Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Wicked Wednesday Meets Throwback Thursday

One of the pleasures of having built up a body of written work over the years is scrolling about in the Documents section and finding forgotten masterpieces.  OK, maybe not masterpieces - but things that I had fun writing.  This is a little gem from that day period of American history known as the Dubya Years.  I was writing a collection of children's verse à la Roald Dahl about Awful Adults - the Dentist, the Creepy Soccer Coach, the Evil Substitute Teacher - when it occurred to me that the most Awful Adult of them all was in charge of running the country.  Here, without further ado, is my ode to the George W. Bush era.

Our Country’s Leader


Our teacher, Mrs. Futter, sent
A letter to the President.
And therefore, she is taking us
To visit him upon the bus.
We pull up at the White House gate
And there is a protracted wait;
They make us all take off our shoes
And ask if anyone has booze.
We’re poked and frisked by six inspectors
And prodded through metal detectors.
And now, we’re in the White House.  Wow.
We go, “So, are we leaving now?
“What do you mean?” cries Mrs. Futter.
Her voice becomes a strangled sputter –
“Our President!” she croaks.  We push,
We crane our necks – we stare.  There’s Bush!
Our eyes pop, for our Prez is wearing
An army helmet, and he’s bearing
A basket full of plastic guns.
He hollers, “You must be the ones
Who’re here today to play ‘Iraq’!
These are the rules.  I’ll say ‘Attack!’
I’m gonna give you each a gun –
Boy! Are we gonna have some fun!”

I’m thinking, “Help!  Our President
Should really be a resident
Of Bellevue.  Geez, the guy is nuts!”
Then Bush leaps up.  He runs and shuts
The double door, and we are trapped.
Is this a nightmare?  Have I napped
Too long?  Please, tell me it’s not real!
But no.  He waves his gun with zeal
And shouts, “Weapons of mass destruction
Are in Iraq!  It’s my deduction
That war will lead to reconstruction
Of my financial state.  Obstruction
Makes you a traitor to the cause!”

There is a lengthy, pregnant pause.

We look around.  Can we get out? 
But then our leader starts to pout.
He yells, “If you won’t play with me,
You’ll all be sorry – wait and see!”
“All right, all right!” we say. “We’ll play!”
He grabs Monique and yells, “Hooray!
Okay, Saddam, I’ve captured you!”
Monique looks horrified as two
Large G-men grab her by the arm.
They drag her out, and our alarm
Is growing.  What will he do next?
For now our President looks vexed.

He scowls and mutters, “I’m afraid,
That someone stole my hand grenade!
And when I find out which of you
Is the repulsive stinker who
Has done it, I’ll be plungin’
Your sorry ass into a dungeon.”

Then Mrs. Futter finds her voice –
She says, “You leave me little choice.
Although I harbor deep respect
For government, I must object!
I fear that it would not be prudent
For us to leave without a student.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bush yells.  “You can go first!
‘Cause everybody knows the worst
Liberal traitors work in schools!
You think Republicans are fools?”
He buzzes, and the G-man geek
Drags Futter off to join Monique.

So now, we’re getting really scared –
The presidential brain’s impaired.
He rubs his hands.  “So!  Let’s play war!
There’s nothing quite as nice as gore!
I don’t mean Al – I pity schnooks
Who spend their lifetimes reading books.”
He glares at us.  “You’re in fifth grade.
Don’t tell me that your teacher made
You read.  I’m glad that she’s in jail!”
We see his loony eyes and quail.

“Oh, man!” I think.  “We need to leave!”
I look at my best buddy, Steve
And try to tell him with my eyes
“We have to take Bush by surprise!”
He nods.  My buddy Steve is brave –
I see his hand begin to wave.
He says, “Uh – Mr. President?
You know, a soldier needs a tent.
Let’s go out on the White House lawn,
Put up some tents, and then at dawn
We’ll be all rested, fit, and ready
To grab our guns and hold them steady.
We’ll save those oil fields, just you wait.”

Bush beams at us.  He hollers, “Great!”
He opens up the double door
And right away starts frowning, for
There stands the guy who took Monique
With two long scratch-marks down his cheek.
He whimpers, “Boss, it’s not my fault!
I tried to stick her in the vault!
The kid fought like a trained guerilla –
I mean, the girl is a Godzilla!”

Bush answers with great irritation
“Well, never mind right now.  The nation
Depends on us to tame that beast
That some folks call the Middle East.”

“Yes, Sir!” Steve snaps with a salute.
“And all us kids are now in boot
Camp. Let us hear your orders!”
“Terrific!”  Bush yells.  “Storm the borders!”

We cheer like mad, and then we race
To the secluded parking place
Where last we saw our yellow bus.
We bang the door.  Our driver, Gus
Opens it up and says “Your friend
Monique is crouched down at the end
Behind the seats.  She won’t say why.”
We tell him, “Thanks, Gus.  Look – no lie –
We’re good to go – Ms. Futter’d rather
Walk school.  She says don’t bother
Waiting, ’cause she thinks her thighs
Could use a little exercise."
Gus revs the motor. “Okey-doke!”
We take off in a cloud of smoke;
And though our bus burns too much gas
And as we leave the grounds, we pass
Our teacher, who begins to wail
And cry, “Don’t make me go to jail!”
And though our country’s being shafted –
At least we have escaped un-drafted.


Tuesday, February 25, 2014

When Life Gives You Lemons, Squirt Someone in the Eye*

Last week an event of a personal nature occurred that left me in some distress, the upshot being that I lost my appetite.  Nothing edible appealed, and when 24 hours had come and gone and still all that I wanted was coffee and a down comforter to crawl under, it struck me that I could turn this situation to advantage by buying some lemons and cayenne pepper and calling it the Lemon Juice Cleanse.

This plan had the dual advantage of parrying inquiries from worried family members and friends as to what in the world was wrong with me ("Nothing!") and probably resulting in the shedding of a few unwanted pounds.  On top of which - it was cheap.  I already had the most expensive ingredient - Grade B maple syrup, which we buy in gallon jugs every summer when we're up in Vermont.  The jugs are lined up in the kitchen next to the ironing board, making us look like hillbilly moonshiners with a still stashed away in the bathtub.

A cursory glance at the websites extolling the Lemon Juice Cleanse revealed that it is better known as the Master Cleanse, which to me sounds unpleasantly like something that might involve high colonics and a whip. I decided that I was going to continue to think of it as the Lemon Juice Cleanse, which is more evocative of Victorian ladies giving their tresses a lemon rinse so they'll be all fragrant and glossy.  It also revealed that I wasn't allowed to drink coffee, and that I was supposed to buy laxative tea ("No, and no"); also, that I must insist on organic lemons, organic cayenne pepper, and filtered water, preferably bought - at considerably higher prices than one is generally accustomed to paying for water and cayenne pepper - from the designers of the websites I was consulting.

Being me, I shrugged, drank my two cups of triple-shot-espresso-machine coffee, augmented by healthy, unmeasured glugs of Trader Joe soy creamer, filled up the Pura water dispenser I'd bought at a yard sale, and walked a block to the little Korean vegetable market that sells lemons at 3/$1.00 and two ounce bottles of La Flor cayenne pepper with a little red rose on the label right next to the claim that it's "HOT!" for $2.59.

Which all goes to show you that even when I try to be pure, I don't want to be as pure as all that.

So here we are on Day 5 of No Food, which is also Day 4 of No Food Plus Spicy Lemonade, and thus far, no complaints, except that I'm kind of tired.  The lemon concoction, which looks like you've bought pink lemonade from the sidewalk vendor that your mother shooed you away from when you were six because there was pigeon poo on the umbrella and the man who was counting out the change had dirt under all ten of his fingernails, is not unpleasant.  It goes down with a hint of burn to the throat and hits the empty stomach with an affable warmth reminiscent of whiskey - not good whiskey, to be sure, but after all, let's remember that I didn't spring for the organic stuff.  Since the weather has now taken a turn for COLD again, I'm microwaving my Elixir of Health, which probably destroys the whole shebang even worse than my non-organic transgressions, but again - being me, I don't care.  Hot or cold, it's palatable and, for whatever reason, I don't feel hungry.

The most interesting thing, to me, is the reinforcement of what I have always thought of as the American Diet Mystique. According to the Online Webster's, mystique means:  1. an air or attitude of mystery and reverence developing around something or someone  2.  the special esoteric skill essential in a calling or activity.

If you suddenly stop eating and say only in explanation, "I have emotional stuff going on, and have, for the time being, lost my appetite; I do not know when it will be back," you will quickly find yourself surrounded by people who want to know what's wrong with you, what your therapist has to say about it, whether you would consider attending a support group for persons with an eating disorder, and whether you've ever heard of Karen Carpenter.

Add some lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne to the mix, however, and suddenly you have dignified your loss of appetite into the Holy Grail of Cleansing.  No longer are you a sulker or a poor sport.  No longer are you exhorted to "get over it."   Instead, you are now an apogee of self-denial, a martyr to mens sana in corpore sano.  You have triumphantly surpassed even the Raw Vegan Fruitarians in the "Let's Think Up More Things We Can Refuse to Eat" Olympics.  Know what medieval society called people who refused to eat and in consequence got all weird and light-headed and saw visions after a few days? Saints, that's what they called them.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Hey, don't take my word for it. Here's St. Jerome on the subject of "No, thanks, not for me, I've had enough":

Of my food and drink I say nothing: for, even in sickness, the solitaries have nothing but cold water, and to eat one’s food cooked is looked upon as self-indulgence . . . My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting; yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead . . . Now, if such are the temptations of men who, since their bodies are emaciated with fasting, have only evil thoughts to fear, how must it fare with a girl whose surroundings are those of luxury and ease? 

According to St. Jerome, whose description of "a girl whose surroundings are those of luxury and ease" fits me like Rita Hayworth's black satin elbow glove, I can look forward to this lemon juice thing ultimately leading to getting incredibly horny, which will be interesting, to say the least, and I only hope I won't fall over in bed due to weakened limbs and muscle loss when it happens.  I should certainly like to know whether this effect was experienced by Beyonce Knowles, and I'm sure others would like to know that, too.

Ms. Knowles, in case you had missed the news, is more or less the poster girl for the Master Cleanse Diet, and pops up on every website that tells you how to mix up the hell-broth; according to her, she stuck it out for 14 days, while everybody around her tortured her by sucking up strands of pasta and telling her to keep it up, she was doing great.  Of course, I do not have the same incentive to persevere as Beyonce Knowles, since an invitation to dance onstage in my scanties at the Grammy Awards has been inexplicably absent from my mailbox.

When I mentioned Beyonce's achievement - two weeks on dirty lemonade and laxatives - to my husband, he regarded me evenly, carefully weighing his next words, then said gently,  "Well, that's remarkable.  But you're not Beyonce."

Which, while entirely true, sent me diving under the covers once again, to sulk another day.  It did say on the website that I might have mood swings.



* Title by Cathy Guisewite

Sunday, February 23, 2014

A Vision Zero for You

It is raining fiercely on a late morning in the Spring of 2002.  I am crossing 79th Street and Central Park West, walking north, my kindergartner's hand and a cheap umbrella clutched in my right hand, the tiny damp fist of his classmate held securely in my left.  We are on a school field trip to the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in Central Park.  The rain is the kind that comes driving slantwise under your umbrella.  We are hurrying across, the last of the kindergarten class in this hasty straggle to make the light and get across two double lanes of traffic to the safety of the sidewalk on the north side of 79th Street.

We are not quite up to the double yellow line yet, and cars are zooming past us, making that westbound turn off Central Park West.  The weather sucks; everybody's in a hurry.  I can see the rest of the kindergarten class, the teachers, the other moms who are chaperoning the field trip, waiting for us on the sidewalk.

Then it happens.  A furious gust of wind rips my two-dollar umbrella out of my hand, and I automatically drop my child's hand to make a grab as it flies ahead of us. All this happens in under a second.  In that same second, I realize I have lost something far more important than my umbrella - I've lost hold of my six year old son.

I panic. I try to grab my child, but his hand isn't where it's supposed to be.  In my terror, my left hand loosens its grasp on the other boy - the boy I am responsible for, the child of two other parents, the child I am supposed to get safely to the marionette show.

I am looking wildly left and right, trying to seize both children at once.  The other parents and the teachers on the sidewalk are screaming.  Is it the screaming that alerts the drivers, slows the cars down long enough for save us?  I don't know.  I will never know.  All I know is that somehow, I've grabbed those two little hands, and somehow we are all on safely the sidewalk.

I do not remember anything about the puppet show.  I only remember sitting in my seat, completely limp, thinking over and over again:

My life almost changed forever today.

I thought I had understood how lucky I was that no one was killed that day.  I thought I'd grasped what it would have been like, trying to explain to that other child's family that a moment of bad judgment on my part had cost them the life of their son.  Trying to explain to my own family that, in that instant, I chose saving a two dollar umbrella over protecting the life of my child.  Trying not to blame myself, each and every day for the rest of my life, for the deaths of two children for whom I had assumed responsibility.  I was wrong.

It is February 2013.  My husband (my son's stepfather) and I are sitting numbly at a meeting of bereaved parents.  It has been a little more than three months since his daughter, who was my stepdaughter, died at the age of 23.  No - not a traffic fatality.  But now I know in my gut what it means to lose a child.

A new family comes into the meeting.  I hate it when a new family comes in.  It means that now someone else is going through that specialized agony reserved only for parents of a child who has died.  You can always tell in our support group when parent have just lost their child.  They have that look you've felt on your own face, right after you heard the news.  Completely shattered.  Can't even speak.  Scorched earth.  Broken, beaten down beyond all possible hope of repair.  

These people are brave.  They manage to choke out what happened to their daughter. Ella was 23 years old, same age as our girl.  Hit by a bus at the most notorious intersection in Bushwick - an intersection that has been the subject of traffic safety studies for literally decades, because so many pedestrians have been struck by cars there, most of them just injured - just! - others, killed.  Their daughter?  Beautiful.  Gifted.  Recently graduated from college.  A dancer.  Setting her sights on grad school. Bright, bright future. Not now. Not ever again.

We become friends.  Bereaved parents share an unusual bond.  The bond of suffering that is never going away.  The bond of getting up every day wondering what it is we're getting up for.  The bond of thinking it's nothing out of the ordinary to feel like your own death is looking pretty good - a consummation devoutly to be wished.  But - there are those other people who love you in your life, and you don't want them to feel the way you feel every single day.  You wouldn't wish this kind of hell on anybody. There's just nobody in the world you could hate enough, to wish this sort of thing on them, too.

Months roll past.  We keep breathing.  We go to work.  We cook food and eat it, even when we have no appetite.  They do the same.  

In the fall, another family comes in.  This time, the dead girl, Renee, is only 16.  Only 16, but she was working to save up for college.  Not yet out of her junior year of high school, she was a superstar scholar, already being recruited by Howard University and a slew of other colleges; all the signs were that she was on her way to becoming a writer of note.  Bright, bright future.  Not now.  Not ever again.  Her life was crushed out by a semi coming off the 59th Street Bridge exit up Third Avenue.  It is common knowledge, we learn, that accidents happen here all the time, because traffic is heavy and the trucks are in a hurry.  Her father tells my husband that the paramedics who tried to save his daughter told him that her last word was "Daddy."

Since then, it's gotten worse.  Allison - a three year old girl in Queens, crossing the street holding her grandmother's hand.  They had the light.  Sammy - a twelve year old boy Brooklyn boy, hit by a speeding van on Prospect Park West.  A hideous ten day period in my own Upper West Side neighborhood in which Alexander Shear, a 73 year old man, killed by a bus on 96th Street and Broadway - and, less than two hours later Cooper, a 9 year old boy crossing West End Avenue at 97th Street, killed by a taxi that failed to yield while making a left turn.  Cooper was hand-in-hand with his father, and they had the light.  A few days later, it's Samantha, a first-year anesthesiology resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, who tried to cross West 96th Street in front of her own building. The ambulance that hit her with its rearview mirror stayed at the scene, as did the Dodge Charger that also struck her. Neither driver was charged.

February 23, 2014.  Today.  I buy an extra-thick marker and some posterboard, make up my sign - a list of names - and take the subway to City Hall.  A new group has been formed in support of the mayor's Vision Zero campaign to eliminate traffic fatalities in New York City.  The group is called Families for Safe Streets.  Ella's parents are speaking.  So are Sammy's mother and father.  Allison's parents are there to speak on her behalf.  Renee is being represented by her big brother.  Her mother and father have spoken at other press conferences to urge for legislation that would reduce speed limits, install speed bumps, provide better visibility at intersections, and, above all, enforce greater accountability on the part of the drivers.  But today they are exhausted.  They didn't sleep last night.  This is nothing new; I understand that completely.  When your child is dead, you lie awake at night.  You lie there wondering what would have happened if only your child had gotten that nanosecond's grace, luck, whatever it would have been, that would have left them shaken, but alive.  You're wondering why that didn't happen.  You're wondering why there are no second chances.  And it leaves you unable to get up and act like all the other people, the normal people, the people who don't have a dead child to think about at night.  And so it's up to Renee's brother to ask that unanswerable question - Why did my sister and all these others have to give up the rest of their lives, so that some driver could get wherever he was going a little faster?  

I stand on the steps of City Hall, holding up my sign, surrounded by hundreds of others holding up signs calling for reduced speed limits that read TWENTY IS PLENTY.  There was a time I would have said, "Twenty miles per hour is plenty? Are you kidding me?  This is New York - we've got to get there!"

I would not say that now.

Do you think, because no one in your immediate circle has died in a traffic-related accident, that this is not your issue?

Ella.  Renee.  Allison.  Sammy.  Alexander. Cooper.  Samantha.  And this is not even a complete list of all the people who died because they were struck by a vehicle in New York City in just the last 12 months.  Not one of those who died, not one of their families, had any reason to think, on the day of their death, that New York City pedestrian safety was ever going to be their issue.  Any more than I was thinking about it, the day I was rushing through a downpour to get to the puppet show.

Now, I ask again.  Do you still think that this is not your issue?

Do you, or the people you love, ever cross the street?


Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A Wednesday of Wicked Witticism

I was just getting the bit between my teeth and setting out for a good gallop through the steeplechase of Books to Read During A Blizzard, when suddenly the temperature skyrocketed to forty degrees, the snow turned to puddles, and I realized that today is Wednesday and therefore Wicked, and I must cudgel my brain to think of something salacious to instruct and entertain you little rascals.

We've had two weeks of Double Dactyls, and I'm not really feeling the Lascivious Limericks thing today. Writing a dirty limerick always makes me feel uncomfortably as though I might be turning into Isaac Asimov, which then sends me running to the mirror to make sure I have not sprouted a pair of large, tufty, grizzled eyebrows that waggle up and down like Groucho's above a pair of Geeky Black Horn-rims (not to speak of the equally grizzled mutton-chop facial hair, which is just unspeakably bad.)  So - in the interest of keeping me out of the laser hair removal spa, we will eschew limericks for the day.

How, then, shall we indulge in our Weekly Wickedness?

Sheer alliteration made me think that perhaps I'd write a little disquisition on Wit.  I have, of course, numerous favorite examples of the witty riposte, and can quote them on the instant, given a momentary conversational pause while you are drawing in your breath to say, "Please don't."

But what is wit?  (Do not, at your peril, come back at me with, "I dunno. Whut's wit choo?")  What constitutes the difference between the flash of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rapier - when asked with a leer by George Bernard Shaw what her new husband was like, Mrs. Pat serenely retorted, "Six foot four, and everything in proportion" - and the clumsy cudgel of your Uncle Melvin, who thinks he's slaying them when he gets drunk at the rehearsal dinner and loudly demands that the waitress, to whose person he has already attempted to administer a surreptitious pinch, fetch him a "honeymoon salad.  Know what that is? Lettuce alone, without dressing!"?

Of all the definitions I've encountered, none has ever seemed to sum it up as well as dear Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:


True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.

"What of was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" - well, there you have it.

I thought I would have a private little Googlefest to see whether I could find a website that would teach everyone how to be witty, so that our future conversations would be delightful fun in the style of the Algonquin Round Table, and all I would have to do from now on, in order to write one hit screenplay after another, would be to invite people over and turn on the tape recorder, later transcribing everything onto my laptop once everyone had gone home and the dishes were in the dishwasher.  But this plan hit a snag, for I came across a website with the promising title:
"How To Have A Witty Conversation."

http://www.wikihow.com/Have-a-Witty-Conversation


This site provides seven simple steps that are supposed to turn you into a twenty-first century edition of Dorothy Parker.  Bizarrely, immediately after Step One: "Listen Well," there is an ad in the exact same font as the rest of the Witty Advice, admonishing you, "Don't File Bankruptcy," and for a second I thought that was Step Two.  Which actually wouldn't have been too bad, since there is nothing particularly witty about filing for bankruptcy, unless you can toss off some clever remark, as you climb to the roof of your building, about how it's raining hedge fund managers because Black Monday is here again.

But then I scrolled down and discovered the real Step Two, "Use Creative and Vivid Exaggeration."  There is a picture of a girl in a purple shirt who is crossing her eyes and pointing at her nose with both forefingers.  Which is mystifying, until you read the example of the bon mot that has just supposedly been uttered:

Let's say your friend is telling you how cross-eyed his teacher is. You can say, in response, "She's so cross-eyed that when she cries, the tears run down her back!"

I almost didn't have the heart to read on, but the horrid fascination that makes me draw closer to that thing on the pavement the dog is straining towards, to see whether or not it really is squashed rat (invariably, it is), made me go on to Step Three: "Use Puns."  


Let's take the example from the previous step: "...the tears run down her back." If you're feeling witty, and there happens to be a stethoscope laying around, because you always carry around a stethoscope with you, hold it up mimicking a doctor and say "Evidently a case of bacteria!"
If you have to say "get it... back-tear-ia?" then you need to work on your delivery.

As if that were not enough, I was advised to pillage the works of Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, and old M*A*S*H* episodes for delectable plays on words with which I would bludgeon my family and friends about the ears, like a Ritalin-crazed jester with an inflated pig's bladder.  Obviously, the shtick with the stethoscope is going to be easier to pull off if you're quoting Hawkeye and Trapper John.

Now we come to Step Four: "Use Metaphors!"

Let's say someone says, out of the blue, "It's 6 o'clock!" You can say "Thank you, Big Ben!" ("Big Ben" is a nickname for a giant bell in a clock in London.) This is a particularly sarcastic example, because you're also implying (by saying "thank you") that you're obviously not thankful!

At this point, I became so discouraged by the knowledge that the writer of this article is convinced that it is necessary to tell Aspiring Wits like me that Big Ben is giant bell on a large municipal clock in  London (that's the London that's in England that's in Europe, f.y.i.) that it struck me, much in the way that Big Ben strikes the hour (in 1949,the clock slowed by four and a half minutes after a flock of starlings perched on the minute hand - a witty allusion, on the part of the starlings, to Sir Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey - "I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. 'I can't get out,' said the starling"), that I am never, no, never, going to be witty in the manner outlined by this writer, that I decided I might as well stop right now and go do something useful, like tat some lace.

As John Donne, the metaphysical poet, sermonist, and subject of the play Wit observed, "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. "

Gentle Reader - if the clod who wrote "How to Have a Witty Conversation" be washed away by the sea, those bells are gonna be pealing, not tolling.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Snow White and the Shaggy Dog Story

You know how you feel when somebody tells you the same stupid joke for the fortieth time, and the weak smiles you used to muster up out of sheer politeness have given way to stone-faced impassivity, which only makes them tell you that same stupid joke for the forty-first time, only now they are digging you in the ribs with an elbow and shrieking, "Get it?!"

Well, that was how I felt when I looked out the window this morning and saw that it was snowing again.

My way of coping with the overabundance of snow has been to read a lot of novels, stories and poems that deal with snowfalls worse than what NYC has been coping with this winter.  Of course, I could just go online and read the Minnesota newspapers - or, for that matter, Atlanta's - but I have ever been one who must interpret my personal reality through the lens of literature.  So, on the umpteenth day that I found myself snowed in with a lot of good books as my only solace (the leftover Christmas candy having run out some time before) I turned to some of the following to remind myself that I'm not the only one it ever snowed on. So until this meteorological nonsense stops, I shall hold forth,  in no particular order, on a couple of works by snowbound writers, some of  whom were clearly clearly tapping their toes to mental strains of Old Blue Eyes as they tapped at their typewriter keys. (Sinatra link below. I must say, I could do without the Triscuits ad, but the images of buried cars and people with shovels and runny noses that accompany the jaunty melody are depressingly familiar.)

Jack London: The Call of the Wild  and  White Fang

Jack London evokes Man vs. Nature with brutal clarity and impeccable powers of description, only he does it from the point of view of Dog vs. Nature.  I had only once before read The Call of the Wild, and it left a vague impression upon me that I didn't want to read it again.  I read it again anyway, and then I remembered why I'd had trouble with it the first time around.  White Fang is hard to take if you are a dog lover.  The Call of the Wild is flat-out impossible.  The abuse endured by the heroic dog Buck, kidnapped from his California home and viciously forced into a life of servitude as a sled dog in the Klondike Gold Rush, is vividly evoked, and the fact that he's left alive and ultimately fades into legend at the end of the book does nothing to mitigate the horrors he and the many, many, many dogs who die in its harrowing course suffer.  My 1926 copy is perfectly beautiful, with gorgeously tinted illustrations of the kind they don't produce anymore, gold stamped titles on the spine and blind-stamped pine tree motifs on the front board, and I doubt I will ever open it again.  How they decided this was a suitable book for children is beyond me.  But then, some people think Der Struwwelpeter is a jolly little bedtime story, too.

White Fang has been a favorite of mine for many years.  For one thing, there's a fairly happy ending: After years of misery and abuse at the hands of a fiendish owner who pits White Fang - 3/4 wolf and 1/4 dog - in death matches against any number of dogs, wolves, and wildcats in the melee of the Gold Rush Klondike, White Fang is saved from savagery and despair, tamed by the Love of a Good Man (I can identify with him right there) and retires to a life of cushy abundance in sunny California (and here, alas, my identification ends.)

In the book's opening chapters, a starving pack of wolves (one of them - the reddish female - will become White Fang's mother) relentlessly pursues two prospectors toiling across the frozen tundra to bring the body of a third back to civilization for decent burial, in the process losing all of the sled dogs and one of the prospectors to the ravening maws of the wolves (and thus anticipating the central macabre joke of As I Lay Dying by 24 years.) In the following passage, all but two of the sled dogs have been eaten, and so has the other prospector; the body they'd set out to transport has been lashed to the topmost limbs of a tree so that the wolves won't get it; and the sole surviving man is desperately trying to stay awake, encircled by a bonfire he dares not let die out, lest he become yet another Beggin' Strip to the rapacious predators.

As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly, now one at a time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realization would strike him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance to him.

He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued she-wolf before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them. She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned her look. There was nothing threatening about her. She looked at him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.

A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to throw at her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was used to having things thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf. Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.

I defy any of you to read that passage without looking at your own hand and flexing your fingers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGRC2LYmHfU






Sunday, February 16, 2014

When to Drink From Your Finger Bowl, or: The Art of the Comment

The Miracle of Facebook and the invention of the Blog has given us many joys, and considerable agita. What could be more delightful than reconnecting with long-lost high school friends? (Especially since you can post an old profile picture that doesn't reveal that you have not gotten to the gym in a while.) What fun it is to have pen pals in exotic lands, without the hassle of going to the post office to buy expensive airmail stamps! True, philately has suffered a blow from which it will never recover.  But what of that?  You now have the satisfaction of knowing instantly, upon arising and reaching for your Smartphone, what your friend in Sweden had for breakfast, and shortly thereafter delighting him with the information that you, too, have consumed pancakes - although, as you take pains to explain, American pancakes are fluffier than their Swedish counterparts, so you didn't really have the same breakfast.  You never have to wait to find out that your friend in Bora Bora has had her eighth baby, that it's another girl, and  that they have named her something truly terrible because they already used up all the good names on the other seven.  Well - the other six.  You didn't like what they named the last one, either.

But my point is - if you are still receiving newscasts from these people, then you are still on their Friends list. And how does one remain on the Friends list, so as to go on receiving these scintillating bits of information?

That, Gentle Reader, is the subject of today's column.  To stay on the Friends list, you must cultivate tact. You must become sensitive to nuance, and learn the art of inference - and, on occasion, the art of artifice.  In short, you must learn to tailor the tone of your comment to the prevailing standard.  Whether or not you are that apogee of over-analysis known as an English Major, it is imperative that you learn to read between the lines.

Think of Facebook as an infinite series of dinner parties, to which you have a standing invitation by virtue of your Friendship (real or virtual) with the host or hostess - i.e., the person who owns the page to which you want to append a comment.  Some of these dinner parties may be formal.  Others are raucous affairs, involving greasy pizza cartons, beer kegs and Jello shots.  Then there are those ghastly dinners at which somebody starts talking about politics, and everybody argues vehemently for three hours without changing anybody else's mind or yielding an inch, while the croquettes adhere to the plates in gummy, congealing pools of gravy and the hostess begs, with ever-increasing plaintiveness, to know whether anyone would care to step into the living room for coffee?

And how do we know what standard our host or our hostess, the titular owner of the Facebook page hosting the discussion in which we wish to join, has set? Ah, how glad I am to hear you ask!  This is where our powers of inference and observation are put into motion!

We look for clues in the language that is being used by our hostess. (I'm getting tired of saying "host or hostess. Let's just pretend it's me and go with the feminine ending.)  Follow the lead of your hostess, and keep your remarks just a shade or two more moderate in tone than hers, and it is doubtful that you will go too far astray.  For example:

1. Profanity.  If nobody has used it yet, do not be the first to do so.  It does not matter a particle that the last time you hung out till three a.m. at a club in the Meatpacking District with your hostess, you heard her turning  the air blue with a string of anatomically impossible suggestions for what that cabdriver who refused to pick the two of you up, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she had lost one of her shoes should go do to himself.  If in today's post your hostess has managed to express her dismay about the fact that the NYC school chancellor has referred to a raging blizzard that dumps another six inches of snow on top of all the intersections as a "beautiful day" without resorting to the ten letter word that got Lenny Bruce arrested (a word, by the by, that I once saw expressed on South Park as a picture of a rooster side-by-side with a picture of a lollipop), do not be the first to use that ten letter word, however great your admiration for the late, lamented Lenny.

2. Do Not Seize the Conversational Steering Wheel.  Do you remember Mr. Dick, the gentle lunatic in David Copperfield who lived with Aunt Betsy Trotwood?  No matter what the other characters were talking about, he always brought the conversation back around to King Charles' head, and the sorrowful fact that it had been cut off.  Mr. Dick was well aware of his aberration, and mildly apologetic for this peculiar obsession.  But he simply couldn't help himself.  Gentle Reader - do not be a Mr. Dick.  You may know in your heart that the source of all human ills and joys lies in living exclusively on organic, gluten-free, vegan coconut ice cream - and I, for one, would lend an attentive ear the first few times you said it; that sounds quite reasonable to me.  However, when the topic is "Should children of six be permitted to retain exclusive control of the remote, and what makes you think so?" kindly do not bring the conversation abruptly around to vegan coconut ice cream, because all you'll do is give everybody whiplash. While it is true that Cato the Elder thundered "Carthago delenda est!" so many times when the topic under discussion on the floor of the Roman Senate was "Aquaducts, and What Province Shall We Tax to Pay for Them?" that the other senators finally had to have Carthage burned down just to shut him up, you can bet that if they'd had an Unamicus button, they'd have pushed it.

3. When in Doubt, Look to Your Hostess and Follow Her Lead.  In her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath discloses that, while dining with the benefactress whose generosity had endowed her with a scholarship to the prestigious (and expensive) Smith College, the novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, author of a number of tearjerker novels that were made into very commercially successful Hollywood films, the most famous of which are probably Now, Voyager and Stella Dallas - Sylvia, as I say, confesses to the following faux pas in Chapter Four:

“The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress.  The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.”

The point of relating the anecdote in The Bell Jar is to contrast the gauche naivete of Ms. Plath, who can never quite conceal her bitterness at having been raised in penny-pinching mode by a widowed mother who struggled to pay the bills, with the worldly pretentiousness of her hostess, Ms. Prouty, who by then had already attained everything that her young protegee thought ought to be hers by right - especially since she, Sylvia, was a better writer.  How humiliating, to learn upon her return to the dorm, amid the derisive howls of the trust fund babies who also lived on her floor, that she had mistaken the liquid in which she was supposed to cleanse her fingers for soup!  How mortifying to discover, by feverishly paging through the index of the etiquette book under "F," that, had Ms. Prouty been a hostess of the more gracious type - such as, for example, Queen Victoria - she would have covered up her protegee's gaffe by picking up her own finger bowl and taking a healthy slurp, thereby setting young Sylvia at ease, and possibly even preventing unfortunate later events involving a gas oven!

But let us pause, for a moment. And, while we're at it, let us suppose that Sylvia had paused for a moment, too. What, then, if Ms. Plath, confronted with the unfamiliar finger bowl, had kept her spoon on the table, her hands demurely folded in her lap, and politely spoken of this and that, all the while keeping a gimlet eye upon Olive Higgins Prouty to see what she was going to do with that after-dinner soup?  Why, in that case - problem solved!  Ms. Plath, by following the lead of her hostess, would have simply emitted a silvery laugh and dabbled her own dainty digits in the scented water with the pretty cherry blossoms floating in it.

Gentle Reader - before you take a swig from the finger bowl, watch your hostess and see if she's swigging, too.

"But what," you inquire, "shall I do, if, in the heat of the moment, I have lost sight of all this excellent advice for How to Win Virtual Friends and Influence Bloggers, and, in my zeal to enlighten all those people who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about, have incautiously hit 'enter' with never a thought of the consequences?"

The etiquette books, happily, provide a remedy in this case, as well. When it is finally brought to your attention that you were the only one at the dinner party who was standing on the table, bellowing Madonna's greatest hits into a lollipop lamb chop and begging others to admire your karaoke skills,  it is never incorrect to offer an elaborately worded, fulsome apology to all who attended, and a lavish bouquet to your justly offended hostess.  Fortunately, there are some very nice images on the FTD site that you can send in a link.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Four Little Words, Or: What's Love Got to Do With It?

There are four different words for love in ancient Greek.  You're probably most familiar with Eros, from which we get erotic and erotica.  While Eros definitely has that connotation of physical passion and intimate connection, the term also allows for the possibility that physical attraction can ripen into an appreciation of the inner beauty of the object of one's eros.  The quintessential example of such a connection in classical myth is the union of Eros, the masculine incarnation of Love, with Psyche, the feminine incarnation of the Spirit, or, if you prefer, of the Soul. This is the romantic kind of love that has come to be associated with February 14th.  On this day, those who are coupled submit tangible proofs of having been smitten by Eros in the form of cards, chocolates, flowers, gemstones, and interestingly configured lingerie, some of it with pieces missing in strategic locations, and all of it raised in its retail price by at least 75%.

But why limit yourself to one kind of Love, is what I'd like to know? If February 14th is all about Love, then let it be all about all kinds of Love.  Let's not leave anyone out.  If it ain't about everybody, then it ain't about Love.  In other words - I propose nothing short of a radical re-imagining of Valentine's Day.

For example, there is Agápe, meaning love in its more purely spiritual sense; the sort of unconditional love that expects nothing in return. It is probably very wrong of me, but by this definition, my dog comes instantly to mind.  Although now that I think of it, she's pretty demanding and if I were to suddenly cease to come across with the liver treats and the 10:00 p.m. walks even in the pouring rain, I would certainly hear about it from her. Agápe  is the way you feel about your tiny, adorable infant, although the reverse probably does not hold true, since I can't think of a better example of "Incessant Expectations" than a baby, unless it's that same baby once it becomes a teenager.

Then there's Philia.  You know.  Like Philadelphia?  Ohhhhh...so that's why they call it the "City of Brotherly Love!"  "Philia is 'mental' love. It means affectionate regard or friendship in both ancient and modern Greek. This type of love has give and take. It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. In ancient texts, philos denoted a general type of love, used for love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity, as well as between lovers." (God, what would we do without Wikipedia?) Philia actually sounds like a pretty good deal for all concerned, and I think we would be well advised to start handing out Philia cards, perhaps with a few M&M's enclosed, to let our family and friends know we appreciate them on February 14th...and, indeed, on February 13th and 15th.

Finally - and don't bother memorizing this one, because you'll hardly ever need it - there is Storge.  I tried to find English words that derive from Storge, but all that Google came up with was offers from the Mini-Storage people, all eager to charm me into giving them a hundred dollars a month so that I would no longer have to look at the things I ought to have put into the garbage long ago.  Storge would be the familial affection between parent and child.  Let's leave Greece for a moment and go to France to contemplate the proverb, "In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek" - and you know who's who when it comes to Storge.  And if you don't, I will help you out by openly admitting to the fact that I got up at 5:00 a.m. on Black Friday to stand in line for the XBox Kinect that my son claimed he couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't have to live without - unless I wanted to be remembered forever as the cold-hearted and uncaring parent who ruined his life and landed him on the therapist's couch - in the very same year that my own dear mother said, "Oh, don't get me anything for Christmas," and I took her at her word, bought her a box of chocolates, and felt handsome for doing it.  What became of the XBox Kinect, you ask?  It's in storge - uh, storage.  That is just how this parent-child thing goes, folks. I have no resentments about it. Well, not many.  What's that you say? Did my kid send me a Valentine's card today? None of your darn business, and by the way, my philia for you just took a nosedive. I think we should talk about something else now.

Happy Valentines Day, O Best Beloveds!

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Waiting for the End of Godot

At the moment, I am looking at the snow, rapidly falling like fat wet pigeon feathers past my tenth floor window, and I am feeling incredibly fortunate that I got to the matinee performance of "Waiting for Godot" yesterday instead of today, because yesterday nothing was falling out of the sky.

Now, as far as whether I was lucky to see this play, with the megawattage of Ian McKellan as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir drawing them into the theater in droves (Billy Crudup is in it, too, playing Lucky, and then there's the actor I can't help thinking of as That Other Guy in the role of Pozzo) - I can't quite decide.  Certainly Mssrs. Stewart and McKellan were good, but then, with names like that, you'd expect them to be good.  Were they inspired?  Did I walk out of the theater saying to myself, "Now I have seen this difficult and - let's be truthful, now! - often tedious play performed so brilliantly that I spent every moment riveted and fully engaged.  Now I can see what all the fuss is about, and why this work endures and has universal application, even though it doesn't always come across on the page when they're making you read it in high school"?

The answer, sadly, is, "No.  No, not really."

And that answer might have been different, had I not had the 2009 Broadway revival of the play in mind as my standard of Beckett excellence, in which we had Bill Irwin as Vladimir, Nathan Lane as Estragon, John Goodman as a magnificently bombastic Pozzo, and John Glover as the luckless Lucky.

Don't get me wrong.  There were inspired moments in the Stewart/McKellan version.  Ian McKellan leaning against a doorjamb in the classic Irma La Douce come-hither pose of a Parisian demimondaine wrung a guffaw out of me.  The switching-of-the-hats-like-a-three-card-monte-game routine was fun - we'd seen it done before, of course, but they did it well, and we were pleased and admiring.  The decision to present Pozzo, slavemaster and tormentor of the hapless Lucky, with a comic Southern accent guaranteed to infuriate all of your friends who hail from south of the Mason-Dixon line into shrieks of, "We don't talk like that!"?  Questionable.

The crux of the problem with the current production, I think, is that not one of the actors in the cast is known for his prowess as a Great Comic Actor.  See the cast list for 2009, above.  Bill Irwin - "American actor and clown noted for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s. He is known for his vaudeville-style stage performances." John Glover is most widely known for his role as Lionel Luthor on Smallville, but don't just take my word for it - the fact that he copped a Tony nomination for playing Lucky. tells you he was good.  Nathan Lane?  John Goodman?  I assume I don't have to explain to you why these guys are funny.

Waiting for Godot is one of the great and definitive Theater of the Absurd masterpieces.  It is a comic presentation of the existential nightmare that faces everyone who has every wondered, "What on earth is the point?  Why are we even on this planet?  Should we all just off ourselves?  Because it seems we're just idling away our time, waiting for the end.  And after that, maybe there's God...or something...or maybe there's not.  Maybe we're just kidding ourselves,  filling up our days with pointless activity that, in the end, means absolutely nothing."

And this line of thinking will eventually get you so paralyzed with horror - the kind of horror that James Joyce, that other Irishman who faced down the terrors and tiny tragedies that make up our quotidian existence with the only weapons at his disposal - i.e.,  a ferocious intellect, an overpowering appetite for Life in all its ugly, smelly, filthy, ludicrous glory, and that depraved Irish wit that makes an evening spent at an Irish pub the equivalent of a semester at Harvard, only you have a lot more fun - termed G.P.I., or General Paralysis of the Insane - that your only remaining choices are to either hang yourself from that dead tree taking up most of stage left, or accept the fact that it's all a great big cosmic joke, the joke is on you, and you may as well join in and laugh your ass off.

And that's why you need a clown - a broken-hearted clown - a clown who is laughing at himself and everyone else, laughing at the undeniable and heartbreaking knowledge that, despite the fact that "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" neither he, nor you, nor I - in short, that none of us - has got the sense it takes to lie down and die.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Wicked Wednesday

Gentle Reader!

Has it already been a week since we were happily fooling around with Double Dactyl poems?  It hardly seems possible.  And yet, since the blizzard promised to NYC by the Weather Gods is supposed to fall on Thursday, and right now it is cold as a witch's mammary but at least the sun is shining, I guess it's Wednesday once again.  Which suits me down to the ground, because I am slated to accompany the Adult Offspring (as I suppose I must now start dubbing the erstwhile Teenager, now that he's 18) to see Captain Picard and Gandalf cavorting at the Cort in a matinee performance of "Waiting for Godot."  Yes, yes...TDF had tickets.  There are some benefits to being unemployed and free to go to the theater on the spur of the moment on Wednesday at two. Try to contain your envy, and please don't ask, "Which one played Godot?"

Let's revisit those Double Dactyls, and then next week perhaps we will move on to Lascivious Limericks.  The structure of the poem is simple, and I have copied the outline of How To Do It from last week's page & it appears below.  I also promised a friend that I would follow up last week's ditty about that double-dactyl dynamo VLAD-i-mir NA-bo-kov with my own Double Dactyl ode to Little Red Riding Hood:

Through the wood, through the wood
Little Red Riding Hood
tripped off to Grandma’s with
goodies to eat


till a transgendered wolf
omnivoraciously
gobbled her up from her
hood to her feet.

Gentle Reader - grab your pencil - you're on!

A Double Dactyl poem is similar to a limerick much of the time, because it is usually comic in nature, as the rhythm lends itself nicely to bawdiness  Here are the rules:

- A double dactyl has six syllables, and the beat of the sound when it is said aloud is like the beat of a waltz: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three

- Each poem is eight lines long.  Two stanzas, four lines apiece.

- Each line is double dactyl meter, except for the fourth and eighth which are two beats short (DUM-da-da-DUM).

- The first line is nonsense (Higgledy-piggledy, Humpety-dumpety, or just a sing-song two-word rhyme - whatever sounds good and silly)

- The second line names the person it's about.  That person's name should be a natural double dactyl:
 EM-i-ly DICK-in-son, WILL-iam De BLAS-i-o, HANS Chris-tian AN-der-sen... you get the idea.

- The fourth and eighth lines have a strong rhyme; other lines need not rhyme.

- One line in the second stanza (usually the sixth line) must be a SINGLE six-syllable, double-dactyl word.


Monday, February 10, 2014

"But Is It Art?" William Carlos Williams & the Red Wheelbarrow

Today I went in as a pinch-hitter for a friend who unexpectedly had to be at a funeral.  My friend teaches a college composition course, and one of the poems I was asked to discuss in class was "To A Poor Old Woman" by William Carlos Williams.  WCW seems to be one of those poets whom people either swoon to or don't get at all, and I was curious as to how the class would respond to this barely punctuated poem, in which very little actually happens.

In preparation for this class, I decided to conduct an experiment at home. (You can try it, too, but don't blame me if there's an explosion.)  I found a copy of what is arguably WCW's best known poem and I asked both my husband and my son to read it, and then give me whatever responses first came to mind.

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

My husband, who, like me, has now passed the half-century mark (and has therefore learned a bit of guile and craft) did what he always does when unexpectedly confronted with something like the above-mentioned poem.  His eyes darted around nervously.  A pained expression came over his face, and I could tell that he was thinking, "I wish to God she wouldn't do this to me."  But he gamely started trying to guess what I wanted him to say, scanning my expression for clues as to whether I was going to award the equivalent of a gold star by exclaiming, "You're absolutely right, and I am delighted I married somebody with such a penetrating intellect and keen sense of aesthetic appreciation." I did not do this; as far as I was concerned, this was a game of poker and I needed to make sure I didn't give away a thing.

After about five minutes of my ruthlessly employing the Socratic method, asking him questions and then not giving him any answers, just a lot more questions, he started getting annoyed. I know this, because when I replied to his, "I guess it's a great poem," with "What makes you say this?" he said rather crossly, "Because you told me it was a great poem, and it's in a book. What do you want from me?"

To his immense relief, his cell phone rang just then and a client who wanted to talk about commercial real estate was on the other end,so he got out of Literature Q&A Hell and I went into my eighteen year old son's room to play a little Poetry Poker with him.

I explained that I wanted his response to the poem because it would be helpful to me to get an honest reaction from somebody who had never been exposed to this poet before, and who had no stake in giving me the "right" response, since obviously I am not grading my family on their reactions to the red wheel barrow, all shiny with the rainwater and surrounded by the chickens.  My son, God love him, read it through, looked up at me, and deadpanned, "WTF, Mom.  See, this is why I hate school.  They make you read this stuff, and then they make you talk about it."

So - what was the point of taking this approach to teaching the poem? I did it because I knew for a fact that many of my students would, at least internally, have the exact same response as my son's - and that, because this was going to be discussed in a classroom setting, those who did would most likely be too polite to say so, and would, like my husband, cover up their confusion as to why this is regarded as a great poem by trying to guess what they were supposed to say.

So after we had read the poem aloud in class, and had a bit of discussion as to its structure - the lack of capitalization, the fact that it looks like a completely random arrangement of words, but then you realize that there are actually four stanzas, and that each stanza is built the same - three words in the first line, one word in the second line, and if you squint and have an imagination you could even maybe pretend that each stanza looks a little bit like a wheelbarrow - I told my class the anecdote about having my husband and my son read the poem, and what they had said about it.  The bodies in the seats, so tense a moment before, relaxed visibly.  Aha - they weren't the only ones who couldn't see what all the fuss was about!

But, I said, there's more! In my ambition to have my students wring every drop of learning they can out of this poem, I did some research! I went on YouTube to see whether I could find WCW himself reading the tale of the Poor Old Woman and/or the Red Wheelbarrow out loud.  And - I found one.  WCW himself reads The Red Wheelbarrow aloud - and quite beautifully, too.  And then, he replies to an interviewer who asks him about the poem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3T1j7AaNSo

WCW: I wrote that.  And then, of course, I sat down to think about it.

Interviewer: And what did you think?

WCW: I wondered what it meant.

Pandemonium.  Whaaaaat?  The guy who wrote it didn't even know what it meant?  Well, then, how could it possibly be a good poem?  My class, so nervous and repressed a few minutes before, exploded into noisy relief.  As far as they were concerned, the emperor had just proclaimed his own nudity.

And this was exactly where I wanted us to get.  I wanted to get us to a place where we could have an honest discussion about personal response to a poem.  Now, the barrier of "Somebody's going to think I'm stupid if I admit that I don't get this" had fallen, and suddenly, everybody had an opinion and was eager to let us know what it was.

The point of the particular class I was teaching today is to teach students how to write a paper about art - whether that artwork takes the form of music, a poem, a movie, a play, a painting, a sculpture, or a work of fiction.  What I wanted my students to understand is, "You do not have to like every artwork you've been told is great.  You do not have to manufacture a false emotional response to it.  Some people may read this poem, and it may speak to them on a very deep and personal level.  That is their response.  It is neither more nor less valid than yours, if yours is, 'I read this, and it didn't do much for me.'  What we are here today to learn is how to use critical thinking and the language of critical thought when we write about an artwork.  If you want to say, 'Many people admire this poem, but others, including the writer of this paper, find it a failure,' then you have to be ready to pull that poem apart and show the person who's reading your paper why it doesn't work.  'I just don't like it,' doesn't cut the mustard.  If you were a lawyer, you wouldn't represent your client by saying, 'Well, I don't think he's guilty and he told me he didn't do it, so please let him go.'  Your job is to come up with proofs and defenses of your statements from the existing evidence - which, in this case, is - the poem."

And this was when the classroom discussion really took off.  We pulled those poems apart and put them back together again.  We decided that the key line in that wheelbarrow poem is "so much depends."  That's the line that creates the tension.  That's the line that creates curiosity.  That's the line that makes the poem.

Because if WCW's first line had been, "I looked at" instead of "So much depends" - well, then, we would probably be perfectly justified in saying, "Yeah? So what?"

But that first line gets us thinking.  Why does so much depend on that wheelbarrow?  What kind of life-or-death situation could possibly depend on a wheelbarrow?  WCW said "so much" - so, it's gotta be important.  We came up with scenarios.  We play guessing games.  And ultimately - like the poet himself - we wonder what it means.  That sneaky WCW.  He strung together 16 short, easy words that every kindergarten student knows.  And, whaddaya know?  He got us all thinking.

And what is my opinion of the the red wheelbarrow and the white chickens?

I'm not going to tell you.  But you can bet your boots I've got one.





Sunday, February 9, 2014

I Follow the Muse & Awaken Famous in Toronto

I took a night off from blogging (did you miss me? No? I thought as much) in order to make a Cultural Pilgrimage to Port Washington, NY, where my favorite female vocalist/guitarist Ruthie Foster was performing last night. I first heard her, and, indeed, first heard of her, last month when she opened for the Blind Boys of Alabama at B.B. King's on 42nd Street.  My entire group of friends was blown away by her performance that night. Who was this woman? Where had she gotten this unbelievable voice that poured out of her throat like a golden river - clear, powerful, confident, and apparently able to perform the most complicated vocal acrobatics with never a hint of strain or a glimmer of fear that she might not hit it right?  Why wasn't I hearing this glorious voice everywhere I went? 

Last night Ruthie Foster was the first half of the evening in an incredible double-bill concert with Eric Bibb. After the concert I had the opportunity to ask her one more question: "Did you swallow a nightingale? Because it's the only explanation I can think of for the sounds that come out of your throat." She laughed, but didn't answer.

It was quite an interesting adventure chasing the Muse last night.  If you who are reading this live in the NYC area, you are aware that car ownership literally gets you nowhere right now, if you happened to have parked on the street last week before two goodish storms first buried everything in snow and then dumped a load of sleet on top, just to keep everything at a standstill. My husband and son labored valiantly to dig our little Saab free from bondage, but there was so much ice under the wheels that it simply wasn't happening.  Like Martin Luther, there we stood -we could do no other.

Luckily, I have kind friends.  One of my kind friends, who keeps her car in a garage, wasn't using her car last night, and was willing to lend it to us for the evening.  So we wound up taking one taxi to get to the car, and another one to get us back home after we had dropped off the car with the garage attendant around midnight.  All of which should be sufficient to explain why I was unable to blog last night - aside, of course, from the fact that the dog at my laptop.

But today, I awoke to find myself famous in Toronto - or at least, mentioned in a column in The Toronto Sun.  Which is, quite candidly, better than I've done so far, except for many, many years ago when I was still  in college and managed to get into a group picture on the front page of the Metropolitan Section of the New York Times because I was helping to clean up Morningside Park.

I am constantly delighted and bemused (and occasionally alarmed - not that there's anything on my conscience) by the fact that, thanks to the Information Age, something I am doing or saying in New York can become known instantaneously in parts of the world I either haven't been to since I was a child (Toronto) or have never visited at all. (Hi, Lisa! How's everything in Bangkok?)  So I am charmed to discover that the good people of Toronto who take the Sun are able, as they sip their Tim Hortons lattes and nibble on dutchie timbits (Dunkin' Munchkins to you New Yorkers), to contemplate a stay at the Library Hotel, enriched the additional pleasures of taking a poetry workshop with the hotel's Poet In Residence - me.

If you don't believe me, here's the link.

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/02/07/romantic-hotel-escapes-for-valentines-day

Just in case you're one of those technophobes like me, who never clicks on a link because doing that would let a horrible virus sneaks into your computer, thus making your spouse give you that awful, incredulous squint and say, voice scaling up, "You did whaaaaat?" here's what it says:

HOW DO I LOVE THEE
Struggling for the right words to express your love? Guests staying at one of the four hotels in New York's Library Hotel Collection can call on an a literary expert for help. With Love Poems For Two: A Couples Massage For The Mind and Soul, Karen Clark, the Poet in Residence, leads a private 90-minute poetry workshop to help couples express their love in a creative way. The cost is $125 per couple, which is added to your hotel bill at the Library Hotel, Hotel Elysee, Casablanca Hotel or Hotel Giraffe. Visit libraryhotel.com/offers.html.

My fifteen minutes of fame is dribbling in, thirty seconds at a time, but it is adding up.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Twofers

Two good writing days in a row is the kind of streak you don't want to jinx by talking about it too much, but I'll risk it.

This morning I was being followed around by the urge to write down a story that had been scratching around at the back of my mind for a while.  It kept knocking and knocking, and I kept telling it to go away because I wasn't ready to write it yet, or that I was busy with another piece and it should come back later.  But it was persistent, and today it even volunteered some information on how it would like to be written.  I wasn't sure where it was going to end, but since I had the beginning and the middle clear in my mind, I decided to sit down, get started, and see where it took me.

I kept on coming back to it, right through several phone calls, an email from a colleague who wanted to know whether I could sub for her next week while she attended a funeral - no, she couldn't get a copy of the textbook to me, but all the poems we'd be discussing were public domain, could I look them up online and print them out?  I could, and I did.  And then I came back to the story.  Texts began to arrive from my teenage son - he was reluctantly babysitting his one-year-old half sister while Half Sister Number Two was being born to my ex and his girlfriend, and I texted back "Don't worry, all babies fuss when you don't want them to" and "LOL" several times before returning to the story.

I was four lines away from the end when my husband walked in.  I said hello, heard about his day, and said, "Do you mind if I finish writing this story?"  He said, "Oh, gosh no - I'm sorry, I didn't know you were writing when I walked in.  Go ahead, I'll read my email."  (Now, there's a husband for you.  Don't you wish you had one just like him?)

So I finished my story.  Five pages.  Tomorrow, I'll look at it again, and I'll give it a name.  I don't have the title yet.  I'm going to sleep on it.

It's good to give things a little while to grow.  And then, when the time is ripe and you know it, you have to grab 'em while they're hot.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

A Good Writing Day

The thing about writing is that it can be so stop-and-go.  When it's flowing, you feel fabulous.  You have faith in Life, and in your future; there is a lilt in your voice and a bounce in your step.  Everything is clipping along nicely, the Universe is in good order, and you feel like being kind to everybody, even telemarketers.

Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, you're blocked.  Painful.  Agitating.  Your happy thoughts are gone.  You feel like Wendy, tumbling from the sky after Tinker Bell snatched away the pixie dust.  Your thoughts limp haltingly along, like a crippled centipede after somebody pulled off half its legs. I have never had the pleasure of being hideously constipated for an entire month, but I know exactly what it feels like.  It feels like Writer's Block.

Then - a miracle! Presto!  Just as you are sitting there, staring glumly at your laptop for the third day in a row and wondering why you should continue to eat, breathe, and take up space on this earth that could be given up to somebody who could actually do something - you type a sentence.  It's not a good sentence, but - at least you've gotten something written.  And what you wrote suggests the next sentence, so you put that one in, too.  Then you need a line a dialogue.  Which elicits another line of dialogue -a reply from the other character on the same page.    Then you go back, and you frown at that first sentence again, and you tinker with it, and it kind of turns into a pretty good sentence - although you may come back and change it a little bit later, you aren't quite sure yet.  Pretty soon you're going clickety-click, clickety-click, and then the key turns in the front door and your family walks in and you look up foggily and realize that everybody is going to be having take-out for dinner again.

That's what I call a good writing day.  Today I had one.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Wicked Wednesday

John Wirenius, whose delightful sequel to Anthony Trollope's "Palliser" series Phineas At Bay I have had the pleasure of editing, has suggested that I indulge myself once a week by having an official Wicked Wednesday.  Therefore, I am going to set forth the rules of writing a Double Dactyl poem, give you an example of one of mine, and then invite all of you to get wicked as well by writing one, too.

What is a dactyl, you ask? (Or maybe you already know, in which case, skip to the next paragraph.)  No, no, nothing to do with flying dinosaurs.  A dactyl, in poetry, is a set of three syllables in a line of metered verse that puts the stress on the first syllable.  Actually, it's sort of a verbal waltz - ONE-two-three, ONE- two-three!

So a double dactyl simply means that each line has a grand total of six syllables, and when you read it out loud, it should have that good old "Tales from the Vienna Woods" beat - "ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three!"

A Double Dactyl poem is similar to a limerick much of the time, because it is usually comic in nature, as the rhythm lends itself nicely to bawdiness  Here are the rules:

- Each poem is eight lines long.  Two stanzas, four lines apiece.

- Each line is double dactyl meter, except for the fourth and eighth which are two beats short (DUM-da-da-DUM).

- The first line is nonsense (Higgledy-piggledy, Humpety-dumpety, or just a sing-song two-word rhyme - whatever sounds good and silly)

- The second line names the person it's about.  That person's name should be a natural double dactyl:
 EM-i-ly DICK-in-son, WILL-iam De BLAS-i-o, HANS Chris-tian AN-der-sen... you get the idea.

- The fourth and eighth lines have a strong rhyme; other lines need not rhyme.

- One line in the second stanza (usually the sixth line) must be a SINGLE six-syllable, double-dactyl word.

I expect you're all counting on your fingers right about now, furiously leafing through your mental cache of history books, celebrity expose magazines, and Favorite Literary Characters (TESS of the D'UR-ber-villes, anyone?)

So here is an example to start you off.  Remember, as you write that this is Wicked Wednesday.  In observance of Wicked Wednesday, the high moral tone and rigid exclusion of words for which Mother would wash out our mouths with soap that are normally the standard of this page are relaxed for the day.  Anything for a rhyme.  Ready - set - GO!

Haughtily, naughtily
Vladimir Nabokov
 Jeered dirty writers and
Heaped them with scorn

Till the adventures of
Nymphomaniacal
Lo carved his name in the
Annals of porn.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Juggling Manuscripts

Everybody has his or her own eccentricities about writing.  Truman Capote, about whom I was writing yesterday, liked to compose in pencil on a yellow Big Chief legal pad while lying down on the couch.  Roald Dahl had a special writing hut built in the yard of his home, and there are pictures of him - looking, as his former wife Patricia Neal said, "like Virginia Woolf in drag" - seated in a big comfy chair in his hut, pen in hand, an afghan over his knees and a Writing Board he'd had specially made supporting the paper. The hut was equipped with a light outside the door, and when the light was on, his family knew they were taking their lives into their hands if they bothered him. (I know.  He had it good.)

I like to sit in the dining room, which is large and has a sitting area, with my feet propped up on the coffee table and my laptop where it belongs - that is to say, on my lap.  I type with the index and middle fingers of both hands, and have been typing this way ever since I flunked out of the interview for Katie Gibbs Secretarial School.  That's right - I flunked the interview.  They asked me, "Why do you want to enroll at Katherine Gibbs?" and I bluntly replied, "I don't. My mother is making me do this."  I wanted to do the same type-with-the-index-and-middle-fingers thing when I got a cell phone with a darling little keyboard that pulls out for texting, but my teenage son physically restrained me, seizing me by both hands and hissing, "Mom.  Use your thumbs."

The other thing I like to do when I write is have more than one manuscript going at the same time.  Which makes sense, because I'm usually reading more than one book at a time.  My nightstand resembles the Tower of Babel, except for the fact that all the books are in English.  Everything I write is also in English, albeit liberally sprinkled with foreign phrases so that people will think I'm smart.

I think the reason I like to be working on more than one thing at a time is that, no matter how smoothly I'm bowling along, I invariably hit a point where I experience complete burnout and an utter lack of inspiration, and find myself sitting there looking at my laptop in dismay thinking, "Now what?"  At which stage it is a real brain-soother to say, "Doesn't matter, I'll just write the other one for a while."  It rests me, and I usually come back to the manuscript that had me stymied with renewed vigor after I've pecked away at Manuscript Number 2 for a while and then hit a wall with that.

At this moment, I'm juggling three works in progress (four, if you count this blog - I don't.)  There's my novel, entitled The F.U. Diet.  That goes very well - until it suddenly doesn't.  I know what I want to do; I know what's going to happen; and I know how I want to do it. I'm loosely structuring it as a riff on Jane Eyre, but I'm employing a lot of the literary tropes and conventions of other nineteenth century novels as well.  But sometimes, I grind to a halt, at which it's time to switch screens to the just-for fun first-person memoirs of my dog, which I have decided to call From Wags to Bitches: Memoirs of a Canine Cinderella. Those of you who have met my dog know what I mean.  Diva doesn't begin to describe that little Entitlement Brat.  For starters, she likes to eat lobster. And caviar.

And finally - also for fun - I am putting the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" into rhymed, metered verse.  Which is huge fun - I've already done a half dozen others, and am going to turn them into a book one of these days.  I love Andersen, but find it irresistible to compose these without poking fun at the fact that he, like Edgar Allan Poe, thought that the loveliest stories are the ones in which you kill off your heroine at the end of the tale. Actually, quite a few male authors of the nineteenth thought this was the nicest thing you could do with your female characters...which is why The F.U. Diet is a departure from type.  I don't like to kill people off just as I've gotten fond of them and have put some little effort into their upbringing and development - not even the ones who don't, in fact, exist.