The Carpenters

"I remember a Carpenters song that came out when I was twelve. I didn't quite understand the song then, young as I was, but I knew that it had to do with birth and beautiful things that lay beyond me. And the song's joyous rhythm and bouyant melody, so full of optimism, ushered me into the shithouse of adolescence."

I've drawn my comb back and forth a few times over the above blurb that I've written for a Carpenters reissue, and I can't quite determine where it loses its way.

The Horrors of Whistling

Whistling is a sorry affair, an affront to humanity, for it is invariably tuneless and never done well. One hears it only in circumstances when escape is impossible---on buses, airplanes, the factory floor. When I was a teenager working in a summer factory job for eight hours a day, the fellow chained to the machine next to mine would whistle for hours and this, like a scar on the face of a beautiful woman, ruined his otherwise comely personality. When conversation fell away to silence, he would take to whistling. To avoid further torture, I would engage him in conversation for as long as I could. I learned that he wiped his ass crack from a standing position, he once lusted after his own sister, and he used to pee in his father's orange juice. That's what whistling brings people to.

No Greater Hell

There’s no greater Hell
Than having a friendship bottom out
For the simple reason that you didn’t measure up
To its recalibrated terms

Shogun: The Life of Ieyasu Tokugawa

Shogun: The Life of Ieyasu Tokugawa by A.L. Sadler.

Having just read Hideyoshi, a fairly recent scholarly work by Mary Elizabeth Berry, I delved into this 1937 biography, nay hagiography, of Ieyasu Togugawa. Though this book was written while Japanese troops were running roughshod in China and threatening Western interests all around, Sadler, an Australian. makes no effort to conceal his admiration for the first Tokugawa shogun.

In this book, Ieyasu is by turns strong and humble, but always behaving in the manner appropriate to the moment. For instance, on the eve of his famous meeting with Hideyoshi in 1585, a nervous Hideyoshi visited Ieyasu to enjoin him to be most submissive the next day, so that Hidyoshi might not lose face with his men. Ieyasu duly complied. Even Ieyasu's later upending of Hideyori, son of the late Hideyoshi, comes across as a matter of necessity, as Hideyori had taken to assembling men and ample arms in his redoubt at Osaka. It took two campaigns to eliminate Hideyori, the second made necessary because of Ieyasu's leniency toward Hideyori after the first.

Meanwhile, Ieyasu appears to possess a talent for speaking in pithy aphorisms in the middle of battle. Did he actually say what Sadler asserts, or is Sadler engaging in a bit of hero worship? I have always regarded battle as a messy, chaotic affair which offers scant occasion for recording what is said. I was reminded of a recent On Point episode about famous quotations when one the guests mentioned that Custer supposedly said "We have caught them napping." at Little Big Horn. How could we know that he said that, and what survivor reported it later? I suspect that if what Ieyasu said during battle were to come to light, we might learn a great deal about sixteenth-century Japanese expletives.

Since it was written in 1937, this book labors under many of the assumptions of the day (with the notable exception of the Japanese). To wit, Sadler writes about a Japanese shipwreck on Formosa in 1616: "their (the Japanese) crews were attacked and most of them killed by these sturdy aboriginals (Taiwanese), who have been a thorn in the side of Japan ever since, for they are animals who defend themselves very decidedly when attacked." Oh, the 1930s! And women? Don't get me started. More maps would have helped as well. There a many detailed maps of the terrain of certain battle sites, but Sadler assumes an expert's knowledge of the geographical map of Japan.

Shogun is nevertheless worth reading for the wealth of details about sixteenth-century Japanese life, from ceremonial protocol to military tactics, and for the insight into the events of a crucial period in Japanese history, when the centralization of the state ran oddly parallel to similar developments in Europe. It is one of a very few works in English on Ieyasu Tokugawa.

Boozy Bonhomie

My early twenties were far and away the happiest moments of my life. My family were alive, my friends unmarried, and college still held out its social, intellectual charm. At times during that brief stretch I remember leaning back in my chair surveying my surroundings, friends about me relishing boozy bonhomie and exchanging honest laughter. My family remained supportive and secure. And the better part of a lifetime of reading awaited me.

I cannot decide which was harder to bear: the sudden death of my father, which reminded me of my own mortality, or the marrying away of my friends, which assured me of my solitude. The former was a terrific blow, the latter an incremental cancer. Both dented my armor. But it was graduate school that clubbed the enthusiasm for living right the fuck out of me, for it was there that I discovered that reading offered little more than a momentary diversion from nothing.

Residual Solace

To realize that even if you get back to where you once were when you had an outside chance at mediocrity

your youth will have passed

and the nest that you hope for is a second blush of it

by the time that you will be in a position to attain even that, the tectonic plates will have pulled apart

and your youth will reside on the opposing plate.

New England

There is a charm to the place

That is mentioned in guidebooks

Thoreau and Dickinson and Melville and all those gables

And brave thoughts were once thought here

And I was drawn here as a young man imbued with Emerson

And I've been here long enough to recognize it as paved over horrifically

Skokie, Illinois with a wicked accent