Consider Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” – you’ve probably read it. It’s the one about the old boxer vs. the young boxer. It’s not my favorite Jack London story. It’s well-written, of course, but it seems to me that it suffers from predictability. Jack London really telegraphed his punches in that one, you might say. If I had to pick a favorite Jack London work, it would probably be his non-fiction around-the-world-in-a-sailboat tale, “Cruise of the Snark”. If you haven’t read it, check it out. It’s great fun.
So “A Piece of Steak” is not my favorite Jack London story, but my favorite Jack London story story is one about “A Piece of Steak”.
Before I proceed, I want you to do something. Assuming you’ve read “A Piece of Steak”, I want you to bring it to mind. It’s a story without very many characters in it. Try to remember who they are, and what part they played in the story. Retell the story to yourself as best you can … I’ll wait.
Ready?
Something like 35 years ago, I was in the break room of the office where I worked, eating lunch with a couple of my coworkers—let’s call them Alice and Bob (We were all computer programmers, after all). For some reason I have long forgotten, I mentioned the Jack London story. Alice said she’d never read it. Bob said he had read it in high school, and proceeded to recap the story for Alice, as follows: On the night before a big match, the old boxer makes a terrible mistake. At suppertime, there is one small piece of steak that his wife has cooked for him—the rest of their meager fair consists of bread and gravy. The old boxer, seeing the hungry look in the eyes of his three small children, cuts the steak up into three pieces, and gives a piece to each child. The terrible consequence of the old boxer’s selflessness is that in the ring the next evening, he doesn’t have the strength to stand up to the merciless pummeling of the young boxer, and he loses the match.
That’s how I remembered the story, sort of. The thing was, I didn’t remember the boxer and his wife having any children, nor did I remember there being any actual steak at all in the story.
Curious as to whose memory of the story was right, I went to the library a few days later and looked it up. Turns out, Bob and I were both wrong, though my recollection was perhaps somewhat more accurate. The boxer and his wife do have one child, a son, but there is no steak, as the family can’t afford it, and as there is no steak, the boxer doesn’t give his steak to his son. In fact, the boy is sent to bed without any supper, and the boxer eats all the bread and gravy himself as his wife looks on. It is not an act of selflessness that condemns the old boxer to defeat—it is simply his circumstances.
Here’s what I knew about Bob at the time: He had recently married a divorced woman with three children.
I ran into Alice a decade or so later, and asked about Bob. She said the last she’d heard, he was living in Florida under an assumed name, on the run from the IRS.
So maybe “A Piece of Steak” is not my favorite Jack London story—but it is a story that people relate to in different and interesting ways, which is pretty great. How did you remember it?
Summer is made for running away, and this summer in particular is made for running away in mind as well as body. Tariffs? What tariffs? Deportations? What deportations? Here are the perfect accompaniments for the beach, picnic table, plane flight, or motel room:
You’re the sheriff responsible for protecting a tiny Western postapocalyptic town from roving bandit armies, gigantic people-eating ticks, and autonomous orbiting nuclear weapons. But those dangers are nothing compared to the beautiful stranger who appears from nowhere. Find out who she really is in Jonathan Eaton’s sci-fi epic The Prairie Martian, ($4.99 Kindle, $12.99 paperback).
Pick one, or all three. We guarantee you’ll reach September a happier person!
Jonathan was kind enough to visit the Verbal Exchange studio located somewhere in the Garden of Eaton (okay, it was actually our mom’s house), where we had a wide-ranging conversation about the novel and the series. I invite you to listen to the podcast of our conversation on tuneIn, Spotify, Apple podcasts,YouTube, or podbean, as part of my Verbal Exchange podcast series. We talk about how to gain admission to a frontier circus if you don’t have any money (or scruples), how to get shot by a dead man, how to negotiate with a stubborn editor, and how a perfectly nice kid becomes a deadly outlaw. Enjoy!
(And a shout out to our longtime loyal reader Bette, who is recovering from an operation. Hang in there, kid!)
The time is long past to argue over the semantics of terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.”
You can call what is happening now in Gaza by whatever term pleases you. The terminology doesn’t change the fact that the Israeli Defense Forces, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, are herding the Palestinian population back and forth within the narrow borders of the Gaza Strip, as they turn entire cities, hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings included, to rubble. Forty or fifty thousand people have already been killed. Aid–food, water, medicine–has been shut off and children are starving and dying of preventable diseases.
And all of this is carried out under the now ludicrously phony aim of “getting the hostages back.” Netanyahu is now speaking of an even more aggressive ground campaign, with military occupation to follow. He seems to lack either the desire or the intellectual capacity to formulate any course of action other than inflicting more death and suffering on the Palestinian people, using all the 21st-century weapons and technology at his disposal.
This is becoming one of Western civilization’s great atrocities. It will be compared by historians to events like the massacre of Armenians by Turkey in 1915–with the difference that this time, it is being carried out by a close ally of the United States, and with the whole revolting spectacle graphically exposed to the world, day after day. But the historical perspective is no consolation to Palestinian parents watching their child starve to death, or to a Palestinian child whose parents lie under the rubble of an apartment building.
Every Israeli, every Jew, every Christian, every American, every human being with eyes and a heart should be appalled at what is happening in Gaza at the moment. It is absolutely wrong. And it is unnecessary. The IDF’s current strategy has no plausible rationale other than to keep Benjamin Netanyahu in power, out of jail, and to forestall the consequences of his own corruption and his security forces’ bungled handling of the horrific October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians.
A permanent, just solution aside, Israel can pull out of Gaza now, let humanitarian aid and humanitarian workers in, use its abundant military and logistical resources to seal off its border with Gaza, and employ its vaunted intelligence services to keep an eye on Hamas and to continue to pick off its leadership, without blowing up entire hospitals and residential communities.
What Israel is doing is wrong, and no accusations of antisemitism or anti-Zionism, whether valid or self-serving, make it right. The United States should use all of its economic and diplomatic resources to make Israel stop. And we the American people must make it politically unfeasible for our government to do anything else.
I’m going to share ten personally memorable movie experiences of mine with you today…though not all of these movies were themselves memorable. If you have a movie memory you’d like to share, please leave it in the comments.
It’s 1967. I’m eight years old, sitting in one of Denton, Texas’ two single-screen movie theaters, watching A Guide for the Married Man, starring Walter Matthau and Robert Morse. It was probably some mediocre Hollywood producer’s idea of a smart, racy sex comedy. I can think of no reason I would have been sitting there, other than it was a hot summer afternoon, and that was what was playing.
It was an awful movie, but it was also memorable—literally, since I clearly remember two things about it, half a century later.
First: in a movie that was essentially a series of sketches, I can remember only one scene: Walter Matthau, as the wise old lecher, is instructing a naïve young Robert Morse on what to do if he’s caught having an affair: “deny, deny, deny,” no matter how much smoke the gun is emitting. Then we see Matthau’s character at home in bed with a girlfriend, as his wife unexpectedly returns home and catches them in the act. As the wife tears into the husband, the girl calmly gets up and starts to get dressed, and Matthau starts making the bed. He doesn’t understand why his wife is upset…nothing’s going on. The girl? What girl? The girlfriend gets her purse and leaves. Matthau continues to patiently deny everything and finishes making the bed. Finally the wife looks at her placid husband and the spotless bedroom, hesitates…and then admits that maybe she just dreamed the whole thing. As a cinematic illustration of “gaslighting,” it surpasses even Gaslight.
Secondly, and more importantly, I was struck by the funky, infectious theme song, written by John Williams and performed by The Turtles. It was stuck in my head for the next fifty years. It took the development of something called The Internet before I got to listen to that song a second time, and…it still rocks.
Still Denton,1967. My little brother and I are watching Bonnie and Clyde, the romanticized, revisionist version of the bank robbers’ story, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. It‘s a big event: the real Bonnie and Clyde had committed some of their robberies and murders in and around Denton, and the film itself was shot partly in the vicinity. Denton was being honored with the film’s premier. (Not exactly true, as I discover now. More like the Texas premier.) We’re accompanied by our mother, who as I recall had to talk her way past the usher, given the film’s R rating for its violence, extreme by the standards of the day. But when the grisly finale arrived, for us and for the ill-fated pair, my mother suddenly pressed our heads into her lap, to spare us the traumatizing spectacle. After all these years, I can come clean: I peeked long enough to see Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies flopping around under the machine-gun fire of Texas Rangers and various other overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions.
Madison, Wisconsin, 1971 or 1972, watching Diamonds Are Forever with a friend. In those days, the intervals between each glamorous, sexy, exciting Bond movie seemed excruciatingly long, and the joy of finally getting to see the latest one was intense. But Diamonds Are Forever marked a growing up for me, at least in terms of cinematic sensibility. It was maybe the first time I could see that a movie wasn’t something that instantaneously bursts into being, fully formed and perfect. It was something crafted by imperfect human beings. As I watched my beloved Sean Connery, the only real James Bond, now sporting a bald spot, as he acted out a gunfight on a yacht or something, I realized that he was…bored. And so was I.
Madison, Wisconsin, 1974 (?), Amarcord. I first saw this movie as a teenager one summer, in the little movie theater in the University of Wisconsin student union. It is Federico Fellini’s fantastic reimagining of his adolescence in the small Adriatic coast town of Rimini in the 1930’s. I saw it a couple of years later with a group of friends in college—I remember the girls in our company laughing when the main character’s crazy uncle climbs a tree and cries out to the world, “I want a woman!,” a scene which, at that point in my life, didn’t seem so comical. I remember watching it in the spring of 1978 in East Berlin. I’ve watched it countless times over the years, and as I have grown and changed, the film has deepened and shown me different things—about being a kid, about being stuck in a mediocre school, about desire, about marriage, about fascism and resisting fascism, about losing a parent, about growing up (or not). I have a warm spot in my heart for Giuseppe Tornatore’s later Cinema Paradiso, which covers much of the same thematic territory, but Fellini’s less sentimental, more imaginative treatment made a personal connection with me. It’s an Italian The Last Picture Show, though what the town loses in the end is not its only movie theater, but the glamorous prostitute every man and boy in town is in love with. She attains her happy ending by marrying a stuffed shirt in a crisp black fascist uniform.
Hyde Park, Chicago, 1982. I am sitting in Hyde Park’s only movie theater, waiting for Mr. Mom to start. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be lousy, but I want to see a movie, any movie. Then a trailer comes on for a science fiction story, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Its future world is neither the standard desolate smoking post-apocalyptic ruin nor the standard gleaming antiseptic space station. It’s an utterly fantastic yet utterly believable squalid, overcrowded, dirty, dripping, urban landscape peopled by a deceptive mix of humans and androids, lit up by gigantic floating animated billboards that promise an idyllic life on suburban planets. I want to see this movie so bad it hurts. But it will be weeks before I get to see Blade Runner. And then I remember, with a sinking heart, that I am here to watch Mr. Mom.
Taipei, 1989 (?), A City of Sadness. Did you ever walk into a movie theater without any particular expectations, and leave feeling that you had just been a part of history? In Taiwan to visit in-laws, my wife and I went to see A City of Sadness. The title meant nothing to me. It turned out to be director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s understated masterpiece about the oppression and cruelties suffered by the people of Taiwan after World War II. The movie had recently premiered and the theater was standing room only. The film was both a cause and an effect of a turning point in Taiwanese society, as the people felt freer to express themselves and to openly examine the recent past. Forty years of martial law had ended only the year before. I don’t know why the film was shown with English subtitles, but luckily for me, it was.
Banff, 1998, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan. We’re in Banff to escape the Texas summer heat. On two consecutive nights we watch Armageddon(forgettable) and Saving Private Ryan (memorable) in the town’s movie theater. Later it occurs to me that we’re in a Canadian town, and the only two movies showing are both about Americans sacrificing themselves to save the world.
Skokie, Illinois, 2001 (?) The Royal Tenenbaums. My wife and I go to visit my grandmother, who is dying from cancer. She has some trouble expressing herself, but makes it clear she’d really like to go see a movie. So we and other family members take her to see The Royal Tenenbaums, which seems to be the best cinematic offering at the moment. It was probably the last movie she saw, certainly the last one in a movie theater. And the movie?…Well, she deserved better.
Austin, Texas 2002 (?), Spirited Away. My wife and I went to see this animated masterpiece at night, based on a capsule review I read somewhere, maybe in the weekend entertainment page of something we called “the newspaper.” I had never heard of the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki or seen any of his works. The theater was completely empty except for the two of us. We were treated to an exquisitely beautiful, dreamlike experience, the story of a child cut off from her parents and lost in an enormous bathhouse for spirits. It was so wonderful that we watched it again two or three nights later, again in an abandoned theater, which only enhanced the dreamlike experience.
A few years later the film returned for another tour, and we went to see it again. This time the place was packed with fans, many of them in costume.
Austin, Texas, 2002, The Sum of All Fears. It bugs me no end when people make noise during a movie, whether it’s talking, whispering, tearing open a maddeningly crackly plastic cover off a piece of candy, or rummaging around in a bucket of popcorn (unless it’s me doing the rummaging). How rare it is to sit in a perfectly quiet theater. But there are some moments of silence I remember.
One such moment happened during The Sum of All Fears, which I watched with my wife in an Austin multiplex. A forgettable thriller, though it did break one convention of the genre: halfway through the story, the good guys are unable to reach the nuclear device before it goes off and completely destroys a city (Baltimore, in this case). At that point the theater went dead silent for several long seconds. Everyone was thinking of 9/11.
The Garden of Eaton 