Surely/ Surlily

1)
Fine Point (12-22-2008)
by John Updike

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel’s defeats—
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.


2)
from “Dialogue” (1929)
by Martin Buber

I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you”— so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.


3)
final verse of “Sugar Baby”
from “Love and Theft” (2001)
by Bob Dylan

Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one
You got a way of tearing a world apart, love, see what you done
Just as sure as we’re living, just as sure as you’re born
Look up, look up - seek your Maker – ‘fore Gabriel blows his horn


4)
from screenplay for “Doubt” (2008)
by John Patrick Shanley

FATHER FLYNN: There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. And I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.

Swelling the Rout

1) To an Athlete Dying Young, by A. E. Housman (1867)

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.


2) Ex-Basketball Player, by John Updike (1954)

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

St. Sebastian

1) St. Sebastian, Andrea Mantegna, 1480:

2) April 1968 cover of Esquire, designed by George Lois:

3) Screen shot from 1991 music video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," directed by Tarsem Singh:

4) Cover of Modest Mouse's 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News:

Can it be this sad design/ Could be the very same

1: Scene from “The Wheel,” first season finale of "Mad Men"

Don

What is the benefit of that thing?

Harry

Uh… it sells projectors to people who already have them?

Don

Yeah. The wheel. Stacks. You store your slides in it and it’s ready to go.

Harry

I took pictures for the paper at Wisconsin; the machinery is definitely part of the fun. It’s mechanical.

Don

What’d you take pictures of?

Harry

Girls, mostly. You could go up, and ask them their names afterward, like you were going to put it in the paper. And some other stuff. Artsy-craftsy stuff. They gave me hell about it.

Don

Artsy, like what, like: relfection of a tree in a pond?

Harry

Uh, worse. I did a whole series that was just handprints on glass. You know the way it fogs up around your heat? Take it off, take a picture.

Don

Black and white, I suppose.

Harry

Of course. I was always fascinated by the cave paintings at Lascaux. They’re, like, seventeen-thousand years old. And then bison get all the attention, but they are also all of these handprints, tiny by today’s standards, with paint blown all around them.

Don

Signature of the artist.

Harry

But I thought it was like someone reaching through the stone, right to us: I was here.

Don bobs his head, falling asleep.

Harry

Are you okay?

Don

That’ll be all.

2: From “First Impressions” by Judith Thurman
June 23, 2008 issue of the New Yorker

“Peoples who practice shamanism believe in a tiered cosmos: an upper world (the heavens); an underworld; and the mortal world. When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.”


3: Chorus of “The Caves of Altamira” by Steely Dan



Before the fall
when they wrote it on the wall
when there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
and they wrote it on the wall
for you and me, and we undersood

In a ca-a-a-fe, or sometimes on a crowded street

ONE: 

Review of “Jasmin et Cigarette”

by Chandler Burr

For Etat Libre d’Orange, whose store is north of Hôtel de Ville in Paris, Antoine Maisondieu has performed a masterful trick. With Etat’s creative director, Etienne de Swardt, he has taken two radically dissimilar concepts and balanced them so that they are perfectly integrated and astonishingly distinct. The first is a fragile, delicate jasmine (stripped of the dirty indolic heaviness that the flower usually leaves behind). The second is a pitch-perfect cigarette. Not the stink of a filthy ashtray. (That, says Maisondieu, an ex-smoker, is "disgusting”) This is the smell of an elegant Frenchwoman in a cafe whose grayish-white plume mixes with the chic jasmine fragrance she just sprayed on. His perfume is named Jasmin et Cigarette, and it is the quintessential French combination: allure and toxicity, loveliness and poison. I asked Maisondieu how he did it. "It’s simple,” he said with a shrug. "We all know how to do a jasmine: Egyptian and Indian jasmine absolutes, some Hedione” — a molecule that adds light to a perfume — "some benzyl acetate for softness.” He paused. "The cigarette was a bit more complicated.” He used to love unfiltered Chesterfields "in the soft box, which have a slight apricot.” So he used hay essence, tonka bean (a flavoring in tobacco), maté from South America, galbanum (a raw green) and sage. The result is a masterpiece: one hears laughter in the cafe, with the faint sound of music from somewhere else.

TWO:

“My Cherie Amour”

Stevie Wonder

THREE:

Scene from “Ocean’s Twelve” 

with Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones

Melody Chain

1) Cab Calloway as Koko the Clown singing “St. James Infirmary Blues”



2) Young woman lip-synching to Mates of State cover of Randy Newman song “Beehive State”



2.1) Young girl watching You Tube video of young woman lip-synching to Mates of State cover of Randy Newman song “Beehive State”



3) Bob Dylan singing “Blind Willie McTell”

Be seeing you!

1) From “Free for All” Episode No. 4(?) of The Prisoner

“Good morning! Good morning! Any complaints?”
“Yes. I’d like to mind my own business.”
“So do we. You fancy a chat?”
“The mountain can come to Mohammed!”
(Hangs up phone. Door opens.)
“Mohammed?”
“Everest, I presume?”
“I’ve never had a head for heights.”
“How’s Number 1?”
“At the summit.”

At 42:15, after Number 6 wins the election and becomes the new Number 2, he walks out to meet the citizens of village. They stare at him blankly, and the beneath the scene we hear, "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow/ The Bear Went Over the Mountain."


2) Ending of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro



Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.
She had a book open in her lap.
She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found. It’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. But I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up—I never wear yellow.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“Are we all checked out now?” she said. He thought the brightness of her voice was wavering a little. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at Grant for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags. All rags and loose threads.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to Grant like green stems in rank water.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, both sweetly and formally. She pinched his earlobes, hard.
“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull.
He said, “Not a chance.”

You Can Always Come Back, But You Can't Come Back All The Way

1) Home Is So Sad
by Philip Larkin



Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


2) From Act 1 of “The Cherry Orchard”
by Anton Chekhov



LUBOV. [Looks out into the garden] Oh, my childhood, days of my innocence! In this nursery I used to sleep; I used to look out from here into the orchard. Happiness used to wake with me every morning, and then it was just as it is now; nothing has changed. [Laughs from joy] It's all, all white! Oh, my orchard! After the dark autumns and the cold winters, you're young again, full of happiness, the angels of heaven haven't left you. . . . If only I could take my heavy burden off my breast and shoulders, if I could forget my past!


3) My City Was Gone
by The Pretenders
(slightly different example)



Well I went back to Ohio
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
Ay, oh, oh way to go, Ohio

Like the Hodge Conjecture?

1) Commercial for the Knowledge Generation Bureau




2) "What Do Women Want?" by Daniel Bergner

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

So close

ONE:



“Me and the Bean”
performed by Spoon
(final two lines):

I am your shadow in the dark/
I have your blood inside my heart.


TWO:



Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
(final two lines):

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

As the rain falls/ So does your love

1) From "Rain" by William Carlos Williams:

Unworldly love
that has no hope
of the world

and that
cannot change the world
to its delight--

The rain
falls upon the earth
and grass and flowers

come
perfectly

into form from its
liquid

clearness

But love is
unworldly

and nothing
comes of it but love

following
and falling endlessly
from
her thoughts

2) Passages from “Nettles” by Alice Munro:

"Stooping, butting his head through the weeds and against the wind, Mike got around in front of me, all the time holding on to my arm. Then he faced me, with his body between me and the storm. That made as much difference as a toothpick might have done. He said something, right into my face, but I could not hear him. He was shouting, but not a sound from him could reach me. He had hold of both my arms now, he worked his hands down to my wrists and held them tight. He pulled me down—both of us staggering, the moment we tried to make any change of position—so that we were crouched close to the ground. So close together that we could not look at each other—we could only look down, at the miniature rivers already breaking up the earth around our feet, and the crushed plants and our soaked shoes. And even this had to be seen through the waterfall that was running down our faces."

"Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t. Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal."

3) From “Buckets of Rain” by Bob Dylan:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets coming out of my ears.
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,
You got all the love, honey baby, I can stand.

The Laboratory

Every day when I pass the Frontier Building on A Street going to and from work, it reminds me of the images of galaxies taken by the Hubble Telescope.



Specifically, I imagine the millions of galaxies stuffed inside of a single glass building, which in turn reminds me of the recurring theory of a Hollow Earth, where certain astronomers, starting with Edmund Halley, wondered if the entire universe existed inside the Earth, rather than outside it.



Imagine Earth as a racquetball, with a hollow interior. The entire universe we see above us — the stars, the moon, the sun and the planets — all exists inside this hollowed out space.

We’re in there, too, because the curved surface of the Earth isn’t the outer curve of this ball, but the inner curve. In this theory, if one could fly, this traveler would be able to fly through the entire universe and land on the other side of the Earth, if that makes sense.

Outside the ball is nothing, I suppose. Or God, maybe.

This all in turn reminds me of the atomic nucleus. And then of The Powers of Ten. And then of "The Laboratory," by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.

The Laboratory

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there's a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel comes running in.
Oh, what sort of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

I first read that poem in this book. Weschler connects it to this painting, but the poem reminds me of this movie, released 10 years ago this summer.

Losing Idols

The Voxtrot song “Brother in Conflict” came on today. The last line of the song caught my attention. Ramesh Srivastava sings — screams, really, several times: “I had to lose my idols to find my voice/ lose my idols to find my voice/ lose my idols/ to find my voice.” Appropriate for someone who channeled Morrissey in early songs.

It reminded me of the Bob Dylan song/spoken word piece “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Dylan performed this at New York Town Hall on April 12, 1963.

It’s a eulogy, but not for Guthrie, who was still alive at this point. Dylan obvious owed a great deal of his early work to Guthrie. This was Dylan saying goodbye to that influence and moving on to something new.

They’re actually similar, the song and the poem. Both rattle off in lost lists: “And this, And this, And this.” It’s the like “The Exorcist”: “The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.” It takes a couple of shakes to get peanut butter off a spoon.

“The music is so much different and much more work-intensive than anything we've ever done before,” Srivastava told “the Austin Chronicle” last year. “You can accept the part of yourself that wants to write really accessible pop songs, and you can also accept the part of yourself that wants to write something a little more complex.”

The last seventeen lines of the Dylan poem:

Where do you look for this lamp that’s a burning
Where do you look for this oil well gushing
Where do you look for this candle that’s glowing
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You find God in the Church of you Choice
You find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
It may be right or wrong
You can find them both at the Grand Canyon at sundown.

Eric Clapton said this about Dylan and the poem: “He’s a poet. Basically he’s a poet. He does not trust his voice. He doesn’t trust his guitar playing. He doesn’t think he's good at anything, except writing—and even then he has self-doubts. Have you heard that thing he wrote about Woody Guthrie? That to me is the sum of his life’s work so far. Whatever happens, that is it. That sums it up.”

Clapton, of course, being the one who inspired people in London to write “Clapton is God” on subway walls.

All of which begs to reference Exodus 20:19-20: “God said to Moses, “So shall you say to the Children of Israel, ‘You have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven. You shall not make idols of Me; gods of silver and gods of gold shall you not make for yourselves.” Repeated several times (Exodus, Levitacus, Deuteronomy) of course.

You have to lose your idols to find your voice.

The moon in June, crazy as a loon

Crazy stories from the crazy world of space.

First, a space trash catastrophe in the works as thousands of tiny pieces of debris orbit Earth. When one of these pieces hits something larger — like an abandoned rocket — the collision creates more tiny pieces of debris. If this chain reaction reaches critical mass, space becomes too dangerous for new crafts.

Second, a space trash catastrophe in the works as one astronaut drives 1,000 miles to confront the girlfriend of her astronaut crush: “Nowak — who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer — was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak said she used so she wouldn't have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman's flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport's Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman's car and then doused her with pepper spray.”

Third, Google Copernicus Center is hiring.

Laugh all you want

NBC does not have a single show with a laugh track in its current line-up.

The laugh track is slowly being replaced by hand held cameras in comedies like “The Office,” a little bit in “30 Rock,” Fox’s now-canceled “Arrested Development,” and the drama “Friday Night Lights.”

This seems like a cultural moment. It’s a shift in the language of television.

The laugh track aids imagination by location. It allows the home audience to pretend to be somewhere else: part of the studio audience, watching actors play characters. The hand held camera effect aids imagination by content. It allows the home audience to pretend to watch real footage in the comfort of their own home.

Where viewers once wanted to be taken to a magical place, they now want to see magical glimpses of the real world, even if they aren’t real.

The next step is “life tracks”: underneath hand held footage would be the sounds of other living rooms. You’d hear people opening cans of soda, whispering about the action, making out, sitting in creaky chairs, gasping at shocking moments. Maybe a phone rings.

Eventually, audiences become sophisticated enough to follow concurrent plot lines: the visual one on screen and the audio one on the life track. The characters in the living room on the life track would have story lines, possibly relating to the shows they watch. Maybe the life tracks would be different from show to show.

The DVD commentary would be maddening: show, topped by life track, topped by commentary, topped by life track commentary. Television fans would be immediately recognizable on the street: they are the ones walking around with one eye off in space, muttering to themselves, trying to unravel that thick knot of information.

Listen to Elvis and Bach. Unless

For the past few days I’ve been listening to The Writer’s Almanac — a five-minute, daily broadcast hosted by Garrison Keillor featuring a short bit of literary history and a poem. Because I often have trouble concentrating, I often read along as I listen. And lately, I have noticed some really beautiful lessons pulled from the difference between poetry that is read and poetry that is heard.

For instance, today’s poem is “How to Live” by Charles Harper Webb:

How to Live

“I don’t know how to live.”
–Sharon Olds

Eat lots of steak and salmon and Thai curry and mu shu
pork and fresh green beans and baked potatoes
and fresh strawberries with vanilla ice cream.
Kick-box three days a week. Stay strong and lean.
Go fly-fishing every chance you get, with friends

who’ll teach you secrets of the stream. Play guitar
in a rock band. Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka,
Shakespeare, Twain. Collect Uncle Scrooge comics.
See Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and everything Monty Python made.
Love freely. Treat ex-partners as kindly

as you can. Wish them as well as you’re able.
Snorkel with moray eels and yellow tangs. Watch
spinner dolphins earn their name as your panga slam-
bams over glittering seas. Try not to lie; it sours
the soul. But being a patsy sours it too. If you cause

a car wreck, and aren’t hurt, but someone is, apologize
silently. Learn from your mistake. Walk gratefully
away. Let your insurance handle it. Never drive drunk.
Don’t be a drunk, or any kind of “aholic.” It’s bad
English, and bad news. Don’t berate yourself. If you lose

a game or prize you’ve earned, remember the winners
history forgets. Remember them if you do win. Enjoy
success. Have kids if you want and can afford them,
but don’t make them your reason-to-be. Spare them that
misery. Take them to the beach. Mail order sea

monkeys once in your life. Give someone the full-on
ass-kicking he (or she) has earned. Keep a box turtle
in good heath for twenty years. If you get sick, don’t thrive
on suffering. There’s nothing noble about pain. Die
if you need to, the best way you can. (You define best.)

Go to church if it helps you. Grow tomatoes to put store-
bought in perspective. Listen to Elvis and Bach. Unless
you’re tone deaf, own Perlman’s “Meditation from Thais.”
Don’t look for hidden meanings in a cardinal’s song.
Don’t think TV characters talk to you; that’s crazy.

Don’t be too sane. Work hard. Loaf easily. Have good
friends, and be good to them. Be immoderate
in moderation. Spend little time anesthetized. Dive
the Great Barrier Reef. Don’t touch the coral. Watch
for sea snakes. Smile for the camera. Don’t say “Cheese.”


This poem is very authoritative, but avoids being patronizing through charm and wisdom. Hear it without reading it, though, and you miss a harsh written line like that one is the sixth stanza — “on suffering. There’s nothing noble about pain. Die.” — which is actually part of three separate sentences, but reads on the page like one of the aphorisms that make up the poem.

Read alone, that line would be curt and cruel (you can imagine a colon after, “on suffering” and the word “already” stuck at the end), but reintegrated back into poem, the line is a plea for appropriateness: suffering is a symptom, not a reason for living. And that is what the poem is about, anyway, a measured life where one extreme is tempered with the other: Elvis with Bach, eating vanilla ice cream with staying strong and lean. Work hard. Loaf easily.

Or this one, from October 16:

“Before I Was Born” by Linda S. Buckmaster

Before I Was Born

She waits
on the corner of Broad Street and
Oregon Ave., Benny Goodman’s clarinet
slipping out of the radio at Tony’s
each time a customer opens
the door. They go in
and out again, and still
he hasn’t come. Twenty past
seven and now they’ll never
make the show.
Streetlights blink on.
She bends to straighten
the seam of her stocking.
She doesn’t know that this
will be her life.


Line six — “the door. They go in” — reads like stage directions, but also an imagining (when “he” arrives, “they” will go into the show). Line twelve — “She bends to straighten” — uses opposites to mock the action; bending to straighten equals dressing up for no one.

And then the master, William Carlos Williams:

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot


A poem that would be almost meaningless without line-breaks.

Top of the Heap

Someone is sketching me right now, while I work. He’s either sketching me, or the band behind me. Normally, it would be wise to assume that he’s sketching the band; they are far more interesting. However, two or three times I looked up and he was staring at me, and each time, he flashed a devilish grin and quickly looked away.

And now that I can see a bit of his sketch pad, I can tell I’m right: he finished the top of my forehead and it has my characteristic scowl I get while working, a muscular twitch often confused with deep thinking. Many have called it “the dead stare.”

No creative person wants to be the subject; that means someone else has a broader perspective. That’s why I’m writing about him while he’s drawing me. (I’m hoping that one of the dozens of people around with laptops has not noticed this silly game and one-upped the both of us).

Newspapers are like this, too. When a publication effectively and convincingly writes about media, it somehow transcends the muddle in the middle, and comes off as a journal of great authority.

Joan Didion, in The White Album, writes about this perspective while visiting Nancy Reagan at the California Governor’s Mansion. Several television crews keeps rearranging the former First Lady, asking her to fake nipping a bud for a better shot. Didion considers taking one step back, and writing about the whole process, rather than just Nancy Reagan and her flower bed.

In 1999, Frank Rich wrote a long, lead story for The New York Times Magazine — American Pseudo — going behind-the-scenes of The Talented Mr. Ripley for an article about identity. A few years later, The New Yorker published a long piece on a Hollywood power agent, and casually mentioned how the Rich piece came to be, as well as the terms of the agreement.

(Woe that my books are all in boxes, or surely I would have included fascinating quotations from all these essays).

(While I tried to get these sentences readable, the guy stopped sketching and left).

Overheard at the JCC II

“You didn’t take a steam today.”
(Long pause)
“Eh?”
“I know you didn’t go to the steam room today.”
“You’re a detective, now?”
“You left your gym bag out after your shower. That’s how I know.”
“I have a meeting to get to.”
“What kind of meeting would you have?”

Overheard at the JCC

“Richard! How are you?”
“Good. Good.”
“Listen, Richard, how did those tests go?”
“They went well.”
“You don’t sound enthused.”
“Well, my doctor said I need to increase my caloric intake. I lost 25 pounds, you know.”
“That’s great. Let’s get lunch.”

The Most Baller Bleep Ever

There is this commercial for Amp’d Mobile where a young man defends his choice of cell phone by saying, “It just has cooler ‘bleep.’” I use the bleep not out of modesty. That’s how it played, and it was surprising. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen on a prime time commercial before. Then, a few days later, I heard it again on a radio commercial, where a girl says, “Oh ‘bleep,’ that’s my jam.”

The bleep started as a genuine response to possible swearing on television and radio, but quickly became something of its own. First, it became a euphemism for other swear words (like the recent movie “What The Bleep Do We Know?”). That is how some people who don’t swear make their point — it ends up sounding wrong, like when sitcoms use “butt” when “ass” is clearly more appropriate.

The Amp’d effect works, though, because it allows the commercial to have it both ways; they can have the character look hip and authentic by swearing, but not actually swear and get the company in trouble. Now, like the Parental Advisory sticker on CDs, or the blank word in pop songs — see Gwen Stefani “It’s my shh.” — the bleep has street cred. It’s self-censoring without having to say “butt” when you mean “ass.”

When South Park started using the bleep, the effect started to lose its value. For a narrative, fictional series — animated no less — to choose a bleep over a script change highlights the word as much as it covers it up. South Park made their intentions even more clear in the episode “It Hits the Fan,” where they lampooned Chicago Hope or NYPD Blue’s use of “shit” in one episode (and the resulting media storm) by using the word 162 times. They also bleep straight characters that say “fag,” but not gay characters. Chappelle’s Show does it too. VHS and DVD sales have allowed South Park to bleep the words on TV and keep them in home sales; which has a result similar to the Amp’d Mobile commercial.

This reminds me of a technique in jazz that also emphasizes through absence. Instead of playing a given note in the melody, the musician will play notes around the note, in the same scale as the note or near that note, but not the actual note.

There is a Bob Dylan song called “Mississippi”” with the line “I was thinking ‘bout the things that Rosie said/ I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.” I always thought the line was “I was thinkin’ about the things that roses had.” I like my lyrics better — no offense meant — and whenever I hear the song now, I think about petals and thorns (although they never appear in the song).

Jacques Lacan, a French pschyoanalyst, described this as the objet petit a, or “The Little Object,” which is the unattainable object of desire. The trick is that pleasure comes from that objet petit a rather than the actual experience. For instance, he argues, seeing someone in their underwear is more pleasurable than seeing them naked, or the hints of a movie monster are scarier than actually seeing it. Not hearing the “right” note or seeing the “right” word creates a desire for what was never there. Hearing a bleep makes you think about swear words.