Monday, October 31, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt six)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

Most banks had stopped lending to Trump after his run of bankruptcies, in a way that effectively made it impossible for him to build on the scale he had in the 1970s and ’80s. There was one major exception: Deutsche Bank, a lesser player on Wall Street that was willing to take on heightened risk in order to build up its presence in the United States. In order to borrow, Trump agreed, once again, to personally guarantee his loans, which put him on the hook when they came due years later. When Trump in 2006 suddenly paid more than $10 million in cash to buy a huge patch of land in northeast Scotland, his mother’s native country, with the goal of building a golf resort, it wasn’t clear where he had come up with the money to do so.

The Trump SoHo, on which ground was broken that same year in Lower Manhattan, was more typical of his new projects. Trump did not invest any of his own money in the 391-room condominium and hotel, instead offering his name and deploying his eldest son and daughter to serve as liaisons to a new demographic to which Trump wanted to appeal, in exchange for an 18 percent equity stake. The majority partner was the Bayrock Group, a New York real estate firm known to be led by the Soviet-born investors Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater. The latter had an especially notable background: Sater had been convicted for both first-degree assault (shoving a broken margarita glass into a man’s face) and fraud (a pump-and-dump penny-stock scheme involving the Genovese crime family) before becoming a government informant. He maintained an office at Trump Tower and a business relationship with its namesake that he said was more than cordial. The building they erected together would be the final one constructed in New York with Trump’s name.



Sunday, October 30, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt five)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

When pressed in interviews, Trump often struggled to articulate his position on those issues as clearly as he did in the pages of a ghostwritten book. “I’m very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion,” he told NBC’s Tim Russert. “I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject. But you still—I just believe in choice. And, again, it may be a little bit of a New York background, because there is some different attitude in different parts of the country.” When King asked Trump if he thought universal health care was “an entitlement of birth,” Trump didn’t appear to understand the question. “I think it is,” Trump said. “It’s an entitlement to this country, and too bad the world can’t be, you know, in this country. But the fact is, it’s an entitlement to this country if we’re going to have a great country.”



Saturday, October 29, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt four)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

As part of his effort to promote hundred-thousand-dollars-a-person memberships at Mar-a-Lago, Trump spent roughly a year appealing to Official Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach to come and spend a weekend there for a cover story he hoped to see run in New York magazine, calling her monthly even before it was clear the magazine was interested in such a piece. He appeared oblivious to the fact that Birnbach had been a deputy editor of Spy, the source of endless torment for Trump. (She was also close friends with advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who later accused him of a rape that allegedly took place in the fall of 1995 or early 1996.)

He gave Birnbach a tour of the property, demonstrating the endless salesmanship for which he had become known, and posed for a photo with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ivanka, sitting on his lap, holding his cheek with her hand. “Look at these doors. Look at the quality in these doors. Nobody has ever seen stuff like this.” And then: “This is a good room. This is the French Room. This is rated like No. 18 or something like that.” Birnbach interrupted, asking whether the rooms were actually rated. “I rate the rooms,” Trump replied. “This room . . . but this is a . . . You know, it’s very hard . . . I rate the rooms in terms of levels of, you know, what you think is the best.” Birnbach pointed out he had used the phrase “the best” quite a bit during their tour. Trump replied, “The best is a very important expression to me.” (Trump ended up complaining bitterly to Birnbach’s editor about how the story, almost entirely a transcript of his own quotes, made him look.)



Friday, October 28, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt three)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

Donald’s stress about the opening-weekend debacle traced to the fact that they had spent so much to build the Taj that they needed extraordinary cash flow to sustain it. The casino needed to take in $1.3 million a day in revenue just to stay afloat. Just weeks earlier, when a casino-industry analyst named Marvin Roffman had been quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying he thought the Taj would have trouble generating that revenue, Trump called Roffman’s bosses at the investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott threatening to sue the company if Roffman did not either apologize and say publicly that the Taj would be a massive success or lose his job. Roffman refused to recant and was fired shortly after, a situation that led Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to call for a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

Trump might have succeeded in delivering vengeance, but he could not keep scrutiny of his finances at bay. A pair of journalists at Forbes received a leaked copy of a financial-disclosure report that Trump was required to file with New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission. Most notably, the filing made clear how dire the day-to-day cash flow was for the Taj’s owner: his businesses were already in the red, stretched by debt from all his purchases. When he learned Forbes was going to write the story, Trump applied pressure.

In one telling, Trump dangled the threat of a lawsuit against the magazine. In another, according to a journalist who worked for the magazine, Trump made clear to the Forbes leadership that he was ready to embarrass the family of the magazine’s recently deceased owner, Malcolm Forbes, a gay man who had worked hard to keep his sexuality secret. The journalist said that Trump warned that shortly before his death Forbes had attempted to enter the Plaza Hotel’s bar with two male friends below the legal drinking age. Trump claimed he blocked their entry, prompting Forbes to call the next day and threaten him. The hit piece about his net worth, Trump alleged, was that retribution. (In Surviving at the Top, Trump recounted that story and twisted the knife into Forbes’s corpse. “I also saw a double standard in the way he lived openly as a homosexual—which he had every right to do—but expected the media and his famous friends to cover for him.”) There were reasons to question Trump’s account—the two reporters behind the article said they did not begin work on it until after Forbes’s death—but Trump’s threats, whether it was about Malcolm Forbes or simply the possibility of a lawsuit, succeeded: the story was changed before publication.



Thursday, October 27, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt two)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

The same year as the Central Park assault, Trump appeared on an NBC News special focused on race relations, along with other guests including the filmmaker Spike Lee, poet Maya Angelou, home-entertaining celebrity Martha Stewart, and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. The guests were asked to speak about affirmative-action policies and their impact on economic opportunity in the United States. “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” said Trump, whose father’s connections and money shaped nearly every aspect of his career. “And, I think, sometimes a Black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that but in actuality today, currently, it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a great. I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”

Lee, whose recent film Do the Right Thing portrayed the era’s block-by-block racial strife in his native Brooklyn, was in shock. “Well, I certainly don’t agree with that garbage that Donald Trump said, that if he could be reborn or reincarnated, he’d want to come back as an educated Black, because we start off . . .” his voice drifted off. “I didn’t believe he said that, that’s crazy.”



Wednesday, October 26, 2022

the last book I ever read (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, excerpt one)

from Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman:

Before they married, however, Roy Cohn intervened to protect Trump’s interests once again. After advising him, futilely, not to get married—“I don’t know why you want to do this”—Cohn persuaded Trump to get his fiancĂ©e to sign a prenuptial agreement. One version included a bonus for each child she had; that provision was excised from the signed deal. Another called for her to return any gifts Trump gave her during the marriage if they divorced, a stipulation that pushed her away from the negotiating table. She eventually returned once the terms were changed.

The agreement included a phrase that seemed to codify Trump’s professed uninterest in personally living the high life by establishing that his current preferences were neither “opulent nor extravagant.” In fact, the way he lived would become ostentatiously opulent and extravagant, but it was already the opinion of Cohn—and possibly Trump too—that Ivana craved a more expensive lifestyle, and the prenuptial agreement was essentially, according to Barrett, a “gold-digger warning.”



Sunday, October 23, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt fourteen)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

They paused in the same place where Trump and Pence were inaugurated in 2017 on a crisp, clear day amid a crowd of former presidents and against a Capitol decorated in red, white, and blue bunting. Four years later, Trump supporters swarmed marble terraces, walkways, and the steps of the west front of the same ornate building. Countless Trump flags flapped in the wind. Clouds of tear gas hung in the air against the purple twilight sky, and the orange light glowing from inside the Capitol’s windows gave the scene a surreal, apocalyptic feel.

Saundra was inspired by a vista of Trumpian strength and patriotism: the Washington Monument off in the distance, the majestic Capitol in the foreground, and freedom-loving patriots fighting like hell to stop a stolen and fraudulent election, liberate their country, and save their president. She snapped pictures and recorded videos.

“It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”



Saturday, October 22, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt thirteen)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

A turning point for others came after Giuliani’s wild news conference on November 19 at RNC headquarters with Ellis and Powell, in which they continued to allege widespread voter fraud—arguments based on falsehoods and conspiracy theories and devoid of any evidence. Powell’s arguments implicated billionaire George Soros and Venezuelan communists.

“President Trump won by a landslide, and we are going to prove it,” Powell said.

After the election, Dominion filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Powell, who defended herself by claiming that her allegations were too ridiculous to be believed.

“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” Powell’s attorneys told the federal judge presiding over the case.

Pence laughed out loud when he read the court filing.



Friday, October 21, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt twelve)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

Administration officials like Pompeo and Milley believed some of Trump’s new hires were conspiracy theorists and discussed whether others might have links to neo-Nazi groups. Senior administration officials weren’t completely sure what Trump was up to, and they started hitting the panic button.

“The crazies have taken over,” Pompeo warned a colleague about the White House.

Pompeo worried that foreign adversaries might view the domestic instability from the electoral uncertainty being fanned by Trump as an opportunity to exploit. Pompeo left one senior administration official with the impressions that he was also concerned about the possibility that Trump might engage in a foreign conflict as a way to strengthen his political argument for remaining in office. Pompeo suggested a daily call with Meadows and Milley to all stay on the same page when it came to hot spots overseas.

But publicly, Pompeo played a cynical political hand and fed into the fraud conspiracy when, during a State Department news conference on November 10, he said he anticipated a second Trump term.



Thursday, October 20, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt eleven)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

There was a corner of Trump World that had, however briefly, at least considered telling Trump he’d lost.

While Trump had been golfing that Saturday morning, a small circle of advisers had been sitting inside campaign headquarters around the table in a glass-encased conference room considering their options. They watched with alarm as Giuliani turned in a news conference performance so absurd that its location attained instant iconic status: Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Standing in a local landscaping company’s parking lot, Giuliani had intended to highlight his allegations of voter fraud in Philadelphia, but the story out of the event was a flub over the location; Trump had initially tweeted out that the news conference would be held at the luxury Four Seasons hotel, only to have to clarify that the event was, in fact, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It was an embarrassing development for the campaign’s skilled advance team that had been grounded in Washington because of budget concerns. As Giuliani stood in the northeast Philly parking lot of the cement block building—next to a sex shop and a crematorium—the Associated Press and all of the major cable news networks called the election. Even Corey was smart enough to stay out of that shot.

Giuliani mocked the news that the race was over, but back in Washington, the bungled news conference crystallized the finality of the moment for some of Trump World’s most loyal lieutenants.



Wednesday, October 19, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt ten)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

In many ways, it was a simple yet systematic failure of imagination in Trump World that prevented anyone from anticipating that the Oval Office was about to be overtaken by Rudy Giuliani; that the president would rush to install a band of sycophants across the administration; and that the repeated misuse and abuse of the bully pulpit from the world’s most powerful political office would foment a revolution in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Trump had spent four years insisting that anything negative about his brand was fake news. The media was lying, no other elected officials should be believed, and the courts weren’t to be trusted. It was a lie that he repeated most consistently when it came to his standing among American voters. Positive polls were accurate, negative polls were wrong, and the only possible explanation for any electoral defeat—the 2020 presidential race, the 2016 Iowa caucuses, or even the 2004 Emmys—was the predictable, if false, claim of cheating and fraud. Each repetition of rigged elections was its own jackhammer to the foundation of the country’s democratic principles.



Tuesday, October 18, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt nine)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

On October 24, Trump cast an early ballot at the Palm Beach County Library.

Trump had mailed in his primary ballot in August, but that wasn’t an option after he’d spent the entire year warning about the dangers of voting by mail.

In May, he accused the “rogue” Michigan secretary of state of illegally sending millions of voters mail-in ballots for which they hadn’t asked, but he was completely wrong. In June, he claimed that unnamed foreign countries would print millions of fraudulent mail ballots, without any evidence. In July, he promised that voting by mail would result in the “most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history”—and he called for the country to delay the election.

In August, he said on Fox News that Democrats were already “trying to steal the election” and that he planned to dispatch sheriffs, U.S. attorneys, and attorneys general to polling places—despite not possessing those powers. At his debate with Biden in September, Trump launched an extensive attack on mail-in voting that was teeming with falsehoods and misrepresentations.

From the debate stage in Cleveland, he accused Philadelphia election officials of improperly blocking his team from monitoring voters filling out mail ballots, even though state law gave his team no legal right to do so. He said a West Virginia mailman was selling ballots, without explaining that the case involved a postal worker—who pleaded guilty in July—switching several absentee ballot requests from Democrat to Republican.

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” Trump said that night.



Monday, October 17, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt eight)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

At the height of his twenty-nine-month run as campaign manager, Brad thought his unlikely ascendancy onto the mainstage of national politics would end with immortality in history books, or maybe at least a feature-length documentary. Instead, it was more like an episode of Cops when Brad—shirtless, shoeless, and hapless, with a beer in his hand—was tackled to the ground by police outside his Fort Lauderdale home and detained for a psychiatric evaluation.

News accounts at the time reported that Brad’s wife, Candice, had called 911 in the midst of a days-long fight. They’d both been drinking, there were guns in the house, and the arguing had continued to escalate. Candice told dispatchers she thought Brad might hurt himself.

What wasn’t known at the time was the source of the argument: Trump. Brad had been devastated by his demotion, and Candice thought her husband had been scapegoated. She was already furious at the Trumps for her husband’s sake. But the final straw came that last weekend in September, when Brad shared something even more stunning: Jared wanted to bring him back inside, and Brad was going to fly to Washington the next day.



Sunday, October 16, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt seven)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

At the airport in Minneapolis, Trump was greeted by a group that included U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis, state senate Republican leader Paul Gazelka, and state house Republican leader Kurt Daudt. They’d all been tested for coronavirus and told not to shake hands with Trump or get close to him, in order to comply with pandemic protocols.

Trump descended the stairs from the plane, and immediately offered to take photos with the group. The greeters stood less than a foot from Trump. None wore a mask.



Saturday, October 15, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt six)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

The main entrance from the south side of the White House is a set of doors that open into the Diplomatic Reception Room—one of four similarly sized oval-shaped suites in the building. But the Dip Room, as the locals call it, holds its own unique history. In the 1830s, slaves used the space to polish silver. In the 1930s, FDR sat near the open hearth and delivered his popular fireside radio chats. In 1961, First Lady Jackie Kennedy redecorated and hung striking hand-painted wallpaper depicting panoramic views of American landscapes and entertained ambassadors and visiting diplomats who were welcome there for much of the twentieth century.

On September 6, 2020, President Trump used the room to host a Covid-19 superspreader.

Just like so many other key moments in the Trump White House, the superspreader was a spur-of-the-moment thing. And just like a long list of Trump’s self-inflicted troubles, this one arose from a willful disregard for traditional protocols.



Friday, October 14, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt five)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

Brad recommended holding the rally on June 19. He loved Friday night events, but rallies those nights were rare because the campaign often had to find open days between concerts, basketball games, and other traveling road shows that had been booked months in advance. Brad floated the date inside the campaign, but not to an extensive circle. No one on Brad’s team flagged that day—or that combination of time and place—as potentially problematic. Had Brad bothered to ask Katrina Pierson, the highest-ranking Black staffer on the campaign and a close friend of Brad’s, she could have told him that June 19 was Juneteenth, a significant holiday for Black Americans that commemorated the end of slavery.

She also would have told him that Tulsa, as most Black Americans are well aware, had been home to one of the bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence in the nation’s history. She’d have explained that it had only been two weeks since Floyd had been killed, that protests over police brutality, which disproportionately had fatal consequences for Blacks were still boiling over across the country every night, and that holding a rally in the middle of a civil rights crisis on Juneteenth in the same city as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was unwise.



Thursday, October 13, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt four)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

On his way to Paris to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the First World War armistice, for example, Trump listened as John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict. Kelly continued the discussion by connecting the dots from the First World War to the Second World War and all of Hitler’s atrocities.

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly.

When I asked Trump about the remark, he claimed the conversation had never happened, and he denied praising Hitler. But others said the remark stunned Kelly. The chief of staff told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred. Trump pointed to Germany’s economic gains once Hitler took over as chancellor. Kelly pushed back again and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.

“Even if it was true that he was solely responsible for rebuilding the economy, on balance, you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler,” Kelly told Trump. “You just can’t.”



Wednesday, October 12, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt three)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

Trump treated his decision to ban travel from China on January 31 as if he had all but solved the crisis.

“We pretty much shut it down,” he’d say on February 2.

But he knew that the virus was far more severe than he was letting on. In a private interview on February 7, two days after his impeachment acquittal—before his rally in New Hampshire, before his swing out West, where he held three more rallies, and before his trip to India—he’d told journalist Bob Woodward that the virus could be spread through the air—a fact that wasn’t widely known at the time.



Tuesday, October 11, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt two)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

In October, the president publicly called on another foreign power (China) to investigate the Bidens, impeachment proceedings for members of Congress (no such thing), and refused to comply with a single subpoena from the coequal branch of government just a couple of miles down Pennsylvania Avenue (sparking concerns of a constitutional crisis).

In mid-October, Mulvaney openly admitted that Trump wanted to block military aid for Ukraine in exchange for political investigations into his political rivals.

“That’s why we held up the money,” Mulvaney said in a disastrous news conference. The White House immediately tried to walk back Mulvaney’s candor. But none of the gaffes seemed to matter.

Just 49 percent of Americans said they thought Trump should be impeached, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken after Mulvaney’s stunning news conference confessional. Two months later, the same survey showed 48 percent supported the move.



Monday, October 10, 2022

the last book I ever read (Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, excerpt one)

from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender:

It was a month after that Orlando rally, on July 25, when Trump picked up the phone and repeatedly pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help smear his political rivals. Trump wanted Zelensky to spread misinformation about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election and investigate Joe Biden, the former Democratic vice president who had opened his campaign to unseat Trump just three months earlier. That phone call—paired with Trump’s attempt to force Zelensky’s hand by blocking $400 million in military aid for Kyiv—sparked the impeachment inquiry in late September.

The impeachment inquiry, in many ways, marked the actual start of the campaign. It provided purpose and mission to Trump World and offered a desperately needed reason for a fractured Republican Party to unite around the president. Trump always intended to treat his reelection in 2020 as a continuation of his campaign in 2016, even though an incumbent running as a change agent was a tricky feat to pull off. The impeachment allowed the president once again to cast himself as a victim and Washington outsider.

But the prospect of impeachment left him deeply rattled.



Saturday, October 8, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt thirteen)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

Blue sky opened its dome above the river, and the river was dotted with sails. I readied myself, but immediately my mother and my brother each laid one hand on a door handle. The tires hummed briefly over the grill of the bridge. Water, sails, blue sky and suspended gulls flashed by like an improbable postcard, and we were across.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.



Friday, October 7, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt twelve)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

I was pretty sure the Catholics wouldn’t take in any crazy nuns. My Aunt Libby’s husband had made a joke once, about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, “Alleluia!” Only she wasn’t sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some asylum.



Thursday, October 6, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt eleven)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

We browned hot dogs on the public grills at the beach, and by watching Jody and Mark and Cal very carefully I managed to cook my hot dog just the right amount of time and didn’t burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing. Then, when nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand.



Wednesday, October 5, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt ten)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

Doctor Gordon waited. He tapped his pencil – tap, tap, tap – across the neat green field of his blotter.

His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.

Doctor Gordon’s features were so perfect he was almost pretty.

I hated him the minute I walked in through the door.



Tuesday, October 4, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt nine)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

I decided to junk the whole honors program and become an ordinary English major. I went to look up the requirements of an ordinary English major at my college.

There were lots requirements, and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.

A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.

I saw how impossible and embarrassing it would be for me to try to switch from my free program into the stricter one. So I looked up the requirements for English majors at the city college where my mother taught.

They were even worse.



Monday, October 3, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt eight)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.



Sunday, October 2, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt seven)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

“Honestly,” Dorren said, “this one’ll be different.”

“Tell me about him,” I said stonily.

“He’s from Peru.”



Saturday, October 1, 2022

the last book I ever read (Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, excerpt six)

from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mold or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.