PS: Hello Possumman, so YOU re the 2 print subscribers that the Washington Times claims. ;-}. They used to put the newspapers in plastic bags whenever rain was expected, I recall, individually, as we normally got only one.

Again, I didn't want the post to get too long, but I meant to mention the USA Today newspapers that lots of medium-level hotels would leave outside the guest room doors. I wrote about this, in fact. That must have made the numbers look better, but at that time (going back maybe to 8 years ago), I had long had enough of the Regime Media, so I'd just step on it on the way out and go on my way.

"The more we read USA Today, the more we like this guy," (Guess who "this guy" was.)

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=120

That is an oldie!

PS I have a print subscription to the Washington Times--they routinely throw 2 copies in a bag on to my driveway. It must juice their circulation numbers and maybe their ad rates a bit!

PS: That sounds like a good life you had back in the New York City of the day. Lots of people swore by it.

"The internet is a cruel substitute for what used to be a part of a richer life." Some things are better, I have to say, but when your life is spent on it, you don't know the real life you're missing.

"PPS, I used to have a colleague who had a line in her e-mail “signature” that said, “Please consider the environment before printing this.”

I often included in my signature in mails to her, “I considered the environment, and concluded that paper is a renewable resource from an industry that carefully cultivates its source materials and keeps tens of thousands of local persons in gainful employment, so I make it a point to always print all e-mails I receive for a better economy.”"

Haha. Yes, I was going to write more on the "sustainability" thing along with other uses, such as phone books for the shooting range, etc. That was for the next post - well, not so much the environmental thing but that it was a long time we had computers before we got to where people don't print out much. I think it's only been the last 10 years or so.

PS

I recall my Sunday NY Times being on the order of three inches thick. The fun of reading the Sunday Times in Manhattan came in several sections, not the least being Section A, which was filled with ads for $10k+ watches, jewelry and other baubles. Real Estate would trumpet properties you could only dream of affording, and Travel kind of did the same in articles but at least offered a few ads for places mere mortals could afford to go.

All made for nice leisurely indolence on a Sunday morning before heading out to brunch with friends (this was still in the days when coffee was bought in a Greek motif paper cup stuffed into a brown bag with a dozen napkins and half a dozen sugar packets, all for 50¢, and not hanging out in a coffee shop), and then heading for a walk in Central Park on the long way home.

The internet is a cruel substitute for what used to be a part of a richer life.

PPS, I used to have a colleague who had a line in her e-mail “signature” that said, “Please consider the environment before printing this.”

I often included in my signature in mails to her, “I considered the environment, and concluded that paper is a renewable resource from an industry that carefully cultivates its source materials and keeps tens of thousands of local persons in gainful employment, so I make it a point to always print all e-mails I receive for a better economy.”

☯️

PS: I remember a writer or two along with the commenters on ZeroHedge back a dozen years ago talking about the Nickel being the only modern US coin that was worth more in metal than its face value. One big finance guy was collecting them in his basement or something... not quite as portable as gold, ...

Seeing as it's a metal that is used to take high temperatures, I guess melting them down for the metal might take a lot of heat... then again, you just need to melt the rest of the metals around it.

Plastic pennies for 3 1/2 cents apiece? Now, if they could be used to gum up parking meter mechanisms in the hot sun, I could use a pack.

I'll read your review shortly, Adam. Thanks.

PS: Good afternoon, everyone!

For the basket of goods...
https://i.ibb.co/nM8DTSqY/plastic-pennies.jpg


How to profit from inflation (in four easy steps)...
>invent un-minting machine
>convert 10 nickles into 140 cents worth of raw materials
>use 140 cents to buy 28 more nickles
>repeat until millionaire!


I've been meaning to chime in for several days now, but I've been kinda busy. And kinda lazy. And ~75% of the leaves decided to fall off the trees over a recent five day period. (Which is good because that means I'm about 70% done blowing/burning/mowing/mulching/etc. the leaves for the season.) And then we had to take Baby Girl to the vet yesterday. (A story for another time. Fortunately, all is well enough.)

So, yeah. Sorry about the slow replies.
I hope everyone is doing well and great!

***

Under post 3384, Mr. Hail commented...

𝐴𝑑𝑎𝑚 𝑆𝑚𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒: "𝐼 𝑠𝑎𝑤 𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑐 𝑜𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 4𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑑𝑎𝑦..."

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑖𝑡?

It was (ostensibly) about health care...

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/520615911/
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1755109587959253.jpg

***

Also under post 3384, Mr. SafeNow wrote...

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑀𝑎𝑚𝑑𝑎𝑚𝑖 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑓, 𝑎 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑎𝑔𝑜, 𝑁𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑀𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑒𝑟’𝑠 “𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑥𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑆𝑜𝑛𝑔.” 𝐻𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑦𝑧𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑦 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒. 𝑅𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑈𝑡𝑎ℎ 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐽𝑜𝑎𝑛 𝐷𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒 𝑎 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚 “𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒.”. 𝑀𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑠, 𝐷𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑, 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒. 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑤𝑜𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚: 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛 𝑚𝑎𝑛, 𝑎𝑛𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡. 𝐸𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑦- 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒, 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘, 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑙𝑒. 𝐴 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘. 𝐼𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑇𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑦 𝐿𝑒𝑒 𝐽𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠.

Mr. Moderator replied...

𝐼'𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘, 𝑆𝑎𝑓𝑒𝑁𝑜𝑤, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑖𝑡. 𝑃𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑠 𝐼 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-song.html

'I Want to Go Ahead and Do It
By JOAN DIDION

The Executioner's Song By Norman Mailer

It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of "The Armies of the Night"; they regard "The Naked and the Dead" as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, "tarted up to deceive, for the "big book" he cannot write. In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth.

"The Executioner's Song" did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became. It began as a project put together by Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who several years before had contracted with Mailer to write "Marilyn," and it was widely referred to as "the Gary Gilmore book." This "Gary Gilmore book" of Mailer's was understood in a general way to be an account of or a contemplation on the death or the life or the last nine months in the life of Gary Mark Gilmore, those nine months representing the period between the day in April of 1976 when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, and the morning in January of 1977 on which he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah.

It seemed one of those lives in which the narrative would yield no further meaning. Gary Gilmore had been in and out of prison, mostly in, for 22 of his 36 years. Gary Gilmore had a highly developed kind of con style that caught the national imagination. "Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gary Gilmore said when he refused legal efforts to reverse the jury's verdict of death on felony murder. "Let's do it," Gary Gilmore said in the moments before the hood was lowered and the muzzles of the rifles emerged from the executioner's blind. Gary Gilmore's execution in 1977 was the first in the United States in ten years, and the last months of his life were expensively, exhaustively covered, covered in teams, covered in packs, covered with checkbooks and covered with tricks, covered to that point at which Louis Nirer was calling Provo in a failed attempt to add some class to David Susskind's bid for the rights, covered to that pitch at which the coverage itself might have seemed the only story.

What Mailer could make of this apparently intractable material was unclear. It might well have been only another test hole in a field he had drilled before, a few further reflections on murder as an existential act, an appropriation for himself of the book he invented for "An American Dream," Stephen Rojack's "The Psychology of the Hangman." Instead Mailer wrote a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people. "The Executioner's Song" is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol, a forthright woman in her thirties who "hadn't gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof," has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home--by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake--to Provo. "With all the excitement," Chapter One of "The Executioner's Song" closes, "Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake."

Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of "The Executioner's Song," sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at K-Mart ("Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite."), the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension. Notice the intake of breath on the clause "and the passes of the Rockies," notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on "just 50 miles below Salt Lake."

It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on "The Deer Park" are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.

"The Executioner's Song," then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those women. Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. "Well, I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo," Gary Gilmore's mother, Bessie Gilmore, said once to herself when Gary was 22 and sentenced to 15 years for armed robbery in the state of Oregon. She said it again to herself on the July morning in 1976 when her niece Brenda and her sister Ida called to say that Gary was under arrest in Provo on Murder One, two counts. "I am the granddaughter and great granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it." This is the exact litany which expresses faith in God west of the 100th meridian.

I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in "The Executioner's Song," is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference. The place at which both Gary Gilmore and his Mormon great-grandfather came to rest was a town where the desert lay at the end of every street, except to the east. "There," to the east, "was the Interstate, and after that, the mountains. That was about it."

In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme. People get sick for love, think they want to die for love, shoot up the town for love, and then they move away, move on, forget the face. People commit their daughters, and move to Midway Island. People get in their cars at night and drive across two states to get a beer, see about a loan on a pickup, keep from going crazy. It is a good idea to keep from going crazy because crazy people get committed again, and can no longer get in their cars and drive across two states to get a beer. Nicole Baker, Gary Gilmore's true love, got committed the first time at 14. April Baker, Nicole's sister, had been a "little spacey" ever since she got bad-tripped and gang-banged when her father was on leave in Honolulu. "I am a split personality," April said when she was asked about the July night in Provo when she went to the Sinclair service station and the Holiday Inn with Gary Gilmore and he seemed to kill somebody. "I am controlling it pretty good today."

"The Executioner's Song" is structured in two long symphonic movements: "Western Voices," or Book One, voices which are most strongly voices of women, and "Eastern Voices," Book Two, voices which are not literally those of Easterners but are largely those of men--the voices of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the reporters, the people who move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events. The "Western" book is a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death. The "Eastern" book is the release of that tension, the resolution, the playing out of the execution, the active sequence that effectively ends on the January morning when Lawrence Schiller goes up in a six-seat plane and watches as Gary Gilmore's ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, "with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread."

The women in the "Western" book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women in "The Executioner's Song," all these women who have dealings with Gary Gilmore from the April night when he lands in town with his black plastic penitentiary shoes until the day in January when he is just ash blowing over Provo. The wind seems to blow away memory, balance. The sensation of falling is constant. Nicole Baker, still trying at 19 to "digest her life, her three marriages, her two kids, and more guys than you wanted to count," pits Gary Gilmore, plus Gary Gilmore's insistence that she meet him beyond the grave, reads a letter from Gary in prison and the words go "in and out of her head like a wind blowing off the top of the world."

Control is fugitive. Insanity is casual. The love-death seems as good a way of hanging on as any other. Gary and Nicole make wishes on a falling star and Nicole has "a rush of memories then like falling down in a dream." Gary's mother Bessie, sitting alone in her trailer in Oregon, gets a call about the murders from her sister Ida and she feels "vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born." A sister-in-law of Nicole's thinks of sinking "right into the swamp of misery." A friend of the family is trying to sleep one night when she hears Gary, whose visit she has declined, shatter her car with a tire iron. "She let it go. It was just one more unhappiness at the bottom of things."

These women move in and out of paying attention to events, of noticing their own fate. They seem distracted by bad dreams, by some dim apprehension of this well of dread, this "unhappiness at the bottom of things." Inside Bessie Gilmore's trailer south of the Portland city line, down a four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores and a gas station with a World War II surplus Boeing bomber fixed above the pumps, there is a sense that Bessie can describe only as "a suction-type feeling." She fears disintegration. She wonders where the houses in which she once lived have gone, she wonders about her husband being gone, her children gone, the 78 cousins she knew in Provo scattered and gone and maybe in the ground. She wonders if, when Gary goes, they would "all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another." She has no sense of "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels up the prairie grass." When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon. This is an absolutely astonishing book.

(I think I pasted in the right thing, Mr. SafeNow. If not, oops.)

Links to 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑥𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑆𝑜𝑛𝑔 incoming soon.

Happy Friday! ☮️

PS: This post was too long already, M, but I thought about describing the problem with newspapers piling up everywhere - I had a friend whose apartment was full of them.

Then too, what I meant to write about was other uses for newspaper... That changes the comparitive value of the daily newspaper vs. news over the internet a little bit, I guess.

PS
Yes, I had a subscription to one of the dailies for a while.

Mostly it ended up being a pain to throw them out. Cancelled. So much for that.