Larry McMurtry is still selling books down in Texas. According to this recent announcement, he might be selling hundreds of thousands of them. If you scroll down a bit, he explains why:
Author Archives: Larry Franz
Fixing “Moby Dick”
Larry McMurtry, the author of The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and much else, has had a parallel career as an antiquarian (used) bookseller. He recounts his experiences in Books: a Memoir.
One day, while looking through someone’s extensive personal library, McMurtry came upon a copy of Moby Dick. It had belonged to an English author named Charles Reade, who once had an assignment to edit Moby Dick for English readers, making it shorter and easier to sell. The copy that McMurtry found contained a number of proposed edits. In McMurtry’s words:
“Charles Reade was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic. He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through ‘Call me Ishmael'”.
Over There
Those poor, benighted Brits — celebrating their socialistic National Health Service at the Olympics opening ceremonies!
Don’t they know it would be so much better to have a system like ours?
One that is reliant on profit-driven employers paying as little as possible to profit-driven insurance companies, who pay as little as possible to profit-driven doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, who charge as much as possible. Â
Leaving millions without decent health care, whether or not they have health insurance, while we spend more on healthcare per capita than any other nation in the world and lag behind other developed nations in quality of care.
A system in which people often decide where to live or work depending on whether an employer provides health insurance. Â
A system in which a major illness can bankrupt a family.
Crazy foreigners.
Government Regulation In Action
There used to be two Exxon gas stations in our town that sold the most expensive gas in the whole state of New Jersey. Their gas was always at least $1.00 more per gallon than other stations around here. I often wondered if something fishy was going on, maybe someone using these two stations to launder money, since they clearly weren’t selling much gas at those prices.
Last month, a “New Ownership” sign went up on both stations and the prices returned to normal. But why were the prices so high for the past 10 years?
It turns out that Exxon used to own both stations. The stations were operated by a local businessman who rented the stations from Exxon. About 10 years ago, Exxon raised the rent. The guy who was operating the stations decided to reflect the high rent in his gas prices. He says it was a protest against Exxon (but how was he able to survive all those years selling so little gas?).
This year Exxon decided to sell all of their gas stations. Because of a New Jersey law, the people who were leasing the stations from Exxon had “first refusal”. They could buy the stations from Exxon if they could match the price Exxon could get from another buyer. So this local businessman matched that price and now owns and operates both stations. He no longer sells the most expensive gas in New Jersey.
Gas is still too cheap in the US (most of us assume it should never go above $4.00 a gallon), but it’s good to see a story involving government regulation and one of the biggest corporations in the world have a happy ending.
This Whole World
Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life is surely a beautiful film, but it raises the question whether this world of ours is a good place to live. Is it a vale of tears, the best of all possible worlds or something in between?
Any generalization to the effect that the whole world is either good or bad seems misguided. Overall, the whole world just is. There is no other real world to compare it to (certainly none that we can observe).
When people used to say that the world is a vale of tears, they meant that this world is one of pain and suffering compared to the next world, the heavenly one. Although we can imagine worlds that are better or worse, like heaven or hell, that’s really irrelevant. We’re stuck with this one.
Or else lucky to have this one. But really neither.
We probably think, however, that living in this world is better than not living at all. That’s the common point of view, although not universal. In this case, we aren’t trying to compare this world to some other one. We’re just concluding that being here is better than not being anywhere.
Brian Wilson offered a positive view of the situation 40 years ago:
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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