Track & field day for the 2nd- and 3rd-graders. I was sitting among the 3rd-graders as the gym teacher described one of the last events, the “distance run.” She explained the boundaries of the course, pointing out the landmarks around the edge of the big field that they’d have to run around,. When it was becoming clear just how far they had to go, the slightly chubby boy sitting behind me whispered to the kid next to him, “Wanna just walk it with me?” His comparatively lithe friend, out of either kindliness or a lack of ambition, immediately agreed to this proposal. They executed it, too.
Eric the Blue
Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews
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Nerdy Minnesotan
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In Civil War times, before we commemorated Memorial Day, Walt Whitman, author of the self-published book of poems now known as Leaves of Grass, traveled to northern Virginia upon hearing that his brother George, a soldier in the Union army, had been wounded and was convalescing there. He found George, whose wounds were slight, but he was so affected by what he saw in the makeshift soldiers’ hospitals around D.C. that he pulled up stakes, moved to the District, and took a part-time job in the federal bureaucracy in order to bankroll his primary activity: working in the hospitals as a volunteer nurse practitioner. He talked to the sick and dying men, took down their dictated letters and made sure they were mailed, brought them gifts, often tobacco or fruit, read to them, changed their dressings, and generally made himself useful. Anonymous deceased soldiers would never know that their last comforter is now regarded as one of America’s greatest poets. In old age, after he’d suffered a stroke, Whitman wrote the prose memoir called Specimen Days in which he recalls his career as an unpaid nurse. He sometimes pastes in journal entries he’d made at the time, and reading it is often, in an understated sort of way, quite a lacerating experience:
May, ’63. As I write this, the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker’s command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals. The men in charge told me the bad cases were yet to come. If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to see the scene of the wounded arriving here at the landing at the foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it The few torches light up the spectacle. All around–on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places–the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c, with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also–only a few hard-work’d transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call’d to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day.
During his life, Whitman continually revised and enlarged Leaves of Grass. His Civil War poems are in the relatively late section called “Drum Taps” and, according to an editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “are, with the pictures of Winslow Homer and the photographs of Matthew Brady, among the most precious records of the American Civil War.” Many are kind of long, and I’m too lazy to transcribe another long quotation, but here’s one of the drum taps, just four lines long, entitled “Look Down Fair Moon”:
Look down fair Moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. -
Sitting at home with a bad cold and Swag, one of Elmore Leonard’s early crime novels. Favorite parts are those in which the lucrative trade of armed robbery brings the low-level criminal team into contact with similarly affluent young men and women who work in the legitimate part of the economy. After just a few small jobs the robbers move from a motel to an apartment complex described by Leonard as follows:
The third place they looked at was the Villa Monterey, out in Troy [a suburb of Detroit; Leonard’s fans sometimes refer to him as “the Dickens of Detroit”]: a cream-colored stucco building with dark wood trim, a dark wood railing along the second-floor walk, a Spanish tile roof, and a balcony with each apartment overlooking the backyard where shrubbery and a stockade-fence enclosed the patio and swimming pool. There was also an ice machine back there, a good sign.
Stick said he thought it looked like a motel. Frank said no, it was southern California. He told the manager, the lady who showed them the apartment, okay, gave her the deposit and three months in advance to get out of signing a lease, and that was it. They got two bedrooms, bath, bar in the living room with bamboo stools, orange-and-yellow draperies, off-white shag carpeting, off-white walls with chrome-framed graphics, chrome goose neck lamps, chrome-and-canvas chairs, an off-white Naugahyde sectional sofa, and three dying plants for four and a half a month, furnished. Stick didn’t tell Frank but he thought the place looked like a beauty parlor.
It hardly needs stating that Stick’s judgment, a cross between a motel and a beauty parlor, is the author’s. There are some “career ladies” among the residents who are cataloged upon being discovered by the new residents. For example:
There was a dental hygienist by the name of Donna who had a boyfriend but wasn’t going to marry him until he made as much money as she did. She told them how much a dentist with a good practice could make and referred to net and gross a lot. Donna was way down at the bottom of Frank’s list of things to do.
There is a kind of worldly weariness to the catalog:
There was a redheaded girl, frizzy red hair and bright brown eyes, who wore beads and seven rings with her bikini. Arlene. She was a little wacky and laughed at almost everything they said, whether it was supposed to be funny or not. Somebody was paying Arlene’s rent, a guy in a silver Mark IV who came twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday at six, and was usually out by 10:30. Arlene said he was a good friend.
Later, the criminals become acquainted with some of the male renters:
There was a junior executive group at the Villa, a few guys with friends who were always coming over. Sometimes in the evening, after they’d changed from their business outfits to Levis and Adidas, they’d sit on the patio and drink beer. If Stick was out on the balcony he’d listen to them, see if he could learn anything.
Usually it was about how stoned one of them got the night before. Or the best source of grass in Ann Arbor. Or why this one guy had switched from a Wilson Jack Kramer to a Bancroft Competition. Or how a friend of one of them had brought back eight cases of Coors from Vail. Then he wouldn’t hear anything for a minute or so–one of them talking low–then loud laughter. The laughter would get louder as they went through the six packs, and the junior executives would say shit a lot more. That was about all Stick learned.
So . . . that was about all an armed robber could learn from the junior executive group. Swag was published in 1976–seems about right considering the decor at the Villa Monterey. Leonard (and Stick) were ahead of their time in being unimpressed. The landscape is that of a moral desert, no one to cheer for, unless you count Stick, an armed robber and regretful killer who sometimes thinks of his young daughter back in Florida, where he used to work for a cement company. Maybe my favorite Leonard book, The Switch, came two years later and features a genuine hero, the wife of a wealthy a-hole. She’s kidnapped, which is fine with the a-hole, as he’s having an affair and considering what to do about her: problem solved, temporarily. Another sign of his a-holery is that he’s a skilled golfer, the men’s champion of his exclusive country club. The world according to Elmore Leonard, where the women are often venal and the men often venal and stupid. I said The Switch might be my favorite: he wrote a novel a year for around 35 years and the dozen* or so with which I’m familiar are almost uniformly terrific.
*In no particular order: 52 Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch, Stick, Out of Sight, Maximum Bob, Glitz, Freaky Deaky,
Out of Sight,City Primeval, Get Shorty, Mr. Majestyk, Rum Punch, and LaBrava–I guess that makesfifteenfourteen. -
I tracked down today an interview I heard on NPR while driving to work one day last week. The NPR host, Michel Martin, was interviewing another Michel, Goodwin of the Georgetown Law faculty, on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in a case about mifepristone, the abortifacient that women living in states that have banned abortion can attain through the mail after a telemedicine appointment. Here’s how the interview began:
Martin: Why do you think the Supreme Court kicked this particular can down the road by keeping telemedicine access to mifepristone while the case plays out?
Goodwin: Well, there are strong interests here, including amongst the manufacturers, that this is a product that is kept in the marketplace. There are some that say this is because there are political interests that have been articulated about the midterm and real concern that if there were a different kind of ruling, it might intensify the Democrats’ ability to win midterm elections. The Supreme Court’s not a political arm of government, but many are saying that it’s acting very much like a political arm of government.
Martin: Is that a cynical take, or do you think that there’s merit to it?
Goodwin: That is a very good question . . . .
It was the assumption that there is truth, and then there is cynicism, that cracked me up along I-94 in north Minneapolis and made me remember the interview now. Obviously the Supreme Court is “acting very much like a political arm of government.” It’s not entirely the Court’s fault. Sometimes in a democracy decisions have to be made. The Constitution does not allow the president to act unilaterally and the Congress, with its two houses, the filibuster rule in the Senate, close margins, and a rogue’s gallery of preening nitwits, has excused itself from the task. That leaves the Supreme Court to act as a kind of legislature of last resort, and they keep up the pretense by pretending that they’re interpreting the Constitution.
Should a woman be permitted to have an abortion? Congress can’t decide, or won’t say, so the Supreme Court steps into the breach. The justices declare abortion to be a constitutional right, and then some years later different justices say no, it is not, and states can if they wish ban it. Senators and US representatives merely get interviewed about this and other matters on cable news shows.
The ideological composition of the Supreme Court is thus one of the gravest concerns of our federal government. There are 435 gesticulating representatives, a hundred talkative senators, and just nine justices who call the shots. Luckily for Republicans, the composition of the Court is largely a matter of actuarial happenstance and the machinations of octogenarians like Mitch McConnell. It’s not as if the the people have voted to be ruled by the Supreme Court, let alone by the current one. Clarence Thomas is the longest serving current justice. He was appointed by H.W. Bush 35 years ago, in 1991. The presidential elections that have occurred over the period that the current Court came into power therefore go back to 1988. There have been a total of ten, the Democrats and the Republicans have each won five, and, in two of the five Republican victories, more Americans voted for the Democratic candidate. These circumstances have yielded a 6-3 Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, which would be bad enough, but it comes with a built-in supermajority in the de facto legislature as well.
Other factors that I’ve alluded to contribute to the charade. In his first term, Trump appointed three of the nine current justices. He had lost the national vote by 46 to 48 percent. The confirmation of judges is one of the few Senate functions to which the filibuster rule does not apply–a simple majority will suffice. Currently, there are 53 Republican senators, and they represent between 46 and 47 percent of Americans. The rest, about 53.5 percent, are represented by senators who caucus with the Democrats. This is possible because every state, no matter how large or small its population, has two senators. In the Senate, then, the “minority party” represents the majority of Americans. The same situation prevailed during Trump’s first term. So, with regard to Supreme Court appointments, a president who had lost the national vote nominated someone who was then narrowly confirmed by a Senate “majority” party that represented a minority of Americans. This happened three times. These justices will rule until they die, if they want. In fact their age and medical record are considerations when the qualifications of potential nominees are under review. I mentioned that Clarence Thomas has been at it for 35 years.
People seem shy about dropping the word “cynical” but really, when the topic is the Supreme Court, our federal government in general, and the status of what is often called in reverential tones “our democracy,” we need a word quite a lot less pale than that.
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My daughters both sing in the school choir, and one night last week was the last concert of the year. It was billed a “pop concert,” as opposed to earlier ones that tend to be on seasonal themes, such as Christmas or, this year, a concert heavy on slightly veiled protest songs aimed at Operation Metro Surge. I missed “Hey Jude” on account of having to leave early to tend to a meat loaf baking in the oven, but I did hear “Wagon Wheel.” While eating the meat loaf I told the kids how much I’d enjoyed it and that Buzza–their designation for the choir director, perhaps because he seems to like “Dr. Buzza”–might have been pushing the envelope, considering the lyric:
Caught a trucker out of Philly
Had a nice long toke.My older girl laughed and said Buzza had encouraged them to sing:
Caught a trucker out of Philly
Told a nice long joke.Of course this had the effect of improving the singers’ enunciation:
Caught a trucker out of Philly
HAD A NICE LONG TOKE.Well, I doubt very many audience members were put off. I might be one of the few parents who’s never been in one of the cannabis shops that are popping up all over the place here in the People’s Republic of South Minneapolis. I’ve noticed that you can buy THC drinks at a neighborhood bar that I sometimes patronize–and typically have two Miller Lites before walking home. I know from skimpy experience that, like the character in a Woody Allen movie, pot does not “make me mellow”: it makes me ripen and rot. Here is a rousing live version of “Wagon Wheel” performed some number of years ago by Old Crow Medicine Show:
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The above is taken from the New York Times’s “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election” and shows the outcome, at the precinct level, of the last presidential race in different neighborhoods of Memphis, Tennessee. The white strip with the dashed line is the Mississippi River, which is the border between Tennessee and Arkansas. Downtown Memphis is built up along the east bank of the river. Since it’s hard to make out the legend at the lower right relating to “Margin, in pct. pts.,” I’ll just observe that the darker the blue, the wider Kamala Harris’s margin, and it was pretty wide in the lightest blue parts of the map: for example, she won the area marked Chickasaw Gardens by 69 to 30 percent. To get the darkest shade, by far the biggest area on the map, Harris had to win by at least 75 percentage points: 87 to 13 percent, in other words, would get the second darkest hue.
I got interested in the political landscape of Memphis when, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Callais case, Tennessee’s state legislature immediately adopted new district boundaries that placed different parts of Memphis within three different congressional districts. The stated purpose was to eliminate the only Tennessee district represented by a Democrat. It’s pretty easy to see why Memphis would have a Democratic representative. The area is so overwhelmingly Democratic that cracking it in two would run the risk of creating two districts in which a Democrat could win. To get all of Memphis into safely Republican districts required cracking it in three.
The question is whether this is legal. If partisan gerrymandering was illegal, then of course congressional maps from sea to shining sea would have to be redrawn. The reason states such as Tennessee had not previously done what they’re now doing relates to the Voting Rights Act, which had been held to prohibit practices that dilute the power of minority voters, especially in southern states with a history of racial discrimination in ballot access. In Memphis, for instance, more than 60 percent of the population is African American, and in Tennessee, in general, whites vote Republican and blacks vote Democratic. So “partisan gerrymandering” that favors Republicans has the practical effect of diluting the political power of African Americans. Actually, “diluting” is too pale a verb. I mean, look at the above map. Once there’s been a congressional election under the new gerrymandered map, who will represent in Washington the views of the people of Memphis, a majority-minority city with a population nearly equal to that of a typical congressional district? No one. Their voice will have been squelched.
The Supreme Court in its Callais decision said no problem, go ahead, and, with the Voting Rights Act neutered, it took Tennessee’s state legislature a New York minute to adopt new maps carving up the city of Memphis. The decision was 6-3, naturally. The court’s conservative majority is like a pulling guard for the Republican party’s end runs. The Chief Justice hates it when people criticize the justices for being political actors. He probably wouldn’t be so sensitive if it weren’t true.
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When I got home from school yesterday I compiled a to-do list for the weekend. Then this morning I got up at 6 and drove my daughters across town to their sportzing tournament in Blaine. Then I watched them play three games. Then we drove home, arriving circa 3 p.m. Then I played on my phone for around 90 minutes. I say “around” because it could have been two hours. Then I made supper for myself and the daughter who wasn’t attending the high school prom. When the dishes were clean, I revisited my to-do list. To be precise, I rewrote it, interspersing some tasks that I had completed earlier in the week, which I immediately checked off as done. I am now on my second glass of cheap red wine and hoping that it stops raining in Cleveland so that I can spend the rest of the night watching the Twins on tv.
Reader, you don’t need a life coach. Just an Internet connection will do. Book mark “Eric the Blue” for a stream of ingenious life hacks. I think it’s important to rewrite the list as it’s a little fakey if the only crossed off items are the bottom ones.
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Before tonight’s Game 2 against the Spurs, I might as well put the hex on the Twolves’ 38-year-old point guard Mike Conley, who, having earned favorable notices for his performance in the decisive Game 6 win over Denver, backed it up in the opening road win against the favored Spurs: in 24 minutes, he scored 12 points (on just 8 shot attempts), got 2 rebounds, passed for 6 assists, did not once turn the ball over, and played “pretty good” defense. With Edwards and Ayo both available tonight, his role will shrink, and the chances I’ll look like a dolt for praising him aren’t too high.
But why should I fear looking like a dolt? Chris Finch only put T. J. Shannon in the rotation when injuries required it. All winter my teen-aged daughters have been grumbling, “Why is T. J. buried on the bench?” Now I have to listen to the Tolja-sos. Thanks, Finchie.
I have so far failed at making these girls baseball fans, which is a shame, because in the summer there’s a game almost every day. It gives you something to do while awaiting senescence. (Come to think of it, it gives you something to do after that occurs, too.) But of course my kids are not worrying about what to do with themselves when their energies fail. If they were preparing themselves by being baseball fans, maybe they’d realize that Byron Buxton must be the most unappreciated sports star ever to wear a Minnesota uniform. Man, has he been on a tear: 11 homers in the Twins’ last 19 games. I saw today that his lifetime slugging percentage of .490 is, among Twins, behind only Harmon Killebrew, which means it’s not behind Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, Kirby Puckett, Justin Morneau, et. al. I would rate Byron a better fielder than Harmon (and everyone else who’s ever played for the Twins). He’s also above average as a baserunner. “But he’s always hurt!” No one ever says that about Mickey Mantle.
Hard to make people happy. There are 30 teams in the NBA and for two seasons in a row the Twolves have been among the last four standing. Three more wins against the Spurs and they will have done it again. When people complain about them, it reminds me of how my mom would advise: “Think about other people once in awhile, maybe your own problems won’t seem so bad.” Yeah, right mom, think about fans of the Utah Jazz. Plus, they have to put up with the Mormons, or be one themselves, which would be unpleasant if you’d somehow acquired a taste for either coffee or liquor.
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My high school senior with her besties on the day they were encouraged to wear to school a sweatshirt from the college they’ll be going to next fall. Here was our conversation around a week ago, when she told me what she’d decided to do:
Me: Who will you be pulling for when we play for the ax?
Her: I can’t cheer against my own school.
Me: I hope you love your mom because we’re done.
Her: [Starts humming loudly the opening bars to “On Wisconsin.”]
Well, it’s a swing state, so her first presidential ballot will weigh more than her dad’s. Thanks, electoral college, for the piss-poor consolation.
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If you also are a casual student of the most prevalent fauna easily observed in different Twin Cities neighborhoods, maybe you’ll get as big a kick out of this as I did. The above photo of a court side trio was taken at last night’s Timberwolves game in Target Center. Someone posted it on social media with a terse comment:
Mac-Groveland/Frogtown/Highland Park
To which a user whose researches are conducted just to the west replied:
Lynnhurst/Whittier/North Loop
As for the game itself, I’d like to bestow a little praise on maybe last night’s least praised Timberwolf (of those who played). The team parted ways with Mike Conley earlier this season, then reacquired him for an NBA pittance (he’s reportedly being paid just over $1.1 million). I assume the expectation was that Conley would fill a seat on the bench and dispense sage advice to teammates young enough to compete, thereby giving color commentators a pleasant story line. But last night, with the team’s three best guards all sidelined with injuries, Conley found himself in the starting line-up for what realistically was a win-or-die-in-Denver home game against the Nuggets. The T-wolves closed out the series with a win, and Conley played a strong, or at least steady, game: 27 minutes, 7 points, 6 rebounds [sic], 3 assists, just a single turnover, and if Jamal Murray, who made 4-of-17 field goal attempts in the game, was relishing the prospect of an occasional break from having Jaden McDaniels inside his jersey, the box score suggests he was disappointed by Conley’s defense. The fourth oldest player in the NBA also has some cameos in the TJ Shannon highlight reel:
The first sequence in this video explains which team won and why. Conley knocks the ball loose, Shannon beats everyone to it and charges up the court with the dribble. At the top of the circle, Denver’s Christian Braun (#0) is in position to try and stop the dribbler, but instead he steps to the side like a bullfighter and Shannon flushes it.
Tell me again what Jaden said about the Nugget players? Maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
All three probably live in Shakopee. Still funny.
UPDATE: I see that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse has posted the same pic on his Bluesky account with the comment:
Lawyers/Guns/Money
Since so far as I know Kruse has no connection to Minnesota, and also because having zoomed in on “Mr Frogtown” I see that he’s wearing a Knicks cap, I think this picture was actually taken at MSG, not Target Center, and that people from everywhere are in a 3-word caption contest that frequently has local flavor. Still funny, even if I have to give up on them being from Shakopee.
Eric the Blue 