It's dated and overly precious to some, but new to us, only the third production the Met has had of La Boheme in its history and in only six of more than a hundred seasons has La Boheme not been performed at the Met. The third act was my favorite, outside Paris, outside an inn in winter, as Mimi and Rodolfo pledge to stay together until spring and on the other side of the stage Marcello and Musetta are fighting and separating over fickleness. One thing Puccini gets exactly right, just like Shakespeare did in R&J, is the goofiness and posturing, a constant no matter what the century, of young men who are in fact not quite men, but no longer boys. (Abetted by yet another stupid penalty and the Giants's inability to put any pressure at all on McNabb, the Eagles march straight down the field with less than 90 seconds and only one timeout and kick a field goal for a 10-8 lead.) Yesterday, a snowy day from about noon on, I did both the Views and Cross Park tours and now feel good about them both, ready to lead my first tour on Tuesday.