On "Asshood"

In my most recent post I said a certain writer by virtue of his bigotry and ignorance evinced asshood.  "Asshood" is a coinage by Lloyd C. Douglas, who used it in Magnificent Obsession, I think as a word in the mouth of "Bobby Merrick,"* the antihero of that novel, who uses it to describe a drunken binge he regretted.  I've had my share of episodes of asshood in my own life.  But that's another story. 

Enough of asshood.  My mother introduced me to Douglas, an ordained Presbyterian minister who wrote sentimental, inspirational novels about people, usually male surgeons, who have lofty ideals, secular conversions (or at least Christ is downplayed), and romantic obsessions with beautiful women, whom they finally win in the last chapter.  Mother introduced me by happening to have a copy of Green Light in the house.  She never discussed it with me when I was a child but she never discouraged me from reading any book I might find in the house.  Recently I reread Green Light and then for the first time Magnificent Obsession.  I liked them both and in my humble opinion Douglas was a fine literary craftsman, sort of like Henry James, not as "great," of course, but not quite as mannered and -- well, stuffy.  James does have one great story that I've read, namely The Turn of the Screw.

She liked Douglas and also Grace Livingston Hill (The Mystery of Mary was the one novel at home), both of whom wrote "wholesome" escape fiction.  I put quotation marks around "wholesome" because I'm self-conscious after all these years, after I've read post-Mailer novels and such.  I say post-Mailer because even the bumptious "Brooklyn Tolstoy" could not bring himself to have his American soldiers in his 1948 war novel, The Naked and the Dead, say "fuck"instead of the word he used, "fugg."  (Leon Uris also used that silly non-word in Battle Cry, about the Marines in WWII.)  Now, even the ethical James Lee Burke uses the coarsest language as well as the most sublime in depicting good and evil in his wonderful novels featuring his righteous lawmen-heroes, "Dave Robicheaux" and "Hackberry Holland**."


Anyhow, I'm surprised I enjoyed wholesome novels without the usual quota of filthy language after all these years.  Truth and beauty and wisdom are where you find them.

*Played by Rock Hudson in the movie version, which was a lame translation without the well-done narration of Douglas.

**Corrected spelling of Holland.  I'd been misspelling it "Hollander."

My Shovelful for 1/12/12 (A Revisit 9 Years Later)

It's Thursday afternoon. Fine snowflakes are coming down, blown fiercely by the wind.  TV weather boys predict a blanket of snow tonight and early tomorrow.  Good day to stay in and write.

(1)  The woman I love just wrote a scathing internet comment to a local white-supremacist who calls President Obama "the Mulatto Messiah."  I find that nickname offensive because "mulatto" slurs the President's race, and because "messiah" assumes that the President has a grandiose opinion of himself.  First, the President's race is irrelevant.  Second, as for the President's opinion of himself, the writer, I believe, knows nothing about it other than what he assumes.  To ASSUME is to make an ASS out of U and ME.  I think the one who suffers most from asshood, however, when I assume things I don't know, is ME.  Ergo, the writer is an ass.

The writer, with commendable candor, states that he despises the President.  He is entitled to express his opinion and my wife and I are entitled to express ours, which is that we like the President, care very much for his success, and dislike his being vilified by a self-ascribed "Caucasian," which word I am entitled to interpret as "racist."  Ass dismissed.

(2)  Snow has now accumulated on roofs and grass but not yet pavement.  I'm glad I got back home from Florida on an afternoon of warmth and sunshine.  I left Chattanooga on the morning of the 10th in gloom, fog, and rain, which prevailed until I got almost to Nashville.  The daylight in Music City was strong, and Kentucky up I-65 got ever sunnier as I drove north.  "Johnstown, Indiana" was all blue skies and sweet sunshine and there was little need for a coat when I got out of the car at home, sweet home.

I'd visited with my son and his wife in Pinellas County.  We had a nice visit, several great meals -- we went out a couple of times and both kids are great cooks -- and we rode around some -- the weather was nice.  My son has an open-top sports car and weren't we the blades riding around in that?  We also watched some good, irreverent TV and laughed.  It's always good to laugh with my kids.  Almost forgot: saw just one pelican, but I did see a pelican (whose beak holds more than his belly can).

I told them I wish I'd been better company during the visit.  I've been in low spirits for quite a while.  It has to do with my default status as depressed, and it has a lot to do with my contemplating my decline and death.  I've thought too much lately about drinking, which for me is tantamount to suicide "on the installment plan," as my comrades who talk about such things like to say.  I've thought about drinking anyway.  I'm a fool.  God help me not to take the first one.

(3)  I've read many wonderful books in the past year and more: most of the novels of James Lee Burke, Ed McBain, Jeffrey Deaver, Colin Dexter, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, almost all fiction, but nonfiction too: Life Itself by Roger Ebert, And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, On Writing by King.  I've read the biographies of John Cheever and Bill Wilson of AA by Susan Cheever.

Reading makes me want to write.  What?  Anything.  In The Elements of Style, E.B. White wrote that writing is a "way to spend one's days."  I could write a "column" every day on this blog.  I am retired, I have 24 hours each day, I have a state-of-the-art word processing program on a wonderful laptop that allows me to make letter-perfect copy anywhere.  (That used to be an excuse for me because Garrison Keillor had a laptop and I didn't.)  I am a good writer, good enough.

And how do I spend my days?  I watch TV.  I work crosswords and sudoku.  I listen to music.  I read, some good stuff and a lot of crap on the computer the spelling and grammar and exposition of which are by and large abominable.  I spend entirely too much time on the internet.  I eat too much.  I sleep too much.  I have no self-discipline.  None.

The snow has stopped for now but there is a pretty cover of it.  Snow helps the gray day to be not quite so dreary.  We have bird-feeders out now and sparrows, nuthatches, finches, woodpeckers of three kinds, mockingbirds, cardinals, and bluejays have been eating from them.  I'm not sure where the starlings and grackles are right now.  They usually abound and my wife kvetches about them but I don't.  They're birds too.  I see myself as a sort of starling or grackle.  Too many of us, I suppose, and we don't amount to much.  But here.  Something to be said for that.