Al Franken

Thank you, Judge Sotomayor, for sitting here so patiently and for all your thoughtful answers throughout the hearing. Before lunch, our senior senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, asked you why you became a prosecutor, and you mentioned "Perry Mason." I was a big fan of "Perry Mason." I watched "Perry Mason" every week with my dad and my mom and my brother. And we'd watch the clock. And we knew when it was two minutes to the half-hour that the real murder would stand up and confess. It was a great show.

And it amazes me that you wanted to become a prosecutor based on that show because, in "Perry Mason," the prosecutor, Burger, lost every week, with one exception that we'll get to later.

But I think that says something about your determination to defy the odds. And while you were watching "Perry Mason" in the South Bronx with your mom and your brother, I was watching "Perry Mason" in suburban Minneapolis with my folks and my brother, and here we are today. And I'm asking you questions because you have been nominated to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. I think that's pretty cool.

Al Franken, Senate Judiciary Committee, Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings, July 15, 2009

This was a poetic moment: Senator Franken deftly summoning the lovely image of his family and Judge Sotomayor's family united across the vast spaces of America by watching Perry Mason at the same time. Television often gets a bum rap, including from me, but this is a fine reminder that in the heyday of the three networks, at least, the medium could have that kind of unifying effect.

As it happens, I've been watching Perry Mason episodes lately, and they are enormous fun. This is one instance (Chuck Jones's Roadrunner cartoons are another) where adhering to a strict formula really works -- the fun is in the little variations.

The Ramapo Mountain People

William Carlos Williams is often on my mind, since I grew up in Passaic, New Jersey, across the river from Rutherford where he was a practicing pediatrician. The oft-quoted Williams poem "To Elsie" that begins with the famous line "The pure products of America go crazy" is partly about an isolated group in the Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey and New York, known unkindly as the "Jackson Whites" and more respectfully as the "Ramapo Mountain People." They are what some anthropologists call a "tri-racial isolate," a mixture of white, black, and Indian. Although in this case the preponderance of the ancestry is African-American, starting with free blacks in the 17th and 18th centuries (some of whom partnered with white Dutch), and the Native American element if present is not genealogically traceable, the People themselves insist that they have no black ancestry and are mostly Indian, despite the fact that they look more mulatto than anything else. As with some other isolate groups, there has been in-breeding over the years, with the expected resultant higher incidence of polydactylism (extra fingers and toes), syndactylism (webbing between fingers and toes), and albinism. Where I grew up, 25 miles away, the People were considered "hillbillies" and were feared (for no especially good reason except their "strangeness"). They did tend to keep apart. David Steven Cohen's 1974 book about them, The Ramapo Mountain People, is fascinating but was controversial with the People themselves, because it properly insists upon their easily provable black ancestry. As least as of the Seventies, the People expressed both racism against blacks, whom they utterly refused to identify with, and also "skin tone racism," favoring the lighter-skinned among their own group.

Commonplace Book: Scotland

As my knowledge of Scottish History is v. small I find it difficult to follow who murdered whom, or why – the general trend of Scots history.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Immediate Impression of Wilkie Collins

Oddly for such an enthusiast of the British novel, I had never read a novel by Wilkie Collins, but one of the points of my reading projects, including the 19th century British fiction project, is to fill in these unconscionable gaps. A true pleasure it is to do so, too. A quarter-way into Collins's most famous (along with The Moonstone) novel, The Woman in White, my impression is that Dickens's friend Wilkie has it all going on; those 150 pages demonstrate extravagant gifts in narrative drive and deftness, in characterization and dialogue, in descriptive prose, and in the cunning art of the set-up. Collins was a prolific novelist, and the received wisdom is that his work went into a steep decline after a one-decade heyday in the 1860s --but I'm going to want to test that for myself. At this point, he has me on trust.

My Wardrobe: Straw Boater

This summer, I have been getting a lot of wearing pleasure from my vintage Brooks Brothers straw boater. It takes cojones to wear a boater these days, because the sartorial associations are so definite and so historical; would that I could take every "Great Gatsby" comment to the bank! But people seem to enjoy the gesture a lot, so while I used to wear this hat once or twice a summer, now I'm encouraged to wear it once or twice a week. Gotta give the public what they want.

Acquisitions, July 4-10

Very light acquisitions week. I'm watching my money because of my upcoming move. But at least I know that I'll have an income!

• Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line (Oxford pb) (Half Price Books)
• Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Oxford pb) (Book Store)
  

Birthday: Thomas Gomez

[Born July 10, 1905; died June 18, 1971. A poster at The Blackboard commented on Gomez's fine performance as John Garfield's older brother in Force of Evil.]

Gomez was wonderful in that part. He was a great actor who deserved more than the one Supporting Actor Oscar nomination he got (for Ride the Pink Horse). He was a pioneer as a Latino actor who essayed complex, non-stereotypical roles. Come to think of it, he would have made a compelling Nero Wolfe.

Interestingly, he learned his craft as part of the Alfred Lunt/Lynn Fontanne theatrical troupe in the Twenties and Thirties. Now that's training!

Birthday: Craig Stevens

[A poster at The Blackboard commented on Craig Stevens's July 8, 1918 birthday (he died on May 10, 2000), and on all the smoking in Peter Gunn.]

I'm no fan of smoking, but Stevens was one of the very best at handling cigarettes as a masculine prop. Watch for it. He is, as noted, a darned handsome fellow, smooth as all get-out, and (with the help of wardrobe coordinator Sydney LaVine) a terrific dresser who is one of my sartorial inspirations. He is often seen in the now exceedingly rare button-down French cuff shirts. (Raymond Burr can also be seen wearing them in Perry Mason, made at the same time.)

One aspect of the series that I love, and that was daring for its day, is that Gunn and Edie Hart (Lola Albright) are clearly involved in a torrid, ongoing, unmarried sexual/romantic relationship. They are more connected than many married people, and a pleasure to watch together. It is cool to see a 1950s television series strongly sanctioning an "unorthodox" and mutually satisfying arrangement.

Domestic Migration

I've been looking at some fascinating statistics on domestic migration between U.S. states (rather than immigration from other countries) for the years 2000-2007. What the stats tell us boils down to three facts:

1. Americans migrate from colder, cloudier states to warmer, sunnier states.
2. Americans migrate from more expensive states -- states with higher costs of living and tax and regulatory burdens -- to less expensive states.
3. American migrate to states with expansive economic development and job opportunities. To a large extent, this is a corollary of (1) and (2) -- once people start migrating into a state, that tends to create jobs and economic development, which then attract more migration, so the process becomes self-fueling.

I am about to move to northern Nevada from northeast Wisconsin after a successful search (finally!) for a teaching job. I don't suppose it's any surprise that the two states from which I had serious inquiries -- Nevada and Arizona -- are by far the two states with the highest rates of domestic in-migration from 2000 to 2007 (2.4% and 1.7%, respectively) as well as the highest rates of overall population growth including immigration (27.1% and 22.7%).

Regionally, the patterns are very clear:

1. The West is growing except for two very expensive states in rapid population decline -- California and Hawaii -- and one cold state -- Alaska.
2. The South is growing, but some parts more than others. The Atlantic coast states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia have been highly attractive. Florida's growth, strong for many years, has been tapering considerably as the cost of living there skyrockets. Louisiana and Mississippi had a period of substantial out-migration owing to hurricanes, but are bouncing back. Texas, with a low cost of living, decent job opportunities, and no personal income tax, has a growing rate of in-migration; Tennessee is also doing quite well.
3. The Midwest is shrinking, predictably; but perhaps surprisingly, Illinois leads the way -- its recent levels of out-migration are higher than those of Michigan or Ohio. This is probably due to the high cost of living in Chicago, which was a pretty affordable city 20 years ago but is now unenviably rated America's "most overpriced city" by Forbes Magazine. The Midwest really has no strong spots. Even Minnesota, often touted as an economic development success story, had overall out-migration for 2000-2007; it's just too cold there.
   
4. The Northeast is troubled because of its ridiculous cost of living. The three states with the highest rates of out-migration from 2000-2007 (leaving special case Louisiana aside) are New York (1.1%), New Jersey (0.7%), and Massachusetts (0.7%). The situation in Connecticut and Rhode Island has been substantially worsening as well.
   

Since none of the trends underlying these figures yield much to ameliorative effort -- certainly not climate! -- I'm forced to conclude that economic development efforts are largely a waste of time (and I say that as someone who has been substantially involved with them in northeast Wisconsin). You can't market or incentivize your way out of brute facts. People like warm weather, they like sunshine, they like affordability, they like availability of jobs. How can you persuade them otherwise? There is no way.

I notice that my own moves throughout my adult life illustrate all three of the patterns I enumerated:

1. New Jersey to California, 1985 -- Move to better climate and (at that time) better economic opportunity.
2. California to Illinois, 1989 -- The Bay Area was getting phenomenally expensive, and Chicago was still affordable. So this was an economy-based move, but I went backwards on climate -- and I have to say, I always regretted it.
3. Illinois to Wisconsin, 2002 -- Now Chicago was getting phenomenally expensive; Wisconsin was way more affordable (and has remained so).
4. Wisconsin to Nevada, 2009 -- The trifecta: moving for better economic opportunity, better affordability (since Nevada has no state income tax, and Wisconsin has a high one), and better climate.
   

There Is Hope

When you have a U.S. president who is an enthusiast for Urdu poetry, you have officially reached one of the outer limits of cool.

Commonplace Book: Governors

People, what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state?

Gail Collins, New York Times, re Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford, Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, James McGreevey, and probably some others I'm forgetting

Phil Karlson and Samuel Fuller

[A poster at The Blackboard wondered why Phil Karlson didn't have a reputation similar to that of the much-celebrated Samuel Fuller.]

Fuller and Karlson are about even through 1960. But from that point on, Fuller burnished his resume with eccentric masterpieces such as Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, and White Dog, while Karlson worked mainly on indifferent commercial assignments such as The Young Doctors, Ben (the sequel to the "rat horror" film Willard), Kid Galahad with Elvis Presley, and a couple of Matt Helm films with Dean Martin. His most celebrated later film is Walking Tall, which tends to hit liberal viewers as well-done right-wing action fascism -- the same criticism that Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs took a long time to recover from.

So Karlson did his reputation no favors by his seeming indifference to the shape of his filmography. Fuller kept it personal, which rightly endears him to historians, critics, and buffs.