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.