Today’s Saturday Stumper

In the word of 53-A, five letters, “Peanuts plaint”: ______! Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff, or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing under the pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. The puzzle is fairly easy, but I hit a snag in the upper left corner: 17-A, six letters, “Physician’s patron.” All I could think of was HERMES, which is not a good answer, but ASCLEPIUS didn’t fit. So I searched for “Physician’s patron,” and magically, that corner fell into place, becoming as straightforward as I think it was meant to be.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Whom Alda got his M*A*S*H nickname from.” Lifelong learning.

12-D, eight letters, “Monitored?” Clever.

16-A, eight letters, “Successor to LAN technologies.” What once sounded like the future now sounds like science-fiction of the past.

22-A, three letters, “Not following.” Befitting a Stumper.

24-D, five letters, “Changes to one’s story.” Not LIES.

25-D, four letters, “Viva Rock Vegas character.” An idiosyncratically specific way to clue this name.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Nothing I can do.” Just a nice bit of colloquial speech.

36-D, eight letters, “It achieved statehood in 1901.” Statehood, eh? NEWMEXI? — oops, no.

48-A, six letters, “811, to librarians.” Or to readers who know the stacks.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-D, six letters, “Cat without a coat.” More lifelong learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Unsealed

The indictment is here for the reading. Just one passage:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.

The document is worth reading in its entirety. It makes clear that Trump knew exactly what he was doing, knew that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it, and went to great lengths to keep what he had in his possession in his possession. Notice, for instance, in section 66, the discussion of a Redweld folder and a “plucking motion.” No words, no explicit instruction, just a motion.

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Notice too, in a snarky spirit, 58.c., which reproduces a text from a female member of the Trump family to Walt Nauta:

I saw you put boxes to Potus room. Just FYI and I will tell him as well:

Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.

“I saw you put boxes to Potus room”: that’s gotta be Melania Trump, sounding a bit like Natasha Fatale.

It’s so extraordinary to think that that a non-reader may be meeting his downfall over an insistence on keeping printed matter close. I keep thinking about serial killers who save mementos of their crimes. But here the mementos themselves are crimes.

[A Redweld folder? That’s what I think most stationery fanatics know as a red-rope folder.]

How to convict

If I were to read one item today about last night’s indictment, it’d be this one, by Norman Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, and Joyce Vance: “How to Convict Trump” (The New York Times gift link).

[I’m not sure why the Times has the writers’ names in that order, but I’ve kept that order here.]

Writing it and changing it

The composer John Kander, in an interview aired on the PBS NewsHour last night:

“The ideas can be terrible, and nobody is a bad person because they have it. So you write it, and then you change it.”

Great advice for any endeavor that allows for revision.

Snoopy, downstairs

Snoopy is planning to play at Wimbledon. Charlie Brown: “Where will you stay if you go to England? You don’t know anyone there.”

[Peanuts, June 11, 1976. Click for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a Peanuts strip that references some once-obvious, now-gone bit of popular culture. The reference in this strip, then and now, is to the television series Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its time (1971–1975 in the UK, 1973–1977 in the U.S.). I remember Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson (Angela Baddeley and Gordon Jackson) and Rose (Jean Marsh), all from downstairs. No other names have stuck.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Sláinte!

We have a bottle of Redbreast twelve-year-old Irish whiskey ($$!), bought in anticipation of a friend’s visit this summer. Our friend can’t visit, so we need another occasion for which to open it. I think that occasion is now: “Trump Indicted in Documents Case” (New York Times gift link).

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Redbreast is so good.

“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”

[“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons. Franklin Roosevelt.” Poster by S[teve] Broder. 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

I found this poster via a report on “Letters Rising in the Air,” an exhibit at the National Library of Israel marking the ninetieth anniversary of Nazi bookburning in Berlin (May 10, 1933). Follow the link to see a letter (May 9) from Stefan Zweig to Max Brod urging a response by German-Jewish writers to the imminent burning. Also at the link: two partially burned pages from the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, psychologist and sexologist.

Cather in the Capitol

There’s now a statue of Willa Cather in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. I watched as much of the unveiling ceremony as I could bear, with a series of political figures characterizing Cather as a Nebraskan, a nostalgist, a regionalist, a writer of the (so-called) heartland. No mention of the young woman who cut her hair, wore men’s clothing, and signed her name William. (Here’s a photograph of the young Cather.) No acknowledgement that Cather left Nebraska in her early twenties and lived most of her life in New York City, making a home with Edith Lewis, her companion (as they used to say) of nearly forty years. A low point that wasn’t a silence: a string quartet fumbling through “Maple Leaf Rag.” More nostalgia, I guess. Something that Thea Kronborg sang might have been more fitting.

I think of Susan Howe’s repudiation of another writer’s characterization of Emily Dickinson: “Who is this Spider-Artist? Not my Emily Dickinson.” Who is this Nebraska nostalgist? Not my Willa Cather.

Perhaps a lower point than the mangled Joplin: PBS NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett mangled the name of My Ántonia, Cather’s best-known novel, as “My An-TOW-nee-uh.”

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After writing this post, I remembered something in a previous post, from a letter Cather wrote to the critic E.K. Brown (April 9, 1937):

I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live.

Related reading
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

Out the window

It’s a busy day in news, so I made the mistake of looking at Talking Points Memo. From a piece by the proprietor, Josh Marshall:

As you’ve likely heard, CNN CEO Chris Licht was fired today, not so much because of that headline-grabbing Atlantic article but because of a string of failures and reverses which might have simmered and percolated for a few months longer if a minor-defenestratory masterpiece had not wrapped them together with a bow in a way that was impossible to ignore.

A string that might have simmered and percolated, save that a masterpiece wrapped them together with a unignorable bow and . . . also threw them out the window?

I’m not sure what “minor-defenestratory” might even mean: throwing someone out a first-floor window? I’m more deeply confused about how much credit Marshall is giving the Atlantic article: Licht was fired not because of the article but because the article made all his failures known?

But I refuse to take the time to try to improve Marshall’s sentence, which I think would make, as is, a fine sixth exhibit in George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I hope

From The Independent:

The Department of Justice is preparing to ask a Washington, DC grand jury to indict former president Donald Trump for violating the Espionage Act and for obstruction of justice as soon as Thursday, adding further weight to the legal baggage facing [burdening?] Mr. Trump as he campaigns for his party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election.

The Independent has learned that prosecutors are ready to ask grand jurors to approve an indictment against Mr. Trump for violating a portion of the US criminal code known as Section 793, which prohibits “gathering, transmitting or losing” any “information respecting the national defence.”

The use of Section 793, which does not make reference to classified information, is understood to be a strategic decision by prosecutors that has been made to short-circuit Mr Trump’s ability to claim that he used his authority as president to declassify documents he removed from the White House and kept at his Palm Beach, Florida property long after his term expired on 20 January 2021.