Dear Fred,
Thanks for Frog Hospital.
Admitting that I'm always open to surprise, I think Trump is will get trounced... unless some late-breaking scandal undoes Hillary.
That said, I also think Bernie could fill the breach and give Devious Donald an even sounder thrashing.
We could even be looking at an election that will finally break the fever of National Lunacy and set the United States on the path of civilization.
This post is to the point. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/05/donald-trump-calls-for-trillion-dollar.html
Although I'm hesitant to have it bandied about, I think that if Trump were elected, his presidency -- barring some stupid act of impulsive belligerence (to which Donald's nature coupled with his interrelated desire to "leave his macho mark" by having His Own War -- might surprise us all, particularly conservatives who think there getting a rebel and 4 new Scalias.
Elsewhere...
I once read something damning about Maugham's personality. It left me with the impression he was a prick although I have no idea what words were used to describe him with such residue.
Maugham's Wikipedia entry is, I think, unusually satisfying, including the following passage whose central quotation is especially striking:
Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary, and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. In 1934 the American journalist and radio personality Alexander Woollcott offered Maugham some language advice: "The female implies, and from that the male infers." Maugham responded: "I am not yet too old to learn."[33]
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way".[34]
For a public man of Maugham's generation, being openly gay was impossible. Whether his own orientation disgusted him (as it did many at a time when homosexuality was widely considered a moral failing as well as illegal) or whether he was trying to disguise his leanings, Maugham wrote disparagingly of the gay artist. In Don Fernando, a non-fiction book about his years living in Spain, Maugham pondered a (perhaps fanciful) suggestion that the painter El Greco was homosexual:
But Maugham's homosexuality or bisexuality is believed to have shaped his fiction in two ways. Since he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave his women characters sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time.[citation needed] Liza of Lambeth, Cakes and Ale, Neil MacAdam and The Razor's Edge all featured women determined to feed their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. As Maugham's sexual appetites were then officially disapproved of, or criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he travelled, the author was unusually tolerant of the vices of others.[36]Some readers and critics[who?] complained that Maugham did not condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."[37]
Maugham's public view of his abilities remained modest. Toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters".[38]
***
And finally, Old Hickory...
A few year's ago, I gave my brother-in-law Meacham's biography of Jackson.
Here is a comprehensive review of "all" Jackson's major biographies: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2013/11/20/the-best-biographies-of-andrew-jackson/
And here are some links to Jackson's inaugural bacchanal - a riotous debauch that forced Jackson to flee the White House to lodge in a nearby boarding house:
Please keep me posted on the Love Story.
"Outgoing President John Quincy Adams did not attend his successor's Inaugural Ceremony. Relations between the two men were not good after the bitter campaign of 1828. Jackson blamed the verbal attacks made by Adams and his political allies for the death of his wife." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilKbDsRRBs0
***
Also keep me posted on Spinoza.
I know little about him but clearly Baruch was a decisive, linchpin, sine que non figure in the development of world philosophy.
On Einstein's Wikiquote page there are 19 references to Spinoza, including a poem of praise Einstein penned. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Pax
Alan
On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 9:06 PM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
A lot of writers would try to smooth that out. But Maugham doesn't. He has a story to tell, so he just wrote that it was a week later -- why try to be stylish?Of Human BondageFROG HOSPITAL -- May 14, 2016 -- unsubscribe anytime
By Fred OwensBut first the news:
Politics. Donald Trump and I have a lot in common, except I'm not rich, or mean, or crazy. Trump will be 70 on June 14, I will be 70 on June 25, so we are just the same age.But in other ways we are a lot different. I like to read books. He likes to build golf courses.... I wonder if he actually plays golf?
He says he only sleeps three hours a day. Good for him. I sleep eight hours plus an afternoon nap.
Otherwise, he's a human being like me and we live in the same country.
Headlines. Trump can get a headline anytime he wants. I was half-listening to his interview on Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos who was pressing him to reveal his income taxes. Trump said, "It's None of Your Business." I heard him say that -- it's none of your business -- and I knew that bingo! he had just gotten himself another headline.
The New York Times dutifully wrote the front-page headline that Trump said, "It's None of Your Business."
So Trump marches on and I heard that recent polls show him ahead of Hillary Clinton in Ohio.
I have to check up on this. I have some friends in Columbus, Ohio, all ardent Democrats, and they read this newsletter. Hey fellas, is Trump gonna take Ohio?
Of Human Bondage. I'm on page 23 of this great novel by Somerset Maugham. He is a plot-driven writer. That's how he can get away with poor sentences like "It was a week later."
I read a volume of his short stories this winter. Then I read the Painted Veil which was made into a 2006 movie starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. Another good movie, The Razor's Edge, starred Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946, also based on a Maugham novel.Next Book. Hannah Arendt is best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her point was that Eichmann was quite an ordinary man and still capable of great evil.But she has written on philosophy as well, so I checked out her two-volume work titled Thinking. It's about thinking. I do a lot of thinking so I decided to read it.Here's one sentence: "Aristotle's De Anima is full of tantalizing hints at psychic phenomena and their close interconnection with the body in contrast with the relation or, rather, non-relation between body and mind."I don't understand what Arendt is saying in this book. I have made it to page 44 and it just keeps going, getting thicker and denser. The thing is -- I trust her and I believe she is not wasting my time, so I'm sticking it out.Next Book. The next book is Consilience by E.O. Wilson. Wilson is the famous ant doctor. He knows from ants. That is his life's work. Isn't that the coolest thing in the world -- to be a bug doctor? He writes with authority on the social life of ants and humans. He explains the path of evolution, and he is so much easier to understand than Hannah Arendt.Next Book. The next book has a very long title but it is quite an easy book to understand. It is called the Theological-Political Treatise written in 1670 by Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish philosopher.You need to understand Spinoza because he was the foundation of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza was the man who inspired the very non-religious thinking of our Founding Fathers. From Spinoza you get Thomas Jefferson.God is Nature. Nature is God. Moses did not part the Red Sea, that is just a story. Jesus was a wise teacher but he did not rise from the dead.Spinoza's thinking was very radical for the time, 1670, but he was fortunate to live in Holland, which tolerated this free thinker."Men should never be superstitious." --- That is the opening sentence in the Preface to this work.Next and Last Book. President Andrew Jackson got Zinn-ified and downgraded off the $20 bill (Zinnified is where you get found out. Howard Zinn finds out that you were a bum and a tyrant and no hero whatsoever.)Another statue gets torn down and so the mighty have been humbled. But I know so little about Andrew Jackson. He won the Battle of New Orleans after the war was over, and he drove the Indians out of the Old Dixie and over to Oklahoma.There's to more to it, so I must read his history. I found a heavy 500-page volume with his stern visage on the cover. This would not be a good book to take to the beach. But next to it was a sweet and slender volume titled A Being So Gentle: the Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson.This slim volume lies before me on the coffee table. It seems he had a wife. I have not read it yet. It might be good.
With that I wish you a restful and pleasant weekend.
Spring Subscription Drive. In a response to overwhelming demand, I have decided to keep Frog Hospital going for another year. I believe I have goods worthy of your reception. I do not write when the mood strikes me, I only write when I have something to say that you might find interesting.This is quite a political year, so we will have lots of that. And be ready for surprises. Can you learn? It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how experienced you are, it only matters if you can learn. Frog Hospital will be making many regrettable errors in the coming year -- because we are learning as we go.Stay with us and please help us out with subscription dollars. This income keeps the editor from endorsing a cause or a movement. This income keeps the editor from getting preachy or self-righteous.Go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your contribution of $25 or $50.Or mail a check for $25 or $50 toFred Owens1105 Veronica Springs RDSanta Barbara, CA 93105
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