Bernadette Mayer's potty mouth

On the Poetry Foundation "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast, they talked about the poetry of Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945.) She's an avant-garde poet and artist. Apparently, she's been compared to 20th century titans from Gertrude Stein to James Joyce. She's well loved especially by younger poets for her experimentation.

I really liked this poem which was written in 1968 but you'd never know it:

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up

By Bernadette Mayer

You jerk you didn't call me up

I haven't seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You're drinking your parents to the airport

I'm through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It's the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

                               the Cobra Commander

_________________

To make love, turn to page 121.

To die, turn to page 172.

More great lines from Downtown Owl

There's a certain enjoyable meandering quality to this book that reminds me of Cannery Row. It's not that book of course. Not even Steinbeck could re-write Cannery Row. (see: Sweet Thursday.) But the anecdotal decoupage is reminiscent and gives me the same feeling like I could read it forever although a small town in North Dakota is obviously not quite on the same level of fantasy destination.

Several interesting stories, like the one about Horace getting fleeced by a con man he met at his wife's funeral. He was fleeced 4 months after the funeral for all of his wife's insurance money on some crazy betting scheme that was predicated on NFL games being fixed.

Or the conversations between Julia and Vance Druid. I loved the one about his musical tastes (Bruce Springsteen "seems like an asshole." Cheap Trick "dressed like circus freaks." ELO are "like a combination of the dullest parts of the Beatles and the gayest parts of Led Zeppelin.") He only likes the Rolling Stones. And one song by Steely Dan ("Deacon Blues" excellent choice) but they seem boring.

That was a good chapter but here's an excerpt of one where Julia, Ted and Naomi are cruising through town. There's lots of drunk driving in this book. Ted tells a story about a girl he hung out with in college that kissed one of his friends at a party and killed their three-way friendship (the story is more complicated but that's the skeletal version.) Julia has done a face plant in the back seat and Ted and Naomi keep talking:

"Do you ever wish that Sarah Greenberg would have kissed you instead of Tiger Lyons?"

"Never. I used to, but I haven't for years."

They drove another hundred yards in silence.

"Ted?"

"Yes."

"Sometimes I would like to kiss you."

They drove another hundred feet.

"Naomi."

"Yes?"

"You need to pay closer attention to the stories people tell you about themselves."

They were almost back in Owl. Nothing was different.

Horace's wife Alma died in the early 70's. She developed a rare disorder (fatal familial insomnia which is apparently a real thing) and was unable to sleep. Like ever again. And she began to hallucinate after about 30 days. Here is Horace talking with Alma:

Alma paused. She looked at Horace's chest and squinted her eyes.

"Why is this happening?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said, unconsciously inferring that this had been an existential query about why his wife had contracted a hyper-rare sleep disorder that wasn't even supposed to exist. In truth, Alma was asking why both of their bodies were suddenly becoming translucent. But under these specific circumstances, that is probably the same question.

Mitch spends the first half of the book being tormented by his teacher and coach, Mr. Laidlaw. I like this exchange between Julie and Laidlaw that efficiently lays out the gap between what teachers think of students versus what students think teachers think of them:

Mitch Hrlicks walked by with Nineteen Eighty-Four in his left hand, trying to ignore both of the authority figures who were watching him. His hair was out of control. There were bags under both his eyes.

"Merry Christmas, Vanna," said Laidlaw. "Are you going to be an elf this year?"

"Probably not," said Mitch. "No." 

"You would make a fine elf, Vanna," said Laidlaw. "You could be Sleepy."

"Sleepy was a dwarf," said Mitch.

"So what? Don't you think elves have names?"

Mitch slouched toward Bethlehem.

"I don't understand that kid," said Julia. "He seems nice enough, but he always looks depressed."

"Mitch is a good kid," said Laidlaw. "He's a really good kid, relatively speaking. But he has no sense of humor. That's his problem."

Of course, perhaps it better illustrates how some old people fail to realize they are coming across as assholes to everyone under 20.

Mysteries of the galaxy

Continuing with the Astronomy Cast theme, here is their list of the top 10 mysteries of the Way, Milky.

The show notes are located here and here.

1.) Blue stragglers: are stars that appear to stay in their youth longer than expected, even regressing to their hotter youths. They're big and blue and given where they are located (in globular clusters), they should have burned more hydrogen than they seem to have. It seems they might be stealing mass from other stars although that's just speculation.

2.) Some of our supernovae are missing: The math says we should see 2-3 a century. The last one that occurred relatively close to us was in 1680.Chandra appears to have found remnants of supernova explosions in some dust clouds. What astronomers can say is there doesn't seem to be anything unique to our galaxy to explain why they can't see them. It may just be a question of not seeing them in the visible spectrum due to obstruction.

3.) The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds: these are the satellite galaxies that are...orbiting the Milky Way? Apparently, we don't quite know. They might be just be dwarf galaxies nonchalantly traveling past us. The explanation for why we can't tell is, once again, mathy but it has to do with factors like our inability to precisely estimate the Milky Way's mass. If they are orbiting us, it's possible the Milky Way will rip them up one day and gobble their stars. Andromeda is going to do the same thing to us, but it's billions of years away so I'll focus on worrying about Michelle Bachman actually winning the Republican nomination for now.

4.) Proxima Centauri's intimacy issues: Proxima is a red dwarf in the Alpha Centauri system, around 4 light years away. The problem is, it's awfully close to Alpha Centauri A&B. Some say it's a captured object that is orbiting this system. They all appear to be moving through the sky close together at around the same velocity.

5.) When is Eta Carinae going to blow already: this is one of the brightest stars in the sky, around 100 times the mass of the sun. It's located in the Homunculus Nebula (it's a great name, it just means "little man.") Stars in constellations are named according to their brightness. Thus, Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in Centauri, this Beta and so forth. Eta took the giant leap forward in 1843 when it brightened and appeared to be supernova-ing. There's no way to predict when. If you happen to be watching with the right kind of equipment, you can see the xray burst minutes before the eruption.

6.) One of our spiral arms is missing-or not: apparently when you study galaxy arms (and of course, such a specialized field exists), you are supposed to look at them all in the same color. But when you look at galaxies through different lights (radio, ultraviolet) the morphology changes. And parts of the arms could be obscured from us. I admit, I don't totally see the big deal about this one since part of it seems to apply to all galaxies.

7.) Where are the Sun's nebula buddies: Around 4.6 billion years, our solar system formed out of a solar nebula. When we look at other stellar nebulae (e.g. Orion, Carinae, Pleiades), we see clusters of stars. It could be due to gravitational effects that the rest were flung out of the system. You can't tell from looking at a star or its motions where it started out so to find out if another star was birthed with our sun, you'll need detailed chemical analysis. I gather this is a somewhat moot point because the answer, by present means anyways, it never much more than maybe and siblings could be on the other side of the Galaxy just as easily by now.

8.) The 60 million year extinction cycle: Here's some cheery reading--10 potential causes of mass extinctions from gamma rays to magnetic field reversals. UC Berkeley contends that around every 60 million or so years, some mass extinction event occurs that wipes out up to 90% of life on this planet. How old is that KT Boundary again? Yup, we're about due. There are some interesting theories about what is protecting us, at least most of the time including the Milky Way's proposed magnetic field.

9.) The case of the missing G-Dwarfs: G-dwarf are also called yellow dwarfs although that can be misleading (they range in color from white to yellow.) They are a subset of the main sequence stars, like all dwarfs. Our own sun is a G-dwarf, but the ones we are looking for would be a little smaller than the sun. Here's how the reasoning goes: the smaller the star, the longer it burns so the longer it hangs around burning through its hydrogen. There are a (at this point theoretical) group of stars formed just after the Big Bang called Population III. They should have little to no metal in them, as they should have formed before being polluted by supernovae. There should also be red dwarfs composed of this primordial hydrogen. It's possible the big stars (that form faster) just didn't leave room or resources for the smaller stars to develop. Or maybe the lack of metals in the primordiverse just prevented smaller stars from forming.

10.) The intermediate black hole quandary: an intermediate black hole would be greater than a stellar black hole but obviously not a supermassive black hole. The moniker "supermassive" always seems to me to indicate its kind of rare but in fact, the intermediate ones are the hard ones to find. They've tried looking in dwarf galaxies and globular clusters but no dice. Chandra has identified some extra-luminous x-ray sources  that might turn out to be the culprits.

First and last for The Coroner's Lunch

First:

It was a depressing audience, and there were going to be a lot more like it. Now that Haeng, the spotty-faced magistrate was back, Siri would have to explain himself every damn Friday, and kowtow to a man young enough to be his grandson.

Last:

"Given the bad luck you've been having lately, I figured you could use a lucky charm. Like it?"

Great lines from Downtown Owl

The reviews seem to all be saying the ending is sketchy but I really like this book so far, partly because I know a little something something about growing up in a small town in the 80's. Although, I grew up in Kentucky and Paris, Ky (population: 8000. Salute!)  within 30 minutes of Lexington sounds like a veritable metropolis compared with Owl, ND, population 800 and change and falling.

So far, I'm liking Julia the best. Which figures.

Here the Principal explains to Julia, who is young and new in town for her first teaching job, what Owl has going for it:

"And you've probably heard that the movie theater is going to close, and I'm afraid that's true: It is closing. But the bowling alley is thriving. It's probably the best bowling alley in the region. I honestly believe that."

By chance, Julia did enjoy bowling. however, when the most positive detail about your new home is that the bowling alley is thriving, you have to like bowling a lot in order to stave off depression. And-right now, in the middle of this conversation-Julia was more depressed than she had ever been in her entire 23 year existence. As she sat in Walter Valentine's office, she felt herself wanting to take a nap on the floor. ..Julie could feel hydrochloric acid inside her tear ducts. There was an especially fuzzy tennis ball in her esophagus, and she wanted to be high.

...

She soon arrived in her apartment, where she had no furniture (and no idea how to acquire any, as there were apparently no furniture stores within a 30 mile radius.) ...Julie reached into the same cardboard box and found her copy of The Random House Thesaurus (College Edition), which contained drugs. The day before leaving Madison, Julia and her college roommates meticulously rolled four perfect joints and hid them in the thesaurus, operating under the assumption that buying pot would be impossible in small-town North Dakota (which was, in fact, the case.) The plan was that Julia could smoke one joint after the first day of class, one on Thanksgiving (which she would have to spend alone), and one after the last day of school in May.  The fourth was a spare....Julia sat in her sleeping bag and smoked three of them, all in a row. It was 2:45pm.

One of the other characters is Horace, an elderly farmer and lifelong Owl resident who hangs out with his peers in a local coffee shop. Here they are arguing about Columbus Day:

"They should recognize the man," said Bud.

"Why?" asked Edgar.

"The man deserves recognition."

"That's not an answer to the question. You're just repeating what you already said. That's not an argument."

"Why should I have to explain why Columbus is important? You're acting like a two-dollar jackass."

"I just think it's idiotic that we don't get mail today, simply because Columbus was a bad explorer. You do realize he discovered America by accident, right? He thought the Indians were pygmies."

"We all know that," said Bud. "That isn't the point. Have you not listened to anything we've been saying for the past twenty minutes? Do you have shit in your ears?"

"You know, they say Columbus was a rapist," said Edgar. "I don't know if that's fact or fiction, but it's certainly not impossible. And I'd hate to think we didn't get our mail this morning in tribute to an Italian rapist."

This sounds just like a bunch of old guys egging each other on.

The third narrator is Mitch Hrlicka, a high school junior and fair to poor football player. He hates his coach and English teacher, John Laidlaw. Here, Laidlaw asks the class a question about 1984, the book the entire school is reading in anticipation of it being, well, 1984 in a few months, and Klosterman narrates what all 22 students are thinking. Ahhh, youth. Here are just a few:

1) How awesome it would feel to be sleeping.

3) What it would feel like to be asleep.

6) An empty room, filled only with white light and silence (this was Rebecca Grooba.)

9) Theoretical ways to make a Pontiac Grand Prix more boss, such as painting a panther on the hood or moving the entire steering column and floor pedals to the passenger side, which would likely be impossible without a cherry picker and extremely expensive tools.

10) The meaning (and linguistic derivation) of the phrase "Gunter glieben glauchen globen," as heard during the preface to Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages."

12) Robot cows

22) Firing a crossbow into the neck of John Laidlaw while he received fellatio from Tina McAndrew (This was Mitch.)


Tina being the student that the married Laidlaw allegedly slept with and impregnated (actually, not even allegedly because he reminisces about it in an earlier chapter.) Her parents sent her out of town. I remember this kind of stuff did happen, including the sending the shamed girl away part.


I feel a certain kinship with Mitch because my English teachers all seemed to hate me too. Part of the reason Mitch (last name: Hrlicka) hates Laidlaw is because he calls Mitch "Vanna"-as in, his last name needs to buy vowels:

"How about you, Vanna?" said Laidlaw.

"What?"

"What do you think about this?"
"I didn't hear the question," said Mitch. "The radiator is too loud."
"The radiator is not working, Vanna," said Laidlaw. "However, I'm not surprised that you are hearing things. That is, after all, a sign of psychosis. As such, I will pose my question again, this time above the din of the imaginary radiator. WHO. ARE. THE THOUGHT POLICE?"

I swear I had this same teacher in high school except his name was Kokas and he was the history teacher/baseball coach.

What I looked up thus far for The Coroner's Lunch

The book takes place in October of 1976. This means the Pathet Lao takeover is about a year in. Although considered the equivalent of the Viet Minh or Khmer Rouge, they never seemed to be as bad or, at least, they never made the news if they were. They certainly were bad news for the Hmong, who had collaborated with us. The numbers aren't clear but thousands fled the country following Communist takeover by crossing the Mekong into Thailand-the town on the Thai side by the way is Sri Chaing Mai which is evidently the spring roll capital. There are refugees scattered all over-in the States, in Australia, in Thailand (where they've been having troubles recently.) There have been efforts to both improve US-Laos relations and repatriate the Hmong but the results are mixed. According to Wikipedia, the Hmong were called Montagnards by the French because they lived in highland areas but they shouldn't be confused the the Vietnamese Degar, who were also called Montagnards.

Pathet Lao just means "Lao Country."

The Laotian Civil War lasted from 1953-1975. This means it pretty much had been going on ever since the French officially withdrew after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The battle was actually very close to the Laos border:

After 1953, the history gets too complicated to summarize well but there's more here. There were various coups and corruption caused by an influx of US aid. We of course were freaked out by the creeping Communist umbrella. According to the article. Laos is the most bombed nation in the history of war.

The article says the LPRP (Lao People's Revolutionary Party) is still in control but they have been enacting economic reforms since 1986. They are a poor country with lots of debt. The Lonely Planet once again assures me this is an great, cheap and low crime place to travel.

Comrade Kahm tells Siri that he knows the cause of his wife's sudden death: her addiction to lahp, a raw meat dish. Apparently, it can also be served cooked. Which is good news for Laotians. Lahp seems to just mean "minced." You can even have tofu lahp. Here's the recipe.

She actually died from cyanide poisoning, the almond smell being the standard dead giveaway. I'd read various mystery novels for years where someone sniffed the cadaver's breath for an almond smell but it was only recently that I learned why that smell was connected to cyanide.

The almonds we eat are Prunus dulcis, the ones that produce cyanide in significant quantities are Prunus amara. Turning the original poisonous version into the key ingredient for Almond Joy is the result of a simple human-induced genetic mutation. Plants produce cyanide as a defense mechanism. Some other common foods that contain cyanide (reduced to safe amounts such as selective breeding) are lima beans, soy, spinach and cassava. There are people in Africa whose diets, principally due to war and famine, consist mainly of cassava who suffer from a low-grade form of cyanide poisoning called konzo. 

In passing, Siri mentions the Anusawari Arch. I wanted to go into a little more detail because it's quite striking and because the back story is funny.

First here it is:

It looks old but it was built between 1957-1968 and is a monument to those who died in the battle for independence from France. It's also known as Patuxai or "Victory Gate." Evidently, it was built with American money and cement that was intended for an airstrip. Oops. Well, at least it's pretty. It is sometimes known as "the vertical runway" for that reason.

It's mentioned a few times about people being sent to Vieng Xai (or Viengsai) for re-education. This was the stronghold of the Pathet Lao during the insurgency and where the took shelter in the cave system during the US bombing. It's supposed to be a very lovely place. Here and here is some more information about traveling there.

The absolute last time I'll talk about being on Public Radio

Unless, of course, I am again in which case trust that I'll blather on about it for a few weeks again.

I got a nice thank you letter from the producer of The Dinner Party Download, saying that the (edited) dinner party submissions were on their blog.

Here is the blog link.

And here is my submission which they actually printed in its entirety with some editor's asides and format tidying:

Vanessa McDaniel in Columbus, OH needs a bigger table for:
1.) John Steinbeck - My favorite author. I want to sit next to him and absorb some of his love for humankind.
2.) Liza Minnelli - An old school broad with a great sense of humor who could prevent any awkward silences.
3.) Paul McCartney - My chance to meet a Beatle, are you kidding? If I ever actually met him, I would probably cry and kill the party though.
4.) Caravaggio - He was a genius artist plus he had the balls to do a self portrait of himself as the severed head of Goliath. I just hope he doesn’t stab anyone.
5.) Idris Elba - He’s fascinating. Plus I just want to stare at him.
6.) Ed Ricketts - I can’t invite Steinbeck without his close friend and inspiration, Ed Ricketts. They’d be so happy to be reunited.
7.) Werner Herzog - I could listen to his Teutonic monologues forever.
8.) Stan Lee - My inner comic geek demands this.
9.) Brigitte Nielson - She just seems cool to me plus I’ve loved her since Red Sonja.
10.) Pepa - It’s Pepa.
Is this too many? [Answer: NEVER!] I have some more for dinner party #2: Ru Paul, Marc Chagall, Richard Dawkins, Jim Henson, Dolly Parton, Quentin Tarantino, Jack Kirby, Juliette Binoche, Alain Resnais, Joni Mitchell, Anatole France, Jill Clayburgh, Judy Blume, Gabriel Byrne, Lee Krasner.

Bryan thought it was funny I invited Ed Ricketts just to make John Steinbeck happy. Maybe I should have said instead that he was a pioneer of marine ecology, an outstanding drinking buddy and a muse to great writers.

Poem of the day-Jane Miller

Jane Miller (b. 1949) worked as a painter before her career in poetry. I liked what she had to say about her poetry, “I use and have brought forward many of the reasons why I was attracted to painting into my poems. For example, I make use of color and design, so the structure of poetry, that’s related, and it’s a lot like making the underpainting for a painting.”

I'm not sure this poem makes a lot of sense in places ("may your desire always overcome your need"? Is that really a good thing always? I'd own 5000 comic books, seven pairs of Prada shoes and be homeless.) However, it sounds lovely when read out loud, which the Poetry Foundation recommends you do to really get the full effect of a poem. This really works better when you live alone, of course:

May You Always be the Darling of Fortune

By Jane Miller

March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides

into rain. The imperceptible change begins

out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new

craving, spring. May your desire always overcome

 

your need; your story that you have to tell,

enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world

you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging

from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things

 

fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because

now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting

the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything

wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I

 

vigilant.

Mysteries of the solar system

Astronomy Cast did a two part series each about mysteries of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe about a year and a half ago and I'm just now . It was way too much to absorb in a podcast so I'm going to try to recount all of them here. All information originated from their site or links provided by them.

First, the solar system.

1.) The Pioneer Anomaly: the Pioneer spacecraft (10 and 11) are heading towards the edges of our solar system but not at the speed they are expected to travel, they seem to be slowing down. The data has been difficult to analyze because some of the tapes have been misplaced and the the data was never intended to be analyzed this way. And the explanation is really....mathy. But it points to a possible significant misunderstanding on our part of the laws of physics. The Planetary Society is in the process of doing the largest analysis ever of 30 years worth of data.

2.) Axial tilts of Uranus and Venus: the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees. Uranus is tilted at 98 degrees when compared with the orbital plane of the sun (people sometimes ask tilted in comparison to what? There's your answer.) Whereas other planets can be thought of as tops spinning around the sun, Universe Today says Uranus is more like a rolling ball. The common wisdom these days is something big smacked into Uranus to flip it over on its side where it couldn't get up, like my dog sometimes.

For Venus, the tilt is a whopping 177.3 degrees. This means it's essentially upside down. This is why it rotates backwards (or clockwise when seen from above) as compared to all other planets in the solar system. The upshot of the almost upside down tilt is that the net difference versus the plane of the ecliptic is only 2.7 degrees so no seasons. Why is Venus jacked up? It could be caused by some asteroidal bombardments in the days of the early solar system. Key word to understand: Kirkwood Gaps.

3.) What's beneath Europa's ice? Io takes more pounding from Jupiter's immense gravity. Europa, which is one of the brightest objects in the solar system due to reflection, might have a warm, salty ocean under its icy crust if the probe data is correct. The hope is there's life under there.BTW, here's an acronym for remembering the names and positions of the Galilean moons in order from furthest in: I Eat Green Cows.

4.) Methane on Mars: the question is where is it coming from and how is it getting replenished. Due to the conditions on Mars, Methane only lasts a few hundred years. Is it geological activity or is it, again, life? If it's geological activity, it means Mars is not, as we've thought, geologically dead. Or maybe it's coming from meteorites.

5.) Titan's atmosphere: another question of, for one, where is the Methane that makes up less than 2% of the atmosphere coming from. It seems to be coming from a phenomenon known as cryovolcanism. It's also fascinating because it's a little moon with an atmosphere about 1.5 times the size of our own.

6.) Corona temperature: the corona is where the solar winds originate. It refers to the area around one million kilometers from the surface. Temperatures reach one million degrees. But the surface is only 5000 degrees. Why is the corona so hot and what is making it so hot? The preliminary answer involves magnetic field lines.

7.) The Kuiper Cliff: the Kuiper Belt starts sooner than I realized, within the orbit of Neptune. The prediction basically is that the further out you go, the more objects you should find. Instead, there is a sharp drop-off around 50 au's. What this means, according to a dude named Patryk Lykawka, is that there could be another planet out there sweeping its orbital path clean.

8.) Why are there long period comets: these are comets that have periods ranging from 200 to 10 million years. This means their orbits are very long ellipses. This could mean there's a planet in the area of the Oort Cloud that is periodically knocking objects loose into these crazy orbits. This does not mean that Planet X will return from the fifth dimension to destroy the world in 2012 like the Mayans thought. Another cool tidbit: the Oort Cloud isn't definitely proven but we can see what looks like it's "shadow" in the CMB. Cool.

9.) The geysers of Enceladus: Cassini has confirmed there are geysers ejected regularly from the South Pole region of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. And the geysers are of water and ice which means that maybe there's a warm ocean underneath somewhere. These geysers appear to be replenishing Saturn's rings. And Enceladus appears to just be an icy moon, like so many others. Why is it the only one (we know of) doing this weird thing?

10.) The Saturn Hexagon: another Cassini discovery, or rather confirmation since it was first seen by Voyager. There appears to be a perfectly shaped hexagonal hurricane on Saturn's north pole turning at the same speed the planet is rotating. A giant planetary hurricane is cool but not unheard of. But physics says it should be a circle. And by giant, I mean really giant. The sides are 14,000 kilometers.

The video is said to be quite amazing but...well it's all relative isn't it? It's amazing we can even get video from Cassini. Anyways, here it is.

Poem of the day-Sharon Olds

After a streak where I wasn't that excited by any, I enjoyed this poem from Sharon Olds. Per the Poetry Foundation, she is one of our leading contemporary poets. She published her first book of poetry, Satan Says, at the age of 37.

What I liked: I like that she had this relationship with her father. I've seen many a diary with this type of lock but now I'll look at them anew and think of scarabs.

My Father's Diary

By Sharon Olds, b. 1942

I get into bed with it, and spring

the scarab legs of its locks. Inside,

the stacked, shy wealth of his print—

he could not write in script, so the pages

are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,

WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD

IN A GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, WENT

TO TRY OUT SOME NEW TENNIS RACQUETS,

LUNCH WITH MOM, life of ease—

except when he spun his father's DeSoto on the

ice, and a young tree whirled up to the

hood, throwing up her arms—until

LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS, WITH LOIS,

LUNCH WITH MOM AND LOIS, LOIS

LIKED THE CAR, DRIVING WITH LOIS,

LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,

LOIS! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO

GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE

NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE

TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the dark

legs of the capitals, moonlight, soft

tines of the printed letter gentled

apart, nectar drawn from serif, the

self of the grown boy pouring

out, the heart's charge, the fresh

man kneeling in pine-needle weave,

worshipping her. It was my father

good, it was my father grateful,

it was my father dead, who had left me

these small structures of his young brain—

he wanted me to know him, he wanted

someone to know him.

Great lines from The Coroner's Lunch

Another mystery set in an exotic locale actually written by a Brit expat. Why are those Brits so damn good at this type of stuff?

Colin Cotterill lives in Thailand currently and has worked to prevent the child sex trade. Here is a link to an NPR story about him. He felt like the Laos were underrepresented in literature.

The Lonely Planet, btw, says the Lao people are some of the chillest on earth and it's a great travel destination. The story takes place in the capital of Vientiane. Here is a map:

This explains how Dr. Siri, the protagonist, is able to hear the banned Thai radio programs.

Dr. Siri is a 76 year old coroner in 1970's Laos following the communist takeover. I wish I knew more about this area. They've had their problems but obviously not as bad as Vietnam or Cambodia.

Here, Dr. Siri ponders his Communist party membership:

If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He'd come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

Just to remind us that living in a communist Utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be, Dr. Siri is awakened very early on his only day off to go dig a canal by his local Communist leader:

Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn't a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. It was the authorities' gift to the people. They didn't want a single man, woman, or child to miss out on the heart-swelling pride that comes from resurfacing a road or dredging a stream. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.

....

"What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers."

"Dr. Siri, I'm surprised at you....There's no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We're all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an ax....All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing re-education at the islands. You know that."

...

When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbors, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labor for irrigation canal section 189.  

Dr. Siri gets the shaft for falling in love with the wrong chick when he received his medical training in France:

She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons....Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland. 

She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He'd been poor all his life, a state that he was hoping to recover from as a doctor....So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams.... The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hotel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration asked him to consider staying on in France...but his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side. 

...This was it. This was the team he'd inherited, the job he didn't want, the life he didn't expect to be leading.


Siri is given a ride home by his friend, the policeman Phosy (who has been "re-educated" to limited success thankfully) after he survives an assassination attempt:

The bike growled away, leaving Siri in the lane in the dark. Despite his brave words, it was still an eerie spot. Around him there were a few yellow lamps, some candles in neighbors' windows. There didn't seem to be insect noises any more at night. People wondered whether the bugs had all escaped across the river, too.

You're Killing me

I've pretty much drunk the Kool-Aid on the AMC brand. I cannot wait for Breaking Bad-which might be the best show on television-to come back in July. In the meantime, AMC offered up a little tidbit called The Killing which was based on a Danish show called Forbrydelsen. If you have watched the show, you know all of this.


The finale was last night and the internets are NOT happy, my droogs. No, they are setting cyber trash cans on fire and ready to play surprise visit at AMC headquarters where there will be singing in the rain-which is fitting if you've seen the show where it rained every episode.

I don't want to talk about the finale except--ok. The show has been on a steep decline since episode 3 or so. It squandered all the original good will (and there was plenty. Here is one example.) The finale though was the penultimate fuck you. I watched 13 episodes just hanging on in the end to see who killed Rosie Larsen considering I might even watch next season if they retooled because the cast is so talented...and they served up more lameass plot "twists" and didn't fucking tell us who killed Rosie Larsen. They actually expect us to turn in next season and find out. If you have watched the show, you know all of this.

Then there's the matter of this infuriating interview the show runner granted Alan Sepinwall.

I just want to take a moment and observe the pop culture wrath. I have never seen so many critics so enraged (if you only read one link, read the last one from NY Mag. I'd eat my shoes a la Herzog to be able to wield this kind of literate snark.)

Then, there's the matter of a boneheaded review from, of all places, the New York Times. And finally, NY mag speculates on who did do it and all I can say is someone from AMC needs to hire them immediately to perpetrate a fix on season 2 now.

Most of these reviews concluding with the recapper throwing up their hands and saying "Fuck you, I ain't watching this shit again." At least literally in one case. You see this all the time on comment boards but rarely from critics.The neutron bomb of bad will is riveting.

All of this ironically is much more fascinating than anything I saw in the last 13 hours of AMC original programming that I've watched.

What I've learned from A Journey Into Steinbeck's California thus far

I quite like this synergistic combination of an author's life and work with geography. It makes sense for someone like Steinbeck particularly. There is a whole series from Roaring Forties press on this topic, including Dorothy Parker's New York and Michelangelo's Rome.

I picked this up of course because it's about Steinbeck. Ya da ya da ya da. I need to find a Steinbeck scholar somewhere so we can be BFF's.

I also like the maps of Steinbeckian locales even if they do descend into serious fan trivia ("This is where Kate from East of Eden did her banking.")

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, the county seat of Monterey County, in 1902. His father was a businessman who suffered various ups and downs and his mother was a former school teacher. He spent the summers on the nearby Monterey Coast. If you are planning a visit to Salinas, you should basically read or re-read East of Eden.

Salinas was known as the "salad bowl of the world." Although he was wildly unpopular in his hometown during the Grapes of Wrath era, they started coming around in the 1950's. They offered to name a high school after him but he declined, saying a bowling alley or dog track would be more fitting. In 1959, they offered to name a reading room in the new library after him which he very much liked, "if my name would not drive people out." The year following his death, the library board voted to name the library after him. The vote wasn't unanimous as an Assembly of God pastor voted against it due to his "lifestyle." I'm baffled why Mr. Assembly of God was on the library board anyways. I can't imagine he's liking the book learnin.

Steinbeck attended Stanford off and on for six years. It was free to attend (!) during those years. He eventually left, traveled on a boat to NYC and lived there from 1925-1926. His experience on the boat gave him the material for his first novel, Cup of Gold. From there, he moved to Lake Tahoe where he worked as a winter caretaker and met his first wife, Carol.

I have to note here Carol was so good to him and he ended up treating her kind of shitty (in one of his worst moments, he brought his girlfriend and incipient second wife Gwyn to his home in Pacific Grove and told the two of them to decide who wanted him more and left.) She understood the writing came first. She sheltered him from the outside world. She typed his manuscript for Cup of Gold not long after meeting him. She also gave him the idea for the title of The Grapes of Wrath.


In his Monterey trilogy (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday), he makes several mentions of the Hotel Del Monte. This was a famous luxury hotel in Monterey that operated between 1880 and 1942. When it first opened, every room had a telephone which was a real rarity. It had the first glass-enclosed swimming pool. It's now the site of the US Postgraduate School. The costumer party in Sweet Thursday was possibly inspired by a famous party thrown at the Del Monte in 1941 by-get ready for it-Salvador Dali.

Not only were many characters in East of Eden inspired by real people (including those in Steinbeck's family) but Pilon in Tortilla Flat was an actually guy who lived in Spanish Monterey and sometimes slept in a tub. The Pirate and his dogs were also based on fact. Steinbeck had such love for Spanish Monterey. It really sucks he was accused of mocking them.

During the 1930's, Steinbeck and Carol lived in a cottage in Pacific Grove, a town formed as a clean-living Methodist retreat. The cottage is still around today. You can take a Steinbeck walking tour there. The house is still around but it's a private residence. There are pictures of the interior in the book. He wrote Grapes and Of Mice and Men here. I swoon.

He was really into gardening and dogs. In his letters, he mentions the varieties of flowers he has planted in his garden and the lives of his dogs. One died of distemper and apparently broke Carol's heart. Another one ate part of the manuscript of Mice which caused Steinbeck to fly into such a rage "he had to be locked up." Not sure how literal that is but I own a dog so I definitely understand. A few days later, he had calmed down and wrote this letter "My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half my ms. Two months work to do over again... There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn't want to ruin a good dog for a ms."

Awww, I love this man.

The butterfly festival in Pacific Grove and the town's fondness for the game of Roque (similar to Croquet but more complicated) as documented in Sweet Thursday are both factual although there was no "Roque War" of course.

In his later years, he enjoyed fishing and said in a letter to a friend, "I consider it the last of the truly civilized pursuits. Surely I find it a most restful thing. And if you don't bait the hook, even fish will not disturb you."

I've read some about the life of Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts. I get such voyeuristic joy from it and yet it's so painful to read about too, given Ricketts untimely death and the effect it had on so many people including Steinbeck himself. I want to reproduce the book's paragraph on it:

On April 24, 1948, Steinbeck wrote in his journal that he felt close to "some kind of release of the spirit. I don't know how this is going to happen. I just know it is so. Maybe through the book maybe through sorrow or pain or something. Anyways it is near and I must be ready for it." On May 5, he wrote, "No word from Ed. I have a feeling that something is wrong with him." three days later, ed Ricketts was struck by a train as he drove across the tracks at Drake Avenue and Cannery Row (now marked by a bust of Ed Ricketts.) Having eerily anticipated the loss, Steinbeck was numb. After Ricketts's funeral, he wrote to Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, "Wouldn't it be interesting if Ed was us and that now there wasn't any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him. I've wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which."

I think the book he is referring to is East of Eden (which he called "The Salinas Valley" at the time.)

In 1959, the city of Monterey asked him about naming a local theatre the Steinbeck Theatre (high schools, libraries, theatres. At least he lived to somewhat see the worm turn.) He replied in a letter:

Your suggestion... is of course flattering. I can only warn you that my own success in the theater has not been all rosy. You may be taking on a jinx....Would it be out of order in view of our long association, and because he was one of the greatest humans I ever knew, that Ed Ricketts's name be substituted for mine, or if because his name is not yet as widely known as it deserves, that our names be used together?....If your projected theater could be named the Ricketts and Steinbeck, any reservations of mine, self-conscious or sentimental, would instantly disappear, and a name that deserves remembering could be at least proposed. Thank you for the compliment.

And, according to the authors, Joe Elegant in Sweet Thursday was a poke at Joseph Campbell (who spent some time with Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts around 1932 before a flirtation between Campbell and Carol soured the group dynamic):

...a writer who explains to brothel owner Fauna "the myth and the symbol" of his book and the "reality below reality." She isn't impressed: "Listen, Joe, whyn't you write a story about something real?"

Even though they had been divorced for many years and she had remarried, his first wife Carol still evidently harbored rancor towards John. Carol Brown, the sister in-law of Carol Steinbeck Brown, (they were married to brothers) created a bust of Steinbeck for Cannery Row that was erected in 1973. Carol Steinbeck Brown wished to collaborate with her, bringing in family pictures and letters, etc. Although she was still angry with him, she wanted the likeness to do him justice. Unfortunately, she became obsessed with the head telling the sculptor it wasn't big enough. The first bust collapsed because the head was so big. She also would come to the studio and swear at the now giant head of her ex-husband, all of which unnerved Carol Brown a bit.When it was completed, CSB wanted credit but only Carol Brown's name is on the plaque. Brown speculated it was like Carol's life with John all over, not getting credit for her artistic contributions.

Curious about the bust? Here it is.

Why I hate Facebook: the Final Conflict

When I was in college several years ago, FB was kind of unknown outside of the college set and only users with legit university email accounts could create an account. I created an account really just to see what my classmates were talking about. At the time it was funny.

Now of course, everyone is on there and it's just an unhip, oversharing hub of white noise. Really, if your Dad or some nosy relative is your FB friend, FB no longer serves a point. My Dad is not my friend on the internet for anything I actually use.

So, anyways I've always been too lazy to delete the account plus every once in a while I do hear from someone I used to know. But I always consider just deleting the thing. Then today, someone posts this on my wall:

Doyou think Vanessa {last name deleted} is gay?

Which is a link to some sort of annoying FB app that needs to access my personal info, of course. Which always annoys me. And more to the point-WHAT THE FUCK?? I should add also, my Uncle posted this.

No I'm not gay. I have Asperger's Syndrome. But thanks for asking. And no, I don't want that posted on Facebook either. Jesus.

Great lines from Wells Tower

Ah, now I love this short story collection. Profane yet elegant. Full of despair but funny as hell. The New Yorker has a fiction podcast where writers come in and read one of their favorite short stories from the archive. One of the best of these was Mary Gaitskill reading "Signs and Symptoms" by Nabokov. Anyways, if I were ever asked to do such a thing, I now know my go to would be Wells Tower.

A few lines I liked so far:

From "The Brown Coast" (I loved this story. I loved this story SO much in fact, I was angry it was over and didn't want to read the next one):

Right then the sound of metal on metal rose in the lane, along with a man's voice raised in rage. "Son of a bitch!" The voice belonged to a man bent down half-vanished under the hood of a Pontiac. "Aw, God fuck a milk cow!" The white-haired women turned pursed faces at the angry man. The golf cart whined and moved faster but not much.

Derrick came back into the living room. "Gotta take a ride over the bridge," he said. "Need to pull something out of a horse's pussy."

"What king of a thing?" Bob asked.

"A baby horse, I hope."

I really love the economy of emotion that Tower can deliver like in this sequence where Bob calls his wife, who kicked him out when his downward spiral led to him losing his job and cheating on her. His uncle sends him to fix up a cabin that used to belong to Bob's father and now his uncle. Imagine Bob's surprise when he calls his estranged wife and his uncle answers the phone:

"Well, how is it?" [Vicky asks.]

"Oh, real great," Bob said. "I struck oil in the yard. It's all champagne and gold toilets down here. I got people on call to put grapes in my mouth. But, anyway, I've enjoyed it about all I can. I'm getting ready to get ready to come on back."

"Huh," she said, "We have to talk about some things." 

....

She said she did not like being without him, but that, though she tried hard to, she could not think of a reason to take him back right now. In a calm, lawyerly style, she detailed a long catalogue of Bob's shortcomings. From the sound of it, she had everything written down with dates and witnesses and the worst parts underlined. Bob listened to all of this and he felt himself get cold. He watched a mouse walk out from behind the soda machine. It was eating a coupon. 

"Why don't you tell me about what Randall's doing on my property," he said. "Why don't we talk about something like that?"

"How about let's talk about nothing," she said. "I'm a happier person when I forget who you are."

Bob sighed and went into a fumbling half-hearted apology, but Vicky wouldn't answer, and he suspected she was holding the phone away from her face, as he'd seen her do when her mother called.

Bob becomes obsessed with fishing in the tidal pools and putting his finds in an aquarium. His neighbor Claire brings him a sea slug (Bob says it looks like "the turd of someone who'd been eating rubies.") It's poisonous and it kills all his fish. Her husband Derrick says they should kill it, after fussing at Claire for being a dumbass:

But Bob felt a kind of kinship with the slug. Had he been born a sea creature, he doubted God would have robed him in blue and yellow fins like the splendid dead fish at his feet, or put him in the body of a shark or barracuda or any of those exquisite destroyers. No, he'd probably have been family to this sea cucumber, built in the image of sewage and cursed with a chemical belch that ruined every lovely thing that drifted near.


From "Retreat" about an estranged pair of brothers attempting to bond on a hunting trip. Matthew, the narrator, is a real estate speculator down on his luck and living in a cabin in the Maine woods next door to an older man named George. It soon becomes apparent to Matthew that George likes his brother Stephen better than him. He then tries to get his brother to invest in the land as a hunting retreat for middle-aged suburban men, which George doesn't like. At all:

"And for another thing, I didn't move back here to get among a bunch of swinging dicks."

"No offense, George, but it's not your land we're talking about."

"I know that Matthew," George said. "What I'm saying is, you carve this hill up and sell it out to a bunch of cocksuckers from Boston, I'd say the chance is pretty good that some night in the off-season, I'd get a few too many beers in me and I'd get it in my head to come around with a few gallons of kerosene."

And here a brief moment of brotherly bonding between Matthew and Stephen. Any happiness in these stories is guaranteed to be transitory:

"I'm just fucking tired, Matty. I've been pushing for twenty years. I work so goddamned hard, and what have I got? I filled out this dating thing on the computer a few weeks ago. One thing they ask you is, 'If you were an animal, what would you be?' I wrote, 'A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.' It's true. Just grinding away at this goddamned thing that never gives back. Pointless."

Some details on Stephen's life where he makes his living as a failed musician/music therapist:

When no orchestras called him with commissions, he had an artistic crackup, exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre and eke out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment that he shared with a dying collie. The animal had lost the ability to urinate, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. There, he'd stand astride the poor animal and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that. I told Stephen that from a business standpoint, the smart thing would be to put the dog down. This caused an ugly argument, but really, it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside hand -juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you'd flock to for lessons on how to be less out-of-your-mind. 

In "Executors of Important Energies", a man contemplates the senility of his father who has always been distant and the hot young 21 year old wife he brought home when the narrator was a teen:

I'd had a hard crush on her, and in some dim way, I was sure that my father was only with her temporarily, that he planned to turn her over to me someday. The particulars weren't absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but "Night Moves" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.....Somewhere in there, I stopped dreaming of Lucy, the fastback, the alleys and the trusty woods.

In "Wild America", which is I think the only story narrated by a female character, two teenaged cousins in what appear to be the 80's hang out one summer. It reminded me of vividly of that time in my youth when I began to see clearly I had little to nothing in common with my family and we were summertime BFF's no longer.  Here the early blooming cousin Maya is telling Jacey about her new love interest, a 35 year old man (Maya is 15 and, alas, this is the pre-To Catch a Predator era):

"He just unlocks these rooms inside me," Maya was saying. "It's like he knows things about me that I don't even know myself."  

In private revulsion, Jacey clenched her teeth so that an upper canine screeched against a lower. "God, well have you, I mean did you-all..." Jacey could not find a term appropriate for when a young girl is groaned on by a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant of the arts.  

"Have we been lovers?"

Been lovers-the eyeteeth screeched again. Who said that? It called up an image of those two at it beneath a flowering arbor while swans watched.

The title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", is about a Viking raid. On the surface, that is. It's funny to read so soon after The Last Kingdom. I liked the final paragraph which gets to the heart of things:

...after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hate those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing towards your home.

A gaggle of NASA stories

There's been a lot of interesting NASA stories of late.

One, poor Spirit finally gave up the ghost. The rover was put into hibernation last March but alas, it doesn't seem to want to wake up. The little card table sized explorer sure gave NASA more than its money's worth though.

With the shuttle retirement in progress, NPR did a great story about the Crawler, the giant vehicle used to tow the shuttle to the launch site. It's one of those things most people never think about but it's a huge bit of engineering. It's top speed is 2 miles an hour. Only 6 people are authorized to drive it. The drive down the 3.5 mile specially built service road takes hours as even the top speed can't be approached with the multi-ton shuttle and its rockets in tow.

Finally, the James Webb telescope is going to be the successor to Hubble. Unlike the Hubble, it is not intended to be serviced by the Shuttle so it's going to be out in L2. It's pretty cool, it has to fold up to fit inside of a rocket. They referred to it as the "origami telescope." Alas, it's overbudget and now apparently will take years longer to complete. Currently, they launch date has been pushed to 2018.

Underwhelming adventures but awesome conversations

Speaking to my boss is almost always entertaining, as you'll see below. For the purposes of vague anonymity, I'll call him Gary.

He was telling me this morning about his weekend, which involved going to some ice cream place where he took his picture. He was showing me the patron pictures on their website so I asked, "So, your picture is on the website?"

"No, why would it be on the website?" Gary said.

Ok? So basically he had a picture of himself at the ice cream place? No. It was a picture of his motorcycle parked in front of it. He wasn't even in it. None of this is that funny except it took several minutes to figure out that he basically took a picture of his motorcycle and had ice cream this weekend.

So I mentioned I was on NPR on Friday (I am a huge dork about these things. I was once filmed jumping rope in a boxing class at my old gym for the local news when they did a story about bootcamp classes. I taped that segment and pretty much everyone I knew at that time was forced to watch the tape until my co-workers made fun of me for jumping with my mouth open and I got self conscious.)

This conversation followed:

Gary: MPR?
(he then starts to type "MPR Vanessa" in his Google bar)
Me: NPR, Gary. Like the radio?
Gary: I don't listen to that. It's not MPR?
(He keeps trying to type "MPR Vanessa" so I was like, forget it I'll send you the link. I explained what the show was about)
Gary: Who did you invite?
Me: John Steinbeck, Werner Herzog, Pepa.
Gary: Pepa?
Me: Like Salt N Pepa? Caravaggio.
Gary: Who the hell is that?

Me: A 17th century paint...oh nevermind. Stan Lee
Gary: Stanley who? That sounds boring. Your party would suck.
Me: Please.Who would you invite? Sonny Barger?
Gary: Porn stars
Me: Like Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson?
Gary: You know their names?
Me: You don't? You're the one what watches it.
Gary: Yeah but I don't know their names. Doesn't that bother you?
Me: In fact, yes. I guess you fast forward through the credits. So your list would just be "Three random porn stars?"

He did listen to the show though which was very nice of him. He's really a nice guy. That conversation was so awesome though I wish I could have taped that and put it on the radio. My friend JB was cracking up and was like, "I must Google 'MPR Vanessa' now." It actually linked to a story on Minnesota Public Radio so Gary was closer than we knew.

Slightly underwhelming adventures in public radio

I am a big fan of podcasts. One of the shows I listen to is American Public Media's The Dinner Party Download. Last week they mentioned they were going to have a special web article for their 100th episode and solicited listeners to log on and name their dream dinner party guests, alive or dead.

Well, that's a snap right? You're probably making your list right now. Anyways, done and done. I logged on and made a vast, rambling list that included Paul McCartney, Idris Elba, Caravaggio, Pepa, and Brigitte Nielson (I was torn between her and Sandahl Bergman-I was a big fan of 80's movies with sword-wielding bitches.)

I was not expecting to receive this email from the show's producer, Jackson Musker:

Hi Vanessa, 
 
 
. 
Thanks a ton for sharing this amazing guest list (actually TWO lists!) 
Werner Herzog and Pepa together...I love it.  My hosts and I have had so 
much fun reading all of these responses (ranging from Harry Potter to 
Dolly Parton to Jesus of Nazareth to RuPaul!) that we started to think 
it'd be great if we could include fun little vignettes of these guest 
ideas on our radio show...not just on the website. Since your reply was 
one of the stand-outs, I'd love to call you sometime tomorrow and chat 
for just a couple minutes about your picks, if you're game.  I'd tape a 
brief part of the conversation - maybe 30 seconds - and then we'd air it 
on this Friday's show.  (I'll be on the line with you, guiding you 
along.  And it's taped, not live, so we can tape til we get a good cut. 
:-)) We're hoping that 5 or so of the best responses can be part of the 
on-air show. 
 
 
 
Please let me know if this sounds okay to you...and if so, what time 
tomorrow you'd like me to call you for the super quick chat.  Maybe 
sometime in the morning Pacific Time?  (I'm in Los Angeles.)

RuPaul and Dolly were indeed on my list. Jesus was.....not. Anyways, sure I said.

I was told to narrow it down to two favorite guests, so I did. The co-host Rico called and interviewed me the next day. Despite trying to mentally prepare, I got all sweaty palmed. First, let me say it's perhaps not apparent from the show but that guy has a future as a phone sex operator if he ever wants to change careers. From his throaty, "Well, hello Vanessa in Ohio!" I was weak kneed. Plus it was weird to talk to the guy when I listen every week. Then I started worrying how to condense what I was going to say into something brief and brilliant and informative and awesome. And my voice-wait, was I talking too high-pitched? Is my Kentucky accent leaking out and coating the audio like Karo syrup? You also can't tell from listening but they do several takes that go like this:

Rico: "Ok, say your name and where you are and how often you listen."
Me: "My name is Vanessa and I'm from Columbus."
Rico: "And when you listen."
Me: "Shit. Oops, can you edit that? 'My name is Vanessa and I'm in Columb-'"
Rico: "Oh, hang on. Let me check the record level again. Ok, go."


And so on. So by the time I finally got comfortable with the whole process, he had to hang up and I wasn't really sure there was anything usable on that tape although we did talk a few minutes about how Liza Minnelli and Werner Herzog would get along and how he was a big Herzog fan and was going to go to a screening in a few weeks of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" that Werner was hosting (!) whilst "Hey, I Think I Love You" played in my head.

Amazingly, I did make it onto the show for about 30 seconds like Jackson predicted with two other listeners. It's a little over 10 minutes in, should you be inclined to listen. It really is a cool weekly show, regardless of my one-time cameo:

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/dinnerpartydownload/2011/06/episode-100-randy-newman.html

The fears of my sounding too high-pitched and squeaky were unfounded. Instead, I'm speaking in a lovely baritone that would make Tom Waits sound prissy.

Wallace Stevens, the Emperor of Smarty Pants

Poetry Foundation had a podcast dedicated to deciphering just one of Wallace Stevens poems, "The Idea of Order at Key West." People have different ideas about having a poem explained to them but I like it, particularly in Stevens' case because his poetry is lovely (look at some of these fragments: "fragrant portals", "tragic-gestured sea",  "meaningless plungings of water and wind.") but not the most accessible stuff in the world. All of this is fitting for the poet that Harold Bloom called "the best and most representative American poet of our time."

I'm trying to say that if Harold Bloom digs him, I probably won't understand it.

Jennifer Michael Hecht (whose book Doubt is buried somewhere on my to-read list), joined Curtis Fox to explain this poem and it was actually fantastic. First the poem, then some of her observations that I scribbled down.

The Idea of Order at Key West
by Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard. Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

The universe is real but the mind of art is real too. Between these poles, how is man-so small in the universe-to discern what is real and what isn't? And while the universe is big and vast, it is the mind that creates the moment.

Neither the woman nor the sea are illusions. Neither made the other and yet it is the listener's experience of hearing the woman sing that colors his perception of this moment at the seashore. What is the world? What is real when so many perspectives are shaped by thought, chance and circumstance?  One day the woman and listener will be gone, later on so too the trees and much later the ocean. So did it really happen? (Hecht says she gets this because it's the Kilgore Trout in her. You have to read literature to get literature.)

"For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea was merely a place by which she walked to sing" can be read as an expression of transcendentalist philosophy. The human mind and creative impulse was greater than nature. Her singing forges his experience of the sea.

When you look at the ocean at night, it's black. The lights on the boats give it order. Why do we need as humans need order (and art) and the universe doesn't? We demarcate our lives like the lights do on the ocean.

Bishop Berkeley once declared, in a nutshell, that the world is composed by our imagination. The philsophy is called immaterialism. Samuel Johnson famously kicked a rock and said "Thus I do refute it." This poem plays with those ideas.

Who the heck is Ramon? Apparently, Stevens just wanted a Hispanic name to plug in there. 

This is maybe the best explication of a poem I've ever heard or read. I get it. Well, kind of.

Poem of the day-Rhina P. Espaillat

Today's poem of the day from the NPF is from Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932) who is originally from the Dominican Republic. Her family was exiled to the US for opposing the Trujillo regime. That bit of history may or may not add an extra dimension to this poem.

I like how so much back story and emotion is delivered with such an economy of words and images. It's also kind of rare to find contemporary poetry that rhymes, at least in my experience.

“Find Work”

By Rhina P. Espaillat

 

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
—Emily Dickinson, #443

My mother’s mother, widowed very young

of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,

moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue

and country heart anaesthetized and mute

with labor. So her kind was taught to do—

“Find work,” she would reply to every grief—

and her one dictum, whether false or true,

tolled heavy with her passionate belief.

Widowed again, with children, in her prime,

she spoke so little it was hard to bear

so much composure, such a truce with time

spent in the lifelong practice of despair.

But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,

her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

First and last for Little Altars Everywhere

First:

In my dream, I'm five years old again and it's a summer night at our camp at Spring Creek. 

Last:

And all I have to do is keep walking, with my ears tuned and my eyes wide open.

A non-Orwellian life

I just started subscribing to the NY Review of Books-which is excellent by the way but comes out every 2 weeks so it's difficult to keep up with.

I read a few things I wanted to jot down:

• There is a book on Barack Obama's mother that sounded surprisingly interesting (A Singular Woman by Janny Scott) given that political biographies are usually too sanitized. She spent many years teaching English in Jakarta and learning the Indonesian culture. She married an Indonesian after Barack's dad. She also worked for the Ford Foundation investigating and advising how and where to spend grant money by working with local cultures.
• There are two Bronzino (1503-1572) exhibits being stage currently, one in his native Florence and one at the Met. He painted in the service of Cosimo de Medici for most of his career until he lost favor due to some political gerrymandering with Rome. 
• Doctors are one of Cuba's primary source of income (this was hinted at in Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay.) There are medical missions in countries from Venezuela and Bolivia to South Africa.
• Unrelated to the NYROB, NPR just ran a story about how the death rate from AIDS in South Africa is so high, they are having to re-use graves. 
• There is also a new book out about the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White (Triumvirate by Mosette Broderick.) I'm not inclined to read a nearly 600 page book about an architectural firm but the story was interesting. Stanford White is perhaps better known these days as the guy who was shot by Evelyn Nesbitt's jealous husband as immortalized in Ragtime. Charles McKim designed Penn Station in 1910. They didn't realize how beautifully designed and built it was until they were demolishing it in the 1960's for Madison Square Garden. Demolished 50 years later. Such waste. Here is a story about Penn Station with some great pictures.

Actually all of that is just prelude to my favorite article in the issue by Simon Leys about Eric Blair, the real name of author George Orwell. I knew hardly anything about him but he was kind of a charming and sometimes sad eccentric. He took the pen name Orwell at random when he published his first book Down and Out in Paris and London so as to not embarrass his upper class parents. The name just stuck.

In 1936, he moved into a small grocery to live the life of a simple man, a notion he was smitten with. The grocery barely made money. The attached cottage's kitchen flooded when it rained and it stank from blocked drains. Amazingly, he was living here when he married his first wife Eileen who was the love of his life (she died suddenly in 1945.) The grocery went out of business by the end of the year but Orwell didn't care as by this time he wanted to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences there were recounted in Homage to Catalonia.

Speaking of, here is a great passage from that about how he saw a man jump out of the enemy trenches running while holding his pants up. Orwell was unable to fire:

I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at "Fascists"; but a man who is holding up his trousers isnt' a "Fascist," he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

Orwell came to hate imperialism after time spent in his youth in Burma. He also contracted the Tuberculosis there that would eventually kill him at only 46 in 1950. He described himself as a Tory Anarchist. I must steal this title and find a way to use it.

In 1947, Orwell went on a boating trip with his son, niece and nephew to his farm in the Outer Hebrides. In the region of a notorious whirlpool near Corryvreck, the boat was sucked in. The author of the article said the area was only passable during low tide so Orwell either was ignorant of this or didn't check the tide chart. He also didn't secure the motor to the boat so it was blown away. Miraculously, they were able to get to shore on a small island where they were later rescued by a passing lobster boat (also something of a miracle for that time of day and year) although the boat capsized and they had to swim. The funny part of the story (other than the bit about the motor) is Orwell recorded this story in in his journal but barely mentioned almost drowning and wrote a long passage about the species of puffin on the island. He simply didn't have much of a reaction and scouted out fresh water for the party. Conclusion: not useful at sea but terrific in a crisis.

He really loved nature. In an essay on the Spanish Inquisition, he detoured to discuss the hedgehog who visited his bathroom every day. There's something so charming in his lack of guile. While he was serving in the Spanish War, he wrote to a friend to ask how his cottage, goat and vegetables were doing. About his goat, Muriel:

I hope Muriel's mating went through. it is a most unedifying spectacle by the way, if you happened to watch it. .. Did my rhubarb come up I wonder? I had a lot & then last year the frost buggared it up. 

Something about the author of 1984 discussing his goat's mating habits and rhubarb crop just amuses me to no end.

Even when he was in the hospital on his death bed, he was making plans to return to his cottage with a pig and was working out the logistics of impregnating her ("I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in the Autumn to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.")

Great lines from Little Altars Everywhere

I reluctantly guess I can see why some people don't like Rebecca Wells. She just captures certain aspects of Southern-ness to me though. The smells and the feel of summer especially.

I love the chapter "Skinny-Dipping" about Baylor reminiscing about summers spent at a camp at Spring Creek. I could almost type the whole chapter out here but I won't. All I can think is, yes a child could have narrated this and yes this is the South in the summer and yes I could listen to this forever and there always was a giant fan that looked like it could suck you up:

Your first dive into the water in the morning is the finest thing in the world. It's never too cold. It's Louisiana summer creek water, not some northern-state water-where I've never been, but I know it's so cold it takes your breath away and would give Daddy a heart attack. Little Spring Creek is the kind of water that lets you wake up slow, lets you roll over on your back and float and stare at the clouds without getting the shivers, without having to swim fast to keep from freezing to death. Mama says, This is the kind of water that spoils Southerners for any other part of the country.

...

Anyway, what we usually do is this. We swim in the morning. Then when it starts to get around noon, we pack up and walk over to Spring Creek Shop-and Skate, which is your only roller rink and grocery store in Central Louisiana. Inside the store it is all cool, with the concrete floor under your feet and the jukebox playing in the skating rink....And we get our bread and milk from there, and the big blocks of ice that you have to carry out to the car with these big iron tongs. If you drop that ice on your foot you'll be crippled forever so you better be careful. 

....

Finally when it cools down a little, the Ya-Yas let us go without them back to the skating rink. We rent skates for a quarter. Sidda is all the time playing Nat King Cole on the jukebox. There's this huge fan at one end of the rink that I swear you could get sucked into if you don't watch out. I won't skate down at that end. We put ice cream sandwiches on mama's tab, and we eat them sitting on the bench. Then Lulu always goes and gets her a second one, even though she knows we're only supposed to charge one apiece. I been working on my skating but I'm not what you call the greatest.

....

And if you think that sheriff scared my mama and her friends, you are wrong. No. This is what they do. They get out of their swim cover-ups and put on their shorts and tops and build a fire in the pit, and we all have a weenie roast. mama rubs Six-Twelve all over us and we turn our hot dogs in the flames, and the ladies help us put mayonnaise and ketchup on the buns. And we have this huge wooden bowl of potato chips and tall cold bottles of Cokes, and the ladies are drinking cold Jax beer out of the red cooler.

I don't know what it is about mayo and the South. I can remember when I was a kid, a friend of my grandmother's thinking it was the oddest thing that I didn't like mayonnaise and how I only wanted mustard on my sandwiches.

Here is a bit where Siddha mourns a haircut that was pushed on her by her mother and one of her drinking buddies:

I was used to how I had looked for so long and how my hair felt when I reached up to roll it between my fingers. When I was alone, I used to hold a clump of my hair and just smell it. and tht would make me feel good because it was my smell and it made me feel more there. 

Later, Vivi dumps an ashtray into the trashcan full of hair and sets it on fire. I just picture Vivi's poor kids, being shuttled around by her drunk mother and left in random places to hunt for food (anchovy paste and tonic) and a place to sleep so Vivi doesn't have to go home and fight with her husband (who thinks, correctly, she's a sloppy selfish drunk.) More of Siddha on the hair but lots of things really:

But I can feel the ground underneath me. And I tell myself: The earth is holding me up. I am lighter than I was before. My hair is like grass planted on the top of my head. If I can just wait long enough, maybe it will grow back in some other season.

And here's a bit where Vivi contemplates her children moving out (Vivi is a really shitty mother and borderline shitty person and like many people who are in that way, she has no idea):

It was all so fast and furious-having them, raising, them, watching them go. I thought when Baylor left: All right now, this is when my life can begin! But it never did begin and I can't tell you why. 

There's a certain deceptive economy that Wells uses to get you to know her characters. I really liked the chapter "Looking for My Mules" that Vivi narrates where an old black man wanders onto Pecan Grove looking for his mules so he can plow. It's 1991, there's not much farm land left in that part of Louisiana and no one uses mules. Shep tries to run him off, realizes what the man's story is, and is overcome with grief for all that is lost. It's surprisingly moving since neither of these characters are particularly likeable:

We all three of us sit there not saying a word. Part of me wants to sob, and part of me wants to scream bloody murder. Part of me wants to take Shep by the throat and yell, You care more about this old black man than you do about me!


But I don't say a word. I will not be dragged away from Pecan Grove in my old age because they claim I'm nuts (like certain people have implied when they thought I wasn't sharp enough to know exactly what they were saying.) They don't know what sharp is. I have been sharp as a tack my whole life, so nobody better even try to fool me. 
...


We sit that way for-oh, I don't know-about fifteen minutes. Until I'd seen at least two lightning bugs over by the clothesline. When the sheriff's car pulls into the driveway.....The car backs out, and the old man rolls down the window and calls out to Shep: I sho nuff hope the good Lord give us enough rain this year!
Shep walks over to the car and leans down to him, puts his hand on the man's shoulder and says, I do too, padnah, I do too. 


Then the sheriff's car pulls out of the driveway...Shep watches until it's out of sight, then he stares out into the field where the beans have disappeared in the dark. He stands in that way for a good long time with his hands in his pockets. When he turns to me, his eyes are so soft and serious.


He says, it goes by so fast, Vivi, it just goes by so goddamn fast.
I know, Babe, I fell him and try to hook my arm through his.
But he turns and walks up the drive saying, I'm hungry. It's way past suppertime.
Oh God, I think, it's such a good life, but it hurts!



 ....

I will tell him that when we are old and looking for our mules, we don't have to be alone, we can help each other....I walk down the hall to Shep's room....I reach down to open the door, try to turn the knob to the right.
The door is locked.
There are only two of us in this house and he has locked his door before going to sleep. 
I will never let him hurt me again as long as I live, I say to myself. As I walk back down the hall, I say it over and over to myself. One of these days I will learn. 

The book ends with Siddha, which is appropriate. I will follow these words of wisdom, I will follow these words of wisdom:

 I have one main rule for myself these days: Don't hit the baby. It means: Don't hurt the baby that is me. Don't beat up on the little one who I'm learning to hold and comfort, the one I'm trying to love no matter how raggedy she looks. It's sort of a code, a shorthand of the heart. 

I murmur Don't hit the baby when I wake up, when I ride the subway, when I board a plane, when I step into a theatre. I whisper Don't hit the baby before I go to sleep. And on the nights when I make it through without a futon-soaking nightmare, I know I've breathed it like a prayer during my sleep.