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Weekend Butler: James Carville and “The Walking Woke,” Charles Dickens sleepwalks, Raymond Chandler’s memo to his assistant, and the book I’m reading now (you might, too)

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Apr 28, 2021
Category: Weekend

JAMES CARVILLE WOKES UP
In an interview, political adviser James Carville — author of the famous campaign slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” and my personal favorite, “No man stands so tall as when he stoops to kiss an ass” — said the unsayable: “Wokeness is a problem.” If he’s right, we’re about three weeks away from a SLN parody. I’ll give them the title: “The Walking Woke.”

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud. Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.

I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.

WILL WALKING KEEP YOU SMART?
– William Wordsworth is said to have walked 180,000 miles in his life.
– Nietzsche: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
– Charles Dickens walked in his sleep: “The road was so lonely in the night, that I fell asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly.”

And this: In 2004, Jennifer Weuve of Boston University’s School of Public Health studied the relationship between walking and cognitive decline in 18,766 women aged 70 to 81. Her team asked them to name as many animals as they could in one minute. Those who walked regularly recalled more penguins, pandas, and pangolins than the women who were less mobile. Weuve then read a series of numbers and asked the women to repeat them in reverse order. Those who walked regularly performed the task much better than those who didn’t. Even walking as little as 90 minutes per week, Weuve found, reduced the rate at which cognition declined over time. Therefore, because cognitive decline is what occurs in the earliest stages of dementia, walking might ward off that neurodegenerative condition.

And thus… Allbirds.

BLAKE BAILEY AND PHILIP ROTH AND SCOTT RUDIN
Of course I have “thoughts.” And “questions.” And even a few “stories” — in the long ago, I spent an afternoon with Roth for a profile. Do you care? I doubt it. And soon enough, I won’t either. So I’m sparing you. You’re welcome.

WANT TO READ WHAT I’M READING? “KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI.”
I knew about the book, but it took a piece about the start of filming to activate me to get David Grann’s book. Martin Scorsese directs. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Jason Isbell and a number of Arizona actors star. Huge budget. Release date: December 31, 2021. If theaters are open, odds favor I’ll be there. You too.

Why?

from The Times review:
In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson hosted a delegation of Osage chiefs who had traveled from their ancestral land, which Jefferson had recently acquired — from the French, not the Osage — in the Louisiana Purchase. The Osage representatives were tall, many of them over six feet, and they towered over most of their White House hosts. Jefferson was impressed, calling them the “ finest men we have ever seen.” He promised to treat their tribe fairly, telling them that from then on, “they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.”

Over the next 20 years, the Osage were stripped of their land, ceding almost 100 million acres, and were forced onto a parcel in southeastern Kansas that measured about 50 by 125 miles (four million acres). This land would be theirs forever, the United States government told them.

And then this promise, too, was broken. White settlers began squatting on Osage territory, skirmishes ensued and eventually the tribe had to sell the land for $1.25 an acre. Looking for a new home, the Osage found an area of what was to become Oklahoma that no one else wanted. It was hilly and unsuited to cultivation. The Osage bought the parcel for roughly a million dollars, later adding a provision that the land’s “oil, gas, coal or other minerals” would be owned by the Osage, too. Thus they owned the land above and whatever was below, as well.

No one argued the point at the time. No one but the Osage knew there was oil under that rocky soil. The Osage leased the land to prospectors and made a fortune. “In 1923 alone,” Grann writes, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.” They built mansions and bought fleets of cars. A magazine writer at the time wrote: “Every time a new well is drilled the Indians are that much richer. The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”

Something was done: the Osage started dying in what became known as the Osage Reign of Terror. After two dozen were dead, they sent Barney McBride, a white oilman, to Washington, D.C., to ask the federal government to intervene. The next day his naked body was found, stabbed over 20 times.

And then J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI got involved.

I’m only a few pages in. I’m definitely involved. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.]

RAYMOND CHANDLER: HIS FICTIONAL DETECTIVE WAS TOUGH; AS AN EMPLOYER, HE WAS A SWEETHEART.
In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlow has no secretary. Raymond Chandler, who created him, did. Her name was Juanita Messick, and these were her marching orders:

“Assert your personal rights at all times. You are a human being. You will not always feel well. You will be tired and want to lie down. Say so. Do it. You will get nervous; you will want to go out for a while. Say so, and do it. If you get to work late, don’t apologize. Just give a simple explanation of why, even if it is a silly explanation. You may have had a flat tire. You may have overslept. You may have been drunk. We are both just people.

“I am only exacting in the sense that I want things right. I am not exacting in the sense that I expect human beings to subordinate their own lives to my whims. If you should ever feel that I am acting that way, for God’s sake tell me so. I must have order and organization from you, because I lack it myself. If you do not fully understand a sentence, or a word, or a punctuation mark, say so and demand an explanation. If the explanation you get does not clarify things for you, demand another explanation. Do not be satisfied with anything less than you want. It is never stupid to ask questions. It is only stupid to guess at the answers and take a chance on being wrong.”

WATER, WATER, FAR FROM EVERYWHERE AND NOT A DROP TO DRINK… UNLESS YOU’RE NESTLÉ
from the Guardian:
California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water, as drought conditions worsen across the state. Nestlé has sucked up, on average, 25 times as much water as it may have a right to.

HEAVY ROTATION: ELLE KING, “THE LET GO”