Books posts

At the suggestion of a friend, I finally got around to reading Armistead Maupin's seminal “Tales of the City,” about life among the lost and restless, the gay and the straight, in 1970s San Francisco, which was serialized in the Chronicle despite openly sexual situations: one-night stands, affairs, the baths, etc. My friend lived this life—or at least lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. Can you imagine what a treasure that would be? Revisiting a place you knew from 50 years ago? It's not lost, it's right there. Hell, I got a rush out of the pop cultural references alone.

I don't know if it's much commented upon, but there are two very prescient moments in the text. One of them, a dialogue between Brian (straight) and Michael (not), presaged the coming Reagan revolution: 

Brian: Sometimes I get the feeling that the New Morality is over. Know what I mean? ... I mean, what's left, you know? Guys and chicks, chicks and chicks, guys and guys.
Michael: Right on.
Brian: But now, you know, the pendulum.
Michael: Yeah ... the fucking pendulum.
Brian: I mean, Michael... I think it's gonna be all over, man. People like you and me, we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

The other, a thought in the bath houses, unknowingly anticipated something worse:

At times like this, the tubs was an easy way out. Discreet, dispassionate, noncommittal. He could diddle away a frenzied hour or two, then return unblemished to the business of being a doctor.

It's returning unblemished from the baths. I thought of kaposi sarcoma and the rest of it. Soon, few would return unblemished from the baths.

These are excerpts from the new insider Facebook book, “Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams (recommended), who worked for the company through most of the 2010s. She began with optimism and left with dread. As did all of us, if we were paying attention, and if we left. Not enough of us have. 

The excerpts are from November 2016, during a post-election trip to Peru in which Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know enough to bring his own passport—he blames the help—but still gets into the country because he's Mark Zuckerberg. But the brunt of the discussion is what's just happened to the U.S. and why.

Mark's still seething at how his remarks there—that it's a “crazy idea” that Facebook influenced the election—have been universally rejected, even mocked. ... Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. Facebook embedded staff in Trump's campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages.

Elliot walks Mark through all the ways that Facebook and Parscale's combined team microtargeted users and tweaked ads for maximum engagement, using data tools we designed for commercial advertisers. The way I understand it, Trump's campaign had amassed a database, named Project Alamo, with profiles of over 220 million people in America. It charted all sorts of online and offline behavior, including gun registration, voter registration, credit card and shopping histories, what websites they visit, what car they drive, where they live, and the last time they voted. The campaign used Facebook's “Custom Audiences from Custom Lists” to match people in that database with their Facebook profiles. Then Facebook's “Lookalike Audiences” algorithm found people on Facebook with “common qualities” that “look like” those of known Trump supporters. So if Trump supporters liked, for example, a certain kind of pickup truck, the tool would find other people who liked pickup trucks but were not yet committed voters to show the ads to.

Parscale's team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They'd be invisible to researchers or anyone else looking at their feed. The idea was: feed them stuff that'll discourage them from voting for Hillary. One made for Black audiences was a cartoon built around her 1996 sound bite that “African Americans are super predators.” In the end, Black voters didn't turn out in the numbers that Democrats expected. In an election that came down to a small number of votes in key swing states, these things mattered.

Reading, I flashed back to campaigning for Hillary the weekend before the election. A rainy Saturday in Seattle, most people not home, or they were, like me, Hillary voters. But one elderly Black woman said she wasn't voting. There was something off about it, too. She seemed scared. I scare no one so it wasn't me visiting her door, it was something else. And maybe the above was part of that something else.

According to Wynn-Williams, eventually Zuckerberg began to understand that his creation did in fact influence the election, and may have brought to power the man who could, and still might, upend American democracy forever. But they disagreed on how the mea culpa should read: 

Elliot wants Mark to post this on his Facebook page when we land, and he wants him to include a concrete action plan listing changes that Facebook will make to address misinformation. That's what the world knows about and people are upset about, all the fake news on the platform. ... Mark's post goes up and it's almost laughably on the nose: The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously.... We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done. ... There's a vague promise to “learn from” fact-checking organizations and to “work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input,” particularly about fact-checking. He also doesn't commit to labeling stories that we know are false but says that we're “exploring” it.

He also begins to think that maybe he can become president of the United States, too, and begins exploring the possibility.

My wife left Facebook in 2019, I left in 2020, but there are still 4 billion users on the site. And in January 2025, after Trump's second victory, all the fact-checkers he'd hired in the wake of Trump's first election victory, were fired. 

I'm reading that insider Facebook book, “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who essentially created a job for herself within Facebook around 2011. A New Zealander, she once worked at the U.N., saw Facebook as a game-changer in a positive sense, and wanted to be part of bringing people together in times of need and otherwise, in every country around the world.

And then problems.

The title comes from the famous “Gatsby” paragraph that only seems to get more relevant each year: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Hell, Silicon Valley made this its motto: Move fast, break things.

It shouldn't be shocking, I should know by now that the truth is these aren't very smart guys and things got out of hand, but some things still shock me. After a few years, Sarah's boss, Marne, left for InstaGram and they got a Bush admin holdover, Joel Kaplan, who had once dated Sheryl Sandberg (herself a vast piece of work), to become vice-president of global policy. He's self-satisfied, dogmatic and, well, not a very smart guy. “Often when we start to talk about pressing issues in some country in Latin America or Asia,” she writes, “he stops and asks me to explain where the country is.” Eventually she offers to buy him a map.

Again, this is Facebook's vice president of global policy. And he doesn't know where shit is. But this is the line that got me:

“Joel is surprised to learn Taiwan is an island.”

Kaplan is still there. A couple of months ago, he was promoted to president of global affairs.

I'm reading a book by Superman's father, F.D. Reeve, “Robert Frost in Russia,” about a trip the great poet made to the U.S.S.R. in 1962 during the coldest part of the Cold War, and only months before Frost's death on January 29, 1963 at age 88. It's not exactly Truman Capote. Capote mocked everybody in “The Muses are Heard,” to our great amusement, while Reeve seems too polite for that. He's like most of us that way. He's also too cards-to-the-vest, which is not what you want in a writer or narrator. I keep waiting for something and not having it arrive. I keep waiting for the concrete. Maybe I'll find it in the second half. It's a slim volume. It looks and feels beautiful, a relic from an era of adults, but I'm mostly reading it because the author's son, Christopher, became a great hero for children, and for the child in all of us.

In that regard, there's an amusing exchange, midflight, when Frost asks Reeve if he likes airplanes—meaning does he like to fly—and Reeve says no. “I used to fly, but I like ships much better.” 

Reeve came along as Russian expert and translator, and the two men were accompanied by Frederick Adams, director of the Morgan Library in New York, and a good friend of Frost. This exchange resonates more than it should.

Frost: You know, Freddy's a real aristocrat. Related to Roosevelt, too. ... They don't have any like that over there, do they?
Reeve: No aristocrats.
Frost: Yeh, it's all workers and such. Yeh, I knew that. Though I bet you they have some. You got to have aristocrats.

I don't think he meant it positively. Either way he wasn't wrong—they had some. They have more now, though none are very aristocratic. They're so bad they make us long for aristocrats.

“The song 'What Was It You Wanted?' was also a quickly written one. I heard the lyric and melody together in my head and it played itself in a minor key. You have to be economical writing a song like this. If you've ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about. It doesn't need much explanation. Folks who are soft and helpless sometimes make the most noise. They can obstruct you in a lot of ways. It's pointless trying to resist them or deal with them by force. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.”

-- Bob Dylan, from the “Oh Mercy” section of “Chronicles: Volume One,” which I've been rereading. The first section, about coming to New York and exploring all kinds of music, was so full of creativity, and it got me so jazzed, that I carried some of that jazz into my life. But then the crash and subsequent crashes as he's just trying to live a life in Woodstock? Oof. He's so good at describing a cloudy mind that I carried that into my everyday life, too, which is why I stopped reading it. But my wife borrowed the book, or I shared it with her on Kindle, and she plowed through the whole thing, loved it all, so I figured I could make it. It gets better. His mind clears. He hurts his hand, wonders if he'll ever play again, and then songs start tapping him on the shoulder again. In a late-night, beer-drinking session, Bono looks over the songs and recommends record producer Daniel Lanois, who hangs out in New Orleans, and New Orelans opens up something in Dylan again and it's fun.

But what an odd book. In the first section, he takes us to the precipice of songwriting and worldwide fame and then cuts to the crashes. Apparently it began as just new liner notes for “New Morning” and “Oh Mercy,” and became this.

I'm reading Bob Dylan's memoirs again, “Chronicles: Volume One,” and it's as good as I remember it, and includes all the fascinating stuff James Mangold's movie left out.

It's 1961, Dylan's in New York and finally playing at the Gaslight (Dave Von Ronk got him in), and listening to whatever he can and reading what he can while staying in different people's homes. Sometimes he gets a couch, sometimes a room. He's a rambler and a gambler. One of his favorite places is at Ray and Chole's on Vestry Street in lower Manhattan. They were well-read so he was well-read while he stayed there. He mentions reading a biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slave Radical Republican of the 19th century who didn't suffer fools, the one played by Tommy Lee Jones in Spielberg's “Lincoln.” He also read “Vom Kriege” (“About War”) by Carl von Clausewitz and says this:

Clausewitz's book seemed outdated, but there's a lot in it that's real, and you can understand a lot about conventional life and the pressures of environment by reading it. When he claims that politics has taken the place of morality and politics is brute force, he's not playing. You have to believe it. You do exactly as you're told, whoever you are. Knuckle under or you're dead. Don't give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness. Don't give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us. Let's get down to brass tacks. There isn't any moral order.

Read that this morning. Seemed relevant.

Now I remember why I haven't re-read Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” in decades and decades: Everyone in it is kind of awful. You get the feeling that even Mr. Vonnegut doesn't like them, and you never want to get that feeling from an author. Eliot Rosewater, the main character, yes, is sympathetic, but he's also dealing with severe mental problems—triggered by the death of his mother, along with service in World War II, along with having wealth and fame he feels he didn't earn. Which he didn't. So there's that. But everyone else is just small and awful.

That said, a passage near the end blew me away. It's a description of a Kilgore Trout science fiction novel entitled “Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass,” about (shades of ST:TOS's “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) an intergalactic group coming to the edge of the universe and trying to figure out if there was anything else “in all that black velvet nothing out there.” Its main character, Sgt. Boyle, an English teacher, was the only Earthling on the expedition. Vonnegut writes:

The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time—to start thinking in terms of projects.

That's what blew me away. That description of telepathy, “with everybody constantly telling everybody everything,” which then “produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information,” well good god if that doesn't describe this thing that we're all on, this disaster of the world wide web and social media and all of it. He's describing the effects of the internet. In 1965. 

Time to start using language again. Time to get unstuck.

Hollander as Capote (amazing), Chalk as Baldwin (miscast)

Last month my wife and I watched Hulu's “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” part of Ryan Murphy's series of shows about women and gay men behaving badly, and Tom Hollander amazed in the lead; but I was disappointed that Norman Mailer never made an appearance. I don't mean physically. I mean his words.

Back in the late 1950s, in his seminal “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer wrote a chapter called “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” a straightforward look at his literary contemporaries. He probably did this on a dare to himself because it wasn't smart. Easy way to make enemies. On the plus side, he couldn't stand bullshit—particularly his own—and he had a large enough spirit to tip his cap when he felt it was deserved. That's what he did with Truman. He also nailed what was missing in Capote's work. And then, amazingly, he predicts exactly what will happen to Truman in 17 years—the stuff detailed in the Ryan Murphy series:

Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's, which will become a small classic. Capote has still given no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel, and his short stories are too often saccharine. At his worst he has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society, which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he would write of the gossip column's real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world. Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the fancier fish. 

I don't know how I would've included it in the series. As an epigraph? An early moment of foreshadowing that Truman dismisses in 1958 only to live in 1975? I don't know. But c'mon. How is it not in there?

Mailer is referenced in the fifth episode, the one where James Baldwin (Chris Chalk) shows up to remind Truman of his legacy. In the show, Baldwin says Mailer called on him to call on Truman, and the two make a day of it in the cafes and bars of New York in 1975-76. It's a fictional episode and I didn't buy any of it. I didn't buy Chalk as Baldwin, I didn't buy their conversation, I particularly didn't buy a mid-1970s James Baldwin listening to Truman whine about how others perceived him without bringing the hammer down. Baldwin forged himself in the smithy of other people's contempt of him—if he'd let other people's perceptions get to him, he wouldn't have lived past 20—so if you're doing this, if you're creating this meet-up, get into that. The series didn't. They didn't go there. Meanwhile, Mailer is in the wings, with a prescient quote explanining everything. They didn't go there, either.

Anyway, Hollander, and most of the swans, did amazing work.

I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” which I think I last read back in 1980 or so, and it's much better than I remember. Yesterday I came across the following. It reminded me of us today:

Samaritrophia, he read, is the suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind. “You must all take instructions from me!” the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience had demanded. They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more.

In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, “The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!”

The conscience is woke people, whom MAGA people throw into a hole while following their new leader, the “Hell with you” guy. One problem with the metaphor is the “enlightened” part. Doesn't fit today. Now we're benighted* self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, at this point, would be a breath of fresh air. 

* Yes, I've been using 'benighted' a lot lately. I think it's going to be a theme.

The day before the election, on social media, I posted this year's I VOTED image along with a 20-year-old quote from Norman Mailer—back when he was on Charlie Rose's show during the runup to the Iraq War:

“Democracy has a fundamental assumption: that if you allow the mass of people to express their will, more good will come out of that than bad. That means that democracy can always fail. And the best of democracies can fail. We have probably the greatest democracy that ever existed: We can go down the tubes; we can turn into a totalitarian country, too.”

And here we are.

So was democracy a good idea in its day and America too stupid/greedy/spoiled/awful for it now? Let me quote another postwar Jewish-American writer, E.L. Doctorow, from his essay “The Character of Presidents,” which is in that book to the right. He's writing about the unlikely return of the thoroughly unlikeable Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon was down, and humiliated, and then he was back in the Oval Office, the most powerful man in the world, and Doctorow gives us this long, beautiful sentence about what that may mean. Please read it in full. See if it reminds you of someone:

“That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spirtually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics as if were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.”

You'd need to lose “...living only by pure politics” because that's Nixon not Trump—with Trump, it's money money money, and power—but otherwise much of the quote actually fits Trump better. Certainly “lurchingly stumbling up from his own wretched career...”

But then there's “a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.” Doctorow wrote that in the 1990s when Nixon was history. So maybe when Trump is history (and c'mon, history!), I may feel the same way about him. But right now? He's remains the greatest threat to American democracy and American rule of law in my lifetime.

• Lucas' favorite comic book character wasn't Superman or Batman but Scrooge McDuck, “the money-hoarding, globe-trotting uncle of Donald Duck.” (Foreshadow alert)
• He wasn't really a movie-loving kid like Steven Spielberg. “While Lucas recalled seeing a few memorable films either on TV or in the Modesto movie theaters—Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, The Bridge on the River Kwai—for the most part, movies were simply a pleasant diversion.”
• I'd long read that Lucas wanted to remake “Flash Gordon,” which he'd supposedly seen as a kid, and I couldn't understand why. He was born in 1944, serials were dead or dying when he came of age, and no “Flash Gordon” had been made for decades. Answer: “The TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those 30-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials. ... 'I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials,' Lucas said.”
• At odds with this? At USC film school, he was a huge fan of foreign and avante-garde filmmaking and into “tone poems” rather than straight storytelling.
• At the same time, Lucas' classmate, future Oscar-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch, remembers that the USC film school didn't think much of the future of film: “The very first thing our film teacher told us... was, 'Get out of this business now. There's no future in it. There are no jobs for any of you. Don't do this.'”
• Lucas made “American Graffiti” out of spite. His previous film, “THX-1131,” had failed utterly and everyone was telling him to make something that wasn't so cold and impersonal. “Don't be so weird,” Coppola told him. “Why don't you try to write something out of your own life that has warmth and humor?” Lucas responded, as if through clenched teeth: “I'll give them one, just to show that I can do it.”
• While he was struggling to write “Star Wars” (writing was always a chore for him), he saw his wife Marcia driving away with their dog, an enormous Alaskan malamute, sitting in the passenger seat. “Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia's copilot,” Jones writes. Yes, that's what led to Chewbacca.
• That malamute inspired an even more famous movie character: His name was Indiana.
• Though he'd cast Harrison Ford in “Graffiti,” Lucas didn't want him for “Star Wars,” but casting director Fred Roos got him into casting sessions by hiring him as a carpenter and then suggesting, “Hey, why don't we get this guy to help them out?”
• Lucas would create casting sessions in groups so he could see which actors had chemistry together. In one, Christopher Walken was Han, Will Seltzer Luke, and Teri Nunn Leia. But Seltzer's Luke was a bit intellectual, while Nunn was still a minor. Plus this group was a bit serious. So he went with the other, more fun trio.  
• Lucas didn't want to use Anthony Daniels voice for C-3PO or Frank Oz's voice for Yoda. For the former he envisioned a Brooklynesque used-car salesman(!), and for the latter, who knows? But he realized what he had was better than what he envisioned and kept it in.
• One of LucasFilm's first hires was a computer scientist named Ed Catmull. Lucas wanted him developing tools to make digital movies but Catmull was intrigued with computer animation—so he and team did it on the sly. What they worked on eventually became a company: Pixar.
• Lucas never saw the value in Pixar and sold it in the mid-1980s for $5-10 million. It was eventually worth billions. And counting.
• I never delved into the “Han shot first” discussion, which I assumed was just a contentious matter within the first “Star Wars” movie. Not quite. In its 20th anniversary update, along with cluttering the screen with gimcrackery, Lucas manipulated what he'd originally filmed in the barroom showdown between Han Solo and Greedo so Greedo shoots first rather than (as in the '77 original) Han shooting first. Lucas wanted his famous characters nice now, while fans felt it ruined Han's arc—from a ruthless solipsist to a semi-true believer. The fans are right. Again.

I still think you can make a good movie about the relationship between Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The larger-than-life Coppola takes the young, quiet man under his wing, and Lucas, with “THX,” all but sinks Coppola's production company, and then with “Star Wars,” revolutionizes the industry away from the very types of films that Coppola was made to make. It's Frankenstein.

The book by Brian Jay Jones is recommended.

“Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, which is to say only 2 percent does anything demonstrably and unequivocally practical.”

-- Bill Bryson, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants,” which does for biology what he did for other sciences in “A History of Nearly Everything.” Most of it, of course, is going over my head or is tough to grasp: “Unpacked, you are positively enormous. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth.” And it gets worse. Or we get bigger. Stuff inside us could go to the moon and back. Here's another line, by the way, that I am one with, that helps explain me to me: “What is perhaps most remarkable is that nothing is in charge. Each component of the cell responds to signals from other components, all of them bumping and jostling like so many bumper cars...” Explains all of humanity, really.

I read this bit the other night in Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” about the period in the late 1960s when Francis Ford Coppola was trying to put together his Zoetrope commune, and George Lucas was his protege with a sci-fi script, “THX-1138,” based upon his student film, that had already been rejected by Warner Bros., the studio Coppola was working with:

But the savvy Coppola knew something Lucas didn't: Warner Bros.–Seven Arts was about to be bought out by Kinney National Services, which until 1969 was known largely for its parking lots and cleaning services. “What we'll do is we'll wait until these new guys come on board,” Coppola told Lucas. “We won't tell them [THX] has already been turned down. We'll just pretend that we've already started it.”

Which is how the career of the man who changed Hollywood began.

Artist Ralph McQuarrie's first drafts of R2-D2 and C-3P0, with the latter looking very Metropolis. Lucas originally wanted the droid to speak like a Brooklyn used-car dealer

Everything below is directly from Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” which is much recommended. The key point, Padawan, is that Lucas wanted to make this Flash Gordon-type movie because he wanted to watch it, but no one else was making it so he had to do it. But no studio wanted to make it with him because no one else was making it. Get it? Lucas' idea was the opposite of the zeitgeist, and business people only try to tap into the zeitgiest, not what lies beyond the zeitgeist or what the zeitgeist may be missing. Cf., Steve Martin's standup comedy career. Cf., Jackie Chan distinguishing himself from Bruce Lee with comedy. Cf., pretty much anything that shifts the culture. See what everybody is doing and do the opposite. Particularly if the opposite is exactly what you want to do in the first place.

1973-74

• Lucas began the writing process by making lists of names and locations for his fantasy, scrawling Emperor Ford Xerxes XII—a suitably heroic-sounding name—at the top of one of his notebook pages, followed by single names like Owen, Mace, Biggs, and Valorum. ... Luke Skywalker was on the list from the very start, but he was “Prince of Bebers,” while Han Solo was “leader of the Hubble people.” 
• On April 17 [1974], Lucas began writing another treatment, this one titled The Star Wars. This draft contained the dogfight in space that Lucas wanted to see, as well as a more fully realized plot that channeled bits of Flash Gordon and Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Lucas poured everything he had ever loved about the Saturday morning serials into his treatment, with plenty of chases, close scrapes, exotic creatures, and general derring-do. From The Hidden Fortress he borrowed a few key plot points—namely, a princess being escorted through enemy territory by a wise and battle-scarred general and, more important, two bumbling, bickering bureaucrats to serve as comic relief.
• The main character in this [May 1974] draft is a young man named Annikin Starkiller, who trains to become a Jedi Bendu under 70-year-old general Luke Skywalker. There are two droids providing comic relief, one short and squat, the other a gleaming “Metropolis style” robot ... There's a “huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills” named Han Solo, a feisty 14-year-old Princess Leia, references to “lazerswords” and Wookiees, as well as to a “tall, grim-looking general”—and relatively minor character—named Darth Vader. And for the first time, one character bids good-bye with “May the Force of Others be with you.” Lucas was still holding on to elements from his first treatment that he liked, including a fight in a cantina, a chase through an asteroid belt, a rescue from a prison, and the concluding awards ceremony.

1975

• In this latest [Jan. 2] draft, Lucas had more carefully fleshed out the concept of the Force—still called the Force of Others in this version—dividing it neatly into a good side called Ashla and a bad side called Bogan. He had also decided that the Force could be intensified through the possession of a mystical Kiber Crystal...
• This time Luke is prompted into action when he receives a hologram message from his brother Deak, who asks Luke to bring the Kiber Crystal to their wounded father, the Starkiller. Luke hires Han Solo, now a “burly-bearded but ruggedly handsome boy”—pretty much [Francis Ford] Coppola as a starpilot—and his copilot Chewbacca (“resembling a huge gray bushbaby monkey”) to take him to Cloud City, where Deak is now being held prisoner. Luke and Han rescue Deak, escape with the Death Star in pursuit, then head for Yavin, where they use the Kiber Crystal to revive the Starkiller. Luke leads an assault on the Death Star—and though he isn't the one to fire the fatal shot that destroys the space station, Luke returns to Yavin a hero, to lead a revolution at the side of his father.
• Lucas realized he had no leading female characters—he had shuffled Leia off to secondary status too quickly—and therefore decided that Luke was now a girl...
• By May, Luke was male again, and Lucas submitted to [Alan] Ladd a new, hastily written six-page synopsis in which he'd added a new character, a mystical old man he had lifted straight out of the pages of Carlos Castaneda's 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. ... “Old man can do magic, read minds, talk to things like Don Juan,” Lucas wrote in his May 1975 treatment. By the time Lucas completed the next draft in August, the old man even had a name: General Ben Kenobi.
• In fact, by the third draft, completed in August 1975, Lucas had tightened and improved the script even further, moving Luke more firmly to the center of the script as the hero, and making Leia—instead of Deak—the character who gets captured and needs rescuing. Lucas still had the Kiber Crystal in the script but was beginning to realize that pursuing the stolen plans for the Death Star made for a much more interesting story.
• As 1976 approached, Lucas was finishing up his fourth draft, now officially titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: Star Wars.

1976

• He had a much better handle on the Force at this point, and had wisely decided to remove the Kiber Crystal from the story altogether, making the Force “more ethereal,” he explained, rather “than to have it solidified in a thing like a crystal.”
• In his latest draft, Kenobi survived his lightsaber duel with Darth Vader by retreating through a blast door that slammed shut behind him. That not only left Vader “with egg on his face,” as Lucas put it, but also made the assault on the Death Star little more than a bit of galactic breaking and entering, with Vader as a flummoxed shopkeeper shaking his fist in rage as the heroes escaped unharmed.
• It was Marcia [Lucas] who had put Ben Kenobi's head on the block, pointing out to George that after escaping the Death Star, the old general didn't have much to do for the rest of the film. Lucas had to agree—“the character stood around with his thumb in his ear”—and Marcia suggested that Kenobi be killed in his lightsaber duel and then offer Luke advice as a spirit guide in the final act. 
• “In the end,” Lucas said later, “I really didn't think we were going to make any money at all on Star Wars.”

I'm reading Timothy Ryback's “Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power” right now, and there are moments that can't help remind me of You Know Who:

• Following his failed bid for the Reich presidency in April 1932, Hitler went to court to have the election results annulled. “Hitler to Contest Validity of Election,” The New York Times announced in a headline. ... Observing that Hindenburg had beaten Hitler by 5,941,582 votes, the court upheld the election results, ruling that the disparity was “so significant that it would make no sense for a national recount of the ballots.” Hitler nevertheless declared victory, noting that his party had gained two million votes at the polls. “That is a feat that has never been equaled, and I have done this despite the unconstitutional ban placed on my broadcasting election appeals,” Hitler said
• What made Hitler so dangerous, Kessler believed, was his bluster, behind which lay “his intuition, lightning-fast ability to assess a situation, and ability to react with astonishing speed and effectiveness.”
• [Kurt von] Schleicher had a strategy he called the Zähmungsprozess, or taming process, designed to marginalize the party “radicals” and bring the movement into the political mainstream. Schleicher praised Hitler as a “modest, orderly man who only wants what is best” and is committed to the rule of law. Schleicher had equally flattering words for Hitler's storm troopers. [Schleicher was murdered by Hitler's S.S. in 1934.]
• Assembling in columns six men across, the storm troopers marched into the narrow, cobbled streets, provoking sniper fire from windows and rooftops that killed two storm troopers instantly. When the police intervened, a full-blown street battle erupted. By day's end, there were five dead, with another seven fatally wounded, and dozens more with serious injuries. The violence produced the sort of headlines Hitler had hoped for—“Reds Shoot at Nazis from Roofs in Altona,” in The New York Times, for example...
• “The National Socialist movement will achieve power in Germany by methods permitted by the present Constitution—in a purely legal way,” [Hitler] told The New York Times. “It will then give the German people the form of organization and government that suits our purposes.”

Trivia question: Which prominent American's photo was kept in Hitler's office in the Brown House in Munich, the early headquarters of the National Socialist movement? Not surprisingly...

Hitler occupied a large second-floor corner salon whose ceiling was decorated with stucco swastikas. On the walls hung a portrait of Frederick the Great; a painting of Hitler's military unit, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, in action during the war; and a framed photograph of Henry Ford. A German translation of Ford's anti-Semitic treatise, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, sat on a table in the foyer.

I'm still in the early going. Recommended.