#12 (13.12.25)
LBJ, Flannery, showmen
SEE
LBJ: The Final Interview, with Walter Cronkite.
CBS/online
It’s been nice to see a photo, rising on the digital thermals, of Robert Caro in the wild: he looks good for his 90 years. Maybe that fifth & final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson will appear, nudging the lot towards page 5,000. In the meantime, I recommend watching this interview with Johnson, recorded 10 days before the former US president’s death. It’s a study in body-language. Johnson leans, grips his chair, angles himself, transfers his weight. Even in this friendly encounter, you’re seeing late echoes of the “Johnson treatment”, as they used to call it in Congress, whereby he would tower over his interlocutor & harangue them until, dizzied & abashed, they did what he said.
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READ
The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor.
FSG
She was a racist, yes, as her letters bear out. To reply that she supported civil rights feels like calculus, & fruitless. There are more, and better, parts of O’Connor’s universe to explore. These letters, to friends, editors, other writers, interested parties, have the same perverse nobility as her fiction, in which grace only descends, finally, on people at their worst. And as I’ve found in recent weeks, O’Connor’s correspondence is, like her stories, absorbing. She moves between literary affairs & Georgia gossip, the personal & the theological, writing tirelessly until sickness grips her & she dies aged 39.
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LISTEN
24 Caprices, by Niccolò Paganini (violinist Itzhak Perlman).
Warner
Like most things that make a virtue of technical skill, Paganini’s Caprices, which were written to be difficult, start to seem hollow before too long. There’s a broader lesson here. Waiting to be impressed can feel like pressure. And even if you’re keen – descending thirds! double trills! – the effects feel quite short-term. Only, on occasion, is there something unusual here, a texture that, in the hands of Itzhal Perlman, gives us a little more: take the 20th Caprice, for instance, which begins by imitating a bagpipe’s drone, overlaid with a lovely slow melody. For a moment, you’re struck by something true.