Everson Walls

I saw people I had known exhausting their final reserves clawing their way in the direction of a wall, one that lingered lazily, whose eternal reaches lay well outside of anything that any of them might hope to achieve. When I was four, I saw some of it; the rest I saw when I was sixteen and most of the rest when I was nineteen . We used to stand in awe of it, this wall. Sometimes, you know, some southern kid or someone from a place you couldn’t imagine existed—somewhere in Missouri or a place like that—like a place from where anyone in his right head could only hope to escape---some kid like that used to carry broken baggage with him..a limp or a dragging slow sidecar….or a slut you can’t shake….,I think that some of the worst things you’ll ever see are my neighbors.

Man or Dog? Why one over the other?

They talked the man from the ledge, and he climbed unsteadily back onto the roof to safety, amid the cheering of the crowd below. It took a while, but he made it there. Now on firm footing, the man seized a small dog that had followed him onto the roof, and hurled it over the edge.

Should you stumble upon this lonely blog of mine, you might detect a note of darkness. If you enjoy that sort of thing, soldier on, for you might detect little sprouts of black humor, which is the most satisfying kind.

By way of experimentation, which of the following two jokes do you find funnier?

Joke One:

A man walking along the sidewalk comes upon a boy and a dog.
"Does your dog bite?" the man asks the boy.
"Nope," the boy replies.
The man bends over to pet the dog, and the dog bites his hand.
"Ouch! I thought you said your dog doesn't bite?"
"That's not my dog."

Joke Two:

I saw a man approach the bar dressed in shorts, orange rubber flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt. He ordered a drink.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Terrible. I just came from a funeral.”
“Dressed like that?”
“It was only a rehearsal. Hospice case.”

If the second joke strikes you as the funnier of the two, heaven help you.
And keep visiting.

Life's Conversations

The post office is open today. You said it was closed.
I didn’t say it was closed; I said that the mail hadn’t come yet.
Well, how could the mail come if the post office was closed? Answer me that!

In the Flesh

As I was driving home this evening, I listened to a rebroadcast of the wonderful On Point NPR program. Today's topic (2nd hour) was George Dawes Green, who founded a storytelling club known as "The Moth." At one point in the show a caller mentioned that he had been taking part in a group similar to 'The Moth." He remarked that those storytellers whose stories revolved around their successes tended to fall flat; audiences, however, hung on every word of those who shared stories---well told, naturally--- of personal humiliation and failure.

www.onpointradio.org/2010/07/storytelling

This comment begged the questions in my mind: does the sound-bite culture lend itself, and thuse reward, shameless boasters? Does such ridiculous grandstanding fail in the presence of a live audience, which can see the raconteur as a fellow in the flesh and thus criticize him more harshly? It is, after all, much easier to manipulate the message in sound-bite form than it is when the audience can hurl rotten tomatoes at you. Live audiences call for a measure of humility and a bit of common touch.

Do soundbites beget pompous asses?

Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald poured everything he had into this novel, and it shows. If ever an author exposes his soul and his heart to the public, FSF did so with Tender is the Night. It is clear that Dick Diver is Fitzgerald himself, and that Nicole is Zelda, beautiful and out of her mind. That Nicole grows stronger than Dick in the noevl's third act is an indication of Fitzgerald's fear--and it was indeed a fear--that Zelda might recover enough to surpass him artistically. He had always drawn heavily on his own life for the material in his novels, and it is remarkable to see how threatened he was by his wife, who in the early 1930s had been consigned to a mental institution.

Tender is the Night has been roundly criticized for focusing on the lives of the wealthy in the middle of the Great Depression. That may have hurt its popularity when it was published in 1934, but are we then to read this wonderful and tragic story only during periods of economic expansion? Isn't the demise of Dick Diver sad in any event?

My only complaint about the novel is Fitzgerald's depiction of Nicole's sudden recovery and independence. Fitzgerald certainly knew the psychological theories of the day and was familiar with the literature. Why, then, does he not explain her recovery sufficiently? Did he really think that Zelda's case was so hopeless? If so, then why was he threatened by her?

Still, the novel is worth reading for Fitzgerald's prose. Consider the closing paragraph of the novel:

After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's at Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Thsi passage speaks volumes about Fitzgerald's view of himself, always impermanently arranged, always alone--his wife must consult an atlas to place him on a map, after all. The ocean that separates Nicole and Dick is little different than the chasm that Zelda's breakdowns caused between her and Scott.

Next: The Tale of Genji, among other projects.

Love with the Left Hand

After football season the father drove his young son out to a cabin in the woods, told the boy to take serious stock of himself, and abandoned him there with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with a single shell. One evening about a week later, the son appeared at his father's door and, thrusting the gun under the old man's snout, held him to merciless account. The son then withdew into the darkness. Soon afterwards they discovered the boy's carcass, relieved of its head, in the ditch along the road that led to the middle school.