The long holiday weekend brought the usual problem of what to watch. I have called a temporary moratorium on mystery and detective series – and a lifelong ban on Harlan Coben, a writer I had never heard about until I subscribed to Netflix. How can it be that so many shows have been made from books one never sees in bookstores – even airport bookstores?
Saturday night I watched the last installment of Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War. There were scenes I didn’t remember – Spiro Agnew debating with war protestors on the David Frost Show – and scenes I remembered incompletely. I of course knew that Jane Fonda visited Hanoi (as did Joan Baez and Susan Sontag) but I had forgotten Fonda saying that the American POWs should be tried and, if found guilty, executed. My favorite scene was of a group of those POWs on an airplane flying home.
At the end of the documentary, statistics appeared on the screen: over 58,000 American dead, over two million Vietnamese. My thoughts go out to them all today.
Someone on social media recently opined that the book is always better than the movie, and invited people to persuade him otherwise.
The Wizard of Oz, wrote one responder. Jules and Jim, wrote another.
It’s become the norm in South Florida: May arrives, with its heat and humidity, and one’s thoughts turn to playoff hockey.
Tuesday night I went with my friend Joe, a high school English teacher, to watch the Panthers at The Federal, the restaurant inside the team’s practice facility in Holiday Park. One rink was hosting public skating – the game showing on two big screens – while the other hosted a men’s league game.
The restaurant – here in Florida’s hockey heartland – was full. We sat outside, at a table overlooking the pickleball courts, with a choice of numerous screens.
The sound was turned up, and punctuated from time to time by the loud roar of cat that was provided by the restaurant.
“I could use that in class,” Joe said, impressed. “Whenever a student falls asleep.”
Sunday’s Times also carried a long article about the new pope, which included a few paragraphs about his years at Villanova. “He majored in math and attended Masses that were sometimes interrupted by shouts of ‘Hoagie Man!’ when a guy selling subs passed by.”
The Hoagie Man was an institution at Villanova, at least in the ’70s. You’d be studying in your dorm room, dinner a distant and unpleasant memory, and suddenly you’d hear the welcome cry of “Hoagie Man!” followed by the Pavlovian sound of a box full of hoagies – Italian, roast beef, ham & cheese – being dragged down the terrazzo floor in the hall. The day Pope Leo was elected I texted a former classmate, wondering if the papal apartment would now be getting nightly visits from the Hoagie Man. But I never thought of the Hoagie Man as a disrupter of Masses. He announced his presence upon entering a dorm, late in the evening, far from church.
David Brooks had an essay in yesterday’s New York Times titled “We Are the Most Rejected Generation.” (The headline was a quote from a college student he spoke with.) I read the piece with interest, though my professional experience with rejection, while long – stretching half a century now – is entirely self-imposed, and I can remove it from my life whenever I like: All I have to do is stop writing and submitting what I write to editors. For the current generation, at least the ones who want to get into good colleges, rejection is an inevitable part of life. Brooks wrote that many students apply to 20 or so schools, hoping that at least a couple will accept them. A friend in St. Petersburg wrote an article recently about the difficulty of getting into college in Florida; he began it with the story of a girl from his hometown who had the grades, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities that in the old days would have gotten her into an Ivy League school; she got rejected by the University of Florida. Brooks asked young people if “living in this exclusionary regime affected their personalities,” and the answer was a resounding yes. Though it’s good preparation if they want to become writers.