In the “I wish I had written that” department, via Frank Bruni: In Time Out, Adam Feldman reviewed a Broadway revival of “Cabaret” and questioned Eddie Redmayne’s performance in the role that Joel Grey played in the movie version. “The theory seems to be that increasing the Emcee’s power exponentially will make him more exciting: That energy, if you will, is equal to Emcee squared.”
Here are Eddie and his pretty wife, Hannah, still wearing the blood-stained dress from a murder she recently committed. “No time to change, Hon.”
The theme of today’s puzzle was Holy Cow! Or, actually, holey cow. There were three long answers with the letters COW in them and holes were placed between the C and the O, and the O and the W. So the cows were “holey.” One of the cows was in MOSCOW, IDAHO. It’s the home of the U. of Idaho, whose teams are the Idaho Vandals. Famous alums include Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, who met while in school there.
Holy Cow, of course, was the signature cry of Phil “the Scooter” Rizzuto. Egs invited “Scooter-obilia” so I posted the following:
Rizzuto was watching a very slow runner plodding his way from first to third. His comment was “He’s spending a lot of time running in the same spot.”
His “Holy Cow” was noted in the very first sentence of his obit in the NYT. When the Yankees retired his number (10) and honored him with a “day,” they presented him with a cow as a gift. It stepped on his foot and knocked him over.
He met his beloved bride Cora at a breakfast event where he spoke, replacing DiMaggio. He was invited by her dad back to their house in Newark. Rizzuto said he fell in love so deeply that he couldn’t go home. He rented a hotel room nearby for a month so he could be near her.
********
At the time of his death, a month shy of his 90th birthday, Phil was the oldest living member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
At a charity event in 1951, Rizzuto met a young boy named Ed Lucas, who had lost his sight when he was struck by a baseball between the eyes. Rizzuto took an interest in him and his school, St. Joseph’s School for the Blind. Until his death, Rizzuto raised millions for the school. Rizzuto and Lucas remained friendly, and it was through his influence that Lucas’s 2006 wedding was the only one ever conducted at Yankee Stadium. Lucas was one of Rizzuto’s last visitors at his nursing home, days before his death.
Here’s a shot of Cora and Phil at their 60th anniversary:
The NYT devoted two full pages to Taylor today, about her Tortured Poets double album, containing 31 songs. In one of the stories, a bunch of music critics discuss it.
Caryn Ganz: I have long found it baffling that some Swift observers are hellbent on inscribing her into a queer narrative. To me, she is by far our most heteronormative pop star, with a catalog of songs longing for the kind of straight, fairy tale romance that ends in traditional marriage and children. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) While it’s never wise to speculate about a public figure’s sexuality, Swift has made her romantic life the overt text of her work and is nearly demanding that fans read “Tortured Poets” as historical record — including lyrics about her current boyfriend, the paradigm of American heterosexuality: a football player. The tracks on the new album, like so many in her catalog, insist that no accomplishment is worth more than, or worthwhile without, that happy ending. The things that threaten it — immaturity, insincerity, addiction, chaos, lack of commitment, enemies tarnishing her reputation — are evils to be vanquished. “Tortured Poets” is quite bloodthirsty, which I enjoy in doses, but its power is blunted by its sonic and thematic repetition. Nobody here knows when to say when.
Lindsay Zoladz asks, How do you square the desire for privacy she seems to crave in many of these songs with the simultaneous Easter egginess of it all? [Easter eggs: planting hints for fans to hunt for.]
Jon Pareles answers: I wouldn’t call it a craving for privacy — not when she’s spending three hours a night onstage, walking red carpets and enjoying a public display of affection at the Super Bowl. Rather than privacy, the theme is more like seeking autonomy under the spotlight: the right to make good choices and bad ones, to learn — or not — from mistakes, to wreak vengeance or come to terms with regrets.
Ben Sisario adds: Something that “Tortured Poets” drove home for me is that perhaps Swift’s greatest strength is how she has melded songwriting and journaling. Even she admits she’s no Patti Smith. But her gift is conveying the sense of honest intimacy, letting her feelings spill out in ways that seem straight from the heart. Her most powerful lyrics often involve telling details — a scarf, a cardigan — that are like burning memories.
And the journal is an inherently messy model. It has no end. Its purpose is to be a repository of the thoughts and feelings that are too raw, too personal, to say in public. For a lot of Swift’s career, I think she has been a master of taming this chaos with the discipline of song.
Here’s a shot Phil shared with us from a recent weekend he spent tooling around with Tay and Travis. Phil has always claimed she’s prettiest when she’s not trying.
The second story in the NYT is about a course on Taylor at Harvard. Not kidding! The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
Get this! — You may recall we made note of Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday earlier this week. Well, LOLITA was in today’s puzzle, weirdly clued with “Novel parodied by Umberto Eco’s ‘Granita,” which I’ve never heard of.
In 1963, VN said in an interview: “I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”
He finished writing Lolita in December 1953, but it was turned down by all of the major publishers in the U.S., so was first published in France. It only made it into the U.S. in 1958 and was an instant best-seller. Because of its salacious subject matter Nabokov considered publishing it under a pseudonym: Vivian Darkbloom. But it’s an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov and he thought people would figure that out, so to hell with it.
Here’s how it opens:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
And here’s a snippet from later on, when he sees her all grown up and a little weary from life:
“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago – but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man’s child. She could fade and wither – I didn’t care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
Here’s Sue Lyon as Lo. Sadly, she passed away at 73 in 2019. She won a Golden Globe for the role. She was married and divorced five times, and dated folksinger Donovan for a while. She had one daughter. Her third marriage took place in a Colorado state prison where her hubby was serving time for robbery and second-degree murder. It didn’t last very long. Her fifth was to an engineer and lasted 17 years.
What a pleasant surprise! The Poem of the Day from The Poetry Foundation today is by our wonderful Ted Kooser! But we shouldn’t be surprised because it’s his birthday! 85, kinehora!
In 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as poet laureate of the US. He said: “I was so staggered I could barely respond. The next day, I backed the car out of the garage and tore the rearview mirror off the driver’s side.”
He flunked out of grad school and took a job with an insurance company that he kept for 35 years. Every morning, he got up at 4:30, made a pot of coffee, and wrote until 7. He said: “I believe that writers write for perceived communities, and that if you are a lifelong professor of English, it’s quite likely that you will write poems that your colleagues would like; that is, poems that will engage that community. I worked every day with people who didn’t read poetry, who hadn’t read it since they were in high school, and I wanted to write for them.”
So This Is Nebraska
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
Happy birthday Teddy!
Have some of this cake George made.
To 120, Buddy!
Everybody! — have some, please. George — get plates and forks.
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 