Bob Jackson doesn’t know what happened, or where the press car is going now, or why, only that it is following the rest of the motorcade toward Stemmons Freeway at a high speed. He is still holding his empty camera in his lap. The other one, which is loaded, is still strapped around his neck. It all happened so fast he didn’t get a single photograph. If he had only gotten a picture of the rifle barrel in the window, he undoubtedly would have won the Pulitzer Priize for the best news photograph of the year. (Jackson redeemed himself two days later when he took a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.)

An excerpt from Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November.

So Benny told Jim the story of why Marcia was mad at him. Since becoming employed full-time again, he had grown aware of a phenomena that seemed to happen only at work, or at least happen with more frequency at work than other places in life, and the phenomenon was this: one person would say something and the person listening would have positively no idea what he or she meant, but not wanting to appear rude, or worse, stupid, or alternatively, not caring to waste any more time, it was easier just to nod or laugh along than it was to pause and inquire what that person really meant. This was especially true with hallway banter and kitchen talk and other types of inconsequential daily exchanges. People were indifferent to what was said, or they were preoccupied by other things, or they had long ago concluded that what passed for speech during the course of a work day was mostly the babble of idiots. “So I thought, would it make a difference, really,” said Benny, “would it honestly make a difference if instead of replying the way I would normally, I answered everybody with quotes from The Godfather?”

An excerpt from Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris.

My final day at the [Disneyland] magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.

[Steve Martin, Born Standing Up]

I am well familiar with this notion of nostalgia for the present, and was struck by this sweet, frank passage in Steve Martin’s memoir. It is particularly interesting to take this phrase, maybe strip it from Martin’s context, and pair it with the Arbus photograph. Disneyland is so much about a nostalgia for simple storybook ideals, but not for those in actual storybooks — instead, for the contemporary “Disneyfied” retellings. Even if eliminating a cynical view of the appropriating and commercialized Disney universe, it clearly often relies on the cultivation of a fictionalized nostalgia.

So I guess it is very striking and, well, heartbreakingly nostalgic to see that Martin is speaking of a very different twist on the concept; a Disneyland that is real and buried into his own childhood experiences, in three dimensions. I get a little uncomfortable with the very near schmaltziness of the last line there, but I do not doubt his sincerity nor disagree with his sentiment.

[Photograph by Diane Arbus via Native Intelligence]

A Primer by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.