I was going to end up in New Hampshire eventually, and this was the week it became inevitable. Nikki Haley launched her campaign for president; I cover campaigns for president; I flew from Washington to Charleston to Boston back to Washington, driving into New Hampshire between all that. All the important stuff went into “Americana,” my Semafor newsletter, but this newsletter’s for the unimportant stuff.
Nobody likes when political reporters act like theater critics, but there is art to this, and campaigns design prosceniums for the real and TV audiences. Haley’s have put her standing in front of potential voters, holding signs distributed by the campaign, with the candidate facing a larger crowd of voters and, behind that, the working press. A “Nikki Haley for President” sign is placed above the voters, and an American flag above that. The shot that makes sense for every camera keeps Haley in the center, and her posterized name readable on screen; the flag is usually lost in the shot, but looms inside the room. On one side of the room, where Haley will pose for photos with supporters, two vertical posters advertise her campaign - again - with a number to text but no explanation of what will happen if you do. (You can intuit it; requests for money, occasionally updates of when she’ll be back in your town.)
It was all terrifically well built. The random sample of voters I talked to at every invent included super-fans and tourists who did not live in the state - a man who drove to Charleston from central Pennsylvania, a woman who’d gotten a ride to Exeter from Lowell, Mass. There were autograph collectors with glamorous prints of the candidate, or freshly-bought books with the receipt still in them. One of them, a friendly man from Maine offered to buy my Haley press badge from Charleston, but didn’t say how much he wanted. I waffled. He showed me, on his iPad, the collage of Romney 2012 buttons and press badges he’d framed in wood. I waffled some more. We exchanged emails. Maybe we’ll make a deal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Haley jumped in the polls this week, by making Republicans aware that there’s a Trump alternative and by saying very popular things to the party’s biggest overlapping factions.
The rest of the week was mostly lousy, and my fault. I started Monday by boarding a train from Wilmington to Washington, walked to a meeting, then jumped on the metro at Capitol South to head into the office. My mind wandered on the short ride, in a way that’s gotten more common with age. I thought about the good habits I was trying to adapt, why I hadn’t done this years ago, and what might have happened if I did; then, I walked off the train; then, I realized that the canvas bag I’d used to pack clothes and some accessories for the short trip to Delaware was behind me, on the train, as it headed to the next station.
Whether you have a shot at recovering a lost item from a subway train depends on when you notice that it was lost, and whether you have the presence of mind to write down or remember what number train it was. I whipped my head around to figure out the train number as soon as I realized the mistake. But I’d realized it too late, and walked up three stairs toward the exit.
There was no way to recover it, and I spent two and a half hours trying. If you find a bag from the Portland book store Powell’s somewhere on the metro, please take it to the station manager, and tell them Dave sent you, and that he recognizes the irony. (He probably won’t understand that part.) I’m lucky, with nothing too bad happening to me as I get older. This, the frequent thinking about un-made choices from years ago, as big as a job you didn’t take or as small as a day you played some game instead of fixing up the guest room, is my least favorite part of the process. I don’t wonder anymore why those success-win mindset influencers are so popular.
Not much downtime, but here’s what I did with it.
The Best Thing I Read: Light week for that, and most of my reading time went to Malcolm Harris’s “Palo Alto.” But’s rhino-sized, I’ve got a bit of it left, and this blog does not live by lies. The winner for the week, by default, was J.M. Coetzee’s “Foe,” which had moved up my stack for two reasons.
One: I’m still trying to sell or donate more than a hundred books, and not keeping many of the good novels I own in flimsy paperback. (The only historic thing about my copy is that it pre-dates Coetzee’s Nobel.) Two: I’d inhaled Philip Ball’s study of “The Modern Myths” last year, and got interested in “Robinson Crusoe” again after he identified it as one of the stories “charged with the magical power of generating versions” of itself. The first English novel was also the first castaway story. If, after the year 1719, you write fiction about a man stranded on a desert island, you are treading in Defoe’s wake.
“Foe” does a bit more with the premise, creating a new castaway, Susan, who gets stranded on the same island as Crusoe, and befriends him and Friday. That’s why she tells us, anyway. By the end, after she’s paid a London writer named Daniel Foe (Defoe’s real name) to tell the story of their stranding; after he’s shared plans to turn it into the story of adventure story that Coetzee would grow up reading; after she rejects that, as “a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire” — well, after that, things fall apart, and by the end we’re not sure if anything Susan told us was true.
The Best Thing I Heard: The criterion here is “what did my mind return to the most after hearing it,” and the answer is “Wedding Vows in Vegas,” sung by Frank Sinatra, Jr. in his collaboration with the inherently funny 80s group Was (Not Was). I’d looked for a video of “the member of the board”* after finishing the first half of James Kaplan’s biography of Frank, Sr., remembering how much I’d liked “Black Night,” the song Rick Alverson dug out of the archives for his movie “Entertainment.” The middle-eight of the Was (Not Was) track made me laugh when I was feeling awful:
How can this be?
Ice cold Chablis
Cable TV
Continental breakfast, free
Baby, then it's you and me
Heard some nice Dexter Gordon albums, too, but nothing as memorable as that.
The Best Thing I Watched: “Days of Heaven,” the second Terrence Malick feature, and the last one I hadn’t seen. The one thing I knew going in was that Malick shot everything he could during the golden hour, to make every image look painted. It works. I’ve seen an idiotic number of movies and this is one of the four or five most beautiful, even if I agreed with the discarded first wave of critics, who sometimes lost track of the plot.
Didn’t watch much else. “Last and First Men,” an abstract adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s novel, consists of Tilda Swinton reading recollections of the final post-human civilization, two billion years in the future. The music and images are by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who filmed the Balkan Spomeniks in 16 mm black and white film. That’s it; it started as a stage production, and turned into this.
The Best Thing I Ate: The Baja Bowl at Huriyali, in Charleston. I can explain. You’ve read about me trying to develop good habits, and my favorite way to test whether they’ve clicked is to glare wide-eyed into temptation and say “no, not anymore.” People come to Charleston for rich Southern cuisine, and if I could resist that, what couldn’t I say no to? It worked. Many more choices like that to come if I’m going to fulfill last week’s joke and turn this into a free self-help blog.
See you next week.
*I think “Family Guy” made that joke first, a good example of a creator’s unfashionable quirk (Seth McFarlane’s love for big band music) elevating one joke over the usual material.
When in a few days the headlines read "reporter becomes millionaire selling press badge" I'll remember this entry.
I liked your thought on un-made choices. As everyone ages we move into that mode of thinking that can be almost paralytic.
Hope you finish Palo alto (I enjoyed hbos silicon valley and was a bit intrigued by the book). Your last paragraph describing foe was really good. I love those twisty meta narratives that blur the line between what's real and what's not. Might check that out.
Didn't think you were totally joking last week bout the self help blog! Nice to see the first family guy reference too. Good luck with the book cleanout, and hope your canvas bag turns up.