A page-ninety test

The first two times I looked for Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, the book was already sold out. But yesterday, there it was. I opened to page ninety:

That was actually the kind of image that Donald Trump had worked to project throughout most of his career. His is a 1950s businessman sort of ideal. He aspires to look like his father — or, anyway, not to displease his father. Except when he’s in golf wear, it is hard to imagine him out of a suit and tie, because he almost never is. Personal dignity — that is, apparent uprightness and respectability—is one of his fixations. He is uncomfortable when the men around him are not wearing suit and ties. Formality and convention — before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump” — are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth, arrival.

Slack writing, even at 30% off. “That was . . . that,” “actually,” “the kind of image,” “throughout most,” “his is,” “sort of ideal,” “anyway,” “out of a suit and tie.” The shifts in tense make for slight confusion: “Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was.” And notice how dashes beget dashes, in three of nine sentences. I’ll leave untouched Wolff’s assertions that “personal dignity” is a Trump fixation and that formality and convention are “a central part of his identity.” But I’ll offer what I think is an improved version of the paragraph:

That is the image Donald Trump has worked to project through most of his career: a version of his father, a 1950s businessman. Away from the golf course, Trump almost always wears a suit and tie, and he grows uncomfortable when men around him are more casually dressed. Mr. Trump — and before he became president, almost everyone but the rich and famous called him “Mr. Trump” — is fixated on personal dignity, and casualness is the enemy of his pretension that the Trump brand stands for power, wealth, arrival.

Original: 137 words. Revised: 88 words. And now I’m realizing that my revised paragraph sounds like capable prose from, say, a Newsweek or Time profile. Which tells me that Fire and Fury is a magazine article inflated to the size of a book. Do I need to buy it? No. Do I even want to read it? I’ll invoke Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

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Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test, an explanation
My Salinger Year : Nature and music : A history of handwriting : A book about happiness : The Slow Professor : Shady Characters (Other page-ninety tests)

[Someday editors and publishers might realize that they should look carefully at the first full paragraph on page ninety.]

Ready for the Snow

[George Lucas, Ready for the Snow (2016). Click for a larger view.]

This oil painting has circulated online without attribution. But the painter isn’t “the Internet”: it’s George Lucas, of Gaithersburg, Maryland. And the painting’s title isn’t Snow Predicted. Here’s the story of Ready for the Snow.

Yes, it’s snowing in downstate Illinois.

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Price points

Un café. Un café, por favor. Buenos días, un café por favor.

Mort Walker (1923–2018)

Mort Walker, comic-strip artist and writer, creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, has died at the age of ninety-four. A Washington Post obituary notes that Walker drew Beetle Bailey for sixty-eight years, “longer than any other U.S. artist in the history of the medium.”

From the Saturday Stumper

A clever clue, from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 14-Down, six letters: “Addressed a growing concern.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is not especially stumping. Too much crosswordese, for one thing: ENE, ETA, MIG, PSA, TET. And sports-themed clues so transparent that even I could fill in the answers without crosses: “Early-fall sports news topic” (eleven letters), “NBA slam-dunking great” (six). But still, says I, finishing a Saturday Stumper is cause for minor self-congratulation.

A Fred Rogers documentary

Coming in June 2018: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a documentary about Fred Rogers.

Mister Rogers is a hero to our household. I wish my granddaughter were growing up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood still airing on PBS.

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“La belle nature”

Walking in the Parc Monceau:


Guy de Maupassant, Like Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).

Yes, an artificial and charming place. Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, the park’s designer:

The true art is to know how to keep the visitors there, through a variety of objects, otherwise they will go to the real countryside to find what should be found in this garden; the image of liberty.

The marble boy must be a reproduction of Boy with Thorn.

Elaine and I picked up two copies of this novel last summer. It’s yet another work we’d probably never have discovered without New York Review Books. More passages soon.

Literally eighty-sixed

“This is the most overused, annoying word in the English language and we will not tolerate it. Stop Kardashianism now!” A New York bar bans customers who say literally.

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Dream drawing

Saul Steinberg, in a letter to Hedda Sterne, perhaps April 1944. Steinberg was serving in the United States Navy. He and Sterne would marry later that year. Steinberg says that all he wants is to stay with Sterne “and make drawings”:

We’ll make a long table for drawing, about 12 ft long, with pen & ink section, tempera and watercolor section. Then we’ll buy from some café or restaurant a small table with marble to make drawings on thin paper over the marble surface, the pencil is really sliding, the ideal surface for pencil drawings.

And from another letter, Steinberg to Sterne, perhaps September 1944:

My hand is itching for drawings. I have a thirst for sitting on a tall chair at a drawing table covered with white-yellow paper as a background or cover, and then a book of white smooth paper, a bottle of Indian ink, colored ink, aniline, sharp pencils, small pens, brushes and quiet afternoon, and Hedda painting somewhere in the room.

Both letters are quoted in Deirdre Bair’s Saul Steinberg: A Biography (New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2012).

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Five desks (five tables)
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Out of the past

Anent danger on stairs, from my first third-grade report card: “Must try to walk up & down stairs more carefully to avoid accidents to self and others.”

Believe me, I wasn’t dancing. As I recall, the problem was that I talked to other kids while on the stairs. From my second third-grade report card: “Has made an effort to follow Rules of Safety.”