tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88169552569319008502024-03-18T17:44:48.046-07:00usedbuyer2.0"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme." -- Henry Jamesusedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.comBlogger8116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-18221375374930924072024-02-02T16:59:00.000-08:002024-02-06T09:33:12.222-08:00No Matter From the Heart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WbZEIsAAQsY/VwBaHOIEu7I/AAAAAAAAM0I/pwkH-4SqZVA41zmNr3-yOD_Nyg4bUYbqA/s1600/kaf1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WbZEIsAAQsY/VwBaHOIEu7I/AAAAAAAAM0I/pwkH-4SqZVA41zmNr3-yOD_Nyg4bUYbqA/s1600/kaf1.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;">“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.” </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;">-- William Shakespeare, <i>Richard II</i>, Act III, Scene 2</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;">Books die. Damned, damaged, abandoned, ruined, waterlogged, molded, abused, burnt. They go out of print, go unread, unremembered. Some survive. Most don't. Most don't deserve to survive anyway. Just think of the forests of antiquated manuals, promotional tie-ins, faded popular fiction, junk porn, Reader's Digest Condensed, Disney dreck. <i>Requiesce in pace</i>, forgotten bestsellers et al. Few published books survive a season let alone a generation and frankly even fewer should. Most books, like all authors, like all of us, like all things -- spoiler alert -- die. "Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die." (Okay, maybe not Charo. Charo will never die. Besides </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">being a great classical guitarist and perfect wig-stand, she's changed the year of her birth more often than her lip color, so I'm pretty sure</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"> she's actually H. Rider Haggard's </span><u style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">She</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">. Day that woman finally grinds out her very last "cuchi cuchi" -- watch out! The stars will go out one by one.) </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">Cicero insisted that the memory of a life well-spent is eternal. Oh? Okay. Maybe. Nice thought. Though eternity seems an unrealistic expectation for anything, Earth for example, or humanity certainly, let alone the good name of dear Aunt Gladys. Also -- remembered by whom? Should such a thing as remote posterity still even be a possibility hereafter, ours would seem just as likely to remember Ted Bundy as Fred Rogers. Philosophers can get a bit wishful with the absolutes. In particular I don't know that Cicero is to be trusted on this subject. A bit smug, Cicero, bless 'im. He was always sending </span><i style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">billet-doux</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"> to posterity-- pretty successfully, as it turned out -- confident we'd want to know his every thought on nearly everything, including death. Not wrong as it turns out but a bit overbearing at the best of times. Personally I've never gotten over learning that the great stoic was in fact a fat gambler who repeatedly married for money. No Cato he. Very much a do-as-I say-not-as-I-do-kind of guy. Stoics and stiffs of all sorts in my experience tend that way. The person who publicly disapproves of your second doughnut privately huffs nitrous while watching Punishing Step Mom porn. Trust. (One of the closeted gay boys I was boning in high school was from a relentlessly and very publicly pious family. I will never forget the afternoon when a bunch of us skipped school and he decided to show us the drawer his parents kept their kink in. SO many toys. SO much porn, just as Father God intended.) But unlike even the life very well lived indeed and more like good furniture, good books are built to last more than a day and mostly do. Not all. Some are lost -- see Homer's </span><u style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">Margites</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">, or damaged -- see Sapho's output all but entirely lost, or just stripped for parts like all those ancients now known only for quotes. Think also of the poets remembered now for the one anthologized example of their work, or even a line because you know only God can make a tree. Or so at least we thought before DNA and 3D printers. The fact is that there is plenty of stuff we admire now simply because, against all odds, nobody broke it. So, in addition to being the final repository of humanity's highest hopes, greatest achievements, and most enduring monuments, posterity turns out to be a bit of a junk-shop.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;">Don't know that I'm the person to weigh in on what should or should not survive of the great western canon. In my lifetime I've seen any number of immortals shunted from the Pantheon, mostly for cause and or limitations of space. Can't argue with the need for a more representative selection, and there have been a number of "new" candidates for whom I've cheered most heartily. I've also witnessed some pretty rum characters put forward as worthy of recycling for reasons not altogether persuasive, at least to me, but then I'm not on the committee -- any committee. I have however been on committees just often enough to know it is not work for which I am much suited anyway. Not that anyone's asking anymore. Turns out that the obscure-old-white-gay-guy is pretty well represented already in cultural matters across the board (see also: church music, community theater, library art-shows, local orchestras, western swing dancing, etc.)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Actually, I think we are living in something of a golden age of the reissued book. Publishers like NYRB and the Library of America, -- created within my memory -- have led something of a revolution in the rescue and reprinting of often neglected classics. The opportunities to read great books from less familiar names, periods, and places has never been so great. This has been one of the primary reading pleasures of my recent life, and a lesson to me as well; never assume there are no more great books yet to be read, no more great names among the dead of whom I have yet to hear. Happens all the time. Honest.</span></span><br /><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Translation is another deep subject for another day and dive, but it too seems to be booming, thanks largely to smaller presses like Archipelago Books, Pushkin Press, etc. One wonders if translators are any likelier to eat any better than they used to. One do hope so. They are certainly doing hard and admirable work. I never thought someone new would take on the whole of Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, but some good soul named Alex Andriesse is doing just that. And the great Russia scholar and historian Douglas Smith is likewise engaged with the whole massy weight of Konstantin Paustovsky's autobiography and we are all better for it, friends.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">I'm curious to know more of the process of selection and resuscitation. How is it that I could sell books for a living for thirty+ years and never have heard of, let alone read Benito Perez Galdos until just a few years ago? Makes me a little ashamed of my narrow provincialism, frankly. More though it makes me glad to be reading now. So how did new translations of "the Spanish Dickens" happen in just the last decade? Who financed that? Who decided to publish <u>Tristana</u> in English again? And why that novel? I should very much like to know.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Back in the bad old days of hierarchical criticism, before the French so kindly taught us that road-signs, matchbooks, and symphonies were all just "texts," I had a snobbish taste for what were then called "minor" writers; important enough to see reprints, but never so important as to sit with the Gods on the syllabi. These tended to smaller oeuvres, shorter or unfashionable forms like personal essays or poetic dramas. My minor masters were all about aesthetic fuss; style over subject, <i>le mot just</i> more than all the words until we run out. Think Leigh Hunt and Max Beerbohm and Harold Acton and Siegfried Sassoon. Nowadays my minors are mostly ghosted -- as in gone --the boys anyway. Some of the ladies have had a better afterlife, say Ivy Compton Burnett or the English lady novelist with the movie star's name, Elizabeth Taylor. My idea of a good minor time may not be yours, but there are plenty such still to be had on the shelf at the bookstore, from Fleur Jaeggy to Robert Walser, just to mention the Swiss.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">All this thriving and surviving can not hide the fact though that in America at least books are in danger yet again. The shrieking harpies of Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and other far Right misnomers and intentional antonyms are padlocking public libraries and burning PTAs to the ground as I write. Same mob as always, same lies, same agenda to "save the children" from the queers and the commies and the colored. Now the yahoos are chasing drag queens out of story-times and silencing women and the differently gendered, and yes, of course these same self-righteous primitives are banning books. Always just a day or so away from burning books, and then people, this crew.* </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">The other threat is of course the ironic triumph of thumb-typing. If everything one might say in a TikTok caption is just as important as every and anything ever written, then it is harder and harder to justify Shakespeare. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">And the Bard, he is very much on my mind:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Sonnet 73</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">That time of year thou mayst in me behold</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. </span><span class="wst-gap __gap" style="color: #202122; display: inline-block; text-align: justify; width: 1em;"></span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">In me thou see'st the twilight of such day</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">As after sunset fadeth in the west;</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">Which by and by black night doth take away,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. </span><span class="wst-gap __gap" style="color: #202122; display: inline-block; text-align: justify; width: 1em;"></span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">As the death-bed whereon it must expire,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. </span><span class="wst-gap __gap" style="color: #202122; display: inline-block; text-align: justify; width: 1em;"></span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span class="wst-gap __gap" style="color: #202122; display: inline-block; text-align: justify; width: 1em;"></span><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,</span><br style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;" /><span class="wst-gap __gap" style="color: #202122; display: inline-block; text-align: justify; width: 1em;"></span><span style="color: #202122; text-align: justify;">To love that well which thou must leave ere long.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Milton, an old friend and coworker, long retired from the bookstore, died recently. Presumably named for that other English poet, Milton was nonetheless a Shakespeare man, through and through. Read Shakespeare. Studied Shakespeare. Worshiped Shakespeare. Wrote about and thought about and talked about and quoted Shakespeare.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Sad story. When it came time for Milton to retire from the Receiving and Tagging Department where he'd worked for ages, he decided to have a bit of a splash out and give a public reading from the critical Shakespeare manuscript he'd been working at for decades. If you knew Milton at all you were at least a nodding acquaintance with his great unfinished book. It was part of his person and always on him in one form or another; usually in his tote as part of the unsorted shock of newspapers, random clippings, free magazines, old books, whatnot and jetsam that he lugged everywhere. (I was privileged to read a very brief bit of something to do with Iago once. Well beyond my critical faculties.) Milton was not a bold person, in the time I knew him he never struck me as the type to stand up and address a room. Nonetheless he decided before he left the bookstore for good that he would give a lecture on Shakespeare.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">The Events people put Milton's Shakespeare lecture on the schedule and promoted the lecture on the website and such, the way they do. I was closing the evening of Milton's event, but still planned to attend at least part of his presentation. Come the day, two people had called in sick and the phones were busy. Events were upstairs in those days and Milton came down twice to check in with me. Nervous as anything, he was. When the event was scheduled to start I was on the phone without a hope of getting free anytime soon. When I finally managed to end the call it was a good fifteen minutes after he was meant to start. Milton came back to the desk. No one came. I told him I still wanted to hear what he'd planned to read but he decided to just go home. He did.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Saw Milton at the bookstore no more than a week or so ago. He looked fairly hale and hearty for his age -- at which I can only guess. I'd seen him in the bookstore regularly since he'd retired, though it did take awhile for him to drop back in after the night of the reading that never was. Always had his bag with him full of papers and notes and this, that, and the other and presumably at least part of his unpublished, unheard Shakespeare book. We still talked about the book occasionally. He still worked at it. Usually we spoke of other things.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">When a mutual friend announced on social media that Milton had died, I was shocked. When I returned to work I mentioned his death to some of his surviving coworkers, to his old boss, to the company's CEO. Asked if anyone knew any next of kin. Records were checked. None on record. Nobody knew. Someone recalled that Milton had had a brother? Didn't know the man's name or frankly if he was still alive. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">Hadn't Milton owned a house? With Tenants?</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;"> Nobody knew who they might be now. No one knew who to offer our condolences. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">It happens. Death doesn't always leave us convenient means to mark the passing even of people we knew, and in the end how well did I know this old man? Don't know that I knew him any better than the people with whom he worked every day for years. Would not presume to say that he intended that I should, but he did like a quick confidence, did my friend Milton.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">I hadn't know Milton that long before I learned, I believe all in the same brief conversation, that Milton was gay, that another, very quiet elderly man who worked in the Fiction Department had been his lover for some time in the seventies, and that the great love of Milton's middle age -- a different fellow altogether, not at the bookstore -- had died years before in the Plague. Milton was quick to confess, at least with me, presumably because I was obviously gay in a way he'd never really been at work, but he tended to be a bit sketchy about the details. I pressed him occasionally to expand on his autobiography, but he never seemed terribly comfortable sharing anything he couldn't frame as an anecdote. He liked a bit of shock as well. He would tell me something he thought fairly scandalous, and then grin through his bushy moustache in a way that suggested one had been shown something secret and frankly naughty, and then he would laugh -- too deep a laugh to be described as a giggle, but in that range emotionally. I was asked more than once by Milton if indeed he wasn't rather a dirty old man? I was always quick to agree and to suggest that he was soiling the innocence of my otherwise untroubled mind, and then I would giggle with him. That was very much our routine. We both enjoyed it enormously.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">A number of people at work with whom I shared Milton's passing mentioned his many eccentricities and traits, thrift being chiefly notable among the the latter. More than one person mentioned Milton's lunch. This usually consisted of whatever canned goods were on sale at the Bartell's Drugstore up the street, and I do mean anything: cold canned beans, yes, but also cold canned pasta, green beans, and at least once a can of cherry pie-filling. Saw that with my own eyes. Milton also brought back even less likely cans from his visits home to his natal place in Virginia. I won't say canned possum, but only because I never personally saw these things, but I am reliably informed that some of that shit was particularly disquieting. His lunches were mentioned pretty consistently by everyone who remembered him. One friend told me that that phrase, "Milton's Lunch," had actually become a family catchphrase for anything rather unsavory being served.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Another indication of the strength with which he held onto a nickel was his aforementioned collecting of any and all printed matter so long as it was free. He was a great one for coupon books, free newspapers (remember those?) free magazines, Xeroxes -- if free. He liked free. Milton amassed the written word as birds feather nests; he took what he found, kept what he chose, clipped and bent all those words to some secret purpose, and mixed in many words of his own. I was never in his home. No idea what that looked like so I won't indulge in speculation beyond saying I assume his living spaces looked very much like his canvas and plastic travelling bags. I'd bet good money. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">He did share one secret with me that I've kept until now. I've debated divulging this information even here, not because I think it either shameful or wrong but simply because I don't know to whom he might otherwise have confided this part of his life and again they may know more than I. Still, I offer what I know in anticipation of someone else actually coming forward with what I would hope to be some tangible part of the record. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Milton spoke regularly about both the Oregon and the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festivals. Not sure how many performances he actually attended, presumably "for lack of purse," but he knew all the personnel past and present and followed seasons closely, particularly the Canadians. He loved Canada for a number of reasons, Shakespeare being just the most obvious. In fact he went North just as often as he could. Many of his best stories had their origin there.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"> I think he was probably retired before Milton told me specifically that he was an amateur photographer. I'd no idea. He seemed almost entirely a man of words, "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart; th' effect doth operate another way." (Cymbeline.) This does not preclude an interest, even a preoccupation with images. Quite the contrary in my experience. All means of making beauty and making it to linger, no? Well, Milton it seems had very specific beauties in mind, and these he found mostly in Canada, first in the classifieds and later online. The reason other than Shakespeare or poutine for his many trips across the Northern border was to visit his beauties.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">I understood his hesitation even if I didn't share it. He was of a generation born before decriminalization, before Stonewall and Gay Liberation and Marriage Equality and all the other advances that have allowed us to live less in fear and more in our own skins. Milton's life was a very quiet one to begin with, and what he himself called his "private life" would remain largely that until the end. I do not believe he was at all bothered that other people should know that he was gay, I just think his life was such that the subject tended not to come up most of the time, with most people. Worth remembering that he brought it up to me. I was glad of the connection to his life and experience and I firmly believe he was glad of a knowing audience.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">And so, his pictures. On the face of it there isn't anything very novel or inspiring about Milton's pictures. He hired good looking young men, hustlers, and had them pose in various stages of dress and undress. He took pictures in parks and amusement arcades and in hotel rooms. He took what I would estimate to be many hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs across a number of decades. When he finally showed me a few pages of this from an album, I was struck by how much of what I saw was surprisingly candid, even casual. There were plenty of obviously posed shots, but there were half again as many of men drinking, smoking, laughing, sitting on a motel chair, or a bed, or a park swing, a bench, on the grass. Some of the pictures had a quality of Nan Goldin's work about them, nothing like the aesthetic sophistication of her work but that same sense of close observation of an intimate but not necessarily erotic or dramatic moment. The most striking thing, other than the repetition of subjects over time, was the sense of familiarity. It actually felt as if the photographer knew these men.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">From what Milton told me, he did, some of them anyway. And that was the most interesting aspect of Milton's hobby, of his secret. He was genuinely curious about these young men and their lives, often spending whole days with them, doing tourist things, visiting local landmarks (free,) having not very expensive meals together, talking. No idea how much if anything of what they told him about themselves was true. Sex work does not necessarily thrive on veracity. Milton's curiosity though seemed to me, and evidently to a number of them, quite genuine. He developed relationships with a number of these men, relationships that may or may not have involved physical intimacy other than that mediated by the camera. When we last talked about this part of Milton's life he lamented that he could not manage to maintain contact with a number of his Northern friends, first during a long illness of his and then during the pandemic. He was quick to express concern about how they were doing. He was not, it is worth noting upset that he hadn't had the chance to see and photograph them again. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">"We've become friends," was the phrase Milton said often and with the greatest satisfaction. I believe he meant it. He came to understand something of addiction, and homelessness, and mental health issues none of which he might have understood had he not made friends with his subjects. That he both objectified and shared history with a number of these men was less a contradiction that a cliche I suppose. Don't doubt it happens all the time. An acquaintance who did sex work in San Francisco years ago once told me how much he genuinely came to care about the men he saw as his "regulars." Makes sense. Fundamentally Milton was kind, offered kindness and had it back, not always but often. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Only once did he show signs of having had a violent encounter. I asked him how it had happened and he told me. It was unusual. Understandably it had frightened him badly and left him deeply depressed. Touchingly, some time later he told me one of his friends from Canada had made a point of getting in touch after he heard what had happened and made a point of telling Milton it would be okay and that he hoped to see him again.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">I decided to tell this part of Milton's story because like his book of essays on Shakespeare, I fear this part of Milton's life will now be lost. It mattered very much to him, whether he told anyone else about it or not. It mattered because he mattered, his life did, does. I've no idea if any of Milton's pictures survive. No idea if his book ever became a book or even enough of a book as to be recognizably a book. Maybe it is still somewhere in his house, in a trunk full of notes, like Pessoa's<u> The Book of Disquiet</u>. Perhaps there is someone as I write organizing Milton's effects, sorting through his papers, arranging his photos, preserving his past. Maybe not. It is entirely possible that we have seen the last of my old friend Milton and all his works and deeds, his art, his mind, his hobbies, his lovers, his friends. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">And that would be a shame and a loss. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Some of the books that die were never really born and no one to mourn them save their authors and sometimes no one left to mourn their authors either. "I'll note you in my book of memory" then. I'll note the loss of all I knew and all I did not, all he never let me read, all he never showed me or told me or confided in me. I can still hope he had kept those confidences elsewhere. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Whatever else, he is not unremembered. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">"Remember thee!</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Aye, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">In this distracted globe."</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">*Hardest lesson of my adult life: e</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: merriweather, georgia, serif;">vil, ignorant fuckers seemingly never sleep let alone die and their fascist fuckery abides. Fight the Right -- 'cause Lord knows they are still trying to erase <i>us</i>.</span></div>
usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-78174419968751527522023-12-06T15:44:00.000-08:002023-12-06T15:53:00.646-08:00A Brief Sermon in Soda Cr*ck*rs<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaTH7reS0gyMnUN-aMLivzgp7kZIqIXNmZF5KYFINbTvzVVBkzIWkLkMY3x7Va3asYuT4DvUwO0fmGu0pScSu1nep8Qh9KHqUqNQla3KSzGNMnH7KH-oc-kMTB8FY3PwfvNoYJH7mc8J3Ag6acC2ioXYYkJw-Jb1WFE3KTk1Qot4kimZGQ0dAgem_BIT4/s3438/crack.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1515" data-original-width="3438" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaTH7reS0gyMnUN-aMLivzgp7kZIqIXNmZF5KYFINbTvzVVBkzIWkLkMY3x7Va3asYuT4DvUwO0fmGu0pScSu1nep8Qh9KHqUqNQla3KSzGNMnH7KH-oc-kMTB8FY3PwfvNoYJH7mc8J3Ag6acC2ioXYYkJw-Jb1WFE3KTk1Qot4kimZGQ0dAgem_BIT4/w400-h176/crack.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">To My Fellow Saltine Americans:</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Aren't we sensitive nowadays?! For the descendants of a mongrelized amalgam of western European peasantry we would seem to be terribly uppish about perceived putdowns nowadays on the Internest. It seems we can't use the C word -- as in Premiere Saltines, Ritz, Club, Krispy, Zesta, In a Biskit, etc. -- anymore. The ever vigilant algorithmic robots may allow hair-raising postings from all sorts of face-ists, kite-nationalists, and gnat-sees, but not one little saltine? Suppositories of the Former Precedent Bump can post seemingly endless crude memes defaming VP Hairpin or Joe Vicodin or former Sprecher des Hauses Fancy Pillates, but I call Virginia born writer Tom Wolf a saltine on the Placenook and the Instagrump and I get threatened with virtual exile for violating Impunity Stanfords? Really?! Has it come to this? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I must tell you, my fellow breadnecks, we have a problem. When no arrangement of asterisks, no clever substitutions and near-rhymes can save my post, there's nothing for it but to delete the thing and resort to other means. Thus my present plea.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It's my day off and so with my late breakfast/early lunch of corn chips, salsa, and leftover refied beans, I decided to watch a new Netflix documentary. Here's what I originally posted with a photo of the subject:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">"He is the American Waugh and the greatest cracker to write politically reactionary modern English since Faulkner. Watching the new Netflix love-letter/doc Radical Wolfe -- Tom, that is, stinging prose, fancy threads. One of the truly ruthless bastards who turns out to have been nice to his wife and pleasant at dinner. Well, bless his heart."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Did you catch it? The saltine that spoiled the dish?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Before it was nuked, the post generated quite a lot of interesting chat about how good the streamer is at this sort of thing, various opinions about the writers mentioned, some of it from folks who had met Wolfe and found him warm and charming, etc.* It was all fairly lighthearted and good natured and literate and nobody, including me was really looking to pick fights or spit in the eye of the late writer, his people, clan, or countrymen. Shame then to see the whole thread burnt to the ground over that one word.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is a larger point to be made, if not in that wisp of a social media post, about America's ongoing love affair with dapper little bullies who invariably punch down rather than up, while insisting the opposite is true. (See for example most of the boys in the current roster of the NYT opinion pages.) </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It's also true that there was meant to be an implied criticism of both the documentary and its subject in what I wrote. I am not subtle. I meant to flick a bit of the gilding off of the lilies so reverently laid at the great man's tomb. I enjoyed the film as I've enjoyed reading Wolfe my whole adult life, with the knowledge that for all his linguistic refinements and modern flamboyance he was an all but wholly reactionary thinker and a fierce advocate of the most repellent kind of cultural and social conservatism. He regularly and consistently used his wit to hurt the well intentioned and the progressive, to argue again diversity, the empowerment of the disenfranchised, and artistic, cultural, and even scientific evolution, and very much in the service of bad ideas, worse politics, and anti-intellectual barbarism. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That's what made him such a favorite, particularly in later life, with so many people who might never otherwise be heard to ever mention a book.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is true that as with Evelyn Waugh, my admiration of Tom Wolfe as a writer (mostly) is tempered by my sincere belief that both gentlemen chose to be on the wrong side of history nearly every time they put pen to paper. I have in my library a whole raft of such writers from Chesterton to Zizek whose work I continue to read and admire and who have nonetheless held opinions I find both offensive and wicked. In Wolfe's case I should think a very convincing case could also be made that as an American prose stylist of the first rank he is</span><span style="font-size: large;"> best remembered in shorter forms and nonfiction. Despite their enormous popularity, I've always felt that his gigantic novels exposed the exhaustion of his sound-effects, adjectival superabundance, and the surprising narrowness of his soul.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The one thing I can guarantee Wolfe would have hated worse than wearing sneakers would have been any attempt to suppress speech on the interwebs or elsewhere. He was an absolutist when it came to the defense of free and unfettered speech. Again, I would not entirely agree, but there is an obvious irony here that I got in trouble with our billionaire media overlords and their mechanical Cerberus for affectionately calling a fellow breadneck a saltine American, for calling a cracker a cracker. Might be the only thing I might ever have to say with which the Great Man may not have taken issue.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(See if I can post this without being banned.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">*I've heard similar anecdotes about the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the equally deceased William F. Buckley. I don't doubt they were all delightful at table and just as adept with expensive flatware as they all were with pickaxe or stiletto. </span></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-56988820017761549572023-12-03T22:59:00.000-08:002023-12-05T12:53:55.786-08:00What there is of<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh07rkx2EPyChDy6XIsdeY-YIPSIBjc3qPxoXYZ9d4Upvnc6Qy6cUQjrQ5fzv1PtqnboGlCsOteo2JgX6HZim2cSEc5iga6-0A4c3K5oLXBRwSwp0yU6_NSoKUs2CBIkoaUlOcyh39H-PaWIYIivG_cAyyZS11VQ0w3ONmZ0P01x3wnXCmSLTm9uKiPHv4/s2016/IMG_7482.heic" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh07rkx2EPyChDy6XIsdeY-YIPSIBjc3qPxoXYZ9d4Upvnc6Qy6cUQjrQ5fzv1PtqnboGlCsOteo2JgX6HZim2cSEc5iga6-0A4c3K5oLXBRwSwp0yU6_NSoKUs2CBIkoaUlOcyh39H-PaWIYIivG_cAyyZS11VQ0w3ONmZ0P01x3wnXCmSLTm9uKiPHv4/w300-h400/IMG_7482.heic" width="300" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"> My mother's house is dark and quiet. The roof of her house is shaded by the trees my father planted fifty years ago. Even in broad day unless you are at a window the room is likely dim. This suits Mum, mostly. She has a sensitivity to light and has learned, it seems, to see in the dark. My brother calls her, "Owl Lady." She turns on the standing lamp to read her paper and her mail. (She also drapes a kerchief over her bosom so as not to get inky from the cheap newsprint.) She balances her checkbook and such on the kitchen table, in her add-on laundry room. Sunniest room in the house. Always smells good too, like fresh towels and clean sheets. At ninety one she doesn't iron everything anymore but the board's right there if she needs it. The quiet in her house was always there, but we never used to hear it. My folks were never people to run a tv or leave the radio on all day. Busy mostly. Things to do. He worked, she worked, they raised children, they went, they did, they were doing every day. There were always other people to be looked after; old people, other people's kids, strangers, friends, and animals to be seen to, and places they had to be or meant to go. Once a week they went out to eat. Every Friday. Usually had fish. Used to order black coffee, then water with lemon. Then that stopped.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The quiet settled on the house for good when my father died. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now widowed, my mother must occupy her own time as best she can. She paints a little. She collages. A week or so ago she "put out Christmas" which means that her little house is now decorated to within an inch of inaccessibility. (If you should go to visit, mind how you go as there will be very few flat surfaces that have not been made abundantly festive. Even without the holiday displays the house is well packed. I joke with her that there is nowhere to fall all the way to the floor.) </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Every day now my mother gets up and makes her breakfast now rather than his. Instead of sorting pills into two little porcelain dishes, she puts her pills into just the one dish the night before. She takes the insulin he gave her for many, many years. She eats her toast, drinks her coffee, and watches the morning's local news (her choices are Pittsburgh or Youngstown, neither of which is actually all that local -- which says something about life in rural America.) Even in her nineties and alone she dresses every day and "puts on her face." She is not to be caught out in her pajamas should anyone come to the door -- so long as no one comes at some unreasonable hour before noon.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And now an assertion I believe I will be allowed as soon as it's made with or without concrete evidence. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I know I am biased, nonetheless I genuinely believe that my mother is now an entirely admirable person. Which is not to say that she used to be a bank-robber or someone who kicked babies. (And now I feel I've rather painted myself into a corner and so I ought to say, no, we neither of us kick babies, dogs, or other people potted geraniums -- and what a dark and dire world in which you must live if anything I've said led you to think we did. But then my fault as I'm the one who may very well have just put that idea in your head. Apologies.) To re-state the obvious, my mother was always a good person and a good mother. I intend only to add that what there is of her now; what is left after illness, loss, survival, resignation, loneliness, love, she now seems to me to be just the essential of what she has always been. My mother has been winnowed but has neither bent nor broken. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Doesn't make her a saint, mind. She still gets irritable, still worries like old bones things she ought not to worry at all, still gets blue, and still snaps now and again. She can still wither your soul with a surprisingly sharp, "Not really" in answer to what may have seemed a perfectly innocent question. There are times now talking to her on the phone when I still can find myself no longer entirely adult. Happens. Say the wrong thing the wrong way and I'm nine. She's still Mum. We both try very hard now not to disappoint, though I know I regularly do, as I always have and inevitably will again, though she'd deny it. We usually laugh quite a lot when we talk, but not always in the nicest way, or at the most harmless things. We can be a bit catty the two of us. We giggle when she's not altogether nice, particularly when she's seen some nasty piece of work at the Walmart or spoken to some mean biddy at the market. Love that. A phrase from my grandmother comes to mind, "piss and vinegar," and yeah, she's sweet, my Mum, but that's still in the mix as well.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For example we both find it funny that when the irascible, the unpleasant, and the mean, the miserable, the stingy, and the gawd-awful-genuinely-bad people die -- and it's never soon enough, is it? -- and before you can say "good riddance" they are instantly beatified by their survivors. Go to any funeral, read any obituary. Doesn't matter that you know better. That wretched woman who used to wallop her kids in the Kmart? Dead? Best. Mother. Ever. Deadbeat Dad? Dead? A Faultless Father. That grandmother you remember shouting racist nonsense at the common-room tv now Sits At the Right Hand of a Loving God. When the teacher who tortured us in Algebra class died she became a "devoted educator." That brute who beat the tar out of anyone in arm's reach, he dies and we are shocked to learn that he was in fact, "a gentle giant" who "loved the Lord." Did he now? It's hilarious. Dark, but funny. We have both, my mother and I, known enough old people to know that old age, in mother's words, just makes one "more so." Whatever you were at forty, sixty to eighty won't fix. "Nobody stops being a jerk," she's told me more than once, "just because they've slowed down." (Only she didn't say "jerk." P&V, remember? When she wants to, that dainty little thing curses like a pirate's parrot.) Neither of my beloved grandmothers was ever less than a handful when they got old. She took good care of both of them by the way. Nobody ever called either an angel, even at their funerals -- and we really loved both of those bossy old ladies, honest. (And no, we didn't always say "bossy.")</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As for Mum, it is not to say that she cannot still worry a thing to tatters when she is of a mind, or that she can't be suspicious, short-tempered, or sharp. But remember what she said about getting old? What she is and has always tried hardest to be is kind and at the very the least never intentionally unkind. She loves who she loves, good and bad, and that's not easily undone, try as anyone might. To be happy is what she intends for us all. To be kind was however very much more to the point. That's what she taught us. Can't control happiness. Can always be kind. And I try. Mostly. Still.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">She has always been stronger than she looks, in party because she's always been well over four feet tall and usually quiet. When she was younger she was rather unkindly dubbed, presumably by one of the crazy sisters, "Stella the Stone," for her personal stoicism. That hurt her feelings I know, obviously disproving the premise right there, though she only told me so years later. Nevertheless, when we were kids it did seem to us that she could and would decide when she would and would not be moved to reaction, unlike my father who raged and wept with equal abandon nearly all his life. Did not want to ride alone with him in a car after you'd misbehaved. That was bad. He was also always the first person to sooth an injury, but there was something distinctly masculine about his public access to emotion. (Still true generally, my fellow men. Ponder that.) My Mum was taught to be a woman of the Eleanor Roosevelt type; if you're going to cry, go to bathroom, lock the door, and turn on the tap so no one can hear you. Probably why she seemed the least sentimental of all the adults in my childhood: always present and practical of necessity, the one to be counted on in any crisis, the one who invariably got the call to help, the one least likely to lose her shit no matter what. She did of course, lose it, but my father lost his with predictable regularity, as did both of their sainted mothers, his especially, whenever the wind blew the wrong way or the mood came upon. I've inherited some of that temper too. Has to be fought. There were also a lot of demonstrably mad people in my mother's life at one time, including both her sisters, and sincerity could sound harsh when it had to be put so often to practical effect; when someone had to be committed or made to see a surgeon and so on. (I've some experience of this now myself and it is frankly impossible. No idea how she managed.) She could love you and make you listen, check yourself in for observation, clean up the mess you'd made, settle what needed putting down. My father it was who obviously felt bad and sympathized. Mum it was who told him "do something or I will," and did. They were a good team. They took good care. (Just as my brother and sister-in-law take care of her now.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Stones of course wear away in the stream and nearly all of my mother's edges have been rounded. She can still make you watch your step now and again, but as I've said, mostly what we do together now is talk and laugh and pass the time whenever I can find the time to do so. She is still funny, self-deprecating, and occasionally forgetful. Still forgiving always but only so far. She remembers some grudges better than what she had for lunch or when we last talked. Still bright as a penny though. And sharp as a tack. All those. She also stubbornly resists being made harmless. She now suffers fools better than she used to, but she is no more fond of them than she ever was. She is also now shameless when it comes to reminding anyone who needs to hear it that at ninety-one she doesn't have time to listen to any nonsense she finds unsupportable, though she is still more tolerant of other people's nonsense than I am likely ever to be. And she freakin' loves that nobody believes she's ninety-one from the look and sound of her. Loves it. She looks great. She's always been cute, always stylish, but new drugs made her lose quite a lot of weight and now she's slim as a girl again. She wishes my Dad had lived to see her so little. She's 'bout as big as a sparrow now.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That makes her adorable, though that's not what I'm on about.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What makes me particularly proud of her just now, what's set me bragging that my Mum is better than she ever was has all to do with her pickin' fights and saying "NO" real loud. Just lately she's made a renewed commitment to a rather gentler, elderly version of kicking' ass and takin' names. Seriously. Stella the Stone is now rather her wrestling name. Immovability her super-power. Will not be budged, this one. Because it seems some bad guys decided to do a bad thing and she was not having it. Not going to have that nonsense. Oh hell, to be honest she called it bullshit and the lady was not wrong.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When I say my mother reads the local newspapers I mean all of it, every inch. Some corporation puts an itty bitty notice the size of a stick of gum in there somewhere on a back classifieds page (they still have those in small town newspapers, the classifieds, which is why there are still some small town newspapers) and this little squib is the only notice of a public meeting, trust me when I tell you, she's reading that. The meeting turns out to be with her Township Supervisors. Soon. Also turns out the corporation is ramming through a new industrial gravel pit just up the road, a gravel pit that threatens to ruin local property-values, wreck the water-table, despoil the air with noise and dust and dirt, bring a a fleet of noisy, road-wrecking trucks up and down the road, and probably make a couple of greedy bastards richer at the expense of everyone else who lives there.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Well, my brother, who reads the paper after her but just as close agrees and the two of them go to that meeting. It is infuriating as all three supervisors insist that their responsibility is to remain "neutral" which is obviously "nonsense" again. The representative from the corporation turns his back on the public and refuses to talk to them. The supervisors do nothing. Everybody goes home mad.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My mother calls both local papers and the nearest news stations trying to get someone interested in this story but no one writes or says a thing. She even plays the "I'm ninety-one" angle -- human interest, see? -- but for once it does no good.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My mother and brother put signs in their yards and tell their neighbors to go to the next meeting. There are people actually organizing the resistance to this insanity, the same brave people who've kept out a "garbage mountain" for years. Next meeting there are more locals. The company lawyer has bodyguards to keep the rednecks from beating him up in the parking lot. My brother notices that those boys are packing heat and they get put out or have to turn in the guns, I forget which, but that had to be good moment. One of the neighbor's has hired his own lawyer now.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Another meeting and some of the local merchants have finally heard about this ugly business and they show up and kick. Now the place is pretty full. Lots of folks get up and raise polite midwestern Hell. Nobody fights the lawyer or his bodyguards. (Everybody but the lawyer finds those boys hilarious.) The tide would seem to have turned. Finally after hours my mother decides to speak. This is not something she has ever done, public speaking. Not her at all. But she does it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">They tell her she needs to walk down front but she tells them straight up: she's ninety one years old and she's been sitting there too long and so that is not going to happen and they can just bring her the microphone and she talk right where she is. People smile and laugh. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">By the time I hear this story she can't remember a damn thing she said. A week nor so later we piece it together from my brother and other sources, plus now it's over she remembers it better. She told those officials and the rest that she was a nice town girl when her new husband moved her out to the middle of nowhere. Just the one corner store then, one gas pump, and fields. Sixty five years she's lived there and she has watched a whole community grow there: families and new businesses and good neighbors. And now they were going to throw all of that away so some greedy men could come in and ruin the land and spoil the air. It was not, is not right. She told them, in her quiet way, no.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And then the corporation quit. They insisted in the paper that it was nothing to do with the locals. But the bastards quit. No gravel pit. The good won.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I'm not saying she did this. Collective action, resistance, and a functioning democracy did this, but even my elderly, adorable little mother knew it doesn't happen unless you show up. And she showed up. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That's what I'm talking about. She always shows up. So long as there's breath in her, she will show up. That's the lesson.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And that's my best gift this year. I'm pretty sure everybody's scheming to get me some new overalls that fit better than the ones I bought myself and that's fine. I will still be surprised. But honestly, my mother's gift to me I happily now share with you. She used to make fudge this time of year and give it to everybody. She made excellent fudge. She'd send some to me in a tin the size of a suitcase, and I shared some of it too because she has never understood portion control or discreet servings. And now she's given me another example I will try to follow and will try to persuade you all to follow too.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Show up. Resist the bullies. Save what is good. Find your voice and raise it when you have to. Make our democracy work. Be kind.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Her name by the way is still Mrs. Gerald Craft, and I call her Mum, or course but you can call her Stella or Mrs. Craft when you meet her and she'd be glad of the company, or you can find her on "the Spacebook" and tell her you're proud of her too, if you are so moved. Feel free to remark that she can't possibly be ninety-one and <i>look that good!</i> That won't do a bit of harm either because it's true. Say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or Happy Chanuka as you choose because I'm pleased to say she not one of those assholes either, as she'd be the first to tell you in just those words and then we can all have a giggle because it really is awfully cute when she curses. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What there is of her now? It's all good.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-33813041675846676042023-11-25T17:12:00.000-08:002023-11-27T09:33:35.731-08:00One Must Have a Name<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4XE5G4b9Uw9uvUicBSi50LbYPUellkc0afvKYg1ovG8jXAlNWsNgSqGWwc4J7GlntqA35-cDfMjmCFnbK2HK6E9eIbs0ABB4WKVuGYML4g_KxhqH84HG_R_Xm1m1pd4dx8X5RbRXWrjmkAF50n04cuL47xrTalUS1_d9jI6Ullgw1Wg-hVm2IsRB7YAY/s777/jan.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="718" data-original-width="777" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4XE5G4b9Uw9uvUicBSi50LbYPUellkc0afvKYg1ovG8jXAlNWsNgSqGWwc4J7GlntqA35-cDfMjmCFnbK2HK6E9eIbs0ABB4WKVuGYML4g_KxhqH84HG_R_Xm1m1pd4dx8X5RbRXWrjmkAF50n04cuL47xrTalUS1_d9jI6Ullgw1Wg-hVm2IsRB7YAY/w400-h370/jan.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><i>“In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity." -- Ambrose Bierce</i></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I have been thinking about names, our names I mean, not just the names of things. (Thanks, Adam.) And I don't mean surnames or names in the old world sense of a Name with a capital N. I can't imagine why anyone still cares if you are in fact an indirect descendent of Wilda, Princess Royal of Knuckleball-Streusal-Top or that your great, great, great grandpa carried the tent-spikes of Confederate Major General Gideon Pillow at the Battle of Little Cat Box. The only thing more boring than ancestry frankly is someone eager to explain it at dinner. No, I'm thinking of names as something altogether more common.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I realized the other day that as the parents of my generation pass away, I may well be the last person to call certain grown people of my long acquaintance by the diminutives under which I first met them. It was very much a fact of my time that all the boys rather lazily named for The Apostles became in my childhood Petey, Jimmy, Johnny, Andy, Taddy, Matty, Tommy, Simon and Phil -- and I don't remember a Simon or a Phil (and be honest, how often have you remembered those Apostles, Simon and Philip, outside of Sunday School?) As a Brad and or Bradley, I was something of an anomaly. All of my little friends had diminutives. True of some of the girls too. I know at least one distinguished professor of French and French Literature who I'll call "Becky" and who recently informed me on social media I may be the last person on earth not to call her either Rebecca, Professor, or "Mom." Could name an equal number of other "girls" I still think of as Katie, Betty, Kathy, or Kimmy. Seems the whole Baby Boom ended pretty consistently in a "Y." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Until I was grown my father affectionately called me "Shorty." My mother and protector who knew me better always called me by my name and only used "Bradley Richard" when I was insufferable -- which was not infrequent. Some years ago, when my father lay dying, he woke one night while I sat beside him in the dark and called to me by my old nickname. I don't remember what I answered, only that I did and that as I did the last light of my childhood guttered and died and somehow that was of course heartbreaking but also fitting and right.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My parents' names, Jerry and Stella, despite having other more famous folk associated with either, will never mean anyone other than Dad and Mum to me, particularly when mentioned as they usually were for better than sixty years in one breath. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Other names are just as clear, and more universally recognizable. Cher. Madonna. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, sometimes Zeppo, and even less frequently Gummo.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>Tammy. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>I'm not really old enough to feel any particular way about the insipid Debbie Reynolds hit song with that name -- "The old hootie owl hootie-hoots to the dove / Tammy, Tammy, Tammy's in love" -- </span><span>and I don't really remember the hit movie or the three sequels (!) with I think -- Sandra Dee, was it? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Not my Tammy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">For me there will only ever be the one. Only Tammy who comes always first to mind is now, has been, and will always be Wynette. (Rest in power, Ms. "Tammy" Virginia Wynette Byrd Chapel Jones Tomlin Richey.) That's my Tammy. In country music they hand out titles like old Italian aristos looking to marry off their useless nephews and unload their decayed palazzos. Everybody not born yesterday is a Country Music "legend" or worse, "royalty" -- which is just silly on the face of it. Real royalty hasn't had hair 'at high in three hundred years and that Charles III never wore nothing near so nice as a Mr. Nudie suit. Now jazz had just the one Duke and the one Count and the first Earl to come to mind will always be Gardner, but Klugh would also be an acceptable answer. Whereas Country Western music must have had at least three Queens and half again as many Mothers, etc. I love them all, them ladies, but Tammy was the One. No one better personified the ache of our Pennsyltucky soundtrack when I was a boy. Beyond the song everybody knows about Standing By your piece-o'-shit-no-account-mean-as-a-wet-rooster-cousin-husband, Tammy sang every song a sad and or sassy gal could need: from I Don't Want to Play House, Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad, to Something to Brag About, to say nothing of her D. I. V. O. R. C. E. And with her sometime husband and the greatest Country singer of all goddamn time, Mr. George "Possum" Jones, Tammy sang every love story from Golden Rings to We're Gonna Hold On (which they sadly very much did not.) Miss the fucked up pair of 'em still.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">The only other Tammy to come to mind will always have the two names, Tammy Faye, like all those other double and triple named belles before and since, like Peggy Sue or Norma Jean or that nice lil' Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon. With her first husband and down-low-friend-of-Dorothy Jim Baker, Tammy Faye was a joke and scandal and the very personification once of greedy, golden-calf worshipping, Evangelical, prosperity gospel, snake oil television vulgarity, and dumb as a goat playing checkers, bless her heart. (That runny mascara! That goosey vibrato! That paint-by-numbers mug! And those horrible, nightmarish puppets!) But then Tammy Faye talked on-air to a gay man with AIDS and was briefly the personification of kindness and sympathy. Remember that? That was confusing. And then after The Fall, it turned out that once Tammy Faye was free from the moral sinkhole of her closeted husband, she actually had a very good heart and a surprisingly wide view. Actually got be very fond of that messy bitch. And when she died? Who knew <i>we</i> would shed a tear over <i>her</i>?! But we did, and not just Jim Jay Bullock but nearly the whole lot of us sentimental old things. Tammy Faye?! Still miss that little confidence drag pixie for Jeebus.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not so much Jan. Remember Jan?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span><span>For some of us that nam</span><span>e doesn't conjure the middle sister on the Brady Bunch, but rather that human haystack of pink wigs and mop-lashes, Jan (Janice Wendell) Crouch, Know her? She and her </span></span><span>Assemblies of Gawd-awful golf-hustle husband Paul ruled the Trinity Broadcast Network. That circus was actually founded by the Bakers, as was Pat Robertson's fief, by the way. And like Robertson, the Crouchs kept their boondoggle going years after the Bakers' PTL empire got sold for parts. One may have to have had a trailer park somewhere in one's family-line to remember the Queen of TBN. Some of us will never entirely shake her. Stuff of nightmares. Jan made Tammy Faye look like Georgia O'Keefe. Picture Dolly Parton drawn by a five year old with neon magic-markers. Jan was Tammy Faye without good gay friends. Jan was Tammy Faye with considerably less <i>ruth</i>. Among the things Jan had that Tammy Faye lacked -- besides a long if creepy marriage -- Jan hilariously</span><span> had an Honorary Doctor of Humane Lettres from the Oral Roberts University, which is just like having a chocolate souffle from a gas-station vending machine. Also unlike Tammy Faye, Jan was about as bright as a pit-bull and far likelier to maul anyone who got too close to the bookkeeping, or her wig budget, or the actual state of the charity missions she flew to on her private plane. Her husband Paul was supposedly the preacher in the family (as the God of the Smug Literalists, as you doubtlessly know, ordains only persons with penises.) Paul dressed like a casino pimp, talked like a carny, and had all the charisma of tax-attorney. It was really that technicolor tornado of false hair, fake boobs, crocodile tears, and blinding white veneers, Jan who kept the ballyhoo going day after grinding day. It was Jan who was under constant threat from demonic forces and liberal journalists. My land, the woman almost died <i>hundreds of times</i>! She sang, she cried, she begged, she gave dolls that looked just like her to mystified African children. I would miss her too if she hadn't been such a poisonous presence on televisions across my youth. The pair's been dead for a long time now, but the mortifying legacy of their brand of charismatic clown show also left lasting scars on the body politic among other horrors. (Their own granddaughter sued them after her rape at TBN was covered up.) The youngest Crouch boy, Matt now runs the considerably reduced empire and hosts with his own shaggy blond, Laurie, but she ain't no Jan, sure enough. Wouldn't even look up if you saw them buying the big jug of Ranch Dressing at the Walmart.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>I wish I could forget Jan Crouch.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>So some names kinda get ruined. Sorry, potentially harmless baby Adolf. You have bad parents. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>Other names, often fictitious, like Ahab, Sherlock, Scout, Jem, Dill, and Atticus aren't so much spoiled as made a bit embarrassing after attaining specific immortality, a bit like calling a new baby Beyonce now, or naming your dog Rin Tin Tin. Really? Who can live up to such a name?! Terrible idea.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>Buddy and Sook are two other such for me -- not spoiled or even so very famous but very specifically characters I can't see anywhere but in the story I read every Christmas time. Well, that's not strictly true. I do have an old friend who calls me "Buddy" like we're in a black and white road picture or riding the rails between Hoovervilles, so maybe there's nothing quite so distinct there, but Sook? None other. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>And rereading that story yet again, I am reminded not just of those names but of the above referenced novel by Truman Capote's great friend, Harper Lee. It would seem that immortality ain't all it ever was nowadays. Much to the shock and chagrin of the generation who once had a "Y" at the ends of their names, my generation, younger readers it seems have little need of fictional little white children to explain racism to them anymore and little or no use for Atticus Finch. (I'll let you all catch your breath.) I fear the day may come when certain aspects of my favorite American Christmas story will soon enough condemn it to a similar fate. If and when it does, those new readers will not be wrong. Don't be upset. I imagine I'll be gone by then. Maybe not. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll go on with it. There will be other books, other authors, other stories as good as these. We needed these. Our children and grandchildren may not.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>It is a loss I already knew something of, having long since abandoned recommending <i>A Dissertation on Roast Pork</i>, by Charles Lamb, or <u>The Merchant of Venice</u>, or <u>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</u>, or <u>Puddin'head Wilson</u>, by Mark Twain. Do I not now think all of these great? I do still and they are. There are however other books, other novels, other essays, other Shakespeare. There will be other readers. Those that know already do, those who are curious still will find these books without me. My endorsement is not required. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>And no one need like everything I like nor love who and what I love. Neither need you. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>Another thing about names, not the ruined ones that haunt us or the ones we hate, but rather the names we keep with us for comfort, for love, our own and others. There is a numeric value to these as well. I don't mean that mystical bollocks beloved now of the Q cult and the Trumpers. Nope. Just... nope. I mean how many now remember the name? My grandmothers, Lella Belle and Minnie Mae, for example. How many still know those names? A dozen people? Fewer than that? More? How many will remember Truman Capote in one hundred year's time? Who will remember me?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span>Matters not a whit. Not to me, honestly, and certainly not tonight. The only numbers, the only names with which I am at this moment concerned are the ones necessary to me, perhaps to us now. Posterity will see to itself. Our only job is not to burn it all down, to love one another, and to read <u>A Christmas Memory</u> again. And when we've finished if you've stayed, tell me your name again, lest I forget.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-76219467274038730272023-10-13T13:37:00.006-07:002023-10-14T09:31:37.704-07:00An Enemy to Civil Liberty: Unicorns<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8WjuPuBI7AIDg-ubU8ihr9u4Y3fW-3fqrs6piGt-7B2Kjd7FW7b4QVzqh1pkxqB86mym3SJk344YU1oCAgVKys0_jz_k8vL6W2ayr3iVYqZQvoCfX4G8GVo9d7ndkVodp6QXBmIzHKO3XOj2bERt22Fqh-1oDkSiUBYn3CFPSA8kARP1xzrb_AESXfU/s1209/horse-drawing-childrens-pegasus-unicorn-children-18683.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1185" data-original-width="1209" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8WjuPuBI7AIDg-ubU8ihr9u4Y3fW-3fqrs6piGt-7B2Kjd7FW7b4QVzqh1pkxqB86mym3SJk344YU1oCAgVKys0_jz_k8vL6W2ayr3iVYqZQvoCfX4G8GVo9d7ndkVodp6QXBmIzHKO3XOj2bERt22Fqh-1oDkSiUBYn3CFPSA8kARP1xzrb_AESXfU/s320/horse-drawing-childrens-pegasus-unicorn-children-18683.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Where I grew up everyone believed in unicorns. The only people who didn't were Soviet Communists who wanted to infiltrate and destroy our American way of life, the bastards. I can honestly say I never heard a single person I knew even suggest that unicorns were not real until I was actually in high school. By that time I'd seen people on Donohue deny the existence of unicorns. I believe it was a taping in a huge auditorium in Dallas or somewhere and I was astonished the disbeliever wasn't lynched there and then. On reflection I'm not at all surprised. The audience was being watched, so they responded the way all unicorn-loving folk do, with acrid condescension and pity at the woeful and fallen state of man and the sure knowledge that <i>someone</i> was never going to get to ride a beautiful horned horse across rainbows in the sky, etc. The average American follower of the unicorn almost never meets disbelief with overt violence, at least when being recorded. Derision, bullying, sarcasm, tears, even screaming rage, but seldom physical violence; unless it's late enough, dark enough, isolated enough, and you know, maybe a very special day in the unicorn calendar.</p><p>That's the thing about the unicorn lovers. They will tell you straight up that they are all about the rainbows, peace, and pretty ponies. They are shocked and horrified that anyone has ever done violence in the name of unicorns, any and all unicorns. Shocked. And horrified. If pressed, most good unicorn lovers will admit that there are folks who follow the wrong unicorns and that they do all sorts of unspeakable things, and the most progressive unicorn folk will insist that any true unicorn believers are fundamentally sweet natured sweetie-pie cutie-patooties and no one should judge unicorns or the genuine believers therein by the behavior of just a few bad horse-apples, as it were. </p><p>And really, it is the unicorn lovers who are oppressed nowadays, if you hadn't noticed. The unicorn haters have an agenda you know. It's Soviet Communism all over again! Corrupting the innocent love of unicorns in our children with their perverted anti-unicorn talk and describing their filthy non-unicorn sex practices in classrooms and those unisex bathrooms and putting secret messages against unicorns in their fancy children's books that they hide in our libraries. </p><p>I don't believe in unicorns myself. Simple as that. Never seen the slightest evidence of 'em. Don't find I need 'em, never really think about 'em, could not care less about unicorns if they played golf or danced on the head of a pin or vomited skittles because unicorns don't exist. You want to believe in unicorns you go right ahead. You do you. I've had my run-ins with the unicorn crowd, and so I generally just avoid the topic altogether. None of my business, really. You "know" unicorns are real because you walk with unicorns, not with sight and so on. Okay. I know that's nonsense, but I don't want to fight. You enjoy your unicorn stories and your unicorn art and your unicorn stickers. Wear your unicorn shirts and crocs and trot on, unmolested by me, to frolic in happy meadows. Would that we could all just get along.</p><p>I personally almost never bring up unicorns. Maybe when I was younger and still finding my way in the world, but now? Trot on. I see your unicorn lawn flag, or your unicorn post on Facebook, I don't have to like it, right? That's how this is supposed to work in a democratic plurality. </p><p>But some of you unicorn people just can't help yourselves, can you? You just have to talk shit about us nonbelievers. Oh, I don't mean the hardcore unicorn fanatics of my rural American childhood. Those unicorn ladies are still out there burning books and takin' names, I know. No, I mean my unicorn loving friends, some of 'em anyway, acquaintances really. Not all. Never all. Some of these just can't help speculating about just what would make some poor, benighted soul like me reject the Truth and Beauty of unicorns. Not the old school, western unicorns you understand -- how vulgar! how stupid! -- no, these more sophisticated, meditative unicorn believers follow altogether different trails; up and down the Himalayas for instance, or into ayahuasca retreats deep in the rain forest. I've just been sucked into a series of these unicorn conversations on social media, all of 'em with terribly smart folk, who just can not frame an argument without a unicorn or address my disbelief without being exactly as smug, pompous, humorless, and narrow as any of the unicorn ladies of my youth. Worse, by way of justification for all this wrong-headed twaddle about we who do not believe in unicorns, these believers only bring it up because (you guessed it) the anti-unicorn people are just so mean to the unicorn people!</p><p>And why am I getting so angry? Doesn't that just prove I need unicorns in my life? Do admit.</p><p>It is just so depressingly familiar, isn't it? </p><p>I did try to crack a few jokes, lighten the mood. I tried to frame the whole thing as a friendly disagreement. I spoke from personal experience. I tried very hard to be respectful of other people's feelings, but I could not convince these otherwise intelligent, thoughtful, indeed creative men (all men, always men) to maybe not be such complete dicks about people who don't believe in unicorns. That was it. That was the whole deal. I wasn't trying to talk anybody out of their unicorns. I wasn't calling anybody names or saying that unicorns are responsible for an unspeakably awful and unrelenting history of violence and oppression and war -- though they absolutely are, the freaks. No. I was just telling these guys to ease off explaining me to myself and others from the enlightened unicorn point of view as if that was not only the best way to do that but the only way, which is just insufferable. I don't believe in unicorns, any color, stripes or no stripes, virginal white or midnight blue, so no, I do not see the point of your insistent invitation to ride yours. It's not there. That's all. Can we talk about something else?!</p><p>This morning I came perilously close to calling a online friend a pompous ass. Instead I deleted the conversation, my part anyway. I mean look at the problem logically for a moment. If he is, nothing I say is going to change that. I actually like the man and respect his work. He seems genuinely kind and he is a very clever fellow, if a bit stiff and occasionally humorless. I've been way worse. I wish he wasn't talking -- we'll say "through his hat" shall we? nicer -- but why go on when it's clear there's nothing to be accomplished beyond hurting one another's feelings?</p><p>That would be the point. </p><p>Fucking unicorns. Ruin everything. </p><p><br /></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-80802344564841066862023-09-09T11:53:00.004-07:002023-09-09T17:17:29.743-07:00To an Online Acquaintance On the Loss of a Difficult Parent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilB7333dyqSwsbfA2oeg3Wr8fhTfQvP4-jRmrKAdrRA7OywALKmugGlyxX-4CbMK37uVUGeGlK44HWsEhmztWnpmRyuFGLfAEaob_kCbKHLX1YEBh8qfzGrAWzkl3vgOZVCH48fvyxAFp1w_P9vN18oRD-8RHj5LdyKb2DUsxPyNkPIzZ7fjmuIi7cid8/s4752/back.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4752" data-original-width="3168" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilB7333dyqSwsbfA2oeg3Wr8fhTfQvP4-jRmrKAdrRA7OywALKmugGlyxX-4CbMK37uVUGeGlK44HWsEhmztWnpmRyuFGLfAEaob_kCbKHLX1YEBh8qfzGrAWzkl3vgOZVCH48fvyxAFp1w_P9vN18oRD-8RHj5LdyKb2DUsxPyNkPIzZ7fjmuIi7cid8/s320/back.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Dear ______,</p><p style="text-align: left;">Have you ever noticed that there are quotes that stick all over the internet like burs? No one seems to know where they come from or who put them up in the first place or why they go on and on like that song by Celine Dion (and that tells you my age if you didn't already know.) Some of these quotes are attributed, or not, or misattributed, but almost always posted without reference to the work from which they were supposedly taken. I don't mean the obvious stuff that Oscar Wilde said or might have said, or Dorothy Parker, the stuff so familiar or famous it doesn't really need a more specific source -- because who is going to check the page number in <i>The Critic as Artis</i>t, etc.? I'm talking about all the stuff that might or might not be Sylvia Plath, or that maybe Anne Tyler wrote somewhere maybe, or that Cicero said in a letter or didn't. Some of these things look good, these feasible quotations. I see them and think, "I could use that." But then who wants to use something that might be a great quote from a great writer's great book -- or not? What if it's just copy from a greeting card that somebody thought would sound better coming from Mark Twain? How embarrassing if I then quote the fake Twain. (I would be discovered and then people would wonder if I'd actually ever read a book and then I would be exposed as the barely literate fraud my brain is happy to remind me I probably am. You don't really need to know how my brain works, but there it is.) </p><p style="text-align: left;">Wherever these quotes start, in actual books or out, they all seem to end up online in the same soft, white, cursive font superimposed on a forest scene, or maybe the ocean or the sandy shore, anyway some tranquil shot of nature -- or stars because everybody loves stars! -- but calm; a notably calm cosmos, calm forest, calm seas, calm sand. That would seem to be the unifying theme, whatever the actual sentiment expressed in the quotation; the point would seem to be -- calm the fuck down -- you will be okay. Breath. Contemplate the infinite. Read just a smidge. Must say I rather resent the insistence that we would all be better off if we just sat down and took a deep breath. I like a good sit as much or more than the next person and since I finally quite smoking I can now occasionally draw a deep breath, but doesn't solve every problem now does it, sitting and breathing? If it did I'd be slim and rich and wouldn't need glasses on top of my glasses and I wouldn't worry about being rebuked and exposed and unloved and dying in a dumpster.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And here I am trying to think of comforting things to say. Apologies. Not as easy as it seems, which is why I want other people's better words. That is very much how I've survived to me present age, by calling on other people's good words. Books, yes? But also just sentences. Sometimes one just wants a sentence or two, no?</p><p style="text-align: left;">Have you seen these floating, seemingly indestructible internet quotes? They're the digital equivalent of sampler-pillows or those calligraphic barn-shingles white women with highlights hang in their kitchens. Big fan of the quotation myself. Better said by better writers seems a legitimate rule of thumb when writing or speaking aloud. Since I was a teenager I've kept commonplace books to record choice bits from my reading. And now there are actual cornucopia of quotation organized by theme and keyword and writer all over the web. I do wish that most of these sites were better vetted, but they exist and they very much didn't when I was young. I still own reference books, and books of quotation in particular, but how wonderful is it that someone has done all this glorious data entry? Still, I am just old-fashioned enough to want to know at least the book if not the page from which the quote was plucked. You're a real writer so I assume this sort of thing bothers you even more than it does me, if in fact you've paid it any mind. I should think writers would prefer that their work be remembered with them; the work as they wrote it, in the context they created, to whatever purpose it was written. Would have thought that was the goal. I suppose there are some writers who probably wouldn't much mind being immortalized as just so much disembodied internet wisdom, so long at least as their names were spelt correctly and they got paid. (What else could a Tony Robbins or now a Dr. Brene Brown hope for after one has bought that second house in France or one's fourth Ski-Doo or whatever one orders online between Hilton seminars? Is there a statue anywhere to the memory of Dale Carnegie? Must look that up. ((Sweet Jesus, there is.))) </p><p style="text-align: left;">Most of the writers I've known tended to be quite proprietary about their work, and rightly so as it is not just their art but their job. (Though nowadays I know very few writers who live exclusively by the pen. Most teach. I assume you do too?)</p><p style="text-align: left;">I was put in mind of this business of internet-attribution when I saw a quote online supposedly from the poet Anne Sexton. I've tried to track it down and may have come close. It could be from her journals, or a letter, but that's as near as I've come. All told, over two or three days I'd have to say I wasted the better part of an hour on this -- not a huge measure of time, but still -- in part though because I was sure I had a physical copy of her journals but then that may not even be a thing and I might have been thinking of a book called <u>A Self Portrait in Letters</u> which I don't have anymore anyway if I ever did. And that is the way memory works or doesn't altogether, isn't it? Mine anyway. Yours may be better.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Just to have it, the sentence which may or may not be a quote is, "It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." It's good, right? Possibly even applicable to your own circumstances. Might be a useful thought for you right now with the loss of your parent. It seems to me that this quote could be Anne Sexton, as it seems to suit the voice I remember, but that could be wishing making the thing so. Whatever the merit of the thought, the problem of attribution rather spoils whatever usefulness it might have in general because not knowing if it is "real."</p><p style="text-align: left;">By which I mean that it takes away the weight of the poet having said it -- if she didn't. Not an entirely happy source for familial wisdom at the best of times was our Anne, but for the power of memory and art to both preserve and distort our personal histories, who better really? I assume you're acquainted with the poet, possibly, probably better than I, so I won't explain other than to suggest that the very label of a "confessional poet" brings an expectation of both great burdens and self-assertion, doesn't it? How I remember them anyway, all those gloomier granddaughters and sons of Whitman.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Typically I came across the Sexton "quote" when I went hunting for something entirely other. My specific intent was to offer an appropriate quote by way of consolation on your announcement of your father's death. I can't now think for what it was I went looking when I was distracted by the possibly fictitious Sexton quote. I'm going to guess that I was probably hunting for some consolation offered by Dr. Johnson on the loss of a parent. Don't know. Doctor Johnson is rather my go-to. Mightn't have been applicable even if I'd found whatever it was. Turns out, there is considerably more in Johnson et al on the death of a child than a parent. Odd, that. Common as the death of a child sadly once was and may still be some places, most people outlive their parents, right? One would think there'd be all sorts of literary consolation online for that. I of course can't know all the particulars of your loss, and I wouldn't think to ask you for more detail than that provided in your original post. Suffice it to say that having described your relationship as difficult and the news of his death as something less than a shock, most of the usual things may not have been quite right. So I thought at the time. Still. Not my place to suggest how you were meant to feel and or mark the event, of course. Not as if you were soliciting comment come to that. I just wanted something to say better than anything I could think to say, you know? </p><p style="text-align: left;">That's the thing about condolence, form very much follows function, tradition, convention. So let me say again here that I am sorry for your loss, complicated as that may be and predictable as that response obviously is. Still a loss, whatever the particulars. Maybe that's the point -- if I'm going to get to one. That would seem to me to be the one safe thing to assume given the circumstances. From what you wrote you know that the loss isn't all to do with the man's death, and yet the finality of that would seem to require acknowledgement. That's where the stock phrases of grief and remembrance serve us best, in reducing everything to basics. Mark, a man has died. I offer his son my hand.</p><p style="text-align: left;">There's more good in that than in most things we say without thinking. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Why say more? Why indeed, other than the custom of talking to those in mourning as one would the ill? The thought with either presumably being that we might offer what? Company? A bit of distraction from the pain? Some comfort? "I should be sorry to think that what engrosses the attention of my friend, should have no part of mine," says Johnson. The impulse is good. I don't really know you for instance though we are friends on social media, and yet I want to offer some consolation for your loss. I lost my own father a few years ago. Still feels not so far from me. I don't equate the two, your loss and mine, anymore than I could or would want to compare our respective fathers. I think my father's death made me something other than I was before. Perhaps the death of a parent always does? That's more an assumption than an assertion. Feels true.</p><p style="text-align: left;">So other than the custom, the habit of it, why console the stranger? What solace for those with whom we are little more than acquainted? Perhaps this question can distract you for a bit. No harm in that now. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Johnson describes himself after the death of his wife as, "broken off from mankind." Seems an obvious thing to say and the usual thing to be in the circumstance, at least once he's said it for me (power of quotation, mister.) But death doesn't just separate us from the person who has died, does it? That may already have happened one way and another well before that person died. I have lost friends after I lost touch, alas. Happens. Relatives I knew and never felt I knew really or well also die. Where I'm from one sends flowers if one isn't to attend the services. Far enough from my immediate family and I will still send a card. One that happens more and more as I age is the death of the parents of my friends. This seems, at least when it reaches me to most often be addressed online. This has the advantage of being more immediate and more diffuse, particularly as geography is eliminated as a barrier to condolence. Don't always know quite what to do in this wider and yet strangely more intimate world, but this seems right, doesn't it? Feels strange though just adding an emoji on a post when the post is about death, doesn't it? May depend on how one was raised I suppose. For instance, we sit with the body. Not everyone does, as I was at some point shocked to learn. Your family, your traditions may be different. Makes it harder to judge the right thing at this new distance/familiarity. One may obviously still be "broken off from mankind" by a death, but are we not all connected in ways now that Johnson never foresaw? Tap a few keys and "post" and the world floods in with all the consolation -- and banality -- that is implied in public mourning in a virtual space. I know that I took it all in gratefully. Doesn't mean you should or need to, just my experience.</p><p style="text-align: left;">When my father died, I must tell you I found the banalities just as welcome as the more thoughtful responses. How expressed doesn't necessarily indicate how things were felt, or received. (I'm a redneck. Even being gay and literate can only do but so much to overcome generations of emotional embarrassment. Rage. We are allowed rage. Otherwise taciturnity is still one of our very few self-assessed virtues. That and misdirected class resentments, Jell-O salads, and country music would seem to be our only real contributions to the cultural resources of the Republic. Sorry about that.) I was glad to hear from those old friends who may have known my father, but I was likewise glad of all the people who never met the man, or me come to that, at least in person, who also expressed their sympathy for my loss. Odd, isn't it? Couldn't hear it enough somehow. Not something I knew until then, about myself I mean.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I spoke at my father's funeral. Got through that. People were unwaveringly kind. Posting about his death online was different though. To some extent I might have done so without thinking. Never would have predicted this, but I do spend a surprisingly large part of my life online. To do with work and selling books, much of it, but by no means all. It's meant for instance staying in touch with my high school boyfriend. Kept up with former coworkers. I've even gotten to know, at least a little better, writers I admire like yourself. That last has been particularly unexpected. I do meet authors at the bookstore where I work. I've even had opportunities to interact with particular literary heroes of mine. I should never have thought to call most of them "friends" but then that became a legitimate designation on social media and who am I to not be flattered by the idea of that? Was I a friend to Howard Cruse? I am now friends with Hilma Wolitzer?! Indeed, I like to think I genuinely am. Would not have made sense, in a way, to not say something to my friends when my Dad died. Likewise wouldn't seem right for people not to have taken note. As I said, more did than I'd ever have thought and it meant something to me at the time -- and more since.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That's the surprise. Whatever I remember of my father is my business, as Anne Sexton may or may not have suggested already. Good and bad, the man I knew is who I couldn't forget even if I wanted to. Weirdly, I find I can now put things out of mind in a way I haven't since I was a child. At sixty, I am now nearly as easy to distract as I was at six. One of the great virtues of having the habit and presence of books. Not the same thing as just reading. Nearly everyone nowadays reads, even if it's just text messages on a phone. Books as physical objects on the other hand have the same solidity as food, flesh, persons, pets. My hand can find a book nearly everywhere I am likely to be (some might call this hoarding.) I find that books can be put in the way of so much: the past, time, hurt, hopes, longing. Books give me somewhere to stand against what Churchill dubbed, "the black dog." Gives me a place to stand still. As a child books took me up and out into the world; down the Mississippi, out to the moon, back in time to the court of Louis XIII. Now I find I can rest on them, sometimes hide in them. Books take me not out of myself but rather to places of greater safety, clearer thought, rest. The act of reading -- not the consequence -- is however isolating. I am usually content so. But in grief? Smack dab in it? I don't remember if I ever finished the book I was reading when my father died, Stendhal's The Red and the Black-- which was fine as I'd read it before. The point though was that rather than books at that moment I needed some sense of other people -- living, breathing, actual people 'round me, if only virtually. Ironic that.</p><p style="text-align: left;">You may not have found this to be so, but I wanted the sight and sound of sympathy around me, but perhaps not always actual people, if that makes sense. I wanted community, but also control of my environment and to not wear shoes, and not to talk, as I remember. Having people say kind things online felt right to me and just enough. The more folks the better, which is not something I ever say otherwise. I went up and down those comments. I checked in. I liked everything. Because I needn't look unless and until I wanted to and as I didn't really want to do anything else, I think I looked more than I might have done. No one thought me rude for walking away, everyone seemed glad to hear from me. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I haven't looked at any of that in years. I shouldn't think I ever will again. Knowing however that it is there, that I was given that sympathy when I asked has made me feel better ever since, about people generally and or about the world, frankly. I can't say that I will ever reconcile with everything my father was, or with my hometown, my past. (Do people do that? Is that an option?) I've heard so many people, overt Christians mostly, who make a point if not a show of forgiveness, often in circumstances far worse than any I experienced: people forgiving the murderers of their loved ones, forgiving bombers, and war criminals, belligerents, the obviously unforgiveable. I don't pretend to understand that process or the point of it. I see no evidence that carrying resentments or hurt or hate harms the people it ought. Maybe it only negatively effects people for whom it is largely alien anyway, who have had so little experience of antagonism, violence, and the arbitrary as to have built up no immunity, or so much as to to have learned long since to lay down what can't be carried. I am not such a one. Meanwhile we have seen too many hateful bastards go contentedly down to die in the sincere conviction of heaven that we would, I think, have to be fools to imagine a universe anything but indifferent to the fate of humans. But don't let let me presume too much. You may feel differently. Perhaps my somewhat jaundiced view of universal justice is why a uniform expression of sympathy on the loss of my father meant all the more to me. As you probably experienced yourself online, people were genuinely kind, I found. I wish you something like and the comfort of that hereafter, whoever the man who occasioned it. </p><p style="text-align: left;">One other thought before I stop shuffling along here, uninvited if only remotely or metaphorically beside you. The usual complaint is that death has cut off the last possibility of dialogue, but that's nonsense, isn't it? Since his death I have engaged more sincerely with my idea of my father than I might ever have managed were he still alive. I know that. My father was a friendly fellow but typically shy of certain conversations. The opportunity truthfully has been made less complicated by the now finite nature of the information available to me. The man was who he was and what I know of him now I know. Actually I was pretty lucky in my father -- not always perhaps, but in the end. Your experience being different, I have tried to avoid making too much of that here. Can't really avoid mentioning it now if just to say it is unimportant to my point. In my life, as I would hope in yours, I am lucky to know love and to have known it even when its absence was all I could feel at the time. I have a better standard by which to judge now, having found someone good with whom to share my life, as my father did, come to that. Even if I had never found my husband, I like to think having found my friends and my community and my family of choice I am in a better place -- to use a phrase usually I find insufferable in talking of the dead. (Nowhere is not a place by definition, no?) Life has shown me love in greater variety than I ever anticipated as a child, as a son. Nothing I did, I don't think, but ask. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Also? Perhaps only old men can forgive their old men, if we want or need to. Doesn't mean you need to of course. I only say I did whether I intended to, or needed to, myself. Perhaps pardon is a better word here, less bedraggled by religion and popular psychology. Like forgiveness it is something asked for and given, but with I think less expectation of admiration for the exercise of it. Think of what we pardon most days -- wind. What could be less invested with moral pretention?! So here's another of those floating quotes I mentioned at the start. I've seen it attributed online to both Shakespeare and St. Francis and I've no idea if it's either or neither: </p><p style="text-align: left;">"It is in pardoning that we are pardoned."</p><p style="text-align: left;">Pretty, i'n't it? Again it may be perfect nonsense, and not at all to the point in your case. It appeals to me really because it suggests so little effort, yes? Forgiveness seems to me a very weighty business full of theology and all sorts of oily blessings. Beg pardon sounds more me -- common as dirt but fundamentally decent. That's at the flat and steady how I hope I am. That's the process I've undertaken with my father's memory and much of it funny when not embarrassing or rude and even when it is. Pardon. All there is to be hoped I suspect other than or as a consequence of love. The thing to be asked if we haven't understood. Pardon? </p><p style="text-align: left;">What I ask of you now if I've gone on too long and said too little. May he rest in peace, your father. If I offend, I ask also pardon of his shade, and I remain at whatever distance</p><p style="text-align: left;">Your friend, </p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">B</p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-64105490337091735232023-08-13T12:42:00.015-07:002023-09-09T15:46:30.316-07:00Cockstoppers<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcjXqnssDlSzOZ-wVKAwdOya7tofpHQFXyyUI0FoK7a-oe7guj7wjs3FbEgBqG6ni3KkiEmMNhdzsuVykbSKlcY64WnoT0Xfxbm5EhUM4TeePCYyMME1BPqwIVpjqXliqS95QqwCOTaPlKuEnqtHfdTFoBuU8DicAXrIl-7OeZdALLSJd026J_QGtr914/s984/FLAN.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="984" data-original-width="780" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcjXqnssDlSzOZ-wVKAwdOya7tofpHQFXyyUI0FoK7a-oe7guj7wjs3FbEgBqG6ni3KkiEmMNhdzsuVykbSKlcY64WnoT0Xfxbm5EhUM4TeePCYyMME1BPqwIVpjqXliqS95QqwCOTaPlKuEnqtHfdTFoBuU8DicAXrIl-7OeZdALLSJd026J_QGtr914/w318-h400/FLAN.jpg" width="318" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />I hesitate to admit this, but here goes: I've never had a great flan. Wait! Don't hate me, I like flan okay. Flan is fine. Big fan of the custard in almost any form. Creme brulee all the way! Totally a pudding kind of fellow -- as might be obvious should we meet. I do not turn down a flan when offered. I have in fact ordered flan for my dessert when dining out, though only because it was the best of not great options and for some reason I needed a sweet so badly I wasn't willing to wait until I got home. (Guess a free mint just wasn't going to do it for me, okay?) And that flan? The last one I remember ordering in a fancy restaurant? Like all the others that flan was just... fine?<p></p><p>Now if flan is part of your cultural heritage -- just as Seven-Up Jell-O salad is part of mine -- then presumably you are appropriately outraged to find white-trash like me trashing flan, however mildly I may be doing so (but then isn't that kind of appropriate?) Seriously though, who hates a custard? That being my point. I don't hate flan. Flan is fine. I am largely indifferent to it as a thing mostly other people eat. If this gives you a sense of mission and you are now determined to convince me of my error, you go right ahead and I promise I will happily try any flan you bring me, but don't feel obliged. It's no one's job to make me love creme caramel, or Heartstopper.</p><p>Actually, given a choice between the two I would have to say, flan it is. </p><p>Both are <i>so</i> sweet, you know? </p><p>I don't know the story of flan. Part of a rich cultural history of eggy custards no doubt. I would probably read that book. However not being at all invested in flan as an absolute good or anything, I can't say I am much moved to learn more. Go with God, little custard. </p><p>On the other hand, the story of the creation of <u>Heartstopper</u> is very good. If you don't know it, in brief, the author Alice Oseman started drawing and writing and posting her stuff on the internet as a teenager. She got her first publishing deal at 17. The central characters in <u>Heartstopper</u>, Charlie and Nick, started as supporting players and an established couple in her debut book <u>Solitaire</u>. In 2018 she decided to revisit them and tell the start of their romance. So <u>Heartstopper</u> the graphic series, and the eventual and inevitable resulting book was born. The graphic novel is now up to four volumes with a fifth coming soon. She's promised at least six volumes in all. The Netflix adaptation premiered in 2022 and the second season dropped just recently. Huge hit both as a television series and an ongoing young adult graphic novel. Oseman's commercial and artistic success is both heartwarming -- she seems a lovely person -- and quite inspiring. I should think she is a perfect example to any young artist intent on making a new way in the world. Good for her, I say and mean it.</p><p>Just yesterday I was fascinated to read that now at age twenty eight, Oseman describes herself as an "aromantic asexual," a phrase I had not encountered before, at least not that first part. Had to look it up. New to me, if perfectly obvious from the words themselves once my rheumy old eyes adjusted. Those initial As do all the heavy lifting. Not and not. Got it. But, it is curious isn't it that someone whose career is founded on what has justifiably been classified as Romance should now self-identify as being even less interested in romance with a little r than I am in the history of flan. It's like learning that Anna Sewell was deathly afraid of horses, or that Lee Child always wanted to write a Broadway musical comedy, or that Leigh Bardugo is strict Church of God, or that the author of <u>Pride and Prejudice</u> was secretly -- gasp -- French. What now?</p><p>And then it isn't confusing at all. </p><p>I became aware of <u>Heartstopper</u> around about Volume 4, which I think just predates the debut of the Netflix series by about three months. Volume 4 and the three proceeding showed up <i>en force</i> in the bookstore in January, 2022, in other words after Christmas and not when one would normally see things coming onto the sales-floor by the cartload. The new year is actually when returns pick up and more usually when carts of unsold stock go off the floor and back to publishers. The only things one can count on in the bookstore come January are flu and returns. January is kinda sad. But then <u>Heartstopper</u> exploded. I must have been vaguely aware of the popularity of the earlier books, but Volume 4 was a whole <i>thing</i>. That's when the series was everywhere. We had so much of it it had to go into overstock displays. Even ten years ago that wouldn't be such a big deal, but now? Oprah could rave and Jesus could descend from the Right Hand of God to endorse a book and we would still order twenty copies. (It is a smaller world altogether, books, alas.) So what the hell was this thing? I took Volume 1 to lunch and finished the next three that night. So now I knew.</p><p>The story is charming and sweet. Boy meets boy. It is also roughly that complicated. The average Beatrix Potter plot is more fraught. I was immediately reminded of yaoi manga, a sub-genre to which I was introduced thirty years ago (?!) by a friend and manga enthusiast. If you don't know this stuff in it's most popular and innocent form, think girlishly drawn boy meets girlishly drawn boy and well, hearts and flowers ensue. There is evidently a more sexually explicit version of yaoi but I never saw any of that at the time. What I saw was basically Sailor Moon in a pants-role wooing some other saucer-eyed innocent also using masculine pronouns and also dressed like NSYNC. The audience for these little "gay" love stories was, I was made to understand, largely pre-adolescent girls. Made a kind of sense. I am old enough to remember when pre-adolescent girls of my acquaintance actually preferred staring at photos of twelve year old Donny Osmond and or Tony DeFranco to the photos of more mature stars like David Cassidy -- the little fools. Years later yet another friend explained that gay romances of the yaoi type are safer for their young, female readers than more realistic depictions of heterosexual courtship. I accepted this explanation and offer it here as, well, flan.</p><p>My response to the yaoi then was, as you've probably guessed, not great. In truth I found the art both weirdly disturbing and yet bland, and the stories infantilizing and frankly repellant. This is how a generation of little girls -- and presumably a few interested boys -- were being taught to see gays?! As sexless dolls in heteronormative narratives straight out of bubblegum pop lyrics?! I guess it was progress of a kind that we were... harmless? Yeah, no. As a gay man who has now aged into harmlessness, I understand it's power. No one's called me "faggot" in a longish time. Mostly what I get now is "Grandpa" or "sir" -- just not in a hot way. I'm mostly okay with this. Takes off some of the pressure and fear I've otherwise lived under all my gay damned days. But, again, no. People didn't organize, and march, and die, and fight for generations just so we could collectively become Ken dolls for little girls afraid of smells.</p><p>So on behalf of the Active Gays as well as the Queers Emeritus may I just say oh, fuck off, kids.</p><p><i>Now how mean was that?!</i></p><p>Can you imagine? Language like that with the innocent children. And the answer is of course, fuck yeah, because this isn't about the innocent children. Everything needn't be. Stunning thought. The children would seem to have all sorts looking after them nowadays and isn't that wonderful and making a better world as we speak and yes, it is. The needs of the little ones are frankly being met at an unprecedented volume seemingly everywhere other than in places already abandoned by the Gods and civilization like Alabama and the ever more benighted Florida. And yes, King Goober and Queen Karen are very much ablaze and afoot as far North as Ohio and Michigan, shutting down drag story hours and burning books and libraries to the ground and yes, it is all horrifying and bad news for the vulnerable wee ones specially, but this is not about that, please. Please. Just this once, and then I swear we can all get back to prioritizing the needs of all the little queer babies, can we spare a moment's sympathy for the adult male cocksuckers of the world being told how much we should love Heartstopper? </p><p>I know, I know. "Okay, boomer." Totally justified, young person. I mean, what are <i>you</i> doing here anyway? Clearly you were meant to be at a different meeting somewhere else in the building. You are of course welcome to stay for coffee and cookies, but here at the Irascible Queer Codgers Support Group you will sadly find that that is probably decaf coffee and those "cookies" are dietetic, sugar-free and genuinely worse even than the coffee. And quick warning: this is not an entirely safe space. Cool with your pronouns and however you identify, actually thrilled by your intellectual curiosity and sophistication, and deeply sorry about burning the planet down before you even got a turn, but this is the part where I am unkind to the sexless teen romance, subgenre gay.</p><p>You know who have actually been the most vocal advocates of the TV Heartstopper, at least in my admittedly aging social-media circles? Call them lesbians of a certain age. Curious, that. Would seem to have all but uniformly embraced the whole baby-fags-in-hesitant-love-thang. I do not pretend to understand this, though one lady watcher not in the actual sisterhood (and who signs up for a full membership these days?) did offer an explanation all to do with what she insisted was a very female desire for romance and comforting visions free of the more usual toxic masculinity of traditional straight stuff. I accept that without comment. Sounds about right, at least for a generation other than the actual kids. Pretty good flan as flan goes. Nothing to do with me though.</p><p>Meanwhile back at the Crisco sling, a variety of voices will insist that even we old queens should just be wet with gratitude to have these romantic stories we did not get in our own youth. I cannot tell you the number of comments along these very lines in every social media post and or journalistic profile or review that I've read. So many old darlings just tickled to pieces by all these pretty children falling ever-so innocently in lurv, why there mustn't be a dry embroidered handkerchief in our reticules, I declare. Men my age or older, mind. It is true that all we got by way of the gay when we were little was pretty much Charles Nelson Reilly's giggle and a promising length of tan thigh from Ron Ely as TV's Tarzan. And yes, it might have been very nice indeed -- then. </p><p>I do not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of the Puppy Bowl or the Super Bowl, in neither of which have I invested so much as five minutes. But then neither has anything to do with me, if you follow. Not a dog owner. Don't follow football. As unbelievable as it might seem now, I was once a teenaged boy and what is more, I was even then queer as a three dollar bill. I remember what that felt like, what boys felt like, though in every sense it has been years. My experience need not be entirely representative to be both authentic and typical. I don't need all of the stories to be my story, and I don't need my story told back to me verbatim in order to have a good time in front of the TV. Generally I like all sorts of TV fiction, save probably Housewives franchises and scary fireman shows (too fake and too real, respectively.) The beloved husband on the other hand loves a good, grim foreign language drama, a western, or a police procedural, and won't watch anything with dragons or superheroes. When it comes to a gay love story, we are forty years in on ours. Stay tuned. We're obviously into this kind of thing. I care. He cares. This is my love story, ours, my culture, our lives.</p><p>I think the boys in Heartstopper have their first kiss roughly episode sixty-three. Felt like that anyway. Pretty sure that in this narrative neither of them has ever had an erection let alone a wet-dream, neither has ever gotten to second base with a boy, masturbated, or touched their own or anyone else's butthole ever -- <i>eeewww, gross, what is wrong with you?!</i> Pretty sure in this story their sweat smells like strawberry shortcake, their bedrooms smell like meadow flowers. Their sheets are as fresh as the first day their beds were changed. The only thing they do with their athletic socks is wear them in athletic montages without getting them dirty but washing them anyway with environmentally friendly detergent, then dry and fold them carefully, finally returning them in orderly rows to their sock drawers. I was frankly amazed that after that one chaste kiss at least one of them didn't say "Golly!" in a heart-shaped thought-balloon. This is of course exactly as I remember it being when I was sixteen. Exactly.</p><p>What this actually is is flan. As storytelling, as romance, this isn't Jane Austen, this is baby's first gay boardbook. (When a boy likes another boy they kiss. The end.) The obstacles to love in Austen were real, adult, even when her heroines aren't entirely. Occasionally the consequences are potentially dire, not just sad but frightening. The emotions in a Jane Austen novel arise from character and circumstance, yes, but those circumstances include specifically the restrictions of time, sex, class, and convention, and all of that is every bit as important and interesting to the writer and hence her reader as the actual love story. Austen's prose is the only tidy thing about an Austen novel. Life is not safe. Love is not sanitary and romantic love is not even altogether sane. Escape? Try the Nature Channel. They love that stuff. But Jane Austen writes toward something, not away from it. That's how she earns those happy endings. (Fan, obviously, though I had to be middle-aged before I felt I really got it.)</p><p>Obviously not every story, not every romance has to be Jane Austen. I can hear someone pointing out that it simply isn't fair to judge every romance by the standard of <u>Pride and Prejudice</u>. Too true. I bring her up only because the hacks and the grubbers and cosplay Austenites just love making the old girl grandmother of a pulp genre she never read or ever saw the like of. It's like sideshow cooch-dancers talking about their sisters in the Bolshoi like they're family. But even by the standards of a Hallmark movie, this Heartstopper business is remarkably bland stuff. As flan goes? not even sauced much. Frankly the only thing heart-stopping in this romance is the audacity in pretending this is about teenaged boys at all, let alone gay boys.</p><p>These are not realistic teenaged boys. Boys stink. Boys have hard-ons from pushing a vibrating lawnmower or riding the bus. Or so at least was my experience. Admittedly there are different boys. But these boys? The Heartstopper boys? Never met, saw, or heard of any like them outside of these comic books and the TV version. Also? This is not how gay works or ever did. Again, the world moves on, but every gay boy I've ever met, with or without a penis, however gendered otherwise, if they say "gay" they do not mean they like boys the way ten year old girls like ponies. Nope. This is just yaoi with plummy British accents for a preteen audience that has weirdly expanded to include straight women in their thirties, elderly lesbians, and old queens nostalgic for a love in the locker-room that never happened and with a boy who never talked to them in a time and place that never was. This is a fairy tale, not a fairy story. This is an aromantic asexual English girl's version, frankly, of my life.</p><p>And this, me complaining about this thing other people like so much, this is not helping, is it? I'm complaining about flan again, aren't I? I think we've established already that I don't have to eat it, now do I?</p><p>Here's what I want you to picture though, before you dismiss me altogether as just another grouchy, dirty-minded old coot. (I mean I guess I kind of am, and proud of it still, but I like to think I'm just ever so much more.) Picture a menu with nothing but flan. Better, picture shelves of flan, whole aisles of flan. Picture flan stretching across the whole dining and media landscape and replacing not just other custards or desserts but meat and potatoes and green salads and tacos and fillet meuniere and everything else you're used to or might enjoy occasionally eating. Flan to the left of me, flan to the right -- what? You don't like flan?! Who doesn't like flan? Have you tried this flan? This flan is gorgeous. Trust us, this is excellent flan. Top quality ingredients -- look at these sunny yolks in these eggs! Look at this pure caramel!!! Try the flan. No, seriously, EAT THE FUCKING FLAN.</p><p>That's what it feels like now. So, so much flan.</p><p> I know I was spoiled by the Golden Age of gay publishing when there were more than two major publishers in the whole world and mainstream houses had gay editors and imprints, and there were gay publishers, and there were gay bookstores, and movie houses showing independent gay cinema and gay theater companies and, yes, print porn. All gone. To everything there is a season, right? Fine. Much of what has come since has frankly been better than so much of what we happily, greedily consumed before. Feels like the ideas are bigger now, the definitions more expansive, and even with all the renewed hate in America today, the world is in fact a better, safer place for a lot of us. But our literature? Cinema? Television? Now? Try the flan.</p><p>A respected, award winning gay author of my acquaintance and generation was told by his publisher that if he wanted to see print again as a novelist he needed to write a YA. His experience I know is not unique. An actor I sort of know still lives in Los Angeles. He's considerably younger than me (and gorgeous) and also so far as I know always out and proud since forever. He was told he was too old for gay roles now not because my people are/have always been nasty about crows' feet, but because the only gay stories getting made now are about teenagers and while he could maybe still play thirty, he definitely couldn't play sixteen anymore. If he knew the right people he could maybe play a background gay, maybe a daddy, in that one gay feature we still get a year. You know the one. Funny guy in his thirties falls hard for someone, you know, butcher and prettier. The Courtship of the Prettier Top. Classic. But there are now only just so many gays even in that movie, honey, even in Village street scene or at a party on Fire Island. Sorry. Abs we got. Youth!</p><p>Otherwise it's <u>Red, White & Royal Blue</u>! What is that you say? Well, you know it's YA because no Oxford commas but also because the President's son? He knocks an actual Prince into a cake-table or something and then harmless, naughty hilarity and love 'em cuddles ensue. (Aren't they dreamy?!) Now streaming on Amazon Prime! (I lasted roughly fifteen minutes. The script and the acting made me miss the emotional subtlety and wit of 90s Warner Brothers cartoons like Animaiacs and Freakazoid.)</p><p>Or it's <u>Boyfriend Material</u>, when the son of famous rock stars has to find a respectable boyfriend to help clean up the family's image after dad gets out of rehab or something like that. Soon to be a limited series!</p><p>Or it's <u>Back Me Up</u> where a teenaged computer whiz and game designer sees his avatar kissing the perfect boy right there in the street! For real! Dude!</p><p>Maybe it's <u>Stars in His Eyes</u> about two boys who meet at Space Camp, or the one where the boys meet one hot summer on the Oregon coast and nothing really bad happens, or on a double-decker bus and nothing really bad happens, or across dimensions and nothing otherwise remotely interesting happens, or whatever -- and how many of these did I just make up? </p><p>Because other than a few venerable surviving elders of the Purple Quill generation, that's what gay books look like now. Romance. Pap. Flan. </p><p>Do we really need more stories about sixty year old gay men? You bet your sweet ass we do. As I said though, I don't need every gay story to be mine. I don't. I do need more stories to be more interesting than all this treacly nonsense. Shit, they can even be romances, if not Romances with little hearts where the Os go. Two boys fall in love? Fine. Maybe one of them has to work in a nursing home to pay for community college and maybe his boyfriend is trying to unionize a Starbucks? How about that? Maybe one of the boys is trans -- but please Jesus don't stop there. That's not a plot, children, that's a caption. Who is is he? Does he have a job? Does he maybe work in a bookstore? Is his father helping with insurance because our protagonist can't afford to transition without financial help? Does his romantic partner maybe try to earn a living with his art but fall back on drugs as both an addiction issue and an economic necessity? </p><p>What? That all sounds too real? Well, that's probably because I based these scenarios on young people I happen to know. But that doesn't sound funny? Aren't rom-coms supposed to be funny? Bitch, did I say these people weren't? See, that's part of the problem, the assumption that romance, let alone comedy requires a certain level of economic security. You know who ain't funny? Besides rich, male comedians? Middle class, boughie boys who play lacrosse, and nearly all the children of privilege and the direct beneficiaries of capitalism, and the kind of gays who talk more about their sweaters and their TikToks than their comrades, and the royal fucking families of anywhere after 1917. Not funny. Not romantic. Not sexy. (The only reason Prince Harry is still fuckable? Guess, and it's not his receding ginger curls, you shallow queens.) </p><p>You know what is romantic? Fucking. Fucking is romantic, fun, more than a little funny or you are definitely not doing it right. But fine. Actual sticky, sweaty, messy, smelly sex is too much or too hard to do even on a billion dollar streaming platform in 2023? Remember how many actual battles are depicted in drama from the Greeks right up through Shakespeare? Yeah, that. Doesn't mean we don't get to hear about them or see what went on before and after. And sex, in case anyone is still confused about this, is or ought to be both healthier and more interesting to sane people than war. Romance is anticipation and fulfillment and conflict and obstacles and who the hell am I to have to explain this to supposedly grown people? (I know nobody asked me to.) Yeah, I would be genuinely interested in a story about an aromatic asexual relationship, gay, straight, whatever. Honestly that could be fascinating. Maybe write that someday.</p><p>Also? Comedy is not about comfort, but it doesn't have to be about shame or humiliation either. Falling in love is fucking funny. Have you done it? Did it go well? You know what's even better than Keaton or Chaplin in confrontation with want or the elements or the cops? Well, nothing. Or I mean to say nothing but Chaplin or Keaton in love. Please note that all of Shakespeare's comedies are about what? Anyway, I'm just restating the obvious by now. Sorry.</p><p>So if you like it, enjoy your flan. As I've said, I don't mind a bit of the ol' flan now and then myself. Tonight though, I couldn't swallow another bite. I'm thinking roast, suckling pig, vegetable samosas... maybe something involving grown men and grease and a little grit and musk and wit and am I still talking about sweets? Why, yes, sailor, I am. Try the cakes.</p><p><br /></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-46073250838570083602023-07-30T18:22:00.004-07:002023-07-30T18:22:52.291-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIa_ApGHrheXbZu7i8UCXN7rM_BHRDZtEK4MWDXxmrl-_9uopEr9jRywkC65gyMHRY_Fk0Tgzru3H__Y1KV-w4K9RY1qCt6bhJzh0pzT4QTyx8O8Kgzy5b2V9qBJBHa-URN0sVFpqDvDR_Eu3E73BJZY_-rf84yZjsFa2SL52tUi_h2X1VcfSCEbEONbU/s6427/queencharlotte.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6427" data-original-width="4837" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIa_ApGHrheXbZu7i8UCXN7rM_BHRDZtEK4MWDXxmrl-_9uopEr9jRywkC65gyMHRY_Fk0Tgzru3H__Y1KV-w4K9RY1qCt6bhJzh0pzT4QTyx8O8Kgzy5b2V9qBJBHa-URN0sVFpqDvDR_Eu3E73BJZY_-rf84yZjsFa2SL52tUi_h2X1VcfSCEbEONbU/w482-h640/queencharlotte.jpg" width="482" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-24884023401905477582023-07-30T17:43:00.004-07:002023-07-30T17:43:23.049-07:00A Caricature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjURc6vOUqO5EgmQ4bdZbjDHW-Hj2EV2lvnTr5vQfPKFFYmv-q8gNbOmGwH5biSqONuYiwM1IWZJTWGW-4jiqVOOJce8lNhSlP7bemST8tMOA2Gplf92t2876Eit9zlDPLXO53sYwnogVfmnXVFMApST0a3IfNcg_fjqdQ19KHTEhoG5TtxL3ESoJau7Jg/s5996/bdylanhollis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5996" data-original-width="4292" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjURc6vOUqO5EgmQ4bdZbjDHW-Hj2EV2lvnTr5vQfPKFFYmv-q8gNbOmGwH5biSqONuYiwM1IWZJTWGW-4jiqVOOJce8lNhSlP7bemST8tMOA2Gplf92t2876Eit9zlDPLXO53sYwnogVfmnXVFMApST0a3IfNcg_fjqdQ19KHTEhoG5TtxL3ESoJau7Jg/w458-h640/bdylanhollis.jpg" width="458" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-48078016054973681172023-07-28T21:31:00.013-07:002023-07-30T17:40:41.845-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP4kOPyAIjsOKlpAGQ_Bc5pZ9dUtSKMrwxvqhiTzbtVPlsP_5ck4-yn7xvSrAuE-PGMyRBeFW6p6-IqPQdD9aLHfj8gzsbojZBhfuXnbIxKvOAh78-z6cJGF2ctASgdh-FjTpSCO7UT_PCUTOW1PPTmlbb9CUWMujfvGnOUcyfhlf-BnMQ7z3jnJW-goA/s5828/tobiassmollett.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5828" data-original-width="4704" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP4kOPyAIjsOKlpAGQ_Bc5pZ9dUtSKMrwxvqhiTzbtVPlsP_5ck4-yn7xvSrAuE-PGMyRBeFW6p6-IqPQdD9aLHfj8gzsbojZBhfuXnbIxKvOAh78-z6cJGF2ctASgdh-FjTpSCO7UT_PCUTOW1PPTmlbb9CUWMujfvGnOUcyfhlf-BnMQ7z3jnJW-goA/w516-h640/tobiassmollett.jpg" width="516" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-40286822909505497142023-07-21T16:02:00.011-07:002023-07-21T21:06:11.265-07:00Monumental Darling<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrMSz224QqNjPUiVGVE4V8XjwlAHY_9KWhm7zLCqoH0nAtfEfSW0pdhUUl6f0ug920QT-OYnmEYAX6I9BU6jmID88a8PYLN8O45q2YDATfH2wXLljiSaSSYp4i7X-399cEtkanWv6K4jYhE0v8t860nAN9vQnw2SFYH9CFFihgM_4jvPy1URl_sqbg/s1280/auden.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1135" data-original-width="1280" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrMSz224QqNjPUiVGVE4V8XjwlAHY_9KWhm7zLCqoH0nAtfEfSW0pdhUUl6f0ug920QT-OYnmEYAX6I9BU6jmID88a8PYLN8O45q2YDATfH2wXLljiSaSSYp4i7X-399cEtkanWv6K4jYhE0v8t860nAN9vQnw2SFYH9CFFihgM_4jvPy1URl_sqbg/w400-h355/auden.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>"A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue."</i></div><p></p><p>Almost anybody else and I would not care. In fact I would probably be actively bitching right this minute about the ways in which academia spoils the joy in art, etc., and how complete, posthumous editions are all but invariably awful. Anybody else. But this is Auden.</p><p>More than a decade ago, Oxford University Press published a 4th edition of <u>Jane Austen's Letters</u>, "collected and edited" by one Dierdre Le Faye, bless 'er. It was an irresistibly plump new hardcover for forty five dollars and yes, I bit. And a mess of pottage it was. I own not one but two earlier versions of the lady's letters, in handsome old editions with few notes and lovely, wide, white margins. Seeing the Oxford I thought, "there must be more to this." There was not. Yes, there may have been a few discovered texts since my 1908 edition, but mostly what had accumulated to the actual letters was a vast coral of dead academic matter, a gray and gruesome lot of notes, variant readings, and guff. In said notes the reader was addressed alternately as a child of five or an assistant research librarian in the Vatican. Not sure which was less pleasant; being told Napoleon was a French general, or being told to "see prev. note pg. 63 re. 'pins.'" I put the book away from me as one would a blighted thing.</p><p>Around the same time, a vast committee of editorial savants at the University of California decided that the great Bernard DeVoto et al. were wrong. What had the biographers and historians been thinking, trying to bring shape and coherence to something that needed neither? This new generation of editors, raised on indigestible wads of critical theory, decided that the maundering haymow of manuscript autobiography left behind when Samuel Langhorne Clemens finally went the way of all flesh was actually a perfected piece of post-structural genius, a final full flowering of Twain's brain, requiring little more than the usual, heavy scholastic potting. And so the three gigantic volumes of Autobiography published between 2010 and 2015. It seems Twain was the American Pessoa. Again, despite my misgivings, from jump I got right with the program. I confess that it was not until the middle of Volume Two that I -- and a number of the most serious and influential critics in America -- finally gave it all up as a bad job. Volume Three we could not shift at the bookstore for love or money. Turns out the thing was a boondoggle of the first order, a bit of collegiate flimflam of a type usually reserved for uninterrupted droning in the classroom -- the kind of arguments made persuasive only by tenure and the surprising tenacity of mid-century French intellectual bullies. (I genuinely believe the benighted souls responsible for those three cement blocks of Twain must have talked themselves right into it; they believed their own grift. I do not remember a single instance in the supporting material that so much as winked at the windy old wonder that was lonely old Sam on his deathbed, or expressed the least doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing, repeating the same stories time and again or telling the same joke for the eleventy-seventh time.) Actually the thing had no more shape nor purpose than an old man's porch conversation and made the reader, me anyway, just as sad and eager to depart. </p><p>I could go on and will. The newest, complete editions of Larkin's poem? Of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry? Both were so crammed with variants and pointless verbiage as to basically double the poets' output <i>while adding nothing to the value of their work, </i>while explicitly contravening their wishes. Honestly, I am all for ignoring Henry James when he begs everyone o burn everything, but poetry is specifically about selection or it's just prose with a hitch in its giddy-up. It's like some demented dearie had collected all of discarded clay from the floor of Rodin's atelier, carefully annotated, logged, and preserved it, and then held an exhibition -- in a plane hanger. I understand better the academic urge to publish Emily Dickenson with all her dashes. That had to feel awfully clever at the time. But honestly, it was not as if in so doing the poet had been rescued from confusion and obscurity. Worth remembering that the importance of a great deal of academic labor would be better measured in the number of untenured associates and grad students employed -- even at slave wages -- than in any lasting contributions to the reading lives of the public. It's nice that your assistants Jesse and Leah could afford the "good" dry ramen for awhile, Professor. You're a prince among men. And may I just say that your cumbersome new edition may well have rescued Marianne Moore from her long-established popularity. I guess your work here on earth is done. Go with GodDamnIt.</p><p>The obvious justification of something like the Yale Boswell Editions, and the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson as well (Well done, Yale) is in preserving and restoring work we might otherwise never see or know the existence of, and in providing properly curated material for scholarship. Worthy worthies all. What the publisher also did however was make trade editions of the Boswell and a fairly new anthology -- the size of a small European car -- of the Johnson for the general public. Only a librarian or a fanatic (I blush) really needs a hardcover of Johnson's <i>Sermons and Prayers</i>. That bad example aside, smart retail choices can coexist with larger academic projects. I would note though that with the exception of the recent one volume Johnson, the distinction between academic and trade publishing has gone the way of indoor tobacco smoking and paper catalogs. It seems that if somebody bygawd did the bygawd research then there will be a bygawd trade edition too heavy to bygawd lift with one hand to please bygawd no one save the mother of the bygawd editor. </p><p>And then there is Edward Mendelson, bless him. Picture an academic gentleman of advancing years. What was doubtless once a crown of auburn curls is now more a tiara worn well back behind large ears. The face is weighty rather than handsome, serious but smiling in more than one photo. To show himself at ease he has occasionally been photographed without a tie. As far back as the mid-seventies he was already editing the standard collections of W. H. Auden's work, and writing two of the only sensible volumes of critical biography we've yet to see on the other greatest English language poet of the 20th Century. (In my experience who you pick for that top spot depends on where you were educated and when. I was told it was Thomas Stearns Eliot, and then later I was told it was William Butler Yeats. All I am willing to say on the subject is it that I'm all for Auden. Also? All three of the old boys apparently used their middle names and all were likewise found of their initials. I just think that's mid-century cool in a way the rest of us will never be. Really the whole idea of top dog in literature would now seem to be old fashioned in the very worst way, so maybe it's just as well we drop the business here.) Had Edward Mendelson done nothing but edit those <i>Collected Poems</i> and written nothing else but <i>Early Auden</i>, I would be deeply grateful. Those two books gave me my understanding of Auden as someone more than the other, less attractive fellow in Isherwood's memoirs, etc. Like many another, I am a grateful gay child of Kander & Ebb and came to Berlin and Weimar by way of their Cabaret. Thence to Isherwood proper, fiction and memoirs and later still fabulous diaries, and from him to Wystan Hugh Auden, Isherwood's buddy, fellow traveler and gay exile in America. I met the poet through Isherwood then, but Mendelson's Auden was how I got to know him. In many ways then Auden was my first serious modern poet. Maybe it was the cigarette-ash and the carpet slippers and the German "trade" (meaning hot and buyable German boy company) that drew me in, but Professor Mendelson showed me why this queen mattered and to an extent, taught me how to read him. Forever grateful.</p><p>But wait, there's more. For the better part of fifty years now, Edward Mendelson has done more than any other individual to honor the memory of Wystan Hugh Auden, in word and deed.* The Princeton edition of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden has been and continues a work of monumental scholarship and perfect good taste, and all of it under the eye of Edward Mendelson. Again the question arises if anyone other than a biographer needed six large volumes of the poet's prose -- (YES?!) -- but anyone picking up any of those six volumes would be rewarded with a rich and varied lot of genuinely interesting travel, criticism, gossip, poetics, essays, journalism, and other otherwise unknown stuff. A remarkable lot of it still worth reading. Some of it may have held up about as poorly as Yeats' <i>A Vision</i>, but that is for critics and future generations to decide. It is a remarkable achievement, that collected prose, in part because it respects wherever possible the author's arrangements and intentions. Here's that whole book, as the author intended. Here's what the poet was writing for money then. Here's what he was thinking about on paper in 1968. (All his life Auden chased, exhausted, and then abandoned opinions and philosophies like a crazy lady hunting feral cats, convinced that the next will be perfectly lovely. As with so many of his generation, Auden was convinced that somewhere someone had actually written Edward Casaubon's <u>Key to All Mythologies</u> and it worked. Unlike Isherwood and Huxley, Auden never found his guru. But even when Auden was silly though, unlike Yeats, Auden was interesting.) </p><p>I am eternally grateful just for the fascinating lyrics Auden produced for the creative team behind what would become The Man of La Mancha. What an interesting idea that was! Never happened as Auden understood the book and the team decided the show was actually going to make pretty much the exact opposite point, but I would never have known about the whole business or read those lines but for Princeton edition.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>"<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">America is I and you"</span></i></span></p><p>Now in place of the one stout volume of Poems there are two. At the back of the second there Appendices interesting -- Auden's Choices for Anthologies -- and others necessary but less interesting like the list of his publications. And then there are 386 pages of very good textural notes. As the above may have suggested, I an not always keen for long chapters of notes. With a writer of Auden's erudition and long history, these can actually help. More than any or all of the supplemental stuff though, what we have in the two big books of Poems now is the published poet whole. You may not need him so. You may prefer a meaty paperback (Mendelson has already made that book for you) or even a slimmer Selected Poems (Mendelson's done that one too.) Again, I don't know that anybody other than serious scholars needed these books, but what a joy to have them!</p><p>There are poets in the reading of whom we may be said to never be done; Horace, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson. Others we come to the end of and start again with better understanding each time like Dante or Milton. Of the three surviving Big Boys of English Modernism, Eliot, Yeats, and Auden, there can be a sense of having done and dusted each as their major poems are ticked off the list in school. There was a time when it seemed all literate persons went slouching toward the Wasteland through to September 1, 1939, etc. Eliot, more than the other two, survived at least as well as a critic as he did a poet. Yeats' mysticism appealed to hippies and his patriotism secured him an unlikely niche come St. Patty's Day in America. Auden had a poem in a movie in the nineties, but otherwise he remains the queer fellow who survived to what seemed at the time a rather disreputable old age -- though he was all of sixty-six when he died! Yeats, the most senior chronologically, lived to only seventy-four. Eliot was the longest lived at seventy-seven, but Auden survived not only him, but to a degree his own modernism. Another ten years and he might have joined his old friend Isherwood in the new gay pantheon/parade. Instead, the late Auden came too early and seemed to stuffy buggers in 1973 embarrassingly light and or light in the loafers, aka too queer and too funny to be wholly respectable. Alas the poet oroved also too venerable (and English) to ever really be hip. He would have enjoyed a bit of attention from the shirtless boys with dirty feet (rather his type, once upon an earlier time.)</p><p>Recently a friend sent me an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg's memories of Auden. Unsurprisingly, Ginsberg sounds an absolute ass; insisting on playing his squeezebox and "singing" sutras at Auden instead of sitting still for a nice cuppa and a bit of a chinwag about cute boys and cock and maybe even poetry. (Was there ever such a gang of noisy, self-centered junkies, drunks, and hallucinatory blabberguts as The Beats?! Jeezuz. They make the Romantics sound laid-back and humble.) Poor Auden might as well have been visited by a talking dog for all he might have made of the great American moon-calf. The rather unintended poignancy of the anecdote reminded me of yet another displacement that may keep Auden out of the main of things American. He is terribly, terribly English. True, he moved to the US in 1939, became a dual citizen in 1946, and until the end of his life spent at least half the year in New York, a city he loved very much more than London, or even ultimately Oxford. He loved America and Americans. He married an American -- although they couldn't call it that at the time. Despite this he remained rather stubbornly English, in his speech, his manner, his class, conversation, and his taste in everything but cigarettes, boys, and democracy. Notwithstanding all his youthful dislike of his hidebound homeland, she remained very much the motherland. St. Louie Mo's own Thomas Stearns Eliot of course went the other direction, straight to London and promptly became more of an Englishman than any of the royal Georges who were, after all, just so many bug-eyed Krauts. Eliot, like Henry James before him, can be claimed and often is by the Brits as he did all his best work there and in Saville Row bespoke suits. But neither Britain nor America has ever really claimed Auden as entirely their own. The English of his time hated him as a pacifist who skipped the Atlantic just before the War, and America outside of Manhattan just never made much of such a queer fella. Really, queers with plumy accents only made sense in America when they were playing villains in Bible movies. ("... Starring dreamy Jeffrey Hunter as Our Savior, and featuring acclaimed poet, Wystan Hugh Auden as King Herod Antipasta!") Nabokov probably made more sense to his fellow Americans than did the shy, ginger giant from Oxbridge. At least Vladimir liked girls.</p><p>To me, the later Auden is only possible because of America. Here it was he found lasting if not uncomplicated love. He needed America to relax a bit, and to write as simply as he sometimes later chose to do in poems like the lovely "Walks" from <i>Homage to Clio</i>, and more famously "Lullaby" from <i>Thank You, Fog and Other Poems</i>. That's my guess. Auden in America? Took his shoes off and metaphorically never really put them on again.</p><p>But is Auden American? How is that to be decided if not by him? (His complete edition and greatest editor certainly are, American. That says something in favor of our claim, does it not? If only that we had the institutional dough to do it.) Was Auden American though, and when? He certainly seemed to think he was. Is he now taught as an American poet? Which sadly leads me to ask is Auden still taught?** Don't know.</p><p>I certainly hope he's still taught. Rather hope they all are, the three great dead white dudes of the English modern. Meanwhile I can't answer any of those questions I just asked. I mean, I'm genuinely curious, but not so curious as to do the necessary research 'cause that is not my bailiwick. I'm just a guy who sells books and buys too many books and who now owns The Complete Princeton Auden. Now as a bookseller I can tell you that Eliot still sells pretty well, and not just that idiot cat book. Auden does too. Yeats not so much now, which seems to me both sad and odd. Of the three I should have thought Yeats wrote the poetry that speaks to the widest audience, addressing the most readers, and was most recognizably THE Poet down to his recorded readings, his velvet jackets and floppy ties. Am I wrong? Has Yeats faded? Neither Eliot nor Auden had politics the way Yeats did -- not just convictions but active party politics -- which ought to endear him to the young. He was in the contemporary sense the most "engaged." Both of the other boys had opinions political and otherwise, often as not diametrically opposed to one another, a fact perhaps best explained not by their actual politics as by only Auden having any empathy. Tom was rather a cold fish, no? Moreover, nearly the whole of Auden's philosophy outside his aesthetics <i>and</i> the whole of his religion was by the end best summarized <i>as empathy</i>, though he always did like a pretty priest in fancy dress.</p><p>-- And that's exactly the sort of dizzy talk about poets I had hoped to avoid! The only thing worse is talking without expertise about music. I do that too. We all do it, or so I like to think by way of excusing myself. If I had to pick a topic about which I am perhaps least qualified to describe, it might well be the religious and political convictions of early modernist English poets. Worse, I could be describing poetic forms I only vaguely grasp because my friend Richard, himself a poet, repeatedly explained them to me down the years.</p><p>The fact is, I have never been entirely comfortable talking poetry because I am neither a poet nor a scholar. Yes I read poetry. Nope, don't talk about it much. Mine is a very modern problem. Our ancestors, the literate ones anyway -- of whom I probably have fewer than you might assume -- had no problem with poetry. They had opinions about poetry the same way they had opinions about prose, or potato salad, foreigners, farming, the gold standard, politics, and pie-contests. Not a one of them would have hesitated to write a poem here and there for purposes of courting or for a contest in the newspaper and the like. The ones who went to school long enough probably memorized a bit of Shakespeare, say "The Quality of Mercy," and could recite "The Ballad of Barbara Fritchie" for 4th of July picnic at the Grange Hall. If my immediate ancestors had a favorite poet it would probably have been James Whitcombe Riley. Perhaps the brightest of my folk, all women -- there was a one room school teacher or two -- might have known at least a few lines by James Russell Lowell and or Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poets with three names again! Did you notice? Did not plan this. Might be onto something there.) There was a time in this country when pretty much everyone read Mrs. Browning even if they'd never read a word written by her husband. (Can't imagine why but Robert was in his day nearly as confusing to some folks as say Louis Zukofsky is to me now.) </p><p>I always take at least one book of poetry with me when I go home to Pennsylvania to see the beloved elderly mother. I take lots of books as I'm unlikely to find many new ones once I'm out there. I take books for the airports, books for sitting on the porch when the passing traffic is loud. I take poetry to read before bed, usually nice, fat, paperback anthologies, best for dipping at random. One year I read my way straight through Shakespeare's <u>Sonnets</u> for what I'm pretty sure was the first time. A few years ago though I took an old paperback of Eliot's <u>Four Quartets</u> and surprised myself by enjoying it thoroughly. Could not have told you how many years it had been since I had last read Eliot let alone those poems. I mention this because reading, even rereading Eliot (Auden, Yeats) does not of itself feel enough to then write, however casually about Eliot's poetry, or Yeats', or Auden's. I am not unaware of at least the most common of educational and cultural commonalities of the English poets between say Shakespeare and Houseman, but there's only so much one can do with a high school education, a smattering of Latin, and a tattered copy of Edith Hamilton's <u>Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes</u>. Still, as a reader, I'm game at least and until. The Eliot was surprisingly straight forward mostly, and the computer in my pocket makes difficult vocabulary so much simpler now. I actually think that I am happier now to try such things than I was when I was young and much more concerned with being stupid or being seen to be. Now? Why not? Then there's John Ashberry, and Don Mee Choi, and the afore mentioned Louis Zukofsky. Well I did try, honest. But writing about all of this, even the easier ones? That is something I've left to the professionals. Better they should explain even my enthusiasms to me. </p><p>And yet this isn't right, is it? Can any of my three Dead White Men have meant to be the subject only of serious -- that is to say academic -- study? Even with Eliot I can't credit that. Did any poet ever really write to be read only in a classroom? (And how dreadful if one did, or does.) </p><p>I've read a fair bit of modern philosophy, believe it or not, and the better part of that by some genuinely deep and or dense writers. I can't say that I feel confident recommending Peter Sloterdijk's <u>Spheres</u> to somebody in the bookstore, or explaining Jurgen Habermas ' communicative action to a guy in a bar. Couldn't if I tried, actually. Again, glad I did what I've done in the way of reading such weighty books, but not confident, as I might be with Hume or Locke, in chatting about what I've read. Why? Well, it's two things really: lack of education and vocabulary, and well, the First World War.</p><p>That first bit is self-evident. I ain't educated much. I do however have friends now with all that stuff; advanced degrees, conversation full of spondaic this and an anadiplosis there and here a bit 'o the old anaphora. (All those "ands" by the bye? Polysyndeton. Any of those last three would be a good drag name at a MLA talent show. Yours for the taking. My gift.) I do indeed now know actual professors. For instance, I recently spent a very happy hour listening to a podcast in which a new friend and former academic had a chat with another of the same brilliant sort all about a single poem by a poet I very much love, Cowper. By the end I was dizzy with admiration. I could never do such a thing! Even if I wanted to, and I don't, and even if I studied as they did for years and learned the trick of such things, I would never. Should I try I'd feel like a dancing bear; the whole charm of it would be in seeing me up on my hindlegs, ass out, pretending to be something I clearly am not.</p><p>All I really do is read for pleasure (and a bit extra for Book Club.) I am not unlike a minor Austen sister, though I do work for wages to avoid genuine if genteel poverty.</p><p>And then there's the war. The Great War is rather a line (trench?) in the literary earth, ain't it? Before that horrific event, most writers at least in English would have probably described their reader as -- them, or someone very like, or perhaps a young lady whose blushes were to be avoided, or a clever youth, or a literate shopkeeper, or the rising working class, or any of the other obvious populations known to open books unassigned nor mandated by God. Not every writer was ever for every reader, but the more generally the merrier. And then bombs were dropped on the lot of what was or is or ought to be and distrust of the obvious and the easy, and thinking and feeling persons in the arts generally threw baby and bathwater, Bible and Greeks, sentiment and sense, right out and good riddance to false rubbish. Before anyone gets squeamish in anticipation of some curmudgeonly rant or neo-conservative lament for the good olde days of English literature, let me just say that <i>nostalgia is poison</i> and much of what modernism blew up was deserving of the dynamite. More, I would not know how to read without its influence in everything I know now as art. It was a good thing.</p><p>It did however put the common reader (me) on unsteady ground in so far as it valued individuality and innovation sometimes over sense, and music over meaning, and various other rejiggerings of the status quo that have left a poor redneck boy unsure of much he might not entirely understand and no, I am not good with that. A symptom of a simple mind perhaps, or just an ancestral peasant suspicion of having things put over on me, but there's only so much sense I can bring myself to do without when reading. (Actually, acting classes rather weirdly helped. During my very brief college career, I was a theater major. I remember the insight, small as it may be, that Gertrude Stein writes punctuation, that James Joyce writes aloud, and that Ezra Pound was a ham. Also? The novels of Virginia Woolf remind me more than anything of ill-considered, over-long audition monologues to which shy, bright girls were drawn. At a certain point one just wants that to be over.)</p><p>One lesson learned from The Moderns? I need not read, know, understand, or love everything. There is not in fact a list of required reading. And so away with Icelandic sagas and the Vorticists and William bloody Gaddis! Thomas Pynchon be damned and Hanya Yanagihara can get stuffed. Done. Just me, mind. You be you.</p><p>Which is not to say grown people of thirty five should still be reading novels with magical sixteen year old protagonists (so creepy) or that video games are just as good as the Louvre or that regular people shouldn't read Fielding' <u>Tom Jones</u> because the author uses "eleemosynary" in the first sentence. Don't be so damned childish, people. Art is more than the familiar hum of contented expectations. Try, you lazy bastards. You might learn something. You might change. You might be moved or even made better.</p><p>I went to an exhibition of Rothko once and was struck by the size of the things, and the heat, and the quiet. No intention on my part to like, just to look. And at the end, I wept. Still have no idea why or how that happened. (True, I'm an easy weeper, but yeah.) I didn't have to study Rothko or painting. I just went and in the end was glad of it.</p><p>Call it, The Philistine Takes It In.</p><p>Now with Auden, I almost never have a sense of the man talking intentionally over my head. If something proves obscure, and it often can, I look to the structure of the thing to tell me what I'm looking at. Failing that, and having always tried the line aloud, I will take recourse to my phone. And if some of what he wrote is not within my ken, there is still much to love, much that is moving, earnest, handsomely said. He has ideas I like and opinions I may seemingly never understand, but he is engaged with me and I with him and I have always a strong sense that he is glad to tell, not just to perform. Perhaps I'm wrong, but he seems to like us, whatever he thinks of the times, war, horror, love.</p><p>One of the delights of late Auden specially is that he was genuinely funny. Say that of another major 20th century poet in English. Who would it be? Marianne Moore? Bishop is a beauty, but not funny. Larkin? None's a patch on Wystan. Eliot makes me smile pretty broadly now and again as it turns out, but I can't even picture the man laughing, let alone The Poet, not out-loud like some vulgar person. Don't remember Yeats ever resulting in a grin, come to that. But Auden, every bit as serious and sophisticated as the other two and still he would do:</p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">When the young Kant<br />Was told to kiss his aunt,<br />He obeyed the Categorical Must<br />But only just.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">He wrote clerihews! He celebrated and introduced collections of light verse including dear Phyllis McGinley. He loved Edward Lear. Auden drank and smoked and told dirty stories at cocktail parties and flirted hopelessly with undergraduate athletes and gossiped and joked and laughed aloud. He also was dear to E. M. Forster and kind to young people and to Edith Sitwell which wasn't always easy. Thom Gunn admired him and Stravinsky adored him. Auden was out before that was something to be and catty as he could be, he was fundamentally kind.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Now none of that has much of anything to do directly with his major work as a poet, but it endears him to me none the less and as a common reader, that is allowed. And perhaps it has more to do with what made him a major poet than dominant criticism will admit. Poetry is felt if it is read right, at least by me. Art is not the technical means by which it is made or if it is I needn't know how to have it speak to me. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">And neither need you necessarily, my darlings. If your only way to enjoy magic is to learn the trick, go on and pay a magician to teach you. (Actually, I loath magic, but obviously I needed the example just here. In reality the last magic I liked was watching the late, great Ricky Jay manipulate a deck of cards, and that I liked as much for the patter as the tricks. He wrote a good book about Learned Pigs too.) Read Auden -- and Eliot, and Yeats, and Bishop, and Moore. Read Terrance Hayes and Eileen Myles. Read poetry and by people unlike ourselves and like. Read Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker. Read people who are smarter than one's self, or simply better at poetry. No permission required. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Read Auden. Eventually, you may also need all ten volumes from Princeton, or not. Up to you. I can however recommend the monumental, darling. well worth it if I were asked.</span></p><p>*The professor also has an inexplicable fondness for the work of the supremely dreary Thomas Pynchon. This is like learning that Julia Child secretly liked not something perfectly understandable like ballpark franks or sloppy joes -- pretty sure she'd eat either with pleasure -- but rather had a pronounced fondness for edible gelatin-balloons and tomato foam and smoke infused appetizers made from a single frozen pea. Ick.</p><p>**I understand from an academic friend that that horndog Yeats is finally "problematic" which is both perfectly just and frankly disappointing. He was rather, wasn't he? Just, disappointing, problematic, etc. Bless 'im. I understand if he might now seem more trouble than he's worth, but the answer is that he's still worth more than the troubles he made or the mess. Have you read The Lake Isle at Innisfree? Easter, 1916? A Prayer for My Daughter? Mustn't let those go. The loss would be insurmountable, and I don't say that as easily as you might think. Must everyone read Yeats? I don't know, but pray do.</p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-79822055328531903642023-07-07T22:19:00.003-07:002023-07-07T22:19:21.466-07:00A Caricature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMM2MnabhhnSyBxiBVoVippfpJlct0099ozKNyMkmEVg8L1f2-M5_xrO7OKo8zFDGPAVv_0NrAJyGCLX0C2a6X1JUGQZVUdBvEsuYH-x9c_q9yC1ojQ_vLs3zKLT4-k20xzTQ9oFTlTb_9DUhvlx8erKUozEGJA56quIGXRiymvQLwRP5Z0MuYd_bgtT4/s4832/vilanch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4832" data-original-width="4320" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMM2MnabhhnSyBxiBVoVippfpJlct0099ozKNyMkmEVg8L1f2-M5_xrO7OKo8zFDGPAVv_0NrAJyGCLX0C2a6X1JUGQZVUdBvEsuYH-x9c_q9yC1ojQ_vLs3zKLT4-k20xzTQ9oFTlTb_9DUhvlx8erKUozEGJA56quIGXRiymvQLwRP5Z0MuYd_bgtT4/w572-h640/vilanch.jpg" width="572" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-76316354131672247062023-07-06T16:00:00.004-07:002023-07-06T16:00:25.115-07:00A Quick Announcement<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-hYywkvMU3Q5Ivfk971gLqvepOLrFhdar91IbI-sazCGeb41DVKF1ZCxw_PjD3YMiDt5IfuW5UCU-iCeRlwhG78LvkCJ8ZE93kyup19vP-3G8hl8Lf8HB_zxrHJyexq68dRN-FpBIdzpEBjHy1x4SqLUlLL-TSAeSJg-w_uRigCBqaUA_gW1ydUQyEOY/s6038/club.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="4009" data-original-width="6038" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-hYywkvMU3Q5Ivfk971gLqvepOLrFhdar91IbI-sazCGeb41DVKF1ZCxw_PjD3YMiDt5IfuW5UCU-iCeRlwhG78LvkCJ8ZE93kyup19vP-3G8hl8Lf8HB_zxrHJyexq68dRN-FpBIdzpEBjHy1x4SqLUlLL-TSAeSJg-w_uRigCBqaUA_gW1ydUQyEOY/s600/club.jpg" width="600" /></a></div>
Quick! Scribble something to decorate an online listing for the next selection of Brad's Big Fat Book Club! Done.usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-21067851452196713512023-06-07T08:36:00.004-07:002023-06-09T10:55:26.014-07:00A Caricature<br /><p><br /> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwWdIjlICv7LCAfBajTMQk81vezYGgGflTP-Q1bem6cteD8g0qHTALTZQeh90-cMxxjBuNV2Yi-VPuDcFS_MOf1x0sDIYQHJ8zigJNgWVZpTAWhWftihZt6tqizaaooy6kQXKwcZnk1y8Krc_yCF235ievJbXn2mu_ObD0qn0CaENuPftpmFs0Rfi/s5657/HPiozzi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4879" data-original-width="5657" height="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwWdIjlICv7LCAfBajTMQk81vezYGgGflTP-Q1bem6cteD8g0qHTALTZQeh90-cMxxjBuNV2Yi-VPuDcFS_MOf1x0sDIYQHJ8zigJNgWVZpTAWhWftihZt6tqizaaooy6kQXKwcZnk1y8Krc_yCF235ievJbXn2mu_ObD0qn0CaENuPftpmFs0Rfi/w640-h552/HPiozzi.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-44215868692896089462023-06-03T20:44:00.004-07:002023-06-03T20:44:27.592-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZMKX4dyW-C10c5LvWH_HKqnOHZLAlZr4tQ5DsILXgQ2KgTU9ipae1m3x5ExRA4pm1jNYXg9KB19ept-67dMp8APlw1JWzXC_d_QaPigv0MrOGSkCsgfECvfHWAQ9C70bROA-Da-R4KhFdoEWq1SyGLSEyzpGlPlYPR9tZHy1hvL3J0pdWL-gQiSr/s6028/EGibbon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4854" data-original-width="6028" height="516" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZMKX4dyW-C10c5LvWH_HKqnOHZLAlZr4tQ5DsILXgQ2KgTU9ipae1m3x5ExRA4pm1jNYXg9KB19ept-67dMp8APlw1JWzXC_d_QaPigv0MrOGSkCsgfECvfHWAQ9C70bROA-Da-R4KhFdoEWq1SyGLSEyzpGlPlYPR9tZHy1hvL3J0pdWL-gQiSr/w640-h516/EGibbon.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-40291992154567204312023-06-02T23:04:00.004-07:002023-06-02T23:04:23.223-07:00A Fantasy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicJvpdLVITmlxM6o2LcwPDWY3Ybbw5qZsUjiTmsu5s9YsL4kPhtEjjVQPbf_skfbn6N3OaqKiUY-k04mj0CB8ohfniCgoJex3kqvYFy_g6JPdVhKrRnna-kcLaqMUKcX1NkF8s5GuJiLIjcbw6k4FmdfzauDACeJI1TfFBjuNSraXHKBKceuv6V--U/s6213/LaurelHardy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4739" data-original-width="6213" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicJvpdLVITmlxM6o2LcwPDWY3Ybbw5qZsUjiTmsu5s9YsL4kPhtEjjVQPbf_skfbn6N3OaqKiUY-k04mj0CB8ohfniCgoJex3kqvYFy_g6JPdVhKrRnna-kcLaqMUKcX1NkF8s5GuJiLIjcbw6k4FmdfzauDACeJI1TfFBjuNSraXHKBKceuv6V--U/w640-h488/LaurelHardy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-64295863002269269182023-05-29T22:01:00.005-07:002023-05-29T22:01:53.292-07:00A Preliminary Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisGH2pJoOh2LvnaCz7Z3QXVU03Y0azIdjNnwCDvqcY1k5XUcqIxtYP4akUAscJNDWvyppKSFToo28_Dn1UL9cDuAtzsxdcxSu-vTWLFgG3JMcYbw0p15J31AJSPbAHUkAavucK5t--63JTxRarjUQj3IIFF_y_mjkOUNxxbcHRSuT05YqCE4Cuj4CO/s6208/SJohnsonblank.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4885" data-original-width="6208" height="504" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisGH2pJoOh2LvnaCz7Z3QXVU03Y0azIdjNnwCDvqcY1k5XUcqIxtYP4akUAscJNDWvyppKSFToo28_Dn1UL9cDuAtzsxdcxSu-vTWLFgG3JMcYbw0p15J31AJSPbAHUkAavucK5t--63JTxRarjUQj3IIFF_y_mjkOUNxxbcHRSuT05YqCE4Cuj4CO/w640-h504/SJohnsonblank.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-23145413291330898112023-05-29T21:59:00.005-07:002023-05-29T21:59:29.133-07:00A Caricature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1N0cOoIL6VmI3Mn5dZ8D_peAq1WMclANx53ZVUDH2O0n4XMd5_YIer9N1umjGDfACwK5gIEzKoZV6WGG54P8u3L_aflMMIo20ld9GbxmcWvMVTJiftgZvKiaBpD2_HM-TpcGOoHlyHOaTifAWoChKT_sORvOF7ExA9u7D9iYmCph6lwuCWDu5SDAJ/s6191/BFranklin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6191" data-original-width="4501" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1N0cOoIL6VmI3Mn5dZ8D_peAq1WMclANx53ZVUDH2O0n4XMd5_YIer9N1umjGDfACwK5gIEzKoZV6WGG54P8u3L_aflMMIo20ld9GbxmcWvMVTJiftgZvKiaBpD2_HM-TpcGOoHlyHOaTifAWoChKT_sORvOF7ExA9u7D9iYmCph6lwuCWDu5SDAJ/w466-h640/BFranklin.jpg" width="466" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-17655430971831286472023-05-27T22:00:00.004-07:002023-05-27T22:00:41.284-07:00A Caricature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EYbApGZAv7MrAf25vL89CfdXEGN3pH8_D1mvxAoVN_Iwq_8a1oQRDye-OkfIv-URdVlh59Eo9t2mJoVFQQJcQ0vojMqP8OKGpWDjpyeokecwOJTyW-_QuJIhZ3KTeTYP9WDwOxzmZkqyeO67A2zQkLDgPNBswQjCduAkbYkJILZd9zdn2j2sgIVe/s5600/FBurney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5600" data-original-width="3703" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EYbApGZAv7MrAf25vL89CfdXEGN3pH8_D1mvxAoVN_Iwq_8a1oQRDye-OkfIv-URdVlh59Eo9t2mJoVFQQJcQ0vojMqP8OKGpWDjpyeokecwOJTyW-_QuJIhZ3KTeTYP9WDwOxzmZkqyeO67A2zQkLDgPNBswQjCduAkbYkJILZd9zdn2j2sgIVe/w424-h640/FBurney.jpg" width="424" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-22564560301735579682023-05-26T23:11:00.007-07:002023-05-26T23:22:31.607-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC_Wb4368i_wYWz2P5kEJwRm2pC3OqlOtspq19DjK-WO6lXT89j5nvhohYV6YjOknzWtUKZRtq0hgiihzWr0BazjWsEiMmCmQxCVV5gYpS3b8TFxaWW2kV8_XkhigrDg8AgeOjoyW4EengTPDDjwVb18TGHCSYYk8kKBmUd-ByciNx94n48zFZpTPW/s5143/OGoldsmith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4562" data-original-width="5143" height="568" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC_Wb4368i_wYWz2P5kEJwRm2pC3OqlOtspq19DjK-WO6lXT89j5nvhohYV6YjOknzWtUKZRtq0hgiihzWr0BazjWsEiMmCmQxCVV5gYpS3b8TFxaWW2kV8_XkhigrDg8AgeOjoyW4EengTPDDjwVb18TGHCSYYk8kKBmUd-ByciNx94n48zFZpTPW/w640-h568/OGoldsmith.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-16811975570347320562023-05-26T23:10:00.003-07:002023-05-26T23:10:19.983-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOhDlN3ekyt8kkrjfDIBysMFHlQCPfm4oib8HUL1t_umIm5SP-sk_7WDXVBPZdNceUtORTOYqxbEIZOjLu_aY_XQgaowlVurQzXEB1icpsRaRJmOp3jmGMSdSOwJkwoXiArL1_dxinsH_3tVL4rouge9oLRcLQre20OmJ1arvhc2oMS68rg36ooyc4/s5326/ASmith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5326" data-original-width="4632" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOhDlN3ekyt8kkrjfDIBysMFHlQCPfm4oib8HUL1t_umIm5SP-sk_7WDXVBPZdNceUtORTOYqxbEIZOjLu_aY_XQgaowlVurQzXEB1icpsRaRJmOp3jmGMSdSOwJkwoXiArL1_dxinsH_3tVL4rouge9oLRcLQre20OmJ1arvhc2oMS68rg36ooyc4/w556-h640/ASmith.jpg" width="556" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-23484799437365136762023-05-26T23:08:00.005-07:002023-05-26T23:08:58.619-07:00A Caricature<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2chQrZtnwrwmCF7_qyXrE23M5C5O-oSNMAa3uCKVUsEr-qQXOlV8WEdXzr6PXWj1w_2KrJSGLfZIrWRj7IAmwFccM61OuooYNwWncQVbmWta-8mZ4umR0trL9O39nByWPSdcSvnVhgDvCQr-QbWKXn5jy92lLI137wUsU0LUCnGm4WWunI1H1lvdY/s5283/EBurke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5283" data-original-width="4240" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2chQrZtnwrwmCF7_qyXrE23M5C5O-oSNMAa3uCKVUsEr-qQXOlV8WEdXzr6PXWj1w_2KrJSGLfZIrWRj7IAmwFccM61OuooYNwWncQVbmWta-8mZ4umR0trL9O39nByWPSdcSvnVhgDvCQr-QbWKXn5jy92lLI137wUsU0LUCnGm4WWunI1H1lvdY/w514-h640/EBurke.jpg" width="514" /></a></div><br /><p></p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-62231379387123477002023-05-16T12:42:00.001-07:002023-05-16T12:42:40.186-07:00My Diva<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwCgZnyPTYC1sQSH-tTJoa1z1JriE60HemCcfaQK8baay8mpo36tohTx8Lhaq-x16Xc-YfmnA9jeKhSAIFDxouubyBItGz5WFrU1UGZNDolyQtGXrowqD4XQfOttEqPi-1rO3sxZcv6z6KyJXqcqZuQOu3G9rBY9GbHGqo_k95eUxwuFM_famNswFB/s663/davis.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="663" data-original-width="475" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwCgZnyPTYC1sQSH-tTJoa1z1JriE60HemCcfaQK8baay8mpo36tohTx8Lhaq-x16Xc-YfmnA9jeKhSAIFDxouubyBItGz5WFrU1UGZNDolyQtGXrowqD4XQfOttEqPi-1rO3sxZcv6z6KyJXqcqZuQOu3G9rBY9GbHGqo_k95eUxwuFM_famNswFB/w458-h640/davis.jpg" width="458" /></a></div><br />We're all meant to have a personal Diva, or at least we once were, gay men. May still be true for all I know. Is it, young LGBTQIA+ persons? Are there queer young people laying on narrow beds in a childish rooms, greedily reading every word about Zendaya or memorizing all the lyrics of Billie Eilish? There must be. But is it still a gay thing? (Come to that, are there still going to be gays?) The whole business of gay Diva worship may well have passed into obsolescence, like wearing a green carnation in one's buttonhole, like buttonholes, or the hanky-code, or being defined exclusively as gay. There will always be crushes and fans. Youth will call to youth and kids will pick some pretty child from a Korean boy band or devote a wall to exactly the same kind of mild, manufactured rebellion that put up all those pictures on bedroom walls across the nation. Remember those spreads from Tiger Beat and Teen Magazine featuring cuties and "bad boys." (In my day a "bad boy" was basically any young celebrity who posed for a photo while smoking -- preferably in his underwear.) Some of us weren't brave enough to keep Matt Dillon anywhere but tucked away in our dreams and or under the mattress. However having pictures of Dolly, or Linda Carter, or Marilyn wasn't quite the tell you might think. Despite Sontag's 1964 essay, in my youth camp hadn't yet come to the hinterlands. So loving Bette Davis, while part of a long and storied gay tradition unknow to me at the time, was weirdly both safe and daring. My grandma liked Bette Davis. (Dad was a Gene Tierney man. Always a sucker for a sexy overbite. Mom was a big Van Johnson and Johnnie Ray fan, which is of course why I am gay.) <div><br /></div><div>Even as a little kid I loved the movies, particularly the old ones. No westerns. No war pictures. Never a Three Stooges enthusiast. Not one for Jerry Lewis either. More of a Marx Brothers man, even when I was ten. (Unusual perhaps, but hardly unheard of. Groucho was having something of a last hoorah in the late sixties and early seventies, when they started showing his movies on college campuses. He frequently appeared on the Dick Cavett program. The Paramount and MGM pictures still ran on television now and then. Groucho glasses with attached eyebrows, nose, and mustache were <i>de rigueur</i> for the sophisticated humorist of the 5th grade.) And then there is, was, and will always be Davis. From the first time I saw one of her movies, I adored Bette Davis. Watched <i>The Nanny</i> (1965) one Saturday night and found her terrifying, and sad. My favorite kind of monster! Saw<i> Now Voyager</i> (1942) one day on the Afternoon Movie. "These are only tears of gratitude -- an old maid's gratitude for the crumbs offered." And... I just knew before I even knew I knew, if you know what I mean. Saw <i>Winter Meeting</i> (1948) and wanted to live in her New York apartment. By the time I saw <i>Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?</i> (1962) my fate was sealed. Bette was it, sister. Davis was my Diva. I scoured the TV Guide. I remember the absolute thrill of buying a paperback of <u>Mother Goddam</u>, by Whitney Stein at Walden Books in The Hermitage Mall, Sharon, PA. I studied that book like Torah, honey. And yes, I put up pictures of Davis in my bedroom, right beside Karloff's creature. Monsters! Maybe it didn't seem so very strange at the time. I was as I said movie-mad. Maybe it did seem odd in an eleven year old boy, but nobody said anything. Never really changed my preferences since, so to say. I still have a photograph of Davis on my wall. I may be the last of the dinosaurs. Worshiping some great female star and carrying that idolatry into adulthood, that may already be as dead as disco, but hey, I liked disco.<p></p><p>When I was in my twenties, I worked in a video store with a man who owned an original oil painting of Joan Crawford. That's right, an original oil painting. The painting was nearly the size of an actual Crawford. He lit it like a shrine. Pretty much took up the one empty wall in his very small studio apartment. At least two other walls were lost behind bookcases containing every available film and bootleg of the lady on VHS. He had every book and every article ever written about her and files of photos, signed and unsigned. He knew her credits and her husbands, her triumphs and struggles the way a nun might know the Stations of the Cross, or straight guy might know a baseball player's freshman stats. It was impressive. He was a good looking guy, the Crawford fanatic, if balding, with a magnificent mustache. He did alright in the bars, from what I'd heard, so his tricks must not have minded all that Joan -- though who really wants to wake up to that woman every day? (Who ever did? Poor Joan.) Years later when the video store was long gone, I visited him once in his new digs. He was managing quite a nice apartment building and had a big place on the ground floor. By then he had a menagerie of abandoned pets from dead tenants. A box turtle sat under the kitchen table and ate lunch with us. Not a sign of Crawford and for some reason I didn't ask. Simply moved on I suppose.</p><p>Once in San Diego I was introduced to a friend's neighbor who had photo-albums uniformly bound and filled with Diana Ross. His greatest treasure, brought out specifically because I'd been told beforehand that I should ask, was an album full of Polaroids he'd taken at concerts with the lady herself. There were dozens of these. I worry now they must all have eventually turned that sickly green Polaroids tend to turn over time, maybe they even faded away altogether. In the end, was there anyone to preserve those pictures? Save that album? He must have meant to pass them on, but to whom? My friend moved, then died some years later. They hadn't kept in touch. When I met the Diana Ross queen it was clear he hadn't long to live, though who knows? Some did.</p><p>Of course those examples were both extreme and all the more memorable for being so, but I certainly met others less fanatical through the years, if no less devoted in their own way. Once, aged maybe twelve, at a sledding party at a working dairy, I was drawn away from our hot coco by the sound of unfamiliar music. Without a moment's hesitation I abandoned the party of grubby, noisy boys and the freezing wet "fun" of hurtling downhill and into the side of an enormous barn. Boys. Ick. (And yum, admittedly.) Safely inside that big, stinky farmhouse, I went in pursuit of that music and found it. Thereafter I spent a happy hour on the floor of an older brother's bedroom, being introduced to the mystery that remains Liza Minnelli. The brother's room was all about Liza; scrapbooks, and posters, and records. This was probably also my first time hearing the story of her mother, the glorious tragedy that was Judy Garland, in many ways the Mother of Them All, the Gay Divas. If I did not entirely understand everything about that dark afternoon, I nevertheless remain grateful for the effort made to initiate -- in the most innocent way -- a fledgling queen. Every queer boy needs his first Judy.</p><p>Much latter I would meet opera queens, show queens, and enthusiasts of various cults like Barbara Cook and Julie Wilson, even a man who claimed to have seen every show Edith Bouvier Beale ever did at Reno Sweeney. I don't know that I ever laughed harder in my life than I did when a friend played me the cassette a Barbra queen made -- back when making such things was harder to make -- of just the final note held in every Barbra Streisand song. Heroic was what that was.</p><p>My taste in heroines would prove fairly catholic, though I've naturally had long-standing, largely dead favorites. Before she passed, I actually prayed that Mama Cass Elliot would cohost The Mike Douglas Show for another week. (The show broadcast from Philadelphia in those days. Mike bought Cass a grocery cart full of Tastykakes -- a local competitor of Hostess -- and presented the gift to her on air. It was a simpler, crueler time, though I must say Tastykakes still kick Little Debbie's ass.) I've loved Bette Midler since I first saw her sing <i>Ten Cents a Dance</i> on the same show in 1971. I collected records by Blossom Dearie, Shirley Horn, Rosemary Clooney, so many. For a time I was obsessed, in turn with Margaret Rutherford, Cloris Leachman, Anna Magnani. Later I became determined to see everything Margo Martindale has ever done or will do. I like a broad performance, so to say. For me it has almost always been women artists who most attracted me, be they actresses, jazz singers, pop stars, novelists. Still, there's only ever been one woman whose picture I keep on my office wall, so yes, I do have a Diva, capital "D" for Davis, first name Bette. I know it is not an original choice.</p><p>I have a friend who prefers Hepburn -- Katherine not Audrey -- a choice of which I completely approve. Some years ago a film organization voted Katherine Hepburn the greatest female film star of all time, though as I remember it, they revealed the name of her male counterpart, Bogart, after her, top of the bill as it were, which even then seemed to me sexist and wrong. Hepburn deserved that spot. (Davis was number two in that particular list of top actresses.) This same friend, the Kate man, regularly insists that one should never argue matters of taste and he is right, as I've found he is about most things other than Margaret O'Brien (inexplicably he can't stand the kid, even in Meet Me in Saint Louis wherein she was maybe the last performer able to steal focus from Judy Garland, and Judy singing <i>Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas</i>, yet! That's a pro, right there.) I concede Kate's place in the pantheon without a murmur. Extraordinary creature, astonishing, long career, and in a number of my favorite films. AND she was Spencer Tracy's beard. (And he hers.) Points again. I could and do watch Hepburn over and over and over again and always with wonder, affection, and abiding admiration of her very great, and very specific gifts. In her way, she was a kind of genius, and an admirable human in most other ways to boot. </p><p>Bette Davis was many things, but not I think admirable in quite the same way. I would not have her any but the way she was, you understand, but no one ever looked at Better Davis and thought, "she must be fascinating on a hike," or "I should very much like to see her garden." Both New England girls, by the way. That in common if little else. Question of class, possibly? Hepburn's parents were moneyed, her father a crusading, overbearing doctor, her mother a Suffragette. Davis' dad was a lawyer, but a deadbeat. Bette was raised by her rather grasping, somewhat hapless mother, Ruthie. Both actually enjoyed the outdoors and both looked pretty good in a flannel shirt, but Hepburn? Hepburn made everything she did, everything she wore, everything she said into Hepburn. "My, she was yar." (Not unlike Dietrich in that regard, though Dietrich had a distinct offstage persona too: glamourpuss to hausfrau and never the twain shall meet.) Ruth Elizabeth Davis was more cigarettes and tinned beans and a bottle of Jack by the campfire. I might have wished Davis more happiness in her personal life, though that is simply sentimental and not at all to do with why she's my star. I don't hold with artists being more worthy of worship for coming to sad ends; Judy, Judy Holliday, Monroe, Lady Day*. Love those ladies all and find their untimely ends deeply moving, but I don't listen to Billie for the heroin, as it were, or listen for the amphetamines when Garland played the Palace. I like my stars upright and running circles around the competition. And I generally prefer the truculent to the tragic, a riposte to a riptide. All these tragedy women were smart and funny, but at some point you had to look away. I like my stars fixed and flashing. I love Billie kicking the tar out of an up-tune. I love Judy when she could still giggle. Come to that, I love Hepburn when she purrs a putdown without missing a consonant. But I love Davis in everything. </p><p>Hepburn has sharp angles. Bette has edges.</p><p>I have in fact read every major and minor biography of Bette Davis -- none of them very good, may I say, though I still own nearly all of them -- and I believe I have by now seen every surviving film and most of what she did on television, including interviews and talk show fluff (she was never a great talk show type, like Judy G. or even Hepburn when she finally did it on Cavett. Bette Davis doesn't relax much on camera without a script. We get only glimpses of how much fun she must have been at lunch with Olivia de Havilland, or watching TV with Victor Buono.) In her greatest film roles it would be no exaggeration to say that I have seen Bette Davis dozens of times. I've kept all these years the People Magazine announcing her death, and then there is that eight by ten glossy of her as Margo Channing, her greatest role, framed above my bookcase.</p><p>I love Bette Davis I think for the very thing that now threatens her reputation as a great actress, namely that she was almost never not acting. Not so Hepburn. Hepburn at her very best, though never not Hepburn for a minute, was supremely clever at allowing the camera to slip in and see her, the actual woman, if only for a very well judged moment exactly as she was or would be in that moment, in the given circumstance. Most famously she did this watching Spencer Tracy's last monologue on film, the admiration and affection brimming her eyes, but she did it nearly from the start, and at least once or twice in every early film until she'd mastered the camera completely. It can still be quite startling, and very moving. It might be her frustration in <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>, her hilarious practicality in <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>, or her wry vanity in <i>Lion in Winter</i>, but always there she is and nothing in the way. It is an intimacy Garbo might have envied. It makes even some of Hepburn's most mannered performances weirdly modern, despite that diction and the languorous physicality very much of an earlier style of acting than any we might see now.</p><p>Davis invites no such intimacy. She might well have bristled at the suggestion that anyone in her audience had a right to any such thing. In this she remained all her life and despite a history littered with husbands and lovers, a very proper New England sort of prude. The very idea! (For a woman who by literally aaaalll reports liked dick nearly as much as Crawford liked attention, Davis was hilariously prim in public discourse, insisting for example that she saw something in her first husband, the appropriately named Ham Nelson other than, well, meat. If she did she was proved very sadly wrong. Of the lot though, and she had four husbands, based on even just the few surviving photographs? I'd fuck 'im.) What's more, as she was always the first to point out, and again unlike great beauties like Hepburn, the camera did not love Bette Davis. From the moment she arrived in Hollywood this was the one thing about her with which her employers all seemed to agree; there was nothing in her face, figure, or person that called the camera to her. Even those famously large eyes are less likely to invite us in than frankly to stare us down. At five foot three, with a broad face and a high forehead, bad teeth, and a bust too big for her frame, as she put it, she was "never a glamour girl." Sex, on the rare occasions it was called for from her on screen, though obviously in her personal wheelhouse, was -- when she acted -- neither more nor less than the task at hand; like playing the piano, or starting a campfire, shooting Claude Rains, or making baked beans; something to be acted as well and as honestly as she was able. </p><p>I'm reminded of a moment from very early on in Davis's career, in a picture she claimed to detest called <i>Three On a Match,</i> from 1932. The stars are the delightful Joan Blondell and the repulsive Warren Williams -- a now almost unwatchable example of 1930s Lothario best passed over quickly. In the film there is one of those typical pre-code scenes where, for no good reason Davis is dressing while talking to Blondell. Curious now to think that it is Davis in the slip and Blondell fully dressed, but then maybe Blondell being the bigger name at the time was entitled to keep her dress on. Almost any other actress of the day would have played up or have been made to play up the suggestiveness of such near nudity. Blondell herself might have played the same moment any number of entertaining ways, comedic and or weary, but sexy in either case. When Davis puts on her stockings and garters it is nothing of the sort. Instead it is a sixty second study that might as well be titled A Woman Puts On Her Stockings. There's nothing prudish in it, no demure, but neither is there a hint of anything other than a practical, unobserved task appropriate to the action. This is how one does that. One can almost sense the voyeur's and presumably the director's disappointment even now. Still makes me smile.</p><p>A more famous example of the actor's sangfroid would be from <i>Of Human Bondage </i>(1934), perhaps her first really good part in a really good picture. As fans, in our house we still quote entire her deliciously hateful confrontation with poor Leslie Howard, "And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!" and always with appropriate gestures. But it's the end of her Mildred of which I now speak. Her cockney accent has dated about as well as Dick Van Dyke's. There are now faults to be found throughout the performance that established her as more than a star, and a serious actress. Not my business here. I would not presume. (Try not to watch her though, every minute she's on screen.) But for the end of the picture, when her character Mildred is discovered dead or dying in a seedy room, Davis researched how such a person facing such a death would look, where she might fall when she dropped, and Davis fought fiercely to be discovered exactly so. It is still a breathtaking moment. It is a minor triumph and a tragedy in miniature and unequaled I think by any American actress of her stature until Meryl Streep played dead in a similar scene in <i>Ironweed</i> more than fifty years later and for what feels like half of an hour. Of Davis' Mildred we get only a glimpse, but there is still an echo of the original audiences gasping nearly a century ago. Comedy may be hard and death easy, but dying is no easy thing to get not just right but real and Davis was intent on getting things right.</p><p>She didn't always. Setting aside all the things she may have got wrong offscreen; marriage, parenting, theater, exercise, alcohol, some of her choices on film can seem arbitrarily fulsome, her commitment disproportionate to the occasion. She won her first Academy Award for <i>Dangerous</i> (1935,) a potboiler about a dipso actress on the skids, rescued by selfless love. (Joan Crawford would have nailed it.) It is about as good as that sounds, though it has some beautiful work from cinematographer Ernie Haller. Down and out, stumbling along the genuinely mean looking streets, Davis is superb. No one in cinema ever looked likelier to hit the gutter, hard. But when rescued and threatened with kindness by the blandly pretty Franchot Tone, she vibrates and pops like dry beans in a hot pan. It is a genuinely startling performance, if not always in a good way. Davis was frequently accused of being theatrical. She isn't here. There are actors of that period, Judith Anderson, Constance Collier, Ethel Barrymore come to mind, who always look and sound like they've just crossed into frame out of a production of Medea or Macbeth or something by Congreve. However trite or contrived the screenplay, however small the part, They all just sailed in from the wings of the Old Vic. Angela Lansbury may have been the last truly great theatrical movie actress. She could do screen acting beautifully, and did when they let her which wasn't often enough, but she knew just when a broad should be broad as well -- <i>Death on the Nile </i>(1978) comes to mind -- and it now looks breathtakingly bold. (But I'm wrong. There's another. Nathan Lane.) Despite some serious stage training and the mid-Atlantic accent that used to connote legitimacy, Davis never declaims or poses or mugs. She does shriek, honk, yell, wring her hands, roll her enormous eyes, pull her hair. When required, as she saw it, her voice is no prettier than her puss. Why? Because this character in these circumstances wouldn't be concerned about such things and so Davis plays it that way. Keep that very much in mind watching Davis, she intends not to tell but to play the truth. That's the lady's job. If it's pain required, she will by-God perform pain in every excruciating particular, likewise anger, love, distrust, lust, despair, hated, exhilaration, etc., and all in the space of the time allotted. She doesn't exaggerate the emotion so much, or the moment, she just performs -- everything. In <i>Dangerous</i>, it's too much. It lacks variety. It can be as hard to watch as an actual breakdown. These explosions are not infrequent in her early work, on the rare occasions when she was actually given something big enough to do. Mostly though they tried to make her into either a denuded platinum starlet -- see those dreary first Universal pictures -- or another blond dame at Warner Brothers, sort of an anemic Joan Blondell or a Glenda Ferrell with veddy gud deportment and elocution, see?</p><p>But one has only to watch her in better films, with better scripts and better stories and better directors to see her make better choices. In her greatest triumphs from the late thirties through the mid-forties she is capable of unparalleled subtleties that put every other actress save Garbo -- and only Garbo inevitably in love, at that -- to shame. She goes blind better and dies more beautifully than anybody, in part because before this she panicked perfectly, and laughed and played house, and suffered. Yes, she could be a bitch. So could Joan. Joan wants us to love her even when she's being an asshole. Bespeaks an insecurity not so much in her acting as in her person. Davis doesn't need our sympathy. She has our attention. She breaks an engagement or a <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">fiancé</span></span> like a matchstick and we love her untroubled selfishness. Her uncertainty in borrowed evening clothes is exactly right and achingly real. Her all too brief mad scene in <i>Juarez</i> (1939) is actually dizzying. Rigidly unhelpful as her husband dies behind her, or meltingly faultless in her secret love for a married man far above her station in life, or older than it seems possible to be when she lets Errol Flynn lose his head, no actor on film ever made bolder, more beautiful choices. She needs you, the audience to know what this looks like, to see the emotion she is showing you, this character at this moment, and all of it alight. She never fights onscreen but for her life. She never falls in love but from a great height, even when all she has to land on is usually just doughy George Brent. It's not dishonest, it's just more; more than is seemly, more than is usual, more than we might ever allow in anyone but Davis. She feels everything for us. She is never without an audience, but we are expected, very much what she deserves. We are after all her one true love, but it is a love of equals. We pity Crawford. We admire Hepburn. We rise to Davis. It's why we secretly like it when Paul Henreid won't leave his wife, or Gary Merrill looks like he won't last. Davis will always turn to us.</p><p>In 1976 Davis paid tribute to her greatest director (and former lover) William Wyler when he received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. (A year later Bette Davis became the first woman so honored.) She described a particularly tempestuous exchange with Wyler when he insisted she do a scene not as she intended but as he wanted. Unsurprisingly, he won that fight. He was the director. He was a man. In her speech Davis could not resist adding that she still thought she was right, even as she lauded Wyler as her first great director. I loved that. The point wasn't that she was right, but that she was still willing to continue the argument. A major part of her legend comes from her willingness to fight; for parts, for better scripts, with the studio and against the limitations imposed upon her as a woman and an artist. She was to the end notoriously combative. Lots of performances and loads of anecdotes to support this idea of Davis as a termagant -- all delightful to relive as a fan at this safe distance from her death. Also points to what I think is one of her greatest achievements on screen. Bette Davis was film's first really angry woman.</p><p>Think about it. Gish suffered. Garbo made art from unequal parts unhappiness and bliss. Blondell was sassy. It only feels like Crawford slapped more faces on film than John Wayne threw punches, but usually she just wanted some dope like Jeff Chandler to notice her and say she was pretty. Stanwyck was the only other star I can think of with something of the same temper on film. Women's anger was shocking. Still is, sadly. It was usually punished, even in a Bette Davis picture. She wore that red dress to the Olympus Ball in <i>Jezebel</i> (1938) but it did not go well thereafter. Both Davis and Stanwyck were humbled on film for their discontent, punished for kicking against the pricks. In the misogynist hegemony, what could be worse, or more thrilling, than laughing right in men's faces? With Crawford this always looks like a strategy before the inevitable clinch. When Stanwyck said she'd kill ya, she meant it. Davis too. When Davis as Margo Channing fights with her not so charming younger lover in <i>All About Ev</i>e (1950) it is clear she would kick him right in the nuts if she could, not because she is jealous, or insecure, or hurt, but<i> because he deserves it</i>. She clearly knew whereof she acted. An incandescent Davis is a force with which to reckon, not just a lady in a mood. Davis didn't do anything by halves. Pissed off she's near perfect.</p><p>Other than angry, and often at the same time, my favorite Davis is Davis laughing. She was a great actress and some of her very best performances are quiet to the point of delicacy, as in <i>All This, and Heaven Too</i> or the superb William Wyler adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's <i>The Letter</i>, both released in 1940. But a year later, in <i>The Little Foxes</i> and <i>The Man Who Came to Dinner</i>, for very different reasons playing completely different characters, she laughs and it is thrilling. When it was right for the role, she roars, but even better is the laugh that slips out. It feels perfect, exactly what we want from her, utterly human. She can smile very like an actual movie star, but there's effort in it, whereas bemused is her at maybe her most attractive. Sarcasm came naturally to this working woman in a man's medium, and with it she tends to show off her lower register. But her bark has bite and mocking or mirthful her laugh is I suspect as close as we the viewers ever get to seeing Davis do that thing Hepburn could seemingly do at will, maybe the mask slips a little. There she is, Bette. Hepburn and Stanwyck could play comedy brilliantly. Neither strikes me as having had a specially developed sense of humor or any real capacity for self-mockery. Neither was I should think very funny in company, whereas Davis was rarely funny on screen, not a lot of that came her way, but she is uniformly reported to have been a hoot in real life at least as often as she proved a horror, I imagine depending on her blood alcohol. When she is funny in movies, it's usually because she has let herself comment a little on the scene with a look, a smile, a pause to light the next inevitable cigarette. But when she laughs I laugh. Doesn't matter if it's a chuckle because Robert Montgomery has briefly stopped being a prat, or a mad cackle at her own villainy later in her career. Davis laughing isn't pretty, it's profound. That's how you do it, that's how you tell death to fuck right off. Smoke forty cigarettes a day, sip a gin martini, adjust the hair, and -- bark. There's always a hint of a jeer in even her lightest laugh, often at her own expense. Even when she isn't funny, she gets why it is, or should be. Never winks though. Beneath her. Furies don't wink.</p><p>And that's why she's my Diva. I inherited my father's quick anger, but not his birthright as a straight, white dad to express it. I've always avoided confrontation. Many of the most awkward and uncomfortable moments in my life have come from panic in the face of strong emotion. I don't fight, I scramble. Better to please, amuse, distract, defuse. As a sissy I learned early that my antagonist always had a weapon in easy reach. I was born outnumbered. So no, I did not identify with the melting femininity of Marilyn Monroe or the bisexual dash of Carry Grant. One cannot aspire to be as pretty as Robert Taylor or Brad Pitt. I'm never going to be as funny as Chaplin holding a fork or tying his shoe. Watching the movies, I hoped one day, if I was lucky, to be either Clifton Webb or Monty Wooley. I could see my lane. I studied Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward and longed for silk dressing gowns and snappy lines. Eventually I used an actual cigarette-holder. I did. As a boy I watched for coded faggotry on the tv and prayed one day for wit. I cultivated what I could of self-deprecation and disdain -- the defense and offence of gay. I hid as much as I could of what would get my ass kicked. No question what my authentic self might look like -- turns out he's fat with a white beard, remember Monty Wooley? -- but I knew it was going to be a long time before I had the chance to be him. Meanwhile, to understand authenticity, to know emotion, I had to see it acted. That was how you do that, honey, soon as you get the chance. Make a note. Someday, when it's safe, that's how you tell someone to fuck right off. That's how you show contrition. That's how you sacrifice yourself for love, and suffer beautifully, and laugh at fate, and smoke. That's how you shoot Claude Rains, slap Miriam Hopkins, keep Mary Astor on a diet, lose your damn mind and push a flower pot onto the heads Joseph Cotton and your friend Olivia de Havilland. And so I worshipped Bette Davis. She inspired not because I saw myself in her, but because I saw in her the possibility someday of feeling everything overtly that I had to keep very much to myself.</p><p>I recently had a brief conversation at the cash register with a customer buying books by the famous Buddhist monk and writer Thic Nhat Hanh. I told her that I had actually seen him once, years ago in San Francisco. The customer gasped and told me how lucky I was and I agreed. She told me she considered him her "spiritual master" and greatest teacher. When she asked me who mine would be I said without hesitation or thought, "Better Davis." We were both startled by my answer. Took her a minute to even sort out who I might have meant. "The movie star?" she said. "That's the one," I replied.</p><p>If that seems absurd it is because it is. There was a time when I intended to become an actor. Went to school for it and all. Never once at the time did I think "I want to be Bette Davis!" Neither did I ever ask myself onstage, "How would Bette Davis do this scene?" I was too busy reading Stanislavski and studying Uta Hagen. I was trying to peel imaginary oranges and worse, trying to smell them as I did. It was all rather awful and wonderful and all too brief. Really nothing to do with Bette. </p><p>There are writers, novelists, poets, and yes, even philosophers and scientists who have been my greatest teachers, writers who have shaped my thinking, and my language which comes to the same thing. Montaigne would have been a good answer. Artists of all sorts have inspired me and from earliest childhood I have studied and imitated the line of this one and the composition of that. No one has had a greater influence on my character than my parents and later my husband of nearly forty years. </p><p>Nope. Bette Davis.</p><p>The truth is I've no idea why I said it, but it still does not feel wrong. Bette saw me through some shit, may I say. I remain absolutely fascinated even after all the unflattering, occasionally damning information I've so greedily taken in over the decades. I would still rather watch her in some pre-code stinker than almost anybody else, including the real stars of that era, just because it is her and I might miss something. I still make myself not watch <i>All About Eve</i> or <i>The Old Maid</i> unless they turn up on Turner Classic movies just so as to not miss out on other things -- like Glenda Ferrell in a <i>Torchy Blane</i> programmer or Ann Sothern playing Maisie again, because that can be great fun too. ("Can't all be caviar and cock," as my late friend Jimmy used to say.) Nonetheless, given my druthers -- and who's to say what I do with my own damned druthers at this age?! -- I would rather reread <u>Great Expectations</u>, and listen to Ella sing the Cole Porter Songbook, and watch Bette Davis in any goddamn thing than do just about any goddamn thing else. Haven't watched <i>June Bride</i> in awhile, or <i>The Sisters</i>. <i>The Catered Affair</i>?</p><p>She made me the man I am today, or at least the one I still intend to be. </p><p>Miss Bette Davis, ladies and gentlemen? Rise.</p><p>*In a later generation, there are those who are quick to insist that when it comes to more contemporary pop Divas that the late Amy Winehouse was superior to Adele, somehow the more authentic artist or some such because -- heroin and dead? Balls. Loved them both the very first time I heard either. Not the same artists. Not a competition. </p></div>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-50333864219212639832023-05-08T11:01:00.008-07:002023-06-09T10:55:49.297-07:00Old Man Listing<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2chDYwYC_os0bADuuMqghrodYuN7sTQNbdaNUnmY_iIJZIIQXOGBf4WTk68xsYKO4Uze2wP26Tof5uNSHK1RFvNDzpQH1CuXnAd4kkx2l-lGrxvvBwBFbeEFxoNwJ6XlILfEf1xkWv7R3J83yvth_Wzv5beLymb4ZUUT66b0llC_6t4xHzNMONy44/s2057/ship.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1690" data-original-width="2057" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2chDYwYC_os0bADuuMqghrodYuN7sTQNbdaNUnmY_iIJZIIQXOGBf4WTk68xsYKO4Uze2wP26Tof5uNSHK1RFvNDzpQH1CuXnAd4kkx2l-lGrxvvBwBFbeEFxoNwJ6XlILfEf1xkWv7R3J83yvth_Wzv5beLymb4ZUUT66b0llC_6t4xHzNMONy44/s320/ship.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><span>Time for a new list? I think yes. Specifically, an old man list, by which I do not mean a list of old men. (For that, Please See: Congress, all major political donors, and "established" rock bands - a term of art I recently learned from a friend who still writes about that Rock and Roll music. "Established" in this context means even I remember them,</span><i> </i><span>or put it another way, "Good lord! Isn't </span><i>he</i><span> dead? Are </span><i>they</i><span> still touring? Why do the Rolling Stones </span><i>all</i><span> look like Maria Ouspenkaya now? </span><i>Is</i><span> there still Journey? How are they not </span><i>all</i><span> dead?!") No. I am proposing a list of things that I've begun to realize may define me now as old, whatever my actual age. Due to a variety of recent indicators, many of them physical and involving new or more profound deficits, I've become increasingly aware of my age and or encroaching mortality. I wasn't unaware. The reminders just got rather more thick on the ground in recent weeks; kidneys and gall-bladder kicking up, knees misbehaving, had to cut the dosage on one of the heart medications that keep me alive because the higher dosage decided to kill me a different way, things like that. What else, by which I mean what other than the premature if entirely predicable decline of my body? What else has made me feel old lately? Best make a list. Lists are good. In order to make a list I've had to stop and think about what makes me old, which is something old people do by the way, stop and think, and make lists. A contemplative, scribbly bunch, the aging. It's all that free time when one stops going out or wanting to go out or do anything that involves wearing trousers after seven in the evening. Also trying to remember things like why one went into the kitchen, etc. (See: all the aging comedians.) that rather requires stopping and thinking even if this doesn't seem to change the outcome the way it used to. And sometimes old people just stop of their own accord, if not forever then in something like a preview of coming internment. The phrase is "stop dead." Old people do that a lot, I've noticed. I don't yet, but I know people who do. Not my problem so far, but who knows if I'll know when it is? People don't seem to. Lists are something of a hedge against unknowing. A good list is almost like doing something. I make lists instead of doing other things that may well be more useful, like updating my phone contacts and taking out all of the dead people (and the one convicted murderer now doing life -- no lie -- but that's a story for another day. Old guys say shit like that all the damned time too. Annoying, ain't it?) So, am I old yet? Turns out, the signs are all there. Now I'm deaf in one ear, I'm missing organs (Glad to be shed of 'em, mostly, you understand.) So maybe I am just getting to it now, but then I was always told I was old beyond my years and it seems the years have caught up. So maybe I am old-ish at last. This is strange considering that I'm being told incessantly by television commercials that no one my age or older is actually old at all anymore. Advertising would seem to have abolished old age. Seems nearly all of my contemporaries, at least the straight ones, are still fucking in hot tubs and on hammocks, taking Tai Chi classes, and walking off their COPD symptoms at various State Fairs with the grandkids, when not actually discussing term life insurance with their remaining friends in kitchens the like of which I can only dream. Even advertising can't stop death. So am I old now? How old am I really? Let's see.</span><div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><u><b>ACTUAL SIGNS THAT I'M GETTING OLD </b></u></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p><span style="text-align: center;">1) What is a "substack"? What is it to be "Drake"? Is it "sus" of me to ask?</span></p><p>2) I still cook something called a "ham-steak" regularly, sometimes for breakfast.</p><p>3) I eat breakfast. </p><p> 3A) <i>Or</i> <b>My Breakfast Ruined.</b></p><p>Took the elderly husband into the hospital for an angiogram the other day. Normal enough, as he is actually of an age. (He's fine.) Anyone who has done will know that is is an all-day business, whatever weirdly optimistic estimate offered by one's health care provider. Got there in the morning. Didn't escape until late in the afternoon. Procedure actually took less than an hour start to finish, but they book medical procedures nowadays like they're scheduling flights for Southwest; cardiac cases stacking up like discount flights to Vegas on a three-day weekend. It's a mess. Now how old am I? I'm so old I actually rate hospitals -- all of which are now nightmares of for-profit-callousness and service-shaving -- at least in part by the quality of their cafeterias. Yeah, you heard me. Hey, you spend the day, you're going to get hungry and they frown on egg-salad sandwiches pulled from pockets. I won't say I looked forward to this visit, but I did remember this particular cafeteria being specially nice, at least pre-pandemic.</p><p>Entirely automated now, with touch-screens to order and pay, and no chance of an actual human interaction. I personally know exactly one person who likes the self-checkout in the grocery store and this sort of profitably impersonal interface. He's an old friend, I'm quite fond of him, but I sometimes worry he'd rather his friends were actually robots. All I know is that someone actually had to help me order my breakfast burrito after I repeatedly tapped "pay now" but could not see what came next -- turns out this was "done." There used to be a whole line of cooks serving hot food in this cafeteria, some of it made to order, as well as fresh salads and pastries and whatnot. Now there were three lost souls in the whole kitchen, all of them looking like they'd been forced to work off a dermatologist's bill. None of them spoke until one finally bawled out whatever name one had typed into the wretched touch-screen to tell you your order was ready. (Wish I'd known this as I would have typed in "Dante Alighieri.") </p><p>When it came my food was cold and not so much wrapped in a traditional tortilla as shrouded in one. Soon as I picked the thing up, everything fell out. It was not good. Looking around me nothing looked good. I noticed that none of the staff seemed to be eating anything that had not been prepackaged in plastic. </p><p>So, yeah, I did lean over to strangers at the next table and tell them how nice the place used to be. So now I'm that guy.</p><p>4) We still watch television on a television.</p><p>5) I wear hats because my head gets cold -- because bald not hip.</p><p>6) I remember when Johnny Depp was fuckable and you could still see Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes.</p><p>7) We watch what we still call, "The News."</p><p>8) we subscribe to four newspaper and two of those are printed on paper.</p><p> 8A) <i>Or</i> <b>My Virtual Newspaper Spoiled.</b></p><p>The new-to-me theatre critic for The Guardian newspaper recently wrote a piece defending people eating and talking and applauding at awkward moments during live performances. She argued there was historical precedence for this seemingly new raucousness and that reverent silence was a fairly recent imposition on audiences. This piece made me as furious as anything happening of actual consequence in the real world including war and the climate crisis. I actually argued aloud with my phone while reading this nonsense. Now I will hate this person forever and ever and cannot bring myself to even open that section of the paper. Hurrumph.</p><p>9) I still speak to at least three Republicans, and one unaffiliated Libertarian which is way worse.</p><p> 9A) <i>Or</i> <b>The Real Reason I Hate QAnon.</b></p><p>Just this morning I was reading a new book called <u>Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspirac</u><u>y That Unhinged America</u>, by journalist Will Sommer. (Old men it seems like making themselves furious over breakfast, when we still have the energy for a proper sputtering fury.) The broad strokes of all of this Q bullshit were pretty familiar. Even some of the loopiest details I already knew from previous reading. Still, it was weirdly satisfying to have a proper narrative of the whole rotting horror, like watching that time-lapse footage of a dead opossum turn eventually to dust and fur. So what was nagging at me this whole time? What was the thing I couldn't and still can't get past about this cult? </p><p>Q. The letter Q.</p><p>For me Q will always be the nickname of the very late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; out of print novelist, first editor of <u>The Oxford Book of English Verse</u>, and chief influence, via the New York Public Library, on my beloved Helene Hanff, author of <u>84 Charing Cross Road</u>. She didn't get to go to college on account of the Great Depression. She always credited Q, whom she never met, and the books he wrote and edited as being her university, as in a smaller way she was a vital part of my own education. (From her I made lists of books I had to read and did, including Quiller-Couch, but also Hazlitt, Newman, Landor, Milton.) I continue furious that this inoffensive if somewhat pointless English letter, and by extension the memory of a great and largely forgotten English Gentleman of Letters, has now been forever besmirched by these conspiratorial goons, these whooping Yahoos and shit-slinging lower primates of American politics. Damn them all to the very Hell they've made in their empty little heads, for all the evil they do, yes, but also in memory of dear old Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, heaven rest 'im. The man embodied nearly every virtue in opposition to the Philistines, and now the Philistines have taken his nickname and made it synonymous with insanity. The bastards.</p><p>10) I always take the envelope when I buy a greeting card (no one under the age of thirty does this.)</p><p>11) I probably have change for a twenty.</p><p>12) I'm gay. Just gay. Straight up homo. No flex. No bend.</p><p>13) I vote, every time.</p><p> 13A) <i>Or</i> <b>Why I Vote.</b></p><p>Washington is a Vote by Mail state because -- sanity. Don't get me wrong, we have plenty o' local, homegrown crazy, they just can't keep their numbers up, bless 'em. The state is actually divided East and West by a mountain range and attraction/repulsion to Idaho. That's right. There are people whose ideal, whose shining city on a hill is -- Idaho. Dude, I am not making this up. There are separatists right now in the eastern part of Washington who want to join, county by county, Idaho. What's your vision for the future, my Eastern Washington friend? Well, mister, that would be the past, and not just any past, mind you, but an execution by firing-squad, we love militias, can't practice obstetrics anymore 'cause 'bortion, "weather creating difficult calving season conditions" leading the local news past. Sometimes think Western Washington being the cradle of aviation may have happened just because no rational person wanted to drive east.</p><p> 13a) The last Special Election we voted in? One issue. It was something called a "social housing" initiative. look it up if you want the details. Did not know what this meant, so I read the ballot information booklet and looked up the definitions online. I am that old. It passed, by the way. </p><p>14) I remember things now but not other things.</p><p> 14A) Okay, not birthdays or the name of the lady who buys all the crochet books, but I do remember:</p><p> 1) The John Birch Society</p><p> 2) When fresh cut roses cost less than a car-payment</p><p> 3) Having a waist</p><p> 4) Network television</p><p> 5) FM radio</p><p> 6) When Teenage Jesus Jeffrey Hunter redefined the temptation of Christ (if you didn't want Robert Ryan's John the Baptist to do unspeakable things to Him, you simply were never gay.)</p><p> 7) <i>Or</i> <b>We Have Been Here Many Times Before.</b></p><p>I remember Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafly, the fat Falwell, and Ronald Reagan. I remember Pat Robertson and the Lesbian hurricanes. I remember Matthew Shepard. I remember the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. The time before that I read about in books, as I have all the times before that that I know of. (So old I read books. So old I read history. So old I remember history. So old I don't expect to be remembered by history.) It is always our fault, or rather it is our fault when it isn't the Jews or the brown people, etc. O course there's quite a bit of crossover there, and never more so than when the reactionaries are looking to explain The Decline of the Bless'd, or Now Why Ain't It Enough I'm White? I remember the Birchers and the Blimps, the Dixiecrats and the South'rn Baptists, the closeted clergy and the closeted congressmen, the conversion "therapists" and the troglodytes in pickup trucks, and the Nazis and the Klan, and yeah, I remember yesterday and Trump and the NYT before they decided to hire Terfs and trolls for their editorial page. I remember what it feels like to be threatened and bullied and unsure of my safety. I remember what cops all but invariably were and mostly are still. I remember being punched in the face for just being gay. </p><p>Now it's drag queens reading children's books aloud to kids, and transgender athletes, but it's the same shit. The same assholes who can't understand that I have exactly ZERO interest in their wretched, filthy, little litters of Future Fascists of America are exactly the same goons, dullards, and bores who think those precious babies should be spared the history of race in America, the sight of David's penis as sculpted by Michelangelo for a cathedral, and knowledge of my existence. How is this sort of thing still possible in the modern world? Well, if one's cosmology comes from a comic book and one's politics from a Fox feeding trough, safe bet that one will be just as pig-shit-stupid as one's unremembered and un-mourned grandpappy. More to the point though, it seems there will always be cynical types in search of scapegoats and wedge issues, and those fuckers can never let the gays alone.</p><p> 14B) And just for balance, I don't remember the following:</p><p> 1) Civility in American politics (guess you had to be there in the Senate dining room)</p><p> 2) "Life before phones," a phrase I've heard a lot from actual old people, but none of them born before 1876 so just shut up about this. We have COMPUTERS that fit in our POCKETS!!!</p><p> 3) When candy bars were "way bigger" (My husband insists this was true, and no, it's not just that his hands were smaller when he was a child and... now I'm an asshole.) </p><p> 4) Caring about cars, sports, camping, maps, or pandas especially. </p><p> 5) The words to Tiny Dancer, though I always seem to think I do and should but then I don't.</p><p>Wait. Is this still a list? Where was I? </p><p> 15) I lose the thread sometimes.</p><p>Okay, enough with the listing. Maybe just skip to the Big One, the number one sign that I am getting older. Ready?</p><p><b> (DRUMROLL!)</b></p><p>Hate. </p><p>That's right. I'm hateful now. What does that mean? I will explain. (Old men do this ALOT.) It means I hate more now, more easily, and more often. One could say that I've gotten better at it. (Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?) I guess I'm a hater now. I'm surprisingly okay with this. At least I've become accustomed to it, to hating, I mean -- oh, and I specifically hate way more people than I used to. It's "second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in." </p><p>You wouldn't know it to look at me. If anything, I now look absolutely harmless, not unlike my childhood hero Freddy the Pig when he would affect human clothes and false whiskers. This is one of the most common dodges of the old, looking harmless. If one didn't know the real purport of a <i>Trumpf Hassfest</i>, for example, just looking at all the whitehaired attendees one might be forgiven for assuming they were just watching the wrestlin'. Do not be deceived! Grandma isn't singing along with Wayne Newton, she's making overt her hostility to the Jews and the queers, and the GD brown people, and grandpa is wishing Nancy Pelosi and her elderly husband actually, violently murdered. No, really. That's what these MAGA goons do now. Ignorance and pride aren't just for Sundays anymore. Pawpaw and Meemaw go to Nazi rallies now, just like they kin used to was spending picnic-time with the Klan. Some of these good white Christian folk hate full-time now, 24/7 and right in front of the grandkids and the television cameras. I'm not so far gone as that, I can still keep my head, I still have all my faculties, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. Unlike them I am not yet consumed by hate, but I do hate, even as I seemingly grow ever more so adorable. Irony!</p><p>Maybe older people just hate more easily, just as love seems pretty straight-forward to me now. (Old people quote old songs a lot so I could just say that if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with. Just change the singular to plural. You get it. Peace and love.) Getting older means feeling everything pretty much all the time. Joints, kidneys, receding gums, for instance, but also complex psychological states and rich veins of sentiment. Emotions seem nearer under thin skin. Some clever person suggested that we humans tend to hate what we fear and I cannot disagree. It's true. I'm scared. It seems I am frightened anew, and in a way I perhaps foolishly thought I had done with, until Trumpf. In my youth I remember being very much aware of young men in crowds, and old men in pick-up trucks with gun-racks, gym coaches, and cops, and all the people who did not hesitate to call me a faggot and threaten my life. It's not like I thought these men went away, (a number of them seem sadly to have gone on mission to post colonial Africa,) but I did think they'd been driven well back into the VFW Halls and golf resorts and gun clubs. Perhaps naively I hoped they would all eventually go peacefully into pig and boar sanctuaries, mostly in Florida, and there die.Years ago I decided to only live thereafter in civilized places north of the Mason Dixon Line, places with large and diverse populations, public transportation, more than one Asian cuisine, and more than one bookstore. I thought, frankly, I'd outrun the bastards. Turns out, no. They regrouped, elected a leader, and got if anything louder. Hate that.</p><p>Hate, not dislike, mind. There's a difference. I dislike babies on airplanes. I dislike gin. I dislike commercials on Hulu (but refuse to pay more just to watch <i>Murders in the Building</i>. I dislike pretty much everything else on Hulu.) I disliked both Bushes and remain to this day none too fond of Bill Clinton. I disliked everyone on Fox News since the launch and I thought Glen Beck was an unbelievable ass. Then they came out with Bill O'Reilly who was of course a whole new kind of bellicose buffoon. (Always up-grading ((down-grading?)) their idiots at Fox. It's what they <i>do</i>. Now Tucker's got the boot! Who's next? Just an actual boat-shoe full of actual shit? Stay tuned. Actually, don't. Please.) What did I hate though, back in my callow youth? Well, I hated bullies in school. Wished those boys dead in a ditch many a bedtime. And algebra. Hated algebra. Hated my algebra teacher, come to that. She was a miserable old bitch who's favorite question was, "Are you stupid?!" I was heartened years later when my mother sent me that teacher's obituary. Mum wrote on the back, "Knew you'd want to see this." Funny. I have of course hated the Republican Party as long as I can remember, but then we were always Democrats. Didn't mean I necessarily hated the neighbors. Most of them voted wrong even then. Didn't make me like them, but hate? I did actively hate Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, all those other old bigots, racists, and windbags from back in the day. Why wouldn't I? Why didn't everyone? I know that I hated Reagan and I will 'til the day I die. Soulless, empty-headed, suit. He left my friends to die. Couldn't make him even say the word for years. Hated him and was glad he died sitting in his own mindless mess. See? I've had practice. So, yeah, I have been doing this whole hate thing longer than you might think. Nothing new really, just more so now. Never knew how easy it could be though until Trumpf. Not all to do with him, but yeah, him. </p><p>If there's ever been a man in the White House or out that only sapheads, hoaxers, and authoritarian-bossy-bottoms could love, it was Donald whores'-john Drumpf, that piss-poor President for all the worst reasons and all the worst people. You remember him. If you don't hate the sight, sound, and smell of the man there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Have you had a stroke? Are you completely disengaged? Are you really that dumb? What is wrong with you?! And if you've been itching to pipe up just here and say that you, as a Christian, or a Buddhist, or an ethical vegetarian, and or just a better-person-than-me, that you <i>don't hate anybody</i> and that the only answer to hate is love and whatnot -- well all I can say to that, my darling, is go fuck yourself. Was that uncharacteristically harsh? Did that sound shocking coming from a human snow-globe of otherwise relentless good cheer? Well? See? Hateful.</p><p>Growing up in the 1960s as a sissy in a small town I understood pretty quickly that hate was coming my way sooner rather than later, the minute I spoke, walked, or sang quietly to myself while I played with my troll dolls and or drew pictures of misunderstood clowns and monsters. Hate could spring up from various directions and pop like a jack-in-the-box from seemingly harmless looking, even cheerful settings. Sunday school and church functions could be a minefield. Any sport or sporting venue was inherently dangerous, and locker-rooms were guaranteed to be unspeakable. It was my responsibility to avoid, deflect, deny, or diffuse. Being hated was something of an accident of biology, if not my actual fate. It somehow was my fault. Knew that. I was the object of the verb. Nothing to be done about it but dodge. I certainly saw and heard it directed at other innocent folks like blacks and Jews and feminists and foreigners -- none of which tended to be anywhere near in those days -- and other real or imaginary radicals, communists, and or strangers. When I was little I didn't always know that that was what that was, hate, but that was what that was. I wasn't very old before I understood that I deserved a share. I hate knowing how young I must have been when I learned that. But then even if I've been hating for a good stretch now, those motherfuckers have been at it for centuries.</p><p>The most obvious difference between me hating them and them hating me is potential. They could kill me. I wouldn't care if they died but that's not the same thing. Me being frightened of them is not the same as them being frightened of us. They are always frightened of us for stuff they insist we intend to but never do like take their guns for instance, and their children, and their Constitutional right to worship an angry little white god, and listen to Trace Adkins read the Bible as a book-on-tape while they drive their Ford F-150 across endangered tundra. They're convinced we will make them watch RuPaul and not go to Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A, maybe spell out the word "filet" or maybe even spell it with two "l"s like a bunch of damned foreigners. They are sure that some crossdresser is just waiting in the next booth in the lady's loo to molest them. Actual history, like science, matters not at all. The odds matter not a bit. Percentage of transgender athletes actually in competition? Evidently one's too many. Every single advance in human equality, every scientific advance in our understanding of sexuality, identity, gender, reproduction, -- well, anything frankly not to do with making Cheetos cheesier or guns more deadly -- it's all a slippery slope leading to... their mild discomfort, and that would be INTOLERABLE. </p><p>Meanwhile they shoot us at nightclubs, accuse us of unspeakable horrors more properly left at the doorstep of their preachers, priests, pastors, and police. They bully, bash, and murder us as if we mattered less for being unlike them <i>which is the greatest blessing frankly in our collective lives</i>. They have influenced whole nations in Africa to make us illegal again, to send us to prison, or to our deaths. Suddenly they even like Putin -- a fuckin' Russian -- in part at least because he hates us too. And we, it seems, and people being respectful to one another, and people struggling to make a more equitable world, plain old common decency, all of this is a graver threat to them than actual deadly viruses. It is insanely stupid. I hate them.</p><p>I can see this more clearly now after decades of unlearning the self-loathing with which they once sought to control and marginalize me. That's energy better directed now at the idiots who think me and the beloved elderly husband are a bigger threat to their children's safety than pink AK47s for the baby's birthday. </p><p>A century ago George Bernard Shaw said, "I have defined the 100% American as 99% an idiot" and that has clearly not changed. What has changed for me at least is my willingness to call a blockhead a blockhead I guess. I understand that it is possible to hate ignorance and stupidity and yet not hate the person manifesting these in public. Seems to me high school teachers must do this every hour of every working day, bless 'em. I am not a teacher. I do work in retail. That has its struggles too. Not the same, briefer pain, but real. Really, nearly all of us put up with quite a bit, humans, but some more than others and some, it seems, have to invent their oppression just to feel more important and exaggerate their loss of power and status and blame equality for their inadequacy and narrowness of spirit, and yeah, I fucking hate 'em.</p><p>Yup. Hate. I honestly do not wish them well. More, I wish they all fell right off the edge of their flat earth and took the Taliban, and Narendra Modi, and the Tories, and the dictators, and all the evangelicals here and in Africa and the Carribean, etc. with 'em. I should live so long as to dance on all of their graves. May all their children become dance majors with a minor in French Literature, marry outside their race and religion and cease to define their gender traditionally. May their churches fall in on their heads and their fortunes be lost in crypto and their guns be melted down to anchors to be hung 'round their stupid necks. That's hate, isn't it?</p><p>According to <i>my</i> dictionary (like I have just the one! Ha!) it is meant to be "a strong feeling of dislike" but in common usage we tend to hate pretty indiscriminately in conversation: I hate these commercials, I hate my hair, I hate beets, I hate poppy seeds in my teeth, etc. Such drama. Getting older hasn't broken me of the habit of exaggeration. I still "adore" singers I will not listen to in a month's time. I still describe meals as "unforgettable" and then forget them. I insist that everyone simply <i>must</i> read this book or that and then, a week later when they do I don't remember the plot anymore. Did I say I love broccolini? Well, now I don't so much anymore. Fickle bitch, that's me. My "strong feelings of dislike" though, at least for the people banning books, and drag shows, and medical care for trans people, you know, assholes like that? That turns out to not be a mood.</p><div style="text-align: left;">I was angry with my friend:<br />I told my wrath, my wrath did end.<br />I was angry with my foe;<br />I told it not, my wrath did grow.</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">SO many smart people have said SO many smart things about hatred, including above, this brief bit o' Blake. And maybe wacky William is right and just expressing my detestation of bullies and boneheads and bigots allows me to let some of my anger go. But all of that wise advice about hatred hurting me more than the people I hate? Doesn't alter the fact that I can't look at a Proud Boy and not want to punch him right in his smug ignorance. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">What to do then with this new knowledge of just what a hateful ol' bastard I've become? Where, as it were, to put that bit of self-awareness? Obviously - here - was my first thought. Makes sense. Among friends. And then there's the list of where and what I won't:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1) Much as I may want to and much as I may feel fully justified in doing so, I will probably never:</div><div style="text-align: left;"> a) punch a Nazi</div><div style="text-align: left;"> b) slap Lauren Boebert in her stupid mouth</div><div style="text-align: left;"> c) set Mar-a-Grosso with all its hideous occupants, goods and chattels alight</div><div style="text-align: left;"> d) kill, crush, mutilate, torture, abuse, traumatize, and or actually shit on anybody</div><div style="text-align: left;"> e) be rude to grandma until she's rude to me</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">All of that said I will probably go on feeling what I feel and doing largely as I've always done because I was raised right and I am not actually a jerk. Not bragging. Still hating, still okay with it too, but if one were forced to demonstrate the clearest difference between what I do and what they do? There it is. I may be yet another hateful old bugger, but I'm not a fascist. If you are, please keep in mind that I did say "probably." </div>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8816955256931900850.post-50540147072975996332023-03-04T15:59:00.012-08:002023-03-04T17:36:22.726-08:00Cool Reaction <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRVRmm9osz3zHeEvqwVtBYGvnGQb6ljyETEHRkR8gOc8RTusOZBLG2uCx2He9fukGmSnskpUGfadh11yv8yNhQ7ctVCDSRO-OFIeZgEbtBG4FdeN7E_7O4UdVFpMFYc1Gow5sM6nVndX35cMONrle1m6P7AzveP-oZ7wE2oby9rctjbaOcyVoXAF68/s631/space-cadet-631.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="631" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRVRmm9osz3zHeEvqwVtBYGvnGQb6ljyETEHRkR8gOc8RTusOZBLG2uCx2He9fukGmSnskpUGfadh11yv8yNhQ7ctVCDSRO-OFIeZgEbtBG4FdeN7E_7O4UdVFpMFYc1Gow5sM6nVndX35cMONrle1m6P7AzveP-oZ7wE2oby9rctjbaOcyVoXAF68/s320/space-cadet-631.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />OMG! "Beat" (Kitano) Takeshi's favorite movie is <i>Les Enfants du Paradis</i> (Children of Paradise) 1945, directed by Marcel Carne. (!!!!) This is also my favorite movie. "Beat" Takeshi is so cool. "Beat" Takeshi thinks <i>Children of Paradise</i> the best movie ever and I do too SO, I am now cool just like "Beat" Takeshi -- because that is how that works. Waste of time, may I add, explaining logical fallacies and transitive law and such to me just now. I am not proving anything. I am claiming what one might call associative cool. No, it's not a real thing. <p></p><p>I found Takeshi Kitano's Top Ten Films of All Time List exactly where such lists breed, on social media. A friend, a playwright and cineaste, posted a link. Takeshi is a big Kubrick fan.<i> 2001: A Space Odyssey</i> 1968 (#2) and <i>A Clockwork Orange</i> 1971 (#3) show up right after the Carne picture. There's a Peckinpah,<i> Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia</i> 1974, that I never liked at #7, and Sam Raimi's<i> Darkman</i> 1990 at #8 which I find completely mystifying. None of that really matters though. All that matters is that I now have something to talk about with my new pal, "Beat" Takeshi, namely <i>Les Enfants du Paradis -- </i>when and if we should ever meet which is never going to happen. I would of course also tell him how much the beloved husband and I became obsessed with him after <i>Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence</i> in 1983, how we loved <i>Kikujiro</i> 1990, how much I admire <i>Sonatine</i> 1993 and <i> Hana-Bi</i> 1997, how I've watched his version of <i>Zatoichi</i> 2003 a ridiculous number of times on television. Now that we are buddies and I am cool like him, he will probably be embarrassed by how much I go on about his work. Better we should talk about Carne.</p><p>I first saw Marcel Carne's great Romantic drama from the light booth at the Craft Avenue Theater in the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The playhouse was actually a complex of various stage spaces. Most nights they showed repertory movies in the Craft Avenue stage, children theater during the day. The theater was so old, I actually had to raise and lower the lights manually, using levers. This meant I got to sit in the booth and watch the movies -- in case there was an emergency or the film broke and I had to bring the lights up. It was the early eighties, I was a student and doing the lights was part of my work-study job. I also sold Milk Duds and popcorn (more than once to Mr. Fred Rogers!) Saw a lot of great films for the first time at that job: Fellini's <i>La Strada</i> 1954 and <i>Amarcord</i> 1973, <i>Wild Strawberries</i> 1957, <i>Le Belle et le Bet</i>e 1946, <i>Seven Samurai</i> 1954. The prints were usually shit back then; unrestored, often cobbled together with glaring breaks, unreadable white subtitles on washed out film. Sometimes it didn't matter. <i>Rashomon</i> 1950 survived the worst showing through which I ever sat; repeated breaks, bad sound, a mess and a revelation. And Carne's masterpiece was magical even when I couldn't quite hear or read Jacques Prevert's words, even when Jean-Louis Barrault's face faded to just sad eyes in a blazing white mask. (There was finally a worthy and complete restoration of the film in 2012.) </p><p>If you've never seen <i>Children of Paradise</i> you must. It is a great film. It is beautiful and moving and the story of its creation and the artists and collaborators (ahem) who made it is as fascinating as any in film history. If you don't like it you may still be cool, but you can never be my friend, or "Beat" Takeshi's either I should think, though he may not be quite so judgmental as me.</p><p>Takeshi Kitano, if you don't know (and if you don't know you can never be cool, sorry) is a Japanese comedian and tv personality who became an exceptional filmmaker and actor. He's won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He's been awarded the <i>Ordre des Arts et Lettres</i> in France. He is cool the way Bogart was cool. He has the cool to which most actors, most directors, most humans may only aspire. What is that? I do not know, but, you know, right?</p><p>Generally speaking, cool is something about which I could not be made to give much of a shit. I myself have never been. Hasn't bothered me much. Like obscenity at the Supreme Court, I know it when I see it of course, but cool has changed a lot since I last worried about it in my teens. Back then it involved cigarettes, liquor in heavy glass tumblers, maybe a little cocaine, tight trousers, what else? Even then cool was unreliable. Miles Davis, sure. The gays? Depended then on who one was meeting in which alley to what purpose and so on. I was pretty sure at the time that pretty much all the gays other than me were cool. Right? What did I know? Redneck is frankly antithetical to cool and guess what I come from. When I was a teenager I must have aspired to at least a little cool. Reading a little Marshall McLuhan back in the day probably helped. And People Magazine, maybe? Esquire? I don't remember. Also, I never much liked most of the people who were cool, back when cool was still a thing in pop culture -- which we did not call it at the time by the way. Nobody thought "pop" was any kind of culture at all back then. Elvis was white trash. Comic books were for little kids and lowbrow Gomers. Nobody thought pop music was cool except nine year old girls and their little gay friends. Even low culture wasn't quite so low as to be overtly popular, just a little simple, like folk art and white gospel music. Pop was neither threatening nor respectable, just pleasant, like menthol and wine-coolers. It's actually hard for anyone in this post-ironic age to appreciate that kitsch was still just worthless trash back then. That cheese had to age a long time before anyone decided to serve it again. We weren't completely clueless, but we weren't terribly hip either, most of us. In the seventies some of us understood that those hideously bright clothes we all wore were made out of fibers better suited to underground cable than to underground clubs, but most of us just thought we looked pretty. Everybody knew Nixon wasn't cool. The Vietnam War, Bob Hope, etc., not cool. Abbott & Costello had to be long dead before "Who's On First?" started to sound like Congreve to anybody over the age of twelve. Before pop got to be anywhere near to being high culture or any kind of culture back then Roy Lichtenstein had to repaint it -- and much BIGGER. So, cool? Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall. I don't have an answer, or even need one really. Everybody hates a fad but loves a trend, no? Cool.</p><p>Obviously I am not immune to any of this even now. I tried kale chips, and those flat, watery soda drinks, and I watch all the latest true crime still hoping for another Tiger King. Back in the day I wore something called "Earth Shoes" despite the fact that they were fucking ugly and not actually all that comfortable. Why? Were they cool? I'm thinking not, but for a minute there they felt very much of the moment. Fad then. Likewise mood rings, the Equal Right Amendment (alas), and pet rocks. Trends that survived the seventies? I'll say, sexual liberation, computers & new tech, maybe... library science - 'cause that's where the Internut was a bornin'. Not unrelated though I certainly never saw it coming was the eventual triumph of nerd culture. How did THAT happen?! (See computers and tech.)</p><p>Nerds are nice. Admittedly I encounter them primarily in one of their happy places -- the Science Fiction/Fantasy section at the bookstore -- but in my own anecdotal experiences nerds are much nicer individually and<i> en masse</i> at a book-signing or a convention for example than, say, ladies of a certain age who garden. Never has a nerd taken umbrage at the absence of an out-of-print title on nasturtiums or insisted that they've "always" bought their seed catalogs at the bookstore, etc. If anything, nerds are inexplicably delighted by almost everything related however tangentially to their hobbies, interests, collecting, reading, childhoods. Nobody ever laughed more heartily or with less reason at the slightest joke made by anyone at an author event. No one applauds a pun like the nerds. It isn't mindless enthusiasm either, like you might see at rally for the Orange Goon, or at a music service in a mega-church. Nerds are serious people, good humored and kind, also earnest, intellectually engaged, and deeply attentive to detail. They like art and ideas and conversation. They respect and honor their favorite artists and encourage each other's creativity. They share information and research and they support their communities. I honestly admire them.</p><p>I am not however of them. I don't read their books anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but then I started reading other things and fell out of the habit. I'm not a fan of their Marvel movies either, or their comics or their cosplay, or their tv shows, mostly. I have enjoyed some epic dragon related content, but I was also one of those spoiled, casual viewers who turned it off even before the blond lady lost her wits like soap opera actress in search of another daytime Emmy nom. Zombies, icy, or smelly or both are just so fucking dull. I like a villain capable of a bit o' pointless verbal taunting, maybe a little light seduction. Icy stares are fine, but there are only so many ways to play wordless menace and most of them are fucking boring, mate.</p><p>Not that I am not still occasionally induced to watch new zombie dramas despite being bored to walking death by zombies. Fast or slow, zombies are tired, honey. (Also? Any Halloween costume a frat boy can make without a girlfriend -- vampire, caveman, zombie -- is not cool. But then frat boys are inherently not cool unless they are in gay porn and even then they are not cool, just hawt, depending on one's investment in wooden paddles, performative reluctance, hypermasculinity, etc.) Now it seems zombies might be cool again. Well, shit.</p><p>What's kept zombies current in the culture is guns. Simple. (Guns figure pretty obviously in some of the Bogart and "Beat" Takeshi cool too.) Video games are where zombies come from now. Zombies aren't characters, they are targets. The timeline runs roughly: folklore, evil hypnotists, Val Lewton, <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, comic books, Max Brooks, then Frank Darabont decides to become Walt Disney (Zombies on Ice! Zombies of the Caribbean!), and -- exhaustion. And somewhere in there, between Ms. Pac-Man and Grand Theft Auto, the undead went straight to video, just games this time. Zombies, zombies, zombies, 'cause your mom was not comfortable with you shooting people people. I was far too old for first person shooter games. I still remember playing Pong for about ten minutes when it was the new thing. That's how old. That's how long my interest was held. The idea of roaming through incredible complex digital landscapes interests me not at all as I am already disinclined to wander through actual landscapes. Virtual cities wherein one can neither book shop nor eat? Get back to me when I can browse for rare volumes of Walter Savage Landor and can taste virtual pizza. Add to this carrying a gun around to shoot anything and I am simply not your guy. If I need to carry a gun in order to survive I won't. Seriously, what is this? Texas? No thanks, y'all.</p><p>I think we've established though that I am not immune to trending and faddish whatnot, so yeah, I watched the first couple of seasons of <i>The Walking Dead</i>, even after they killed off the reliably shirtless Jon Bernthal and I no longer had a reason to live. Actually, I lasted on and off until two things happened. First, some asshole with a baseball bat beat Glenn to death for no fucking reason and we were meant to watch the whole bloody business no thank you and fuck you ALL VERY MUCH. Then my friend Chuck died and nobody I loved was watching anymore so I couldn't care. Anytime I happened to catch some stray episode from some random redheaded stepchild of the franchise thereafter I had to wonder what we were all on about back in 2010. Watched a bit of the "series finale" (which it wasn't) and frankly it made Dick Wolf's <i>Law and Order</i> retreads sound like Shakespeare. What an airless, empty graveyard of a show it has become. Seriously, last season of <i>Lost</i> level bad. </p><p>And now a much admired first person shooter game has become a much talked about new television series. Again, not the audience. (Enjoy.) But then, the beloved husband -- who refuses to ever watch anything with so much as a hint of the supernatural or the speculative -- messaged me while I was in Pennsylvania visiting the elderly mother and told me I had to watch episode three of season one of the new HBO show, The Last of Us. What now? If there is anything my darling A. likes less than dragons, it may be zombies. For him to insist that I needed to see this new zombie show was really weird. (I understand that because the arising incident in this thing is some mushroom-mycelium-whatsit rather than straight up dead rising from the grave, one ought not to call said creepers "zombies." The fact that no one in the story calls these things "'shrooms" or "truffle-shufflers" or anything fun tells me... they're just zombies with a more fabulous color palette -- "Zombie, Shiita - kay, you stay.") </p><p>So I did as I was told, like I always do. Okay, maybe not always but often. When I got back from Pennsylvania, I settled in and watched season one episode three of <i>The Last of Us</i>. Have you? If not, do. And don't read this as I will not hesitate hereafter to spoil it for you, try as I might not to, and not for want of enthusiasm. I loved it! I laughed! I cried! I cried a lot. It was maybe the best hour and change of television I've watched this year or in years. I even went back and watched the two preceding episodes which were just fine for what they are. Don't know that I'll ever need to watch the rest, but episode three -- Holy Shit that was GOOD!* </p><p>Basic outline of the show/game is your usual magical child savior who must be protected at all costs because only she can... oh, who cares? The world has ended after the usual fashion, just this time with mushrooms rather than mushroom clouds or Martians. The usual mayhem ensues. And zombies, natch. (If I may be allowed a curmudgeonly moment from the get, is there anything more artistically and or ethically bankrupt than the one wee innocent who must be saved in order to save the world? Stillborn storytelling. Monotheism at it's most reductive. Innocence can't save shit, people. Not its job. Just stop investing in this bullshit. Nobody else needs to admire your damned baby, Mary. And while I'm ranting? The world doesn't have to end for the Fascists to win, people. Think we've proved that more than once now. Don't wait for the apocalypse, go ahead and punch a Nazi now.) </p><p>Anyway, the magic child this time is a really good actor named Bella Ramsey and she teamed up for most of this long zombie road picture with the delicious Pedro Pascal, who is clearly having a moment now what with this and <i>The Mandalorian</i>, <i>SNL</i>, etc. (We know him from <i>Game of Thrones</i>, and <i>Narcos</i> and appearances in old people tv like <i>The Mentalist</i> and<i> The Good Wife</i>. Watch <i>Narcos</i> if you can stand seeing people people seriously mistreated.) Pedro plays the hero here, though I don't think I'm giving anything away by predicting that savior girl is destined to kick ass in her own right someday. Just a guess. I don't care.</p><p>The heroes in these adventures are always rough and ready types, violent, macho tops who always have to be humbled and broken to learn or relearn empathy and to love or love again. (You know, kinda like bottoming that first time. Well done, butch! Who was a big brave boy?!) I don't begrudge them their teachable moments and life-lessons. They're always SO tired you know, after all the murdering. Better late than never I guess. (Is it though?) The sad reality is that a delightful human and very good actor like the beautiful Pedro Pascal, at least in these hero roles, never gets the chance to be silly and fun and charming and all the other sexy stuff he so clearly is in real life because this kind of hero story doesn't have a lot of room for dancing, or jokes, or sex, come to that, at least not the fun kind where people actually enjoy themselves and maybe laugh while naked. Sex in this kind of apocalyptic story, when it isn't actual rape (see <i>Game of Thrones</i>) tends to either the ravenous up-against-the-wall or clear-the-table quickie, or the sort of softcore romantic porn that years ago in the cable-tv-era became a brand on Cinemax, aka Skinamax: soft lighting, heaving male backsides, lingering shots of clasped hands, tracking shots that end in a raised knee or perfect if slightly damp eighties hairdos. Passion! Profiles! Sparkles! Here poor Pedro doesn't get so much as a lingering kiss, bless him. Widower to start I think and just say his luck does not much improve thereafter.</p><p>None of that is ultimately the point, at least for this unlikely viewer. We are now pretty much done with the leads here. What is special in episode three is that our heroes are just the frame story. (!) I went online and learned a new term, it seems that this kind of Very Special Episode is now called a "bottle story," meaning a complete narrative within the larger, episodic story. I also learned that this tv story is very different from the original game narrative. In fact, I learned a lot online after watching episode three of <i>The Last of Us</i>, titled "Long, Long Time." <i>In fact</i>, I have now spent more time online watching videos of people watching episode three than I did watching the whole first season of the show. Plot twist! Who saw this coming?!</p><p>For my book club I am rereading the first half of one of my favorite novels of all time, the English comic masterpiece, <u>Vanity Fair</u> by William Makepeace Thackeray. It's nearly time for our second of three virtual meetings on this glorious book and what have I been doing every night at bedtime for weeks? Well, yes I have been reading about Becky Sharp, but I have also been watching something called "reactions" or "reaction videos" on YouTube. I have been neglecting -- just a bit -- something I genuinely love, distracted not by life or other art, but by<i> watching people watch television</i>.</p><p>Not my first rodeo. I've actually seen this sort of thing before: young black people realizing that The Righteous Brother or Tom Jones could sing like that and be white, other young people hearing Whitney for the first time, or jazz, or their first chamber music. I regularly watch two adorable British twinks watching old horror films for the first time just because the boys are awfully cute and very genuine and savvy about their love of film, even if they've never seen<i> Battleship Potemkin</i> 1925 or <i>Citizen Kane</i> 1941. I watch this kind of thing for the joy, the cheap hits of happy adrenaline, the contact high, as it were.</p><p>However I have never before binged this shit like a hayseed with access to a Sackler plant. Clearly I have a problem. First step, right? So how did this happen? Well, episode three of <i>The Last of Us</i> is special, everyone seems to agree, and more than that -- spoiler alert! -- it's really gay.</p><p>It seems that in the game the character Bill, played expertly on tv by Nick Offerman, is a straight up survivalist dick (redundant) who happens to be gay and something of a widower when the players meet him. The writer decided to correct and expand this for the HBO show. And so we get the equally brilliant Murray Bartlett as Bill's lover Frank. Really great television ensues. It has not been without it's critics, this new and much elaborated love story. Everybody's a little tired of gay tragedy and dead queers -- me too in principle -- and there's a whole discussion to be had about gender roles and straight interpretations of gay relationships, and even a straight actor playing half of a gay relationship. I get all that. Valid criticism, mostly. I don't necessarily disagree with any of it. I also get how not cool all of that sounds now. I do. That said, I still loved this story and these actors and this exceptional hour of television. I hope everybody gets an Emmy. </p><p>More though and more to the point, I have loved the reactions of all the viewers on YouTube, or nearly all of them. In large part this is to do with what to my mind is a shift in the culture for which I had long hoped but of which I had almost no expectation in my lifetime. I have now watched better than three dozen people watch a love story between two grown men and nearly no one had anything either homophobic or hateful to say. True, a few of the guys complained about such fuzzy, bearded kisses, "so much beard, dude!" Also, a couple of the fellas blushed and looked away from the (very tasteful and brief) love-making scene. That's okay. What was wonderful to see was how happy nearly everyone was to see Bill, a character all the gamers knew already, find real love. Even the folks who were not players of the game and came to the story for the first time, like me on television were obviously glad for the crazy survivalist bastard. </p><p>I was also impressed with the devotion to detail of so many of these reactors; how they noticed consistently the turn of a dinner plate on a charger, appreciated the finer phrases in the dialogue, pointed out improvements in the interior decoration from one time jump to the next. I was shocked to hear one after another of them identify Max Richter's composition, "On the Nature of Daylight" -- at least until one of them mentioned that it's been used in a lot of other movies and shows I've never watched like the movie <i>Arrival</i> 2016 and <i>The</i> <i>Handmaid's Tale</i> that never ends on Hulu. Still. Good eye, good ear. And remember, they record their reactions in real time. One of the pleasures of watching is also seeing them jump to the wrong conclusions with all the enthusiasm of a frog on a hot-plate. Enthusiasm, it's what they do best, bless 'em!</p><p>I cannot emphasize enough just how heartening it was to watch a genuine cross-section of people, all races, all genders, in relationships and not, domestic and foreign, united in their nerdiness and devotion to gaming and or this kind of story and this style of storytelling take pause to sincerely enjoy and engage with gay characters, cheer on their love story and cry real tears at the most moving bits. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that watching this made me cry more than the actual episode. Here were these people, not really my people though some were gay, most of them sitting in their special watching chairs, with their Marvel movie posters and comics memorabilia behind them, more than a couple with a wall of boxed Funco Pop** figurines behind them, and in the hour it took to tell this story, these people loved these two gay men, this couple, this story.</p><p>That was so fucking cool.</p><p>Of course I ended up with favorites. First, all the people who comforted their partners and friends when the story upset them. Obviously, I loved everybody who cried, and the more they cried the more I loved them, but even better were the people who rubbed shoulders or held a hand or got up and got the roll of toilet paper because they couldn't find the Kleenex box. I loved all the young guys who say "bruh" constantly, and to express every shade of emotion. I loved the people who argued with the deviation from the game and then surprised me and usually themselves by saying that this story was "beautiful" which it was, or even "better than the one in the game," for which I will with gratitude have to take their word. I loved all the people, mostly cis men who tried very hard not to cry in front of their friends and found themselves with strange and unlikely itches that needed scratching near the ends of their noses and under their eyes. I loved the young lesbian couple who had to rewind repeatedly for crying so hard and for expressing exactly why this kind of representation on tv and in this genre was so important. I loved the lovely, elfin British lad (do I have a type suddenly?) who wept from the midpoint on and through an accent straight out of Dickens said repeatedly that this episode "'at's the moes b'u'ifull fawkin' fing" he'd ever seen.</p><p>As I write there are in the United States roughly 351 separate pieces of anti- LGBTQ+ legislation currently working their way through various State Houses. The Grand Old Minority Party of Political Reaction, (suspicion, hate, racism, greed, etc.) has returned to it's old strategy, well-remembered from my youth, of queer-bashing to appeal to the doddering gray bigots cursing progress as they hurry not nearly fast enough to their graves. The Trumpian circus bankrupted the last plausible claims to civility in the Conservative Movement and revealed it as the know-nothing shit show of fascism, intolerance, and xenophobia it always was. Meanwhile, a whole new generation has come up behind mine, a generation even less interested in religious foolery, sexual repression, granny's suspicion of brown people, and grandpa's fundamental distrust of women. I have great hope, even as I watch the "demon-haunted world" rise up yet again from the pit. I have hope because I have renewed faith in the decency of nerds.</p><p>Nerds triumphant might be the watchword of our present cultural. For good and ill their taste in entertainment (save music) has come to be the nation's, if not the world's. (Not mine.) Nerds are the new cool. Obviously we could do worse. (Think Sinatra singing to Nancy Reagan, think Elvis at the White House.) I don't have to like this. Neither do you. Before we know it, if we should live so long, something else will come along. Meanwhile there is this admittedly anecdotal, unscientific review of nerds watching a zombie show and seemingly out of nowhere, restoring my faith in humanity, even as the cruel people seem to go from strength to strength the world over. </p><p>And now (in my head) I'm going to invite my dear friend Takeshi Kitano to pull up a comfy imaginary chair and we'll watch our favorite movie of all time and trust to the new cool. (Now if I could just convince those cute British film fans on YouTube to watch <i>Les Enfants du Paradis</i>! I've left multiple suggestions in the comments but so far nothing. Kids today, am I right?)</p><p><br /></p><p>*And I did watch the rest eventually and it was... well made.</p><p>**Full discloser, I do myself own a Funko Pop figure -- out of the box -- of a Cyberman. Bought it off the discount table at the Funko flagship store in Everett, WA. (Go if you can. Cool joint.) A nerdish friend explained these charming objects to me. "They have big heads and little bodies like human babies. We are hardwired to like them." Absolutely so. Genius.</p>usedbuyer 2.0http://www.blogger.com/profile/08909335300273240931noreply@blogger.com0