Lary Bloom

Writer, Editor, Teacher

The Bloom Blog

Photo by Nancy Dionne

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

A Jury Of His Peers

The defendant, dressed in a sports jacket and conservative shirt and with his hair close-cropped -- unlike his FBI Most Wanted photo, with unruly dreadlocks -- whispered to his lawyer, and looked out over the room.

He seemed to survey all of us, the 100 or so potential jurors for the case of Connecticut v. Julian J. Lockhart, only one of whom had the same skin color as he. Meanwhile, the judge, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, defendant, and security guard offered an orientation that might have been for all its decorum and courteousness and occasional attempts at humor mistaken for a business seminar.

It was clearly not that. The charges were read by the judge in the driest and most legalistic sense. He said "Mr. Lockhart is accused of murder, felony murder, and robbery." He did not divulge particulars, such as, "Julian Lockhart, or J.J., as he is known by his associates,
answered an ad for a used car for sale, went to Killingworth, asked the owner of the car, Robert Glidden, a 25-year-old Navy veteran, if the two could go for a test drive in the Honda, and then, according to police and prosecutors, during the course of the next hour or so beat Glidden to death, dumped his body in the woods, and drove off with the car."

Trials are like that. They begin in formality, and are careful to not tread on the rights of the accused. We had all been shown the usual video, which pointed out that every person charged with a crime is presumed innocent until the state proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, otherwise.

Yet, I can imagine what went on in the head of Julian J. Lockhart as he surveyed us. He knew that when the trial begins, scheduled for May 10 and estimated to run for about three weeks, it may come out that he became a fugitive, and was captured in Atlanta. He knew that, when the final selection of jurors from the 100 or so eligible was made, it would likely include only white faces.

Mine was among those white faces excused from the jury pool, because the trial dates conflict with a family wedding in Ohio. But I pointed this out when my turn came with the judge with some regret. If I am to serve on a jury -- for the first time -- there could hardly be one in which more is at stake.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 9:03 AM

Monday, February 27, 2006

Seeing The Piazza Light

For some time now, friends have urged me to see The Light In The Piazza, at Lincoln Center. And finally, yesterday, we made the matinee. By 5:30, I was a mess. The old tears of joy that I hadn't shed in a Broadway musical since the Golden Age. And, oddly, it was a descendant of the Golden Age who created the thing -- the grandson of Richard Rodgers, Adam Guettal. Unfair -- so much talent in one family. Here's Adam, all these years later, carrying on his grandfather's rich tradition, writing sweeping melodies (and affecting lyrics) . The setting for The Light in the Piazza (Florence, early 1950s) is the kind of setting that would have suited a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic.

Perhaps we have become so cynical that an old-fashioned (and entirely compelling) love story like the one sung so beautifully in Piazza would seem out of place if set in the present. I hope not. While the present is still the present, however, run to see this. (As you'll see, such an effort will fit right in with the play -- the ingenue, in high heels, sprints around the stage.)

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 3:30 AM

Friday, February 24, 2006

Hero Muffins

I heard a couple of days ago from Edward Beale, a particular hero of mine. He was one of those selfless holicopter pilots who flew into the teeth of Hurricane Katrina, and then rescued victims from rooftops. Last summer, I wrote about him for Connecticut magazine and in the piece emphasized the role "power muffins" played. These were baked by Beale's wife, Michelle, before each mission, and then stuffed into her husband's flight suit. Though intended initially as emergency rations for him many muffins landed in the hands and deprived stomachs of refugees from the hardest hit neighborhoods of New Orleans.

In the time since, I had thought of the Beales' contributions to the relief effort often -- they were lost in the fury over FEMA's ineptitude and apparent indifference. What Edward Beale did, risk life and limb, and tirelessly, will be fully acknowledged only in the stiff language of U.S. Coast Guard citations he'll hang on his wall. Even so, I thought in time the Bealeses of the world would get their due. Who would have thought that brain tumor would intrude.

Edward's email to friends gave the details, and that Michelle had just recovered from surgery. He asked everyone to send their best wishes to her, which I did, with a request that he send me the recipe for the power muffins. In that way, we could honor Michelle at the dinner table.
We baked the muffins the other day. You will do yourself a favor if you make them yourselves. When you call up the recipe below, you'll see that they are named Morning Star muffins as well as Power Muffins. However, I will call them Hero Muffins.

http://www.rezonate.com/cookbook/bakedgoods/b001msmuffins.html

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 5:42 PM

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Icy Stares

And so to our little town comes X-rated ice scupture. Perhaps I overstate this. It was only a body. But what a body.

Used to be that ice sculpture competition was decided by who carved the best American eagle. No more. The level of sophistication has hugely increased.

And so when Chester, Connecticut, invited eleven competitors for this years Winter Carnival, there was much antipation. I recalled my favorite from years past -- a carving of an outfielder's glove. Timing is everything. And a comment on baseball and the beginning of spring training was just the warm touch needed on 28-degree afternoon.

This year's bunch was less-springlike, but impressive, and an entirely new dimension. Used to be that contestants carved from a single block of ice -- not anymore. One adventuresome fellow set out to re-create the Parthenon, but settled in the end for Stonehenge. Another created a lion wrapped in a serpent. I was relieved, I guess, that no one had tried to carve the Prophet Mohammed.

Unless that was the name of showstopper -- the sensual and captivating body of, what? A dancer? A women in the act of something in which the usual venue is the bedroom? With his power saw, and a cigaret dangling from his lips, the sculptor carved away, or should I say curved away? He was enormously successful, particular in the upper regions of the body.

I did not stick around for the blue ribbon ceremony, or to exactly where, on that anatomy, he hung it from.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 6:17 PM

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Dominick Dunne's "Tempestuous Situation"

When the January issue of Vanity Fair arrived, I did what I always do. I spent several minutes hunting for the table of contents (never easy to find in that magazine because it's buried among ads) for Dominick Dunne's column. There was no mention of it, which seemed odd. He'd been writing as Vanity Fair's diarist for many years. As such, he has offered a window into the world of high society and crime.

Dominick loves to dish, and, at the same time, is passionate about the criminal justice system. He is furious about the way certain people get away with murder (O.J. is a prime example) while others are wrongly accused. The interest stems from a case that broke his heart -- when his daughter Dominique, an actress, was strangled in 1982 by her former lover, and the killer went to prison for six years on the wrist-slapping charge of voluntary manslaughter.

His passion for justice is what makes his writing resonate, and such an enticing part of Vanity Fair, which my taste is otherwise too heavily reliant on Hollywood profiles. So when his column was not to be found, I wrote him an email. (He lives not far away, across the Connecticut River, and I see him on occasion at local restaurants or at a farmer's market in Lyme.)

He wrote back and said, "a tempestuous situation occurred between writer and editor. I held my own." He offered no details the dispute, except to say he'd be back in the March issue. I'm pleased to see that he is. This time he's writing primarily about three women he admires -- all of them married to financial barons who got themselves indicted for high crimes. It's good, once again, to have Dominick Dunne sitting at the wrong, but delicious, dinner tables.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 2:06 PM

Saturday, February 18, 2006

How To Save $250 On Airport Parking

1. Fly to Mexico for a 10-day vacation..
2. Return to JFK the night after a blizzard.
3. Note the chaos at the valet parking lot -- people waiting in line for many hours because cars can't be dug out or found.
4. In disgust, take a cab to the apartment of relatives in Brooklyn. (Cost: $50)
5. The next morning, drive their excuse for a car home to Connecticut.
6. Drive back to JFK three days later to get your car (though the valet parking company office still doesn't answer the phone and you don't know for certain they've found the car.)
7. Arrive at the company. Wait for your car to be delivered to the door. Watch as the woman behind the counter presents a bill for $250, which includes charges for the days in which the car could not be found.
8. Imagine a long prison sentence for murder of a clerk at a valet parking company.
9. Say, "I won't pay for those days. In fact, I won't pay for any days." A man who passes for a manager agrees with you.
10. Drive back to Connecticut in your own car. Stop at Stew Leonard's and buy the ingredients for enchiladas. You can do Mexico at home.

(Note: Advice inspired by an actual account, revealed by friends over dinner of, well, Cuban food.)

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 4:03 AM

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The Student/Athlete Myth

Much has been made recently of the matter of Marcus Williams, an enormously talented UConn point guard, who last year demonstrated his ineptitude at committing crimes. He and another basketball player stole laptops and were immediately caught. It was a sad affair, particularly in that these were two young men were the already recipients of the great rewards of our athletic culture. Williams in particular seemed to be an NBA prospect. Worse, however, was the appearance of special treatment after the crime. Though UConn argued the punishment was one routinely given to students for such offense-- a slap on the wrist -- it gave no evidence to back up that claim. My view is that poor slobs who can't dunk are tossed out on their unheralded asses.

And now, the New York Times has weighed in. It has done so because a Hartford Courant columnist, Jeff Jacobs, who has been on UConn's case for its light punishment of Williams, drew the ire of UConn coach Jim Calhoun. That, too, is a sad affair.

There was never a scandal, on the other hand, about Diana Taurasi, who may have been the most talented player UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma ever recruited. And yet in an interview she gave as a senior, when she was asked what her favorite book was, she replied that she had never read a book in her life, not even in college -- except for one on basketball strategy. I was surprised that nothing was ever made of this revelation -- that a person could get a degree at what is considered a state intitution of considerable merit without knowing anything but how to dribble behind the back, score from well beyond the three point line, and dazzle with no-look passes.

And so we go, pretending that athletes are student/athletes. We should accept the fact that although on occasion there is someone like Emeka Okefor, the talented NBA center who came out of UConn and who actually studied impressively there, most major in something other than finding out how the world works.

When I was a student in Athens, Ohio, I was outraged that hockey players were given the answer to the test in Music Appreciation in the days beforehand. It was an outrage. I should have seen it for what it was -- the price of our hero worship.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 8:53 AM

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Lies Of Blizzard

The Hartford Courant reported yesterday that the weekend snowstorm was among the "worst" ever. Residents of the Northeast who lost power, or who were obliged to travel the highways to get to work or in response to emergencies, or who had a wedding planned, or were trying to catch a flight in vain, might be inclined to agree. But to the rest of us -- worst? Why not best?

On Sunday night, intrepid dinner guests walked through the "blizzard" to our house, and home again afterwards. None were reported missing the next day, and all had found the outing invigorating.

As always after a storm, the morning sky turned brilliantly blue -- and the trees still glowed from nature's inspiring performance.

Where did we get the idea that snow is a terrrible thing? How did the joyous snowfall of youth, which, hooray, cancelled classes for the day, become just one more anxiety of adulthood?

Next time there are warnings of doom, haul a few logs in for a fire, gather a few books you have meant to read, put a pot of soup on the stove, and try to think of this as -- sorry to quote Martha Stewart -- a good thing.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:57 AM

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Pharaoh Bush

Yesterday morning, in our weekly session of Torah study, known with some irreverance, as the Holy Scrollers, one of our more astute participants offered a new spin on Exodus's evil Pharaoh. The matter of God hardening Pharoah's heart several times has always been, for us, problematic -- making the Pharaoh a mere stooge and stripping him of free will. More than once, God's motives have been questioned in our group, and the whole story seems farfetched and unnecessarily cruel. In all the years we've been reading this, Pharaoh seems less and less like a believable figure.

But then, perhaps Pharaoh's hardened heart is nothing more than, well, George Bush's stubborness. Our commander in chief finds it implausibe, once he has put forward a position, to admit error. His war on terror, for example, is rightly centered in Iraq --a circumstance that underscores his failure at Yale and in other places at geography and common sense. There's no backing away once a position is taken, particularly on national defense and the "foreigners" who are a threat. No evidence otherwise makes any difference.

So, put Bush in Pharaoh's place. Plague after plague have come upon the Egyptions, yet the man in charge "stays the course." And when the 11th plague, Katrina, hits, even many of those who have been taken in by Pharaoh are beginning to feel as if we will all soon be at the bottom of the Sea of Reeds in our chariots.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 11:52 AM

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

You Aren't What You Eat?

At least, you aren't necessarily what you eat. A new and disturbing study about to be published in a respected medical journal shows that women who ate healthy diets over a test period fared no better in avoiding cancer and other major illnesses than women who ate diets high in fats.

No doubt the execs at McDonald's will welcome the news. They're bottom lines grow in direct relationship to the bottoms of Americans.

Who are we kidding? As the sage says, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Forty years ago, the genius cartoonist Jules Feiffer predicted (in inspired drawings) the future of America. "Barbarians" from the east will simply press their index fingers against our chests and our fat bodies will roll over backwards and keep going until we tumble into the sea.

As it looks to me now, they may not need to exert that much pressure.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:40 AM

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson, Fyodor Dostoevsky

In his acclaimed new film, Match Point, Woody Allen cleverly presents at least three visual clues to the possible outcome, including the most obvious -- the gun in the right hand drawer (or in this case, the shotgun in the rich man's display case.) His twist at the end is inspired. And his seriousness of purpose clear throughout.

So why is Match Point so tedious? It's not because Scarlett Johansson's lips are uninteresting. They aren't uninteresting. Or because Enrico Caruso provides the music. This is a wonderful touch. Or because all of this was inspired by Crime and Punishment. We can't point the finger at Dostoevsky for the two hours plus of Woody Allen's carefully crafted dullness.

Throughout Allen's film careers, and for whatever you've thought of his body of work, you would never say that the characters he created were uninteresting. But you could certainly say that here. When you are left with trying to decide whether you want the former tennis pro Chris Wilton to get away with his brutal crimes or not, you might as well be out in the lobby securing a box of Jujubees.

Those of us who are fans of Allen are desperate for him to succeed once again. And perhaps this accounts for some of the acclaim he's received. "His best film in years," seems to be the consensus.

This may be true. But it's nothing to celebrate.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 9:28 AM

Friday, February 03, 2006

Oprah, Frey, And Us

I have not yet weighed in here on the Oprah-Frey memoir mess. I have waited for the sanctimoniousness to die a natural death. But it doesn't seem to, and so it's time.

Every Thursday, I teach a memoir class in West Hartford. Students there have been following the news stories about Frey, even as they address their own writing issues. What, they want to know, is acceptable in memoir writing, and what is not acceptable? Or, as book critic Carol Goldberg wrote in The Hartford Courant yesterday --There are no rules in writing memoir, and James Frey has broken every one of them.

Only the most self-righteous among writing teachers or people who practice the craft of writing would argue that imagination has no place in memoir writing. Such writing actually requires imagination. So then what crosses the line from imagination into literary felonies?

There is only one key point: the reader's trust. The writer must earn that. Without it, two million books sold or not, the work is a bust. And yet, writers can receive that trust without being precisely accurate.

About his much acclaimed nonfiction narrative, "In Cold Blood," which spawned the true crime genre, Truman Capote proclaimed that every word is true. But how can all the words be true when conversations are reconstructed only from impressions the writer received about the Clutter family after the murder of four of its members? In Frank McCourt's three compelling books of memoir, conversations are presented as fact throughout. No seasoned reader accepts them as accurate -- they're merely truthful, in the sense that it's easy to believe that such utterances came from such characters, and that McCourt, as the human (and thus flawed) tape recorder, got the essence, if not every conversation, exactly right.

Of course, McCourt is an engaging man, a wry soul whom we admire. James Frey appears to have lesser qualications in that regard. He bears the brunt of the scandal, but he should be not be alone. It isn't as if Frey was a veteran writer who'd written best-sellers before. He wrote his book as fiction -- which would have made its contents entirely proper. It was his publisher, Nan Talese, who wanted to bring it out as memoir. At that point, of course, Frey had the duty to point out what objective facts in the book wouldn't hold up in memoir. The author's character is at issue here, but any writer whose been at the game for some time knows that when you have a publisher interested -- especially one as powerful as Talese -- and you haven't caught a break before, you can be easily swept up into whatever marketing scheme she is concocting. So I assign a heavy responsibility to Talese, who apparently never grilled Frey on matters that would make such a switch of literary category acceptable.

In a way, this is all good for writers. Any time books can be fodder for front page news it sure beats the alternative -- relegation to book pages avoided by most readers. But that's probably too optimistic a view. I have worked with many writers over the years who take no task in life more seriously than getting it right -- and retaining the reader's trust. When people like Nan Talese and James Frey (with the unwitting help of Oprah Winfrey) undermine this, we all suffer.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:39 AM

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

What Every Journalism Major Needs To Know

Stephen Brill has given Yale $1 million for journalism instruction. He should have saved his money. I can provide in this small space all the instruction journalism students need:

1. Change your major. When I was a senior in high school, my journalism teacher gave me one rule to remember above all else: don't major in journalism. She said this in an era when jobs were plentiful, and it looked as if newspapers would be around forever. I disregarded her advice, and ended up workng nearly 35 years in the field, also disregarding Mark Twain's counsel: "Journalism never hurt any man, as long as he didn't stay too long."

2. Bone up on Google and Yahoo. If you have a chance at a job, those will be your employers. Forget about the New York Times -- the Times traditionally plucked its up-and-comers from the staffs of the regional newspapers. But those papers are dumping staff and no longer serve as a reliable farm system for the Times, the Wall Street Journal, of the Washington Post, the only three newspapers in America who have not been greatly diminished by newsroom cuts (though all three have also trimmed budgets and staff.)

3. Disregard all of this, if you are like I was. Journalism was a calling. Nobody could talk me out of it. And I'm glad they couldn't. But, if you go into the field, remember just this: get the story the right. Period. That's all there is to know.

Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:21 AM