So you think you can do better!

This sounds like a very engaging documentary about George Plimpton. There was a time he was a celebrity, famous for Paper Lion, his account of his tryout with the Detroit Lions in the 1960s. It seems Plimpton prefigured the celebrity reality show, so common today. He was also an excellent sportswriter, covering Ali's grand comeback in his victory of George Foreman in Kinshasha, Zaire, otherwise known as "The Rumble in the Jungle."

His greatest legacy is The Paris Review, which he co-founded with Harold Humes and Peter Mathiesen, putting him in contact with virtually all the leading lights of literature, including Ernest Hemingway, who he apparently rubbed the wrong way when he asked him about the white birds popping up in Hemingway's sex scenes.

George Plimpton generally tended to play himself in film, but he popped up in a few movies as other characters, including the psychologist, Henry Lipkin, in Good Will Hunting and the President's lawyer in Nixon. He even had an uncredited role as a bedouin in Lawrence of Arabia, no doubt an opportunity to interview Sir David Lean.

Plimpton died in 2003. He has had many tributes since then, but one would think the most gratifying would be having an asteroid named after him. Here's the trailer to the film.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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