Tom Wolfe on Portis: "Charlie is the funniest man I've ever met. During the time we were working together, he appeared on a radio show with Malcolm X, and before the show Malcolm X said, 'Look, my name is Malcolm X. It's not Malcolm – I'm not your Pullman car porter. I'm Malcolm X.' Everyone nodded, and the show begins – and then throughout the show, Charlie called him 'Mr. X,' which just drove him nuts."
"Not surprisingly, as America becomes more Hispanic and otherwise less Northern European, the popularity of conspiracy theorizing has grown."
Obama seemed to be peak Nordic America to me.
Complete gullible faith in sappy afrocentric BS with hardly a hint of heathy British skepticism... You won't find anything like that in Italy or Spain.
Obama (who was raised in Hawaii) seemed to get along best among world leaders with Angela Merkel (who was raised in East Germany until she was 35). Both seemed to find the cynicism of others distasteful.
I’ve read all his books multiple times and was laughing my ass off at this excerpt. Sounds like a Mexican version of Masters of Atlantis. Hopefully they find many more of his unpublished work. Portis was brilliant but only published five novels. All required reading.
Yes, totally agree. I too have read them all, and this excerpt reveals the same whimsical affection for loony fraternal orders and secret societies as "Masters of Atlantis," his funniest book.
He seems to have quietly divorced Unz. Whose insanity now knows few bounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if Unz teamed up with Candace Owens to prove the Jews faked the Moon Landing.
Steve should know that the Irish also take a certain delight in conspiratorial thinking. Having inherited that trait from my full-blooded Irish father, I immediately recognized this newly discovered "Portis" ouvre as a hoax, either perpetrated by or on the Coen Brothers. Everything in the text quoted by Sailer confirms it--I almost cast the roles as I read along.
Del Toro definitely. Bardem, meh. Both are rather unique-looking, not your standard classic handsome actor. Del Toro gives off a party dude vibe, and I can visualize him smoothly entertaining a group of ladies. When I look at Bardem, I get the sense he would be right at home in Torquemada's entourage.
The excerpt is ridiculous. I think that’s the point, but the average conspiracy nut will miss the point in any case. I wonder if the Walkers talk to the Elders?
The Five Proud Walkers were pretty obscure, one of the millions of bands that didn't make it big. Without Brian Epstein and replacing Pete Best with Ringo Starr, the Beatles might have been just a Liverpool band.
That is a very funny story about Charles Portis. I've only read one Portis novel, "The Cowboys." It was a rather bleak, cynical novel and the boys don't like Mr. Andersen but take on the rustlers almost as a bloodlust thrill. The film had to change that, of course. The film starred the Duke, of course, so he had to play the beloved father figure shot in the back.
I thought the remake of True Grit was pretty pointless, but I’d love to see a remake of The Cowboys that hewed more closely to the book.
I do remember seeing an interview with one of the child actors in The Cowboys who told the story of how they all got together for a few weeks before the movie. Most of them were city kids, and John Wayne taught them horseback riding. Can you imagine going through life being able to casually mention that John Wayne taught you to ride?
Having John Wayne teach you to ride a horse would have been a lifetime memory. The Duke said that filming "The Cowboys" was his most favorite filmmaking in his career because he was with all those youngsters. Duke got along with Roscoe Lee Browne, who's politics were way different that the Duke's and "The Cowboys" was filmed right after Wayne's controversial Playboy interview that was not kind to black politics. Wayne also encouraged Bruce Dern to treat him with disrespect when they were on the set so that the youngsters would despise Dern. It worked. Dern himself had a great deal of respect for the Duke as a professional and in an interview with Dick Cavett Dern declared the Duke the most professional actor he'd worked with.
As an add-on, most remakes fight a losing battle from the beginning. Thirty years ago, on a plane flight with my wife, a remake of "Sabrina" was offered. I stopped watching after ten minutes. How can you beat the original? Audrey Hepburn. Humphrey Bogart. Bill Holden. I would have loved to have gotten drunk with Holden.
Charles Portis never wrote a novel called, "The Cowboys." All Portis's novels are bleak but they are also all funny as hell. Novels by Charles Portis: Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, The Masters of Atlantis and Gringos.
“it was nothing more than an elaborate sham structure of sticks, cardboard, and painted canvas. It was a mere puppet show of elections, with dummy presidents, senators, and the like going through their scripted paces. It was all a colorful but empty pageant which served to entertain the people and keep the lawyers occupied with endless artificial disputes”
Silvio Berlusconi’s genius as a political operator (followed to some extent by Trump 1.0) was thus to be entirely open about the sham, and to embody in one person the colourful pretender and drab behind-the-scenes operator. No one could accuse him of being a puppet since he seemed to be playing the part of puppet and puppet master simultaneously, and pretty well.
Maybe I've seen too much of Latin America to put up with any magic-real fiction. Folks down there aren't quite so helpless as to postulate occult forces or to rely on conspiracy theorizing. I do like the back story about the discovery of the manuscript. But as a guide to culture or politics...nope.
Why make up stories about Latin America when there are so many good real ones? Here's one about diplomacy and geopolitics of all things. Mexico, imagining the Tehuantepec isthmus would someday have a canal, sought to secure its dominion over the area by defending Oaxaca, which naturally required it also defend/claim/steal Chiapas, which in turn required it to defend/claim/steal Soconusco. Around 1842, the Central American confederation having expired, the Mexican maximum leader Santa Anna decided his country’s 1825 treaty with it – the one that guaranteed Soconusco’s “neutrality” – was null and void. So, he had troops sent in, and they took it. As Soconusco bordered Guatemala, which was the great and true rump of the superstate and therefore the part most likely to care, both by proximity and by technicality, that fine new country...dithered. El Salvador and Honduras volunteered armed forces to drive the Mexicans out. Likewise, indigenes indigenous to Chiapas wanted to help, with guerrilla actions. But Guatemala’s striped-pants set kindly rejected the offers and opted for diplomacy. It felt it had a legal case, and that 1825 treaty would, if only in a historical sense, support it. Only the diplomats couldn’t FIND it! They rummaged through their own archives, as well as at the legation in Mexico City. No dice.
Is this comedy? This is comedy. “I thought YOU had it...” etc. Well, I don't know about THAT. All I know is that the document remained lost. The British consul had then offered to arbitrate, but neither side really having much textual evidence, nothing happened. Mexico’s claim stood, and stands to this day. Looking at all this now, and purely as an American, I say: had the Three Stooges been Mexican diplomats, and I see no reason why they could not have been, Curly would have said, “Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.”
My source for this story is a book published in 2012 titled La república federal de Centro-América : territorio, nación, y diplomacia, 1823-1838. I recommend it, and not just because it is a conveniently slim volume. I actually read it aloud, for Spanish drill, and my cat seemed not to mind.
You mention Rudyard Kipling, who I think was among the wisest of the moderns.
Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas are fantastic. Gilbert's comic poetry is good too. Look up the Bab Ballads, and The Three Kings of Chickeraboo. Lots of Englishmen were deeply skeptical about Empire.
The Brits also make incredible actors. The Crown is the best TV watching I've ever seen. But it also stars John Lithgow as Winston Churchill and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher and they just knock it out of the park.
Outsong In the Jungle remains my favorite poem, much better meter than the somewhat syrupy and clunky _If_ So much wisdom.
If I had billionaire money, I'd produce a movie version of Captain's Courageous true to Kipling's novel. The 1937 Spencer Tracy film inexplicably butchered it.
I don’t think it is a question of mindset. The more shambolic and badly run a country is the more conspiracy theories proliferate. There is nothing mystifying about everyone mostly doing what they are supposed to do and institutions functioning more or less in the manner described on the tin ( it does turn out as we are now learning that some high trust society magic was involved which we never noticed or appreciated till it began to drain away).
But lots of people and things stubbornly and against all expectation and public messaging NOT working does require explanation, and when the official explanations are denials or obvious misdirection, quite sensibly people develop multiple explanatory theories of their own.
The great thing about this excerpt is that in real life you'd have to suspect this was a gag. Some guy you don't know calls up and tells you that you are now one of the secret leaders of Mexico? Imagine the narcissism required to overrule your reason in this situation.
My own idea, should the people ever make the error of electing me president, was at the end of my term and during the transition, to tell the incoming president that the greatest secret of the US is that we have been under the control of space aliens since the 1950s. We have to do what they say or they will destroy the earth. They don't interfere often, but when the call comes in, you have to take it and do what they say to the letter. How will you know? Oh, you'll know. Ok ta-ta!
I enjoyed the John Wayne version of TRUE GRIT a half-dozen times before noticing the name of Charles Portis. When I did, I got his book, True Grit, and I am still amazed at how faithfully director Henry Hathaway's film version keeps to the text. The scenery, the sets, the characters and the dialogue are near mirror-image, start-to-finish.
OTOH, Numerous times, I've watched director Adam McKay's film of the book entitled THE BIG SHORT. After each viewing I become more convinced Mr. McKay's film is a clever slice of deep-state propaganda configured to steer audiences away from the absolutely planned & executed destruction of the U.S housing market by fully complicit\complementary roles played between big bankers and relevant government agencies they'd captured via lobbying and election-buying. Is that a conspiracy theory?
Nonetheless, Mr. McKay's skill in writing, casting and direction is evident in his docudrama, The Big Short. Maybe Adam McKay could be the guy who brings more of Mr. Portis' work to the screen. However, from his wikipedia page, it appears Mr. McKay takes very seriously the very sorts of things Mr. Portis finds most ridiculous. We live in interesting times.
Tom Wolfe on Portis: "Charlie is the funniest man I've ever met. During the time we were working together, he appeared on a radio show with Malcolm X, and before the show Malcolm X said, 'Look, my name is Malcolm X. It's not Malcolm – I'm not your Pullman car porter. I'm Malcolm X.' Everyone nodded, and the show begins – and then throughout the show, Charlie called him 'Mr. X,' which just drove him nuts."
Awesome anecdote.
"the Mediterranean world, of which Mexico is a cultural outpost ..."
Boy, I just don't know about that. You'll never meet even a UMC Mexican who's ever read Unamuno or Galdos or Benavente.
not being conversant with the oeuvre; that be great fun.
"Not surprisingly, as America becomes more Hispanic and otherwise less Northern European, the popularity of conspiracy theorizing has grown."
Obama seemed to be peak Nordic America to me.
Complete gullible faith in sappy afrocentric BS with hardly a hint of heathy British skepticism... You won't find anything like that in Italy or Spain.
Obama (who was raised in Hawaii) seemed to get along best among world leaders with Angela Merkel (who was raised in East Germany until she was 35). Both seemed to find the cynicism of others distasteful.
I’ve read all his books multiple times and was laughing my ass off at this excerpt. Sounds like a Mexican version of Masters of Atlantis. Hopefully they find many more of his unpublished work. Portis was brilliant but only published five novels. All required reading.
Yes, totally agree. I too have read them all, and this excerpt reveals the same whimsical affection for loony fraternal orders and secret societies as "Masters of Atlantis," his funniest book.
As an unz writer calling Mediterraneans conspiracy minded is a bit of projection
He seems to have quietly divorced Unz. Whose insanity now knows few bounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if Unz teamed up with Candace Owens to prove the Jews faked the Moon Landing.
I wish being a Jew were half as fun as the nutters would have me believe.
Ron Unz has even called Ms. Owens a tad too credulous, citing her belief that Mrs. Macron is an ex-man as a bridge too far.
Steve should know that the Irish also take a certain delight in conspiratorial thinking. Having inherited that trait from my full-blooded Irish father, I immediately recognized this newly discovered "Portis" ouvre as a hoax, either perpetrated by or on the Coen Brothers. Everything in the text quoted by Sailer confirms it--I almost cast the roles as I read along.
To my mind, Benicio del Toro makes any movie 10% cooler.
As does Javier Bardem.
Del Toro definitely. Bardem, meh. Both are rather unique-looking, not your standard classic handsome actor. Del Toro gives off a party dude vibe, and I can visualize him smoothly entertaining a group of ladies. When I look at Bardem, I get the sense he would be right at home in Torquemada's entourage.
The excerpt is ridiculous. I think that’s the point, but the average conspiracy nut will miss the point in any case. I wonder if the Walkers talk to the Elders?
The Five Proud Walkers were pretty obscure, one of the millions of bands that didn't make it big. Without Brian Epstein and replacing Pete Best with Ringo Starr, the Beatles might have been just a Liverpool band.
That is a very funny story about Charles Portis. I've only read one Portis novel, "The Cowboys." It was a rather bleak, cynical novel and the boys don't like Mr. Andersen but take on the rustlers almost as a bloodlust thrill. The film had to change that, of course. The film starred the Duke, of course, so he had to play the beloved father figure shot in the back.
I thought the remake of True Grit was pretty pointless, but I’d love to see a remake of The Cowboys that hewed more closely to the book.
I do remember seeing an interview with one of the child actors in The Cowboys who told the story of how they all got together for a few weeks before the movie. Most of them were city kids, and John Wayne taught them horseback riding. Can you imagine going through life being able to casually mention that John Wayne taught you to ride?
Having John Wayne teach you to ride a horse would have been a lifetime memory. The Duke said that filming "The Cowboys" was his most favorite filmmaking in his career because he was with all those youngsters. Duke got along with Roscoe Lee Browne, who's politics were way different that the Duke's and "The Cowboys" was filmed right after Wayne's controversial Playboy interview that was not kind to black politics. Wayne also encouraged Bruce Dern to treat him with disrespect when they were on the set so that the youngsters would despise Dern. It worked. Dern himself had a great deal of respect for the Duke as a professional and in an interview with Dick Cavett Dern declared the Duke the most professional actor he'd worked with.
As an add-on, most remakes fight a losing battle from the beginning. Thirty years ago, on a plane flight with my wife, a remake of "Sabrina" was offered. I stopped watching after ten minutes. How can you beat the original? Audrey Hepburn. Humphrey Bogart. Bill Holden. I would have loved to have gotten drunk with Holden.
Charles Portis never wrote a novel called, "The Cowboys." All Portis's novels are bleak but they are also all funny as hell. Novels by Charles Portis: Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, The Masters of Atlantis and Gringos.
My bad. Portis wrote "True Grit." William Dale Jennings wrote "The Cowboys."
“it was nothing more than an elaborate sham structure of sticks, cardboard, and painted canvas. It was a mere puppet show of elections, with dummy presidents, senators, and the like going through their scripted paces. It was all a colorful but empty pageant which served to entertain the people and keep the lawyers occupied with endless artificial disputes”
Silvio Berlusconi’s genius as a political operator (followed to some extent by Trump 1.0) was thus to be entirely open about the sham, and to embody in one person the colourful pretender and drab behind-the-scenes operator. No one could accuse him of being a puppet since he seemed to be playing the part of puppet and puppet master simultaneously, and pretty well.
Maybe I've seen too much of Latin America to put up with any magic-real fiction. Folks down there aren't quite so helpless as to postulate occult forces or to rely on conspiracy theorizing. I do like the back story about the discovery of the manuscript. But as a guide to culture or politics...nope.
Why make up stories about Latin America when there are so many good real ones? Here's one about diplomacy and geopolitics of all things. Mexico, imagining the Tehuantepec isthmus would someday have a canal, sought to secure its dominion over the area by defending Oaxaca, which naturally required it also defend/claim/steal Chiapas, which in turn required it to defend/claim/steal Soconusco. Around 1842, the Central American confederation having expired, the Mexican maximum leader Santa Anna decided his country’s 1825 treaty with it – the one that guaranteed Soconusco’s “neutrality” – was null and void. So, he had troops sent in, and they took it. As Soconusco bordered Guatemala, which was the great and true rump of the superstate and therefore the part most likely to care, both by proximity and by technicality, that fine new country...dithered. El Salvador and Honduras volunteered armed forces to drive the Mexicans out. Likewise, indigenes indigenous to Chiapas wanted to help, with guerrilla actions. But Guatemala’s striped-pants set kindly rejected the offers and opted for diplomacy. It felt it had a legal case, and that 1825 treaty would, if only in a historical sense, support it. Only the diplomats couldn’t FIND it! They rummaged through their own archives, as well as at the legation in Mexico City. No dice.
Is this comedy? This is comedy. “I thought YOU had it...” etc. Well, I don't know about THAT. All I know is that the document remained lost. The British consul had then offered to arbitrate, but neither side really having much textual evidence, nothing happened. Mexico’s claim stood, and stands to this day. Looking at all this now, and purely as an American, I say: had the Three Stooges been Mexican diplomats, and I see no reason why they could not have been, Curly would have said, “Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.”
My source for this story is a book published in 2012 titled La república federal de Centro-América : territorio, nación, y diplomacia, 1823-1838. I recommend it, and not just because it is a conveniently slim volume. I actually read it aloud, for Spanish drill, and my cat seemed not to mind.
Charles Dickens
You mention Rudyard Kipling, who I think was among the wisest of the moderns.
Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas are fantastic. Gilbert's comic poetry is good too. Look up the Bab Ballads, and The Three Kings of Chickeraboo. Lots of Englishmen were deeply skeptical about Empire.
The Brits also make incredible actors. The Crown is the best TV watching I've ever seen. But it also stars John Lithgow as Winston Churchill and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher and they just knock it out of the park.
I was blown away when I read _Kim_. Not at all what I expected from Kipling’s sort of syrupy public reputation.
Outsong In the Jungle remains my favorite poem, much better meter than the somewhat syrupy and clunky _If_ So much wisdom.
If I had billionaire money, I'd produce a movie version of Captain's Courageous true to Kipling's novel. The 1937 Spencer Tracy film inexplicably butchered it.
I don’t think it is a question of mindset. The more shambolic and badly run a country is the more conspiracy theories proliferate. There is nothing mystifying about everyone mostly doing what they are supposed to do and institutions functioning more or less in the manner described on the tin ( it does turn out as we are now learning that some high trust society magic was involved which we never noticed or appreciated till it began to drain away).
But lots of people and things stubbornly and against all expectation and public messaging NOT working does require explanation, and when the official explanations are denials or obvious misdirection, quite sensibly people develop multiple explanatory theories of their own.
The great thing about this excerpt is that in real life you'd have to suspect this was a gag. Some guy you don't know calls up and tells you that you are now one of the secret leaders of Mexico? Imagine the narcissism required to overrule your reason in this situation.
My own idea, should the people ever make the error of electing me president, was at the end of my term and during the transition, to tell the incoming president that the greatest secret of the US is that we have been under the control of space aliens since the 1950s. We have to do what they say or they will destroy the earth. They don't interfere often, but when the call comes in, you have to take it and do what they say to the letter. How will you know? Oh, you'll know. Ok ta-ta!
I enjoyed the John Wayne version of TRUE GRIT a half-dozen times before noticing the name of Charles Portis. When I did, I got his book, True Grit, and I am still amazed at how faithfully director Henry Hathaway's film version keeps to the text. The scenery, the sets, the characters and the dialogue are near mirror-image, start-to-finish.
OTOH, Numerous times, I've watched director Adam McKay's film of the book entitled THE BIG SHORT. After each viewing I become more convinced Mr. McKay's film is a clever slice of deep-state propaganda configured to steer audiences away from the absolutely planned & executed destruction of the U.S housing market by fully complicit\complementary roles played between big bankers and relevant government agencies they'd captured via lobbying and election-buying. Is that a conspiracy theory?
Nonetheless, Mr. McKay's skill in writing, casting and direction is evident in his docudrama, The Big Short. Maybe Adam McKay could be the guy who brings more of Mr. Portis' work to the screen. However, from his wikipedia page, it appears Mr. McKay takes very seriously the very sorts of things Mr. Portis finds most ridiculous. We live in interesting times.