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

I'm about to give up on following basketball. After watching about fifteen games of the NCAA tournament, I've seen too many prematurely-hoisted 3-point shots and recklesss body launches into opposing defenses for me to draw any other onclusion than that team ball has died and it's all a televised circus show. What Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan spawned has finally come back to kill the game.

Where those players--and those of their time---delighted crowds with no-look passes and mercurial shots, they did so in the knowledge that they would include teammates when it counted--witness MJ's double-nickle game against the Knicks, which he ended with a dime to--Bill Wennington.

Two dribbles and a jump shot. UConn is up by three over Butler with 15 minutes left, and they worked 5 seconds off the clock before settling for--you got it!--a jump shot!

Man, oh man!

James Joyce--The Dead

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There is little that is lovelier than this. I am at a loss to think of a greater ending to a story

A Girlfriend's Dog

At what point do you forget the name of an old girlfriend’s dog? Not the one that bit you on the arm (dog, not girlfriend), but just an ordinary dog that occasionally trotted past you in their living room or slept in front of you as you picked her locks on the sofa. I had a girlfriend years ago—when I was nineteen—whom I thought I loved deeply, and I thought of her day and night. We went out for a year before we broke up. For a while after we broke up, I thought of everything about her, including the warmth of her family home, and the faces and names of her family members, and among these I placed her dog, since they treated him like a family member (they even fed him turkey during the holidays).
A few months ago I thought of this girlfriend, and I recalled the holiday meals at her house, and the faces and name of her family. But I could not for the life of me recall the name of her dog. I can picture its size and coloring, and I think that its name began with the letter “C.” But at what moment did I lose the dog’s complete name? There must have been a moment when you might have asked me, “Just what was the name of that dog of an old girlfriend?” And to this I would have replied with full confidence, “Charlie.” But had you waited another moment to pose the same question, I might have answered with, ‘Corky’? or was it ‘Cortense’?” And if you had waited yet another measure of time to ask me, I might have responded with “Callie”, or “Canover.” But more time has passed since those hypothetical questions, and now my answer has been reduced to “C-------.”
Soon, no telling when, I will refer to the dog as “Bernie”, and then soon thereafter I will deny that my old girlfriend even had a dog, or even a name of her own, and then I will forget that I had a girlfriend.
And all those little moments that my old girlfriend and I shared together, like the time we escaped from the rain into an old baseball dugout in a field where I had played little league ball or the time when we got stranded in a snowstorm together on Christmas Eve and missed Christmas with our families---all of that will vanish.

Egyptian Revolution?

The naivete of expectation, well, I've grown accustoned to it. This is what happens when you attain a certain age. This BS in Egypt, all of these gestures to a democratic future...what a joke. This country simply has no history of democracy--the building of the pyramids comes to mind---and never will have. History has certain rules. Egypt will enjoy democracy in the same manner as Russia has done since the heady days of the decline of the USSR. Mubarak has nodded to democracy by transferring authority to, of all institutions, the military. Arab militaries. as everyone knows, represent the long-suppressed voices of the democratic minority in that part of the world. Think Libya.



Democracy?...Democracy? Playoffs?.......Playoffs?

Nina Simone--Princess Noire

Nina Simone was obviously an exceptional talent, and according to Princess Noire, the recent biography by Nadine Cohondas, almost impossible to live with or be around. Trained in classical piano as a young girl in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (the Eunice Waymon) studied for a while at The Juilliard School, but was afterward rejected for admission by the Curtis Institute, which Simone interpreted as a racial snub. She maintained the dream of becoming a performer of classical music, but eventually backed into playing blues and jazz as a young woman in New York City. All of this, as well as Simone's early career, Cohondas treats with substantial detail. I found the account of Simone's transformation into a protest musician during the Civil Rights period fascinating, and I found myself listening to "Mississippi Goddam" and "Backlash Blues" as I read.

Nina Simone's behavior soon grew erratic, and she would berate audiences or storm off the stage. Beginning in the late 1960s, it appears, one in possession of a ticket to a Nina Simone performance stood only an even chance of watching her perform. Indeed, Cohondas focuses on the tragic trajectory of Simone's life in the book's second half, and the story assumes the form of a series of tales of crude behavior, missing opportunities, and crumbling fortunes. Certainly there was more to Simone than that.

Still, Princess Noire contains vivid descriptions of Simone's music, and that alone makes the book worthwhile.

Seeing or hearing?

Gérôme was perfect, but few care to view his work these days. Once, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a would-be artist was aping Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant, and the young imitator somehow upset his easel, which toppled onto Gérôme ’s painting, tearing its canvas. I worked at the museum then, and I remember that Gérôme’s original was quickly whisked off to the catacombs below for restoration. A momentary whirr of excitement about the mishap carried throughout the administrative offices and spilled into the galleries for a spell before it all settled down. I worked there for two years after that episode, and I cannot remember when the restored painting returned to the gallery. All I can recall is that one day, as I was walking the gallery beat, I noticed The Carpet Merchant hanging in its old space on the wall. And I remember wondering about how the return of the painting to its place had escaped my attention, especially as I was rather familiar with the stretch of galleries in the modern Western European wing of it all.
Why had such a furor over the damage to The Carpet Merchant risen and died as quickly as it had? I suspect that the museum staff simply ran a tight ship, and such an affront to any work of art would have been greeted with like thoroughness. I suppose that The Carpet Merchant hadn’t been considered much of a painting after all; it was in its near-exactitude of depiction a virtual photograph. And that’s part of the problem. When painters achieved a skill of depiction nearing verisimilitude, there was nowhere for painters to go, so they veered off into odd directions. And this is exactly what you saw.
What about music, which also began to see odd variations in form at about the same time? One can’t judge Schoenberg and Beethoven with the same ruler, after all. When perfection in music was achieved, what did it resemble? Gérôme painted a photograph, and so painters had to move sideways and yield to the photographers (at least for a time, as photography resembles verisimilitude less and less). Who is the Gérôme of music? Which musician achieved the precise depiction reality? Bach? Mozart? Anyone?
There was no objective reality there. It was impossible to attain because the possibilities of music were infinite. The visual arts regress or move sideways.
It seems to me that I would prefer to retain my hearing to my eyesight if presented with a choice between the two. Hearing simply offers a greater possibility of feeling, sensation, and profundity than sight, for all its obvious practical applications, can ever hope to supply.

Prostitute is an underused term, for it suggests a proffering of something innate and dear to oneself for the prospect of flimsy gain. In its purest sense, the term prostitute defines not a single person, but every single one of them, man and woman alike; it's a common thread, like mammality is. Prostitute is often considered a pejorative term, but I can imagine it settling comfortably upon our shoulders--those angel wing harnesses were troublesome, anyway. I propose that we everywhere replace person with prostitute until further notice. We needn't seek a replacement for prostitute because our nature has reduced the original thrust of the term to a condition of terminal vacuity.

How fascinating it is to speak a living language!

My Little Kindergarten

The plumbing failed, and so we took to crapping into paper bags, which we hurled in the hammer-throw manner from the roof as soon as completed. This sort of behavior, drastic as it was, warded off even the most predatory of gangsters, for an unanticipated “flying latrine” to side of the head in the middle of a drug deal or a car-jacking proved sufficient to relieve even the most hardened gangster of a street cred years in its making. So it came about that our little hellhole turned into the epicenter of a drug-free zone whose radius extended stiffly outward for several blocks. My cousin raised his kids there.

Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

This is a terrifying book, for it lays bare the effective re-enslavement of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly set them free. Blackmon throws light on the way that unscrupulous lawmen and businessmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee seized black men and women---mostly men, incarcerated them on trumpted-up charges---typically, vagrancy--- and sold them as convict laborers to southern industrial concerns. Once purchased, these African-American men endured horrific conditions in the mines of the south; they were beaten, starved, and worked to death.



All the while, the occasional crusaders for justice--Wareen S. Reese, for one----saw their efforts at redress met by a stone wall of southern injustice. Vested southern interests had little practical reason to extend the hand of equity toward helpless southern blacks. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when improved technology rendered labor-intensive methods of production of coal and steel obsolete and the federal government feared exposure as hypocrites by the Nazi enemy, that the U.S. government enacted and enforced laws against enslavement.

Anyone who thinks that the Jim Crow period--Blackmon prefers the term Neoslavery---was a period of harsh treatment of essentially free people will find themselves summarily disabused of that notion up reading this book. The chapter "Anatomy of a Slave Mine"--whose title is a euphemism--speaks volumes.

German companies have compensated the victims of Nazi atrocities. Should U.S. Steel do the same?

Read
Slavery by Another Name and wince. And learn.

An Enjoyable Bromide

This book is a necessary book, not because the reader should agree with all of Howard Zinn's ideas--he occasionally drifts off into ranting, especially in his chapter on the Clinton presidency---but because Zinn poses explanations for events in US history that are plausible. The idea that the top one percent of US society has since the inception of this country held its position by maintaining divisions among those below it makes sense given the current distribution of wealth in this country.

What strikes me as unconvincing is his claim that the slightly privileged (mostly middle-class whites) have been used as a buffer against potential concerted action by society's losers. He provides evidence that suggests that this might be the case (uncited eveidence, as this is a history written for a wide audience), but I didn't see conclusive proof of the grand conspiracy against the downtrodden. In many cases, Zinn quotes three of four people whose cases might mean they were victims of calculated exploitation.

The value of this book, in my eyes, is as a corrective of the great men, great country interpretation of US history that I was fed in middle school and high school. Every society, after all, is made up of a small minority of winners and a mass of losers. What Zinn does is that, by strongly suggesting that the US is no different than elsewhere, he deflates the notion that this is a special land.

The culture that might be considered an anomoly to what he sees in the US was the pre-Columbus Native American culture, which held most everything in common and was ignorant of monetary culture. So in a sense, Zinn weeps for a lost, ireetrievable past.

This a book that every educated person should know about and enjoy reading--for Zinn is a fine writer. It needs to be part of the discussion of US history.

The End of the Novel

There was a time, once, when a novelist’s examination of, and rumination over, the mind of her subject made some sense, but no longer. Tolstoy devoted hundreds of pages to the slow, painful, psychological demise of Anna Karenina, for example, as did Dostoevsky toward Raskolnikov. I am now thinking of Theodor Dreiser’s account of the slow descent ofHurstwood in Sister Carrie.
The point is not that the writer’s trade has diminished or that style has gone awry; it is a crisis of a poverty of subject. That is to say, a media-addled, morally indifferent subject simply isn’t worthy of anyone’s time—on the writing or reading end of things. There is simply no depth to the recent personality—why would there be? Gameboy and immediate gratification? The novel is the improper form for such an audience. The novelist should meet them on their own terms—the 140-character (as it currently stands) snippet of comment. The nuanced commentary is decaying fruit.
I was once a research librarian at a major university. In 1999, I found myself aghast at the indifference of graduate students to the possibilities that lay within the stacks. Whenever I fielded a question from a graduate student and pointed them to the dark, mystery-ridden floors of stacks of books that loomed behind me, “Nah,” they would reply, “Way back there? Anything on the web?” With that, we would make our way, the grad student waddling some distance behind me, toward the bank of computers that lined the walls of the coffee shop/library. I can only imagine what the students are like today.
People seeking the quick out, the immediate solution, are not worth study. Why would anyone write about them?

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.