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Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

End of PM Newspapers

Livingston, Montana is the part-time home of Tom Brokaw and the town of the last of two evening newspapers in the U.S. That’s right. The whole, entire U.S. The Livingston Enterprise and the Miles City Star are it. They live because in Montana, no one will get up in the morning dark to deliver papers when it’s 20-below. Across the nation, PM newspapers went from 4-to-1 in 1980 to less than half by 2000. And now down to two.

For a nostalgia read, Carl Bernstein’s Chasing History will tell you of the adrenaline flow of getting out today’s news today.

See: Peter Funt, “The Last of the Afternoon Newspapers,” The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2022, p.A15.

It’s Triple Crown Season – Let’s Read Horses

C.E. Morgan, The Sport of Kings (2016) (Southern saga of breeding a champ); (2) Susanna Forrest, The Age of the Horse (2016) (amazing array of horse anecdotes); (3) Tamsin Pickeral, The Horse (paintings, sculptures, hieroglyphs, petroglyphs of the horse); (4) Jilly Cooper, Riders (1985) (jodhpur-ripper in the Cotswolds); (5) Kareem Rosser, Crossing the Line (2021) (Kareem was dirt-poor but rose to polo-playing star and Ralph Lauren model.)

See: Courtney Maum, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, April 30-May 1, 2022, p.C8. Courtney’s recent memoir is “The Year of the Horses.”

Desert Isle Reading

Julian Barnes is the winner of the Booker Prize in England for Elizabeth Finch. He is currently reading Simenon’s Betty and Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witness.

If he were to be marooned on a desert island, he’d take along the OED — 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary with the definition of each word and illustrations of its use. When he wrote a novel on papyrus made from chewed palm leaves, his spelling would be perfect.

See: “WHAT BOOK would Booker-winning author Julian Barnes take to a desert island?” The Daily Mail, May 21, 2022.

Delights of Lille

For Fiesole Retreat afficionados who were at the Lille event, little did you know the city is recommended by the WSJ as a serene retreat. Beer and waffles. Mussels and fries. And the first week in September is the braderie, Europe’s largest flea market.

See: Eric Sylvers, “Continental Dividends,” The Wall Street Journal, May 28-29, 2022, p. D8.

Let’s Read Counterintelligence

Victor Cherkashin, Spy Handler (2005) (Soviet who recruited Americans avid to betray their country); (2) Henry Hurt, Shadrin: The Spy Who Never Came Back (1981) (spymasters who use their agents and then slide away when things go wrong); (3) Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars (2007) (The walk-in: a treasure trove of info or a plant?); (4) Peter Wright, Spycatcher (1987) (After a pension dispute, a vindictive British spy airs the dirty linen.); (5) John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy (the author who is said to have invented the spy novel.).

See: Howard Blum, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, May 28-29, 2022, p.C8. Blum’s most recent work is “The Spy Who Knew Too Much.”

Obit of Note

Vangelis (1943-2022) was a Greek composer who made new age style solo records but became famous for film scores. He was the son of a real estate tycoon who was playing piano by age 4 yet never learned to read music. Moving to France, he co-formed a rock group Aphrodite’s Child and earned wide success.

But his real fame began with winning the Palme d’Or for the score for Missing (1982). There was Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But his score for Chariot’s of Fire (1981) brought him global fame. “Success is the enemy of creativity,” he said.

See: “The bold composer who scored Chariot’s of Fire,” The Week, June 3, 2022, p.35.

Non-traditional Ed Grows into “National” Model”

As colleges circle the financial drain, San Diego’s National University is booming. It’s one of 31 colleges out of 905 to get an A+ finance grade from Forbes. While not an Ivy, that ranks it with MIT, Dartmouth, Stanford type places.

Student enrollment has jumped from 33,000 to 45,000 and is not slowing. Since it’s largely online, the pandemic gave it a boost. And now Amazon has contracted for courses for 750,000 employees in career oriented subjects.

The academic calendar is structured as month-long courses on demand. The price is certainly attractive. $1,665 for a course; $66,600 for a bachelor’s degree. Michael Cunningham, the brains behind all this, has reduced physical locations and pays mostly for adjunct professors. With no dorms or fancy facilities, National has a war chest of $1.2 billion.

Cunningham is from a blue-collar Queens background, made a fortune in printing financial data, has a Ph.D. from NYU.

See: Emma Whitford with Matt Schifrin, “Schooling America’s School,” Forbes Special Issue, June, 2022, p.110.

Book Store Plugs

Mary Laura Philpott is the author of Bomb Shelter: Love, Time and Other Explosives. She calls herself a “professional bookstore enthusiast.” On an author’s tour, she dubs Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, SC a “magical cavern” that goes and goes in the back. The owners of three restaurants have a program where their employees may pick out a free book each month.

Charleston Conference goers will know it as across King Street from the Francis Marion hotel.

Books & Books has several locations in the Miami area. Their Coral Gables store is in a Mediterranean style building dating to 1927. There’s a courtyard café with perfect Cuban sandwiches she dreams about.

East City Bookshop is in the neighborhood around Capitol Hill. Covid prompted them to develop a Zoom-based bookclub and hotline for book recommendations.

Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee has happy shop dogs and a canine history of the store — The Shop Dogs of Parnassus — written by co-owner author Ann Patchett.

Snail on the Wall in Huntsville, Alabama isn’t a store but an online book selling business launched in 2017. They hold visiting author events at elegant venues in the city.

A Cappella Books in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood does pop-ups around the city.

Mainstreet Books in Davidson, North Carolina has both books and book adjacent gift offerings like the Bookaroo pen pouch which clips onto the book for obsessive underliners.

See: Mary Laura Philpott, “Reader Retreats,” Garden & Gun, June/July 2022, p.151.

Dame Agatha Trends on Tik-Tok

#AgathaChristie videos on Tik-Tok scored 26 million views.

Devin Abraham, owner of Once Upon a Crime bookstore in Minneapolis says Christie is wildly popular with younger readers — younger as in teenagers. Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler readers are in their 50s. The craze is traced to the 2017 movie version of “Murder on the Orient Express.” Agatha Christie Ltd. which manages rights in the works said they also shot up with the 1974 version. For further fuel, “Death on the Nile” came out this year and “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” streams on BritBox.

See: Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Lillian Rizzo, “Young People Discover a Hot New Writer – Agatha Christie,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2022, p.A1.

Inventing Mobster Argot

The late James Caan ad-libbed “bada-bing” in “The Godfather,” and gangsters and wanna-be wiseguys snapped it up. And of course it was the name of the strip club in “The Sopranos.”

The Oxford English Dictionary made it an entry and cited Caan as the earliest documented use. It posits possible origins as the Italian “bada bene” meaning to “mark well” and the drum rim-shot that punctuates a comedian’s punchline. When asked, Caan said he thought he said “Bada-boom.”

See: Ben Zimmer, “Improvised Nonsense Turned Mobster Argot,” The Wall Street Journal, July 16-17, 2022, p.C3.