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.