Archive for August 24th, 2017

Quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore (#4 in a series).

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

I ran across this one at Half-Price a few weeks ago. It was a little more expensive than I would have liked, but not signed Capstick level. I vacillated on it, but ended up pulling the trigger because:

  1. It is the only copy of this book I’ve ever seen.
  2. It was published by a small press, so it probably isn’t that common.
  3. It was still cheap relative to Amazon asking prices.
  4. I’d actually read about the subject, and the book itself, in Bill James’s Popular Crime. This is a case (kind of like guns) where I paid as much for the story behind the book as the book itself.

He Made It Safe to Murder: The Life of Moman Pruiett by Howard K. Berry.

Who was Moman Pruiett? Like Earl Rogers, Pruiett is one of those forgotten titans of the law. As a criminal lawyer, he operated mostly out of Texas and (what became) Oklahoma, and later Florida, around the turn of the last century. Out of 342 murder cases he acted as the defense attorney for, he won outright acquittals in 304. 37 of his clients were convicted of lesser crimes than murder. The only client of his who was actually sentenced to death received a presidential commutation of his sentence.

How did Moman Pruiett do this? Well, he wasn’t just a criminal lawyer: he was a criminal lawyer. The young Pruiett had two felony convictions on his record and spent three years in prison. In spite of that, he read for the law and somehow managed to gain admission to the bar at the age of 22. It was a different time back then.

Even after being admitted, Pruiett didn’t have a lot of respect for the law: he suborned perjury, manipulated juries (in one case retold by Bill James, Pruiett figured out who the jury foreman was going to be and had the defendant’s sister seduce and move in with the man), kidnapped witnesses, played poker with judges (and, per James, “accepted acquittals to settle debts”) and generally just did whatever he needed to – legal or not – to get his clients off.

There’s an online article that partially retails one of the most famous Pruiett stores. Since this is already running long, I’ll put a jump here.

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Random notes: August 24, 2017.

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

Also among the dead: the print edition of the Village Voice.

In other news: WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Keeping your head up, your eyes open, and not driving into high water is probably a good idea. But. I remember the last time a hurricane came ashore near Houston, and was threatening Austin. I was still attending St. Ed’s at the time, and the university was sending out regular updates. There was tremendous hysteria. Everyone was hunkering down waiting for the storm.

In my part of town, the skies turned dark…and we got maybe three drops of rain, total. The hurricane was a giant bust.

I suggest being careful. But I’m not going to put any faith in apocalyptic predictions until the water starts coming over the top of the dam.

Whatever happened to Alice Goodman? She wrote the librettos to John Adams’s “Nixon in China” and “Death of Klinghoffer”…and then she just sort of vanished.

Turns out, she’s an ordained Anglican priest living in England.

“I never drifted away from music,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I couldn’t get work commissioned, so I did what members of my family do when that kind of thing happened: I started another degree. By 1997, I was being offered commissions and collaborations again, but none of them were particularly interesting to me, and my ideas didn’t interest my colleagues.”

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Obit watch take 2.

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

To quote John “Daring Fireball” Gruber: “Finally.”

NYT obit for Brian Aldiss.

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Obit watch: August 24, 2017.

Thursday, August 24th, 2017

Still no NYT obit for Brian Aldiss.

But the paper did run one for outsider artist M. T. Liggett.

He built a sculpture of Hillary Clinton, with a swastika for a torso, that he called “Our Jack-Booted Eva Braun.”

But before you jump to the conclusion that he was a Republican (he actually ran for local office several times as one, but was never elected):

One of Mr. Liggett’s signs links former President George W. Bush to Big Oil and asks for the return of his predecessor, Bill Clinton: “Bring Back Slick Willie.” But he also depicted Mr. Clinton as a bright red hog; he called that work “Razorback Draft Dodger.”

Apparently, he pretty much hated every politician:

Mr. Liggett could sound as angry as Howard Beale, the unhinged anchorman of the movie “Network.” He hated political stupidity, was suspicious of government intrusion into people’s lives and held “turkey politicians,” as he called them, responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

…

“I got this thing about me,” he said in “Moon Tosser of the Prairie” (2010), a documentary about him that was produced by Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan. “If you walk up to me and say you’re a Democrat, I’m a Republican. If you’re a Buddhist, I’m a Shinto. If you’re a Catholic, I’m a Protestant.”

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