Dave's journal, year two, weeks sixteen and seventeen

Black tie, white noise.

(Photo by me, from London, a few weeks back.)

Here is how important the White House Correspondents Dinner is to the media class: The New York Times has boycotted the event itself for 17 years, but it covered the “best red carpet looks.” Did any reporters make it? Not unless they were TV reporters, no. Andrew McCarthy, the “Pretty in Pink” actor who became a pretty good travel writer, was the only writer who made it in.

Who cares? Not me! There are gala dinners all the time, and I’ve evolved from wanting to attend this one, to attending it, to churlishly turning down an invite, to being perfectly fine with its existence. My wife and I went to one party, sponsored by my company, and had three and a half hours of pleasant conversations. I was rude just once, and even then, it’s debatable.

This is what happened. I was walking from the interior of the party house to the veranda, where my friend Jonathan was at the bar. A PR professional stopped me, and said her name — I know her, we’d worked together. She wanted to introduce me to someone from “[acronym]” — I’m not being coy, I couldn’t hear the letters. The VIP she wanted me to meet was mid-conversation with someone I didn’t know, and it looked like one of those fun conversations, like it might end with exchanging dinner recommendations. The PR professional, to kill time, asked me: “You cover politics, right?”

Back me up. Isn’t that strange? This person knew me, had exchanged emails with me — the most personal connection most people have with most other people. And she needed to check if I still covered the beat I’d covered since 2006? “I’ll do this later,” I said, and walked outside to meet my friend.

Not much of a story, but seriously, good for the people who got stories out of this weekend. I don’t like bothering people for photos, and prefer talking with them if I have something sort of interesting to say. Not easy. The Washington look-over — eyes breaking contact with yours, scanning for someone more famous who might be in the room — is especially bad on these weekends. But I’ve had nice little conversations with the people whose studios force them to go to Washington. When “Modern Family” was on the air, and a gay Republican strategist named Fred Karger was “running for president'“ (showing up at things so he could attack Mitt Romney over the Mormon church’s role in banning same-sex marriage), a friend from CBS brought Karger over to an afterparty to meet Eric Stonestreet, half of the gay couple in that show.

“Do you want to meet Fred Karger?” my friend asked.

“I assure you,” said Stonestreet, “that I don’t want to meet Fred Karger.”

It was well said and it crushed Karger, who was standing two feet away and probably expected a photo. (Stonestreet wasn’t even the famous half of that TV gay couple!)

I don’t write much about work here, and I’ll keep it that way this time, even though the big story of my last few days was very easy to bump into. (Protesters gathered on the GWU campus, then outside the Hilton where the WHCD is held and, weirdly enough, where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan.) When I had downtime and clarity, I worked on a proposal for a long-form project I might want to write. When I had less clarity I went outside and read. My wife and I spent a lovely little day in Annapolis, splitting fish and chips in a not-that-overpriced place on the water, and loaded up on bread products at an Amish market. She was busy that night, I wasn’t, and I drove from Maryland to a friend’s house in Virginia where she and her husband, for the fifth year, had roasted a pig and encouraged guests to rip juicy chunks out of its crisped skin.

Other than that, I kept to myself.

The Best Thing I Read: Hugh Thomas’s “Cuba” mocked me from its place on the bookshelf for at least a dozen years. I picked it up cheap, knowing little about Thomas — I hadn’t read “The Slave Trade” yet — but impressed by the girth of this thing. In paperback, it was nearly cubic, 1700 pages of small type. Did I need to know this much about Cuba? Did I want to?

It turned out that I wanted to, though I’m not sure I really needed to. “Cuba” is a Deepwater Horizon of a book, gushing beyond anybody’s ability (certainly not Thomas’s) to control it. Everything makes it in, from charts about sugar production to minute-by-minute recreations of coups. Half the book covers the centuries before the Castro revolution; half covers the Communist takeover of the island in journalistic detail. I hacked away at this sucker for months, and didn’t let it beat me, but it was easy.

I liked Michelle Dean’s “Sharp,” too, a book I’d bought in 2018 when I walked past a signed copy. Dean tells the history of American literature and criticism in the 20th century through the lives of acerbic women, each career flowing into the next, very fair about what they were denied and unsparing about how some kept going after the muse left. In her closing bit about Dorothy Parker, Dean quotes Parker’s well-remembered description of her Robert Benchley’s panic in bookstores.

It was no joy to him to see lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, ‘There–I’ve done it! I have written THE book. Now it and I are famous forever.”

Recently, I’ve felt just the opposite. Bookstores, and my own library, inform me of just how much stuff has been published to be read by maybe a few thousand people. Ted Gioia gave his Honest Broker newsletter over to Elle Griffin last week, and her recap of what we learned in the antitrust case that killed the Penguin Random House acquisition of Simon & Schuster. Most books simply won’t get read. Books by superstars go out to fanbases who don’t want them; Billie Eilish is the most famous recent example. (I have a beautiful but un-enlighting coffee table book about Spike Lee’s films that I bought because he signed it, and I don’t know why anyone would buy it if he didn’t.) The scouring of my book collection will go on for months, and every week I feel a bit less trapped by the stuff, a little happier that at least somebody read these yellowing paperbacks.

Two I enjoyed and will give away: Fake memoirs by Chris Elliott (a piss-take on his comedy career) and Neal Pollack (a parody rock memoir by a then-33 year old writer who had a spectacular grasp on bullshit rock history in the Lester Bangs tradition).

Books read
Malachi Ward, “From Now On”
Hugh Thomas, “Cuba”
Scott McCloud, “Destroy!!”
Mike Resnick, ed., “Alternate Tyrants”
Robert Kirkman, “Science Dog”
Hirokatsu Kihara and Junji Ito, “Stitches”
Simon Pegg, “Nerd Do Well”
Neal Pollack, “Never Mind the Pollacks”
Chris Elliott, “The Guy Under the Sheets”
Rob Delaney, “Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.”
Julia Wertz, ed., “I Saw You…”
Michelle Dean, “Sharp”

Books purchased
Roddy Doyle, “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”
John Julius Norwich, “Absolute Monarchs”

The Best Thing I Watched: “Soy Cuba,” which is sitting around on Kanopy and free if you have a library card. Everything Scorcese did makes a little more sense when you see what Mikhail Kalatozov did with a propaganda assignment.

Runner-up: Maybe the last Piskor/Rugg “Comics Kayfabe” video, the only pure nostalgia content that I’ve enjoyed recently, for three reasons. One: Nobody digs as deep in the stacks as Piskor and Rugg did. Two: Both learned how to make comics, and Piskor in particular was a generational talent; they know how hard it was for artists to finish their hats and writers to pack all their jokes and references into the pages. Three: Alan Moore’s “1963” was one of the reasons I stayed interested in comics, a total fluke purchase when I was killing time at Black Whale (RIP) in Rehoboth instead of going to the beach. Alan Moore and two of his old collaborators, Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette, created a six-issue tribute to Marvel’s golden age — incredibly faithful, with obvious stand-ins for the Lee/Kirby/Ditko characters, faithful art, and even parodic house ads. As a kid who thought all parody was funny, I read and re-read the weird gags Moore put into these books, like a gibberish English correspondence course (“Shamed of you English?”) and a “delicious monkey” you could get in the mail. Moore would return to this well years later with “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” his collaborations with Kevin O'Neill that recast Victorian and Edwardian-era British fictional characters as the members of a super-team. But O’Neill (another RIP) had a distinctive style, very far from the mighty Kirby art that generations of kids would copy. Bissette and Veitch really captured the look of 60s comics; their colorists nailed the assignment, too. I remember obsessing over the “1963 1/2” that was going to wrap up the series, and never got released — maybe intentionally, maybe because Moore got distracted. He would get more personal satisfaction from other nostalgia-jamming comics, and like the “League,” every post- “1963” attempt he made to deconstruct the genre was better received. But there is something special in how he wrote these books, living completely inside the prose of the schlocky early heroes of comic-writing. Before I watched this, I read some early Keats poems and stumbled across “Imitation of Spenser” — which I found hilarious. Moore would end up parodying Spenser, too; by the end of “League” he has recreated the entire history of Britain through its contemporary pop cultures, and brought the Fairie Queene into his own fantasy universe. No one else can pull this stuff off.

The Best Thing I Heard: Made another playlist, this time compiling Allen Touissant’s songs from 1959 to his award-aimed collaboration with Elvis Costello in 2006. (Costello is the most annoying vocalist any of his heroes have ever worked with, but you can’t really hate him for helping them write and sell new songs.)