Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech--WRAP UP

Looking at the maps in The Guns of August, tracing with my index finger von Kluck's sweep through Belgium and then down to Compiegne...that great gray slug smearing itself over Flanders...is depressing.  Why did I choose to read that on vacation, in sunny California, in August? 
Of course WWI was not a surprise to anyone.  Of course it was going to happen.  General staffs from Moscow to Berlin to Paris to London had planned for it for at least fifteen years.  That's what general staffs are for.
We all know the future.  It is, after all, right in front of us. 
Was it a good speech?  My mind was wandering.  I'll try to focus next time.

Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech--UPDATE

It's a tiresome truth that The Sun Also Rises is about WWI.  Every person in the book is wounded, of course, and of course the central wound is impotence.  I know that Hemingway has the rep of going way overboard on the macho crap, and that impotence is not the correct word, strictly speaking, to describe Jake Barnes's condition.  But at this distance from the war, I think we can take interpretive license to move our pawn one space forward to occupy the impotence square.

Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech--CONTINUED

Beth thinks I am silly for thinking this, but beer really does taste better from a glass than from a bottle or a can.  I used to refuse, at restaurants, the offered glass.  Now I take it, and use it. 
It is almost eerily quiet in Baltimore tonight.

There is a funny story about Errol Flynn.  Hemingway was showing his film "The Spanish Earth" to raise money for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  Flynn showed up, not knowing apparently, anything about Hemingway or about Hemingway's politics or feelings about the Spanish Civil War.  The way I heard the story, Flynn--no dummy, if a Fascist--figured out pretty quick what was up, and climbed out a window to escape.
I don't think that this happened in Carmel.  I think it happened in Hollywood.

Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech--CONTINUED

Barbara Tuchman does not hide at all her bemused but serious frustration with Germans.  At least with the Germans who ran things in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  She relates stories of this or that German loudly proclaiming the superority of German culture, loudly insisting that Germany have dominion over all of Europe to rid it of trash and weakness, etc...and then this or that German being surprised, and finding it incomprehensible, when his interlocutor expresses, shall we say, another point of view.
And another thing: can a person be considered an interlocutor when he is being shouted at?

I often think things like this:  I wonder how many people have, while vacationing in Carmel-by-the-Sea, read Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August?  I then play a little parlour game with myself, estmating as closely as I can how many people have ever done that.  Sometimes I come across a convergence of activity, place, and person (usually me, of course) that leaves me with the inescapable conclusion that I must be the first and only person ever to have done this thing in that place.  I can't think of one of those right now, but this is probably going to be a long speech, and the subject is bound to come up again.

Has Facebook killed off blogging as a medium of communication?  Do people still blog?  Do people still read blogs?  Do the kids even know what the word "blog" means and refers to?
I know that this space has (like how I elided into the non-personal there, providing some emotional cushion for myself?) never had more than a handfull of readers.  So what.  But it feels different, now, than when I left off posting things here in '08.  It feels, empty.
I suppose that Mitt Romney would have something to say about that, but that's not what I am talking about. 

Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech--CONTINUED

Usually the police helicopter visits us at night.  Foxtrot, I think it's called.  So far, the skies are quiet.
Earlier, this afternoon, I saw what really looked like an old B-25 Mitchell flying over my house.  Had an old, loud sound.  Two engines, but big ones.  Flying west.
Now it's quiet, though.  I bet everyone's inside, watching the game.

It is very quiet tonight in Baltimore.  In this part of Baltimore, anyway--now that the huge garbage truck has moved on to some other place.
I think that there is a Ravens game tonight.  Beth said something about that earlier.  Football!  In August!  I remember watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics (which was in July, mind you), not paying a whole lot of attention and then all of a sudden there's Peyton Manning on the screen.  I almost spit my beer.  The papers hadn't even started printing the wild card standings for baseball yet and here we are already talking about football.

I wonder if Hemingway ever went to Carmel.  Or did he pick that town, and Provincetown, Massachussetts--without ever having been in either place--as stereotypical of a certain kind of pretentious place?
I'll ask Mike Huckabee next time I see him.

Some guys are driving back and forth down my street in an enormous garbage truck.  I think they are lost.
It's really an enormous garbage truck--one of those that are so big their rear ends are curved outward, and with those big swinging claw-arm things to lift big restaurant-size trash cans up and over to dump the trash into the top of the truck.
Its roof is crashing through my maple tree every time they pass.  Three times now.  I would go out and help them, ask them if they are lost, where are they going, how to get there, etc...but I'm stuck here, live blogging Mr. Romney's speech.  I wonder what he'll say!

I suspect that Clint Eastwood is not speaking in Tampa anymore.  I don't think he is the mayor of Carmel anymore, either.  He has probably never edited a literary magazine.  I bet he's boxed, though.  Not at Princeton.  Does anyone know where he went to college?
I bet Marco Rubio edits a literary magazine. 

When we were in Carmel, I was reading Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August.  An excellent book.  Since we have returned home I finished that book and moved on to The Sun Also Rises.  It's funny--Hemingway, on almost the first page, makes fun of Carmel.  I think that we are supposed, if we are sympatico (yes, I know) with Jake Barnes, to think that Carmel is, well, a wealthy place where people go to exercise pretensions of an artistic nature.

We did see some sea lions.  Not in Carmel, but at Point Lobos--which is a beautiful, severe place.

My wife and I recently spent a night in Carmel.  It was nice--left the windows open all night to hear the waves on the beach a block away.  Drank some good coffee.  We didn't see Clint Eastwood.

Thanks.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.
About all I know is that CLint Eastwood is talking now.  Or was few minutes ago.  I turned off the radio.
Clint Eastwood lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, in California.  He was once mayor of that town.  It's a nice town, with many art galleries.

Live Blogging Mitt Romney's Speech

Our Portipont Correspondent is in his front room (the room next to the living room, at the front of the house, for which said correspondent and his family don't have a better name), ready to live blog the speech in Tampa (which is no where near PC's front room).  Take it away, Correspondent...