Cruising Speed (1971)

Cruising Speed covers seven days and nights in the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. at the beginning of December, 1970. 

During a recent episode of The Great Books podcast, the guest Richard Brookhiser described it as a vivid portal to both Bill and to his era, an era not so remote that we can’t recognize it but one that is, alas, gone completely. By that he refers to Bill’s signature program, Firing Line, and he is correct. Somewhere around the time of the McLaughlin Group, which Brookhiser suggests was the hinge to the cable news variety, the type of program that Firing Line was – and here I do not mean conservative or liberal but adult-conversation structured intentionally around points being made in bursts longer than commercials (or Twitter character limits) allowed. And everyone - left and right - came on Firing Line; everyone talked to Bill – began to disappear.

Now, the Great Books is a National Review podcast, and National Review was the magazine founded by WFBJR in 1955, so of course sooner or later they’d cover it, right? Does that make it, actually, great? Fair question. The distinguished New England novelist and college professor Mary Ellen Chase told students of Smith College English majors a century ago that in judging a work of literature one should ask what the author had in mind to do, how successfully he brought it off, and finally, whether the project had been worth doing in the first place.

As with the TV and debate standards and practices of Bill’s era, these ideas of how to quantify a work of literature (and of course Cruising Speed is not a novel but what its byline pointedly states: a documentary, but stick with me here) seem to increasingly belong only to one remote era of America’s past. But I’d say it passes the test pretty well. 

That said, I’m not sure I’d make this the first Buckley I’d recommend to someone. It’s easy to picture someone reading only the first page (“...my Rowley, her Pepper and Foo, the last an ill-tempered, eccentric Pekingese, a gift from Martin Liebman, one of the two or three people I would forgive the giving of a dog as a Christmas present, perhaps the only friend I’d forgive the giving of Foo. I named horrible Foo "Foo" making the point firmly to call him “Fu” would be inexcusably bad taste. Pepper is a beautiful cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who loves Pat and naught else in this world, which I take unkindly. Rowley is also a Cavalier, a Blenheim, quite simply the most beautiful, the most engaging dog I ever saw, his only fault being that of Browning’s Last Duchess, who smiles as sweetly for the gardener as for the Duke”) and slowly making the faces Bodie and Poot make in that one episode of The Wire when they leave the broadcast reach of familiar Baltimore radio stations and hear for the first time the alien cadence of Garrison Keillor.

But for the more seasoned Buckley reader – or for fans of this era of New York City – there are many delights to be had here. I’ll give the barest of bones below. 

Monday

The book begins with piling into the car and heading to NYC. The Buckleys have their family home in Connecticut and their place on 73rd st. in the City, to which Pat  proceeds while Bill heads to Broadway to tape an episode of Firing Line (Jerris Leonard, Jeff Greenfield - I couldn't find it on first pass but have at it.). Then to his physical therapist’s, then back to 73rd for a private concert from Rosalyn Tureck. (Bill was devoted to her.) Then off to the Russian Tea Room, “then a cab, a little reading, and to sleep.”

Tuesday

A couple of hours correspondence in the morning, then off to the doctor, then an editorial conference at National Review HQ with the editors (James Burnham – a personal favorite – et al). They all go to lunch in the glow of brother Jim’s recent electoral victory. (Jim Buckley was elected junior Senator from New York in 1970).

The rest of the afternoon seems to be telephone meetings in various languages with various (and fascinating) people. Then it’s dinner with the editors at Paone's and then off to the Filmore East to hear Virgil Fox.

“Virgil Fox comes on and speaks a minute or two before each number, attempting to attract the audience to God by stressing the common wavelengths on which He and Bach operate. The performance was god-awful, because Fox clearly wants to impress the kids by a) the noise and b) his virtuosity. At one point during a prelude I am tempted to rise solemnly, commandeer a shotgun, and advise Fox, preferably in imperious German (…) that if he does not release the goddamn vox humana which is ooo-ing, ahh-ing, ee-ing the music where Bach clearly intended something closer to a bel canto, I shall simply have to blow his head off (...) After the intermission, Fox introduces the Passacaglia at Wagnerian length, almost but not quite to the point of causing mutiny in the audience whose stirrings become discernible after the fourth or fifth minute. The maestro then turns and snows them with his dexterity which is undeniable, the problem being it will be ten years before I can appreciate again the music he has played so overloud, so throbby so plucky-wucky the portamentos, so Phil Spitalny the cantanados.

We drive home, I speculate how come it didn’t hurt Fox more than it hurt us? And Jim Burnham as usual offers the only acceptable explanation, namely that Fox is so much an evangelist he must have figured that it was more important to fill the house with listeners who would hear Bach for the first time than worry about those who would resolve like me to have heard Fox for the last time.”

(Does this performance exist anywhere? Answer yes. I doubt Bill bought the album when it came out. Who is Phil Spitalny? Answer here.)

Wednesday

J. Dan Mahoney in morning, then writing columns, then putting the finishing touches on the magazine together. This takes all day and would normally terminate with drinks at five o’clock, but Bill’s off to Princeton, where he handles more correspondence on the drive, including with Daniel Moynihan (who ends up unseating his brother from the Senate seat in 1976), and this bit:

“The Musical Heritage Society has sent me thirty long-playing records, most of them the cantatas of Bach with a note expressing thanks for my devotion to music – a euphemism for writing a column advising music-lovers of the Beethoven-bargain the Society was offering. I acknowledge the gift most gratefully, and guilt-free, since I can’t believe that any words of mine commending the work of Bach would constitute payola.”

The MHS! Nice. I was a member for many years and still have (and listen appreciatively to) their discs. I did not know this little connection to Bill existed in my life through our respective music collections. Just last month I finished collecting all of the MHS Haydn there is to get, crossing off a bucket list item (albeit a fairly easy one) of many years running. 

At Princeton there’s a dinner and a speech and then it’s back to NYC where he turns off the late show to as not to wake Pat, which of course wakes her.

Thursday

On the road early to the University of Bridgeport for a lunch and a debate with Dick Gregory. This prompts some of the more reflective passages of the novel, remembering similar debates with Howard Zinn and James Baldwin. When describing the rudeness of the students at the campuses that ask him to speak, he stops to consider whether his offense and brooding over one such incident (where he spoke from the heart and was congratulated after for “snowing the audience”) was from vanity or whether they offend him as “ruptures of the membrane of social affections that makes it possible for people to live together, people by definition being people who disagree on questions trivial and substantial.”

This is something I relate to strongly. Look, no secret - I left the left years ago, not because I suddenly saw the wisdom or appeal in being a Right Wing Nut Job or a sudden desire for mass unfriendings and social media abuse, but because of stuff like this, the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster-ification of discourse both public and private. The internalization and subsequent externalization/projection of unreasonable and goddamn unAmerican attitudes. Live and let live and mutual respect for space to do it became, what, white supremacy over the past twenty years? That's just 2021 - who knows what it will be recharacterized as, this time next year. Anyway, disagreements over policy, religion, family, just about everything - these things are going to happen. You can't police people into conformity, and it's a wretched impulse to begin with, whether the intentions are Marxist or Lutheran (or both). Look to those who are gaming "the public square" to ghettoize (or worse) any narrative in competition with theirs and you have your culprits, ladies and gentlemen, on the left, right, or indifferent. Back to the show. 

Reflecting on the extremes of the left and the right prompts him to reflect on an absolutely fascinating night he spent at Prof. Revilo’s house. Revilo was once an ally of Buckley’s, but he stayed on the John Birchier side of conservativism (and how!) when Buckley et al. put National Review squarely and pointedly against it. Still as anti-communist as necessary, just hey, enough with the batshit. Always a good philosophy, where I'm standing. Anyway here’s one for King 11/22/63 fans. Once the above schism happened, Revilo felt compelled to excommunicate Bill and was explaining to him one night why he could longer can see him socially (“I have no way of knowing whether or not you are an agent of the communist party.”) Bill was listening, politely, or trying to, as he kept getting distracted from strange noises from the kitchen.

“I discovered that the scramble was the voice of General Edwin Walker. The General had recently been brought back from Europe for excessive and undifferentiated anti-communism, and soon embarrassed the entire conservative community, which had presumptively backed him, when, interrogated by a Senate committee, he betrayed a Birchite ignorance of any distinctions, shored up by his indecipherably documented certainty that everyone in sight was an agent of the Communist Party. Well, General Walker was now running for governor of Texas, and the commotion in the kitchen was caused by the arrival at Revilo’s of a tape of Walker’s most recent speech, which (his followers) were coming in, one by one, to duplicate on their own tape recorders. And of course the way to record fast in order to facilitate the traffic is at super high speed which when you play it to listen to will then switch back at normal speed.”

These books are filled with wonderful glances at and puzzled reactions to emergent twentieth-century tech like that. Anyway, I could so easily picture the scene as if in a movie. I'd put Revilo in an armchair by a roaring fire, explaining in Stentorian tones why he can't be Bill's friend anymore, with the flames casting ominous shadows and Walker's demagoguery playing at chipmunk speed from the shadows. 

“If you are prepared to believe that the in-guys are presumably on your side, then you bemoan their delinquencies as you would aberrations, rather than as delinquencies that issue out of their flawed understanding of reality. Thus a Democratic administration that signs a conciliatory agreement with Laos is presumed to be weakminded, critically short of anti-Communist corpuscles, while a Republican administration that signs a peace with North Korea is assumed to have got the best deal one could hope to get."

Then it’s off to dinner, then reading til 1 am, waking Pat again when shutting off the late late show.

Friday

Some business with the Starr Broadcasting Company (defunct now - Bill was out by the late 70s), then a stage debate with Ramsey Clark at the Waldorf, then over to the Newsweek Building where he had an office that he'd use six or seven times a year to write his columns. Then to Maxwell’s Plum for lunch. Dinner that night with Rosalyn Tureck and friends at the apartment on 73rd.

Saturday and Sunday

“We sleep late and send out for the New York Times.”

Reading and lazing and then a lunch date with Otto Van Hapsburg, the heir to the throne of Austria and Hungary (the claim of which he had to renounce in order to re-enter the country after the war). Tantalizingly, this ends with an invitation for Buckley to join a small organization to discuss deeply and off the record all manner of public affairs. Could this be, perhaps, the Bilderbergers? Buckley was already a member of Skull and Bones, ex-CIA, and a member of Bohemian Grove. Why not add more to drive Alex Jones really crazy…!

At night, dinner at La Seine with Pat (where we catch a glimpse of her argumentative side, especially after her "supernumerary" martini) and friends, including Truman Capote and the daughter of the recently-dead-by-suicide publisher of the Washington Post. He reflects on the column he wrote of the affair – a there but for the grace of God go all of us affair – but there’s a certain frostiness in the air and he reflects on how a late need for a column/ deadline combined with turning on the radio and hearing a news item (“The publisher of the Washington Post dead by suicide”) might result in personal harm to a young woman he’s never met nor wished to harm at all. It’s an interesting moment. I wish more journalists – especially nowadays, where it seems there’s relentless pressure TO cause personal harm – were this reflective.

Then it’s off to the Sanctuary on the West Side then home. Sunday is more correspondence, mass, remembrances of and at Yale, lunch at Maxwell Plum’s again, and then a viewing of Gimme Shelter, which allows for some wonderful “wow, what the hell are the kids doing?” observations. But this last chapter also contains the entire text of a speech (and a good one) as well as some sailing preparations (interesting in light of the Personal Adventures on Land and at Sea framing we’re doing) and Big Thoughts on life, work, the spirit, and the flesh.

~

It’s tempting to describe such a project as seven days in the Ritalin-fueled life of WFBJR. I can picture it as an old movie trailer: WITNESS! Him answer his correspondence! MARVEL! At the breakneck pace of his schedule! ABSORB! Asides on friendship and anecdotes on interesting people! Etc. etc.

Before we go, there’s a funny story on this blurb:

His war of words with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. over the years is a lot of fun stuff. I'll cover it more when I get to the WFBJR collections, but this was something Schlesinger said, unguardedly, in a debate with Bill, and Bill plucked it out of context for this quote on the back. I love that kind of pranking. (Schlesinger was appropriately irate and of course threatened litigation.)

Windfall: The End of the Affair (1992)

 "This is not a volume about Columbus' crossing, and not in any clinical sense even a volume about our own Atlantic crossing. The ocean passage serves as a spinal column, but the book is primarily a tribute to people and to institutions that have nourished me for many years; so many years now that (the by-line to this book is) I speak of the end of the affair, not knowing whether I will set out again to cross an ocean, knowing that I will never again serve, as I did for so long, as editor in chief of the journal I engendered, and love; increasingly aware of mortality (and) of the fragility of even the most intimate associations.”

In 1990 William F. Buckley Jr. and friends set out from Portugal, bound for Barbados, on their fourth transoceanic passage (“Ocean-4”). This account of the voyage, Windfall, was published in 1992, and he groups it along with the other sailing books and two others like this in the front of the book:

This is the first and I believe only place these works are grouped under that particular header. It gave me the idea to go back and reread them through that lens. Mainly it was an excuse to reread them. I figured I’d start with the last of them – why not? – and then go back. So here we are.

The above, from reading them all the first time to the re-reads to sketching out the plan, was 2018 until just a few months ago. Things move slowly and swiftly in alternating currents round these parts.

~

All but the first of these transoceanic voyages were done on the Sealestial, a seventy-one foot long racing ketch built in 1973. If you've seen the movie Dead Calm (referred to bafflingly as White Calm here) the Sealestial is built from the same prototype of the Stormvogel, the boat used in that movie. Its owner, the mysterious Dr. Papo, remains off-camera throughout the books. More on him later. 

MEET THE CREW

-  Bill, of course, pardon the familiarity. Captain of the enterprise in all ways but one (his agreement with Dr. Papo on chartering the Sealestial: if the official captain, Allan Jouning, disagrees on any course of action that might imperil the Sealestial, it is understood that Bill will be overruled). WFBJR led a unique to say the least life. As he writes re: a dinner party with James Clavell and his wife: "In the ten weeks since I last saw you, I have played two harpsichord concerts, I've retired as editor of National Review after 35 years, I've crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a sailboat, and I've published two books, one fiction, one nonfiction, and I have become a senior citizen." 

-  Van Galbraith, Reagan's ambassador to France, on the board of directors for Moet & Chandon, Morgan Stanley, National Review, Club Med, college friend of Bill’s. 

- Dick Clurman, “the most organized man in the world,” “the man born to cut Gordian knots”, former chief of correspondents for Time/Life, author of the excellent Beyond Malice, college friend of Bill's and Van's. 

- Christopher Little, hired as the professional photographer for Atlantic High and earlier sails, fellow Yalie, former EMT/Chief, former Miss America Judge, and, most recently, mystery writer. 

All pics, I should mention, were taken from my phone from the book, under varying light (and kids chaos) conditions. Sorry for the imprecision.

- Tony Leggett, a former Olympic sailor introduced to Bill and the gang after Louis Auchinchoss read Airborne and arranged it. Still at it, year later. 

- Danny Merritt – a vital protagonist of these sailing books, Christo’s childhood friend and subsequently Bill’s, father of the founders of Nine Line Apparel, which has an admirable backstory. But his progeny aside, info on Danny is kind of hard to come by on the web. Unknown on the internet but immortalized in print by WFBJR? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. 

I mentioned Allen Jouning up there, a professional sailor, one-time captain of William Simon's superyacht the Freedom, longtime associate if Bill et al's, New Zealander, possible walrus-man. 

In the Canaries - roughly the halfway point - Dick and Danny fly back to the States, and their berths are taken by Christopher “Christo” Buckley, (son, author, journalist), Bill Draper, international financier and muckity-muck, longtime friend of Bill et. al's "since we were inducted into the same society at Yale", and Douglas Bernon, a friend of Christo’s and husband of Bernadette, onetime editor of Cruising World. 

Christo, and Liz, the chef. (She had her own exclusive part of the ship.) 

THE ITINERARY

SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TRIP

Prior to leaving, Bill runs into Jack Paar in the hotel bar in Portugal, twenty-eight years after their (quite mild in retrospect) dust-up written about in Rumbles Left and Right. They exchange pleasantries, and Paar compliments Christo's latest book, a compliment always appreciated by any father/ literary family, I assume. Nice to see this and another nice bookend for Bill's career. 

However, if such a thing is a good omen for the sail, it falters quickly, as two days from shore they hit the worst storm anyone aboard has ever experienced. 

Some great storm reading in this stretch.

Reaching Funchal in Madeira, they don't think much of the Casino Park Hotel, of which Christopher Little writes: “(it) had about as much Old World Charm as Donald Trump.” Good line and a bit of chuckling portent, there. Speaking of, elsewhere in the book, Buckley mentions having been recruited by Roger Stone in a bit of Machiavellian electioneering in CT, trying to persuade voters to send Rowland (a bad guy) to the Senate in order to keep Weicker (a worse one) from winning, resulting in Joe Lieberman's victory. That plus the Donald Trump line made me laugh - good thing Bill was getting out when he did. Stormy weather and the shape of things to come!

After that, back at sea, they are shadowed by a phantom ship for awhile, possibly a drug pick-up (they speculate), and then they cross the path of the Eagle, which is the Coast Guard cadet ship. “Two sailing ships, one with its sails full, the second headed into the wind under noiseless power. The cadets’ cameras popped in the night, opposite our own doing the same thing, a ghostly simulacrum of cannon flashes exploding at each other at sea.”

Then the 2nd leg after switching in the Canaries, after stopping to pray at the same church Columbus stopped at on his own journey east. 

Christo brings correspondence and papers, so we get a lot of that (Bill is forever answering letters or cross-clipping from columns, etc.) for the remainder of the book, as well as their shared remembrances of Reggie Stoops (1925 to 1988). 

With whom we'll spend substantial time in the other sailing books. 

Bill celebrates his 65th birthday abroad. “In fifteen years he’ll be eighty and I’ll be fifity-three.” reflects Christo. (Bill died exactly fifteen years after the book's publication. Christo's still going strong, although he doesn't seem as active as he once was.) 

“Most of my friends I met forty-odd years ago, met them within a radius of two hundred yards of where I’m now standing." (Yale graduation ceremony, 1990) "It occurs to me that  forty years is a long time. Less than forty years went by between the day Lincoln was shot and the day Victoria died. Just forty years before we graduated was the year the Chinese abolished slavery, the year Edward VI died as well as William James and Mark Twain. Friendships that last forty years are something. Monuments, I call them, few better grounds for celebration. So let’s toast to the class of 1950."

With some non-matriculators in there as well. 

At one point, Bill gets yelled at by Doug when he goes forward without a lifejacket. This is the same offense he (Bill) yelled at Christo for at the beginning of Airborne. More bookending! It’s not a crisis or anything – it’s a cardinal rule on boats, but I think Bill had his own set of rules, it must be said – and while he concedes he was wrong to do so, I couldn't help but wonder if Doug’s invitations to the Ocean-4 reunions always arrived a day or two late.

SOME THEMES

(1)  The book is a reflective affair, as indicated in the subtitle, and part of that reflection has to do with the inevitable widening and hopeful closing of distance between father and son. Part of this theme - reconciliation with Christo (and I probably shouldn't use "Christo," it's just how I got to know him through the books, but it's not like he chose that as his professional name and I should respect that. But that would force me to use "Little" everytime I need to refer to Christopher Little, and I'm trying to avoid just using last names over and over. It feels rude. I almost erased this little aside, but screw it: you need to know this stuff) relates to the other, as that distance is recorded in Christo's terminating the MCI-mail they share. i.e. email/ internet, at that time as much a luxury item as the GPS prototypes they're trying out in these books. An act which he took as a personal affront, as he did his resignation from Bohemian Grove. Equally super-select (then or now.)

(2)  I mention the GPS, i.e. the Trimble/ Loran. This brings up one of the most fascinating (and somewhat entertaining, given his exasperation and difficulties with getting the equipment to work consistently, not to mention the lengths everyone goes to to fix things or diagnose the problem) aspects of all Bill’s sailing books, which I always call the Time Travel Tech aspect, i.e. the appearance of new technologies that those well-versed in old ones instantly grasp as revolutionary. (And that we-the-modern-reader might take too much for granted.)

The WhatSTAR stuff is fascinating but a bit impenetrable. (“Was this last sight due to the proximity of Peacock to Rasalhague, less than the tolerable distance between the navigator’s assumed position and his actual position?”) But Bill's excitement with the technology and his inability to get his companions to grasp its revolutionary nature are great fun. 

“The Trimble GPS NavGraphic is the ocean equivalent of the postman who knows how to find 22-A Maiden Lane, undistracted by 22 Maiden Lane which is a half-dozen beguiling yards off to the right.

My very first experience with it, sailing into New York from Stamford, was engrossing. I designed the installation so that in inclement weather I could situate the monitor to the navigational miracle on the cockpit, under the dodger. That way we could all actually see ourselves sail, second by second, westward from Stamford, past Execution Rock, up into the East River, past La Guardia Airport and Rikers Island and Hell Gate to Gracie Mansion, and then south down the length of Manhattan. 

On the screen, a tiny facsimile of a sailing boat sliding along the illuminated chart, identical to your sailing chart, expanding or diminishing in scale accordingly as you push ZOOM IN or ZOOM OUT, keeping always in front of you the course to your destination and the distance to it, the Estimated Time of Arrival, the Course Made Good – all of those plums to which Loran has accustomed us; but now all there on a live TV screen in front of you. So that when you get to the Brooklyn Bridge your boat is shown under the Brooklyn Bridge – uncanny. Assuming the availability of detailed charts and a disk that covered that part of the world – and all of this will be with us in a matter of a year or so – we’d have glided into Valle Gran Rey as confidently as we slid down the East River. 

Granted, it’s a luxury item. The Trimble unit retails for about ten thousand dollars. But it is delivering up to you at no supplementary cost, the fruit of about two billion dollars of Department of Defense technology. The Department of Defense’s GPS satellites are to the NavGrapic as the alphabet is to a typewriter.”

They certainly have come down from ten thousand dollars in the time since Bill wrote that, and expanded their services considerably. 

(3)  The book also terminates many years of musical loneliness at sea. We'll see this develop in the other books, but he is always disappointed at his shipmates' lack of curiosity in his cassettes. 

"The effect of this experience, after about twenty years onboard boats, of trying to cultivate appetites I assumed to be merely dormant, not dead, has melancholy implications. (Classical) music is not a readily addictive drug. And you learn, reflecting on the inventory of cassettes that are the permanent collection of the Sealestial, that there are two very distinct musical cultures out there. The Sealestial's collection is about the size of my own, and although the Nutcracker and the Best of Wagner are there, the balance of the tapes are all of the modern variety, or so I assume, having recognized the names only of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. 

I like some of the Beatles' music (I don't presume that anybody cares whether or not I do, but there it is); but I had to confess something to Christo a few days later, on the final evening aboard the Sealestial when we came back to the boat from the hotel for the last meal, in the heavy heat of late afternoon Barbados, and I had begun packing my gear. Lo! There was MUSIC issuing of the ship's stereo system. It wasn't my kind of music, but I didn't say anything. After about three minutes, I went to the main unit, removed the tape, inserted one of my own, and went back to my packing. Nobody noticed the change of music - nobody was really listening (...)

"What haunts the musically isolated sailor is the inability to share. It is as though you were sitting there hour after hour repeating to yourself silently all the amusing stories you had ever heard but husbanding them determinedly to yourself. This generates a masturbatory sort of sadness. I have in late years affected to be interested when the subject is raised in my company in institutional sport, because I have sensed the disappointment that some people feel when my response is not as it ought to be to the intelligence of somebody or other had just won the World Series."

It doesn't seem like he kept up this (faking it to making it re: interest in sports) but you can't help but empathize with his plight. 

WHAT DO YOU BRING?

In addition to the Satcom unit aforedescribed, Bill brought "a computer, printer, sea-chest of correspondence, clothes, Scopolamine, Percodan, Antihistamines, Laxatives, Mercurochrome, Saltwater Soap, “and various exotica pressed into my hand by my wife and internist, spare sextant, sextant, chronometer, Air Almanac, plotting sheets, dividers, parallel rulers, HP-41C calculator, stopwatch, HP-249 tables, guidebooks, and assorted Columbiana." This refers primarily to Bill’s out of print copy of Admiral of the Seas, by Samuel Eliot Morison, who was the Navy’s choice to write the official history of WW2 but is somehow considered an untrustworthy source now. Morison merits superficial but scornful mention in Zinn's now-foundational A People's History of the United States, its future-present acolytes to whom Bill unknowingly alludes when he writes “It’s a pity (Morison) is not around to take a role in the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ crossing. And to take care of Columbus’ critics, a diabolical cult.”

“How did Columbus measure the passage of time? I give you thirty seconds. In Columbus’ days and until the late 16th century the only ship’s clock available was the ampoletta or reloj de arena (sand clock), a half-hour glass containing enough sand to run from the upper to the lower section in exactly thirty minutes. Made in Venice these glasses were so fragile that a large number of spares – Magellan had eighteen on his flagship. I warrant Columbus had some little hour glasses, perhaps gauging the time down to as little as thirty seconds."

VOYAGE’S END

As they near Barbados, Bill rises just before dawn to shoot Jupiter (a trick he learns from Columbus) and predicts they'll sail into Bridgetown Harbor by noon. Not the sort of intelligence Columbus had on his side when making his own journey five hundred years earlier.

“Columbus’ decision to follow these feathered pilots (playing a hunch, Morison informs us) rather than his inaccurate man-made chart was vital for the whole future of Spanish colonization. For when he determined to follow the birds, his fleet was on latitude twenty-five degrees, forty seconds and fast, approaching the area of zero compass variation, Had the due west course been maintained from that point, the voyage would have taken at least a day longer, and landfall, provided Columbus had managed to keep down mutiny another day, would have been Eleuthera Island, or Hole in the Wall on Great Abaco. 

What then? Except for the unlikely contingency of the local Indians piloting Columbus south through the Tongue of the Ocean, the fleet would have sailed through Providence Channel slap into the Gulf Stream (...) which would have carried him north of Bermuda – heading back toward Europe.”

As Bill notes, had this happened to Sealestial nothing too terrible would have come of it. (Outside of making Bill Draper nervous on missing his December 5th rendezvous with President Bush.) But had this happened to Columbus, it's likely he wouldn't have survived the trip home. What might have happened to the peoples of the Caribbean then? One of those what-ifs, but more than likely, the exact same thing, just under different sails. 

And speaking of those sails, at book's end:

“(As Columbus approached the New World, Morison remarks) 'only a few moments now, an era that began in remotest antiquity will end.' And our own, as well. About fifteen minutes after the appearance of this volume we can expect that navigation at sea will cease to be more than an antiquarian exercise. Probably a couple of flashlight batteries attached to a Trimble hand unit will tell you exactly where you are, day or night.”

~

Bill spent his retirement years writing plenty more books, giving interviews and speeches, and sailing, mostly in Long Island Sound and along the eastern seaboard on his thirty-six foot sloop Patito until failing health forced him to stop. We'll look at all that in turn. Next time let's skip back to Cruising Speed and spend a week in Bill's life, November 30th to December 7th, 1970. 

Reviews and Overviews (Film)

I had this post ready to go this morning when suddenly, inexplicably, Blogger glitched. I did nothing wrong or out of the ordinary but suddenly the formatting got screwed up. While just trying to figure out what happened, what button might mistakenly have been hit, etc., the entire post went blank and then auto-saved. Five or six hours of work - more, really - gone in a flash. No explanation, no reason, no appeal, no recovery. 

So, back to the drawing board.

An accumulation of spirit-crushing glitches like this can really do a number of a fella's equilibrium. I wish it was just Blogger. Someone fix the goddamn Matrix. 

Here is a Table of Contents post for all film-related content here at the Omnibus. 

MY FAVORITE FILMS

Pretty straightforward. I’m not capable of answering things like a normal person so one of those “Name your favorite film for every year of your lifetime” viral quiz things crossed my social media path and these were the results. 

1970s

1980s

1990s

21st Century (through 2016)

FRIDAY NIGHT FILM NOIR

This was kind of a watch-along-with-me-while-I-screencap-the-movie-and-tell-you-the-plot sort of project, which in retrospect isn't the most satisfying thing to read. But there a gazillion screencaps in there, for cover photos or slideshows or just to admire while you practice your saxophone solos under the blinking argon lights. 

FROM NOVEL TO FILM

Full list here. There were so many I wanted to get to and didn’t. I left those inactive links in there, just to get an idea of what the full range of films would have looked like. 

RANDOM REVIEWS 
AND OVERVIEWS

- The Films of Oliver Stone. I probably wouldn't even make that list now. I did it in 2014, and even by then I wasn't much of a Stone fan anymore. But in the past seven years, I've read this book, which kind of makes it hard to look at some of the things in Stone's movie the same way. It's still great theater, has plenty of fun performances, etc., but now it seems like it's gathering together the kind of Flying Spaghetti Monster strands under one banner. Which at one point wouldn't have mattered to me. Sidenote: the release of the JFK files was postponed once again, which will likely make Kevin Costner's remarkable speech at the end that much more persuasive to some. Maybe they're right. 

- The Films of Martin Scorsese. What, did you miss one? Nope, I never did this one. I bring it up because, remarkably, I find myself in the same boat with Scorsese as I just described with Stone. I never would have thought most of his and Stone's work would hit me like a big bag of "meh" here in the far future of 2021, but that's where I'm at. Still think Casino is a masterpiece, and that Personal Journey Through American Movies should be seen by any aspiring filmmakers. 

- One Crazy Summer. Seems kind of conspicuous all by itself like this, eh? There’s a very bloated three-parter on Heathers back there somewhere that I’ll leave unlinked. Not to be coy, just not my favorite work. Great movie though. Still holds up.  

- The Things I Watched Recentlys. These are fun, and they’re rather habit-forming. Probably good I’m giving up the blog when I am as I could see myself just doing nothing but, year after year to the grave. I mean, hell I’ll be doing that anyway, just as I was doing it beforehand. Anyway I’ve done a few of these: 

(a) some Halloween viewing from a few years ago. (Blacula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Exorcist II, The Exorcist III, Halloween: H20, In the Mouth of Madness, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, Little Shop of Horrors, Mandy, The Omen III: The Final Conflict, Scream Blacula Scream, Summer of '84, The Watcher in the Woods)

(b) One from earlier this year (Alien, Unhinged, The Hot Rock, The Hot Spot, Lady Cocoa, Lifeforce, Lifeguard, The Lost World: Jurassic Park II, No Escape, The Omega Man, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, TNT Jackson, The Towering Inferno)

(c) One from a few months ago (Bird Box, Chopping Mall, The Edge, The Fog, Freedomland, Invitation to Hell, A Quiet Place, Queen of Outer Space, Tai-Pan, We Can Be Heroes, Wind River)

(d) Another from a few months ago. (Boss Baby 2, Breaker Morant, Carbon Copy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Crazies, Emma Mae, The In Laws, Pillow Talk, Police Story III: Supercop, Saint Jack, Slap Shot, Slumber Party Massacre, Sparkle, That Touch of Mink)

(e) Still another from a few months ago. (Class of 1984, Cleopatra, Death of Me, The Guilty, Freeway, Halloween II, Land of the Pharaohs, The Mummy, Retreat, The Ten Commandments, WNUF A Halloween Special, Yes Day)

(f)  December 2021 viewing pt. 1 (Elf, The Family Man, The Family Stone, Gremlins, The Holiday, Identity, Jingle All the Way, Titanic, Troop Zero) and pt. 2 (The Artist, Beau Geste, Beyond Mombasa, The Block Island Sound, The Dam Busters, Dawn Patrol, Dishonored, King Kong Escapes, Lost Command, Private Resort, Private School, Safari, Shot Caller, Ski School, Summer School, Twelve O'Clock High, White Witch Doctor)

THE SCENIC ROUTE

Full list here. I really pumped a lot of screencaps out into the inter-ether. May you use them in peace, Planet Earth. May a thousand cover photos bloom. 

STAR TREK MOVIES

The definitive McBreakdown! Pts. 1 and 2. 

STEPHEN KING MOVIES

Likewise. Pts. 1 and 2. Someday someone will make a film of Duma Key and it will hopefully top that list, as it does my list of favorite King books. 

TEN WESTERNS

Well this list feels incomplete or askew to me now, even if it was really only meant to be a list of hey-here's-some-good-westerns not an attempt to nail down the definitive grouping or anything. Still, I'd add or subtract a few now. That's horse races. 

~

Chicago, IL, USA 

December 2021