Category Archives: Books

The Pigeons of ’48

Posted on by

Missed the big-hairy-deal debate last night. Nothing either of them could say at this point is going to change my mind. This election has gone on long enough already.

Instead I worked, as I usually do on Monday nights, and late in the evening read for pleasure, as I often do. Currently I’m working my way through 1948 by David Pietrusza (2011), which is about (as the subtitle says), “Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory,” or the story of an election that didn’t go on quite so long, and had its share of surprises. I read Pietrusza’s book about presidential politics in 1920 some time ago, and it was fairly good. So is 1948.

I haven’t been in a hurry to get through 1948, diverting into other books as well, such as a second reading of The Right Stuff (first time was in the early ’90s, and well worth the re-read), and first readings of The Basketball Diaries and Death Comes for the Archbishop. It’s a rare time when I just read one thing all the way through to the exclusion of others. I might even take up News from Tartary soon, since it’s been much too long since I read any Peter Fleming.

1948’s got some interesting detail. Here’s an anecdote about the Democratic National Convention that year that I like: “With the convention running three hours and forty-three minutes behind schedule, [Sam] Rayburn nevertheless undertook one last chore before introducing the exceedingly patient Truman: ‘I want to introduce Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, Pennsylvania delegate-at-large. She has a surprise for us which I hope the convention will enjoy.’

“The plump, white-frocked, seventy-three-year-old Mrs. Miller, younger sister of former Pennsylvania senator Joseph Guffey, had prepared an elaborate, six-foot-high floral display composed of red and while carnations, in the shape of the Liberty Bell. Imprisoned inside it for several hours were forty-eight caged white pigeons, officially and symbolically designated ‘doves of peace.’ In the horrible heat, a couple had already expired. The band stoked up ‘Hail to the Chief,’ and the surviving birds — crazed by the noise, lights, and the heat — exploded out of the opened ‘Liberty Bell.’

“Pigeons flew into the rafters. They dive-bombed delegates. Men and women shouted, ‘Watch your clothes!’

” ‘Though the press delicately did not mention it,’ noted Clark Clifford (who did), the ‘doves of peace began, not surprisingly, to drop the inevitable product of their hours of imprisonment on any delegate who had the bad luck to be underneath them.’

“Some birds landed on the platform. Rayburn frantically shushed them away. One nearly landed on his glistening, bald head… ‘Get those damned pigeons out of here!’ he screamed over live radio and TV.

” ‘As [Truman] spoke,’ Time reported, ‘pigeons teetered on the balconies, on folds of the draperies, on overhead lights, occasionally launched on a quick flight to a more pigeonly position.’

“Thus, Harry Truman’s choice of a crisp, double-breasted white suit that evening may not have been the wisest choice of the campaign…”

Nevertheless, Truman’s ’48 Democratic Convention acceptance speech famously turned out to be a barnburner: “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it — don’t you forget that!”

Departures and Arrivals

Posted on by

Been reading Departures and Arrivals by Eric Newby (1999) lately. It was his last book, and gives the impression that Newby and his publisher had a conversation something like this:

Publisher: Newby, old man, have you got anything new for us?

Newby: I’m afraid not. As you know, Wanda and I are getting on.

Publisher: Nothing at all?

Newby: Well, there’s always something. I’ve a few files of unpublished pieces.

Publisher: Places you’ve written about before?

Newby: Some of them yes, some no.

Publisher: Let’s see what we can do with that.

So the book reads mostly like a series of diary entries. Mind you, these are Eric Newby’s, so they’re really good diary entries, including items about traveling to places that no sane person would now visit, such as Syria. Also, many of the items were about trips he took in the 1980s and ’90s — times and a few places (England, China) I have first-hand experience with, unlike the Hindu Kush in the 1950s. Somehow it feels different when you read about a more familiar time, even if the place is unfamiliar.

Speaking of reading material, I’ve been receiving AARP’s magazine lately. It’s well edited, of course, since the organization probably devotes more resources to its production than most magazines get. But it also has the same irritating tendency as many other mags to focus on celebrities. I can’t say that I care much what Cyndi Lauper (for example) thinks about life, now that she’s pushing 65 pretty hard.

Even so, AARP is a lobbying group I can get behind as I get older.

One Summer: America, 1927

Posted on by

Bill Bryson’s a most entertaining writer. Recently I spotted his One Summer (2013), subtitled “America, 1927,” at the library and I had to pick it up. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, with accounts of Lindbergh’s flight, Babe Ruth’s season, the Great Mississippi Flood and much more still ahead (which reminds me, I want to read Rising Tide).

So far I’m enjoying it. Among other things early in the book, Bryson discusses the rise of the tabloid in America during the 1920s, kicked off by the Illustrated Daily News in New York, which Col. McCormack had a hand in creating. The following is about a clearly colorful character I’ve never heard of.

“Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic. The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden…

“Macfadden was a man of strong an exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and wife wife frequently bemused their neighbors in Englewood, New Jersey by exercising naked on the lawn…

“As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated himself to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned, no idea is too stupid…. When tabloids became all the rage, Macfadden launched the Evening Graphic. Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to the truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them… The New Yorker called the Graphic a ‘grotesque fungus,’ but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By 1927, it’s circulation was nearing six hundred thousand.”

That’s only a small part of the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden. He even had a go at running for president, though it isn’t clear how seriously. Sounds like a man who liked to hear himself talk. Under just the right circumstances — as we’ve all been reminded of recently — that can get you pretty far.

Wednesday Leftovers

Posted on by

Fine warm day today, the latest in a string of them. Rain ahead. Back again on May 31, after Memorial Day and Decoration Day, one in the same this year. It’s possible I’ll see a few things between now and then.

Some evenings, lights illuminate the baseball field behind our back yard.

Nighttime baseball 2016If the lights suddenly looked like that to our eyes, we’d be alarmed. One of these days, maybe I’ll read the instruction manual for the camera on the subject of nighttime picture-taking. Or maybe not.

This one-panel Bliss from May 2009 was hanging on my office wall until recently. Now it’s in a file. I’ve taken a few things down.

I like a comic that assumes you know “The Rime of Ancient Mariner.” Bliss is still in the Tribune, and still amusing. Not long ago a panel showed a woman opening up blinds to reveal the sun, while a tired-looking man in bed under a blanket says, “Must you press the issue?”

I’m reminded of “When Potato Salad Goes Bad.” Has it been over 20 years since Larson discontinued The Far Side? Apparently it has.

Speaking of a writer that assumes his readers have a certain amount of knowledge, what follows is a passage from Ninety-Two Days (1934) by Evelyn Waugh, which I recently finished. The book’s a highly readable account of his journey through the British Guianan bush and across the border into Brazil, where he comes to the town of Boa Vista.

“Already, in the few hours of my sojourn there, the Boa Vista of my imagination had come to grief. Gone; engulfed in an earthquake, uprooted by a tornado and tossed sky-high like chaff in the wind, scorched up with brimstone like Gomorrah, toppled over with trumpets like Jericho, ploughed like Carthage, brought, demolished and transported brick by brick to another continent as though it had taken the fancy of Mr. Hearst; tall Troy was down.”

Bird update: the young robins seem to have left the nest. That was fast. I’m pretty sure I saw one of them flapping its wings yesterday, getting ready to go. Haven’t seen it since.
Both the duck and the drake were on the garage roof yesterday afternoon, when it was quite warm — mid-80s, which must be warm enough for the duck to leave the eggs a while.

Lately Mars has been in the southern sky, and the nights have been warm enough to spend a few moments looking at the red-orange planet. A small delight. I take them where I can get them.

Bargain Books

Posted on by

Bargain Books arrived in my mailbox the other day. It’s a paper catalog produced by the Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Co. of Falls Village, Conn. How much longer will there be paper catalogs?

A while yet, probably, but I’ll still show this bit of ephemera to one or the other of my children and say, remember these, they’re on their way out. A few of them, such as the Sears Catalog, were once as big as phone books, even in the 1970s. You know, phone books. One or the other of my children will not be impressed. Youth looks forward.

The catalog is essentially a remainder table. Guess some mailing list algorithm somewhere detected that I’m fond of remainder tables — which is true, I always take a look — and so I took a look into Bargain Books. It promises books in the following categories: Arts & Entertainment, History, Home & Garden, Cookbooks, Military History, Biography, Healthy Living, Fiction, Crafts/Needlecrafts, Science & Nature, and Children’s Books, plus Bargain DVDs.

It seems like a fine selection, but some of those categories are a bit stretched, let’s say. In History, for instance, I found Secret Journey to Planet Serpo: A True Story of Interplanetary Travel. By Len Kasten. “On July 16, 1965, a massive alien spacecraft from the Zeta Reticuli star system, piloted by alien visitors known as Ebens, welcomed 12 astronaut trained military personnel aboard their craft. This volume exposes the truth of the human-alien interaction, revealing that our government continues to have an ongoing relationship with the Ebens to this day.”

The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe

Posted on by

Among the many books at my mother’s house, I found a copy of The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe, by Pfc. Arthur Frommer, first printing, dated August 1955. The book isn’t crumbling yet, but at 60 years of age it’s distinctly yellow, and at risk of falling apart if I handle it too much. Probably the only reason it hasn’t fallen apart already is that no one has handled it much since my parents came home from Europe in 1956.
GI's Guide to Travelling in EuropeAt the risk of damage, I took a look inside the book. It’s precisely what I’ve read it is — the first modern travel guide for a mass audience. In this case, U.S. military personnel stationed in Europe in the mid-50s. In the case of its successor title by Frommer, Europe on $5 a Day, American civilians traveling to Europe during that decade who had neither the time nor funds for a Grand Tour-style trip. Which would be most people.

The focus is on how, rather than what. Chapters include: Army Travel Regulations, Free Air Force Flights, Train Travel in Europe, the G.I. and His Auto, Cities, Hotels & Restaurants, Army-Run Resorts, Talking Through Europe, Menu Translations, Changing Your Money.

GI's Guide to Travelling in Europe backThe book’s done in a conversational, nuts-and-bolts sort of style, and quite well written. Besides the fact that Frommer was filling an unfilled niche, I can see why his books succeeded: useful content, done well.

“But where do I, as the author of this thing, get off posing as an expert on the subject?” Frommer wrote in the book’s introduction. “I’m a G.I. about to rotate home after more than a year of Army service in Germany. This was my first trip to Europe, and I wanted to see lots of it. During that year, therefore, I’ve taken the full allotted leave period of 30 days. I’ve requested and received, in addition, a 3-day pass per month. I’ve also traveled on several 3-day weekends resulting from Army holidays.

“In this manner, during a year of busy Army duty, I’ve been able to spend a full 3 to 10 days at every one of the following places: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, London, Barcelona, the Island of Mallorca, Vienna, Florence, Venice, Zurich, Munich, Frankfort, Innsbruck, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam.

“The entire amount of this travelling has been done solely on the proceeds of an Army salary that has never been higher than a Pfc’s pay. No money from home has ever defrayed any of these costs. Nor have I gone without coffee, razor blades and fresh laundry during the on-post portions of my Army life.

“Nor have I endured any grinding discomfort on any of the trips described… as the miles piled up, I learned; and the ordinary accumulation of experience was supplemented by a constant search for the gimmicks and short-cuts of European travel. I wrote for regulations and interrogated everyone I met. I was a pest, but I was able to accomplish a type and amount of travelling on the continent which — without fear of exaggeration or boasting — would’ve cost the ordinary civilian tourist over a thousand dollars, as well as months of free time. All at the expense of our benevolent Uncle.”

I hope my parents got their 50 cents’ worth out of the book. I’ll wager they did. I know they went to London, Paris, Strasbourg, Rome, Venice, and some other places from a posting in Germany. I rarely used any of Frommer’s later books myself in Europe or Asia, but I consulted others in the same style, and so have benefited from his work as well.

I’m also reminded of something my friend Dan, stationed in Germany as a Army lieutenant in the mid-80s, told me. By then, of course, getting around cheaply was easier (and there was no euro to mug you in places that should be cheap, like Italy and Greece). A handful of his men, Dan said, made an effort to go as many places as free time would allow, a la Frommer. A good many others, however, were content to hang around nearby and drink Bud.

Frommer, by the way, is still alive at 86. A few years ago, my friend Ed met the man in New York and did some walking around with him there. He says that was quite an experience, and I believe it.

First Folio Exhibit, Lake County Discovery Museum

Posted on by

ShakesBirthI’ve done a little Shakespeare tourism in my time, such as visiting his birthplace in Stratford. When I scanned the ticket from that visit, I noted that I paid £1 for admission in 1983. The Bank of England has a handy UK inflation calculator that tells me that’s the equivalent of just over £3 now.

I checked the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust web site today and found that a “Birthplace Pass” now costs £16.50 for an adult. For that, you get into “Hall’s Croft, Harvard House, Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Shakespeare’s Grave,” so that’s not as outrageous as £16.50 for just the birthplace, but it still doesn’t quite sit right. Can you just buy a single ticket for the birthplace, or is the pass the minimum? Also, there are other, more expensive options that include other houses and a garden.

Shakespeare’s grave is at the Church of the Holy Trinity, and I don’t recall being charged admission. These days, the church asks for a £2 or £3 donation if you want to take a look at the playwright’s grave, and spare those stones and not move his bones. A good idea, since moving those bones wouldn’t just get you cursed, it would probably be a fairly serious criminal offense in the UK.

FirstFolioAll this comes to mind because last week we — all of us going the same place, an increasingly rare thing — went to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Ill., to see a First Folio. It was my idea. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare being laid to rest in that church near the Avon, the Folger Shakespeare Library has sent out some of its First Folios in traveling displays. Each state has one display in one location over the course of 2016, and Illinois’ is this small museum in the far northwest suburbs.

Of all the times I’ve been to DC, I’ve never managed to make it to the Folger. There’s a good chance I’ve seen a First Folio somewhere — maybe at the British Library or the New York Public Library — but I don’t remember. So I wanted to see this one.

I’d been the Discovery Center a few times before, mainly to see excellent exhibits drawn from the museum’s Curt Teich Postcard Archives. That includes over 400,000 postcards of more than 10,000 towns and cities nationwide and elsewhere, plus a lot of other subjects.

The First Folio exhibit was straightforward: a room with tall signs offering various facts about Shakespeare, his plays, the Quartos and the 1623 and later Folios, along with the King’s Men actors who saw fit to have them published: John Heminges and Henry Condell. A smaller, adjoining room includes the First Folio itself, behind glass and opened to the page that includes Hamlet’s soliloquy.

First FolioIt’s a handsome volume, not much worn or yellow. This was no pulp publishing. It’s also one of the 233 copies that are known to exist, and one of the 82 that the Folger owns as the largest collector of them. Remarkably, Meisei University in Tokyo has the second-largest collection, numbering 12. How did that happen?

A cop lurked in the shadows at the exhibit; a wise precaution, no doubt. At a Sotheby’s auction in 2006, a copy fetched £2.5 million, and thieves have been known to target the book, though the fellow in that article sounded like a bumbler.

I thought it was worth the 45-minute drive to Wauconda. My family might not have been persuaded, except we also had an enjoyable dinner in that town first. More about that tomorrow.

Mala Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Posted on by

“There, now, that wasn’t so good, was it?” — Leonard Pinth-Garnell

I’m rarely persuaded that something bad, especially a movie, is so bad that it’s good. Usually bad is bad. I’m not going to waste much time watching bad romantic or other comedies, bad drama, bad action flicks, bad horror, bad adaptations of comic books, bad SF, bad war movies, and so forth. I have soft spots for some of the bad movies I saw as a child — The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, The Killer Shrews, Frogs, Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, and a few others — but even so I don’t really want to see them again.

Reading about bad movies is another matter. The Book of Lists, mentioned earlier this week, introduced me to a number of titles universally acknowledged as bad, the only ones of which I’d be temped to watch — a few minutes of anyway — would be The Conqueror, just to see the ridiculousness of John Wayne pretending to be Genghis Khan, or Che! to see Omar Sharif as Che and Jack Palance as Castro. Other titles on its list included The Horror of the Beach Party, Lost Horizon (1973), Robot Monster, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and That Hagen Girl.

WorstMoviesIt’s a little hard to remember that before the Internet, lists like that, while not rare, weren’t everywhere you looked. They were still something of a novelty. On the remainder table at Harrods’ book department in 1988, I happened across a fuller example of a bad-movie list in the form of The World’s Worst Movies by Tim Healy (1986). For all of £1.99, it was a deal.

It’s more than a series of lists. Instead, the chapters are thematic essays — entertaining, not very serious essays — mocking bad monster movies, bad SF, bad action pictures, “sex schlockers” and “teenbombs,” along with subchapters along the lines of the Worst of Joan Collins, the Worst of Ronald Reagan, the Worst of Elvis, and the Worst of Roger Corman. Many familiar titles are discussed: Plan 9 From Outer Space, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, The Swarm, Glen or Glenda? etc, etc.

The book also introduced me to movies I’d never heard of, such as Night of the Lepus (1972), which is “a horror film about a horde of monster rabbits which roams the Arizona ranchlands in carnivorous packs leaving trails of destruction of their wake.” Or Zombies of the Stratosphere, a 1952 serial featuring a young Leonard Nimoy as a Martian. Or Percy (1971), about which the book asks, “What could be worse than a film about a penis transplant?” The answer: “Another film about a penis transplant,” referring to the sequel, Percy’s Progress (1974).

I will say that I went out of my way to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space on tape after I saw the entertaining movie Ed Wood. It was as bad as promised. Yuriko watched about 10 minutes and then left the room. I stuck with it and noticed that while Ed Wood tried to re-create some of the bad performances of that movie, they didn’t always work. Most notably, Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge, who was the “The Ruler” in Plan 9. Bill Murray is simply too good an actor to be that bad.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton

Posted on by

I’m about halfway through Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990) by Edward Rice, subtitled in its Amazon entry, “The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West” (but that phrase isn’t on the cover of the book). At the halfway point, Burton’s already been an agent for Gen. Napier in Sind and other places, daringly visited Mecca, and done a lot more, and now — around the time he met Speke — he’s preparing to venture into Africa for a date with a spear through his cheeks.

Wiki (to borrow only one sentence) describes Burton as a “British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat.” Rice’s biography, I’m happy to say, does him justice.

“Burton was unique in any gathering except when he was deliberately working in disguise as an agent among peoples of the lands being absorbed by his country,” Rice writes. “An impressive six feet tall, broad chested and wiry, ‘gypsy-eyed,’ darkly handsome, he was fiercely imposing, his face scarred by a savage spear wound received in a battle with Somali marauders. He spoke twenty-nine languages and many dialects and when necessary, he could pass as a native of several eastern lands — as an Afghan when he made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca, as a Gypsy laborer among the work gangs on the canals of the Indus River, as a nondescript peddler of trinkets and as a dervish, a wandering holy man, when exploring the wilder parts of Sind, Baluchistan, and the Punjab for his general. He was the first European to enter Harar, a sacred city in East Africa, though some thirty whites had earlier been driven off or killed. He was also the first European to lead an expedition into Central Africa to search for the sources of the Nile…

“His opinions on various subjects — English ‘misrule’ of the new colonies, the low quality and stodginess of university education, the need for the sexual emancipation of the English woman, the failure on the part of the Government to see that the conquered peoples of the empire were perpetually on the edge of revolt — were not likely to make him popular at home. Nor did his condemnation of infanticide and the slave trade endear him to Orientals and Africans. His scholarly interests often infuriated the Victorians, for he wrote openly about sexual matters they thought better left unmentioned — aphrodisiacs, circumcision, infibulation, eunuchism, and homosexuality…

“Burton’s adult life was passed in a ceaseless quest for the kind of secret knowledge he labeled broadly ‘Gnosis’… This search led him to investigate the Kabbalah, alchemy, Roman Catholicism, a Hindu snake caste of the most archaic type, and the erotic Way called Tantra, after which he looked into Sikhism and passed through several forms of Islam before settling on Sufism, a mystical discipline that defies simple labels. He remained a more or less faithful practitioner of Sufi teachings for the rest of his life…

Wow. Previously I only knew about his career in the broadest terms, colored by reading Mountains of the Moon by William Harrison in Japan in the early ’90s (published as Burton and Speke in 1982), an exceptionally fine work of historical fiction, and seeing the movie Mountains of the Moon, which is a good adaptation.

Never mind the fellow who hawks Mexican beer. Even though he’s been dead for over 125 years, I’d say Richard Burton would still be a strong contender for status as The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Liebling for the New Year

Posted on by

On January 1, I picked up A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, subtitled “An Appetite for Paris,” which is a 1959 collection of essays about his eating experiences in that city and other parts of France, which were vast and diverse, beginning in the 1920s. It’s an immensely charming work, not just about the food and drink he encountered, but also with bits about other gastronomes, life as an expat, technically as a student in Paris, boxing — he wrote a lot about that elsewhere — and other asides.

It’s a somewhat different expat-Paris-in-the-20s than Hemingway’s. For Liebling, eating and drinking were the point, and not just in the context of hanging out with other expats (Liebling seemed to eat alone a lot). Hemingway drank a lot, of course, because That’s What Men Do, but for Liebling his “feeding” — his term — was purely aesthetic. In France he found a lifelong devotion to being a gastronome, and by the time he died in 1963, at 59, it had made him very fat.

I doubt that he regretted it. In Between Meals he writes: “Mens sano in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with the debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drinking water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

You’d thinking eating to excess in Jazz Age Paris would be enough for any man, but Liebling asserts that Belle Époque gastronomes had it better: “In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor — spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet….

“One of the last of the great round-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical comedy books [1875-1957]. In 1955… Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Borbeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the young leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne…”

Liebling also touched on another puzzling phenomenon, in the context of eating, but which applies to other things. Namely, why wealth often seems to narrow, rather than broaden, experience: “A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.”