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Weekend Butler: Dalai Lama literary contest (there’s a prize). Jesse and Daisy at the Book Fair. The most beautiful car commercial. Why does Air Force One have one more takeoff than landings? Bill Blass Meat Loaf. Mary Oliver. And more.

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Oct 05, 2023
Category: Weekend

SUPPORTING BUTLER: You can become a patron of this site, and automatically donate any amount you please — starting with $1 — each month. The service that enables this is Patreon, and to go there, just click here.  Again, thank you.

THIS WEEK IN BUTLER: Egyptian Magic. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic.  Free Covid Tests. Jesse news. 3 movies

NOT A SCAM! FREE COVID TESTS IN THE UNITED STATES

The govenment will mail you 4 free COVID tests. Click here.

JESSE AND DAISY WAUGH AT THE EMPIRE STATE RARE BOOK FAIR

This Friday, Oct 6,  from 3-4 PM, at something that sounds snooty but isn’t — The Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair — I’ll be interviewing the fascinating English novelist Daisy Waugh (yes, of the Waugh literary dynasty) about her work. (Scroll down for her profile).  We’ll take some shots at the state of publishing today and offer suggestions that might help writers sidestep some new challenges and pitfalls, but mostly, I hope, the novelist who thinks of the career-enhancing aspects of book publishing as “white noise” and I will try to be as amusing as her novels.  At St. Bartholomew’s Church, 325 Park Avenue (between 50^th and 51^st Streets). For tickets, click here. The organizers would like Butlerites to have a discount. In the appropriate box at checkout, type BUTLER.

A QUIZ: STARTING IN THE PRESENT AND GOING BACK IN TIME

I borrowed the idea for Chapter 1 of my just-finished, not-yet-published novel, “The Next Dalai Lama” from a famous chapter in a famous American novel.  Know the book I’m thinking of? If you do, write me at HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com. Yes, there’s a prize. 

The Dalai Lama had been feeling poorly, and he knew — of course he knew — he was about to die, so he turned his attention to dying.

He summoned his aide, had him open the windows and close the door, leaving him alone to his final work.

He lay on his right side. He placed the fourth finger of his right hand in his right nostril. He recited a sutra and began the meditation on death he had rehearsed for decades.

He expressed gratitude that he had been chosen.

He felt, as he had felt for some years, satisfaction that he had done all he could to kill his ego and serve as a simple monk.

He closed his eyes and watched the movie of his life.

Standing with Richard Gere on a stage in Central Park.

Delivering the Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Tibetan.

Drinking cup after cup of hot water in the afternoon.

Putting on a soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle as he left Lhasa on a cold night in 1959, not turning back to look at a home he knew he would never see again.

Meeting Mao in Beijing and believing Buddhism and Communism might be able to co-exist and even bring progress to Tibet right up to the minute Mao said religion is poison.

Watching prisoners from his room in the Potala with his telescope, and marveling that they prostrated themselves when they looked up and saw him in the window.

Reading Life Magazine and making toy tanks out of tsampa dough.

The first time he took a broken watch apart and put it together and it worked.

As an infant, sleeping by the stove.

He arrived at the beginning of his life in this incarnation.

Eyes closed, breath weakening, he mind-traveled 900 miles from his bedroom in India to the night sky over Tibet and the clearest stars he had ever seen, and he looked into their light, and embraced it, and died.

WERE WE EVER THIS YOUNG?

COMING ATTRACTION

The preview of “All the Light We Cannot See,” on Netflix in November.

KEITH RICHARDS AND CHARLIE WATTS

Keith: “A most vital part of being in this band was that Charlie was my bed. I could lay on there, and I know that not only would I have a good sleep, but I’d wake up and it’d still be rocking.”

A TAXI JOKE

Passenger: “Cabbie, take me someplace where I can get scrod!”

Cabbie: “Pal, I’ve been asked that many times before, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

WHY DOES AIR FORCE ONE HAVE ONE MORE TAKEOFF THAN LANDINGS?

James Fallows answers this esoteric question.  Air Force One is the call sign when the serving president is on board. In 1974, Air Force One took off with Richard Nixon aboard—but en route from Washington DC to California, his resignation from office took effect, and the plane landed with a different call sign.

 ONE HUNDRED IS THE NEW $20 BILL

from the Times: New York Is Rebounding for the Rich. Nearly Everyone Else Is Struggling.

The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259, according to 2022 census data, released earlier this month. Social Explorer, a demographic data firm, analyzed the data for The Times.

“It’s amazingly unequal,” said Andrew Beveridge, the president of Social Explorer. “It’s a larger gap than in many developing countries,” and the widest gulf in the United States since 2006, when the data was first reported.

“One hundred is the new $20 bill,” he said. “It’s hard for people right now.”

THINKING OF BOB CARO AND HIS EDITOR, BOB GOTTLIEB

from Middlemarch: “Somebody put a drop [of Mr. Casaubon’s blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”

THE WEEKEND POEM

by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

WRITER’S STRIKE

From Twitter: In retrospect you probably shouldn’t go up against writers in a contest of who can keep doing something longer while not making any money.

PREVIEW OF THE WEEK

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” click here.

TOM WAITS, GREAT DAD

My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. ‘Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?’ they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, ‘Look at me…I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.’ And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, ‘Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.’So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

WEEKEND RECIPE

Bill Blass Meat Loaf

From the NY Times: This homespun, bacon-wrapped version of the American classic is attributed to Bill Blass, the clothing designer of the 60s, 70s and 80s, who is perhaps best known for dressing First Lady Nancy Reagan and the upper echelons of New York society. While he became hugely successful – he reportedly sold his business for $50 million in 1999 – his culinary tastes remained firmly Midwestern. From his 2002 obituary in The Times: “A man of robust but simple tastes who would go out of his way for a hamburger, Mr. Blass would serve guests his own meatloaf recipe, followed perhaps by lemon meringue pie. He always maintained, only partly in jest, ‘My claim to immortality will be my meatloaf.’”

 6 to 8 servings

1 cup chopped celery

1 onion, chopped

3 tablespoons butter

2 pounds ground beef sirloin

½ pound ground veal

½ pound ground pork

½ cup chopped fresh parsley

⅓ cup sour cream

½ cup soft bread crumbs

¼ teaspoon dried thyme

¼ teaspoon dried marjoram

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 egg

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1½ cups Heinz chili sauce

3 slices bacon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Oil an 8-by-4-inch loaf pan. In a heavy skillet over medium heat, saute the celery and onion in the butter until soft, about 5 minutes. Scrape into a large mixing bowl and cool.

 

When the onions are cool enough to handle, add the meats, parsley, sour cream, bread crumbs, thyme, marjoram and salt and pepper to the bowl. Whisk the egg with the Worcestershire sauce and add to the mixture. Using a wooden spoon or your hands, combine the mixture and mold into the shape of a loaf.

 

Place the meatloaf in the prepared pan. Top with the chili sauce and bacon slices. Bake until firm and nicely browned, about 1 hour.