Joseph Dobrian’s "Willie Wilden"

There’s much to admire about Joseph Dobrian’s Willie Wilden (Rex Imperator).  Dobrian is narratologically adept, sticking pretty closely to the “show, don’t tell” rubric, and handling potentially awkward POV issues cleverly by the “as told to someone else later” dialog approach. It works well. The prose fabric of Willie Wilden is tightly and attractively woven, neither too flat and pedestrian nor excessively stylized; Dobrian seems to believe (rightly in my opinion) that the most effective style for mainstream prose fiction is that which doesn’t call too much attention to itself. The protagonist, Roger Ballou, is deftly portrayed – we know nearly all we need to know about him as result of his words and actions, with a bit from others around him in the story. Again, well done, in my opinion, to eschew the “Roger Ballou was forty-something and six feet tall and had a receding hairline, yatta-yatta” school of character revelation.

     The rest of the cast is well-sketched, with the level of detail needed deftly selected so that we see enough about each character to form a reaction/response to him or her, but without delving into unnecessary detail or depth of character revelation. Most of the characters who are not Roger Ballou are cartoons or mechanicals anyway, but they’re not cardboard cutouts. My favorite character in the story is probably Effie Hoo, and Dobrian is deserving of particular kudos for handling the very difficult problem of dialect or accented speech quite well. We only need to know that Effie is Scottish, and have her speech peppered with  a consistent use of “ye” and we hear all of her dialogue in a nice – if a bit sanitized – burr.  Skipping the “Och”s and “wee laddies” and “d’ye ken tha’?” and other stage Scots conventions, Dobrian trusts his readers to fill in the details as they see fit. It does seem to me that the “bad guys” are one-trick ponies, and there might be a little excessively overt telegraphing to the reader of desired responses to Wandervogel and Bannister; they’re the only instances of cartoonish bordering on cardboard cutout. It might be lazy to mark out a guy as worthy of contempt by making him grossly obese, and it might be lazy to mark out a female college president as an obvious type by putting her in a sweatsuit in professional situations. It might be… I’m not 100% sure, but these two seemed like straw villains to me.

     I have to accept the plausibility of the plot on faith; never having functioned in or observed such an environment first hand I have no difficulty believing the bridge parties and small-circle socializing and the interactions portrayed here. It seems within the reasonable bounds of “willing suspension” anyway, and the plot points serve the narrative purpose adequately. The injection of outside influence in the form of Runs’ brother being who he was and having the knowledge he had to move the plot in a critical direction as it did might carry about it a whiff of deus ex machina, but I only say “might” and even if it does, it’s only an eyebrow-raiser, not a knee-slapper. It just tested the limits of “willing suspension.”

     The Lee Grossbaum plotline lacked purpose, it seems to me. It might have been gratuitous fantasizing; maybe not, but it didn’t, in my opinion, contribute significantly, and cutting it would not have hurt the story in the least.

     The ideas behind the plot and character are well-formed, reasonably presented, and – to my mind – mostly sound and rational. It does feel though that they are the novel's raison d'etre and that’s perfectly fine, but they don’t, in and of themselves, justify over 500 pages (but in my opinion, not much does, in fiction). There may be some pages here to be sacrificed to succinctness.

     There’s a bit too much fussy detail about too many things unimportant to the story in too many places; about a hundred pages too much, in my opinion, maybe more. This level of focus on prissy (to my mind) distinctions without differences among  things that are not particularly germane to the story could be trimmed down considerably.

     Finally, there’s the characterization of Roger Ballou. We see the workings of his mind, and Dobrian is quite masterful at portraying them (I especially like the demons). But the point is made early, and indeed it’s critical at the end, but in between the story could be improved considerably by removing a fair amount of the “Roger gets the fantods” narration.

     Campus novels* are an honored and admired tradition. I’m not sure Dobrian has joined the likes of Waugh, Amis, Barth, DeLillo, Chabon, and even Sayers and Dexter, mixing genres as they like to do, but Willie Wilden is more than a hanger-on at their student union. It’s an enjoyable, worthwhile book that’s well-crafted and tells an interesting story. There’s a bit too much of it to be as effective as it deserves to be; it could easily be judiciously edited down to a much more intense, affecting story.

* One thing struck me repeatedly – for a comedy, there’s starkly little humor, even so-called “dark” or “black” humor. It’s there, but I only remember actually laughing once (and I forget what it was that made me laugh).

This "taking writing seriously" stuff is a fascinating way to go.

So at a little over 200 "conventional" pages and something over 50,000 words, I am within a few more thousand words of declaring victory over Draft One, and have my battle plan in place for Draft Two (many VERY substantial changes in plot, but satisfyingly few in any characters). What's really scary (I may have mentioned this below/above) is that I have a beginning sketch and prologue already for the second book (same setting & characters, mostly), and a notional nod for a third. What's tough is sticking with the First though. But once I'm officially "working on" Draft Two, I plan to begin Book Two, so I'll be doing new write and rewrite in parallel. I suspect I'll go wacky, but I don't think I"ll burn out.

A dream brought her to mind, but this is not a Dream Journal post

The High School Sweetheart showed up in a dream snippet the other night - played, as usual by someone unknown to me, but who at least resembled the original. When I awoke, I only remembered that she had been in the piece of dream, not anything more about it. Then I remembered that another old HS chum (one of the two with whom I am still connected) apprised me a few months ago that this old HSS's son had died recently, aged 42, "unexpectedly." I felt so sad for her, and wished I could tell her so, and give her a hug, just for all we'd been to each other almost 50 years ago. But it's been almost 50 years, after all, and we haven't seen each other in all that lifetime, haven't been in any contact at all as far as I remember, so what would it mean? What would it carry? I'd like to think she'd be grateful that I'd remember her warmly (for I do) and kindly; of course for all I know she'd have to pause to remember who the hell I was. But I'm sad for her all the same.

Does anyone know how the "shuffle" feature on iPods works?

It amazes me how much music there is on my little teeny 16 gigabyte thing about the size of a large postage stamp - something over 3000 tracks. I don't even think about how they manage that any more, but the algorithms behind the shuffle logic seem really weird to me. You'd think (I'd think anyway) that with the same shuffle list going I should be able to not hear the same song twice in weeks worth of commuting (at about 90 minutes a day on the road). The thing seems to me to go in weird cycles though - lately it's been trying to convert me to some of the more obscure early tracks from Stan Rogers - when he was a coffee house folkie, and hadn't yet become the World's Champion Canadian. Some of the tracks are ok, but mostly I want to hear Barrett's Privateers and Northwest Passage and Mary Ellen Carter, etc. but it's tried to make me listen to "Picture of the Past" (or something like that) about sixteen times in the last four days.

 And Ramblin' Jack Elliott - now it's true that I have quite a number of RJ's tracks (mybe 40 or 50) but over the past couple of days every other damn track is Ramblin' Jack, and a lot of it's just not that entertaining. Why is my iPod trying to make me memorize everything The Carter Family ever recorded?

On the upside, the iPod seems to like Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grapelli as much as I do, so I can't complain there. If anyone really knows how that feature works I'd be interested to hear it.

In the event that anyone's reading this, and is the least bit interested,

The novel (working title is "The Willing Detective") is at about 80-85% first-draft-complete. I amaze myself. What's daunting, and has been part of a huge learning experience, is that stringing words together cleverly is such a small part of writing a sustained work of fiction. Well maybe not "such a small part" it's clearly sine qua non but it's so far from what there is to it. I'm eager to finish the first draft because 1) I'm getting a tad bit bored with the process, and 2) I want to get started on the next one in a more considered, planned fashion and see if it's less daunting that way. I also want to see what it's like to be working on two phases of two pieces at the same time. I could get used to this.

Dream Journal 1/7/12

Another product of a tag-end of sleep. I was driving an old-time VW beetle. I can't say what year for sure, but it was white, and I did own a white one, a '62 or '64 or so, I think. Anyway, I was driving across a very long bridge; then it was snowing like hell, and then there was snow in the road up to your yayas. The bug performed well, even unto dodging around other vehicles abandoned in the right-of-way, necessitating detouring into yards-deep snowbanks. How the little beetle did it I have no idea, must have been my superior driving skill. Then it got bogged down trying to make it around a large piece of non-automobile machinery in the middle, after passing through a thoroughly red light at an intersection (brakes failed to stop it, fortunately the roadway through the intersection was snow-free and there was no visible traffic for miles in any direction.)

Then woke up.

Dream Journal 12/7/11

It was raining out, and I'd just come back from the Wally-the-dog's 0230/0315/or-so pee call, and crawled back for the last few minutes of shut-eye. I've noticed lately that these little tag-ends of sleep after the dog call seem to produce some odd snippets of dreams, but nothing I've been able to track down for recording purposes. This morning though, I guess the rain triggered some dream artifacts, so it was raining in the dream, and I was at someone else's house (dreams for me always seem to take place elsewhere, often at a house that is not my "real waking life" house, but that sometimes is "supposed" to be, in the context of the dream. In this case it was supposed to be someone else's house, and I know the person whose house it was supposed to be, and I know their house too, and this was NOT it, by any stretch. But I was in their bathroom, and it was messy, and the rain was coming in, and the water level on the floor was rising a bit more quickly than was comfortable, and then I woke up.

A lot of my dreams lately are concerned with water being where it shouldn't be. Wonder what that means? Wonder if dreams really do mean anything?

Well Happy Birthday to George (yesterday, the 23rd)

He'd have turned 100 yesterday, so it's a pretty good bet that even if he hadn't died all those years ago, he'd be dead by now anyway. I'm not sure what that means. Children of parents who died young deal with strange thoughts the rest of their lives, I guess. Like "When my old man was my age he'd been dead for nine years." I turn 65 today. It was not all that long ago that I considered the event very unlikely. Maybe even undesirable. But today I'm delighted, given the alternatives, and I have plans for the next 20 (or ten, or thirty, whatever) years; I need to cram my life's work into them, and I consider that I need to get all of my life's work into them, and that life's work would not have ended at 65 or 66 or whenever I choose to "retire" - which really only means stopping the work I don't care about but do for money, and taking up the work I do care about but was unlikely to have made a living at. What if it turns out that I'm really good at it and could have made a living at it? That has occurred to me more than once, and I've allayed any fear of such by deciding that if I had given it a shot 30-odd years ago, and had succeeded, I'd probably be burned out by now and  - like Bronco Bill in Don McLean's song - have nothing left to say. Vonnegut claimed - at a point before he'd actually stopped writing - that he had said everything he had to say and didn't really have any more books in him. But what else could he have done, I guess? So my philosophy now is from Rabbi Ben Ezra, via Robert Browning: "grow old along with me, the best is yet to be."

I bought some new old music the other night

and this morning I've been listening to Bill Morrissey's very early eponymous album, which has - for my money - most of his best work, and some Stan Rogers, (From Fresh Water and Home in Halifax). I haven't listened to much of these guys for quite a while, other than when they turn up on the iPod Shuffle. Dance The Grizzly Bear and The Idiot and The Mary Ellen Carter are among the niftiest songs written in the last half of the previous century (and they're not even these guys' best stuff!)

Some time ago, following the advice of Raymond Chandler

(one of the best writers of popular fiction ever, IMO - in any Top Ten list I'd compile whether "genre" writers in general or any other category), who once said (it's alleged) that if you're stuck in a story, have a guy with a gun enter the room (or words to that effect). So some time ago, having nothing going on with my neverending saga of "not writing" I started out a nice fresh doc file with "A guy with a gun came into the room." (OWTTE). It ended up being a wee poem, and I liked it (I tend to like my own work quite often). Shortly thereafter, the wee poem grew legs (a girl's legs, specifically) and became the beginnings of a short story. I now find myself with a novel growing before my eyes. The interesting thing I've learned is that once you get past whatever wordcount has been your barrier (in my case about 2500 words, tops) you find out what's been daunting you to date: there's so much to figure out about the damned story. Every time I crank out 1000 or 1500 words to resolve some unexplained gotcha or fill in backstory or clarify (or further obscure) the MacGuffin - it leads to lots more questions and more stuff that needs to be clarified (or obscured). A little like life, in that way, I guess. But I really like being able to say (to myself if no one else, at this point) "I'm working on a novel.."

An odd thought struck me this morning, while listening to a Bill Morrissey track

on my iPod, while driving to work ("Just Before We Lost The War") - something made me wonder whether Morrissey had died. I can't think of any reason why I'd have wondered that; but I haven't been listening to much news lately other than major headlines on the All Classical station (99.5 All Classical) so ...

So. So for some reason it was still in my mind when I got to work and got the laptop all connected up, so I browsed Wikipedia - mostly to see what they had to say about Morrissey, and WHAM there it was, poor guy died last month (July 23, 2011 to be exact, in some backwater-sounding place in Georgia). He was 59, and died of heart disease (it says). A sad but very talented man, Bill Morrissey. I liked his music very much; saw him at the Stone Church in Newmarket, NH a few years ago. He was not in top form, but was game & ready to give it a go. Came out on stage and the first words out of his mouth were "I'm home!" He forgot some of the words to "Barstow" and he seemed more agitated than necessary when his pal Cormac McCarthy (not the writer, the other one) was a bit delayed in joining him onstage. His set was brief, but he ended with a nice rendition of "Don't Think Twice."

Summer Sunday afternoons mean

I get to cut the grass. I say "get to" without irony, it is a reward and a rewarding activity for me. We have enough land in grass to justify a riding mower and I'm enough of a peasant dipshit to like the fact that ours is configured to look like a tractor. I enjoy driving tractors, have since I was 14 and worked for Harold Turner and Eddie Wheeler back in North Reading. I also enjoy fantasizing to myself that I'm actually engaged in some sort of physical labor that links me to my ancestors (one G-Granddad a lumberjack in Quebec, another an iron puddler back in Sheffield and Glasgow). No farmers there but something makes me think they weren't all that far separated from their own G-Granddads who probably migrated to the cities from their own ancestral farms.

And the tractor has a cup holder just right for a cold Long Trail Double-Bag Ale.

Sometimes my iPod knocks me out.

As I think I've mentioned, I've reinvented my commute from Hampstead to Nashua & vice-versa by eschewing news and commentary a la NPR and have plugged in to 'GBH's all classical outlet (which used to be WCRB and I guess it still is only now it's public radio), and my iPod, which, though it's teeny, has a capacity of 16 gigabytes which means I have pretty much my entire music collection on it and room for another year's worth of discoveries, etc.

SO anyway I play it on shuffle, and sometimes really nifty stuff comes up (and sometimes something comes up that just puzzles me entirely) and sometimes it just lands on a gem.

This morning's gem was from a compilation album called "Benny Goodman-1935-1936 - Rare Recordings" and featured The King of Swing, plus Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa playing "My Melancholy Baby" - the solo breaks were amazing. Another smile-inducer (BG often makes me smile)

So Austria's reputation for dour inability to get a joke

was cited in one report I heard yesterday about the Pastafarian in the piece below. I happen to think they (the "authorities") not only got the joke but turned it back on the joker.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/15/137824732/austrian-man-wins-right-to-wear-pasta-strainer-in-license-photo?sc=nl&cc=es-20110717

Just started reading "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" on Mein Kindle

Highly recommended by a Very Highly Valued Correspondent. It's by Muriel Barbery, a name (and author, obviously) unfamiliar to me. The original is in French, it's been translated by Alison Anderson. Too early for comments, but reading translations is a bit of a departure for me, I'm usually pretty stalwart anglophone. So I'm grateful to the VHVC above for pointing me in a horizon-expanding direction. She always does, but usually in Italian. More comments as the tale unfolds.

Well it's almost too late to get another post into June, isn't it?

It's almost too late for a lot of things. It IS too late to die young, for example - at least James Dean young, or My Dad young. Too late for that altogether, and it makes for some odd musings & cogitations, that. The widely acknowledged "borrowed time" notion, for example, whereby kids of parents who died young pass the marker on their own roads, and probably stop for a bit to contemplate it. "Here's the point on life's journey where the Old Man bailed out" is one way to see it. I suppose it's egocentrism that makes me phrase it that way, surely there are women whose mothers died young who must have the same thoughts; I wonder if the "borrowed time" thing is as prevalent among men whose mothers died young, or women/father pairings of similar situations? But what's all this about, I hear you snicker uncomfortably, as if hoping there'd be something witty and clever or at least diverting hereupon. Well what it's about is that I've discovered that it is, in fact NOT too late to embark on a serious crack at a "life's work" or at least a chunk of it. And that commitment, which I've been tap-dancing around for fifty years or more is liberating in the sense that - at least for a little while - I'm actually taking steps to realize what has 'til now been mostly moping internally. The writing is taking shape with the help of some former strangers with whom I've banded as a "writers' group" and with whom I'm sharing progress and frustration, along with their own progress & frustration. It's very interesting to note that we're a disparate bunch in terms of how much we've actually accomplished: several of the folks have completed multiple narratives so what we're seeing of their work is second or later drafts, one guy hasn't written anything yet, and my piece is definitively "in progress" so they're suffering through the initial composition phase. I think we're all learning something. I may have overcome my "stuck at 2000 words" syndrome, as well as the "if I start writing about the writing I'll never get the writing done" fears. It's good; scary as hell, but good. I'm dealing with the notion that the legitimacy of taking it seriously is entirely up to me, nobody else, and nodoby else has to like it, approve of the effort much less the product, or endorse it, or even acknowledge it.

I finished "Invisible Boy" - the third Madeline Dare book by Cornelia Read.

I liked it, it's a good book, it's very well-written. There are some things I'm still thinking about. For one thing, it's not really much of a mystery. It's pretty plain whodunit pretty early on. Maddie does less investigating than in Field of Darkness, (I haven't read The Crazy School, so no compare & contrast available there). She does a great deal of observing and commenting, and at times the commenting begins to sound & feel a bit like sermonizing. The plot uses a fairly quick & easy device to engage the reader's sympathy: the death of a toddler at the hands of his mother's abusive boyfriend. The evils of crack and poverty abound, as of course they do in real life; but I think we know that. Everybody has to be against little kids getting beaten to death. There's no ethical ambiguity available to Maddie here, as there was in "Field" - there's really no gray area to find her way out of.

Plus, the plot points involving attacks on her, and on a nice little old black lady, great-grandmother of the victim, are not satisfactorily resolved, or even explained. Quite a bit of text is taken up by these events, and having them dismissed as incidental assholery, and justified as neighbor boys looking out for a gang brother and/or the boyfriend of a childhood pal doesn't hang together at all, and turns out very unsatisfactorily. A weakness, in my opinion, but not fatal.

I also think the whole subplot (if it was even that much) involving Maddie's childhood pal and her neo Nazi husband was not sufficiently integrated into the main action. Clearly it was intended to illustrate that the cost of drugs, etc. is not levied only on the poor and black, but the whole relationship was a bit gossamer - it wasn't as well drawn as it might have been, felt rushed through.

The denouement felt rushed through too.

Not as satisfying an outing as the first in the series, though I do think it was wise to keep hubby "Dean" out of town through most of it.

Our Writing Group at the local library spent a delightful 4 hours yesterday

with Cornelia Read, author of Field of Darkness, The Crazy School, and Invisible Boy. She's the creator of Madeline Dare, sort of a "stumbler-upon-nefarious-deeds" who cusses her way through difficult confrontations to see miscreants discovered and justice done. Not a detective, exactly, more of a driver and observer, and an altogether sympathetic character. Ms Read allows as how Maddie is mostly Cornelia, and after a close encounter with the latter, this is plainly true. A most generous sharer of everything from the expected "tips, tricks, and techniques" and personal insights about writing, as well as a great deal of insider dope about the insanity rife in the book trade, and a lot else outside the expected sphere of topics. Spending time with her was well worthwhile for us wannabes, and as much fun as reading her books.

I mailed back the DVD of

"At Last the 1948 Show" this morning. I Was eager to see the "juvenilia" of some of the python crew, though it would be easy to argue that the Python stuff was in fact their juvenilia. As a whole, "1948" doesn't measure up to Python, unsurprisingly. Chapman and Cleese were just barely out of their Footlights training, Idle didn't have very much to do at all, and even Marty Feldman didn't have a handle on how to do much besides look in three directions at once. (I'm not sure Feldman ever did get beyond capitalizing on his "eyes akimbo" to use WC Fields's phrase. Most of his work that I can recall was manic setup of a full-face-on shot that substituted his roving eye for a punchline. But I digress) So I watched bout 40% of what was available, and it didn't get any better, and it didn't promise any hidden/lost gems, so I packed it in & packed it up. I'm glad I watched it, it's always (in my opinion) worthwhile to see how & whence your favorite talents arose.

Dream Journal 6/5/11

So there I was, in a new work situation, and my boss had a specific assignment for me, which he called me about on the phone and told me to come to his office, which I couldn't find, and the plant was spread out over the top of a derelict city - as in superimposed - the skin & bones of the dead city were still in place, and the facilities of the company were here & there in between. The twists and turns of the old city's streets and alleyways and the empty, abandoned diners, luncheonettes, convenience stores (though they were all of a style we would more likely term "mom & pop stores" - of a bygone era, not like 7-11s) and so on were VERY creepy. I couldn't locate my boss's office, nor figure out how to call him on the phone. I wandered a lot, and was some stressed. I"m not sure whether this was lucid or not; not sure either what woke me, nothing particularly shocking or threatening happened in the dream, it was just very frustrating and WAY creepy.

Finished Cornelia Read's Field of Darkness last night.

Very enjoyable it was, very compatible I think I would find myself with its protagonist Madeline Dare. I enjoyed it; I found her style totally compatible with my taste. The story moved very well, settings & characterizations quite well-drawn. I think there may have been more time & place-specific allusions than would serve well for other than an airport book (it's NOT an airport book but might be mistaken for one), but I suspect that at least some of them work without cultural familiarity with the reference (an example, as the protagonist is driving out of town on a particularly grim day in a grim mood, leaves the chapter with the line "All the leaves were brown and the sky was gray" - well that works just fine even if you aren't hip to the John Phillips song. I'm not sure they all did, but I don't think I'll re-read right now to track them all down.

A fun book, but more than just fun, well done & worthwhile, worth reading - glad I bought it & read it.

Good old Wikipedia points out that it's the 28th anniversary of

the destruction of Air Canada flight 797, in a fire on the ground in the Cincinnati-Kentucky Airport, in Boone County Kentucky. Ordinarily I don't think much about such anniversaries, but Stan Rogers happened to be among the fatalities in this particular event, just as his career as "the voice of Canadian folk music" was swinging into high gear. He was 33; had a gorgeous voice, a more than tolerable way with a 12-string, and a real sense of what being Canadian meant (at least for the Anglophone Europeans). Wrote a number of very memorable songs, and is practically worshiped in Canada today (among some of course; I don't think the First Nations or francophone Quebecers care all that much about him, but I could be wrong). Hell of a singer, damn shame he left so early.

Finished "The Blind Assassin" just now.

Atwood's writing is so good it leaves me breathless, shaking my head, muttering "Whoa... how good is THAT!" And it ain't a question. Atwood's mastery of voice is in the forefront here - she tells the story through various layers, from various directions, but by the time she's winding up, the voice of the story is consistent throughout, and the seemingly disparate narratives are welded into one, inevitably, predictably (you've figured it out with glimmers and flashes over the past couple hundred pages) and with ironclad certainty. This is a truly wonderful book, I couldn't recommend it more highly, and Atwood is a truly wonderful writer.

Speaking of musical things that NEVER fail to make me smile

The clip below was recorded something like 30 or more years ago. It is - in my opinion - a perfect performance of a nearly perfect song. It is also a demonstration of two very talented friends sharing their talent and having an absolute blast doing it. (It seems to me).

Check especially the little break Goodman does in this piece. I'm sure it wasn't improvisation, but it has that "just tossing some stuff off for my pals" feel to it that he did so well. It is hard to fathom that Goodman's been gone almost 30 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOTbg39-I5Q&feature=related

Sometimes my iPod surprises me

with a particularly interesting sequence of tunes on its shuffle. This is especially felicitous when it's the first few tunes on starting up the pod after pulling out of the driveway on the way to work. This morning I was greeted by John Prine's "Illegal Smile" (the live performance version from John Prine Live), which always makes me smile, followed by Scott Joplin's New Rag, though Max Morath does play a skosh too fast for my taste, it's still a piece that makes me grin & laugh out loud, then on to Tony Bennett and a near-perfect offering of "Who Can I Turn To" - I agree with Frank Sinatra about Bennett being just about the best pop singer ever. After that the shuffle broke down and I had to skip a track or two before I got to Django & Stephane's "Sweet Sue" and after that a track from "Not Your Same Old Blues Crap" and a little Norman Blake, and a very early Stan Rogers track. After that it got pretty normal (for my iPod).

Random blurts

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; I'm about 80% through (metric courtesy of Kindle). It wasn't so long ago we'd have expected something like "I have about 100 pages to go" or the like. This is only the second of Atwood's that I've read – read The Handmaid's Tale ages ago, back when it was new. I highly recommend Assassin; for the prose, for the story, for the very intelligent and engaging postmodernism. Postmodernism is my current self-edification topic; revisited a little Vonnegut some time back (Player Piano) and introduced myself to Don DeLillo earlier this year (White Noise). Atwood is a master stylist and very engaging storyteller. More later – in this morning's treadmill installment, I think the denouement is beginning to unfold.

Watched The Big Sleep last night for the umpteenth time, for lack of anything more engaging on the scheduled channels. I don't think I ever noticed Marlowe's ear-tugging business before. It's a pity Elisha Cook Jr didn't have more to do in this film, he was always fun to watch. Sleep is one of my favorite Chandler movies and Bogie's certainly my favorite Marlowe. Bob Mitchum was too old when he did "Farewell" though he made a decent try of it, and Eliott Gould was never anything but a joke. The others are also-rans, IMO. As a Bogie film it's not quite up to The Maltese Falcon or The African Queen (though to be fair it's hard to say whether Queen is a Bogie film or a Kate film).

Have joined a local writers' group at the public library. What fun, not unlike the informal online groups but more effective to be in F2F contact and sharing thoughts in real time I think. Stay tuned as this unfolds.

"Upstairs, Downstairs" completed its 3-episode mini-revival on 'GBH last night.

I missed the second episode so will have to catch up. All-in-all it was fun to see Rose, of course, and fun to watch the uppings & downings, to-ings & fro-ings of a "great" house, though not so great as in the Bellamys' day. But the last 20 minutes or so of the final episode seemed like just a whirlwind of sub-plot resolutions coming in hectic rapid fire, as if the producers & writers had in fact originally plotted out a full season of episodes, with proper sub-plotting, minor story arcs and character building stuff to support 8 or 10 or even 12 or 13 episodes, and then got cut back but didn't know how to prune properly, so had to wind everything up in 20 minutes. It felt like Luke Skywalker blasting through an asteroid field with all the loose ends roaring at you to be tied up. As much as I'd like to see "more, please" of this new incarnation of 165 Eaton Place, I think what I'd really like is to see a fast rewind so we could watch these various story arcs, characters, and subplots unfold at a reasonable pace. And THEN move on; I think Pritchard has possibilities (obviously he's no Hudson, but I can't imagine Hudson delivering his employer's baby, either), Agnes is completely missable, actually, and Hallam isn't much more exciting. The Materfamilias, predictably, since played by Eileen Atkins has the potential to be a driving force, and the budding friendship between Rose and the cook also has potential. Persephone was well-packed-off to Berlin, though clearly - should there be more - we have not heard the last of her, knowing as we do what's in store for these folks in the upcoming years. It was a fun show, and well worth doing, and sign me up for more, should it come along.

So I watched "Get Low" last night

and I admired it much. Duvall and Murray of course; splendid. Worth watching just to see Duvall grunting and crotcheting; it might have been worth watching just for the hearse, which was classic.

I did think there was a bit more "old fart business" in Felix's noises and caperings than was absolutely called for, and I did get a sense that Duvall wasn't completely comfortable with his concept of the character. I'm not sure why I felt that, but the speech at the actual funeral seemed to me a little contrived, a little rushed-through. I didn't feel any conflict at all in Felix's getting up in front of all those people and blurting out his story; the ease with which it came forth was inconsistent with the reluctance that had been portrayed, (indeed the reluctance & shame that had driven him to spend 40 years in solitary).

But (in the words of so many critics) "these are quibbles." It was, after all, a fable, and not intended (I reckon) to be a true-to-life, realistic retelling of the facts. I enjoyed it immensely.

A small, early morning blues

There's way too much to do
And I've used up all my spare time
In advance, making big piles out of small ones
Picking up & putting down
Making short stacks out of tall ones
Doing time in my own home
Nuns may fret not
But it seems to me
that even they can choose and be
mistaken

I figure that I might have - at the outside - 25 years, though

the likelihood of more than 20 in which I might be really productive is scant. So say 20 years, in which to do 60 or 65 years' worth of work. Clearly I can't get it all done, so I have to pick and choose, and that means I'll have to cull some stuff before it even gets to the idea stage. I guess I'll try to cull the bad stuff, which means that 20 years should be plenty of time.

Finished "Townie"

Glad I read it. It isn't a book I'd recommend for the writing, but it's not a book one wishes to read for style. I'm envious of the younger Dubus that he had as much from his father as he did. It took him forty years to learn it but he was very lucky indeed.

Well I'm 80% of the way through "Townie" which translates to about

280 pages (the Kindle doesn't have page numbers only locations & percent complete odometer). DubusIII has managed to get himself out of the bar fighter mode and into the story writer mode, and has just reached the point where "Pop" is mangled up on route 495. Here's what amazes me about this memoir so far. Dubus Junior ("Pop" the highly respected fiction writer, the "Writer's writer") has figured more & more over the course of the narrative, and that's understandable since a big chunk of most men's coming of age is coming to terms with our fathers - their absence, or shortcoming, or the pain their presence caused, how their presence or absence, words or silences drive us to be or not be certain things or ways. But here's the puzzlement: Dubus Junior ("pere" that is) is VERY clearly a latter-day Hemingway knockoff, what with the outback hats and the guns and the womanizing and the drinking and the general "true balls" ethic. But Himself ("Papa") has not been mentioned a single time, not as an influence on "Pop" personally nor as a writer, but the omission is glaring and can't help but be anything other than purposeful and intentional. I will not believe that the parallels aren't there, and haven't been noted. Artistically, I wouldn't put either of them in the same pew as Hemingway (and that's not disparagement, believe me). I just find it odd that such a GLARING parallel hasn't found its way into the narrative or ruminations thereon. Maybe AD fils doesn't know from "Papa" or else doesn't see him in "Pop." I dunno. Doesn't ring true there, somehow.

Dream Journal 4/6/11 - a fragment

It was my mother's place, but of course she's been dead for 20 years (she wasn't dead in the dream, but she was played by someone else, some old woman I've never seen before). And of course though the house was hers in the dream context it had nothing to do with any house I ever knew about that she lived in. But the main thing was there were hornets and bees ALL OVER the place, and I kept asking if there was hornet spray (very specifically "hornet spray" not "bug spray" or "insecticide" or "Flit") and she kept saying "I'll get some tomorrow" and I remember the dreaming me thinking "Tomorrow hell, I'm not sleeping in this place with all these frickin' bugs flying around" and then a pipe that ran up alongside the stairs from down somewhere started leaking water UP. And I saw that and thought "Wait a minute, how can that pipe leak UP?" and I woke up.

A random thought tripped over while cleaning up old files

From 18 January 2010
We are tools and dupes of the chemicals with which nature floods our bodies between the ages of eleven and thirty or so. At these ages our purpose in the Grand Scheme of Things is nothing more than to propagate the species. Most of us do this, or at least strive mightily so to do. We then spend the remainder of our primes nurturing and protecting the propagands, which mostly exhausts us.

I bought Andre Dubus III's "Townie" for my Kindle

(and why does that phrase always morph itself into "mein kindle" in my head?) and have been reading it diligently. Perhaps more diligently that some other things I've read so far on "my book." My initial attraction to the DubusIII memoir was a geographical & temporal connection: I lived in the places he lived & memoirizes about around roughly the same time he's talking about. I was a bit older so probably one of the stuffy adults who surrounded his adolescence, and he was one of the damn teenagers getting underfoot of my young adulthood. But the geographical connection is startling; my stomping grounds in Haverhill and Newburyport, at about the same times, were literally around the corner from the places he lived and acted out. Yet the culture he was in was contiguous to but not touching the one I lived in, even though, at many times, we were literally within arm's length of each other.

I'm undecided about the quality of the writing; for one thing there's a lot of repetition, of sense if not of precise examples and phrases. For another, there are many, many examples of very awkward phrasing and infelicitous imagery. So I'm dubious about DubusIII's basic literary talents and will have to read some fiction to get a better sense of it, but in this piece he is most certainly not a stylist, and even more certainly in need of a good editor.

Why is it, I wonder

Why is it, I wonder, that lately I have had a spate of forgetting VERY specific things, over & over, even after renewing my memory of it. This is not old timers short-term memory loss, though there's a touch of that in the noggin from time to time, this is something different. For a period of several months I could NOT remember then name of the chairman of our board of selectmen, though he's a neighbor and we used to see him & ux on Saturday nights at the defunct Hampstead Station eatery. I'm now again fully in possession of his name (possibly as a result of trading emails with him over the state of a dangerous curve by our house as a result of snowbanks carelessly piled). I have it now, I doubt if I'll forget it again. But I couldn't keep hold of it for a while - I'd look it up, say "Oh yeah of course" and a few hours later it'd be gonzo.

Now it's The Radetzky March, which is one of my favorite marches, have known & loved it for years, but lately (few months) it keeps blanking out in the memory banks, and I got to YouTube and look it up at one of the Vienna new year concerts, and go "oh yeah..." and I have it for a while. Yadda-dum-yadda-dum-yaddaDUMDADA

I think I'm losing some little grey cells.

I sat down aimlessly in front of the tube last night

and there was Tommy Lee Jones, looking the tiniest bit skid-row, but speaking articulately. And there was a similarly aged black guy, speaking articulately but not in the same educated vein as was TLJ. After a beat or two it dawned on me that it was Samuel L. Jackson, whereupon it dawned on me that I had lucked into The Sunset Limited, about which I had heard on NPR the other day (interview with Jones). It's Jones's take on the two-character play by Cormac McCarthy. From the interview on the radio it had sounded interesting, I'm always up for TLJ (SLJ not quite as much but I respect his talent & much of his work), but since it was on HBO I hadn't figured I'd likely see it (I didn't even know we GET HBO). It took less than 90 seconds to lock me in place, and I did not move for the next 80 minutes or so (I had missed the first few minutes). And nothing happens - nothing in terms of what we'd call "action" - it's a jam-packed 90 minutes of dialogue between two very different characters, approaching The Big Question (What it Means To Be A Human Being) from diametrically opposed perspectives and points of view. It's a little like "My Dinner With Andre" only with real substance. There are a couple of places where Jones's directorial sense falters a little, he lets himself use a couple of sight gags that are cheap, IMO. But the words and the ideas they convey are riveting, and the delivery is stunning and superb. As I said, I did not move from my place for the duration. Marvelous, and if you have the opportunity to see it, do so.

Dream Journal 1/29/11

This was a story that - sadly - had deep roots in the software industry and what is referred to as the "life-cycle." It doesn't specifically refer to the life-cycle though, it just reflects it. In the dream, I am chatting with our CEO, who is a very bright, astute guy. He asked me what tool our IT group uses for data backups of our servers. Not an illogical question to ask me, but not really my bailiwick, I work with apps that live on the servers, and IT owns boxes, OSes and connectivity. (Also not terribly likely that the CEO would be chatting with me about anything, he knows me but we don't see each other much as we work in different buildings). So anyway I told him I had no idea about the backups but I'd be glad to find out for him. So I set off on that journey. As I went our corporate "campus" turned into a humongous, Gormenghastian factory complex, down at the heels, with Steampunk machinery, cavernous spaces filled with the detritus of a century of industry, oily rags, rats, and so on. I located the information I needed, but it had morphed into not info about data backup on servers, but about a recent software tool evaluation I conducted. Since I hadn't pulled the notes & stuff on the eval into final form, all I had was "notes and stuff" but I slogged back through the medieval mire of the Factory to present the stuff to the CEO. In the interim he had aged such that he looked about 70 (he's really about 55 or 57). So we sat down and he started asking me about what kinda flux Carl was going to use when he started welding. Allova sudden Carl (I know no Carl, he is apparently a plumber) is sitting in the room and I ask "Are we talking about data backup or plumbing." "Plumbing," said Carl. "Shit," I said, "this must be a dream." So I woke up.

So I finished the two selections that were chosen for me

to kick off my Kindle collection - "White Noise" and "Breakfast of Champions" (the latter a re-read from 40 years ago). These were chosen - mostly I think - by my English Major son, and well-chosen indeed, as they are very closely tied in many ways. So here I am off on a foray into Postmodern American fiction, which started, I suppose, when I read John Barth's "Sot-Weed Factor" back in 1968, but which has sputtered with stunted attempts at Pynchon and a few others here & there over the decades. So any recommendations? I'm thinking of Pynchon redux, I've read enough of Barth for him not to be a new experience, ditto Vonnegut. More DeLillo? If so which? Auster? Same query? What about Pamuk or Murakami?

Well I finished White Noise by Don DeLillo.

First novel read on the Kindle. A satisfying milestone in itself. The book is impressive, and makes a statement about literature in its time (mid-1980s), and as I've said elsewhere it's clearly a book by "a Major Talent writing in His Prime." It is certainly one of the texts that expounders and expositors will point to (or at) in their discussions of Postmodern fiction. It contains many of the themes and telling character details of PMF, to be sure – a family populated by variously related (and unrelated), precocious, mostly verbal kids, none of whom belong jointly to the protagonist and his current spouse. The exception to the verbal precocity is (of course) a kid who doesn't speak at all. It contains characters who verbalize a lot more than they actually DO anything, who are seemingly completely caught up in expounding on their inner lives. Well not entirely. They have occupations, these characters, but at times these occupations seem a little surreal – It is necessary, it seems, that the prot. can't just be a professor of Victorian poetry or some vanilla subject, he has to be head of the Hitler Studies department. It is necessary that a jester/chorus character talk like Woody Allen (a LOT like Woody Allen; he practically has "Smartass New York Jew" tattooed on his brow like a mezuzah). It is necessary that an adolescent male character deconstruct everything to the point where you wouldn't bother asking Heinrich (that's necessary too) "what time is it" even if it meant maybe missing an appointment. You'd miss it anyway as a result of his diatribe on "does anybody really know what time it is" or worse "what is time?"
I don't mean to sound as if I don't respect the book – it's extraordinarily well-written and powerful. Perhaps some of its predictability comes from the fact that so much of what constitutes it has – over the 25 or so years since its publication – found its way into much other literature (not that I think DeLillo invented this stuff, it was just less common in 1985 than it is now). It is a book in which ideas jostle to be taken seriously, but you're not sure which ones are being taken seriously by the author. Certainly most of the people in the book can't be taken terribly seriously, unlike some of Yates's or Carver's folks, who are a lot more like you & me than these wackos.

I'm impressed with Don DeLillo, though I admit

I may not be up to a competency in Post-Modern fiction (however it's capitalized and hyphenated). "White Noise" is a work clearly written by a Major Talent in his Prime, and I'm sure that the places where it leaves me in its dust are artifacts of the datedness of my own literacy.

However - what do you think of this? I'd really appreciate it if anyone browsing past who hasn't ordinarily commented would stick his or her oar in on this. I happen to think this little blurt is quite smart and well put. The speaker is an "early 30 something" brilliant lab chemist in a university. She's a caution unto herself, a minor character in the book but frankly worth reading it for on her own account.

She says to Jack (the protagonist & narrator)

"… I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

Well I finished Bryson's "At Home" and found it thoroughly enjoyable, if not

100% reliable in its array of "Things you might not have known or perhaps hadn't thought of." I'm quite sure it won't be my last hardcopy book, but by golly this e-Reading thing has its charms. I'm about 1/3 of the way through "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, and - for next to no money - have stocked the Kindle with some "dipping" material (Wodehouse & Saki). Breakfast of Champions came for holidays too. Shopping for the thing is nearly as much fun as reading. So far, there is no doubt in my mind, e-Readers are an unmitigated boon to the distribution of text. What their effect on literature will be is going to be great fun to watch over the next few years, especially when combined with the capabilities for individual publishing opened up by the other features of our connected/electronic age.

I was doubtful about posting this, but only about three people read this blog anyway so...

I was trading comments with carolina, below/above about Bill Bryson's At Home and I offered that I had wondered about a few of his assertions, and didn't need to wonder about a couple of others. Now mind you, I'm not saying the guy's full of it, or that nothing he says can be trusted. I certainly didn't look up everything he asserted. But when he opens throwing out all the wondrous stats about the Crystal Palace and follows up with all sorts of architectural and scientific hoo-hah, then I spots a couple of things that I was pretty sure weren't kosher. So I did indeed check them (though there wasn't much checking to do, actually).

For example - in his screed about whaling, in support of the stuff about the oil industry & what-all, he mentions whaling as a source of the original wealth of such New England towns as Salem and Nantucket. Well, nevermind that Nantucket is more commonly referred to as an island rather than a town, but my eyebrows rose a la Spock at the notion that Salem's wealth arose from whaling. Not the case - Far East trade, all the way. I knew this, but checked anyway, and nary a mention of a whisper of a whale in the wealth of Salem.

In several places (at least two, then) he is fundamentally confused about the relationships of weights and measures. He is convinced, for example, that a litre is smaller than a quart, as he cites a bushel as 32 US quarts (which it is), then converts that to 35 litres - which it ain't, since a litre is bigger than a quart. 32 quarts is a little over 30 litres.

This is more a math error, but he states that before fossil fuel, in the woodburning days, an average home required 20 cords of wood to heat. He doesn't (I don't think) state whether that's a winter season or year-round, since wood-fueled existence really needed wood year round, but for my money 20 cords is reasonable. But then says that 20 cords would be a stack of wood 80 feet wide by 80 feet tall by 160 feet long. And even he acknowledges that "that seems like a lot of wood" and that's true because it's about an order of magnitude out of whack from 20 cords, which would be a stack of wood 4x4x160 (you don't multiply all 3 dimension by 20 to get the volume of 20 cords). Picky picky, but...

He speaks of family fortunes that arose out of America's industrial success, the era of the rise of the robber barons and financiers. And as is his wont, he needs to cite a laundry list of examples - and along with Morgan and Carnegie and Vanderbilt and the DuPonts he lists "the Astors." Well the Astors were rich before anybody got industrialized; their wealth arose from the 18th century fur trade and expanded into New York real estate.

So all this mightn't add up to the proverbial hill o'beans, except that when someone is attempting to dazzle you with these lists and all the impressive data, and some of it ain't so, when he mentions that the fogs in London in the mid 19th century were so bad (pea-soupers we all love from Sherlock Holmes) that "one night seven people in a row walked into the Thames" - I wonder if it's true. And if I can wonder whether that's true, I guess the impact of the rest of it is diminished. But I do enjoy his style, and I'm willing to believe that - on the whole, and in the grand scheme of things - most of what he says is true enough.

So, it snowed this morning.

Didn't last long, didn't amount to much, but when I put out the trash barrels for pickup at about 0600, it was real, honest-to-god snowing, and there was white on the ground. There were some flakes floating around a week or so ago, but not even enough to constitute a single flurry, never mind flurries, so I'm saying "Snow" started today this year. It hasn't been terribly cold (though cold enough for many in my immediate circle, who are doing the "old fart" puffing & blowing about not being able to stand the cold the way they used to. Some of them, I assure you, could never stand it they way they think they used to. A pal says he's disliking the cold more & more with each passing winter, and is pretty sure his wife would never move away, to someplace warmer like the Carolinas or Florida. I wouldn't either, at least not from this vantage point. Who knows if I make it to 90 I might feel differently. But I spent a bit of time in the South, and in Texas (which, though south, is not South) and it is not with jocularity that I point out that the South may be warm, but you have to rub elbows with Gomer & Goober, and put up with fairly primitive social structures. Mrs. Lewis, my landlady in Colonial Heights Virginia (across the river from Petersburg, just up the road from Fort Lee) was a nice enough old bird, but she baked spoon bread that made a stink like to gag a maggot, and on Sunday mornings thought she was doing the Lord's Work by putting on hour after hour of "come-to-JEEzusss" on her TV and cranking the volume up to 11. No thanks, if I learned anything in the years I spent elsewhere (Virginia, Florida, Syracuse NY, Korea) I learned that I am a New Englander, bred in the bone. Had a conversation the other day about MAssachusetts vs. New Hampshire, and feeling "At home" and I guess, after 25 years, I do feel at home in New Hampshire, but no less so in Massachusetts, and only slightly less so in Maine and Vermont. Upstate New York is not bad in terms of hominess, so I"m thinking it has to do with "northeastern" as much as "New England" - but when I'm away from New Hampshire/Massachusetts very long, I truly do get homesick, and when I get up country in the boonies, up in the hills, it is as if there's a compatibility of the landscape with my makeup that sorta comforts me (though I was not aware of being uncomfortable - does that make sense?)

Ya can take the boy outta New Hampstah, but...

We need a Skiffle Revival and it should start right away. Sign up.

I don't know what prompted it, who knows what prompts these things, but I've just been browsing Youtube's collection of Lonnie Donegan clips. I think it's high time we had a Skiffle revival in this country, I really do. Check out some of the 40+ years of Donegan's taped oeuvre, and even in his last years, he was quite clearly having a complete blast. And not just in the cliched "Chewing Gum" clips, but in his handling of Lead Belly stuff like Rock Island Line, and Midnight Special, into the gospel "I Shall Not Be Moved" (which is a terrific song, as proven not only by Dongean's rockout take on it, but others from Mississippi John Hurt to Greg Brown).

Some time ago in this symposium I rambled on about the morphology of the many incarnations of "The Ship That Never Returned" through The Wreck of Old 97 up to "MTA", and in that vein I point fans of either Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee Dam or Roy Acuff's Wabash Cannonball to this clip, which is terrific.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=MLGxdCwVVULXfiPeMzM9ZSvoaYOzHFO369

Another one of those obligatory "Gotta have something to say about Such-and-Such-Day"

Meaning of course 11/11 (which is cool because it's one of those days that's the same in US and European/International notation). I've heard a few complaints about it being in the middle of the week instead of a Monday. So I think about the Grumpy Grampies I've heard snarking that "The War didn't end on the second Monday of November it ended on the 11th" and so then I think "Well yeah, that's true, but it isn't Armistice Day anymore it's Veteran's Day, and it isn't limited to The Great War anymore, so some other non-11/11 Day could reasonably be expected to serve just as well. Are there any WWI veterans around anymore? Could us Non-WWI Veterans not make better use of a long weekend for commemorative purposes? Then again, it isn't even a sanctioned holiday at my company, so Wot-The-Hey, eh? But I'm glad for the notion that some folks have a day off to pay homage to me & my comrades. (I'm being ironic here - I'm a veteran alright, but the closest I came to combat was when some Home Island Guard guys, out on Dear Old P-Y-Do, got uppity and wanted some of the beer we were drinking on the beach during our softball game. I'm not in the same class as folks who actually got shot at, or took risk of same.) (And thankful for it, I might add) But let's all think about veterans; I'm not one who thinks "thanks" is necessarily appropriate, but I guess it could be. I'll defer to others with more reason to be thanked I guess. (Is my ambivalence to this whole thing coming through adequately? Good.)

Dream journal – 11/1/2010

Two recent snippets survived waking. The first, which seem related to some others I've had over the past year or two, had to do with a rather nasty, decrepit house in which we were living ("we" being wife & I, though she didn't actually appear, but was present by implication, I guess). As in some others recently (year or two) the house was a huge, rambling affair that seemed to keep going in many directions, and didn't seem to "repeat itself" meaning if you went in a single direction then turned around and retraced your steps, you didn't actually come back the way you went originally, but through different hallways & staircases. Some outer walls did not actually exist, that is some rooms were open to the elements. People were living in seeming "apartments" though there were no definitive boundaries to these various apartments; they seemed to flow into each other. I'm pretty sure "we" owned the property, but none of the other inhabitants seemed to be very tenant-like, more like squatters. In this most recent incarnation of the setting (a few nights ago now) water was a big factor (no doubt as a result of the suggestion posed by the fact that our real-waking-life drain was acting up, putting some overflow on the cellar floor); seems like water would flow from walls and down staircases, etc. I should have recorded this sooner; I've lost what few details survived my awakening.

Last night, I was in a similarly rambling arrangement of rooms, but I was not the owner, nor even a regular tenant, but a casual guest, staying over for a night or two. I forget/never knew where I was going, but I was in the midst of a longish journey that I was eager to take up again. My "daughter" – and I don't know which one, I don't think it was one of my real daughters, none of them showed up as an actual character in the dream, it was a fictional daughter, had put my car somewhere, and the somewhere wasn't where I would have put it (apparently I knew my way around this particular dreamscape), nor was it easily findable, so I had to wait for her to return (whence I have no idea) before I could get on my way. I recall that in the dream, getting on my way again was a matter of some urgency to my dreaming self, I didn't like being where I was, and getting to where I was going was important. Daughter did not show up prior to final awakening. I do remember that at some point my dreaming self tried the "This is only a dream so I can make my dreaming self find the car" but I don't think it worked; I (the dreaming "I") did however stop fretting over "Getting on my way" since it realized "it's only a dream."

The thing about pre-history, apparently, is that

no one wrote anything down. I've just been reading a blurb about a new theory that the White Horse of Uffington might be a dog. Other theorists suggest a feline configuration.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

How odd to be entering my sixty-fifth year.

I watched "The Men Who Stare at Goats" last night

on the recommendation of a pal. Not that it needed a recommendation, with George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges at the top of the bill. Somehow I'd never heard of it - apparently it didn't get a lot of ballyhoo in the places whence I get my movie ballyhoo. It was a fun movie, but a little unsettling. The underlying notion is nothing surprising (or unknown) to most of us - that the military has been investigating applications of the paranormal for quite some time. At least since the hippie days and it hasn't stopped. The "basis" for the movie was a supposedly "factual" piece of investigative journalism (a book bearing the same name as the film) from a few years ago. The main revelation that reached public eyes & ears was the fact that insurgents/terrorists/whoever-the-bad-guys-du-jour were at the time were being subjected to long stretches of Barney the Dinosaur. So big deal, I snicker. But the movie (I don't know about the book) paints a pretty unnerving picture of just how loony some of those involved in such an initiative might have been. That said, the movie is clearly playing Clooney's, Spacey's, and The Dude's characters for laffs; these guys are clearly nuts, and it's very hard indeed to sort out how far into its cheek the movie has its tongue thrust.

Anyway, there are indeed some laughs, if no real knee-slappers, and the performances of the three focal-point actors are all very creditable, if indeed they echoed some "Canned" characterizations the relevant actors have more or less patented. I can't think they got involved for any reason other than it promised some quick bucks and the script looked like fun. Ewan MacGregor was in it too, in more or less the lead role. Someone was VERY cagey in not letting him complete with Clooney, Bridges, and Spacey. He was Dr Watson all the way, telling the story from an arm's length, and doing it very plausibly. I liked the movie, it was fun, but scary, a little, too, making one wonder how many real loonies are in similar positions (not unlike Generals Turgidson & Ripper, and Col Bat Guano and their ilk from decades ago, but in new & refreshing ways).

A while back, Comcast decided to bundled Turner Classic Movies

with some furshlugginer sports package, and I lost about the only premium channel I thought was worth a damn (it wasn't worth paying for sports to get it). More recently, my Chief Negotiator, in the process of the annual wrangle with the cable/internet/phone provider at our house, managed to get TCM "thrown in" as we "upgraded" to more service fo less money (introductory rate of course, to be wrangled over again in six or nine or twelve months). TCM has the insufferable Robert Osborne pontificating over their presentations, but that's fair penance for getting their library broadcast without commercial interruptions. So I've been checking regularly, and put TCM on my favorites list of course, and finally last night hit paydirt - The Big Sleep, 1946, Bogie & Bacall and Faulkner and Chandler, lacking only John Huston directing to have made it perfection. Hawks is a classic director, but his work doesn't move me the way Huston's and Billy Wilder's do. I think I've seen The Big Sleep half a dozen times, so it's in the "evergreen" category for me, up there with Double Indemnity and The Stranger and The Third Man, and of course The Maltese Falcon. But I haven't seen it in a few years, so it was fun knowing vaguely that poor Elisha Cook Jr ("Jonesy") was gonna get it but not remembering exactly how until the last minute. And stuff like that. I will say though that the movie would have been improved by omitting Bacall's singing. I'd love to know how much of the final dialog was actually Faulkner's work.

So I've signed up for PubIt (or however it's capitalized & punctuated)

and in the course of perusing around the B&N website, where I've had an account for practically as long as there's been a B&N website, I see that it's changed a great deal in the last year or two. Maybe it's been longer since I've been there but I don't think so, really. But my point is that B&N have jumped with both feet (all four feet?) into the digitalization of literature. Between eBooks, and their proprietary e-Reader "Nook" and the free Nook apps for all sorts of devices including PC, they are wholeheartedly embracing where words are going, and making it very clear that they intend to be a presence there (wherever "there" is when it comes to digitalized literature). What strikes me is the proliferation of "meta-literature" that's aggregating on the relevant site/portals/whatever-they-are. All the author chat that used to take place face-to-face in one bookstore at a time is now - more or less - available on demand. You can click to get access to anything from Billy Collins reading his stuff accompanied by cute animations, to Jeff Foxworthy yakking about why he likes writing poetry for kids. And with the advent of "PubIt" B&N is inviting everyone into the game. A brilliant recognition of the so-called "democratization" of writing (if not literature - yet) that's been going on for a few years with blogs and comments from the plain folk on new stories and columns/blogs. Now folks who used to holler at the idiots on their TVs can have their golden opinions immortalized in the digital ether by appending a comment to the words of anyone from Henry Louis Gates to Sgt. Crowley. The frightening thing though is that there are actually folks who think all opinions are equal. But I digress.

So Barnes & Noble has opened the gates to the riffraff & hoi-polloi, and I suspect that sooner rather than later I will publish an e-book "just because I can." God only knows what I'll do if anyone actually coughs up cash for a copy.

Went to see Gordon Lightfoot tonight, in Concord

I feel like a heel saying it but he was bloody awful. His voice is shot to hell and what little of it's left is not really under his control. We bolted at the break between the sets. I was uncomfortable for the guy. Others seemed not to mind the fact that what they were hearing bore little resemblance to the quite serviceable baritone of yore, most of the audience (or at least a sizable chunk of it) applauded and cheered enthusiastically. I have to suppose it was recognition of it being done, rather than it being done well. I truly hope it was just the way he was tonight rather than the way he's gotten to be entirely. If that's what he's routinely like, he really needs to stop booking shows.

It is, I learn from Garrison Keillor, T.S. Eliot's birthday

Happy Birthday Old Possum and thanks for all the words. Especially

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I hated studying Eliot back in 1965 and '66, when he was freshly dead, and had only recently ceased to be a threat by issuing new work. I didn't get his stuff. Something made me keep looking & looking, and in the course of more study, I began to get it. Now I love it. I went through the same thing with Joyce. It's hard to convey to someone else - especially a young person in the throes of "WTF is the POINT of studying this crap I'll never use it yatta yatta..." and it's doubly discouraging because so much stuff that seems obscure and difficult really is just bullshit, and so much that's very good and eminently worthwhile takes next to no effort at all to get (like Wodehouse) if you're going to get it at all.

It's a mystery. But Eliot had so much to say outside of his poetry, most of it very valuable indeed. And he stands along with Wallace Stevens as a shining example of how to be successful in your art and achieve great things in your day job too.

So I guess it's Fall now, and I should issue the obligatory

"Gosh this is my favorite time of the year" bleat.

Well dammit it IS my favorite time of the year. The weather's still warm, but I expect the hot days are dwindling. Nights are cool. We have a few weeks before the November Nasties strike. I have pledged to myself to get in at least one day of leaf-peepin' this year; I have not driven the Kancamagus for three or four years, since my pals from Belfast were over. That particular excursion was less successful than I'd have liked because 1) the Old Man of the Mountain was already gone, so when we pulled into the scenic lookup, all I could say was "There's where he used to be. Now he's down there, in a pile of rubble. Sic transit..." And then we were late arriving at the station for the Cog Railway, and couldn't/didn't want to (never have been sure which) wait for the next train so we missed that wonderful experience, though the drive up the auto road was a hoot, which I recommend (take the Cog first though, just in case you only have one opportunity for the Summit of Mt. Washington, the railway's the way to remember it.) And then we took the Kancamagus back down into Lincoln, but it was late October, and instead of being on fire with blazing crimson and gold, we got brownish, and beige-ish, and grayish, so I had to say "Just imagine what this looked like a couple of weeks ago..." but it wasn't quite the same.

So this year I want to do what I used to make an annual ritual, at least once per Fall - hike up north of The Lake, peruse the foliage a little, meander on back home, and rest reassured of one of the reasons I'm so comfortable in New England.

I signed up over the summer for the local Freecycle board/group/whatever-it-is

Some of the offerings are interesting, some junk of course, and some of the requests are plaintive, but one has to wonder at some of them. Is there REALLY anyone who can't afford $3.00 for a phone-jack multiplier so their Aged Parent can have a Life Alert? Or maybe they don't really know what it is they need, and how easy/cheaply they're available? A while back there was an interesting kerfuffle on the email list - one participant - who was apparently cleaning out a large estate that had been inhabited by destitute hoarders, based on what she was offering - was posting lots of items one-per-email. Someone actually complained that the emails (offering free stuff, mind) were intrusive!!! Completely ignoring the fact that she (the complainer) had the option of getting daily summary emails instead of real-time delivery. Well let me tell ya, a right old brouhaha ensued, until an admin broke into the fray with a sternly administered "cut the shit you guys" and things calmed down. People are hilarious.

I'm looking forward to October 3

Hieing us up to Concord to the Capitol Center for the Arts (there may be a "Performing" in there, not sure, too lazy to look it up) to catch the author of several of my favorite Folk Scare songs - Early Morning Rain, For Loving Me to cite the biggies. I've seen recent footage of Gordon Lightfoot performing, and I have to say that though he LOOKS every second of his almost 72 years (and maybe a few minutes of someone else's as well) his chops seem pretty much in place.

It Depends on How I'm Feeling

A few stragglers from breakfast lingered over cold coffee and toast crumbs; the plates were stained with the blueberry left from diner pie, ketchup from home fries, and yellow goo from long-gone eggs. Sally the waitress was speaking to the old man in his booth by the window. From where we sat we could not hear her even though the early morning throng had finished and gone, and the lunch horde had not yet descended. The place was almost quiet enough for us to think we were in fact having our last conversation in privacy.

"What are your plans?" she asked.

"Well right now I think it's time to go. Then I will have lunch. After that, it's hard to say, it all depends."

"What does it depend on?"

"It depends on how I'm feeling."

"What are the possibilities?"

"Endlessly limited, I'm afraid. I might go home and wash my clothes; I might go to The Tin Hat and have a drink, whereupon I might or might not get drunk; I might get on a bus to Manchester, and forget to get off. It depends on how I’m feeling, like the man said"

"And how are you feeling?" she asked.

"Like puking and shitting and running naked through the park, of course. Wouldn't anyone?" I got up, picked up my folded Banner and my cap. "At the moment, I'm not feeling. Or at least I can't really tell what I'm feeling. I suspect that before the day is over, I will have felt a number of things, and some of them I might recognize. If I experience any epiphanies, I'll be sure to get word to you." I put on my hat, squarely at first, then I tipped it jauntily and in a flush of foolishness assumed a tilted, Fred-Astaireish stance and flipped a song-and-dance salute off the brim of the cap. "In the meantime, my dear, ain't we got fun?" I flipped the newspaper under my arm as if it were a swagger stick, turned on my heel, and fled as elegantly as one fleeing can possibly be expected to flee. I held down the tears until the door of the Chit Chat Café closed behind me.

Out of pure habit I turned north out of the door of the Chit Chat and headed down the back of The Hill. My shoes were already soaked from the morning's walk so there wasn't any point in trying to avoid any of the slush piling up on the sidewalk. The cold rain blowing into my face was a mercy; it seemed to numb me against the effects of the recent conversation. Suddenly I was wondering whether I was plodding or trudging down Chestnut Street, and what the difference might be, or if no difference, whether there was a distinction, then just as suddenly I realized that I urgently wanted to get out of the rain and the wet, and sure enough here was the door of The Tin Hat, opening at my tug. The inside of The Tin Hat, was brighter and emptier than I usually found it. I didn't often arrive before four or five in the afternoon. I'd probably never come here at noon. The lights were up and there was a vacuum cleaner grumbling. The bartender looked up as I came into the empty bar. I didn't recognize him nor he me. "We don't really open 'til one" he barked.

"Shit" I rejoined

"Sounds like you're not in shape to wait," he said. "What'll tide you over?"

"Scotch would be a step in the right direction" I said. "Straight up, a double please."

"Must have been quite a morning" he said, as he poured four fingers from a bottle from the bottom shelf into a rocks glass. "I can't really serve you, you know, so this'll have to hold you."

I slugged down the whisky and pulled a sawbuck from my pocket and laid it on the bar. "Thank you very much" I said. "If there's enough change in here for another, hold it for me 'til tonight, or pass it to Jeff, the night tender. I'll be in after dinner to catch the rest. Keep a couple bucks for yourself." The bartender lifted the ten to his brow & used it to salute with. Then he stuffed it in his shirt pocket.

"I'll tell Jeff when he comes in. Who shall I tell him has the credit?"

"Hard to say. Describe me to him. I think he'll nail me if you're careful to include 'oldish, shortish, stoutish bachelor professor from around the corner.' "

"Ah" he said. "Gotcha. I'll put the change from the ten in the tip jar. You oughta get a snort out of it."

I flipped him a returned salute and turned back toward the door

Went into town* Saturday night

("in town" or "going into town" is how Boston-area folk refer to The Metropolis) to catch Jerry Seinfeld in his new (or new-ish, I guess, I dunno) "concert" standup act. It was at The Wang, down in the theater district, on Tremont a block up from Stuart St. started life in 1925 as The Metropolitan, became The Music Hall, then The Wang; now part of the Citi Group center. Gorgeous theater, heavily gilded rococo interior, etc. etc. Seinfeld was very funny, and it was an enjoyable experience; BUT - I think sixty bucks a pop was pretty steep for an hour or so of laffs, even if you do have a brand-name.

Slippery Slope

The parts still work, mostly,
though some not as well,
as formerly.
And I don’t feel that
I’m as well, either,
as I used to be.
The insults to the tissue
still heal, if not as quickly,
and illnesses, so far,
have fled with time,
and rest, and lots of fluids.
Unused days pile up,
like unstopped newspapers
on the stoop,
one more thing forgotten.
Then slip away as if
the wind snuck up
as we were bending over to
gather them in.

It hasn’t started yet,
the long slow slide of
irretrievable decline,
as life outlasts
ability to live it.

The places we went back then...

(that sounds a lot like the title of a Raymond Carver story, dunnit?)

The post immediately below, with its coda about Benson's in Hudson, brought to mind some of the trips in the days when gas was 15 cents a gallon. Sometimes there were "gas wars" going on and on Sunday afternoon Dad would put us all in the '41 Mercury and drive south on US 5, along the river, down into Connecticut, (usually no further than Windsor Locks) and fill up the tank at eight gallons for a buck. Then we'd get ice cream, and it was a recreational experience. We lived in what's known as The Forest Park neighborhood, "Forest Park" for short. This is (or was, I've no idea what it's like now that Springfield is on its uppers) a lovely, huge park, mostly built on land donated by Everett Hosmer Barney, an industrialist who made a fortune in clamp on ice skates (who'd a thunk it). His family Mausoleum is still in place on the grounds of the park, and is a well-known Springfield landmark. His house, alas, was sacrificed to Interstate 91. We lived within walking distance of the park, and it was a frequent destination for the family when I was very little, and when I got a bit older, a destination for pals & self though under the tutelage of older brother. There was a zoo (still is, I think) and gardens and miles of trails. Dr. Seuss's father was in fact in charge of this zoo once upon a time, I think.

Just up the street (Sumner Ave.) from the Main Entrance of the Park was a shopping district known as "The X" which sounds weird until you look at a map and see that Sumner Ave and Dickinson Street cross there at an acute angle (though I guess it's an obtuse angle if you look at it differently) and form, ayuh, an X. There were Mom & Pop stores there as well as some national outlets, back in the day when a national chain didn't require that the market population be in the millions and the stores take up city blocks. There was, at the X, the Phillips Theater, a "nabe" and many a Saturday afternoon we spent ensconced in its gum-encrusted, popcorn-scented womb. The Phillips had a balcony, whence I learned how to wing an empty popcorn box such that it sailed straight up the middle of the path to the screen, then banked 90 degrees just before it made contact.
Further up Sumner Ave, away from the Park entrance and out of the X, was another nabe, of later construction and smaller capacity, called The Bing, named after the crooner (so legend has it anyway). The Bing was slightly closer to home and didn't require crossing as many major streets, so it was our venue of choice on our 50-cent Saturday expeditions (a quarter for admission - two features, three cartoons, previews, newsreels, usually a sports short, a good full afternoon out of the Parents' hair - plus a dime for a coke, a dime for popcorn, and a nickel for a candy bar - Three Musketeers for me) - but after 1953 the Bing became problematic for mass outings to the movies.

They ran a movie called "The Moon is Blue" in spite of said flicker being denounced by the RC church, which was a major social and political force in the neighborhood (Holy Name). It wasn't a problem for us (we didn't go to ANY church much less the RC flavor) but some of our pals did, and some of their parents were more involved in paying attention to Monsignor's pronouncements than others. So when Monsignor said "Don't go to the Bing" a number of our cronies' parents acquiesced and denied permission to their offspring to frequent said cinema. So we either went to The Phillips at The X, or we went without Smitty and Choochie and Whatzisname with the runny nose. The offense of "The Moon is Blue" by the way was its use of the word "virgin."

Honest to god. Apparently the RCC figured they owned it.

More places later.

Once a week or so, ("or so" meaning more often when I can arrange it)

I stop into a little store in Hudson, New Hampshire, on Route 111 just outside of Nashua* called "The Drink Shoppe" and wander through their collection of microbrews from all over the place, and select something to bring home for spouse & self to try out, ostensibly over pizza, but most of the stuff is good enough to sip on through the rest of the week. Once upon a time there was a micro out in Milford called The Pennichuck Brewing Company, that put out a brew called Bagpiper Scottish Ale that was amazing. And then of course they went out of business.

So last week I grabbed a six of something called Storm King Stout, from Victory Brewing Company in Downington Pennsylvania. It was tasty, lots of body, etc. but the next morning (I had exactly one bottle) my head was fuzzy and uncomfortable. I thought it might have been something else, but the next time I had some of this stuff - a day or two later - the same thing happened.

Now I don't mind having a wee hangover if I've had a dram too many (not that it's happened all that often... lately) but it doesn't seem right that one beer should do that kind of thing to one. Especially at a sawbuck a sixpack. Bluefin Stout, from Shipyard Brewery in Portland, btw, is quite excellent. Almost everything from Shipyard is. Smuttynose puts out some terrific stuff too, especially Old Brown Dog.

* For folks of a certain age and a certain familiarity with this particular part of the world, The Drink Shoppe is diagonally across Route 111 from a large chunk of derelict blacktop that was, in days of yore, the entrance to Benson's Wild Animal Farm. Somewhere, I have a very old photo of self atop an elephant at Benson's. When my grandmother lived in Lowell, it was a special treat for us, as kids, to be driven up into what seemed to be the backwoods at the time (and I reckon it was pretty backwoodsy back then) and visit Benson's. Apparently a GREAT many other folk remember Benson's fondly - http://www.bensonsanimalfarm.com/

Not sure exactly why, but

I signed up for gmail, finally. Initially I stayed clear because of privacy and "content ownership" issues, but it occurred to me that no one is really likely to give a flying fart about my puny little emails. And then I was introduced to "Buzz" which is clearly Google's answer to Twitter, and their bid in the "social networking" sphere. So naturally it got me to thinking about Twitter and social networking, and Droid phones and text messaging, etc. and it further occurred to me that I suppose I should have an opinion about all of this, or at least should say something about it even if I don't really have a fully formed opinion. Which I think I don't. Or at least, I'm not sure if I do, and if I do, I'm not really 100% sure what it is.

One side of my head is very much attuned to technology, and making use of it - I think having all the digital stuff we do is ultimately a good thing for the species and will continue to differentiate us from reindeer and wildebeests, though maybe not so much from chimps if they get hold of iPhones anytime soon. I think this sort of mass communications technology will quite possibly help lift huge chunks of humanity out of their only-slightly-post-neolithic existences more quickly than any other set of tools to date. This will (I think) be a good thing.

On the other hand, the same mass & instant communication capabilities are in the hands of people who wish me ill, not because of anything I've ever done to them, but simply as a result of where I was born & grew up & how I live. I'm enough of a happy idiot to believe that there aren't millions of these people out there who wish me ill, but the downside of our modern age is that there don't have to be millions of them in order for them to potentially do me & my ilk grave harm. And they are indeed working on it, with greater diligence than I'm spending on my day-to-day activities.

But the real "final question" that I suspect I'll spend more thought on, since there's nothing I can do about those bad guys in the paragraph above - nothing much to be done, really, I think they're probably part of the fabric of human life from here on out. They've always been around, of course, but now they're much better armed, in touch with each other over long distances (only a few years ago most of them would have been unaware of the existence of most of the rest of them), and they know where I live, so to speak. But my point, back at the beginning of this paragraph, was that I'm wondering whether we are in fact really seeing something evolutionary taking place. Some years ago we used to joke about teenaged girls having phones surgically implanted. We are not far from that capability (not far hell, I'm quite sure the technology exists, and is in the plans of more than one organization of some kind or another in the real world. And not all of those organizations wish us sweetness and light). But in a nutshell, my ponder is this: are we seeing the beginning of the Borg?

What is it that makes us decide we want to see a movie, and order it in,

and then let it sit on the coffee table of the family room for days on end ("bogarting the queue" we call it) until we either decide we don't want to see it after all and send it back unwatched, or else we decide we're in the mood for it and finally devote a couple of hours away from Cops and World's Dumbest to actually watch something at least ostensibly artful, or else we decide "Geez I'd better at least put it in the DVD player" and we do, and give it 20 or 30 minutes, and like as not walk out on it, and sneak it into the mailer and back to the post office with all due stealth. I think there shoulda been a question mark up there after "stealth" but I"m too lazy to go back and see if that was really all one sentence. Good for me if it was.

I think it's because Netflix gives the impression of being free & unlimited. But bogarting the queue is a bad thing, especially if more than one person feeds it, and tastes are not shared. I gotta cut that out. So I"ll watch The Road and Transsiberian over the weekend. Honest...

If it weren't "One damned thing after another" it would

be everything all at once. A'propos of bupkis, of course, it just occurred to me this morning. It actually re-occurred to me this morning. A while back my wife - in the throes of the sort of concatenation of events that's typical for lots of folks our age & socio-economic bracket - uttered the classic "One damned thing after another" remark, purely as a conversational deadair filler, and the response above just sorta popped out of my mouth. It made her laugh, which was a plenty gratifying result. Of course it's the converse, or contrapuntally moebius or whatever the logico-rhetorical descriptor would be, of the old "Time is just nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

Summer is almost over, at least notionally if not calendrically. I always point out to the captive audience of family that - technically - Summer lasts well into the school year by which we all seem to be bound when it comes to seasonal milestones, but in general, no one is having any of it. Summer is over on Labor Day. And it didn't really start 'til the Fourth of July, in spite of the fact that Commercial Summer runs from Memorial Day to Columbus Day (at least in New England. I realize Columbus Day - historically 12 October - is not universally observed).

More important than Summer being almost over is the fact that Foliage Season (or "Leaf Peepin' as we like to call it) is about to begin. This was brought home to me just yesterday when I noticed that the big shade tree out in the garden is beginning to shed its trashy little dull yellow leaves. We have no attractive trees on our property, that I know of. There may be one or two out in the Wayback, but mostly those are poplars and pines. I don't go out there unless I have to, there's too bloody much poison whatzit. So the poplars will dump their gnarly, leathery leaves all over the place, and the scrub maples will turn sickly yellow, while down on Main Street, toward the center of town, the stately oaks and maples that have lined the right-of-way for about 150 years will turn glorious gold & crimson, and burn themselves out in October, which will warn us that dismal November follows to be endured until at least we get a little pretty snow to distract us for a while. And as soon as the year is over we'll be sick of that and wish for spring.

One damned thing after another...

So last Friday was the thirteenth of August.

And it only just occurred to me that it was a notable day in the chronicles of who I used to be and how I'm not anymore, and how I got to be who I am now (which is somebody else).

So on the 13th of August, 1969, a new cluster of 2LTs (USAF) were created (by gosh & by golly & by act of congress), down in San Antone, at the old USAF OTS campus known in those days as "Medina" which was sort of an annex to Lackland AFB (more properly LMTC or Lackland Military Training Center, which was the main tenant of Lackland AFB). It was a hot day, and we marched all toy-soldierly out onto the bigass parade field, and stood while some buncha brasshats uttered the usual outrageous bumph, then we were commissioned and all of a sudden transformed from snot-nosed, wet-eared, greenhorn mewling & puking recent college graduates into the Air Force's version of Trained Killers. Well, maybe soon-to-be-trained-killers. If at all.

We threw our wheel hats high in the air, and somehow actually all managed to find our own (at least I did, I dunno how many lost theirs), and then glad-handed each other and got first salutes from various folks, fetched our gear from the barracks, and hauled ass out of San Antone with all possible haste.

I was a couple months shy of 23 years old. Hoping not to be sent to Southeast Asia, where there was a nasty shooting war underway. Many of my pals from Basic Training and OTS (I was one of the twice blessed who got to participate in BOTH levels of indoctrination) did indeed go to SEA - Vietnam & Thailand mostly. As far as I know they all came back. I lucked out & went to Korea. Some pals went to Alaska. After remote assignments, we ended up in places like Syracuse, Duluth, Petersburg Virginia, Seattle, etc. I ran into a couple of my Basic and OTS compadres later on at Syracuse. After leaving the service, we all pretty much left it & each other behind, though recently I've been in touch with a couple of the guys, quite by accident - one's a professor of something wet in Florida, and one's a golf pro.

Military service seems to stick with you; it plays a huge role in shaping who you turn out to be - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but always, it seems to me, for keeps. It's the classic "wouldn't want to do it again, but wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Saw Eliza Gilkyson & Cheryl Wheeler Friday night (the 13th of August)

They were each superb in their own ways. Great music, much laughter - if you've heard Wheeler's music but not seen her stage set, you're missing about half of her talent to entertain. And that's saying something, as her music is top notch. I had not heard Gilkyson's music before (though have heard her name around quite a lot) - she too is very versatile, very talented and put on a very enjoyable set. And of course the setting (literally on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee, on the grounds of Brewster Academy) is picture postcard, and the weather could not possibly have been better.

I watched "The Lion in Winter" the other night

The one with O'Toole and Hepburn from '68. It is a monumentally good film. The language is amazing, the characterizations phenomenal (Anthony Hopkins' film debut as Richard I the Lionheart), the photography stunning (and to my eye at least VERY historically accurate).

Favorite lines:

Eleanor, when John (the pustule) whines that Richard has a knife: "Of course he has a knife. You have a knife, I have a knife, we all have knives, it's 1183 and we're barbarians."

Henry, when, upon learning that Henry has decided to have the Pope "annul her" and get a new batch of kids, since his sons are such putzes, Eleanor asks "To Rome?" and Henry says "That's where the keep the Pope."

The script is rife with lovely gems, but those two have always stood out for me. And their final exchange, as Eleanor is back in her barge and headed back to her imprisonment:

Henry: I hope we never die!
Eleanor: Me too!
Henry: Do you think it might happen?

and they both laugh, and laugh, as Eleanor's boat heads down river toward the channel.

First of June, Random stuff glimpsed through the smoke from Quebec afire

Whatever happened to the Indy 500? Or is it me?

It only just occurred to me that the race was yesterday. It used to be ALL over TV, and other media, but I don't recall seeing a single item about it. Not that I watched very much TV over the long weekend, but it seems to me that there woulda been mention of it during the "run up" during which I watched my usual glom of worthless nonsense. Is it just me, or has everyone's interest in Indy flagged over the past few years? In favor of NASCAR maybe? Interestin' ...


So this 13-year old climbed Mt Everest with his Dad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Romero

It's to be expected, I guess, that there are folks carping about it. Recently, a 16-year old Australian girl became the youngest person to sail around the world solo,

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/15/australian-teen-youngest-person-sail-world/


I think it's great, and would be the last one to criticize; I do however wonder what they're gonna do for encores.


I got sick of hearing about the Gulf oil this morning, so on my way to work I listened to Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

The Wreck of Old '97 -

He was coming down that slope
doing ninety miles an hour
when his whistle broke into a scream
They found him in the wreckage
with one hand on the throttle
scalded to death by the steam.

This song was based on another, The Ship That Never Returned by Henry Clay Work (who also wrote "My Grandfather's Clock" and a lot of us Great Scare Folkies know the tune of this old chestnut better as the Bob Gibson's fun "Super Skier" (which the Chad Mitchell Trio ended with "Get poor Charlie off the MTA" which of course is a reference to ANOTHER song that uses the tune - ain't the Folk Process grand though?)

(Oh they called him Super Skier,
as he sat around the sundeck,
he swore that he would never take a spill,
when they finally got him down
they had to use three toboggans
to carry all the pieces off the hill....

He was coming down that slope
doing ninety miles an hour
when he caught an edge of his ski...)

Seemingly on a roll with railroad songs, Jack follows this with The Wabash Cannonball, a song done so many different ways by so many different artists it's practically a genre in itself (my favorite cut of it is by the Limeliters, on a live album, where Glen Yarborough crescendoes & glissandoes a whistle leading into the chorus)

Later on the side he returns to the Age of Steam with Hobo's Lullaby & Rock Island Line, so the side goes from trad to early country/bluegrass to straight country to Lead Belly via Weavers and Lonnie Donegan. Ramblin' Jack would be the last one to claim himself as a great singer or guitar picker, but I have never heard him when it didn't sound like he was having fun doing what he loved to do, and that always makes entertainment - he's fun to listen to. I plan to get to see him before he leaves us.

Gowf Chronicles, 4 May 2010

Great Zot I've fallen behind again. So anyway… I spent Tuesday morning (4 May) in the company of 9 other superannuated wannabe duffers, in a "Senior Golf School" conducted on a gorgeous course (Stow Acres) in East-Central Massachusetts (Stow, Mass (surprise, surprise) - Johnny Appleseed country). The Golf School at Stow Acres sets aside a number of two-half-day sessions for "Seniors" leaving a day off in between to let us old farts recover. Instructor-to-student ration is one-to-five, so one gets a fair amount of attention. I let our "teaching pro" know that I was a rank beginner and he was delighted – "no bad habits to unlearn" – well, maybe, maybe not, I cautioned. At any rate I figured any bad habits I have after Thursday can be laid at his doorstep.
So I learned the proper way to approach the ball, pick a target line, align one's elderly self vis-à-vis the ball, grip the stick, swing the booger, etc. etc. Tiger needs not fret, of course, but I had the feeling that I walked away from the session somewhat less a rank beginner and slightly more informed about how this thing is supposed to be done. If nothing else I have a routine for lining up on the ball correctly, and I will say that by the end of the morning fewer of my shots sucked entirely. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Guilty Pleasures Dept - Ken Russell adaptations of Bram Stoker novels

ok, ok, so it was a boring TV night, even for the desultory drill I peruse. So I went to On Demand, and browsed the free movies, and there was "Lair of the White Worm" (1988) starring Hugh Grant and other people no one's ever heard of, at least I haven't. It rang a bell, and not just because of the obvious "white worm" gag, promising sex. The other bell it rang had long black hair and went by the name of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark." I was pretty sure I'd seen this flick back in Elvira's heyday, so I looked it up & sure enough it was as I'd remembered, a cheesy Ken Russell (is that redundant?) adaptation of one of the many novels that fall into the category of "Bram Stoker's work that isn't Dracula"

It's a cheesy flick alright, but the allusions to genuine British folklore are pretty comfortable (look up The Lambton Worm for pretty much the entire backstory), and there are some funny bits (well it is Ken Russell, so there were bound to be some funny bits, but some of them I think were even intentional).

I don't recommend this film if you've a better idea, which includes a "My Mother The Car" marathon of all eleven episodes. But barring that, if you've nothing to do with your evening and you have access to it, what the hey, I've spent more on worse.