This past week a conversation with the wife turned on how a reviewer could read a book a week and still find time to write.
Dorothy Parker has one answer: "I don't want to review books anymore. It cuts down on my reading."
Post middle-age, if only for the sake of eyesight, choices must be made, and you need the local quack to innoculate against Magnum Opusitis. It means the end of history -- before my last booster, I arrived home lugging the thousand-page Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. It took months to shake off like a bad flu. Parker notes the warning label, "to be read with a furrow in the brow."
Exposures to the disease come at least twice a year at the Central Rappahannock Friends of the Library booksale, espcially during the Friday night members-only feeding frenzy which only has one North American rival in the annual Filene's bargain basement wedding dress shoot-out.
Whether growling at the usually mild mannered second-hand book dealer from the friendly shop on the next block as he beserkedly hurls volumes by the yard into a cavernous Absolut box; leaping over what Aerosmith might generously describe as a fat-bottomed girl crawling under the table to ingest any stray morsel of literature that might have fallen down the back, or glancing furtively at what the 'professor,' grabs just before you can clamp your paws on it, a blitzkrieg of crazed Ralph Waldo Emerson devotees advances over small children and grandmothers alike until the pounding symphony cresendos as five hundred pound sacks come crashing down on the cashier's desk pausing only for one final brief quixotic culling of what you can't imagine ever possessed you to pick it up in the first place. Dante's Inferno - in the original Italian - what?
Reading tastes evolve gradually after eons of struggle. What might have emerged in early childhood as a predeliction for the gentle wisdom of small-town newspaper editors like Robert Qullen, who wrote, "As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer," may mutate, after decades of nerve wracking sixty mile commutes, to a fondness for an acerbic Cyril Connolly who was once accused "of arriving in time to spit upon the grave before the mourners had departed," after he'd written a mildly scatching review of recently deceased poet, A.E. Housman.
Perhaps book reviewers pressed for time might eliminate unnecessary inconveniences, say, editors, as much as possible. Trent Reznor recently proposed to his record company that they release the band's new album, as is, on-line, minus copyright protection, for $5. After he was turned down he left the company and started his own.
I can top that. I write for no recompense whatsoever and move straight to publication. Of course, there aren't any consumers either to worry about. A New Yorker movie critic wrote a few weeks ago that "user-generated content marks either a long-over due democratization of the arts, or, if you prefer, a mass proliferation of the mediocre."
I'm not sure I care. As a character in a Louis Auchinloss novel gripes, "You artists...can't look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art." What prospective talent this admittedly raw artist may possess is optimistically more akin to what Clive James describes as the capability of a jazz musician to notice and combine "other people's individual creativity into a larger vision." I'd contentedly replace 'larger,' simply with 'my,' and be done with it.
David Denby, another New Yorker movie critic puts it this way, "Like mystics or ancient philosophers, we long to perceive the secret and idiosyncratic pattern within chaos, the singular currents running through the tumultuous sea. We are denied this in life, since we can never recall everything in an event happening around us, no matter how many times we replay it in our heads."
The longer I keep at this, the more the patterns form out of currents, and what once was unconnected takes on a certain logical patina. A.J. Leibling points out a fella who joined successive splinter groups until he ran out of wood. Parker, as usual, has the last best word, "Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both."
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
The Barber's Lament
I note this week a conversation in the barber's chair occasioned by the appearance of the book I held in my lap. He said he'd held one once. A paperback copy of VC Andrews, Flowers in the Attic. The sight of him holding even such a potboiler (used; $1) prompted his astonished niece to enquire solemnly, "you read books?"
I changed majors in college like socks. One month it was English. I commented in class once on a line of poetry written by a fellow student where it looked like he'd exchanged 'see' and 'hear' for deliberate effect. In order to fully grasp the picture, please envision the poet cooly sitting, Depp-ly, sporting a beret, gorgeous blonde inches to the northeast of his left shoulder, fawning professor by his side: there was no doubt we were in the presence of the star of Contemporary Modes of Modern Literature. His response, "someone actually thinks..." elicited grins if not outright smirks from Sophmore groupies. Is that why books intimidate? Is it why good common folks suspect readers, let alone writers, form an inaccessible hipster doofus clique? (If you're wondering, I switched majors to Sociology the next day, and stayed, until statistics...)
Some readers of this blog complain they don't get the references. I've been thinking about what I do here and why. The great English critic Cyril Connolly offered, "there are so few people who care about poetry in England, and fewer still who are critical of it, that one is tempted at first to make no comment." This was 1936. Cyril is the same fella who said, "There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation." He's got me there, and I suspect, everyone else in the world, except for, at most, ten people (excluding Greeks, themselves, of course).
It's dawning what I do is collect and share. Keith Richards (the coolest hipster of all?) says his epitath need only read, "I passed it on," referring to the blues and rock n'roll the Stones expropriated off Chuck Berry.
What started as a counter-response to the Puritan elements who destroyed our once unified parish, this blog's morphing into something not under my control. It therefore comes as a surprise I must reject, "When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important," as spoken by French artist Gustave Courbet, in the nineteenth century. To protest, only, for too long, bores writers and readers.
Like Dorothy Parker I similarly dismiss a responsibility in the way she alludes to Upton Sinclair's insistence to crusade by describing the urge as "a specialized soreness. He is off American authors because they do not always write of sweat-shops and child-labor, of mill-slaves and wages. Surely there is no denying that a great novel of social conditions would be a boon to American letters. But it does seem to be not especially useful to roar and stamp because certain authors choose to speak of jade and satin and the shining surface of old furniture."
Even Connolly, who creates the references others don't get, helps when he pens critics may charge writers of "triteness and banality, linked to being under the influence of popular trends -- imperialism, place nostalgia, games, beer. Now, I will not deny that many poems written under these influences have been bad, but they do not always make for bad poetry."
Such is a poem like John Henry Newbolt's 1897 Vitai Lampada:
There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat.
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame.
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honor a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
Talk about your trite. Talk about your imperialism. Talk about the banality of comparing the game of cricket to war. Yet, it moves me. I can't think of anything else, except Captain Smith's repeated exhortation on the sinking Titanic to "Be British," which captures more succintly what it means to be English in foolish and noble ways.
During the Civil War, Confederates spotted Union counterfeits easily since the bills looked better than the real thing. At the end of a path in an Irish woods I've passed through in Killarney, there's an ordinary tea room. Whenever I see the sentimental harmless kitsch of a Thomas Kincaid painting depicting a glowing cottage on the edge of a forest at twilight, I'm reminded of the tea room, and smile.
There are universals to which we involunatarily respond no matter the source. Philip Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, wrote about dying, in 1770, "I feel the beginning of autumn which is already very cold. The leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them; which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely tired of this silly world."
A poem Alexander Pope wrote about the same time, at first glance, contains references totally out of our reach:
Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you travers'd! And what fields you fought!
Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wonder'd while they dropped the sword!
I have no clue what a Maeonian wing might be. The remainder was equally meaningless until Connolly placed the poem in context by alluding to Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich, waving a piece of paper, declaring, "Peace in Our Time."
On the way to a family reunion last summer in Decatur, Illinois, we traversed highways along the Land of Lincoln trail. In Springfield, we toured the modest house in which he lived, and gazed in awe upon the small triangular desk where he wrote famous words. We then visited the massive Lincoln library to watch a hologram of a ghostly Lincoln gliding through the same house accompanied by stirring narrative and song. Which of the two experiences leaves the most indelible mark? That they both leave something can't be denied.
When I read an article incorporating references I don't know, I explore where they lead. In this, I seem to be alone. What I convey, inspired by subsequent findings, provides pleasure to the author, if not the reader, and so, that may be an end in itself.
Joyce writes in Finnegan's Wake that "Michael Roberts remembers forgotten beauty. He presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world." To rediscover and post lost treasures doesn't turn the world on its head on as Sinclair Lewis would have liked, but, perhaps in an era when even a reader of VC Andrews is a suspect egghead, and someone who reminisces wistfully after gazing upon a Kincaid is by rights a connoisseur, it remains quietly useful to to pass it on.
I changed majors in college like socks. One month it was English. I commented in class once on a line of poetry written by a fellow student where it looked like he'd exchanged 'see' and 'hear' for deliberate effect. In order to fully grasp the picture, please envision the poet cooly sitting, Depp-ly, sporting a beret, gorgeous blonde inches to the northeast of his left shoulder, fawning professor by his side: there was no doubt we were in the presence of the star of Contemporary Modes of Modern Literature. His response, "someone actually thinks..." elicited grins if not outright smirks from Sophmore groupies. Is that why books intimidate? Is it why good common folks suspect readers, let alone writers, form an inaccessible hipster doofus clique? (If you're wondering, I switched majors to Sociology the next day, and stayed, until statistics...)
Some readers of this blog complain they don't get the references. I've been thinking about what I do here and why. The great English critic Cyril Connolly offered, "there are so few people who care about poetry in England, and fewer still who are critical of it, that one is tempted at first to make no comment." This was 1936. Cyril is the same fella who said, "There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation." He's got me there, and I suspect, everyone else in the world, except for, at most, ten people (excluding Greeks, themselves, of course).
It's dawning what I do is collect and share. Keith Richards (the coolest hipster of all?) says his epitath need only read, "I passed it on," referring to the blues and rock n'roll the Stones expropriated off Chuck Berry.
What started as a counter-response to the Puritan elements who destroyed our once unified parish, this blog's morphing into something not under my control. It therefore comes as a surprise I must reject, "When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important," as spoken by French artist Gustave Courbet, in the nineteenth century. To protest, only, for too long, bores writers and readers.
Like Dorothy Parker I similarly dismiss a responsibility in the way she alludes to Upton Sinclair's insistence to crusade by describing the urge as "a specialized soreness. He is off American authors because they do not always write of sweat-shops and child-labor, of mill-slaves and wages. Surely there is no denying that a great novel of social conditions would be a boon to American letters. But it does seem to be not especially useful to roar and stamp because certain authors choose to speak of jade and satin and the shining surface of old furniture."
Even Connolly, who creates the references others don't get, helps when he pens critics may charge writers of "triteness and banality, linked to being under the influence of popular trends -- imperialism, place nostalgia, games, beer. Now, I will not deny that many poems written under these influences have been bad, but they do not always make for bad poetry."
Such is a poem like John Henry Newbolt's 1897 Vitai Lampada:
There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat.
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame.
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honor a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"
Talk about your trite. Talk about your imperialism. Talk about the banality of comparing the game of cricket to war. Yet, it moves me. I can't think of anything else, except Captain Smith's repeated exhortation on the sinking Titanic to "Be British," which captures more succintly what it means to be English in foolish and noble ways.
During the Civil War, Confederates spotted Union counterfeits easily since the bills looked better than the real thing. At the end of a path in an Irish woods I've passed through in Killarney, there's an ordinary tea room. Whenever I see the sentimental harmless kitsch of a Thomas Kincaid painting depicting a glowing cottage on the edge of a forest at twilight, I'm reminded of the tea room, and smile.
There are universals to which we involunatarily respond no matter the source. Philip Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, wrote about dying, in 1770, "I feel the beginning of autumn which is already very cold. The leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them; which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely tired of this silly world."
A poem Alexander Pope wrote about the same time, at first glance, contains references totally out of our reach:
Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you travers'd! And what fields you fought!
Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wonder'd while they dropped the sword!
I have no clue what a Maeonian wing might be. The remainder was equally meaningless until Connolly placed the poem in context by alluding to Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich, waving a piece of paper, declaring, "Peace in Our Time."
On the way to a family reunion last summer in Decatur, Illinois, we traversed highways along the Land of Lincoln trail. In Springfield, we toured the modest house in which he lived, and gazed in awe upon the small triangular desk where he wrote famous words. We then visited the massive Lincoln library to watch a hologram of a ghostly Lincoln gliding through the same house accompanied by stirring narrative and song. Which of the two experiences leaves the most indelible mark? That they both leave something can't be denied.
When I read an article incorporating references I don't know, I explore where they lead. In this, I seem to be alone. What I convey, inspired by subsequent findings, provides pleasure to the author, if not the reader, and so, that may be an end in itself.
Joyce writes in Finnegan's Wake that "Michael Roberts remembers forgotten beauty. He presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world." To rediscover and post lost treasures doesn't turn the world on its head on as Sinclair Lewis would have liked, but, perhaps in an era when even a reader of VC Andrews is a suspect egghead, and someone who reminisces wistfully after gazing upon a Kincaid is by rights a connoisseur, it remains quietly useful to to pass it on.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Buried in a Petrified Forest
I note this week we've been studying the Book of Acts in Sunday School where there's much ado about a Faith that's barkered by a mighty wind announcing Holy Spirit appearences that never fail to astound Jewish and Gentile audiences alike.
I've been wondering if acting on faith is practical.
In multiple volumes, Thomas Friedman repeatedly advocates faith isn't conducive to chasing great profits, though the technocracy he champions doesn't inevitably gain the upper hand either. The NY Times reports on a fantastic short era lost to history when an eccentric Brit planned to run a country from a Star Trek-like captain's chair, incorporating terminals in the armrests, soliciting real-time data flowing non-stop from the nation's factories.
The Cybersen program of A. Stafford Beer, whom Chilean Presidente Allende hired in 1972, was designed to fashion a socialist alternative to moribund economies managed by rigid Communist apparatchiks in Cuba and the USSR. The project concluded the afternoon Allende was shot dead by fascist underlings of Pinochet, yet it's not a stretch to venture Cybersen was doomed the day Beer attempted to inspire his team of twenty-somethings by reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
What's the best way to plan an economy? The AP reports "a new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles - sex." Apparently, after young men view porn, in lieu of scarier pictures, say, of spiders, it stimulates a part of the brain that's also excited at the prospect of financial risk and gain. If money in itself isn't the kick, instinctive desires must otherwise lie in a perception of what advantages money may gain.
It's difficult to imagine a Nixon possessing a determinent drive for sex, if not money, rather than the attainment of power as a sole end in itself. The same was said of the seemingly a-sexual J. Edgar, in his lifetime, but, evidentally, we were mistaken.
If economic growth is not always spurred on by evolutionary struggle, what might our world be like if driven by passion's opposite number instead? The local rag reports, "Fed up with violence and economic hardship, voters in deeply conservative Northwest Pakistan threw out Islamist parties and gave their support to secular parties that promised to pave the streets, create jobs and bring peace through dialogue and economic incentives to the extremists."
In India, as well, the Post writes of a "silent revolution where citizens' groups have been empowered to walk into any office and demand answers, no small feat in a country infamous for its bureaucracy and red tape."
Activists in New Delhi gained recent success as measured by streetlights repaired, increased collections of accumulated trash, and elimination of the so-called 'monkey menace,' fashioning an Indian derivative of Giulianni governance, i.e., a de-militarized Times Square model, swept of all Tom Waits not for profit 3 in the a.m. diner denizens, small change grifters, homeless drifters, squeegee sifters, neutralizing likewise perceived threats of alien-simian home invasion, for if we don't fight them over there, we must fight them....
Is freedom the worthy enemy of efficiency? When Tito gained dictatorial power in Yugoslavia after World War II, the region enjoyed forty years of peace and reasonable prosperity for an erstwhile Communist state. After the break-up of greater Serbia in the 1990's, and after Kosovo declared its independence this past February, gay activist Korab Zuka, whose life, no bed of roses before the uprising, was forced to flee the nation, entirely.
Yet no American instinctively desires to live under such a Tito-style dictatorship despite a generally stable quality of life. When Whittake Chambers asked William Buckley why he was starting National Review, since the West was already doomed, and "any effort to save it is correspondingly doomed to failure." Buckley replied, even if that were so, "the Republic deserved a journal that would argue the historical and moral case that we ought to have survived so that even if the worst were to happen," I hope the magazine "might serve, as the Diaries of Anne Frank had served, so to speak, as absolute, dispositive proof that she should have survived in place of her tormentors - who ultimately perished."
On the eve of war, in 1938, when the question of whether Western civilization might not survive wasn't merely theoretical, Leslie Howard, playing a precursor to Ashley Wilkes, the ultimate champion of all lost causes, tells Bogart, the gangster on the lam holding him hostage, "I'm planning to be buried in the petrified forest. You know, I've been evolving a theory about that, that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot out from under us, the world of outmoded ideas...they're all so many dead stumps in the desert. That's where I belong. So do you. You're the last great example of rugged individualism."
Ten years earlier, in an essay on Andre Gide, English critic Cyril Connolly describes the writer in Wilkes-ian terms as "the apostle of the Hybrids - perpetually haunted by a conviction of exile; his spirit is expended in home-sickness, his intellect in trying to discover what is his home. This leads to a passionate curiosity that sends him experimenting everywhere to find out where he belongs, left on earth to wander, and forlorn."
There we are; left at passion's doorstep, once again, regardless of how we might have striven for a more orderly life. It always comes down to our battles with passion, forlorn, nevertheless, since we tend, so often, like Leslie Howard, to prefer being buried in petrified forests of what once was and might have been.
Jonathan Swift wrote, "men are never more mistaken when they reflect upon Past things, and from what they retain in their memory, compare them to the present...So I formerly used to envy my own Happiness when I was a Schoolboy, the delicious Holidays, the Saturday afternoon, and the charming custards in a blind alley; I never considered the confinement ten hours a day, to nouns and verbs, the Terror of the Rod, the bloody noses, and broken shins."
The Book of Acts conveys the discomforting fantastic unprecedented presence of a risen God which can not be logically comprehended through corroborative historical evidence. The appropriate response, therefore, may only be found in the far wistful regions of the heart.
I've been wondering if acting on faith is practical.
In multiple volumes, Thomas Friedman repeatedly advocates faith isn't conducive to chasing great profits, though the technocracy he champions doesn't inevitably gain the upper hand either. The NY Times reports on a fantastic short era lost to history when an eccentric Brit planned to run a country from a Star Trek-like captain's chair, incorporating terminals in the armrests, soliciting real-time data flowing non-stop from the nation's factories.
The Cybersen program of A. Stafford Beer, whom Chilean Presidente Allende hired in 1972, was designed to fashion a socialist alternative to moribund economies managed by rigid Communist apparatchiks in Cuba and the USSR. The project concluded the afternoon Allende was shot dead by fascist underlings of Pinochet, yet it's not a stretch to venture Cybersen was doomed the day Beer attempted to inspire his team of twenty-somethings by reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
What's the best way to plan an economy? The AP reports "a new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles - sex." Apparently, after young men view porn, in lieu of scarier pictures, say, of spiders, it stimulates a part of the brain that's also excited at the prospect of financial risk and gain. If money in itself isn't the kick, instinctive desires must otherwise lie in a perception of what advantages money may gain.
It's difficult to imagine a Nixon possessing a determinent drive for sex, if not money, rather than the attainment of power as a sole end in itself. The same was said of the seemingly a-sexual J. Edgar, in his lifetime, but, evidentally, we were mistaken.
If economic growth is not always spurred on by evolutionary struggle, what might our world be like if driven by passion's opposite number instead? The local rag reports, "Fed up with violence and economic hardship, voters in deeply conservative Northwest Pakistan threw out Islamist parties and gave their support to secular parties that promised to pave the streets, create jobs and bring peace through dialogue and economic incentives to the extremists."
In India, as well, the Post writes of a "silent revolution where citizens' groups have been empowered to walk into any office and demand answers, no small feat in a country infamous for its bureaucracy and red tape."
Activists in New Delhi gained recent success as measured by streetlights repaired, increased collections of accumulated trash, and elimination of the so-called 'monkey menace,' fashioning an Indian derivative of Giulianni governance, i.e., a de-militarized Times Square model, swept of all Tom Waits not for profit 3 in the a.m. diner denizens, small change grifters, homeless drifters, squeegee sifters, neutralizing likewise perceived threats of alien-simian home invasion, for if we don't fight them over there, we must fight them....
Is freedom the worthy enemy of efficiency? When Tito gained dictatorial power in Yugoslavia after World War II, the region enjoyed forty years of peace and reasonable prosperity for an erstwhile Communist state. After the break-up of greater Serbia in the 1990's, and after Kosovo declared its independence this past February, gay activist Korab Zuka, whose life, no bed of roses before the uprising, was forced to flee the nation, entirely.
Yet no American instinctively desires to live under such a Tito-style dictatorship despite a generally stable quality of life. When Whittake Chambers asked William Buckley why he was starting National Review, since the West was already doomed, and "any effort to save it is correspondingly doomed to failure." Buckley replied, even if that were so, "the Republic deserved a journal that would argue the historical and moral case that we ought to have survived so that even if the worst were to happen," I hope the magazine "might serve, as the Diaries of Anne Frank had served, so to speak, as absolute, dispositive proof that she should have survived in place of her tormentors - who ultimately perished."
On the eve of war, in 1938, when the question of whether Western civilization might not survive wasn't merely theoretical, Leslie Howard, playing a precursor to Ashley Wilkes, the ultimate champion of all lost causes, tells Bogart, the gangster on the lam holding him hostage, "I'm planning to be buried in the petrified forest. You know, I've been evolving a theory about that, that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot out from under us, the world of outmoded ideas...they're all so many dead stumps in the desert. That's where I belong. So do you. You're the last great example of rugged individualism."
Ten years earlier, in an essay on Andre Gide, English critic Cyril Connolly describes the writer in Wilkes-ian terms as "the apostle of the Hybrids - perpetually haunted by a conviction of exile; his spirit is expended in home-sickness, his intellect in trying to discover what is his home. This leads to a passionate curiosity that sends him experimenting everywhere to find out where he belongs, left on earth to wander, and forlorn."
There we are; left at passion's doorstep, once again, regardless of how we might have striven for a more orderly life. It always comes down to our battles with passion, forlorn, nevertheless, since we tend, so often, like Leslie Howard, to prefer being buried in petrified forests of what once was and might have been.
Jonathan Swift wrote, "men are never more mistaken when they reflect upon Past things, and from what they retain in their memory, compare them to the present...So I formerly used to envy my own Happiness when I was a Schoolboy, the delicious Holidays, the Saturday afternoon, and the charming custards in a blind alley; I never considered the confinement ten hours a day, to nouns and verbs, the Terror of the Rod, the bloody noses, and broken shins."
The Book of Acts conveys the discomforting fantastic unprecedented presence of a risen God which can not be logically comprehended through corroborative historical evidence. The appropriate response, therefore, may only be found in the far wistful regions of the heart.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Dusty Trails
Every morning on the train, a canned voice bids us ask the conductor if we have any questions. Every morning, I reply, "What ever happened to Amelia Earhart?"
I note this week, one mystery solved. A colorfully enbroidered jacket purchased on E-bay was found to have originally belonged to a Marine stationed in Shanghai, 1937-1940. He likely knew a former Hospice patient I attended, sixty years later in Mansassas, Virginia, who, also stationed in China at the time, was called upon to search for Earhart after she vanished.
A letter was delivered to my desk recently containing an inquiry wanting to know if the World War I-era bond belonging to his great grandfather, which he'd just discovered in a bureau, might yet be redeemed. The building where I work was constructed in 1919 to sell those very bonds, of which, this one, had completed a ninety-year journey to its point of origin.
This sort of thing keeps happening - could it be if you merely live long enough such everyday serendipties are inevitable per certain cosmic odds?
Upon invitation to lecture at St. Francis of Assisi on social justice, I began with the concept's modern origin during Reformation England when responsibility to minister to the poor was transferred from the local parish to the national government. After Virginia's settlement in the late 1600's, ten such State poor houses were built. After innumerable consolidations, the function was assumed by private interests, yet, in that very same town of Manassas, the present old age home for indigents still stands on the original spot of the 1690 poor house.
In searching for what endures, some trails are fruitful, others, dead ends. Reading H.L. Mencken brings to mind the fellows I worked with thirty years ago who began their careers in turn, twenty years prior, on Chicago's Printers Alley. These rough, tough, so-called 'white-shirt' mechanics, never travelled without a pipe gripped tightly between their lips and bottle of Schnapps in their briefcase. Whether engaged in manufacturing a book or an envelope, their lives were devoted to achieving the untroubled elegance of humming machinery, no matter the cost. Like, Mencken, there is no longer a place for those who view the world as filled with inefficient, therefore inferior, impediments to their erstwhile self-proclaimed brilliance. Mencken in all his prejudices is virtually unreadable today; the oldtimers, from whom I learned a trade, are, likewise, despite their unparalled mechanical skills, unemployable.
Currently on my shelf, plucked from the obscurity of the library, initially, upon a general antique appearance, reside bound magazine collections by Lardner, Runyon, Connelly, Kaufman, Parker and Fitzgerald and Woolcott; mostly forgotten names, unless, like Fitzgerald, for great novels, or Runyon, for entertainments like Guys and Dolls. You read them now just to savor the grand American style of their era, but also, as when reading anything by men such as A.N. Wilson, Christopher Hitchens, or the recently departed William F. Buckley, to sniff and peck along trails they've blazed, discovering for yourself the fruitful connections which at any time may come out of nowhere.
Woolcott casually mentions the first ever sports agent, George Floyd, who negotiated a contract in 1886, on behalf of Mike 'King' Kelley, who invented the hook slide, and hit and run, and who played for the Boston Beaneaters, who held Spring Training in Richmond, Virginia, where, in 1954, the year I was born, Luke Appling was the Colt's manager, and who I saw play in an Old Timers game in 1965 at Yankee Stadium. You may think these connections contrived or tenuous, but please allow for this: upon opening the mail, yesterday, there was a letter announcing that which otherwise would have gone unnoticed: as the latest candidate for enshrinement in The Southern California Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals: Mike 'King' Kelley.
There is far less hope for the resurrection of other forgotten Woolcottian heroes, like Elizabeth Bergner, whom in 1934 he calls 'the ablest actress in the world today,' or Charlotte Saunders Cushman, who in 1835 "went on to become one of the greatest actresses of her day," or Olga Nethersole, Eva La Gallienne and Sol Smith Russell, whose existence I can only validate, on the internet, which, if it doesn't generate a hit, as it does for even the most obscure, means for certain the poor souls will soon forever be lost when the last few obscure books, their final home, are culled.
Edmund Burke wrote, society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are not yet to be born." The writers who languish, forgotten on dusty library shelves, convey through time, not only things gone, but that which still serves to instill meaning and purpose. Of the characters that populated his universe, Woolcott wrote, "they constitute an implicit reminder that there was once a way of life called America, that it still exists and that it is worth cherishing. It will abide when much that we now think important is dust scattered down the wind."
There is thus eternal truth, though, lest we forget, all remains subject to the folly that humanizes the grandest notions. Woolcott intended to be laid to rest in Clinton, New York, close to his alma mater, Hamilton College. His ashes were mailed to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York instead. Upon discovery, the remains were forwarded to Clinton, where they arrived, 67 cents postage due.
I note this week, one mystery solved. A colorfully enbroidered jacket purchased on E-bay was found to have originally belonged to a Marine stationed in Shanghai, 1937-1940. He likely knew a former Hospice patient I attended, sixty years later in Mansassas, Virginia, who, also stationed in China at the time, was called upon to search for Earhart after she vanished.
A letter was delivered to my desk recently containing an inquiry wanting to know if the World War I-era bond belonging to his great grandfather, which he'd just discovered in a bureau, might yet be redeemed. The building where I work was constructed in 1919 to sell those very bonds, of which, this one, had completed a ninety-year journey to its point of origin.
This sort of thing keeps happening - could it be if you merely live long enough such everyday serendipties are inevitable per certain cosmic odds?
Upon invitation to lecture at St. Francis of Assisi on social justice, I began with the concept's modern origin during Reformation England when responsibility to minister to the poor was transferred from the local parish to the national government. After Virginia's settlement in the late 1600's, ten such State poor houses were built. After innumerable consolidations, the function was assumed by private interests, yet, in that very same town of Manassas, the present old age home for indigents still stands on the original spot of the 1690 poor house.
In searching for what endures, some trails are fruitful, others, dead ends. Reading H.L. Mencken brings to mind the fellows I worked with thirty years ago who began their careers in turn, twenty years prior, on Chicago's Printers Alley. These rough, tough, so-called 'white-shirt' mechanics, never travelled without a pipe gripped tightly between their lips and bottle of Schnapps in their briefcase. Whether engaged in manufacturing a book or an envelope, their lives were devoted to achieving the untroubled elegance of humming machinery, no matter the cost. Like, Mencken, there is no longer a place for those who view the world as filled with inefficient, therefore inferior, impediments to their erstwhile self-proclaimed brilliance. Mencken in all his prejudices is virtually unreadable today; the oldtimers, from whom I learned a trade, are, likewise, despite their unparalled mechanical skills, unemployable.
Currently on my shelf, plucked from the obscurity of the library, initially, upon a general antique appearance, reside bound magazine collections by Lardner, Runyon, Connelly, Kaufman, Parker and Fitzgerald and Woolcott; mostly forgotten names, unless, like Fitzgerald, for great novels, or Runyon, for entertainments like Guys and Dolls. You read them now just to savor the grand American style of their era, but also, as when reading anything by men such as A.N. Wilson, Christopher Hitchens, or the recently departed William F. Buckley, to sniff and peck along trails they've blazed, discovering for yourself the fruitful connections which at any time may come out of nowhere.
Woolcott casually mentions the first ever sports agent, George Floyd, who negotiated a contract in 1886, on behalf of Mike 'King' Kelley, who invented the hook slide, and hit and run, and who played for the Boston Beaneaters, who held Spring Training in Richmond, Virginia, where, in 1954, the year I was born, Luke Appling was the Colt's manager, and who I saw play in an Old Timers game in 1965 at Yankee Stadium. You may think these connections contrived or tenuous, but please allow for this: upon opening the mail, yesterday, there was a letter announcing that which otherwise would have gone unnoticed: as the latest candidate for enshrinement in The Southern California Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals: Mike 'King' Kelley.
There is far less hope for the resurrection of other forgotten Woolcottian heroes, like Elizabeth Bergner, whom in 1934 he calls 'the ablest actress in the world today,' or Charlotte Saunders Cushman, who in 1835 "went on to become one of the greatest actresses of her day," or Olga Nethersole, Eva La Gallienne and Sol Smith Russell, whose existence I can only validate, on the internet, which, if it doesn't generate a hit, as it does for even the most obscure, means for certain the poor souls will soon forever be lost when the last few obscure books, their final home, are culled.
Edmund Burke wrote, society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are not yet to be born." The writers who languish, forgotten on dusty library shelves, convey through time, not only things gone, but that which still serves to instill meaning and purpose. Of the characters that populated his universe, Woolcott wrote, "they constitute an implicit reminder that there was once a way of life called America, that it still exists and that it is worth cherishing. It will abide when much that we now think important is dust scattered down the wind."
There is thus eternal truth, though, lest we forget, all remains subject to the folly that humanizes the grandest notions. Woolcott intended to be laid to rest in Clinton, New York, close to his alma mater, Hamilton College. His ashes were mailed to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York instead. Upon discovery, the remains were forwarded to Clinton, where they arrived, 67 cents postage due.
Friday, March 28, 2008
The Right to Dry
I note this week the reaction I have every time I stay at a casino hotel in Kansas City: it looks like it was built by someone who has an idea of what Las Vegas must be like, but never's been there.
A feeling something's out of place is one I've never had about the suburbs. According to Paul Akers, the Opinion Page Editor of our local rag, that may be about to change. He reports the existence of suburban foundations, based on 'excessive square footage, short home life cycles and cheap transportation,' in times of economic scarcity, may lead to 'a new appreciation of city-centric life which is more compact and manageable.'
I don't know about that but I do know one thing that drives folks out of suburbs: overbearing Home Owners Associations. According to the Boston Globe, HOA's across New England now ban clothelines "to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values." Once in the land where the cry rang out, 'No taxation without representation,' there rings out, today, far and wide, a new cry: The Right to Dry.
I sat down yesterday and counted 155 business days left in the office. I've long dreamed, upon retirement, of hanging clothes on a wash line. In impatient anticipation, I bought a candle a few weeks ago called 'clean white cotton sheets swaying in the breeze.' In these annoying times, will that now unprofitable scent survive as the only closest experience to the real thing?
If I can't hang wet clothes out to dry, what shall I do? The Norfolk Virginian Pilot reports on a fella who "after retiring from a 20-year career with the FBI is going full circle, back to his first job as a street cop." I started as a typist. I don't reckon there's much future in returning to that profession.
In search of vocation, I return, inevitably, to obituaries, seeking out evidence of other lives well lived. A woman is described in a Kansas City Star obit as a mom, seamstress, executive secretary, a liquor store owner, a china painter, a dollmaker, and a cook whose homemade noodles were perfect.
What real skills has a career paper pusher like myself?
The Dallas Morning News reports on a fella who "armed with high-tech cameras and computers, travels around the world to photograph New Testament manuscripts that are many centuries old - his goal is to photograph 1.3 million pages of Greek manuscripts - a project he expects will take until 2020."
I've just completed a study on where professional baseball teams of Richmond took Spring training. I'd venture to say there are less people interested in that than in reading millions of pages of manuscript of Greek New Testament manuscript, but what if no ones interested in either?
Clive Davis writes of a German scholar, Ernst Robert Curtius, who initially warned his countrymen about the rise of the Nazi's, but later wrote, "when the catastrophe came, I decided to serve the idea of a medievalistic humanism by studying the Latin literature of the Middle Ages."
Here now arises the same qualm I felt when I searched for what the great German theologian, Karl Barth, might have written in the 1950's about the Holocaust. There is nothing. Its absence invalidates his brilliance.
I'm likewise content to study what nobody's interested in most of the time. Friend Mark and I have discussed many times, though, how I can't resist temporarily interupting those fond pursuits to write letters to editors, where, for example, the original author's spin is so outrageous, it insists upon rebuttal. The latest involves a bishop who claims an ethos of radical inclusion for a movement founded upon homophobia. If I don't, no one will, therefore, I must.
Upon publication, the response certainly will generate, as usual, scorching on-line posts from the usual suspects. Is there not a choice to be made of pursuing the seeming futility of 'wrestling with pigs in mud,' according to Mark, or acting, regardless, especially, since at least one well known Episcopal on-line scribe says the responses are noted by at least a few other interested parties, or even if they weren't noticed by anyone at all?
Colleagues of an Oxford professor who died recently agreed to sell the beloved books in his renowned personal library for charity. All was well until those same dealers who mar our local otherwise cozy Friends of the Library used book sale, marched in, greedily tossing any books they grasped into cavernously large boxes; the same malevolent forces at work which transform the environmentally beneficial bucolic wholesomeness of clothes drying on a backyard wash line into an assault on property values.
The achievement of perfect homemade noodles (an ideal the chefs of my family relentlessly pursue) for Christmas dinners, now otherwise individually long forgotten, is indeed apparently a great accomplishment in itself. What counts much more is that Edna Harper of Kansas City will be remembered forever as 'an all-around beautiful lady whom everyone just loved.'
As Jackson Browe sings, "nothing survives but the way we live our lives."
A feeling something's out of place is one I've never had about the suburbs. According to Paul Akers, the Opinion Page Editor of our local rag, that may be about to change. He reports the existence of suburban foundations, based on 'excessive square footage, short home life cycles and cheap transportation,' in times of economic scarcity, may lead to 'a new appreciation of city-centric life which is more compact and manageable.'
I don't know about that but I do know one thing that drives folks out of suburbs: overbearing Home Owners Associations. According to the Boston Globe, HOA's across New England now ban clothelines "to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values." Once in the land where the cry rang out, 'No taxation without representation,' there rings out, today, far and wide, a new cry: The Right to Dry.
I sat down yesterday and counted 155 business days left in the office. I've long dreamed, upon retirement, of hanging clothes on a wash line. In impatient anticipation, I bought a candle a few weeks ago called 'clean white cotton sheets swaying in the breeze.' In these annoying times, will that now unprofitable scent survive as the only closest experience to the real thing?
If I can't hang wet clothes out to dry, what shall I do? The Norfolk Virginian Pilot reports on a fella who "after retiring from a 20-year career with the FBI is going full circle, back to his first job as a street cop." I started as a typist. I don't reckon there's much future in returning to that profession.
In search of vocation, I return, inevitably, to obituaries, seeking out evidence of other lives well lived. A woman is described in a Kansas City Star obit as a mom, seamstress, executive secretary, a liquor store owner, a china painter, a dollmaker, and a cook whose homemade noodles were perfect.
What real skills has a career paper pusher like myself?
The Dallas Morning News reports on a fella who "armed with high-tech cameras and computers, travels around the world to photograph New Testament manuscripts that are many centuries old - his goal is to photograph 1.3 million pages of Greek manuscripts - a project he expects will take until 2020."
I've just completed a study on where professional baseball teams of Richmond took Spring training. I'd venture to say there are less people interested in that than in reading millions of pages of manuscript of Greek New Testament manuscript, but what if no ones interested in either?
Clive Davis writes of a German scholar, Ernst Robert Curtius, who initially warned his countrymen about the rise of the Nazi's, but later wrote, "when the catastrophe came, I decided to serve the idea of a medievalistic humanism by studying the Latin literature of the Middle Ages."
Here now arises the same qualm I felt when I searched for what the great German theologian, Karl Barth, might have written in the 1950's about the Holocaust. There is nothing. Its absence invalidates his brilliance.
I'm likewise content to study what nobody's interested in most of the time. Friend Mark and I have discussed many times, though, how I can't resist temporarily interupting those fond pursuits to write letters to editors, where, for example, the original author's spin is so outrageous, it insists upon rebuttal. The latest involves a bishop who claims an ethos of radical inclusion for a movement founded upon homophobia. If I don't, no one will, therefore, I must.
Upon publication, the response certainly will generate, as usual, scorching on-line posts from the usual suspects. Is there not a choice to be made of pursuing the seeming futility of 'wrestling with pigs in mud,' according to Mark, or acting, regardless, especially, since at least one well known Episcopal on-line scribe says the responses are noted by at least a few other interested parties, or even if they weren't noticed by anyone at all?
Colleagues of an Oxford professor who died recently agreed to sell the beloved books in his renowned personal library for charity. All was well until those same dealers who mar our local otherwise cozy Friends of the Library used book sale, marched in, greedily tossing any books they grasped into cavernously large boxes; the same malevolent forces at work which transform the environmentally beneficial bucolic wholesomeness of clothes drying on a backyard wash line into an assault on property values.
The achievement of perfect homemade noodles (an ideal the chefs of my family relentlessly pursue) for Christmas dinners, now otherwise individually long forgotten, is indeed apparently a great accomplishment in itself. What counts much more is that Edna Harper of Kansas City will be remembered forever as 'an all-around beautiful lady whom everyone just loved.'
As Jackson Browe sings, "nothing survives but the way we live our lives."
Friday, March 21, 2008
Time and Place
I note this week in the New Yorker an extraordinary photograph from an ordinary photo album. A picture all of us might have lying around: the gang, relaxing casually, at the office picnic. A man plays an accordian. One person in the front row, smiling, looks familiar. It is the Angel of Death: Joseph Mengele. This is a retreat for the staff of Auschwitz.
I don't recall the exact phrase but remember the idea put forth by William Shawcross, where, an event occurs, such as the Holocaust, while in another place, at the same time, a family attends a Fourth of July parade in Idaho. It's only incomprehensible to us in this time and place that the breadwinner of a household at such a parade might earn a paycheck by gassing children.
On the fortieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, Seymour Hersh makes a similar point, in reverse. He writes, "it's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had - we'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why."
An article last week in the local rag describes a third grade class who admirably pooled their pennies to send care packages to a hometown unit stationed in Iraq. When the Marine Colonel, on leave, visits the class, the school girls squeal as if at a Hannah Montana concert.
Amongst the scraps, now lost, I'd kept for years, was a letter to my third grade class from another Marine Colonel, John Glenn, after he'd circled the globe three times. I know we were thrilled.
I wonder if any third grade class ever hosts a poet whose presence creates hysteria?
Can you imagine a place and time when schoolchildren were required to memorize poetry, so much so, as Clive James reports in Cultural amnesia, you held a poem in your head all your life 'as an infinite source of ready reference?' Sadly, poems, in the time and place of my life, are like David Halberstam books. I know I should like them; I try; but never finish a one.
A fella from South Carolina led a "Resolve to Win,' march through our town last week. He said he was generally pleased with the turnout though there should have been more flags strewn along his path. Well, maybe so, when they are troops in the field, in harm's way. Yet I also feel akin to the sentiments in another article in the same New Yorker, a 'Life and Letters' sketch piece on author Pat Barker, who "resists any sort of glorification of war by those at home or on the sidelines. War, she says, is a single bullying voice shouting all the other voices down."
The national Boy Scout jamorbee is held down our country road every few years in a campground on an Army base. Recruiters conducting business freely mingle amongst the boys. This attracts no attention, no concern. It wouldn't have been so forty years ago when ROTC programs were being driven from campuses. In a review of the current play Chicago 10, "At a moment when a youth movement has gathered behind a candidate capable of seizing power the old-fashioned way, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's nonsense about revolution just looks lame."
What's normal, at this time and place, up North, is an anti-war rally with David Byrne, Norah Jones and Lou Reed, proceeds going to 'United for Peace and Justice,' and Veterans Against the War. What's normal, at this time in place, in my Southern town, is a 'Resolve to Win,' march - neither event, in its own time and place, creates dissension, or for that matter, great support, yet hold the same event, at the same time, switching places, New York for Virginia, and all hell is sure to break loose.
In Washington's time and place, through Viet Nam, the ideal American was a more humble civillian. He was there when his country needed him, returning home when crisis was past and war was won. Professional soliders are a rare breed throughout history; draftees are far more the norm, as Minute Men, and GI Joe dog faces, univerally bemoaning, enduring, a decidely unglamorous fate. No school girl hysetria in store for them.
Perhaps if you merely live long enough, like Pete Seeger, blacklisted 1950; Kennedy Center medal recipient 2007, or Muhammed Ali, reviled draft resister 1968; universal hero 2008, you may also transform, if necessary, in the same place, different time.
Invite a poet to school. What's the worst that could happen?
I don't recall the exact phrase but remember the idea put forth by William Shawcross, where, an event occurs, such as the Holocaust, while in another place, at the same time, a family attends a Fourth of July parade in Idaho. It's only incomprehensible to us in this time and place that the breadwinner of a household at such a parade might earn a paycheck by gassing children.
On the fortieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, Seymour Hersh makes a similar point, in reverse. He writes, "it's stunning how much impact My Lai had and how little impact Abu Ghraib had - we'll have to leave it to historians to figure out why."
An article last week in the local rag describes a third grade class who admirably pooled their pennies to send care packages to a hometown unit stationed in Iraq. When the Marine Colonel, on leave, visits the class, the school girls squeal as if at a Hannah Montana concert.
Amongst the scraps, now lost, I'd kept for years, was a letter to my third grade class from another Marine Colonel, John Glenn, after he'd circled the globe three times. I know we were thrilled.
I wonder if any third grade class ever hosts a poet whose presence creates hysteria?
Can you imagine a place and time when schoolchildren were required to memorize poetry, so much so, as Clive James reports in Cultural amnesia, you held a poem in your head all your life 'as an infinite source of ready reference?' Sadly, poems, in the time and place of my life, are like David Halberstam books. I know I should like them; I try; but never finish a one.
A fella from South Carolina led a "Resolve to Win,' march through our town last week. He said he was generally pleased with the turnout though there should have been more flags strewn along his path. Well, maybe so, when they are troops in the field, in harm's way. Yet I also feel akin to the sentiments in another article in the same New Yorker, a 'Life and Letters' sketch piece on author Pat Barker, who "resists any sort of glorification of war by those at home or on the sidelines. War, she says, is a single bullying voice shouting all the other voices down."
The national Boy Scout jamorbee is held down our country road every few years in a campground on an Army base. Recruiters conducting business freely mingle amongst the boys. This attracts no attention, no concern. It wouldn't have been so forty years ago when ROTC programs were being driven from campuses. In a review of the current play Chicago 10, "At a moment when a youth movement has gathered behind a candidate capable of seizing power the old-fashioned way, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's nonsense about revolution just looks lame."
What's normal, at this time and place, up North, is an anti-war rally with David Byrne, Norah Jones and Lou Reed, proceeds going to 'United for Peace and Justice,' and Veterans Against the War. What's normal, at this time in place, in my Southern town, is a 'Resolve to Win,' march - neither event, in its own time and place, creates dissension, or for that matter, great support, yet hold the same event, at the same time, switching places, New York for Virginia, and all hell is sure to break loose.
In Washington's time and place, through Viet Nam, the ideal American was a more humble civillian. He was there when his country needed him, returning home when crisis was past and war was won. Professional soliders are a rare breed throughout history; draftees are far more the norm, as Minute Men, and GI Joe dog faces, univerally bemoaning, enduring, a decidely unglamorous fate. No school girl hysetria in store for them.
Perhaps if you merely live long enough, like Pete Seeger, blacklisted 1950; Kennedy Center medal recipient 2007, or Muhammed Ali, reviled draft resister 1968; universal hero 2008, you may also transform, if necessary, in the same place, different time.
Invite a poet to school. What's the worst that could happen?
Friday, March 14, 2008
Recognizable Background
I note this week a letter in the Times from a Ms. Carlisle taking exception to Ms. Seltzer, who "by pretending to have led a life she has not, and by passing off that lie as a memoir, has betrayed those of us who have stories to tell and who attempt to write them honestly and faithfully."
I'm taking exception to the exception.
An alarming letter in the local rag a few weeks ago complained our town has "gone downhill this past year because of a chronic problem with intoxicated individuals, unruly gangs wandering in the streets, and drifters who lurk on the Parkway." Intrigued by 'lurk,' I looked it up. There was lie-in-ambush, sneak, conceal - hardly words which come to mind looking at the poor souls who sit forlornly on a guardrail in plain view holding an "I'm hungry," sign. This letter writer, who's clearly annoyed just by the sight of their passing presence through a windshield, employs lurk instead of sit to tell a better story.
Another writer this past week takes exception to a prior letter writer taking exception at those not wishing to help African refugees who settle in our small town in lieu of assisting the lurkers described above. She contends no one should worry Africans take jobs intended for the native-born since our own lurking homeless 'wouldn't hit a lick at a snake.' I don't know what that means, exactly, but I think I get the point.
AP writer Douglas Birch warns, though "Tomorrow's presidential election (in Russia) marks a symbolic end to a tortured post-Soviet odyssey from poverty to economic might, the country has embraced a rigid political orthodoxy - call it Putinism - that the Kremlin has used to crush the independence of political parties, civil society and the media."
First off, putin, which sounds something my two-year old godson is more wont to do than a world leader, is an invitingly funny word, like pickle, or, coincidentally, seltzer. Another AP writer, Mansur Mirovalev, informs us, 'anekdoty,' indeed, "have long been a litmus test of public opinion and individual liberties in a country where in the past, people faced exile, prison, or worse for expressing their opinions directly."
Putin, barred by law from another term, ran Medvedev for president, to appoint himself Prime Minister, to still exercise power behind the scenes. What follows is an example of Russian anekdoty: "Putin and Medvedev wake up with hangovers. Putin says, "which of us is president and which of us is prime minister today? Medvedev says, "I don't remember." Putin says, "then go fetch some beer."
I have to say as someone who tries from time to time to write with some small degree of wit, if 'attempted joke' was a felony offense in the U.S, and I could be shot or exiled to Alaska, the joke has to be funny, if not, downright hysterical. I'm not saying I wouldn't still try, but to take that risk, the punchline needs to be more humorous than 'fetch a beer.'
A theme in this blog since it began is to convey what it means to be Southern. In times when it seems reality itself is more bizarre than fiction, it's not surprising memoirs are king, since the public demands a truth that leaves little room for a good-natured exaggeration which always formed the foundation of the best stories.
Speaking of South, could anyone ever surpass F. Scott, who fashioned the following speech for a Southern woman out of place in New York City:
"These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been unknown; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see, she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of if, you know, like the roses of an old garden lying all around us."
Truth, sublime, submerged, the hallmark of genius, the envy of hacks. Perhaps, though, in order for honesty to hit home, there must first be recognizable background. I instinctively understand Fitzgerald, because I live and speak Southern.
Farther afield, desiring to enjoy Shakespeare, lacking ability to translate its foreign language, I discovered the key - buying the essential DK Shakespeare Handbook. Just to solitarily read its plot summaries and character descriptions drives the life out of the drama - but if you read first, then attend a play, you've got it - you need not struggle to catch the drift; you enjoy the experience, no longer a challenge, still not necessarily grasping all, mind you, but enough to make the difference.
The recognizable background of two letters hit my desk, these past few weeks, that promise stories far beyond the surface of the paper upon which they were written.
The first was from a police department in California. On Christmas eve, someone left a check in a manger on a church altar. With no leads towards its rightful owner, it was returned to sender. What gripping story lays beyond the facts of the case? Enough, certainly, for a gripping movie of the week, no doubt, starring Valerie Bertinelli and Tom Bosley.
The second was simple enough in itself. In an old bureau, a fella found a World War I savings certificate, purchased by his great grandfather, and wanted to know if it was redeemable, and of course, with the interest due. The grander story involves the building in which I work that was constructed in 1919 to process correspondence such as this relative to the issuance of World War I bonds. What epic journey must have transpired for this letter to find its way home?
Whether stories are real, or not, matters less than the imagination they stir which beckons us from the margins to enjoin the page.
I'm taking exception to the exception.
An alarming letter in the local rag a few weeks ago complained our town has "gone downhill this past year because of a chronic problem with intoxicated individuals, unruly gangs wandering in the streets, and drifters who lurk on the Parkway." Intrigued by 'lurk,' I looked it up. There was lie-in-ambush, sneak, conceal - hardly words which come to mind looking at the poor souls who sit forlornly on a guardrail in plain view holding an "I'm hungry," sign. This letter writer, who's clearly annoyed just by the sight of their passing presence through a windshield, employs lurk instead of sit to tell a better story.
Another writer this past week takes exception to a prior letter writer taking exception at those not wishing to help African refugees who settle in our small town in lieu of assisting the lurkers described above. She contends no one should worry Africans take jobs intended for the native-born since our own lurking homeless 'wouldn't hit a lick at a snake.' I don't know what that means, exactly, but I think I get the point.
AP writer Douglas Birch warns, though "Tomorrow's presidential election (in Russia) marks a symbolic end to a tortured post-Soviet odyssey from poverty to economic might, the country has embraced a rigid political orthodoxy - call it Putinism - that the Kremlin has used to crush the independence of political parties, civil society and the media."
First off, putin, which sounds something my two-year old godson is more wont to do than a world leader, is an invitingly funny word, like pickle, or, coincidentally, seltzer. Another AP writer, Mansur Mirovalev, informs us, 'anekdoty,' indeed, "have long been a litmus test of public opinion and individual liberties in a country where in the past, people faced exile, prison, or worse for expressing their opinions directly."
Putin, barred by law from another term, ran Medvedev for president, to appoint himself Prime Minister, to still exercise power behind the scenes. What follows is an example of Russian anekdoty: "Putin and Medvedev wake up with hangovers. Putin says, "which of us is president and which of us is prime minister today? Medvedev says, "I don't remember." Putin says, "then go fetch some beer."
I have to say as someone who tries from time to time to write with some small degree of wit, if 'attempted joke' was a felony offense in the U.S, and I could be shot or exiled to Alaska, the joke has to be funny, if not, downright hysterical. I'm not saying I wouldn't still try, but to take that risk, the punchline needs to be more humorous than 'fetch a beer.'
A theme in this blog since it began is to convey what it means to be Southern. In times when it seems reality itself is more bizarre than fiction, it's not surprising memoirs are king, since the public demands a truth that leaves little room for a good-natured exaggeration which always formed the foundation of the best stories.
Speaking of South, could anyone ever surpass F. Scott, who fashioned the following speech for a Southern woman out of place in New York City:
"These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been unknown; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see, she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of if, you know, like the roses of an old garden lying all around us."
Truth, sublime, submerged, the hallmark of genius, the envy of hacks. Perhaps, though, in order for honesty to hit home, there must first be recognizable background. I instinctively understand Fitzgerald, because I live and speak Southern.
Farther afield, desiring to enjoy Shakespeare, lacking ability to translate its foreign language, I discovered the key - buying the essential DK Shakespeare Handbook. Just to solitarily read its plot summaries and character descriptions drives the life out of the drama - but if you read first, then attend a play, you've got it - you need not struggle to catch the drift; you enjoy the experience, no longer a challenge, still not necessarily grasping all, mind you, but enough to make the difference.
The recognizable background of two letters hit my desk, these past few weeks, that promise stories far beyond the surface of the paper upon which they were written.
The first was from a police department in California. On Christmas eve, someone left a check in a manger on a church altar. With no leads towards its rightful owner, it was returned to sender. What gripping story lays beyond the facts of the case? Enough, certainly, for a gripping movie of the week, no doubt, starring Valerie Bertinelli and Tom Bosley.
The second was simple enough in itself. In an old bureau, a fella found a World War I savings certificate, purchased by his great grandfather, and wanted to know if it was redeemable, and of course, with the interest due. The grander story involves the building in which I work that was constructed in 1919 to process correspondence such as this relative to the issuance of World War I bonds. What epic journey must have transpired for this letter to find its way home?
Whether stories are real, or not, matters less than the imagination they stir which beckons us from the margins to enjoin the page.
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