On January 2, 2015 we signed a contract with to build an in-law apartment, deck and put siding on our home. He told us it would take 2.5 - 3 months to complete. It is November 16, 2015 and the work is still not done. In fact, he abandoned the job on 10/26/15.
The contractor we had to hire to finish the job said that butchered our house. Not only do we have to pay to finish the job and correct mistakes, but he also walked off with the 4800 we gave him as partial payment for the deck we decided to have him make larger than originally planned. I contacted the state after he stopped returning my calls and found out his license has been suspended so he won't be finishing our job no matter what. Apparently he did this to someone else and he was supposed to pay back the guaranty fund, but he stopped making payments so they suspended his license.
I really thought I did my homework before hiring. He was recommended to us by an electrician we use that has worked with him.
I called the references gave me. I checked the CT licensing website and made sure he was licensed and asked him for a photocopy of his insurance. The only thing I could not find was online reviews. It seemed odd to me in this day and age. I hope that this review will spare someone the heartache we have had. What makes me really sad is is very personable and seemed like a nice guy. I just can't believe this happened to us.
WOW & Company Inc has surpassed our expectations regarding integrity, service and customer experience. Five years ago installed hardwood floors within my home, the price was the best and the flooring was exceptional.
My wife and I were extremely happy with their service. Most recently, we noticed there were defects showing in the floor, and we asked to come out to the house to see if there was something we could do to fix the problem.With that said, advised us that there were a defect in the wood and this problem should have never occurred. Went into action immediately, sending out his crew to further inspect. The outcome was that replaced all of the flooring at no cost. This happened over a period of 3 weeks. If you are looking for a great product with outstanding customer service that will over deliver in everything they do flooring is the place to shop. Previously, we referred to my family and friends and today I am referring service to the entire state of Florida how about the entire WORLD! I called about the job, he asked me to email his assistant as he was at a job site when I called.
His assistant was quick to respond to my email and got me set up with an appointment. She emailed again a couple of days before to check that the time was still good for me. Came to look at the problem, we discussed solutions and a price. He was back within the week to complete the job which he did efficiently. I would use his services again, he was prompt, efficient and very knowledgable of the best products and solutions for the situation. # 218 Robina Street Philadelphia, PA. 27 PARK PL 303 New York City, NY.
31 14 84 street East Elmhurst, NY. 913 New Jersey 23 Pompton Plains, NJ. 655 Washington Ave. A 80 Franklin Street Bloomfield, NJ.
23 White Birch Cir Miller Place, NY. Shelton, CT. 55-07 Metropolitan Ave Ridgewood, NY. 162 ceaview Avenue Jersey City, NJ. 909 Woodland avenue Belmar, NJ. PO Box 1045 Newburgh, NY.
3109 81st St East Elmhurst, NY. 45 Barkley Avenue Clifton, NJ. Jamaica, NY. 2 Ranch Blvd, Manahawkin, NJ. 127 Melissa Ct Lakewood, NJ.
Basking Ridge, NJ. 175 lauman lane Hicksville, ny. 5 quincy court Wayne, NJ. 35 North Woods Dr. Ocean Township, NJ. 15 Reese Ave Hackettstown, NJ.
525 Alexander Avenue Linden, NJ. Morris Plains, NJ. A 174 Passaic Ave Fairfield, NJ. 4 Calloway St Howell, NJ. 259 Main St Chester, NJ.
3 Wield Court Park Ridge, Nj. 558 Main St. A 37 Lake Ave Eatontown, NJ. 200 Avenel St Avenel, NJ. 36 Mill Plain Road, Danbury, CT. 361 Victory Blvd.
Staten Island, NY. 1 BAYSIDE TER Jersey City, NJ. 15 TOWNLEY Hartford, CT. 229 MAIN ST Andover, NJ. 372 Fullerton Ave Newburgh, NY. 1987 Cruger Ave Bronx, NY.
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4824 Beach 48th Street Brooklyn, NY. 326n lanza ct Saddle Brook, nj. 773 Maple Ave Piscataway, NJ. 112 W 34th street Manhattan, NY. 209 Overlook Dr Sussex, NJ. 1081 Buxton Rd.
A 1015 Elmont Road Valley Stream, NY. Park Ave Guttenberg, NJ. 433 Shirley Parkway Piscataway, NJ. 221 CHERRYVILLE RD Flemington, NJ. 24 STONEHURST TER Hazlet, NJ. 605 Springfield Ave Newark, NJ.
55 LINCOLN CIR Flemington, NJ. 20 Laurel Hill Road Mountain Lakes, NJ. 2751 Grand Avenue Bellmore, NY. Located in Kearny,NJ and Sea Girt, NJ Kearny, NJ. Piscataway, NJ.
41 Sears Ave Atlantic Highlands, NJ. 5920 8th Ave Brooklyn, NY. 230 Northland Blvd Cincinnati, OH. 147 Hillside Ave Newark, NJ. 207 linden ave. Verona, NJ. 1372 Merry Ave Bronx, NY.
14805A HILLSIDE AVE Jamaica, NY. 2444 Olympia Ln Blakeslee, PA. 149 MAIN ST Bloomsbury, NJ. 1 Osborne Ter Wayne, NJ. 12 MARY LANE Fanwood, NJ. 430 Grant Street Bridgeport, Ct. 11 Oxford Dr East Hanover, NJ.
PO Box 5231 Clinton, NJ. Danbury, CT. 12-09 Astoria Blvd Astoria, NY. 1371 Hamilton Street Somerset, NJ. 1976 gildersleve ave. Bronx, ny. 415 92-nd street Brooklyn, NY.
2334 Boston Road Bronx, NY. 41 1st street Dover, nj. 26 A Righter ave Denville, NJ. 91-03 32 ave East Elmhurst, NY. 353 Aycrigg Ave Passaic, NJ.
419 15th Avenue Newark, NJ. 184 Garside st Newark, NJ. 35 E 106th street New York, NY.
330 Pleasant Road Long Valley, NJ. 399 Cary Avenue Staten Island, NY. 862 Westfield Ave Elizabeth, NJ.
226 Smithtown Blvd. Nesconset, NY. 6 lace bark lane Jackson, NJ. 220 N 14th St Kenilworth, NJ. 3115 Sedtwick Avenue Bronx, NY. PO Box 155 Garnerville, NY.
560 Cross St Lakewood, NJ. 14 Pitt Road Springfield, NJ. 35 Scenic Dr Oak Ridge, NJ. 144 Simonson Avenue Staten Island, NY.
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6 Bluebird Lane Manchester, NJ. 259 Merchants ave South Plainfield, NJ. 184 Strong Sreet Brentwood, NY. 7 West 37th St New York, NY. 1863 Pond Rd Ronkonkoma, NY.
950-7 Old Medford Ave, NY. 1 Dogwood Ln Washington, NJ. 1075 Webster Ave Bronx, NY. 33 Chamberlain Ave Elmwood Park, NJ.
144 Sherman Ave Cedar Grove, NJ. Milford, Nj. 16 Fountain Street Clifton, NJ. 55 Main St Lebanon, NJ. 1335 Route 31 S Annandale, NJ.
19 Hunter St Succasunna, NJ. P.O. Box 157 Sergeantsville, NJ.
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812 County Road 579 Flemington, NJ. 1214 east 37th st Brooklyn, NY. 60 Portland Ave Bergenfield, NJ.
636 Rockaway Tpke Lawrence, NY. 141 Moonachie Road Moonachie, NJ. PO Box 308 Middlesex, NJ. Bedminster, NJ. PO Box 8282 Astoria, NY. 62 Elm Dr.
Farmingdale, NY. 300 ROUTE 24 Chester, NJ. 268 Route 6N Mahopac, NY. Po Box 8121 Bridgewater, NJ. Monroe, NY.
244 5TH AVENUE Ste Q205 New York, NY. 11 holland ave White Plaine, NY. 607 11th Street Union City, NJ.
Lakehurst, NJ. 504 Openaki Rd Denville, NJ. 23 E Shore Trail Sparta, NJ.
new york Manhattan, NY. 92 Bell St Orange, NJ. 576 CHRISTOPHER ST Orange, NJ. 2 Woodmere Ct Barnegat, NJ.
535 Old York Rd Somerville, NJ. 163 farnham avenue Lodi, NJ. 5 Culebra Ave Toms River, NJ. 101 E Main Street Little Falls, NJ.
A 120 Stryker Lane Hillsborough, NJ. 27 Goldmine Road Budd Lake, NJ. po 6095 East Brunswick. 275 State Rt 10 E. 220-226 Succasunna, NJ. East Brunswick, NJ. 56 JERSEYVILLE AVE Freehold, NJ.
89-91 Coit Street Irvington, NJ. 1809 N Black Horse Pike Williamstown, NJ. 4309 43rd St. A 10 Newhardt Place Jackson, NJ. 38 Old Beaver Run Rd Lafayette, NJ.
110 West 34th Street New York, NY. 2678 e 7th st floor 2 Brooklyn, NY. 867 Boylston St Boston, MA. Freehold. 341 Harding Hwy Pittsgrove, NJ.
PO Box 1085 Forked River, NJ. 20005 33RD AVE Bayside, NY. 457 Bayberry Lane Mountainside, NJ. Bronx, NY.
531 US Highway 1 North Palm Beach, FL. po box 554 Wading River, ny. Po Box 232 Ogdenburg, NJ. 51 KERO RD Carlstadt, NJ. 350 7th Ave New York, NY. Astoria, NY.
6 Saxon Ct Freehold, NJ. 6 Blazier Rd Warren, NJ. 354 belgrove dr Kearny, NJ.
20 Mine St. Flemington, NJ. 1059 riverton street North Brunswick, NJ. 16 MOUNT BETHEL RD Warren, NJ.
217 WATCHUNG AV No,Plainfield, NJ. 66 Little Falls Rd Cedar Grove, NJ. Metuchen, NJ. 105 Cornelia Brooklyn, NY. 45 Oceana Drive Brooklyn, NY.
Nutley, NJ. 547 River St. Paterson, NJ. 155 east 4 street New York. 5 Knoster Dr. Stockton, NJ. 133 Water Street Brooklyn, NY.
3 Prospect Street Peapack, NJ. 1908 Coney Island Avenue Brooklyn, NY. Staten Island, NY. 1620 Orchard Ter Linden, NJ.
2446 Wallace Ave Bronx, NY. 31 Fowler Ave Carmel, NY. 15 W 36th St Fl 13 New York, NY. PO Box 128 Whitehouse, NJ. 4 Chaucer Drive Hackettstown, NJ. 6817 Clyde St Forest Hills, NY. 101 West End Avenue Inwood, NY.
166 TANGLEWOOD DR Somerville, NJ. 128 N 5th Ave Mount Vernon, NY. 1439 DEER PARK AVE North Babylon, NY. Fanwood, Fanwood, NJ.
1007 Livingston Ave North Brunswick, NJ. 11 Quail Court Hamburg, NJ. A 1851 Cable Dr Toms River, NJ. Comly Rd Lincoln Park, NJ. PO Box 1001 Bedminster, NJ. 87 North Water Street Greenwich, CT.
PO Box 1438 Greenwich, CT. Chatham, NJ. 156 East Main Street Huntington, NY. Oakdale, NY. 3 CONVERY BLVD Woodbridge, NJ. 212 WRIGHT ST Newark, NJ.
6 Deal Ave Oceanport, NJ. Staten Island, ny. PO Box 412 Springfield, NJ.
17 provost place Mahopac, NY. 7 Salem Park 1A Elizabeth, NJ. 570 BARNUM AVE Bridgeport, CT. 151 W Industry Ct Ste 7 Deer Park, NY. 22 Schweinberg Dr. Roseland, NJ.
PO BOX 162 Harrison, NY. 800 lindley st Bridgeport, CT. B 18 Biggs Ln Hillsborough, NJ. 304 Gower St Staten Island, NY. Elizabeth, NJ. 528 Homer Ter Union, NJ.
30 Rutgers Ave Jersey City, NJ. 114-28 175 STREET Jamaica, NY. 10 warwick cir.
Springfield, NJ. 18 Macculloch Avenue Morristown, NJ. 212 day ave Cliffside Park. Atherton State College, PA. 7 Bright Rd Port Murray, NJ. 28 Parker Ave Flemington, NJ.
30 old kings highway Darien, ct. 22 Britton Rd Stockton, NJ. Po Box 245 Pompton Plains, NJ.
315 Seventh Avenue New York, NY. 118 STAGECOACH RD Clarksburg, NJ. 655 Rahway Ave. Woodbridge, NJ. 496 Grand Blvd Westbury, NY.
149 E. Long Beach, NY. 113 Elmwood Dr Clifton, NJ. 122 Park Ave Manalapan, NJ. New York, NY. Forest Hills Forest Hills, NY.
Columbia, NJ. 8558 67th DR Rego Park, NY. Blairstown, NJ. 31 Hillview Avenue Franklin Park, NJ.
113-12 Richmond Hill. 65 Townhouse Ln Littleegg Harbor, nj.
B 92 Brooklawn Dr Morris Planes, NJ. 1107 Reagan Ct Wall, NJ.
65 West Warren Street Washington, nj. 7516 14th Ave. Brooklyn, Ny.
174 POINT BREEZE DR Hewitt, Ne. 424 Central Avenue Peekskill, NY.
Brooklyn, NY. 6976 113th St. Forrest Hills, NY. 136-20 38 Ave Suite 10J Flushing, NY.
13 Peace St Danbury, CT. 228 Johnson Ave, Suite #4 Hackensack, NJ.
45 Catherine Ct. Ringwood, NJ. 791 Middle Country Rd Saint James, NY.
20 Wilton Ave Norwalk, CT. PO Box 341045 Jamaica, NY. 1080 New Haven Ave Milford, CT. 275 Engle St Englewood, NJ.
404 E 55TH ST New York, NY. Elizabeth, NJ. 1631 brunella ave Piscataway, NJ. 139 MORRISTOWN RD Bernardsville, NJ. 424 N.
Midland Ave Saddle Brook, NJ. Nutley, NJ. 245 Whitenack Rd Far Hills, NJ.
200 E 2ND ST Huntington Station, NY. Middle Village, NY. 9263 Queens Blvd Rego Park, NY.
Manasquan, NJ. 618 Montgomery Rd Hillsborough, NJ. Floral Park, NY. 716 Newman Springs Road Lincroft, NJ. 408 EAST 154TH ST. Bronx, NY. 270 New Jersey 18 East Brunswick, NJ.
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207 Green Street Brooklyn, NY. 200 Bradford Ave Linden, NJ. 458 Cleveland Ave Bayville, NJ.
296 kings hwy # 3 Brooklyn. 210 west 107th street New York, NY. 630 Ridge St Peekskill, NY. Sylvan dr West Hempstead, NY.
48 Park Avenue Roosevelt, NY. 600 Third Avenue, 2nd floor Manhattan, NY. 26-12 Borough Pl Woodside, NY. B 171 Hidden Lake Pl Newport News, VA. 271 Vanderveer Place Long Branch, NJ. 40 Woodlan Dr. Brick, NJ.
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9840 57 Avenue Corona, NY. 607 W Westfield Ave Roselle Park, NJ. 54 Ralph ave Brentwood, NY. 2187 Holland Avenue Bronx, NY. 1 West ST Bronx, NY. 630 Windermere Ave Interlaken, NJ. 225 Parsonage Rd.
Edison, NJ. 124 remsen road Yonkers, NY. 94 frederick street Stamford, ct.
4 Stockton Blvd Hillsborough, NJ. 20 Staats Rd Bloomsbury, NJ. Roxbury, CT.
414 Century Ln Somerville, NJ. 35 New Street Montclair, NJ. 2958 West 8th Street Brooklyn, NY. 4 Willowcresrt Road Denville, NJ.
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261 W 35th St Ste 1408 New York, NY. 56 Elizabeth Lane Budd Lake, NJ. 1005 Mauna Loa Drive Forked River, NJ. 805 Orchard Avenue Point Pleasant Beach, NJ. 540 Tiffany Street Bronx, NY. 19 longfellow dr Carmel, NY. 26 Dartford Road Morris Plains, NJ.
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44 Hilton st Clifton, NJ. 270 old york rd Bridgewater, nj.
91 Park Heights Ave Dover, NJ. 45-24 157th STREET Flushing, NY. 111 East 14th Street #294 New York, NY. 1802 State Route 31 Clinton, NJ. 121 Monhagen ave Middletown, NY. 574 N.
Broadway (Rte 110) Amityville, NY. 2381 Dean st Brooklyn, NY.
I have more than once mentioned in these essays my extensive if unsystematic collection of our national literary patrimony in the Library of America. Now and again I take one down from the shelf more or less at random. This past week it was one of the two volumes of Teddy Roosevelt, the one containing The Rough Riders and his autobiography.
I found the latter, first published in 1913 not too long before his death, beautifully written, full of fascinating anecdote, and frequently rather profound in its political philosophy. That this final quality should so surprise me is partly an indictment of my ignorance and partly an evidence of the degree to which I and many others have come to “define deviancy down”, in the memorable phrase of Patrick Moynihan. The last place one seeks political profundity is in an American politician. To the degree that I had already formed a conception of TR when I picked up the book, it was of a rugged individualist, outdoorsman, horseman, “environmentalist”, great white hunter, and ninety-seven-pound weakling transformed into a war hero in an embarrassing war. There was nothing particularly mistaken about this conception, except for its utter inadequacy. In his opening chapter, entitled “Boyhood and Youth”, he writes thus: “As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught the laissez-faire doctrines—one of them being free trade—then accepted as canonical.” He is speaking about the intellectual atmosphere of his years at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1880. “All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard.
But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility there is a collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Croly’s ‘Promise of American Life’ and Walter E. Weyl’s ‘New Democracy’ would generally at the time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.”.
In my opinion, a genuinely humble one, a large part of our dilemma is a failure to recognize a truth that Theodore Roosevelt stated as “the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility there is a collective responsibility.” How can it be that the greatest democracy the world has yet known—a nursery and proving ground of seemingly infinite industrial, intellectual, and artistic invention and innovation-has a legislature that simply doesn’t work? How can it be that for all our political passion, principles, polarities, and processes, not to mention the tweet storms, we seem incapable of addressing, or for that matter honestly identifying, the most acute actual problems our nation faces?
As I write this, our Congress is poised to enact “historic tax reform”. Though they are readily available in our overheated press, I share no apocalyptic interpretation of the pending legislation. That it will unleash a gusher of economic growth strikes me as most unlikely. That it will make sharecroppers of the middle class is hardly less so. Rearranged tax policies are not exactly irrelevant, but there are many more important things we should be talking about.
However, one thing about this legislation is indisputable. The process by which it has been created is disgraceful. You or I could make important decisions concerning our personal or professional life by analogous procedures only by abandoning all self-respect.
“I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself,” Roosevelt writes. “But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honesty in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few.”. The question of the relationship of the individual to society, the stuff of political philosophy and for that matter most great literature, likewise features prominently in the preamble to the Constitution. Its authors there announce as their intention the formation of “a more perfect union”. They were using the word perfect in its old Latin sense of “finished” or “complete,” and they could modify the adjective— more perfect-because they knew that the perfection could never be, well, perfect.
This left them, and us, to concentrate on the concept of union. Only rarely can I recall my dreams, but I have a vivid fragment of one from two nights ago. It’s a hot, summer Ozark day, and I’m a small boy sitting on the slight slope of a stock pond.
My fishing equipment is primitive and makeshift, the pole a cut cane, the bobber an actual bottle cork. Suddenly it bobs, at first faintly and hesitantly, then decisively, propelling little concentric rings spreading out about it on the surface of the muddy water.
Immediately there shoots through my infantile frame a current of nearly inexpressible joy and excitement. I may have been remembering an actual event; I certainly was experiencing an actual but long dormant psychological state. It was the wonderment of my young granddaughter Cora a year ago or so when she looked through the glass wall from dining room to atrium and beheld the miracle of a turtle which, she had no way of knowing, I had secretly introduced into that spot a few days earlier. If we are ever going to get back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell among other theologians tells us we must, we may need to read more poetry and think about the things poets write about.
“From the winter of 1821, when I first read BenthamI had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.” So wrote John Stuart Mill in his famous autobiography. To be a “reformer of the world” is no small ambition, but by the autumn of 1826 all meaning and purpose had drained from Mill’s life. Medicine had not yet defined clinical depression. The common term was still melancholy, as in Burton’s famous Anatomy thereof. Mill lacked even the words to describe his agony, though he would find them much later in Coleridge’s poem entitled Dejection: 'A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, a drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, which finds no natural outlet or relief in word, or sigh, or tear.”.
Mill had then still nearly half a century to live. Had he been unable to overcome his depression the Victorian age would never have known one of its greatest intellects and philosophers. But overcome it he did, and it was the nature of his self-medication that interests me here. It involved no opiates or psychotropic drugs. It consisted entirely in a self-directed course of readings in the English Romantic poets, especially the early Wordsworth. Mill delineates his therapeutic experience in the fifth chapter of his autobiography. He slowly worked through an early two-volume edition, at the end of which was the “Immortality Ode,” of which I have already cited the opening lines.
Ai A Hope On The Concrete Raritan Nj
Mill wrote thus: “At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, ‘Intimations of Immortality’: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.” The rest is, as they say, history. The weather gods apparently subscribe to the Gregorian calendar. Friday last was the first of December, and that night we got our first reasonably sharp chill of the year.
I had been raking leaves off and on in a desultory way for a better part of a month, but I would estimate that the trees had dropped only about half their load by Thursday, when the town’s huge leaf-vacuum trucks made what was threatened to be the last curbside collection of the year. Since then there has been a continuous blizzard of light gold and pale red oak leaves carpeting the front lawn.
You would hardly know that I had already removed a small mountain of them. But the turning of the calendar page and its concomitant change in the weather also inspired me to more satisfying exertions, ones that left me with something to show for my efforts. For the first time in more years than I can remember I (1) constructed an Advent wreath before the arrival of the first —or for that matter second or third—Sunday of the season; and I (2) printed the Christmas cards. This latter achievement I regard as particularly spectacular, although we still have the opportunity to face the full angst of crisis by procrastinating on their preparation for mailing. Though my study is dominated by printing presses, type cabinets, a huge composing table, and a paper cutter, it is mainly an overstuffed library that looks like a set for “Hoarders”.
The initial and continuing problem was negotiating the clutter. I hadn’t done much serious printing in a while, as perhaps the fact that I did regard this assignment as “serious printing” might suggest. It involved quite a lot: the marital squabble about the right line etching and the search to locate it when decided upon, the composition of some ten point type despite octogenarian eyesight and fingers, the delicate alignment and make-ready for some eighty pound stock that had to go three times through the press, and the tedious imposition of an elegant return address on five hundred A-6 envelopes with tapered flaps. But it is amazing how much one can achieve once one resigns oneself to abandoning all serious work, such as getting a book finished. I love printing all alone in the early morning hours “while the city sleeps”—or at least that part of the city with whom I share my life. The ample flourescent lighting of my library-pressroom is as bright as a noonday desert in the largely darkened house and in the greater darkness beyond the windows. There is a gentle but business-like hum to the variable speed motor, and the well-oiled clickity-clack of the Chandler and Price, punctuated decisively by the dull percussion of platen and type form at the moment of impact.
It’s not exactly rocket science, but it still requires attention and dexterity, even a little skill, to achieve a good product. In recent years I have liked to have a video playing on my computer while I’m printing. I alternate ten or fifteen minute segments between the old technology and the new. The episodes of viewing offer refreshment from the more demanding episodes of printing. For the printing of this year’s card I had settled upon a Netflix documentary about the life of Joan Didion—“The Center Will Not Hold”. This occurred by pure chance, but there is something appropriate about the linkage of printing and authorship. I am hardly alone in admiring the quality of Didion’s prose or the remarkable sensibility that it expresses.
She is, after all, one of the most celebrated of living writers. But content is also a draw. We are roughly of an age—she’s a year and a bit older than I—and I myself was fascinated by many of the cultural events of the Sixties and Seventies about which she has famously written. Yet what struck me most forcibly in this video was determined I suppose by the eccentric circumstances under which I was viewing it.
It’s quite recent, having come out only this year. Many of its scenes show the author in the last year or two. She has aged dramatically. In fact I would describe her as a frail old lady. Her speech is utterly lucid, crisp, nuanced—finely pointed like her prose.
But she has a disconcerting mannerism of moving both her arms—especially the right one-in front of her while she talks. It is hard to tell whether this is a neurological tic or a lifetime habit grown pronounced in old age. I could see no obvious correspondence between this brachial motion and the content of what she was saying. But it was strikingly similar to another pattern with which I am quite familiar: the arm motion required when operating a clam-shell press. One must concentrate intently on feeding the press with the right hand while constantly ready to disengage the clutch lever with the left. Failure to do so by half a second can result in a real mess.
What is called for is less a cooperation between the upper limbs than a competition between them, or better yet a feigned indifference between them. Jesus had something else in mind when he said “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, but he might have been describing Didion talking or Fleming printing. We have an excellent adult education program at our parish church, which often exploits the resources provided by the faculty and students of the Princeton Theological Seminary. Just at the moment we have four student “interns” on intellectual loan, and for the brief Advent season they are offering a four-part course on the Advent antiphons— antiphon being the fancy, churchy word for the short musical embellishment of a psalm. The Advent antiphons are sometimes called the “O” antiphons on account of their monoliteral beginnings. They were developed in the early phase of the Benedictine tradition, in which the psalter in its entirety is communally recited during the course of each week. There are seven of them, and, addressing Christ by various of his poetic names, they express the fervent desire that he come into the world.
The antiphon under consideration this week happened to be my favorite, Oriens (dayspring, dawn, sunrise, sun of righteousness, light from the East). I mean, of course, really in the dark—hours upon end with no access to light switch, flashlight, matchbox, or at least some little button on our keychains or watches to create a feeble flicker or beam. But if the year were 1400, and you were living at near-subsistence level beneath the cloudy sky of a Flemish village, you did indeed know what the dark was. This was also true of the monks who were singing “O Oriens,” though even the poorer ones could usually scrounge up a candle for the night office. When the Carmelite John of the Cross wrote of the dark night of the soul, we have to presume he knew what he was talking about. The invention of the electrical light has for many of us essentially erased the distinction between night and day, leaving us in a state of almost pathetic technological dependence in comparison to which the mere impoverishment of metaphor may seem slight. The Great Blackout of November 9, 1965 in the northeastern United States—a temporary and partial failure of the main electrical grid that left untouched huge resources of battery power and emergency and reserve capacity for electrical generation, caused chaos and in some instances panic that is remembered to this day.
It shut down America’s greatest city, called out the National Guard, fostered a rich anthology of urban legend, and led to a noticeable uptick in the birth statistics for August, 1966, among other things. But the darker the night, the brighter the dawn. That is what Advent and its antiphons are all about. O, what about euouae? (Note the ending of the musical passage at the top.) Well, I’m being a bit fast-and-loose in calling it a word, let alone an English word.
In fact, it is a kind of coded directive to the monks chanting the antiphon. The formulaic end of many ancient prayers is “world without end, amen.” This is a translation of the more vivid Latin phrase in saecula saeculorum, amen. In monastic chant, there were various “tunes” that might be used for this formulaic conclusion. The euouae tells the chanter what particular notes to use for the final six syllabus: sa Ec Ul Or Um Am En. Cunning fellows, those old monks.
I had already half decided on the topic of this week’s essay—the snappy title “Secular Donatism” had already sprung to mind—when Monday’s PBS “News Hour” definitively sealed the deal. It began with what looked like a large framed photograph of Charlie Rose, television interviewer par excellence, and the news that this eminent senior citizen had just been suspended from practically everything, down to and including his Cub Scout pack, on account of accusations of sexual harassment. The charges were numerous, specific, and sad.
In this instance there was at least no suggestion of pedophilia. Most of his victims were, it is true, young enough to be his granddaughters. But a couple fell credibly in the daughter range, and that was a relief. Amidst all this there are a few engaging ponderables, mostly along the lines of hating sins while loving sinners. A recent offering in the Times’s “Editorial Notebook” by Clyde Haberman-entitled “—raises an interesting philosophical question in a classical form. Do you have to be a good person in order to be a good writer, painter, musician, or whatever?
A few purists, like Philip Sidney in the English Renaissance, thought that you did; but no one familiar with many biographies of modern artists is likely to agree. When I first joined the Princeton faculty, two of my distinguished senior colleagues, Lawrence Thompson and Carlos Baker, were deep into the writing of the “authorized” biographies of two giants of twentieth-century American literature: Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. They had entered into their great enterprises flushed with enthusiasm and unalloyed admiration for their subjects. But they then discovered that these guys were such sons of bitches where women were concerned that they gagged, metaphysically speaking. The scholars carried on, of course, and produced prize-winning books. But duty is not the same thing as delight. In a small way I myself faced a similar unease in writing about Arthur Koestler.
Koestler was in my opinion one of the most remarkable literary geniuses of the twentieth century and the author of perhaps the most politically consequential novel in all of our literature. He was also “a hell of a raper” as his friend Richard Crossman delicately put it. Are you less admiring of the architectural boldness of the Guggenheim when you find out that Frank Lloyd Wright was an utter swine who abandoned his wife and children? Coming at things from the other end, must I research the sex life of Frederick Law Olmstead—a task likely to prove quite difficult, boring, and probably inconclusive—before I can fully enjoy a stroll in Central Park? At least I feel reasonably certain that authorial criminality doesn’t actually enhance artistic worth, as Norman Mailer seemed to believe. In 1981 he helped gain the release from prison of an eloquent felon named Jack Abbott, who rather spoiled the socio-literary triumph with a recidivist murder.
As a medievalist I have on the whole been protected from this sort of embarrassment. My awed admiration of Chartres Cathedral is not compromised by my worries about the politics of its architect, not that it had an architect. Much early literature is entirely anonymous.
Was the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a “creep”? It seems unlikely, but no one would think to go there. Contemporary literary biography often seems to me nearly obsessed with sexual details that tell us as much about modern readers as modern writers. Earlier periods may seem woefully lacking in this regard, though I have to admit that my man Chaucer comes dangerously close to biographical modernity.
There is among the poet’s life records a legal document in which a woman named Cecily Champaine attests to the fact that he did not rape her. I suppose that is better than one claiming that he did rape her, but it actually seems to me a rather near thing.
It is somewhat reminiscent of the notation in the ship’s log that “the Captain was sober tonight.”. In organizing their scholarly shindigs, academics tend to favor the centenary—the so-many-hundredth anniversary of this or that. The last time I got caught up in centenaries was two years ago, when modern historians were much caught up with the implications of the Battle of Waterloo (1815) leaving us medievalists to the comparative obscurity of Magna Charta or the Fourth Lateran Council six hundred years earlier. As a scholar of Franciscanism, among other things, I naturally had to opt for the latter. But should you have no clue what I am talking about, indeed if you have never even heard of the Fourth Lateran Council, not to worry.
It followed the Third Lateran Council and preceded the Fifth. Now I am at it again—on a purely amateur basis. Just at the protracted moment we are in the midst of assessing the First World War, formerly known as the Great War (1914-1918) and, with a more particular focus, the “October Revolution” of 1917, which saw the birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Major war events of 1917 included sensational instances of continuing slaughter (as in the third battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele) and America’s belated entry into the hostilities. However, it is in retrospect pretty obvious that the most important events of 1917 were those taking place in Russia. For the first time in history ideological Socialism came to political power in concrete form that amazed, inspired, or terrified the world and largely dominated its attention for the next seven decades.
For a non-specialist I had read pretty widely in English language Soviet history, but I somehow had missed the essential book. That would have to be Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994).
I recently completed a slow reading of this large, conceptually rich work, and have emerged with a feeling of having seen at last the Big Picture, or at least a much bigger one than I had ever before grasped. I already knew something of Malia and the general contours of his own anti-Communism. (He wrote the introduction to the English language version of The Black Book of Communism.) I was, however, unprepared for the elegance of the writing and the capaciousness of his thought—always a powerful combination. It is not exactly a polemical book, but he does offer trenchant criticisms of the mainstream of Anglo-American academic “Sovietology”, especially as represented by two huge and hugely influential works—E.
Carr’s Bolshevik Revolution and Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume dithyrambic biography of Leon Trotsky. Malia’s criticism of the major Sovietologists is that they constantly mistake a philosophical question (What is the “best” way to build Socialism?) for a historical question. If you begin from the a priori position that Socialism is highly desirable and should work, you must spend a great deal of time either in denial or in rationalizing explanations of “what went wrong”. What “went wrong” was that Russia was too backward, or the peasants too stolid and obdurate, or that Lenin didn’t live long enough, or that Bukharin was marginalized, etc., etc. What really went wrong was that the vast “superstructure” of the Communist Party had no actual “base” over which to be super, and the unceasing attempt to create one necessitated ceaseless cruelty, coercion, and homicide on a staggering scale.
Malia is particularly hard on Trotsky, the great if imaginary hero of a counterfactual Soviet history still alive and well in the Academy. He calls Deutscher’s three volumes of biography, which I remember several radical undergraduates of 1970 schlepping about in their bulging backpacks, a “Marxo-Miltonic trilogy”. But authorial stamina and indefatigability cannot in themselves command a reader’s assent.
As Malia points out, Trotsky embraced no particular doctrines that would differentiate him on such issues as mass murder from his fellow Bolsheviks. They were all required as a matter of principle to follow out a sanguinary “logic of history” that directed the seventy-four years of the life of the USSR. Have we reached a “tipping point” in terms of a general social acquiescence in sexual harassment? That is the question raised, and seemingly answered in the affirmative, by a lengthy article in yesterday’s newspaper. I hope so, but I pretty well exhausted such meager opinions as I have on the subject last week, and I was hoping to move on to something more uplifting, engaging, or erudite. Uplift, however, is in somewhat short supply these days.
I know that I am not the only American patriot who finds himself more or less permanently down in the dumps as I survey the many tipping points we seem never to be able to reach. The really big story in yesterday’s paper was about one of these unreached tipping points.
A “crazed veteran” shot up a Sunday worship service in a Texas church, killing twenty-six people. Given its setting and circumstances one might call it a contemporary Slaughter of the Innocents. Among the many victims were young children and an unborn baby. In terms of the language of the President’s Inaugural Address, the apt political term might be “American carnage”. My appellation “crazed veteran” is intentional and allusive. I remember it from a headline in a 1949 article about the murder spree of Howard Unruh in Camden, N. This atrocity made a huge impression on the country at the time, and now seems to be regarded by criminologists as the initial episode of a new genre of American mass murder, of which there are too many recent examples to require further comment, in which mentally disturbed people trained in military combat, or simply using guns manufactured to pursue or simulate warfare, have committed mass murders.
Unruh’s weaponry, which will now seem quaintly modest, consisted of a single German Luger pistol and thirty-three rounds of ammunition. The Texas gunman had a rapid-firing “military style” killing machine. Had he also had Unruh’s impressive kill ratio, he would easily have wiped out the entire congregation. The unjust and unhelpful stereotype of the “crazed veteran” returned in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The preferred term of art among journalists now seems to be “ticking time-bomb”. I suspected this would be no turning point, but knew so for certain when our President opined from an Asian press conference that “We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries.
But this isn’t a guns situation. I mean, we could go into it, but it’s a little bit soon to go into it. But, fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been — as bad it was, it would have been much worse.” Like too many of our President’s pronouncements this one marshaled faulty syntax and factual error in the service of a hollow argument.
If killing twenty-six people with a rapid-firing rifle isn’t a “guns situation” what does a “guns situation” look like? It is precisely our American “guns situation” that so often renders our American “mental health problems situation” grotesquely homicidal. There is no way to eradicate gun violence in our country, but there are many ways in which it might be constrained. I offered my own suggestion on this blog some years ago. I suggested that the second amendment to the Constitution be repealed, conceding the near political impossibility of what I was suggesting.
This would mean that gun legislation would have to be crafted by our duly established legislative bodies in the light of actual twenty-first century social realities. I think there would be absolutely no chance of prohibition, let alone of “confiscation”; but it might be impossible, too, to return to the maximalist status quo that has been allowed by fetish anachronism and an uncertain reading of an obscure gobbet of eighteenth-century prose. But lacking any national consensus, or even the will to seek one sincerely, that is neither here nor there. We are left with the conventional thoughts and prayers of our political leaders. As it happens I am in favor both of thinking and of praying, but I find in my own life that both are rather hard work if taken seriously.
I doubt that politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” have much linguistic precision. But the desire for linguistic precision may simply be pedantic here. In the final act of this Texas massacre there appeared a “good guy with a gun”, Stephen Williford, who lived near the church and who wounded and pursued the bad guy with a gun, Devin Kelley, after Kelley had completed his slaughter.
Williford’s actions demonstrate extraordinary bravery and initiative. The term “hero” is used so generously in contemporary journalism that I was surprised not to see it used of him in the first press reports I saw.
What I saw instead was “Good Samaritan”. Out of respect to the slaughtered members of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, many of whom were probably Bible readers, I recommend going with “hero”.
If you check out Luke 10 you will find a good guy with pity, a first-aid kit, and two pieces of silver—but no good guy with a gun.