Goethe Was No God: A Bilingual Novel

Once upon a time, most literate Germans acted as though Johannes Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1834)was God Almighty. They regarded what he wrote as another Gospel from on high.And there's no doubt he was a great writer. His "Faust" (at least Parts I and II were landmark in World Lit: Part III was another sort of puzzle, a kind of message from Hell!) Anyway, in the late twentieth century, the old G could do no wrong. I think this Goethe worship had something to do with the shame that followed the Nasty Nazi decade of Adolf Hitler.

In any case, along came one Italian lawyer named Ettore Ghibellino who wrote a sensational book entitled "Goethe and Anna Amalia: A Forbidden Love"(Weimar, Dr. A.J. Denkena Verlag, 2012), and the heretofore Godlike Goethe was back down on our everyday earth, with a very tacky reputation as a Lady Killer.

Anna Amalia was a widow of great mental prowess: she encouraged promising writers like JWG and sponsored the theatre culture that gave his ilk a public voice. But a common citizen, no matter how gifted, didn't mess with the dead Duke's lady. That was risking execution. So G and and AA went underground with their forbidden love. And they used a lady named Charlotte von Stein as their secret keeper. She delivered messages between JWG and AA. Except that passages in the letters were written in Italian and Latin which CvStein didn't know!

Meanwhile, back on earth, JWG took up with a lovely blue collar gal named Christian Vulpius. For eighteen years they shared a marital bed with no license of marriage! It was a common scandal. Everybody knew about their forbidden love, but no one talked about it. Until Napoleon's troops invaded Weimar. 

One night a soldier with a rifle knocked on Christiana's door, and JWG pissed his pants in terror. He called his lady down to the door where she told the French soldier to get the fuck out of there! He did. And the next day G married CV! They even had a son together, one August, whose rep as a "bastard"  was stricken by the two decades delayed marriage. JWG went on with his weird sexual life, chasing publicly a 17 year old beauty at age 83! Wowee. No God acts like that. And so it goes in the tangled sex life of a great writer.

My Favorite Weimar Art Gallery

Visiting the GalerieHebecker for its dual exhibit (Schillerstrasse 18, until 2/15/14) reminded me of my first art assignment in 1948 at my hometown Jesuit University of Detroit. The priest teaching the course gave us our first assignment: go downtown to the new Detroit Institute of Arts and find a work you really like and explain why it appeals to you. My choice was “The Liberated Slave”, reminding me powerfully of the not yet released Detroit Negroes.

I get the same sense of challenge from Hebecker in the four to six shows they present each year. Michael Hebecker founded the gallery in 2002, but his daughter Susanne took over when he died in 2008. (Her brother runs another family gallery on the Kramerbrücke in nearby Erfurt). 

The current show, dubbed “Red and Black”, contrasts the black and white style of Karl Ortelt (1907-1972) with the richly colored style of Fritz Keller (1915-1994). Both served in the German Army during the First World War, and both were jailed in Great Britain for several years after the war in the ‘40s. But the similarities end there.

Ortelt’s portraits were frontal views of ordinary people, a man and a child, a married couple, and a couple with a small child, celebrating. Keller’s rich colors teem with energy, the realities in the frames being often obscure but nonetheless eloquent. I’ve been since then to all the greet museums of the world, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the many Smithsonians in Washington., the Kyoto in Japan. Even the brilliantly retrieved Gotha Museum nearby. 

 

Part of the Hebecker’s power lies in their brilliantly edited brochures. And catalogs. And the friendly presence of their staff. Like that Jebbie priest in Detroit 66 years ago who made an esthetic fanatic of me with his “simple” assignment, Ms. Hebecker and her Hungarian mother are the sweetest guides I’ve encountered in my 87 years. Bless them and their open-minded, second floor display area.

The Corruption of Bauhaus Ideology

I came to Weimar in 1999 when it was declared The Cultural Capital of Europe to research the history of its most famous institution. As a homeless kid in Depression Detroit (1930-45), I was eager to explore what I had learned in graduate school about Walter Gropius’s attempt to bring Good Design to “the working classes”. Both he and Mies van der Rohe came out of the horrors of World War as “lefties”. That ideology would haunt both of them as the rightist ideals of Naziism gradually took over in 1933. Gropius’s Denkmal was for the Victims of the March Putsch (1923). Indeed the rightists were gradually expanding in the Weimar assembly. (The first minister of education to be a Nazi sounded the warning. But Gropius didn’t like fights. Indeed his first wife Alma Mahler chided him for being too nervous to participate in the Denkmal dedication in the Weimar cemetery.
 

Similarly, Mies (theoretically the third and final directors’ first famous work was a Denkmal for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg (1926) in the Berlin Cemetery.) In 1930 as Mies started to take over what was left of the Bauhaus, Alfred Rosenberg wanted to know why he had so honored the founders of the German Communist Party. (Mies tried to smile affably and dropped all the Communist students. But it was too late. He became a Nice Nazi until 1937 when Gropius got him a summer home in Yellowstone.)

I had a serendipitous encounter in 1970 with Bertrand Goldberg (1913-97) who was Mies’ Azubi until the school finally closed. He became my architectural mentor every time I visited Chicago. Indeed he was easily the greatest architect to attend the school, still in Dr. Annette Seeman’s standard history (2010) only his name is listed with thirteen other American Bauhaus students.. Period. 

In our last meeting, August 1987, the day after Timothy Dwight blew up the government center in Oklahoma, we were in a very gloomy mood. Bert sadly criticized the way the current Bauhaus had betrayed the working class ideals of Gropius which the Chicago architect implacably followed to his dying day. (There has never been a Goldberg exhibition in Germany, partly from total ignorance of his work and partly from the distorted hagiographical version the current Bauhaus promoters use to hide their shame at the real Nazi and DDR truths about his aborted ideal.) When I discovered these contradictions in the true history, I was removed from press contacts. 

The only exception has been Omar Akbar, the Afghani engineer who ran the Dessau part of what the Bauhaus brass have just re-named the Bauhaus Triennale (June 2013). Their plans include new teenage (12 and up) seminars to combat “Bauhaus Hate”! (I think they’re talking about me! Their latest, greatest lie: I only report objectively their betrayal of Gropius idealism!) I wish they would remind themselves of that bad old Nazi habit of Beruf Verbot. For sixty years I have written contentious journalism all over the world. Only today’s German Bauhustlers have stooped to conquer me so stupidly!

My first surprise was to discover how minor an architect Gropius was. He cried to his mother in letters, ”I can’t draw. I can’t draw!” Why for heaven’s sake did he aspire to be an architect?. A recent exhibition in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau gave me a satisfying answer. His great uncle Martin Gropius was generally regarded, excluding Schinkel , as the greatest pre-modern Berlin architect. So he asked Adolf Meyer to be his secret partner. No wonder the first architecture course didn’t come until 1927. And then he gave that absolutely central post to Hannes Meyer, the Swiss Communist! Yet the Dessau city politics were fast running faster and faster to the right.

And indeed they canned the Swiss Commie in 1930. Mies would stumble for three years to no avail, and then became a Nice Nazi until 1937, bugging Albert Speer for commissions that never came, so poisoned was his Denkmal past when he left for America.

But the biggest error in official Bauhaus history was that it ended in 1933. It really ended in 1928 when Gropius gave up and moved to build Siemenstadt in Berlin. His life was more and more miserable. A Dessau journalist was trying to create a career for himself by harassing Gropius for “double dipping”—a Bauhaus salary plus extra pay for consulting in the creation of the Junker suburb, Törten. And his pretentious star faculty was fighting against pay cuts, not to mention their contempt for his medieval Master concept when they argued for good old Patriarchal Professor! (They lost on the money and won on the status!) There was even scuttlebutt that Herbert Bayer was making moves on his second wife Ilse. So he talked Marianne Brandt to join him for interior designs and off they fled to Berlin. Meyer soon went to Moscow with many Commie dropouts and their work there is architecturally admirable. And many newly motivated students went to Palestine where they created a lush White City in Tel Aviv.

The saddest Chapter is the one created by the erratic gay fellow Philip C. Johnson (1900-2005). He dropped out of Harvard several times before he got his B.A.—not in architecture, but antiquities! His architecture period began in 1926 when he cruised Europe looking for new modern buildings to gain a post at the planned MOMA/New York. When he visited Dessau in 1926, he was so impressed he phoned the projected MOMA director Alfred Barr, Jr. that he had to come and see the greatest modern building—that Gropius claimed to design but where Ernst Neufert probably did all the heavy lifting.

Except he should have asked the professors and students how lousy the Modernoid structure really was: They fried in the summer and froze in the winter. It made great black and white photos with their new Leicas. That facility spread the falsities of Modernoidism throughout the civilized world. Call it International Style and ignore function as you relish its form (aka ART). Peter Blake (the English pseudonym he used after fleeing Nazi Germany), the greatest American architectural critic of the last century, argued in his obit of PCJ that he had totally corrupted the world conversation about modern architecture. He glibly referred to himself when anyone disagreed with him as the “whore of architecture.” His greatest sin was writing nasty letters about his Harvard dean Gropius (1938) mocking him for his obsession about working housing. So MOMA and the AIA sunk into the pit of Starchitecture from which we have barely begun to emerge.

Yet it was no joke being gay and a parvenu in Cleveland in the 1920’s. His German nanny made him fluent. So he partied in gay Berlin on his architectural searches. He returned to America in 1928 a Not So Nice Nazi politicizing for Huey Long before that Louisiana governor was assassinated. Then he started touting the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin who sneered over the air at FDR’s “Jew Deal”! Mies was his first favorite. PCJ made the first modern house in Houston in 1950 for the de Menil family, the greatest art collectors of the era. He also insisted they use Miesey furniture deployed the way the master would have ! They told him to get lost and never talked to him again! Their children thought the frequent visitor was PCJ. It was only carpenters repairing the leaky roof!

Later they quarreled and Mies sneered that PCJ’s vaunted Glass House in Connecticut (1970) looked like” a hot dog stand at Night”. Never mind. It’s a Visitor’s Center now, celebrating his architectural genius, at $150 a shot. Meanwhile his excessively glassed weekend house (1950) outside Chicago Mies had made for his one-time girl friend Dr. Farnsworth was uninhabitable. It’s now a Visitor Center celebrating his genius. Hmm.

But PCJ’s grossest aberration were those hateful letters he wrote in 1938 about his Harvard Dean Gropius, sneering about his obsession about worker housing. But his days of regard are almost over. Fresher voices like Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity and Millard Fuller’s cooperative Habitat for Humanity are the thoughtful idealists of the future. PCJ was just a Modernoid aberration. In 2013 the globally important German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main sounded its significant motto for architecture in the 21^st Century: THINK GLOBALLY; BUILD SOCIAL. Johnson’s hyperestheticism is simply the last century’s bad news.

Getting to Ostseebad Prerow!

I wanted bad to interview Dr. Anita Bach, the first woman to teach Architecture at the Bauhaus Uni. She caught my eye because the then Rector was fixing to tear down her gloriously designed MENSA—so that he could talk Hellmut Seemann into planting the long planned Bauhaus Two Museum where her MENSA used to be. (That that registered architectural historian wanted to commit so stinking a cultural felony will make him history for generations, foul as his intentions were!) 

But I come not to braise Gird, but rather to praise Anita! Getting there was the first hassle. I stayed overnight in a Rostock Jugendherberge. The bus that leads to where Dr. Bach lives in OSTSEEBAD Prerow took more than two hours circling the empty summer homes that I thought I’d go nuts finding her house. She said “Get off at the Edeka store”, easy enough. In which direction none of the locals knew! I must have stopped ten cars (most of them lost!) to find Anita. Not a single address number was consecutive.

Then I finally found their manse gradually built up from a square little mouse house, because their three kids didn’t want to abandon their summer memories! Her husband was also a Bauhaus professor, but he’s crippled now. Has to use a one person elevator to change their three floors. Anita was the sweetest wife to her crippled man. 

She had to translate his murmured German to my English ear. I’m 86 and getting more senile by the day. But she kept showing me books she had written in Weimar. I’ll be damned if she was my age. I was born in February 1927, she in August. She explained with pride how she evolved as an architect as she taught.

And she is a knockout cook, giving me the triad of late breakfast, early lunch and a gargantuan supper, fit for the Duke I ain’t. She described how the men ignored the emerging women as they hogged the best positions. I slept perfectly on the third floor, up at dawn to snoop their outdoors. It was raining a tiny typhoon so she drove me to the train back to Rostock. 

I had to tell the cabbie to hustle back to the hostel where I had expected to overnight. The Rostock Hauptbahnhof is the screwiest one I’ve ever got lost in. Dragging the many books she's given me that I’ve already passed on to Dr. Simon-Ritz, the Bauhaus Uni librarian.

I had only a minute to spare, catching the Berlin train. Full of swinging young men who dug my humor! Wait until I tell you what she taught me about the history of modern German architecture. What a home-run hitter I’d say she was if I were back in America.

Amiri Baraka

Dear Jonathan Fischer: I want to praise you for the deserved eloquence of your obit of Leroi Jones. It reminded me of our first encounter outside Philadelphia at Beaver college. I had just dumped the greatest job in my life as the first director of the State Department funded American Studies Institute at the University of Hawaii's East/West Center. Its purpose was to attract Asian students to study technology and American to study Asian culture. Towards the end of my first year (1961-2) I learned to my horror that my assistant, Seymour Lutsky, had been in the CIA since his Iowa Ph.D.(1952).

I accepted English chair/tenured full professor at Beaver College (now Arcadia U) because I had left our new Louis Kahn home in the Greenbelt Knoll experiment in racial integration in Philly. I had just spent three years organizing the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn, installing my first mentor, Gilbert Seldes as Dean.My run-ins with the fascist billionaire donor, Walter Annenberg, publisher of TV Guide was my first awareness of the high price of integrity Universities pay to solicit cash, two millions in this case. (I taught media history there until the temptation of Hawaii.) I accepted a tenured full professor English chair at Beaver College (now Arcadia U). Its standards were aspiring but not very high. We began by admitting men.

My first public move was to invite Amiri to speak to the entire student body. It was iffy he'd come--until I got a late night call fro L.A. that he was on the last red-eye. He spent a lot of time explaining his new Village Voice activism. A Jewish student who was the school's best actress chided him in mid-address. (Why did he have a Jewish girl friend?) Evasive reply!

After lunch we retired to the basement theatre. Where the same "mouthy" Jewess was the lead! Amiri's activist pal standing next to me whispered "let's get the fuckouta here!"  "No, no, no," Baraka replied softly. "She's doing it exactly right!"

Who Sunk the Bauhaus?

The FAZ essay today by Prof. Franziska (Delft) and Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt/Berlin) caught more than my eye. It gripped my heart. For the past 15 years I’ve been reading and ruminating over the Flop the Bauhaus has been over all of its many episodes. The simple answer is that the current Sinecuriat that “ru(i)ns” the Big "B” betrayed him long ago by declining to be WG’s “Bauhauslers” by being the crudest kind of Bauhustlers”. Cameron Sinclair (London/San Francisco) long ago gave rebirth to the Gropius idealism by founding the global society, Architecture for Humanity. I gave his bible, “Design as If You a Damn!”, to the Anna Amalia Library shortly after I arrive in Weimar in 1999, where the Ossi battered city had been nominated the Cultural Capital of Europe to heal its Marxist wounds. Where nobody but me reads it! But me, when despair to convince the Germans about why their dream turned into a nightmare makes me despondent.

Who he, FAZ readers must well ask. Well, now an 86 year old retired of American Civilization and a global alternative journalist. But at three, my father abandoned his family of three (me, a 10 year old brother, and a middle school teaching mother. Dad and his secretary absconded to Las Vegas where he became successful enough as a real estate agent to leave me $150,000 guilt money (his Bigamate friend Ruth kicked in another $100,000) when he died, financing my global enterprises, outside Academe! But in Depression Detroit (1930-45, when I volunteered to become a naval radar specialist. My brother Mike and I were parked 100 miles to the North at the German Dominican nuns Holy Rosary Academy so my mother teach 9^th grade in Hamtramck, the Polish “suburb” read of Detroit. It was hell being homeless, so when I read in graduate school about Grope’s new kind of art school that catered to blue collars, I vowed to check it out.

My qualifications? A curt CV is required. After leaving the U.S. Navy in 1946 as Electronics Teachnician 2^nd class, I enrolled in my hometown U. of Detroit where I graduated in three years as a philosophy major, having won the annual Midwestern Jesuit Province annual essay contest with a rant entitled “Needed: More ‘Red Blooded’ American Catholics”, by which I mean like American Communists the only whites to push for black liberation. And my date and I integrated the Senior Prom at Eastwood Gardens by double-dated with a black couple, of which there were precious few!

I became a Marshall McLuhan fan at U a D, as we mumbled it, the radical Canadian Roman Catholic who hobnobbed with the ilks of Dorothy Day. Every week I read his “radical”essays about the new global media in “Commonweal”, the lay Catholic weekly, and “America,” the Jesuit weekly. He assembled these disparate “takes” into his first book,”The Folklore of Industrial Man” (1951). In went off to Western Reserve University in Cleveland, mainly because my priest uncle, the Rev.Aloysius Mark Fitzpatrick, was the editor of the “Catholic Universe Bulletin”, the Cleveland diocese weekly. (I learned more from two of the brightest Jews I have ever emulated (they were the first Jews in my excessively Catholicized life, Ray Ginger and Harvey Goldberg. 

They made me Prez of the new Jefferson Forum. (I think because a practicing Catholic, I was a perfect dodge for their leftist obsessions!) But when the dissertation committee rejected my request for Marshal McLuhan (“Who he?”), I revolted to Michigan State, where the English department was making the football team as ashamed of its mediocre gamey. (In state tuition also was cheaper!) I had married the most beautiful blonde in Detroit (hell, Michigan!) at 23 so like good Catholics we started seeding children, Michael (1952), Catherine (1954) and Timothy (1956). It took money, so I became the early morning janitor of the East Lansing State Bank, across the street from the college. When I heard gossip at the bank that a 10^th grade English teacher had just been canned, I asked the English chair if taking that job would disqualify me for a Ph.D. (“Hell, no!” he screamed, remembering his own depression era squeeze.)

It was the best autonomous move I ever made . State had just got an ETV channel and was hungry for programming. I proposed a weekly teenage leisure palaver.It was great fun… and highly educational. In fact it led to a year-long Ford grant in New York City, harassing the media to become more humanistic. When “Scholastic Teacher” got wind of me, they made me radio-TV editor, a weekly entrée to a million U.S classrooms. We couldn’t afford Manhattan so we lived Flushing, with the World Fairs, recent and future, filling our eyes and minds.

One Thursday, reading the daily New Times, I caught a story about a media education conference in D.C. I invited myself! Opening the Aud door I spied Ralph Bunche (he had just been a “Time” cover) talking excitedly to another unindentified guy. I introduced myself. The unknown asked, “Well, how’s it going, Mr. Hazard?” “Lousy,” I curtly replied. “I’ve been trying to get an interview with NBC’s innovative President Sylvester “Pat” Weaver for a month now, but his secretary guards him like a bull dog.” Whereupon, the Unknown One identified himself as the publisher of “Time”. “ I’m also on the board of the Ford Foundation, and I like your jabber. How would you like an office in Time to help,”handing me his card! I nearly pissed my pants.

Monday bright and early, I had my own office on the 34^th Floor of the Time-Life Building, overlooking Sixth Avenue, NBC-TV less than a block away. I’ll call Weaver’s office. She was so cold, smoke was coming out of the wires. “Mr. Hazard,” she began solemnly,”it’s the beginning of the fall season and Mr. Weaver is very busy.” I countered, “Well, it’s the beginning of my Ford. So if your boss ever gets 15 minutes, please have him call, Judson 5-4545,the magical “Time”number. Ten minutes later, there was a P.A. announcement. “Is there a Patrick D. Hazard here today. If so, call Pat Weaver at NBC.”

15 minutes? He grilled me about the schools, what kind of TV do they like. For four hours! Interrupted by his phoning every department head with curt order. If Pat Hazard, a Ford TV Fellow this year, help him all you can. Nancy Goldberg, press officer was especially helpful. And Ed Stanley, in charge of Public Projects was as gracious as he was effective.

I’ll never forget the intellectually most exciting day of my education. The son of the founder of “Der Spiegel” and I were allowed to watch an issue of “Life” put together! The editor-in-chief, a photo editor, numerous writers, making everything fit together. It was a media miracle. 

My Love Affair with USA Today

How’s this for a Coincidence? “USA Today” started publishing in August, 1982. I quit teaching in the same week! Everybody mocked both me, the wild professor, and the innovative newspaper. Goons predicted the experimental daily would flop in months. It puzzled my colleagues at Arcadia University (in a Philadelphia suburb) that I would walk away from a full professorship with tenure, or indeed I had chucked the English chairmanship ten years before. And I taught often in London every summer and often the whole year.

Well, here’s a quick Curriculum Vitae explaining my paradoxes. It all began in 1930 when my furniture salesman father abandoned  my Mother, me and a brother seven years older. He flew off to Las Vegas with his secretary Ruth to bigamy.
 
I was the A+ favorite of Sister Mary Felicia (“felix” means “happy” in Latin. I was there ten years until I entered Sacred Heart Seminary, Detroit to become a Catholic priest. I wowed them in both Greek and Latin! But one night just before Easter vacation, my pal Jim VanSlambrouck and I were experimenting for the first time in Chesterfields (That cigarette sponsored Glenn Miller’s Orchestra every weeknight at 7:00 p.m. But tonight, after midnight, sneaking a smoke in the Gothic Tower.  Bang. Suddenly, there was the Rector, Henry Donnelley. (We adored him because he was so good at playing short stop that the Detroit Tigers gave him a tryout! He asked angrily,”What are you seminarians doing after midnight?”  My smart answer was “We trying to learn how Glenn Miller smokes Chesterfields. Any suggestions?” He kicked me out the next day.

I attended my neighbourhood Edwin Denby High, known as “the Whorehouse of Detroit”. I was too innocent to learn why! (I graduated 2nd in the class of 432 students. I joined the Navy on my 17th birthday, joining as a Seaman 1st class (instead of the usual Able-bodied Seaman) because I had scored so high in the application tests. I was eager to appear at Boot Camp, Great Lakes, September 18, 1944, Wilbur Wright Junior College (to purge sailors not good enough in math to become a Radar Technician. Gulfport, Ms. And Corpus Christi,TX and I was Radar Tech 2nd class. Assigned to Pensacola,Fl Naval Air Station, where pilots just a little older than we were learned how to land on aircraft carriers or how to fly the huge Catalinas.

I was discharged in July,1946 and entered the Jesuit U of Detroit, graduating in 1949 as a Ph.B. in philosophy. Grad School at Western Reserve/Cleveland for a Ph.D. in American Lit. I married the best looking blonde in Detroit, Mary Elizabeth Schneider, at the end of 1950, We soon moved to Michigan State, East Lansing, because in-state tuition was cheaper. (I worked summers in automobile factories for tuition.) I was the janitor at East Lansing State Bank where I leaned that the local high school needed a 10 & 12th grade teacher. I took it. MSU had its first TV station, WKAR, so I talked them into a teenage weekly hour, “Everyman Is a Critic.”

I had become a Marshall McLuhan media freak. That got me a Ford Grant to study the newest media up close in New York City. Scholastic Teacher hired me and my wife to edit a weekly guide to radio and TV, and a monthly column in “The English Journal” on Media Teaching. I read the NYTimes every day as I subwayed from Flushing to Manhattan. One Thursday I read there was to be a media education on Saturday in D.c. I invited myself.

As I opened the auditorium door I saw a black man, Dr, Ralph Bunche, talking intently to an unidentified man: Bunche had just been a “Time” cover. I interrupted their conversation boldly: “Hi! I’m Pat Hazard from East Lansing with a For Foundation grant to improve media education in American high schools. DEAD SILENCE! Finally, the unidentified man asked, Well, how’s it going, Mr. Hazard?” “Lousey,” I replied. “I've been calling the secretary of NBC’s president Pat Weaver, the most innovative TV boss.”. And so  on and on.”

Suddenly, the unidentified guy identified himself. “I’m Roy Larsen, the publisher of “Time” magazine and I like your ideas. And I’m on the Ford Foundation advisers. How would you like an office in “Time”? as he slipped me his card! GULP. “See you Monday morning”! That lucky day I soon had my own office on the 34th floor of the Time-Life Bldg! Looking enviously across Sixth Avenue where now sat Pat Weaver, the NBC boss.

I called his secretary one final time! “Mr. Hazard, it’s the beginning of the Fall TV season, and Mr. Weaver is very busy.” Lamely, I countered it was the start of my grant. “If he ever has 15 free minutes, Please call me. I’m just across Sixth Avenue.” Then I gave the sacred Time number Judson 6-2525.” Five minutes later there was a PA question: "Is there a Patrick D. Hazard here today? Please call Pat Weaver at NBC.” Soon I was in his office where he riding a one man seesaw. It was alleged to reduce tension. Anyway my fifteen minutes exploded to three hours during which he fixed me up with all the brass at NBC.” A great year had begun!

Internationalizing The New York Times

I first “noticed” a "New York Times” as a nineteen-year old swabbie at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in 1946. I had just finished a year-long training in Naval Radar in Chicago, Gulfport,Ms, and Corpus Christi,TX and proudly showed the Aviation Electronic Mate, 2^nd Class sign on my dress blues. It was my first year away from home, and was eager to appear grown up. The pilots who were learning to land on aircraft carriers or fly the huge Catalinas were just a little order than we were and equally eager to appear cosmopolitan. We picked up the paper at the local drug store and looked serious. It wasn’t until I entered the Jesuit University of Detroit (my home town) in September, 1946 that I became a regular reader in the college library.

So here I am now, in Weimar, Germany, finishing a fourteen year stint researching and writing a critical evaluation of Walter Gropius’s innovative art school to bring good design to the working classes. I call my book, “Bauhaus: Myths and Realities”, emphasizing the current school leaders as “Bauhustlers” for their betrayal of his blue-collar meliorism for their Upper Muddle Class snootiness. 

 

I was also astonished to discover that they had never even heard of the greatest factory designer in history, Albert Kahn, who immigrated from Hesse, Germany in 1880, at age 11 to Detroit, the oldest son of a Jewish Rabbi, who was so poor his oldest son didn’t even finish High School, but who was so gifted a designer that the leading architecture firm hired him until he was 21, when they splurged him to know Europe, from which he returned to be Henry Ford’s architect. He also was a leader in forming the so-called American Bauhaus, the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1932, which actually achieved what the German “pioneer” merely hoped to accomplish.

The Times has been indispensable to writing that book, but even more essential in setting an example for my sixty years of “Internationalizing” American Lit into “International English Lit”. America made the fatal error that still corrupts US of believing that the Puritan God set aside North America so it could be Christianized. This foul “Exceptionalizing” legitimized killing and reservationizing hundreds of indigenous tribes, justified the slavery of four million African slaves, as well as incarcerating literally millions of poor blacks and Hispanics for the same “crimes” whites enjoy with impunity. It also, alas, falsely justifies the 1%/99% irrational ratios currently crippling our nation’s economic maturity. Before I analyse the hopeful internationalizing of the December 23^rd issue of the INYT (I like to hear it as the false pronunciation of “Isn’t it”), I want to describe how I internationalized American Lit during my public career.

It started with abolishing the scandalous absence of Afro-American Lit. Then Appalachian Lit which suddenly bloomed in the sixties. Next, Jamaica, when Dean Landis financed a seminar between Rex Nettleford,the so-called Thomas Jefferson of the U of West Indies, Seamus Heaney whom I met at the Belfast Festival when he read to my summer students a chrestomathy of Northern Irish poems, and Michael Harper, the black poet at Brown University. Once you get the hang of it, IE Lit is the only logical way to expand. Teaching one year in Britain I paired Emily Dickinson with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twain with Dickens, und so weiter. We booked Australia’s Robert Frost who was summering in the UK.

You’ve probably guessed I was McLuhanized by the Jebbies in Detroit. Indeed in 1949, with a Ph.B in philosophy, I won the annual Mid-American Jesuit Universities essay contest with my first published rant, “Needed:More “Red-Booded”American Catholics”, by which I mean agreed with the local Communist moves to free American blacks. For good measure, my girl and I double-dated with a black couple to integrate the Senior Prom at Eastwood Gardens!

As I finished my dissertation, I got a Ford Grant to spend a year in New York getting the media used to school criticism. I was appointed radio-TV editor of Scholastic Teachers which put my columns in millions of classrooms. Roy Larsen, publisher of “Time” gave me an office on the 34^th floor of the Time-Life Building, whence I dreamed of snagging NBC’s innovative Pat Weaver, across Sixth Avenue. After he fixed me up with his brass, CBC, ABC, and NET followed. The British Film Institute commissioned me to write a quarterly summary of American TV for its journal, “Contrasts”. TIO head Roy Danish helped me organize a weekly screening of “unseen American TV” under the name “24 Hours” BBC 2’s nightly news. I appeared on “Late Night Lineup” with a PBS name to tout this media at their School of Art. Time-Life Films booked me to New York every Tuesday to screen the possible films we asked to be taped the week before. 

Our chief, Peter Roebeck, cancelled our Monty Python opener, “I’m not paying you a $1000 a month to look at that crap.” Yes, Peter,” we humbly replied, making sure WTTW/ Chicago started the Python crawling into all of the PBS circuits. I claim solemnly that sneaking Monty and his other sneaky snakes onto PBS is my only contribution to the maturing of America.I took American media to Senegal in 1964 for the First World Negroes Art Festival. In 1964 I took a Wole Soyinka film to Lagos, Nigeria for exhibition at the American Embassy during the annual Commonwealth Educational Conference. We urged each Commonwealth country to go home and do likewise.

In 1982, my mother died, and now I was free to write my weekly “Hazard-at-Large” letter from anywhere in the world in Philly’s “Welcomat”. I started by going to Shanghai to study Mandarin for six weeks, Actually, I was really after my first International Scoop, because the first Chinese art museum to leave their country was headed for San Francisco, where I spent my first free two years with Mary Mueller, a sweet Okie exPat! Sure enough, I got the May KQED mag cover. Whoopee.

Heard enough of Hazard’s Internationalizing? Here goes my critic of today’s INYT! Monday, December 23, 2013. Hotel Elefant had no delivery. Anna Amalia Kubus is closed until the day after New Years. It has a grand display of German dailies including both TA and TLZ local dailies,, Swiss, Russian, French, British, Turkish, TLS, NYRB, The Economist (the most literate daily in the English speaking world, and a few freebies who don’t deserve this commendation. It’s my current Church. I’m there, sharply at 9 a.m., every day but Sunday where my Church of the day is my sack where I read a swatch of daily newspapers and weekly mags. Today, for example, Die Welt Compact, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Suddeutsche Zeitung (Bavaria), and Der Spiegel (Virgin Mary and Lutheran theology) and Focus. (“Thin without Stress!)

The first thing I noted was the dark blue view of a kid who has been flying a kite atop a favela, where the story tells of families renting their slums for World Cup visitors. Can’t be more concerned about Brazil’s fragile economy than that. Top above paper’s name are ticklers about an Opera boom, EBay’s devious payment scams, and a Rustic New Home. Left column is on Iceland scamming Bitcoin. Right column is Khodorkovsky’s Berlin free press conference. Four columns explores the Rio favela contradictions. Three short midcolumns analyses new Polish midsize cities providing business services. The bottom third of the front page with six teases, plus five online stories at INYT. Com. I love this hidden expansivesness. More analysis for my 3 euros.1/12 page,lower right corner, ad for BVLGARI watches.UGH! Prestige objects and Fashion jerk my prole soul.

p.5 ¼ page Paul Smith/Design Museum/ until 9 March

I’ll be there: Germania just listed 59Euro Trip!

p.8,1/6 BBC Tout. I internet BBC International every morning and go to sleep on New York Jazz. During the day I scan WHYY, my hometown FM, for which I gladly pay $120 a year. I sneak onto Boston’s high IQ WBUR-Fm. But almost never listen to Temple U’s classics. INYT Classified parallels BBC. Cluttered, except for Villoldo v. the Republic of Cuba!? Tiny plug for Classifieds.Pp. II AND III devotes ¼ of two adjacent pages pushing Rolex. Yuck II. Pp.I-IV are called Front Row Center, special reports on opera, “Manon” to “Moby Dick” in 2014. Berlin’s Philharmonic, and neglected composer Phillipe Rameau. Looks like secretly advertised KULTUR!

P. 9.1/4 page, urging readers to Increase Your Global Intelligence via INYT:COM/EURO. A cheapie under 1 Euro for your first four weeks. I guess I risk getting stung/hooked. Especially hating 10 freebies a month!

P.13 ¼ page to Luxury Law Summit. Brits who can afford such real estate should pay higfher taxes, this red radical groans.

p.14 ¼ page..Dubai Dty Free. Yuck, Arab shahs holding down their women!

p.18 (last page) ¼ page Cartier Exhibition, Grand Palais, Paris.

Back to text: What#s In it, INYT!

p.2, In Your Words. Best new feature. Often better than long articles in persuading.

In Our Pages. Smaller than before but essential to the historical mind

“Lessons During Wartime”. The best new feature. Excellent photography, deepening text.

Albert R. Hunt, always enlightening

p.8 Clinton the Arkie almost a ½ page .

Right column on spy program --!/6

“Front Row Center 4 pages good art criticism

p.9 Egypt turmoil reaches U’s

Am U’s job security/ See my closing song in my VITA

pp.-.10-12 SPORTS in SPURTS . I’m excused. Not as good as USA Today. Mea Culpa!

Love the presence of Peanuts (Though I had a grand hassle with his author when I taught in Santa Rosa for a year. He’s a rich creep whoi pleaded poor. BLAH!

p.13 CULTURE

“Perfect retreats bore me! I just sold my Louie Kahn 1952 GreenBelt Knoll 19 family experiment in integration for $110,000. Paid $24,000 in 1956. I loved it for 50 years. 1783 villa, modernized in 1999 cost us 130,000 Euros. Goethe lived on Seifengasse 1. Hazard at 10! It’s a glory on the third floor!

p.14 Fewer movies, wider profit margin will interest my son Michael who is a poet, photographer, and filmmaker in that disorder, in Minneapolis.

p.14, Irish housing complexities interests me the more since my Deidre, an etymologist at Michigan State just tracked its history. In the eighth century, the French were fighting the Moors in the South of Spain. They won and the defeated graciously invited them into their Castle, El Azard, where they taught the French a new dice game. Returned to France, they yelled”Lessons-nous enjoyons Le Hazard!” 1066, they stole all the duchies they could find there, then moved to Ireland for more theft. Behold this Arab Irish man whose green grandparties were either Fitzpatrick or El Hazards.

p.18 International Travelers as usual as always.#

Pardon me, I’m signing up for a month!

Bottom Obit. Only feature better is “The Economist ”’s final page obit.

P. 3 World News/Middle East/Europe. Ukraine (excellently revolting pix),Turkey snoots US, The Crime of Droning Civies,Egypt gips dissenters.

p.4 World News/Europe Africa

Rescue in South Sudan

Putin’s Wobbley character

Vlad#s unfavorite Billionaire airs his headache

p.5 World News Asia

Brunei, India, Thailand, Dhaka Fire, Beijing antigraft panel

X Marks Malcolm's Newest Re-incarnation

Malcolm X is still America’s most moral hero, unfortunately less lucky than his South African counterpart Nelson Mandela. He was nipped by a buddy before Islam could build its power in America. Consider the stuttering Christianity which was his (super) natural competition. 

That brilliant self-made Okie, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY, Dem), had used his brilliant Harvard education to write the most important American document since the Constitution: the demoralization of the American Negro family. Literally millions of blacks were incarcerated for minor drug offenses for which the second President Bush got not a minute in jail. 

As I took a first look at  Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles, the inspiring catalogue the Philadelphia Museum sent after four ignored requests with $13.75 postage and my spending four hours tracking down Customs at Erfurt Airport, the state capital of Thuringia, where I have been writing a book on Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus he had founded in 1919, I was drawn in. 

In 1999 Weimar became the Cultural Capital of Europe, Helmut Kohl’s maneuver to seal the heals of East and West Germanies. Chase-Riboud explores the new moral world of potential liberation. Raised Catholics, my first wife and I were totally ignorant of this innovative behavior.

Plate 1 is called “The Bed” in which two women are resting from “soixante-neuf” sex, the numbers 6 and 9, illustrating that the lovers were mouthing each other’s vulvas. A newly liberated world. I was divorced in Juarez at 43 before I experienced this avant-garde maneuver. At best, superbly evocative. Ordinarily, mediocre messiness. Malcolm surely was better at it than I ever was. But it was one of his many “X”’s that were opening his innovative, revolutionary life.

Her Steles imitate and innovate the great remembrancers of the two civilizations that generated our most generous virtues. Without honorable memories, we humans slither snakishly. America, born on the Puritan lie that God saved the Americas to bless Christians colonizing its expanses. 

Exceptionalism the sociologists dubbed it. Exceptional Self-Delusion is a more accurate description of its falseness. The splendid “Steles” she has populated the world with are our last chance to purge us of that self-destruction habit. Exceptionally stupid as OUR GREAT LIE has made USA. She could be our last chance. At the very least, she is a grand conversion potential. We have until January 20, 2014 to save ourselves from self-extinction.

The (ST)Inky's Long and Most Unhappy Unhappy Lives

Dan Rottenberg's superb and elegant obit for a crappy daily that shit too much reminds me of involvement in the creation of the Annenberg Congratulation School,1957-61, began with my Ph.D. from Western Reserve where two fellow students, Ray Ginger and Harvey Goldberg, taught me by example how to be radical and objective simultaneously. They made me the first president of the Thomas Jefferson Forum, because they erred in thinking a Jesuit University (Detroit) could be a soft touch leader. They never knew I won the Midwest Provinces annual essay with a rant entitled "Needed: More Red-blooded American Catholics" by which I meant opposed to segregation as the local Communists were. They didn't know either that my girl and I dated the Senior Program with a black couple.

I got a Carnegie Postdoctoral grant at Penn to create the first Mass Culture course in America, spooked by that intellectually crazy Canadian Catholic Marshall McLuhan. As a UD undergrad I read every essay he wrote 1946-49 in the lay Catholic weekly "Commonweal" as well as the weekly Jesuit "America" . Those essays made the second mass culture Bible, "The Folklore of Industrial Man" (1951). The first was Gilbert Seldes's "The Seven Lively Arts" (1924).

It helped that this Philly Jew (immigrating from his father's experimental farming around Atlantic City graduated poor from Boy's High but earned scholarships to Harvard. He took over editorship of "The Dial", the intellectually hippest mag in the twenties. So when Annenberg gave Penn $2 million to start, "faute de mieux" I became the "gofer" getting the plot to boil! The first official meeting of the Annenberg School opened on the Monday after Walter had splurged with a Sunday edition of new comics. As President Gaylord Harnwell, Walter, and I waited for the rest of the committee to gather, I decided to tease Mr. Big: "Is this the way you plann to raise standards in American communities?". Harnwell looked like was about to piss his presidential pants. Walter looked dazed and completely silent! Amazed that a new assistant professor without tenure would tweak his balls.

Later, when my Greenbelt neighbor Leon Sullivan complained to me Saturday at the community pool that the Inky had not printed a word about his six-month old strike against TASTYKAKE. "Hire us blacks or we'll avoid your cakes." Monday, bright and early, I was being frisked for weapons for the first and only time in life as I took the elevator to his 13th floor eeyrie. First he called Dimmitman who argued that they had hired a black boy the summer before, but he hadn't cut the mustard. And his lawyer came next. (His wife was working on a Ph.D. and often visited me in my office, absurdly believing this would ease her Ph.Deification. I warned them that "The Reporter" was publishing a story on their censorship the next week, and if they had any honor they'd beat their star lady reporter into print. They didn't.

I taught the history of media until David Riesman recommended me as the first director of the brand new Institute of American Studies at the East-West Center in the University of Hawaii. It was the best job I've ever had--until I discovered that my No. 2 Seymour Lutsky had been in the CIA since his Iowa Ph.D. ten years ago--to silently police Asian and American lefties. I quick on the spot when I offered a full professorship and English chair at Beaver College.

We happily reoccupied our Louis Kahn house in Greenbelt Knoll. By the way, Penn had promised the right to return, but Veep Charles Lee (born Levy) and Walter decided I was a threat to their Dream! I've lived happily ever after.

Putting Up Your Dukes

Terry Teachout’s splendid bio ,”Duke A Life of Duke Ellington” (Gotham Books, $30) reminded  me of my brief encounters with t hat great man. As a Detroit high school  enthusiast I’d skip  Edwin Denby High to hit the downtown Paradise Theatre  with Glen Kemp, a promising  drummer. We’d put up with the petty piffle for the blacks who dominated the crowd. Just to hear his standards thrilled us in a way Art had not yet touched us.

I was depressed to learn in the 60’s rock music killed it. Not until the 80’s did an obsessed oboeist in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra  collect $23,000,000 to reopen what had been the Orchestra’s  first home. So many Southern blacks moved into the neighbor hood as defense workers in World War that the whites fled to the Burbs. No less an ear than Pablo Casals affirmed it had the best acoustics in North America. In the 80’s, visiting my aging mother, I teased that musician that he had killed my youthful  enthusiasm. “Not so,” he amiably barked back.”We have a jazz concert every Saturday night.”

Later, when I had been Ph.D-eafied and taught Am Civ at Penn and lived in Philly, I took my daughter Catherine into Trenton so she could take the train to the Rhode Island of Design, I had time to kill before the superb but neglected New Jersey museums, I took a new Hotel elevator into see if the big T was as ugly upstairs as it mostly was on the ground. It was. Really ugly. On the 7th floor who should enter alone but the one and only D. “What, Mr. Ellington, are you doing in Trenton, noon of a Sunday.” “Another Doctorat”, with an ironic smile.6th Floor: “Princeton, this time.”

Meaning I guess you can stuff the old ones from Fiske and Tuskegee.I reminded him I had spent Easter Saturday  evening in the American Embassy in Lagos, kanoodling with my fave, Johnny Hodges.5th Floor I was there to report on the very first African World Art Fair.4th Floor. “And the next day we opened the Fair with your theme song, “Take the A Train”! Now he was smiling like a kid remembering a Birthday Party. 3rd Floor. “ And I was so hung over from your booze last night, I could hardly hold my TV camera steady!”  2nd Floor. “I remember now,” he gleamed! Ist floor. The door swung open.”What’s your name.” I walked over to the registration desk and gave my first and only anti-autograph. "Dr. Patrick D. Hazard, Chairman, English Department, Beaver College, Glenside, PA.” As he hailed a cab for Princeton, I hollered “And I have the only footage of that concert!” He smiled and mailed a winning “Oh!” with those priceless fingers. He would never know the tragedy: KQED-TV lost it, creating a jazz series.

Later, jazz scholar Marshall Stearns invited me to the first Newport Jazz Festival after I got a Carnegie Postdoctoral two year grant to create the first “Mass Culture” course for the new Annenberg School of Communication, where I was “gofer” for my first academic mentor, Dean Gilbert Seldes. I drove over from Philly, pooped, ordered the last steak dinner to relax. Ten minutes later the great jazz singer Mahalia Jackson arrived, equally hungry. I gave her my meat if she’s whisper sing “You go to My Head” for dessert! What a deal. How sweet she was! Alas, it was a sleepless night. My room was next to Miles Davis, and as usual he was beating up his date! I didn’t have the Balls to turn him in. And I still feel dirty guilty, 55 years later.

The last day, the semanticist heading the egghead side of the Fair saw Mahalia at the back of the hall and complying with his Semantic Decalogue’s First Amendment, “Everyone Must Talk UP!” “Mahalia, what do you think about the Critics Symposium?” PAUSE. “I don’t knows what youse been talkin’ about.”LONGER  PAUSE. “But I sure doos like Jazz.” Symposium simply closes. Mahalia smiles like an Angel. Put up you dukes, all of youse!

Hitler's Last "Stand"!

As we all wonder (in a state of total wonder!) about the latest cache of “degenerate” art Hitler banned in 1938, please notice a forgotten detail. As Hitler, his favorite architect Albert Speer, and his favorite (if unknown) sculptor, Arno Breker, drove together into Paris victoriously in 1940, he declared he wanted to have a German museum as great as the Louvre. 

The art dealer Gurlitt who was preparing that Museum in Linz, Austria (where the dictator grew up) was also the one whose secret cache was just uncovered in Munich: (It pays to know the Boss!) I serendipitously “discovered” Breker in Schwerin, where my new German wife was celebrating a relative’s anniversary. 

 This was the exhibition that the poster designer Klaus Staeck, who is the current Head of the Academy of Art in Berlin, boycotted! BERUF VERBOT! When Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, hassled the apolitical Dusseldorf sculptor, the failed artist Adolf told Arno not to fret: Artists don’t understand politics, as he bestowed a great ranch on him to expedite his sculpturing! The soft, benign side of Adolf!
 

But I came not to praise Hitler (although the failed artist had a soft place in his heart for artistic beginners) but to say what we may be missing because of his Entartete Kunst campaign in 1938. For example, George Grosz (1893-1959 ). Lutz Becker has just written a lively take on his career in Germany, America, and returning to Germany in “George Grosz: Drawings from two portfolios: “Ecce Homo” and “Hintergrund” THE BIG NO (Hayward Publishing (2012). 

My wife Hildegard has scanned this black and white collection of Gross’s (he de-Germanized his last name when he fled Hitler to New York in 1933.) Hilly’s visual selections begin with his Dada premiere. Get the whole book. It’s the grossest Gross I have yet seen. NO has never been so beguiling. “Degenerate”, my ass! Say a big YES to his shrewd NO’s.

Closing the Book on Elmore Leonard

The obit read: “Elmore Leonard, crime fiction writer, died on August 20^th, aged 87.” I didn’t catch up with that news until I opened my issue of “The Economist” (August 31, 2013) to the obit page: There was the author looking miffed, shaking a fist at me. Sorry, I thought: I’ve been meaning to read something of his ever since we graduated together August 1949 from the Jesuit University of Detroit, he with a business degree, mine in philosophy; we were eras apart from the start. 

And psychologically even more distant. He started out writing ad copy for Chevrolets. I despised the Car Culture that corrupted the emerging metropolis. And I confess I was something of a Patsy, never in a fistfight in my entire life. (Still true!) And yet my closest UD chum, Henry B. Maloney (“Call me Hank!”) was a Leonard Freak. Checking Google today, Henry was quoted in the first six citations! Partly geographical: Hank lived in Troy, due North from Detroit Proper, and Kitty Korner from the Upper Sloburb Bloomfield Hills where Leonard lived like a prince. (I lived due East of UaD where the Nouveau Pauvre were invading their first new house, courtesy of FDR’s New Deal.

So instead of attending his Funeral Mass, I checked out the expat American’s secret weapon, the Universal Library Union whereby you can order by computer for 1.5 Euros whatever American book your German library didn’t have, and didn’t care! (Nearly everything!) Bless Göttingen University, a required pitstop for intellectually upward Amis as early as the beginning of the 19^th century. Before the week was out, I held his “Road Dogs” (William Morrow, 2009) for a month if necessary

Taught to climb the shoulders of other better informed citizens, I Googled the poet Robert Pinsky’s review (New York Times, May 28, 2009): In his review,”Playing Dirty”he characterized the novel as “about the varying degreees of truth and baloney in human relationships.Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s,”Road Dogs”—underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars—presents interesting questions.” 

 

Leonard had the chutzpah to rerun old characters in new books. Or maybe this strange habit derived when he began writing western tales in the 1950’s for two cents a word. Three retreads bear the burden of this novel. There’s Cundo Roy, a Cuban Castro bequeathed to America that became great friends with another export, Jack Foley, the esteemed anti-hero who preens with the fact that he has robbed more banks than anyone else in history. (So far as we know! A Fed who tries to put him back in jail is writing a novelized biography of Jack—and hopes he’ll do another robbery—to hype the book he is finishing.” (Another novel centers on Jack’s seducing the girlfriend of that Fed!) All characters seem to need to be ready to be reused in another story line.” 

Finally, there’s Dawn, a really raunchy broad who is waiting for Cundo to be freed from the prison where he got to be a great friend of Jack. I don’t think you’ll surprised to learn that Jacks bangs and bangs Dawn until the sun comes up. Again and again. Another motif is that they all have fiscal assets, Cundo’s being two million dollar mansions in Venice, California! And they fantasize without end on changing those ownerships.

I’m not going to spoil your weekend by telling you which of the three kills of the remaining characters. I recently stumbled on German across a film based on his “Jackie Brown” novel. She’s an airline stewardess serving Mexico. Her second job is taking stolen drug funds in and out of the country. Her ATF contacts compromise her so she has to do away with them. HoHum. I look forward to seeing “Out of Sight” a Steven Soderbergh film starring George Clooney, on another Leonard novel. Heh, Hank’s daughter Caitlin was even aide to Soderbergh for several years. It’s a tight life supplying L.A. I must conclude with a Leonard lark over Catholicism in “Road Dogs”. 

Chapter Twenty-Two(for impatient readers) concerns a minor character Little Jimmy who has a heavy conscience crisis.The sinner is on his knees in a confessional. Jimmy confesses: “Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been twenty-seven years since my last confession.” “Twenty seven years?” the stunned padre replies “Yes, Father. Since the I have missed Mass almost 1400 times.” And so on, implausibly. It turns out Jimmy was gay and didn’t think doing it with dudes was a sin! 

It’s called comic relief! You’ll love him. But not as often as Jack scores with Dawn, in the early light.