Mark Bernstein points to a Genreville post, Authors Say Agents Try to “Straighten” Gay Characters in YA, which asks us to link to it in order to raise awareness of the problem.
Really, people. Let's build a better world.
26 September 2011
19 September 2011
Right shoulder blues
This is an X-ray of my right shoulder, imaged today in preparation for the MRI-arthrogram that followed, when they shoved me into the magnetic oven for forty minutes to watch the dye (that black streak in the center) seep into the socket to see if any of it leaked out.
Another Humpty-Dumpty piece we're trying to put back together again after my tumble just before Memorial Day. Once the Lyme Disease cleared away, I found that I could no longer reach the top shelf of the cabinets in my kitchen — felt like something was unhooked in my shoulder, and it just couldn't haul my arm all the way up there.
Orthopedist doesn't think it's a torn rotator cuff or anything romantic like that — probably just my bicep tendon peeling off the ball part of the joint. Nice that it doesn't hurt, but it bothers me that I seem to be falling apart all of a sudden.
Beautiful image, though, ain't it?
28 August 2011
About to burst into song
Here's the original pose that all the rest of the pix to follow are based on. This is what I looked like just a little over three years ago, on the 4th of July 2008, a true Independence Day: I'd just got home from my LAST day of working at the Apple Store in King of Prussia PA, some 62 miles and a world of hurt away from my safe & sane little apartment in Bethlehem. Don't know what I was thinking when I started working in that crazy place the previous February, but you can pretty much tell what I was thinking once I'd disencumbered and parked it in front of my doughty Mac to take this pic.
Notice I hadn't yet lacerated my forehead — but I would...
27 August 2011
Face-healing
Here's what I look like today, more or less.
It's the last weekend before Labor Day, the end of the summer, the eve of the Advent here on the US east coast, of Hurricane Irene, a lovely name which comes from the Greek word "eiréne," which means "time of peace." We'll see how that works out.
You may observe the scar on my forehead. Looking closely, you'll notice that it's shaped like the Greek letter omega, in a sans-serif font, and you might think that the scribe got the quill point stuck on the upstroke above my right eye, but then he got control of things at the top of the curve & the downstroke feathers out into nothing near the left temple.
It's new. I'm still putting medicinal stuff on it, three times a day, to keep it from looking any angrier than it does. It's not, as I like to tell people who inquire, a dueling scar. Nor does it make me look like an aging Harry Potter, as I wish it did -- more like Gorbachev, if I'm being honest with myself.
A little over 3 months ago, heading into the last weekend before Memorial Day, the beginning of summer, I fell off my bike on a short spin before dinner, and laid my head open, not to mention herniating a disk in my neck, skinning my elbow and wrist, and somehow contusing my right big toe. I was in the hospital for 5 days. I wrote about that part a few posts back, making it sound kinda fun -- well, except for the pain part, for which I had some righteous medication. I made new friends. My old friends and family were magnificent. I got lots of sleep.
As the penultimate post indicates, after that things weren't so fun. I think I have to talk about that part too. Also I have pictures. Something to look forward to.
04 July 2011
O no! He's crushing my head! Aaaahhh!
In a couple weeks it will be my son Billy's 33rd birthday -- you know, the one that, if you get past it without being crucified by the Roman Army, will demonstrate pretty conclusively that you're not the Savior of the World.
Billy (William James Bly IV) lives at The Center for Discovery in Harris, NY, just past Monticello on the Quickway, US 17, the future I-86, that runs across New York roughly parallel to I-90, the NYS Thruway. He's severely disabled from a birth injury -- a long story that will eventually appear elsewhere. Suffice it to say that he can't do very much for himself, but in a way this just frees him up to do amazing things for others, mostly by way of sharing an overwhelmingly enthusiastic attitude toward life. His joy is utterly infectious, and, though he has his darker moments and a fairly robust temper, the main thing he communicates to anyone willing to get up close and engage with him person-to-person is that 1) the main purpose of life is to provide an occasion for fun, and 2) is it time for fun now? How about now?
Over the years, we've developed numerous routines, many of them involving music (about which more in a later post) -- but my favorite (and one of his as well, I believe) is crushing my head. If I get close enough, he'll sneak his arm around my neck and, with amazing strength for a young man so small, crush my head against his chest. You can see how much he enjoys this routine in this photo, taken last April by my wife Deb:
I have to confess, I derive certain benefits from the exercise, beyond the always necessary deflation in self-importance that accompanies a good head-crushing.
Try it sometime with someone you love: hurts real good.
Billy (William James Bly IV) lives at The Center for Discovery in Harris, NY, just past Monticello on the Quickway, US 17, the future I-86, that runs across New York roughly parallel to I-90, the NYS Thruway. He's severely disabled from a birth injury -- a long story that will eventually appear elsewhere. Suffice it to say that he can't do very much for himself, but in a way this just frees him up to do amazing things for others, mostly by way of sharing an overwhelmingly enthusiastic attitude toward life. His joy is utterly infectious, and, though he has his darker moments and a fairly robust temper, the main thing he communicates to anyone willing to get up close and engage with him person-to-person is that 1) the main purpose of life is to provide an occasion for fun, and 2) is it time for fun now? How about now?
Over the years, we've developed numerous routines, many of them involving music (about which more in a later post) -- but my favorite (and one of his as well, I believe) is crushing my head. If I get close enough, he'll sneak his arm around my neck and, with amazing strength for a young man so small, crush my head against his chest. You can see how much he enjoys this routine in this photo, taken last April by my wife Deb:
I have to confess, I derive certain benefits from the exercise, beyond the always necessary deflation in self-importance that accompanies a good head-crushing.
Try it sometime with someone you love: hurts real good.
22 June 2011
Update on the tumble...
Update 22 June 2011. Things aren't going so peachy as they were upon my triumphant discharge from hospital. Increased pain in both arms, some chills & fever, a little swelling in the ankles. Thankfully, my summer class was canceled, so I can sit home and plot my recovery, harrying my medicos tirelessly from phone and computer, but also conferring regularly with dearest friends and family, which is like having them all around me, a great blessing. And my darling Deb comes every weekend to chauffer me around & shower me with TLC.
I can't do any traveling, except on foot to the Mom-&-Pop grocery a few blocks away, which provides me with exercise & sunshine (thank God it's summer!); but that's OK too: I need to sit still for a long time and ponder what really matters in life. Another blessing -- who has time for it otherwise?
I can't do any traveling, except on foot to the Mom-&-Pop grocery a few blocks away, which provides me with exercise & sunshine (thank God it's summer!); but that's OK too: I need to sit still for a long time and ponder what really matters in life. Another blessing -- who has time for it otherwise?
02 June 2011
BBly takes a tumble
[The "press release" sent to well-wishers on 02 June]
Dear Ones,
First, I want to thank all of you for your kind messages of concern, encouragement, and support -- they mean the world to me.
Second, I'm on the mend, out of the hospital, back in the apartment in Bethlehem, which has been rigged as needed to help me get my legs back under me. No big deal on that score, really.
Third, I want to get back to each of you individually, but thought that spamming you all with the general info would be a helpful way to start. Here's what happened:
I was taking a leisurely bike ride just before dinner on Thursday 25 May, nostalgically wheeling through one of the nearby neighborhoods where I took Census last year. I was on a side street in a residential area near the S curve on Union Blvd in West Bethlehem, if you know where that is (if you don't, you can Google it!).
As best I can reconstruct the event, my front wheel hit a seam in the asphalt near a curb cut, causing it to turn sharply, and then -- well, the bike stopped but I didn't, landing face first in some guy's driveway. I don't have a visual memory of the wipe-out, but I recall precisely the sound my forehead made when it hit the asphalt: CONK! is the exact word. I also felt sharp tingling in both arms; when I tried to get up, I found I couldn't, because my legs were still kind of tangled up in the bike. At this point I said, to whoever might be listening, "This isn't so good."
One of the neighbors whom I'd just passed cutting his grass ran over and asked if I was OK. I said, "I don't think so," trying to roll over on my back in order to chat with him better, and ended up on my back under a shapely azalea bush at the corner of the driveway. I couldn't see my rescuer very well, but do remember his reaction on seeing me: "O my god," the first of many such ejaculations I would hear in the next hour or so.
At that point another neighbor came up, did basically the same take, and asked me if I wanted him to call an ambulance. I said, "I think you better," but neither had a phone; however, I told them where mine was in its clever little holster on my belt, and one of them got it out and called 911.
Another couple neighbor guys appeared, had the same reaction as the first two, and knelt down to see what they could do for me. They asked me what happened, then conferred with each other, doing what guys always do first in a situation like this: figure out who's gonna be in charge. One seemed to think I had to be kept from going into shock and suggested getting a blanket, even though as you may remember it was still above 90º at the time on that day. Since he was the one with the ideas, the other three let him direct the mission from there on. He ascertained that 911 had been called, supervised the covering of my legs and torso with a blanket one of the others had fetched, and then discussed with the others about whether we should raise my head or my feet. In the end they decided not to move me at all, since I had a head injury -- a wise choice, I've since found out.
I then asked the one still holding my cell phone to call Joe Sullivan, who lives nearby and has expertise in this kind of thing, having done Ski Patrol for decades, and also to call my wife Deb, which he did, explaining clearly and carefully what was going on -- he was especially kind, Deb later said, and she was reassured that I was being taken care of.
Just then the ambulance arrived, and EMTs Josh and Tim took over, immobilizing my head with one of those frame things and rolling me onto a board & then lifting me onto the gurney, with help from the other guys, who had to hold back the azalea bush as well. (I was spitting dirt & leaves for the next two days.) Then I went headfirst into the ambulance...
... and the excitement REALLY started -- the siren, the squawk box as Josh called me in to the Trauma Center at St. Luke's, the roaring of the diesel engine as Tim drove quickly but expertly through the streets during rush hour, the clanking of gleaming equipment as Josh lashed my head more securely into its frame, took my vital signs, & asked me what year it was and who was president.
We got to St. Luke's in less than fifteen minutes, and the Trauma Team was waiting -- it sounded like there were at least 20 people in the room, but of course all I could see was the whirling ceiling, the blazing lights, and the occasional face looming into my restricted visual field. For the next hour or so I was cleaned up, then wheeled into radiology where a CAT scan was done on my head & neck, then returned to Trauma, where an artiste with needle & thread named Justine stitched up my forehead and left nostril. At one point the doctor who was supervising her work said, "Look at that!" -- which alarmed me until he added that it was just about the most beautiful stitch he'd ever seen performed.
After that I was wheeled through corridors and into an elevator, then thru some more corridors and into a room, where nurse Lori and PCA Lissette bathed me and cooed over me and rolled me into bed and rigged up an IV site on my left arm, pumped in some pain medication, tucked me in and turned off the light, leaving me alone to rest, which I soon did, interrupted only occasionally for the taking of vital signs and making sure I knew my name and birthdate.
The next morning at first light I got the verdict from Mary Fran, the trauma team lead on my case: I had a major laceration on my forehead, with abrasions on my face, my arms & hands, and my legs, but nothing was broken, dislocated, missing, or even sprained. Considering how stupid I was to not be wearing a helmet, I was incredibly lucky nothing worse had gone wrong.
The only issue that remained was the tingling-burning sensation in my hands. Take the feeling you get when you bang your funnybone and multiply by about ten, and you have what was happening at the ends of my arms. And it never stopped, though some medications helped by putting it to the side, or by putting my lights out altogether so that I slept. In the trauma center, one of the doctors put forth the hypothesis that it was like a "stinger" -- when an athlete butts somebody or something hard enough to bruise the spinal cord, which, depending on where it's bruised, sends tingling messages out to that part or parts of the body it controls.
That turns out to be the case with me, as an MRI a couple days later confirmed. Between the 6th & 7th cervical vertebrae, a herniated disk, combined with a pre-existing arthritic narrowing of the channel, caused the cord to swell up at just the place where all the hand nerves go out, hence the burning sensation on the tops and outsides (towards the pinky) of both hands. Good news: it heals itself. Bad news: it takes a long time, serveral weeks at least. So if the pain can be managed with medication, and I don't do something stupid (or unlucky) like this again, I should be OK in a couple months or so.
I feel fine, except when I look in the mirror, and then I faint from the horror, which is what you will do when you next see me, if you're not warned beforehand. It's unclear whether there'll be scarring -- probably some, given how ornate the laceration itself is: an upside-down U that starts at my left temple, ascends nearly to my fontanelle, then comes back down to mid-forehead just above my right eye. It's really impressive, I must say. And not in a good way.
Tomorrow I go back to Mary Fran for a check of said wound, plus some consultation on when I can start driving again. I need to be able to start teaching next week, and I'm certainly up to that exertion, but getting there may require public transit as long as I'm grounded.
So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Please know, all of you, how precious you are to me and how your messages buoyed me up and helped me cope. I'll be in touch with you severally as I can.
Love to you all,
B.
Dear Ones,
First, I want to thank all of you for your kind messages of concern, encouragement, and support -- they mean the world to me.
Second, I'm on the mend, out of the hospital, back in the apartment in Bethlehem, which has been rigged as needed to help me get my legs back under me. No big deal on that score, really.
Third, I want to get back to each of you individually, but thought that spamming you all with the general info would be a helpful way to start. Here's what happened:
I was taking a leisurely bike ride just before dinner on Thursday 25 May, nostalgically wheeling through one of the nearby neighborhoods where I took Census last year. I was on a side street in a residential area near the S curve on Union Blvd in West Bethlehem, if you know where that is (if you don't, you can Google it!).
As best I can reconstruct the event, my front wheel hit a seam in the asphalt near a curb cut, causing it to turn sharply, and then -- well, the bike stopped but I didn't, landing face first in some guy's driveway. I don't have a visual memory of the wipe-out, but I recall precisely the sound my forehead made when it hit the asphalt: CONK! is the exact word. I also felt sharp tingling in both arms; when I tried to get up, I found I couldn't, because my legs were still kind of tangled up in the bike. At this point I said, to whoever might be listening, "This isn't so good."
One of the neighbors whom I'd just passed cutting his grass ran over and asked if I was OK. I said, "I don't think so," trying to roll over on my back in order to chat with him better, and ended up on my back under a shapely azalea bush at the corner of the driveway. I couldn't see my rescuer very well, but do remember his reaction on seeing me: "O my god," the first of many such ejaculations I would hear in the next hour or so.
At that point another neighbor came up, did basically the same take, and asked me if I wanted him to call an ambulance. I said, "I think you better," but neither had a phone; however, I told them where mine was in its clever little holster on my belt, and one of them got it out and called 911.
Another couple neighbor guys appeared, had the same reaction as the first two, and knelt down to see what they could do for me. They asked me what happened, then conferred with each other, doing what guys always do first in a situation like this: figure out who's gonna be in charge. One seemed to think I had to be kept from going into shock and suggested getting a blanket, even though as you may remember it was still above 90º at the time on that day. Since he was the one with the ideas, the other three let him direct the mission from there on. He ascertained that 911 had been called, supervised the covering of my legs and torso with a blanket one of the others had fetched, and then discussed with the others about whether we should raise my head or my feet. In the end they decided not to move me at all, since I had a head injury -- a wise choice, I've since found out.
I then asked the one still holding my cell phone to call Joe Sullivan, who lives nearby and has expertise in this kind of thing, having done Ski Patrol for decades, and also to call my wife Deb, which he did, explaining clearly and carefully what was going on -- he was especially kind, Deb later said, and she was reassured that I was being taken care of.
Just then the ambulance arrived, and EMTs Josh and Tim took over, immobilizing my head with one of those frame things and rolling me onto a board & then lifting me onto the gurney, with help from the other guys, who had to hold back the azalea bush as well. (I was spitting dirt & leaves for the next two days.) Then I went headfirst into the ambulance...
... and the excitement REALLY started -- the siren, the squawk box as Josh called me in to the Trauma Center at St. Luke's, the roaring of the diesel engine as Tim drove quickly but expertly through the streets during rush hour, the clanking of gleaming equipment as Josh lashed my head more securely into its frame, took my vital signs, & asked me what year it was and who was president.
We got to St. Luke's in less than fifteen minutes, and the Trauma Team was waiting -- it sounded like there were at least 20 people in the room, but of course all I could see was the whirling ceiling, the blazing lights, and the occasional face looming into my restricted visual field. For the next hour or so I was cleaned up, then wheeled into radiology where a CAT scan was done on my head & neck, then returned to Trauma, where an artiste with needle & thread named Justine stitched up my forehead and left nostril. At one point the doctor who was supervising her work said, "Look at that!" -- which alarmed me until he added that it was just about the most beautiful stitch he'd ever seen performed.
After that I was wheeled through corridors and into an elevator, then thru some more corridors and into a room, where nurse Lori and PCA Lissette bathed me and cooed over me and rolled me into bed and rigged up an IV site on my left arm, pumped in some pain medication, tucked me in and turned off the light, leaving me alone to rest, which I soon did, interrupted only occasionally for the taking of vital signs and making sure I knew my name and birthdate.
The next morning at first light I got the verdict from Mary Fran, the trauma team lead on my case: I had a major laceration on my forehead, with abrasions on my face, my arms & hands, and my legs, but nothing was broken, dislocated, missing, or even sprained. Considering how stupid I was to not be wearing a helmet, I was incredibly lucky nothing worse had gone wrong.
The only issue that remained was the tingling-burning sensation in my hands. Take the feeling you get when you bang your funnybone and multiply by about ten, and you have what was happening at the ends of my arms. And it never stopped, though some medications helped by putting it to the side, or by putting my lights out altogether so that I slept. In the trauma center, one of the doctors put forth the hypothesis that it was like a "stinger" -- when an athlete butts somebody or something hard enough to bruise the spinal cord, which, depending on where it's bruised, sends tingling messages out to that part or parts of the body it controls.
That turns out to be the case with me, as an MRI a couple days later confirmed. Between the 6th & 7th cervical vertebrae, a herniated disk, combined with a pre-existing arthritic narrowing of the channel, caused the cord to swell up at just the place where all the hand nerves go out, hence the burning sensation on the tops and outsides (towards the pinky) of both hands. Good news: it heals itself. Bad news: it takes a long time, serveral weeks at least. So if the pain can be managed with medication, and I don't do something stupid (or unlucky) like this again, I should be OK in a couple months or so.
I feel fine, except when I look in the mirror, and then I faint from the horror, which is what you will do when you next see me, if you're not warned beforehand. It's unclear whether there'll be scarring -- probably some, given how ornate the laceration itself is: an upside-down U that starts at my left temple, ascends nearly to my fontanelle, then comes back down to mid-forehead just above my right eye. It's really impressive, I must say. And not in a good way.
Tomorrow I go back to Mary Fran for a check of said wound, plus some consultation on when I can start driving again. I need to be able to start teaching next week, and I'm certainly up to that exertion, but getting there may require public transit as long as I'm grounded.
So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Please know, all of you, how precious you are to me and how your messages buoyed me up and helped me cope. I'll be in touch with you severally as I can.
Love to you all,
B.
01 January 2011
Thanksgiving debrief, 2010
Time: ~0800, the morning after Thanksgiving 2010
Place: The kitchen, Sergeantsville NJMembers present (in order of appearance): BBly, Deborah S., Peter, Molly, Margaret aka "Banjo Meg", John W., Claire, DGBly.
MINUTES
Evelyn Evelyn = Cynthia's new book, out in March 2011, Text by musicians about conjoined twins, touring the world...
A Failure of Imagination. [notes for a rant]
- Thanksgiving Gratitudes, 2008, 2010: John W. recalls Nemo's comparison of same moment in Nov 2004 & 2008.
- CID = Crappy Interface Design;
- the Curse of Knowledge
- The Tree of Knowledge
- Pay Attention; this time (when your kids are little, e.g.) goes so fast, as I told Nelly last Sunday, as everyone older says to the young parents, until the kids of the young parents have kids, & the older ones tell the younger ones. Everyone says it; no one believes it: a failure of imagination.
Parliament of Foules across Rittenhouse Rd: crows in the trees, geese in the field — yelling.
"He's doing the puzzle in INK!" — Narration behind John & Debbie trying to watch Sideways in Doylestown. An old couple, the scene where Paul Giamatti was doing the crossword in LA traffic.
WHRB [Harvard Radio Broadcasting: superior for repertoire, as opposed to Greatest Hits on most classical stations]
Pandora.com — you send in something to play, they pick the rest of what you hear that day.
Greg Mortensen: 3 Cups of Tea
These guys who don't sleep and just do good — Margaret
Paul Farmer in Haiti
A Lesson Before Dying Ernest Gaines
17 pills this morning
Pete signed up for Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, then joined a Reading Gp made up of honors HS + honors college kids + over 65ers + local writers — now *there's* a promising ragout!
Let the Great World Spin: Philippe Petit walking between WTC Towers = iconic image; evocative portrait of NYC in the 1970s
Helene Hanff [author of 84 Charing Cross Road] also wrote a walking tour of NYC Apple of My Eye, which Claire likes better than Pete Hamill's Downtown
The old NYTimes Bldg: presses built under Times Square's new express subway stops
Deb working @ Saks in 1977: at sales meetings before the store opened, they were all encouraged to flog really ugly but expensive merchandise by saying, "However did they do it so cheaply?" e.g., ~ $290 for salmano ultrasuede jackets
ourDeb recommends: blog Letters of Note
Claire, re Peter's only 25-year-old suit: [the] 3 times when a man needs a suit:
- hatchins
- matchins
- dispatchins
John recommends highly: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
Proper tempo for CPR = BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive" — John(?)
Deb's request for her funeral music: Ms. Offenders' "Beautiful River"
Pete Seeger honorary degree from Rutgers — John's trying to talk him into it.
Played a festival all day, when he got offstage said, "You know I don't like music quite as much as I did this morning." — Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Pete's grandson
Where does Rhetoric fit into "encoding makes meat"? — cooking?
"Insane Eyes": song title — John
BBly's in-progress conference paper: Text, meat, ghosts:
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won't starve, but we will perish.
— Franz Kafka to Milena Jesensk, epigraph to John Durham Peters's book Speaking into the Air.
Story in last Saturday's Times on history of "Kumbaya"
CT Gov Wilbur Cross's Thanksgiving Proclamation 1936 — Peter
[Newark] Star-Ledger editorial about the History of Thanksgiving as a National Holiday
Brendan Byrne re Chris Christy: Too big to fail.
Now all [NJ?] political jokes are attributed to him.
- I want to be buried in Jersey City so I can stay active in politics
- I knew I wasn't governor any more when I got into the back seat of a car and we didn't go anywhere.
- Now people wave at me with all five fingers.
Send Despair Inc. to Weingart-Spitalniks
Beppe [Gambetta] album w/ Carlo Aonzo & David Grisman — "Songs of our Fathers"
Incident at Stop sign
< >
14 January 2010
Jacks
I don't remember who started it, but it was finals week in fifth grade, in Mrs. Stitzer's basement classroom in the oldest part of the school, and somehow, after an easy exam that many finished quickly, some boys joined the girls playing jacks on a space of floor cleared by pushing aside empty desks. Naturally we lost to girls our own age, but it was fun picking the small sharp metal stars — so alike in shape to the scrap-metal barricades littering the beaches our fathers had stormed in the last war — off the worn but shiny yellow linoleum.
And when I took my new skill home to try out on my younger sister, it didn't take long for me to beat her at that, too, as I did with checkers, Sorry!, and Fish. (She made me pay, of course, later, by teasing me until I slugged her, requiring our mother to whack me five times with the wooden spoon on my bare bottom, because there's no hitting in the house.)
I remember the girls kidding us, mercilessly, and some were really angry that we'd invaded their turf. And a couple tough guys sneered & called us sissies. But the girls we were playing were loving it, & put them down sharply, which got at least one of us beat up on the way home.
To me, though, the fun was in picking up something new, as shiny & sharp as a new jack, finding sudden joy in an unexpected place.
08 December 2009
Minutes of the meeting, Thanksgiving 2009
Time: ~0800, the morning after Thanksgiving 2009
Place: The kitchen, Sergeantsville NJ
Members present (in order of appearance): Peter, BBly, Deborah S., John, Claire, DGBly, Molly.MINUTES
Old Spellman family joke:
What are we this year — Polish or Russian?
Polish.
O thank God, I *hate* those long Russian winters!
— Peter Spellman
Deadly Medicine, Series at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington — Deb S.
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers: the story of a Muslim family of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. — Pete
Review in NY Times.
Also see Josh Neufield's wonderful webcomic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, serialized in Smith magazine — BBly
"... this should appeal to their fans." — John Weingart, quoting the harshest criticism imposed by reviewers in the bluegrass magazines he reads.
Translation: Life's too short...
How is Your Brain Like a Zebra?, from a podcast ourDeb listened to last night as she was falling asleep.
Olivia Judson, every Wednesday in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times. — Pete
This week's post: An Evolve-by Date, on the importance of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Adam Gopnik, Angels & Ages — Claire
Review in Washington Post.
The Little Book (NOT Strunk & White!), about Vienna in 1890s, the height of civilization. — John
Review in January Magazine.
Bella Abzug's mock American Express ad. — John
We were talking about the existential questions young kids often ask their parents. Two of BBly's favorites, from his daughter Nelly:
- Daddy, you remember the Big Dark?
- Daddy, what makes them *do* that?
All agreed: Great idea for a book title.
Back in the day, Deb Spitalnik recalled, Bloomingdale's had a counter for Charles of the Ritz, where they would formulate face powder based on your skin tone, then mix it up out of big glass jars.
John recommends Stephen L. Carter's New England White, et. al., mysteries —
Review, excerpt, and reading at NPR.org
And
John's Picks for movies to rent from Netflix:
- The Visitor
- The Station Agent
- Smoke (multiple titles — John! HELP!)
I didn't hear the beginning of John's story about a party he & Deb went to at a Harlem home on 144th St between Convent & Amsterdam, where the owner had set up a jazz club in the basement: the joint was packed, with a kitchen in one corner and a jazz trio in the other — and all the musicians were white.
Deb Bly regaled us with many a tale of her old boyfriend Sam's mother Mickey Hurwitt and Thaddeus McDowell. (Darling? perhaps you'd like to write them up?)
Claire recalled BBly's post-prandial Sermonette on The Five Real Things in Life:
- sex
- bearing & raising children
- taking care of the sick & helpless
- teaching
- making beautiful things
Too many TLAs around here. — Pete.
John's favorite xmas tree ornament: Merry Christmas from the Savages
Last but not least, the poem BBly meant to read at dinner, but left at home on the dining room table:
The Landing Game (April 23, 1500)
As our longboats approached,
I can tell you now, each of us aboard
struggled with a thrill of terror.
We could see men coming donw to the beach
in twos and threes—naked, young,
their skin the reddish-brown
of mahogany, their heads tonsured,
like our monks—butt for the fringe
of straight, dark hair below the ears.
Watching us, they gathered on the sand,
so by the time we reached
the river mouth almost twenty of them
waited, bows and arrows in their hands.
And we, all along rowing slowly,
came unarmed—such pounding
in my chest—with caution
our only strategy, our only noise
the creak-and-splash we made.
But how to greet them? How to show them
courtesy? No one spoke.
It simply happened—one of us tossed his hat
into the gulf between our languages,
and the youth who caught it
threw his feathered headpiece to our boat,
so all of us let fly, until the air was full
of hats and feathers, full of laughter
at the useless trade.
Disembarking then, we waded
through the surf, breathing anew
like divers coming up for air.
And they advanced, putting down
their bows and arrows, encircled us to see
our strangeness—our clothes, our skin,
our bearded faces, especially those
of us with sea-tinted eyes. They wanted
to stroke our hair, like lovers.
Faces reading faces, hands gesturing, pointing
toward the land or toward our ships
anchored six leagues out, and all of us
so fully absorbed in mutual scrutiny how could we
have imagined—mingling that day
on the beach—the exchange we'd made?
— Jane O. Wayne, in River Styx 80, Fall 2009
08 September 2009
Something to land on
I thump the spider on the outside of my sliding screen from the inside with my figernail, worried about finding her there, worried she'll get in. But, whereas an insect or slug would either fly away or fall, she just pops right back to the exact same spot as if held there by a strong rubber band, which, functionally speaking, she is, and grapples more deeply into the seam where the screen tucks in, like a — well, like a grappling hook, which she rather resembles, and I desist, knowing a repitition will injure her, perhaps fatally, if in fact I haven't done this already.
I wonder, as I walk to the kitchen to refill my coffee, what she's doing on my screen, high up like that, at eye level, then realize it's more her screen than mine — I merely rent it, while for her it's no different from the tree branch or the bush, from which she hangs her gorgeous deadly web. Our two worlds only intersect by accident: we humans manufacture objects and properties that we pretend to agree we possess; for the bugs & other tiny critters that live among us, these structures — including ourselves — are just something to land on.
I wonder, as I walk to the kitchen to refill my coffee, what she's doing on my screen, high up like that, at eye level, then realize it's more her screen than mine — I merely rent it, while for her it's no different from the tree branch or the bush, from which she hangs her gorgeous deadly web. Our two worlds only intersect by accident: we humans manufacture objects and properties that we pretend to agree we possess; for the bugs & other tiny critters that live among us, these structures — including ourselves — are just something to land on.
29 August 2009
The fawn
Out of the background of joggers, speed walkers,
strollers, the saunterers with their leash-straining
pets, she gallops straight at me down the middle
of the street, so tall she can't be a dog, but too
small for a horse, stick legs drumming, black toes
clicking on the asphalt, just after I've pulled around
the corner, before I've picked up any speed; I jerk
my foot off the gas but can't find the brake, inch over
to the side, nearly taking the side mirror off
the parked cars at the curb
as she hurtles past, black eyes staring, wide,
unseeing, or in any case unmarking, a smear of
bright red on her chin makes me cry, "She's been hit!"
to no one who can hear
the fawn clatters by, nothing but running, running
for her life, for her death
strollers, the saunterers with their leash-straining
pets, she gallops straight at me down the middle
of the street, so tall she can't be a dog, but too
small for a horse, stick legs drumming, black toes
clicking on the asphalt, just after I've pulled around
the corner, before I've picked up any speed; I jerk
my foot off the gas but can't find the brake, inch over
to the side, nearly taking the side mirror off
the parked cars at the curb
as she hurtles past, black eyes staring, wide,
unseeing, or in any case unmarking, a smear of
bright red on her chin makes me cry, "She's been hit!"
to no one who can hear
the fawn clatters by, nothing but running, running
for her life, for her death
24 March 2009
Morning bells
Ada Lovelace Day
It could be a thousand years ago. Maybe not. When the bell?
After two dozen iterations, the door in the sky closes, erasing itself.... Crows crowd west, yelling, cars cram the sensorium with their belligerent being.
Left behind, I busy myself with shoveling empty time from here to there, until the next bell.
It could be a thousand years ago. Maybe not. When the bell?
When the Roman Empire fell, the church used a bellThe mass bell at SS Simon & Jude cleanses the air of noise, driving city groan all the way to the horizon, each peal a stroke of the wet sponge down the slate blackboard, blackening it, its momentary purity pierced & puckered only by the come-and-get-it perorations of cardinal, bossy finch, lovesick chickadee — "O sweetie!"
for a hell of devious scheme:
To summon their flock, they invented the clock
they made time with their new machine...
After two dozen iterations, the door in the sky closes, erasing itself.... Crows crowd west, yelling, cars cram the sensorium with their belligerent being.
Left behind, I busy myself with shoveling empty time from here to there, until the next bell.
07 March 2009
Fifteen albums in 15 minutes (with bonuses!)
My friend John McDaid tagged me with this challenge, which really underestimates the amount of time needed for completing it. And when I finished, I realized I'd left a couple out!
Share(semi-chron order)
Saturday 07 March 2009 2:40 PM
Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!
- George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with the New York Philharmonic (I think) and Oscar Levant at the piano (I'm sure). On two 78-rpm disks that you stacked on record changer (remember those?) and flipped over when it was half-way done. When I was three I could identify it if I heard it anywhere: "That's George Gershin's Rapiddy in Boo!" Later, I got my own 33-rpm LP of the Los Angeles Symphony that I wore out learning how to conduct in the basement.
- I loved Henry Mancini in high school, when I first heard his music to the TV shows Peter Gunn and later Mr. Lucky. But the album that blew my mind was Quincy Jones Plays Henry Mancini. So cool and weird at the same time it made my teeth hurt (well, the orthodontia contributed).
- Well, duh, Meet the Beatles. I don't remember which Xmas my sister and I got this album (1 for both of us), but we wore it out and two copies after that. For me, it was the first time I actually paid attention to what each person was playing and singing, and I learned ALL the parts; it's also when I learned to play air guitar.
- Peter Paul & Mary: I can't remember which one I heard first — their eponymous debut, In the Wind, or Moving — but *that's* when I learned to play real guitar, so I could play in my first group: Bill, Phil, and Penny Ann. (We even had a secret name change, just like Noel Stookey: Phil's name was really Howie.)
- Simon & Garfunkel: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. S&G's first album after the triumph of the soundtrack for The Graduate, it contained lots of tasty finger-picking for me to learn, the better to lever my playing from OK to pretty good.
- Judy Collins: In My Life. This is Judy crossing over, after years as a luminary in the folk scene, and what's best about this anthology is the writers she brings into the same room: Dylan, Richard Fariña, Kurt Weill, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, Randy Newman, Richard Peaslee, Donovan, John Lennon. Every song is a knockout, but the range is astonishing. And then there's the American George Martin, Joshua Rifkin, in charge of producing....
- Burt Jansch. His debut album, before he teamed up with John Renbourn. Paul Simon had erroneously (I think) attributed "Angie" to Burt, so when I saw the album in a leftover bin I snatched it up. His version of the definitive finger-picking solo is a lot more raw — lots of string snapping and no muffled bass line. Plus I learned how to pop in a harmonic every once in a while whilst picking like mad — I had arrived.
- Buffalo Springfield: Again, the second of their three albums. I'd bopped along with "For What It's Worth" and "Do I Have to Come Right Out & Say It" from their first album, and even worked a version of "Hot Dusty Roads" for my new group, Bill Bly, a Boy, & a Girl (don't ask), but when I heard Neil Young's "Expecting to Fly" and "Mr. Soul" they stoned me totally without need for chemical enhancement. And Steven Still's "Bluebird" is in my Top Ten Tewns of all time, and I'm um, still working on that acoustic riff in the middle.
- Beatles again: this time Abbey Road. It's hard to think of a thing to say that hasn't already been said better by others about this work, but, apart from the utter coolitude of "Come Together," I'd have to say my favorite part is the inverted fade-out of "I Want You/She's So Heavy" — keeps getting louder and louder until it breaks the sound barrier (or your eardrums) and you can't hear it anymore. I wonder if the Singularity of Ray Kurzweil's techno-rapture's gonna be like that...
- Laurie Anderson: Big Science. Hallelujah. After more than a decade of lyrics to make you gag, finally some to make you think. Very sexy.
- Don Henley: The End of the Innocence. I listen to this with utter delight at least once a year — an absolute masterpiece. For someone who doesn't have much of a voice, Don sure wails the crap out of these dark, dark songs of modern-day disillusionment, and the man's got a man's heart. "The Last Worthless Evening" and "The Heart of the Matter" still just kill me.Randy Newman: Man, this is hard, but I think I have to go with Land of Dreams. Everything before that's just (only) brilliant, but "Four Eyes," "Follow the Flag," and "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do" simply change the rules about what a song can be and do to a person.
- The Rutles: Archaeology. Yeah, I know it's a joke band, but have you ever listened to these so-called parodies? "Eine Kleine Middle Classe Musik" is pure genius, all the arrangements are tight as ticks, and the playing's clean but relaxed, just like you want a good band to be. And, well, they're funny.
- Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Matapedia. As with Elvis Costello, I always found the McGarrigles' singing rather trying — though the songs were great, and I learned several to perform. But then I heard "Why Must We Die?" and I gave up being such a snob.
- Warren Zevon: Life'll Kill Ya. My buddy John McDaid had only introduced me to selected Zevon songs a short time before, so the first full album I got ahold of was a revelation. I immediately learned "Don't Let Us Get Sick" and "My Shit's Fucked Up" for breaking the ice at parties, and I'm working on "You're a Whole Different Person When You're Scared" for the next Midnight Ramble....
- Soundtrack from the movie version of West Side Story. I loved the movie, of course, and have since tormented my Intro Theatre stoodies with it so I could watch it over and over, but the singing taught me how to sing. Whilst crooning along to "Maria" in the living room back home, I learned how to use vibrato, which didn't come naturally. Ditto singing with feeling. Shy boy learns to cope.
- Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, recorded by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Janice Harshanyi and Harve Presnell, soprano & baritone respectively. I first heard this in the mid-60s, and a couple years later my college choir sang it, with yours truly doing the countertenor solo, "Olim lacus colueram," the Song of the Roasted Swan. Since then its opening chorus "O Fortuna" has become a total cliché of satanic rituals in the movies, but the whole piece is still amazing. Turn the headphones up!
28 January 2009
Voices in the Line
When the telephone first came to our upcountry farm in Kula,I know this guy's story. I was a kid when this happened to me, living in one of the first of a five-house plan in what used to be somebody's front forty, our yard still an open wound in the earth, the view still clear down to the creek and the two-lane up the opposite bank.
there was only one wire. The numbers were a digit different,
but it was the same line. When anybody's rang, ours rang
in the kitchen, and so rang the receivers in every other house.
No matter what somebody said, anybody could be listening,
and everybody knew it, so nobody ever said anything important
or personal on the phone. Phones were public, like a restroom
or a library is public. If the words were private, they were taken
outside or penned. Nobody ever called anybody for no reason,
and conversations were short. Before the telephone, we lived
alone where we couldn't even see the neighbors' lights at night,
but the wires shrunk the world. No longer was there anywhere
you knew anybody you couldn't call anymore. So we called.
Whenever we picked up the phone, there were voices in the line.
-- Eric Paul Shaffer, in Rattle 30, Winter 2008.
Mrs. Wilson had the switchboard on a table in her dining room -- I saw it once when I went to play with her son Tad. She was in the kitchen, I think, and Tad showed me how it worked: pull this plug, stick it in this hole, crank the dial for numbers in the county seat 10 miles away, then you asked another operator for a hookup to Pittsburgh, where my grandparents lived.
The phone hung on the wall opposite our back door, in the short passageway between the dining room and kitchen -- a shiny black box with a hook but no dial, no white disk with number in its center. I'd sit there in a chair dragged from the kitchen table, holding the hook down with my free hand, talking into the heavy handset to pretend friends.
It was a party line, shared by six families, and the phone rang maybe once or twice a day; you listened to the pattern of rings to see if it was for you. Ours was long, short-short, long; the Clearys' up the hill was long, short, long-long. Mrs. Wilson did the rings by hand, pushing a spring switch on the panel next to the dial. I once asked her -- she was my Sunday School teacher that year -- who worked the switchboard when she was asleep. "Why, if somebody calls, I just get up and answer it. What do you think?" But what happens when you go on vacation? She just looked at me.
Our parents were our now-kids' age then, maybe younger; those of us watching our contemporaries roll off the table in ones and twos these days are beginning to realize there's a whole world evaporating atom by atom that will only be retrievable in little vignettes like Eric Paul Shaffer's poem -- and if I don't print out the blog for my descendants to find moldering in the bottom of a linen trunk (remember those?), it's likely this wispy commentary will vanish into the digital dark age like the rest of the artifacts we're impetuously entrusting to the cloud.
It's not just the world of quaint devices and their picturesque usage that's disappearing, but a world of relations to each other, as Shaffer's poem conjures with such lovely simplicity. Indirectly, he also evokes the world of silence and distance that his grandparents watched disappear, perhaps with the same nostalgia that he himself seems to be feeling now, and which may have supplied some motivation for writing the poem in the first place.
That silence and distance was not a gap in our relations -- as it appeared to technologists bent on improving "communication" -- it was a room, and each of us had one: in which to rest, to which to retreat, from which to sally forth when it was necessary to communicate with one another. There was peace in that room -- or maybe it just seems so to those of us too young to remember such a condition of things -- where tranquility was attainable in a way all but impossible in the noisy world today.
The heedlessness of technological progress is a dusty old trope -- think of the story of O say the Tower of Babel, or Icarus -- that doesn't much edify. The alarums about dwindling privacy among our young, who don't seem to know what the alarumists are even talking about, is probably in the same class of prudish or plain cranky ranting against change for ranting's (not change's) sake.
That doesn't make the prudes and ranters wrong. Here's what Kafka thought about "improving" communication:
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won't starve, but we will perish.
-- Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenká, epigraph to John Durham Peters's Speaking into the Air.
24 January 2009
Flashback I
To the tune of "We're Havin' a Heat Wave..."
So yesterday I'm in Macy's, which I haven't visited in the better part of a year, grimly cruising the fragrance counters for my darling's favorite (I gotta say I like it too), when I feel my neck start to tighten up, my shoulders lift in a protective hunch, and my ears prick up as if I'm about to get conked from behind. I whirl around, but all I can see are three very tired looking but well-dressed ladies chatting across the aisle between two make-up stations, one of them sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes she's unpacking.
I'm so relieved I blurt out something totally stupid: "Make me up!" — my arms extended, throwing myself on their mercy.
They all look rather startled, but one of them sees that it's a joke — not likely a portly gent in a baseball cap & a ratty sweater is there for a facial — and plays along. "Where've you been?" she asks. "We haven't had you in the chair for ages!"
I can't keep it up, of course, so I say something lame like "Sorry, long day" and ask for the fragrance brand my wife reminded me last week that she really likes. By now the other two gals are cackling, perhaps at the image of my stubbly face under their hands. But in the end they do have mercy on me and direct me to the proper counter, right by the entrance to the rest of the mall.
And there, after a relatively painless shopping experience, the creepy feeling comes over me again. I look out into the mall itself: the boutique eateries, the gussied-up dummies up against the glass, the weird counterpoint of too-loud, too-happy music that straddles the entrance to every store — and the terror rises exponentially. And I realize... I'm having a flashback.
Just before the holidays a year ago, I began what I now jokingly call my Misadventures in Retail. It was an odd year, 2007. At the beginning of it I went to work for a bunch of Aussies, editing an online arts journal that they were trying to take global, but my part of it was downsized six months later, and I got to be unemployed for the next six months while I scrambled to find something to do next.
Then I saw a posting for a job at a computer sales & service center in New York, and I thought — hell, I like helping people, I love computers (at least mine), and I need a job: what could possibly go wrong?
You never want to ask that question. It's like being disappointed in the results of the 2000 election but thinking, O well, how bad can it be? My friend Nemo did just that, and eight years later is still marveling at the humongous enormity of that particular failure of imagination.
I was hired as an intaker in the service department — in effect, a triage nurse at a computer hospital. I stood behind a horseshoe counter studded with cheap laptops and styrofoam pads, and did my best to counsel, console, and commiserate with folk who all too often had literally just lost their minds: it worked fine yesterday — a little slow, but it's been doing that, and now all I get is this black screen with a bunch of gibberish in different languages...
In chess, intakers would be pawns, the front line that absorbs the enemy attack. And some days it felt like that — people get really upset and irrational when you tell them that all their family photos are lost because the digital key broke off in the lock, or that their senior project for a bachelor's degree will cost them $1200 to retrieve (though it's free if we can't do it), or that their financial records for the past ten years are now totally toast.
It was harrowing, and exhausting, but I really enjoyed it, once I got the hang of the impenetrable intake forms and learned which technicians to bring the poor broken lambs to (and which techs it was best to cross the street to avoid). Sometimes there were miracles, sometimes disasters, sometimes things got worse the longer they stayed. But most of the time I could help, if only to help my customers learn the only real computer lesson there is: BACK EVERYTHING UP IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES.
Trouble was, I was making more money on unemployment, and the two-hour commute (in the dead of winter) was just killing these old bones. So when a similar position opened up closer to home, I took it, even though it involved a 63-mile drive — not a great idea, given my tendency to act like the Avenger of Evil on the road (there's a reason for that: I am the Avenger of Evil).
And it's that gig that still gives me terrible flashbacks like the one I had yesterday at the Mall...
(to be continued...)
I'm havin' a flashback,Yesterday, believe it or not, I went Christmas shopping for my wife. Over the past few years, we've been having a serious motivation problem with The Holidaze — the decorating, the doing the shopping, the wrapping the presents, the getting everything shipped in time, then the scheduling the visits, the making the calls, the whole mishegaas. Now my wife's a fantastic decorator, and when it comes to online shopping, she could be a consultant — hm, maybe I'll mention that... — but I'm a failure at all these things, which doesn't help in the spirit of the season department. Long story short, we don't shop for each other until after we've (read she's) discharged our obligations in the friends & family department.
A terrible flashback...
So yesterday I'm in Macy's, which I haven't visited in the better part of a year, grimly cruising the fragrance counters for my darling's favorite (I gotta say I like it too), when I feel my neck start to tighten up, my shoulders lift in a protective hunch, and my ears prick up as if I'm about to get conked from behind. I whirl around, but all I can see are three very tired looking but well-dressed ladies chatting across the aisle between two make-up stations, one of them sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes she's unpacking.
I'm so relieved I blurt out something totally stupid: "Make me up!" — my arms extended, throwing myself on their mercy.
They all look rather startled, but one of them sees that it's a joke — not likely a portly gent in a baseball cap & a ratty sweater is there for a facial — and plays along. "Where've you been?" she asks. "We haven't had you in the chair for ages!"
I can't keep it up, of course, so I say something lame like "Sorry, long day" and ask for the fragrance brand my wife reminded me last week that she really likes. By now the other two gals are cackling, perhaps at the image of my stubbly face under their hands. But in the end they do have mercy on me and direct me to the proper counter, right by the entrance to the rest of the mall.
And there, after a relatively painless shopping experience, the creepy feeling comes over me again. I look out into the mall itself: the boutique eateries, the gussied-up dummies up against the glass, the weird counterpoint of too-loud, too-happy music that straddles the entrance to every store — and the terror rises exponentially. And I realize... I'm having a flashback.
Just before the holidays a year ago, I began what I now jokingly call my Misadventures in Retail. It was an odd year, 2007. At the beginning of it I went to work for a bunch of Aussies, editing an online arts journal that they were trying to take global, but my part of it was downsized six months later, and I got to be unemployed for the next six months while I scrambled to find something to do next.
Then I saw a posting for a job at a computer sales & service center in New York, and I thought — hell, I like helping people, I love computers (at least mine), and I need a job: what could possibly go wrong?
You never want to ask that question. It's like being disappointed in the results of the 2000 election but thinking, O well, how bad can it be? My friend Nemo did just that, and eight years later is still marveling at the humongous enormity of that particular failure of imagination.
I was hired as an intaker in the service department — in effect, a triage nurse at a computer hospital. I stood behind a horseshoe counter studded with cheap laptops and styrofoam pads, and did my best to counsel, console, and commiserate with folk who all too often had literally just lost their minds: it worked fine yesterday — a little slow, but it's been doing that, and now all I get is this black screen with a bunch of gibberish in different languages...
In chess, intakers would be pawns, the front line that absorbs the enemy attack. And some days it felt like that — people get really upset and irrational when you tell them that all their family photos are lost because the digital key broke off in the lock, or that their senior project for a bachelor's degree will cost them $1200 to retrieve (though it's free if we can't do it), or that their financial records for the past ten years are now totally toast.
It was harrowing, and exhausting, but I really enjoyed it, once I got the hang of the impenetrable intake forms and learned which technicians to bring the poor broken lambs to (and which techs it was best to cross the street to avoid). Sometimes there were miracles, sometimes disasters, sometimes things got worse the longer they stayed. But most of the time I could help, if only to help my customers learn the only real computer lesson there is: BACK EVERYTHING UP IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES.
Trouble was, I was making more money on unemployment, and the two-hour commute (in the dead of winter) was just killing these old bones. So when a similar position opened up closer to home, I took it, even though it involved a 63-mile drive — not a great idea, given my tendency to act like the Avenger of Evil on the road (there's a reason for that: I am the Avenger of Evil).
And it's that gig that still gives me terrible flashbacks like the one I had yesterday at the Mall...
(to be continued...)
23 January 2009
Samizdat
My first and favorite experience in samizdat was The Pick-Pocket's Packet, published by the W.P.A.O.P.P. (Western Pennsylvania Association of Organized Pick-Pockets), Rich Kenny, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.
It was eighth grade, that liminal year which in other municipalities would have been the last year of grammar school, but in those days, in our proto-burb just outside the orbit of metro Pittsburgh, the only school was Peters Twp. Jr.-Sr. High, still attached to McMurray Elementary ("grade school") where I first embarked on my journey towards Upper Education. [See photo.]
Over the summer, more than half of our male colleagues had vaulted into puberty, and now towered over us, deep-voiced and hairy, suddenly dazed by the presence of lumpy girls whom only months before they hadn't even been able to see.
It was a point of pride with shrimps like us (Rich & I were always in the front row in group shots) that we could travel faster in the halls between class periods than any upperclassperson, whose pockets sat at just about shoulder height on us as we zoomed in and out of clumps of flirtiing hulks, and boosting a wallet was pathetically easy.
But the idea was far more intoxicating than the actual experience, which inevitably involved having to give the dang thing back, with the social awkwardness and occasional contusion that resulted. So Rich, a boy of ingenuity and grit that I could only envy (in chorus once he socked a notorious bully in the jaw when the jerk blocked his way), started writing up our adventures, with the usual dilations, on pages of his yellow pencil tablet, which he ruled off into columns, drawing "wire photos" and ads around which he poured breathless accounts of our exploits, announcements of upcoming events, minutes of executive board meetings, and subtle satire of the school administration.
I wrote the gossip column, which I didn't do very well, and so didn't do very often, but I helped copy and distribute issues to the dwindling number of dweebs like us amongst our classmates. Eventually, I think, we were shut down by humorless teachers, who I now believe took the confiscated copies home and had a good yock with their families.
The next year we both crossed the Rubicon into adolescence, and somehow drifted apart. I saw Rich again over a decade ago at some anniversary of our graduating class, and though I recall that he hadn't changed much (except for the mustache), I don't remember anything we said, not even if The Pick-Pocket's Packet came up or not.
I can't say my writing career began there -- I had at least ten more years of goofing off to get out of my system -- but it was a great wonder to me to watch a "piece" take shape under Rich's hand, in #2 pencil on cheap yellow paper, and I think it was then I realized dimly that somehow everything I read had been written by someone in a manner not unlike this, whatever happened to it afterward in its journey towards print that landed it, however briefly, before my eyes.
And somewhere, sometime, I said to myself: I want to do that.
[Originally appeared in Ye Antient Blogge, 14March 2002.]
It was eighth grade, that liminal year which in other municipalities would have been the last year of grammar school, but in those days, in our proto-burb just outside the orbit of metro Pittsburgh, the only school was Peters Twp. Jr.-Sr. High, still attached to McMurray Elementary ("grade school") where I first embarked on my journey towards Upper Education. [See photo.]
Over the summer, more than half of our male colleagues had vaulted into puberty, and now towered over us, deep-voiced and hairy, suddenly dazed by the presence of lumpy girls whom only months before they hadn't even been able to see.
It was a point of pride with shrimps like us (Rich & I were always in the front row in group shots) that we could travel faster in the halls between class periods than any upperclassperson, whose pockets sat at just about shoulder height on us as we zoomed in and out of clumps of flirtiing hulks, and boosting a wallet was pathetically easy.
But the idea was far more intoxicating than the actual experience, which inevitably involved having to give the dang thing back, with the social awkwardness and occasional contusion that resulted. So Rich, a boy of ingenuity and grit that I could only envy (in chorus once he socked a notorious bully in the jaw when the jerk blocked his way), started writing up our adventures, with the usual dilations, on pages of his yellow pencil tablet, which he ruled off into columns, drawing "wire photos" and ads around which he poured breathless accounts of our exploits, announcements of upcoming events, minutes of executive board meetings, and subtle satire of the school administration.
I wrote the gossip column, which I didn't do very well, and so didn't do very often, but I helped copy and distribute issues to the dwindling number of dweebs like us amongst our classmates. Eventually, I think, we were shut down by humorless teachers, who I now believe took the confiscated copies home and had a good yock with their families.
The next year we both crossed the Rubicon into adolescence, and somehow drifted apart. I saw Rich again over a decade ago at some anniversary of our graduating class, and though I recall that he hadn't changed much (except for the mustache), I don't remember anything we said, not even if The Pick-Pocket's Packet came up or not.
I can't say my writing career began there -- I had at least ten more years of goofing off to get out of my system -- but it was a great wonder to me to watch a "piece" take shape under Rich's hand, in #2 pencil on cheap yellow paper, and I think it was then I realized dimly that somehow everything I read had been written by someone in a manner not unlike this, whatever happened to it afterward in its journey towards print that landed it, however briefly, before my eyes.
And somewhere, sometime, I said to myself: I want to do that.
[Originally appeared in Ye Antient Blogge, 14March 2002.]
14 January 2009
blue knit gloves on the window sill...
I want to say to the father at the bus stop every morning fall winter spring with his now two crazy boys yelling running stomping staggering nonstop right up the bus steps when it finally comes that there is a pair of boy-sized blue knit gloves lying on the window sill next to the door of the house on the corner where they wait that must well might belong to one of his sons who probably lost them some mornings back in his wiggling & ramming around with his brother boiling off all that excess energy that'll get imperfectly bottled & contained some tens of minutes later when he spills out of the bus into the hive where it's their job to effect such translations but without his gloves that some thoughtful passerby must have found & put on the window sill in case their owner or owner's parent more likely came looking for in all the places they could've got lost that would certainly include the bus stop right at the top of the list [for anybody who went to look] if anybody thought about it but probably they just bought new ones or had a spare pair because this wasn't the first time & boys are always losing things that don't mean anything to them except that somebody wants them to wear them but will sooner or later get in the way or just disappear the way things do. But they haven't disappeared they're right there on the window sill bright blue the color of nothing else but a little boy's gloves so they'll stick out in the visual field when you go lookng for them on the ground in the woods on the hall floor among the boots [to be continued...?]
10 January 2009
Snow falls in the rising light...
... bringing it back down from the opaque dome just beyond the trees' reach, dropping it on them, the sidewalk, the tops of cars patient as cows lined up to wait out the first storm of the year. The squirrel is pissed, but the crows flap on, kidding & laughing, towards their sunrise staff meeting in the oaks around the old folks' home, where they'll decide, among other things, what to do about the weekend. The squirrel just won't shut about it, but what else can he do? The light's all over everything now, burying it, there's no hiding from anything.
15 December 2008
Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui
This past weekend the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, of which I am a whisky tenor, performed the Vivaldi Gloria and Bach's Magnificat (the one in D). Both are magnificent, dancing works to sing, and I love the Magnificat especially, it being the first major work of his that I performed in my half century of choristing.
The tenor aria in that work, "Deposuit," is one of the most exciting, testosterone-fired solos in the repertoire, with its heroic text, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." One o' these days, I'm gonna get up the nerve to try it in public.
But the best alternative for a choral tenor is the "Fecit potentiam," with its extended fireworks in the opening lines, which then spreads its contagious enthusiasm to the other sections of the choir. Again the text is not what you'd call reassuring: "He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."
It's that last line that has been haunting me in the past weeks: at first, it was part of the refrain of my rejoicing at the "decisive victory" (love the sound of that!) my team enjoyed in last month's elections (along with the well-known parody of "Fascination" — It was schadenfreude, I know...).
Some weeks on, the giddiness has evaporated as abyss beneath abyss opens its maw our under economy, the days get shorter, the moon gets closer, the weather weirder, and somehow the idea that this one reversal in the political climate of my mother country will heal the world of hurt we're in right now seems remote.
Back in September, I read James Woods's bracing review of my idol Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home in the New Yorker, in which she diagnoses our peculiar malady: "Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset." For good or ill, that imagining of our hearts is in for a bumpy ride, and I doubt if negativity will pull us through.
My only consolation these days is poetry. As Octavio Paz reminds us in his magisterial book of poetics, The Bow and the Lyre, "Poetry changes, but it does not decay. Societies decay." Last week, as I read the chapter on Rhythm, I came across this prescient passage (the book was published in 1973):
Puts things in perspective: sure sounds like the place I'm still living in. Maybe we can change (yes we can), but in the meantime, I'm signing up for Hugh McLeod's less Romantic take on the subject, "You are either a poet or a corpse."
The tenor aria in that work, "Deposuit," is one of the most exciting, testosterone-fired solos in the repertoire, with its heroic text, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." One o' these days, I'm gonna get up the nerve to try it in public.
But the best alternative for a choral tenor is the "Fecit potentiam," with its extended fireworks in the opening lines, which then spreads its contagious enthusiasm to the other sections of the choir. Again the text is not what you'd call reassuring: "He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."
It's that last line that has been haunting me in the past weeks: at first, it was part of the refrain of my rejoicing at the "decisive victory" (love the sound of that!) my team enjoyed in last month's elections (along with the well-known parody of "Fascination" — It was schadenfreude, I know...).
Some weeks on, the giddiness has evaporated as abyss beneath abyss opens its maw our under economy, the days get shorter, the moon gets closer, the weather weirder, and somehow the idea that this one reversal in the political climate of my mother country will heal the world of hurt we're in right now seems remote.
Back in September, I read James Woods's bracing review of my idol Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home in the New Yorker, in which she diagnoses our peculiar malady: "Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset." For good or ill, that imagining of our hearts is in for a bumpy ride, and I doubt if negativity will pull us through.
My only consolation these days is poetry. As Octavio Paz reminds us in his magisterial book of poetics, The Bow and the Lyre, "Poetry changes, but it does not decay. Societies decay." Last week, as I read the chapter on Rhythm, I came across this prescient passage (the book was published in 1973):
[T]he real tradition of the United States, as is manifested by Whitman, was the future: the free society of comrades, the democratic new Jerusalem. The United States has not lost a past; it has lost its future. The great historical plan of that nation's founders was thwarted by the financial monopolies, imperialism, the cult of action of action's sake, the abhorrence of ideas. [67]
Puts things in perspective: sure sounds like the place I'm still living in. Maybe we can change (yes we can), but in the meantime, I'm signing up for Hugh McLeod's less Romantic take on the subject, "You are either a poet or a corpse."
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