Art, History, Politics, Reading, Writing

Gore Vidal now through the door marked “exit”

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I’ll miss this guy. He was sometimes full of horseshit, but when others claimed he was full of horseshit often they were proven to be wrong. So allowance must be given.

He tended to bring out the worst in people who weren’t confident in themselves. Interviewers/journalists suffering from what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence got con-testy with Vidal, which he would detect and throw back. The best interviewers were fine in their own skin and ended up in decent conversations or giving him good setups for his lapidary phrases and tales.

He loved his country, his republic, with a deep love that meant always wanting better, and wanting to ward off its perceived decline by calling out when it had more pomp than substance. No, that’s way too buttery. He saw our country as a Miss Havisham, and described her past charms and decay in great and savage detail. If he had a magic wand to restore her vitality he would, but he knew woefully no such wand was available.

Feeling sore about both Vidal and Christopher Hitchens dying within a year of one another. I doubt I’ll be as deeply eager what any other public figure, or eager to be suprised by what any other public figure thinks.

Chronically elegiac with a zest lit from a core of hope.

Music, Poetry, Pop Culture, Reading

Ah, I get it now! “Popsicle” = tumescent male appendage!

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“California Gurls” [excerpt] by Katy Perry

Daisy dukes, bikinis on top.
Sun-kissed skin, so hot
We’ll melt your popsicle.

Uh-whoah-oah. Uh-whoah-oah.

 

For AGES I took these lyrics to be a flat, scientific statement. Of COURSE human skin, exposed, presumably at normothermia let alone warmed by the sun, would carry sufficient heat to melt a popsicle that will turn liquid well before reaching 98.6 degrees Farenheit (37 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world).

Nearly two years after this poem was released in 2010, it finally occurred to me this was a metaphor. See, a man’s popsicle (i.e. penis), normally rigid in a state of arousal, would find itself liquified due to the allure and heat generated by the narrator’s Daisy Duked clan. Fine enough considered blithely. To give longer thought to an organ melting, though, seems horrible. Like what happens to that Nazi’s face when the Ark of the Covenant is opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Thanks but no thanks, Ms. Perry. Has anyone checked that Snoop Dogg is okay?

 

Art, Poetry, Reading

Poetry month: White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

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April is National Poetry Month, and for April Fool’s Day something funny and clever:

Fanny Chicken passed along this hilarious stream of white trash themed haiku her sister wrote up several years ago, with excellent interpretive notes that amplify the experience.

Annotations are an underutilized art form. An example of what you’ll get at the post:

Carnival’s in town,
Who’s that runnin’ the zipper?
Like to git with him.

Interpretation: Note how the lure of the carnival is enhanced by the enchanting possibility of new romance. In this haiku, one can almost hear the “clickity whirr” of the zipper ride. It’s as though the reader sees through the author’s eyes: A hansome, although oily-ish, traveling man who’s yearning for a reason to stay in one place for the first time since his release from juvie 7 years ago. Maybe she shall inspire such desire!

More White Trash Haiku with Interpretation

 

Art, Reading

The Trial of Ulysses

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Watched this 50 minute (they make ’em that long?) YouTube video that I thought would be about U.S. Appeals Court Judge John M. Woolsey’s decision to finally allow Ulysses into the United States. It wasn’t about that. It’s a survey of Joyce’s time in Trieste. I liked it for that, too.

Interesting to see some of the living experts on Joyce whose names I’ve read in the past. They’re not how I ever pictured them, but they LOOK as they should look. Then I realized I’d never made any effort to picture them anyway. Some peculiar people, not a surprise. We Joyceans ARE a precious lot. Nice to see footage of elderly Sylvia Beach rocking the same haircut she had in her 20s!

Poetry, Reading

Watery memory

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Three days ago, I decided it had been decades since memorizing any poetry, and it was time to rectify that. What to memorize? I’d been studying The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and its part four, Death by Water, seemed easy enough. But I’m finding difficulty with three parts of it:

IV. DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                               A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                   Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

For the LIFE of me, when considering Phlebas the precise words of the watery phrases escape me. They don’t stick. “the deep sea swell” “A current under sea”. I got “Entering the whirlpool” reliably but this is SO short and simple, it’s bothering me.

Wait. After typing this out, I got it now. Let me close my eyes and try reciting it again.

Good. Just did it two times in a row. Needed hand gestures, but got it.

See, internet? You CAN be remedial!

Activity, Art, Music, Pop Culture, Reading

‘Neath Neil Sedaka

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During a morning walk, a turn of brain had me switch from the audiobook for A Dance with Dragons (why, Roy Dotrice, must you lose track of your character voices from book to book?) to the two songs on my iPod by Neil Sedaka.

I know he’s recorded a lot more songs in his long career. I recall an odd love duet with his daughter. What trips me out about “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” is the forced cherubism. “Though sad inside, I shall for the sake of commerce and Tin Pan Alley heave a superhuman effort into PROJECTING MIRTH THOUGH ITS FORCE MAY REND TIME/SPACE ASUNDER!”

Let’s focus on his shout out to “December” in “Calendar Girl”. He uses the word “‘neath”. He could have used “beneath” and it would have still flowed. But no, he formally sat at a table, wrote the word “‘neath” on the music sheet and thought “How winningly informal and crafty. I shall keep it.”

He gives out a “Whoo!” at the start of the bridge (at 1:26 in the clip below) that is hilarious. “Holy Christmas on a cracker, I got so much groove I don’t know what to do but whoop in exultation!”

Drafting this on my phone, its AutoCorrect suggested “Meat” for “Neil”, “Defamation” for “Sedaka”, “Shop” for “Whoo”. Good summary, phone! Somewhere out there my smartphone has a funnier, more concise blog than mine.

Activity, Eating, Parenting, Reading, Writing

On a ride with my son

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All this week, my daughter was scheduled for Zoo Camp. My son didn’t have anything scheduled.

I had to work, and my mom was willing to have him stay for four days.

Got him back Thursday night, and wasn’t sure what to do. Then decided to cut work and spend Friday with just him.

He’s 11, and signs are accruing that puberty encroaches. Height increasing. Closes the door to his room a lot. More guarded about changing his clothes, bathing, growing sense of privacy.

We dropped his sister off at Zoo Camp, then strolled around the Zoo for several hours. I gave him the map and let him navigate. We weren’t in a hurry.

We boarded the Zoo Train (I hadn’t been on for a decade or so) and I noticed dark hairs on his legs. I said (quietly) “You’re growing up. Your leg hairs are darker.” “Not as dark as yours” “You’re getting there, though. It’s good to see you growing up.” He smiled. We talked about growing up and being able to drive, and going to college, and other milestones only 5-7 years away.

See the bag of green candy? Sour Skittles. He was MISERLY with them. I only got four, once he gave me three. A second time, one. He worked on that regular-size bag for about two hours. Hope he holds to that Golden Mean.

From the Zoo we went downtown. I let him pick lunch (noodles), and we went for ice cream. We read for about an hour and a half in the library (Me – reading on an artwork to write about, J – Fellowship of the Ring). Then he wanted to see if there were books on martial arts. I made him ask at the information desk and he was directed to a shelf of them. After about 20 minutes of browsing, he picked one. Checked it out, we were on our way.

Outside of the library, he asked me what sixth, seventh, and eighth grades were like for me. I told him they were tough for almost everybody. Puberty, confusion, frustration, kids getting more concerned about the body changes and new feelings, and not as attuned to the feelings and needs of others. I also mentioned around 6th grade is when my parents divorced. He listened thoughtfully. I told him he would someday go through those body and feeling changes, and I said I hoped he would come to us with any questions. “I will probably come to you, ” he said, “as it’ll be about boy and man changes.”

Took the light rail back to the Zoo, then sat in the cafeteria and read some more. All four of us met there after my daughter’s Zoo Camp was finished.

Throughout the day, he ran his arm around mine and we walked together arm-in-arm. He said “I don’t feel like holding your hand much anymore, but I do feel like doing this.” I nodded, absorbing the moments.

Later at night, he was speaking with his mom about cell phones. One of his friends recently got one. He wants one, too. “Other kids in class have them, too.” My wife asked: “Do you want one for talking with them?” “No, only my friends.” “Don’t you mean the kids in your class?” “No, I’m not friends with EVERYone in my class.”

Then she discovered he was only friends with the boys in his class. She observed: “That will probably change.”

“Yeah.” He guessed around age 13 he would use the phone to talk with girls. Then around 17 he would be old enough to drive, and then use his phone and car to go pick the girls up.

My man.

Activity, Reading

Obits in print and online

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After getting breakfast ready for the kiddos I sat down with the morning newspaper and a whole wheat toaster waffle. I slowed down at the obituary section and saw a lengthy entry for S with two photos and an extended tribute to her life and family. Interesting to see the intervening 18 years or so filled by a few paragraphs, but helpful in getting a sense of her complete life as I’ll be attending her memorial on Saturday with long-dormant friends. But an online component was something I’d not engaged with before.

The newspaper obit gave a link to a website, Caringbridge.org, which provides a place for patients and their families to tell their stories.

This morning, the page for S shared about her six-year bout with cancer, its remission, and re-emergence a year ago after it spread to several organs. It described a series of treatments and her courage and photos of her with her three children, husband, and some with her undergoing treatment including a brace on her head for removing a tumor in her brain.

All of the content described her in the present tense, as it was last updated before she died. There was a video consisting mostly of a photo montage of her over the last few years, and ended with a shot within a car driving, trees alongside both sides of the street near her home with orange ribbons on them. “All of this for me?” was the caption. No voice, no faces. Only the line of trees moving by as viewed from behind the windshield.

Tonight that has been scrubbed, with details by her spouse Peter about her death and cremation that happened at 4:00 p.m. today. Also newly posted: info about the funeral Mass for her Saturday, and a party following after the orange ribbons are ceremoniously removed by children associated with S and her family/friends. Not looking forward to the Mass. Organized religion interferes with the very human need to gather and confer and share with its self-serving mumbo jumbo and unprovable delusions that hold our species back. In truth, such moments are deeply meditative for me, as I try to ignore the propitiations the robed figure burbles and instead listen/watch for the genuine humanity that shines through.

In going to the newspaper’s website tonight the obituary section is full of ways for people to express themselves with tributes, signing an online guest book, sharing the obit out, ordering flowers, sending a gift, ordering a copy of a death certificate (weird), and making a donation (though not to the one specified by S and her family – a generic charitable organization lookup).

While the extensive text of the obit and both photos were also online, the effect is really noisy. Yet, it makes sense, with obituaries online, that people would want services and online tools tied into it. With deaths, I’m accustomed to direct interactions and commisseration with others in-person, quiet, perusal of memories, laughter at moments of fond honesty, listening to eulogies or giving them, and not having technology in the hand, lap, or in front of the face. Death and grief and wakes have been strictly real life. Hands, embraces, nods, tears, smiles, laughter, celebration and NOT typing and mouse clicks.

But for people not able/inclined to be at a specific place and time, having something like that online is better than nothing. it would let people contribute or participate preceding or following a service. I wonder how long her family will get notices of people encountering news of her death online weeks, months, years hence.

There have been businesses around that offer a service of managing/deleting your online materials and accounts after death. Again, sensible when pondered from a distance, but inescapably ghoulish.

MAKE NO MISTAKE: Despite the somber tone of these last few entries, life and mind skitter around. All day I’ve had the WiiFit music that accompanies the Basic Step aerobics workout. All day. Kicking again right now.

While sad for extended friends about S who knew her better, I’m not distraught. A dear friend recently got some bad news that is on my mind more. It’s a commonplace to observe as you get older you start turning to the obituaries first. Today was my first step in that territory. Seeing these elements to modern death is slightly interesting, but will also serve as an orientation/scouting trip for when a death occurs that hits closer to home.

Parenting, Poetry, Reading

A gal I once kissed died today.

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We’ve all had moments where the conversation starts: “Hey, do you remember so-and-so?”

Answer: “Oh, sure!” Cue mental memory of last interaction with that person. What the person was like, what you were like. If fond memories (almost always), a sweet haze surrounds the evocation.

“So-and-so is dead.”

Cue giant scythe swooshing down and cleanly slicing the reverie, slicing the moment to something horrible and abruptly sad.

That didn’t happen today. But I got word someone I once kissed died after a protracted fight with cancer. Same age, endured through her birthday last week and then surrendered following a visit from long-time friends and surrounded by family.

When someone we know dies, we become the sole caretakers of those moments. That person can no longer speak up with a smile or a head shake and say “Oh, yeah! I was there with you.” Even minor moments. A stark experience.

In high school, she was wavo/goth. By junior/senior year, pancake makeup, clove cigarettes. Usually second or third banana. Content to be in the background.

I went to college in another city for two years. Moved back into my hometown where she was by then in regular social rotation with a pocket of long-held friends.

The anthropology of dating was never my forté. I was a keen observer, but a lousy participant in picking up/acting on cues. Shy, easily daunted despite tendency toward extroversion and saying severe things very loudly to the acclaim/dismay of those within earshot.

So, in this small social circle she was initially unattached. She had also really blossomed. Dropped weight, got confident about her appearance. Went out into the sun. Got a retail job. A decent car that she painted colorful fish on. Strong sense of humor. Good listener. Fun to be around – good with a supplemental joke to follow someone else’s start. I got interested.

She had no problem dating. One of her boyfriends was a Deadhead guy who was the typical tightly-wound “It’s all good” mellow affectation, VERY PARTICULAR about the type of mellow to be, and who became highly agitated when his sensibilities were challenged. 22 years later, I wonder if he detected my circling around her and reacted to it, or if I was laying topical landmines for him to step on because I was jealous.

Eventually, I had a chance. I invited her to watch a movie with me at my parents’ house out in the country. I had just moved back and transferred to the hometown state university and hadn’t found a place yet. Can’t remember the movie we watched. She was wearing capri pants and I spent much of the movie semi-absent-mindedly stroking her lower leg, which she had rested on my lap.

I drove her back home to her apartment, dropped her off, and we kissed in the doorway. She put her hands in my pants pockets and said: “Oh, what have we here?” “Keys” I answered with a smile. She laughed. No invite in. Never kissed again.

I was still hanging around in group settings, sometimes hanging out in restaurants. I was still interested. I talked the ears off of mutual friends (thank you for your patience). They knew it wouldn’t work even if it DID happen. I kinda knew it, too. But I still liked her. Hadn’t dated for a while other than her. It was a goal.

She finally admitted to others that she wasn’t interested in me, but did like having me around for the attention. Mutual friends told her it was mean to waste my time like that. She reacted with a shrug. *GASP* was my reaction upon this report. Still I continued to hang around. Can’t recall for how long.

A sister of hers was getting married. Among her sisters, she was the only one NOT yet married or engaged. The Catholic wedding was on a Saturday, but she asked me to go as a date. Met a lot of her family, dull as I was, I was clearly a beard or being used to keep the pressure off her a bit. In advice column parlance, in this phase I had the knack of falling into the “friend” track instead of the “boyfriend” track.

During the wedding, someone had taped letters onto the soles of the groom’s shoes so when he kneeled for Communion it said “Send Help”. Really, really funny.

Later that night, I was to carpool with my brother to meet our parents for a weekend at the beach. As I drove with her to the reception, I mentioned looking forward to the beach. She got huffy and said: “Well, if you’re looking forward to the beach so much, you DON’T have to go the reception!” Then the weeks of being kept around, being a prop boyfriend/fiancé, not getting a thank you for sitting through a wedding all fell into place and I felt a bit of a spine forming. “Okay. I’ll drop you off, then.” Did just that. She slammed the door. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. Drove to one friend’s workplace. We cracked up. Reported later that she was FURIOUS for days afterward, and they reinforced to her that I got fed up of being dragged around.

Eventually I think she moved to Seattle. Then a long while later I heard she got married.

A year ago I heard she had cancer, and that it was severe.

A few days ago mutual friends gave updates on her condition: fatal. She’s a mother and wife.

One of the friends posted a recent photo of her. The trend toward coming out of her shell continued. She looked radiant, proud, even prettier than when I knew her.

I feel for her grieving spouse and children. A horrible loss for them, and an awful burden for her, to know you will die and not get to see your children become adults. This children you love losing a parent. Your spouse burdened by your permanent absence.

My memories of her will remain true to the time. I’m still proud of my little stand, slow-coming though it was, but I’ve no illusions: that moment in no way fully reflects on the people we each were and became.

News and contemplations like this can lead to new resolve to strive for something inward, or for something outward. As it does in the plots of books and movies. Even now, though, through the sympathy and sadness I still sense myself wanting what I want, as before. Am feeling the impermanence of things more than usual. Slightly increases the resolve of “capture the day” when it comes to projects and other ambitions, but that could fluctuate based on what’s on tv or other distractions. And had the last few lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” running through my head today:

              We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Goodbye, S. I regret not knowing you better, but am glad to know you became a mother with a supportive spouse and children. I wish them well, and can imagine the depth of their loss knowing an aspect of you (and being drawn to it), though I will never meet them. Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.

Poetry, Reading, Writing

Attunement by a lusty old man

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I’ve been re-reading a favorite book, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, a massive elegy for the sublime in literature. Its tone of defiance and celebration of great art, yelling like Lear at the overwhelming storm of dying standards and political correctness. has always brought great pleasure.

And I hated, as Bloom did, what he labeled “The School of Resentment” — literature critics with political agendas that trounce aesthetics. The late 80s and early 90s were overrun by the massive overshoot by multiculturalists who went beyond consideration and reflection on other cultures to a mad competitive rush to see who could be the most sensitive over the self-identified labels of the day (generally fine) and on behalf of categories they did not belong to (okay in theory, hideous in practice).

And among the things I enjoy now, 20 years later, is the world feels as if the School of Resentment has significantly faded. Gone is the Carry Nation prudery and groupthink of anti-sex writers like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The feminist field is now as wide and diverse in approaches as it should be, given its constituents are more than half the population.

I credit this book for helping recover my love of reading after graduating college. Showing that it was important to read for reading’s sake – as I’d spent the last several years reading in anticipation of quizzes and discussions and dissecting the works in graded essays and other projects. Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia helped me recover my ability to enjoy and seek out works for their ambition and their strangeness, and that I could fly by the nets of identity politics and engage with art of lasting merit.

But Bloom himself.

The videos I’ve seen of him have been of a man who probably looked 60 by his late 30s yet has held steady within his sturdy torso, resembling a bag of profound sighs (though he rarely sighs). A melodious, despairing, challenging voice that suits his authorial tone. He proclaims himself “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator” as a badge, a sense of resignation, and “a certain fury”. He rarely looks at the interviewer or the camera. He obviously tasks his brain with searches and phrases too much for visual courtesies, though he is perfectly gracious in his words to people.

Naomi Wolf famously accused him of hitting on her while she was an undergraduate student at Yale. If true, doubtless a horrifying, macabre experience, and she’s entitled to her rage at the unethical behavior. Yet his alleged line to her was so sublimely skeezy (“You have the aura of election upon you”), the dirty old woman/man part within us all can’t help but feel a little moved.

But, all allegations, and who has NOT had a shady moment in the “Just trying to get laid” department?

Resolutely fond of him I will remain. Sorry for that Yoda syntax. I remain fond and grateful to the man.