Too Much Bad Stuff on the Tube, Too Much Good Stuff

Question of the day: Why aren’t excrement and increment antonyms? One is out and one is in. “Shit out,” as in excrement and “shit in,” as it should be in increment. It seems to me that newspapers and too much television make use of both. The stuff that appears there has it both going out as well as going in.

TV commentary: This season’s opening episode of Big Bang Theory was a real stinker. Now that they’re all getting a million bucks a show, they think they and the writers can get away with stench? I don’t think so. NCIS New Orleans looks pretty good, especially because of Scott Bakula, but they’re using the same irritatingly loud musical background as on NCIS that keeps viewers from hearing what the characters are saying. Do they really think they need a musical score under every scene to make sure we feel the proper emotional response? I don’t think so. The new ones that got dumped right away: How to Get Away with Murder has Viola Davis as a defense attorney who’s teaching her law students how to defend someone who may or may not be guilty, even of murder. She seems to be wasted in this pilot, her acting too good in a show that’s too dark, has too many flashes back and forward, and too many plot complications that don’t make sense. Mysteries of Laura has Debra Messing, who also seems wasted in a poorly written series. Stalker has Dylan McDermott as a really irritating cop who joins an LA unit specializing in stalking. Who needs to be irritated by Dylan McDermott? Not me. And why would a stalker dump gas on two of his stalkees and try to burn them to death? I don’t know. Legends was just too confusing with all the legendary character and accent switches. Red Band Society appeared to be aimed at an adolescent audience, with a plot that was just too adolescent for us, despite the presence of award-winning Octavia Spencer. Of all the new shows, Madam Secretary might be the best. Téa Leoni is believably good as the newly appointed Secretary of State. Of the good returns, The Good Wife is still one of the best on the tube, but I still don't understand why they represent the omninous black drug dealer; Blue Bloods also, even though this season still has Jamie as a street cop when he should have made detective by now; and Jennifer Love Hewitt is a nice addition to the crew in Criminal Minds. We had given up on CM a few seasons ago because of all the really bloody and disgusting crimes committed, but we so like the cast that we began again and just grit our teeth and close our eyes through the gorier scenes.

Today, there’s too much good stuff to watch (movies, television, sporting events) to waste time watching bad stuff. I’m simply amazed at the amount of stuff I can watch on my IPad. I’m an Amazon Prime member, which gives me access to movies and series present and past that I can watch. Six seasons of True Blood, five seasons of Six Feet Under, six seasons of The Sopranos (We may be the only people in the world who've never seen any of this show), seven seasons of Californication, three seasons of Deadwood, and virtually any movie that’s ever been made. I could spend thirty or forty hours a day watching and I wouldn’t even scratch the surface. And that’s just on my IPad. And on NetFlix I can do the same, but that entails the mail in and back by snail mail. I think I may have to dump my NetFlix account. Who’s got time to wait for a dvd to put in s dvd player? Not me.

Rubbernecker & The Skeleton Twins

More about Belinda Baur. Her fourth book, Rubbernecker, had me by the throat from the very beginning. But it also had my head in a jumble. I just couldn’t figure out all the characters and how they fit together. But I sped onward and by the time I’d finished, it all made sense. The main character, Patrick Fort, is a young man with the odd disability called Asperger’s Syndrome, high-end autism. The “high-end” signifies that he has some abilities that would be considered genius, but also other characteristics like obsessive compulsive behavior, lack of empathy, the inability to interact with people (look anyone in the eye, understand irony or humor, touch or be touched by others). Patrick is eighteen and begins a medical course in anatomy in which he and his fellow students dissect cadavers with the end result of determining cause of death. The other students don’t understand Patrick and his odd behavior, but they put up with him. Patrick is trying to find out not just how people die, but why they die. His father had been killed in a tragic accident, struck by a car as he and the young Patrick were crossing a street. Patrick wants to find out what happens after death. Don’t we all? In the process of dissecting a cadaver, Patrick becomes suspicious about the cause of death listed for Sam Galen, the cadaver they were working on. And off we go with Patrick to solve this mystery. Belinda Baur’s writing is much like another English author I admire, Kate Atkinson. Nearly every sentence of both writers is so quotable. Here’s a sample from the opening chapter of Rubbernecker: “Dying is not as easy as it looks in the movies. ¶ In the movies, a car skids on ice. It slews across the road, teeters on the edge of the cliff. ¶ It drops; it tumbles; the doors come off; it crumples and arcs, crumples and arcs—and finally stops against a tree, wheels up, like a smoking turtle. Other drivers squeal to a stop and leave their doors open as they rush to the precipice and stare in horror, while the car—¶ The car pauses for dramatic effect. ¶ And then bursts into flames. ¶ The people step back, they shield their faces, they turn away. ¶ In the movies, they don’t even have to say it. ¶ In the movies, the driver is dead.” Wow, she’s good.

And speaking of good. We just saw The Skeleton Twins, and it was maybe better than good. The two people borrowed from Saturday Night Live, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, give convincingly funny and serious (bordering on tragic) performances as the twins Milo and Maggie, both of whom have issues serious enough for them to attempt suicide. They’ve been estranged for ten years when the movie opens, but come together again to help each other through their issues—Milo’s homosexuality and Maggie’s unhappy marriage. The plot is transparent, but the performances are great. You should see it if only for the hilarious lip-synching of “Nothin’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and the gaseous bit when the two get high on nitrous oxide.

Bad Sports Weekend

A bad sports weekend for me. On Thursday I watched the ASU Sun Devils against the UCLA Bruins. The Sun Devils playing at home, in front of a full house of 70,000 supporters, in front of a national audience to show that they really deserved their 15th national ranking. The Sun Devils looked more like Moon Imps. The 11th ranked Bruins brought about three gallons of shellac to the game and gave the Imps a rub-a-dub-drubbing 62-27. So ASU will plummet in the rankings and UCLA will soar.

The Arizona Diamondbacks are, thankfully, going to end the season with the worst record in all of major league baseball. So, they decided to clean house by firing general manager Kevin Towers and manager Kirk Gibson. “Just Wait’ll next year,” as all losers invariably whine.

And then there was the painful whipping the Europeans put on the Americans in the 40th Ryder Cup in Scotland. It was 16½ to 11½ at the end of the day on Sunday. But after Saturday’s 10-6 lead going into the singles matches, the outcome was never in doubt. Rory McElroy looked like the best player in the world by annihilating Ricky Foster. The biggest disappointment of these games was Bubba Watson, who never showed us the dominant player he’s supposed to be. The two bright spots for the Americans were the youngsters Jordan Speith and Patrick Reed. The Ryder Cup pressure must be enormous. It’s all about who can make the pressure putts, and the Europeans did that better than the Americans. When the collar gets really tight, a player will leave putts short or will open the blade and shove putts to the right. Pressure. These guys play all year long as individuals with only themselves to blame if they lose, all year long for money and majors, and then along comes the Ryder Cup and suddenly they’re playing for national pride while hoping not to disappoint their teammates. Pressure. Especially if they’ve been losing on a regular basis—losing nine of the last eleven Ryder Cup matches. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

My only good sports news for the weekend is that the Arizona Cardinals had a bye week. So they may not have won, but they didn’t lose either.

Quiet Day

A quiet day with little on the horizon. I’m sick and tired of looking through the papers to find something interesting to comment on. So much of what’s there doesn’t deserve comment; so much of what’s there is so awful my stomach rebels at even thinking about it, let alone commenting on it.

So, a quiet day here in the Valley of the Sun. This morning we watched two coyotes stroll through our backyard, both looking huge and healthy, probably from having feasted on grand and great grandchildren whom tippling grand and great grandparents had inadvertently left alone to play out in the backyard. At least, that’s the theory of some rather stupid old people who live here in Sun City West. One letter to the editor moaned over the loss of her little dog, a tiny Chihuahua, I believe. She feared that the nasty coyotes who roam our city would not only chomp down tiny dogs and cats, but also unattended children, maybe even strolling adults. She thought that all coyotes should be rounded up and killed, or euthanized, as she might have preferred. Our local coyotes have a plentiful supply of food and don’t need to prey on tiny children or infirm old people. They really don’t care to be around us humans, adult or child or infirm old people. That says a lot for their intelligence. There are a good many adults and children I’d rather not be around, although I might consider putting them out as bait for any passing wildlife. Oh, now I sound too much like a cantankerous curmudgeon. I’m certainly not cantankerous nor a curmudgeon. Old, yes, but not those other things.

The day is still, no movement in our arbor vitae, only an occasional butterfly flitting in and out, one tiny white one, and one our large, yellow pseudo-monarch. The clouds are gathering in the north and east, huge mounds of whipped cream on the horizon. Our cats are all sleeping, gathering strength to test our patience when they awaken. My wife and I are busy cocktailing to gather strength for the nightly news and the too many shows we feel obligated to watch. And then the cats will awaken and begin to distribute the many cat toys around the house for us to step on in the dark.

Life goes on in Sun City West. Better that it go on than the alternative. I hope you have as nice a day.

Belinda Baur

I'm just finishing the third in Belinda Baur’s Shipcott trilogy, Finders Keepers. There are very few books about which I can say that I really can’t wait to finish but I also don't want to finish. I feel that way about Finders Keepers and the two previous books in this series. I don’t want to lose the characters she’s created. They’ve become old friends and I don’t want to say goodbye to them: the incredibly complex Jonas Holly; the brave Steven Lamb who somehow manages to escape two threats to his life and finds the love of his life, Emily Carver; Detective Inspector Reynolds, he of the hair plugs and insecurities; Detective Sergeant Elizabeth Rice, who hates to have to bow down to her boss DI Reynolds; Lettie Lamb and her mother and even the obnoxious little Davey, Steven’s younger brother; even Lewis, Steven’s self-centered friend. Then there’s the rich undercurrent of humor and the seemingly effortless style. Three examples:

Some of the humor: On the day the new girl, Emily Carver, first attends school, the boys are all agog at her beauty, especially Lewis. Lalo Bryant says, “She’s hot.” ¶ “I’d give her one, agreed Lewis. ¶ There was barely a woman alive that Lewis wouldn’t give one to; for a seventeen-year-old with flaming acne, he had remarkable reserves of self-worth. Even so, Steven felt a prick of anger and a defensive surge towards the brown hair and the green velvet ribbon. ¶ “Yeah, but would I give you one?” ¶ They turned to see Emily Carver a few paces behind them. ¶ Steven blushed all the way down to his toes and the others shuffled and looked away. ¶ Always the rubber ball, Lewis bounced back sufficiently to bluster lamely, “Yeah, I bet you would.” ¶ Emily Carver stopped, looked him slowly up and down with a curious expression on her face, and then burst out laughing. ¶ It was devastating. Nothing she could ever have said could have destroyed Lewis more completely, and his acne positively glowed.

Some of the style: After Steven Lamb is taken by the kidnapper, his mother Lettie, in deep despair, is taking a bath. “Lettie’s mouth distorted with sudden emotion and she squeezed her eyes shut to stop herself crying. Crying helped nobody. She’d learned that a long, long time ago. ¶ She waited until her breathing was normal again, concentrating on her breasts, which sat like little islands on the water—the warm meniscus of the tide rising and falling on the beaches of pale skin, where faint blue rivers ran from the puckered peaks.”

And one for both humor and style: Because they knew Shipcott better than anywhere else on the moor, Rice had booked them rooms at the Red Lion. ¶ It was a mistake on every level. ¶ Cheap but noisy, and with mattresses that had been almost folded in half by years of heavy sleepers, and then turned upside down in a misguided attempt to redress the balance; It was like sleeping on the peak of a Toblerone. On the first morning, Reynolds rolled over, lost his grip--and slid down the west face to wakefulness.

I’m a frequent re-reader of books that impress me, and I’m certain that I’ll re-read these three in the Shipcott trilogy. It will be nice to revisit old friends.

Wacky News

Such strange news stories. In Florida, a man was sentenced to five years in prison for sexual misconduct with his pit-bull pup. What!? And Starbucks is thinking of putting out a beer-flavored coffee. What!!? Residents in Sun City West just finished putting two 18,000-piece jigsaw puzzles together and are now working on one with 33,500 pieces. What!!!? A Florida woman paid $20,000 to get a third breast because she wanted to be less attractive to men. What!!!!? A Malaysian man had ten steel balls implanted in his penis to increase his sexual abilities, but then had to have them removed when they began to rust. What, What, What!!!!!? And here’s one, not a news story but one that simply blows my mind. I went on Google Earth to have a look at our old house in Lakewood, NY. Then I did an on-street view that showed me the front of our next-door neighbor’s house, and there in the side yard I caught sight of my old neighbor Beanie. I realize how far technology has taken us in the last decade, but to be able to drive visually down any street in the country and see clear shots of places and people just amazes me. Especially when I see someone I know. This last merits another “What!!!!!!?”

In a time when we have too many wars and conflicts in which we can’t even determine who the combatants are or why they’re fighting in the first place, when a man can still vault over the fence in front of the White House and make it to an unlocked front door with the intention of doing bodily harm to the president or members of his family, when it seems like the entire state of California will be destroyed by wildfires, when the weather all around the world seems to be chaotically out of whack, when we now have teachers carrying guns into their classrooms—we need a bit of humor to help us face all the craziness. So, here’s one a friend of mine sent me. Its title is “Longevity.” A 104-year-old woman, when asked about how she managed to live so long, responded: "For better digestion, I drink beer. In the case of appetite loss, I drink white wine. In the case of low blood pressure, I drink red wine. In the case of high blood pressure, I drink scotch. And when I have a cold, I drink schnapps.”

“When do you drink water?” her interviewer asked.

“I’ve never been that sick,” the old woman responded.

My advice to my readers: don’t watch any local, national, or world news; don’t drink any water; and go to Google Earth to find old friends.

This Is Where I Leave You

Despite the lukewarm reviews it got, we decided to see This Is Where I Leave You, and we’re very glad we did. I mean, it’s got Tina Fey and Jason Bateman in it, right? I’d go see Tina Fey doing 120 minutes of commercials. And then there’s Jason Bateman. I’ve decided, fickle cuss that I am, that I love Jason Bateman. He seems like such a nice guy, and so very quietly funny. In fact, this whole movie was so very quietly funny. Even the running boob joke when we see Jane Fonda with her gigundous new hooters.

It didn’t deserve “lukewarm.” Maybe not boiling hot, but quite a bit more than luke. Every reviewer seemed to think that this was way too much just a formulaic comedy misusing a wonderful cast, a dysfunctional family who come together in their New England hometown to sit shiva for their recently dead father. Well, we don’t need Osage County every time we see a film, and this dysfunctional family beat the hell out of the one in Osage. If you want a nice two-hour visit with these very nice, very funny people, go see This Is Where I leave You. You won’t be disappointed.

Belinda Baur & ES3

Now it’s time to talk about Belinda Baur and her oh so well-crafted tales set in the little English village of Shipcott. Shipcott may be tiny but any number of horrific murders take place there, beginning in the first novel, Blacklands, in which a young boy tries to find the buried body of his Uncle Billy, who was killed along with six other children and buried somewhere in the moors around that part of England. Steven Lamb makes it his mission to find Uncle Billy so that his grandma can find peace. He spends several years digging haphazardly in the hills of Exmoor, hoping to unearth the body. Arnold Avery, the man who killed Billy and the other children, is in prison but refuses to reveal where he has buried the bodies of the slain children. Steven then engages in a letter campaign to Avery to get him to tell him where Billy’s body is located. And a game of cat and mouse between them begins. The tension builds, somewhat relieved by an undercurrent of humor that seems typical of her writing.

Darkside, the second in the Shipcott saga, introduces us to Jonas Holly and his ill wife Lucy. Jonas is the local policeman in Shipcott, and when someone smothers an old woman, Detective Chief Inspector Marvel and his crew are called in from Taunton to take over the investigation. Jonas feels that he should be included but Marvel, an abrasive, insensitive man, dismisses him and makes him feel foolish. Then six others are killed, two seriously ill women living at home and four others in the Sunset Lodge Retirement Home. The hunt for the killer goes on. So many killing in one little village.

In the third part of the Shipcott trilogy, Finders Keepers, children are disappearing from the village, and two of the characters from the other novels are back, Steven Lamb, the boy in Blacklands, and Jonas Holly, the local policeman in Darkside. From the number of violent crimes committed here, I think I’d simply move away. So long, Shipcott, I’d say. Even more than the plot suspense, though, is the writing style. Let me show you several examples.

“The first flakes wandered down from the black velvet sky like little stars that had lost their way, and within minutes the galaxies themselves were raining down on Exmoor. Without a breath of breeze to divert or delay them, a million billion points of fractured light poured from the heavens, to be finally reunited under the moon in a brilliant carpet of silent white.”

“The heat of embarrassment was leaving Jonas and being replaced by a cool and distant anger, which he found easy to hide but which he knew he would nurture forever in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible, and selfless in his heart.”

I’ll use this last quotation to once again show off my system for examining sentence structure, not that this sentence is structurally unusual, just that I want to make a case for it to any would-be or current teachers of English. I don’t want this system to die along with me. It’s too valuable a tool for that to happen. My book, ES³, is available at lulu.com as an e-book, with a price around $3.00, a bargain for something as useful as this.

For any who think this is just a fancy way of diagramming sentences, I say, okay, try to diagram the sentence above and you wouldn’t have enough room on a 100-foot-square blackboard. This system simply eliminates all the old pedagogical grammatical terms, the stuff that always got in the way of understanding for the students who were trying to make sense of it. It uses s, v, and o for the obvious elements, and numbers for the not-so obvious. If I were to describe the sentence above in traditional terms, we have the subject “heat” followed by a prepositional phrase that describes that heat, then the verb phrase “was leaving” and the noun object of the verb, “Jonas.” Then another verb phrase “being replaced” followed by an adverbial prepositional phrase explaining how it was replaced. Then two adjective clauses describing “anger.” In the first, the relative pronoun “which” is pointing to “anger.” The adjective “easy” is a predicate adjective working with the understood infinitive ‘to be” and the infinitive “to hide” is an adverb describing “easy.” See how easy this is to describe in traditional terms? Hah! My students would be staring glassy-eyed out the window by this time. Some of you may also have that glassy look by now. But to continue, the second adjective clause “which he knew” has the noun clause “he would nurture forever” working as the object of “knew” and the prepositional phrase “in that very small and stony corner” working as an adverb telling where he would nurture that anger. Finally, the word “corner” is followed by an adjective clause introduced unusually by the subordinating conjunction “where” instead of the usual relative pronoun “that” or “which.” Are you still with me? And last, the word “all” is described by an adjective clause with the linking verb “was” followed by a series of three predicate adjectives “kind,” “responsible,” and “selfless” with a concluding adverb prepositional phrase telling where he kept the “all.” And here’s what it would look like without the words:

The pattern shows how we often (maybe too often) begin a sentence with a simple main thought and then tail off with subordinate ideas in a variety of structures. ES³ has the advantage of showing students how various word groups can be used in different places for variety and an avoidance of ambiguity. Please, any English teachers out there who might be reading this, consider going to lulu.com to buy ES³. Also, please find Belinda Baur and read her. You won’t be disappointed.

Forrest Gump & Stupid Me

We’re still waiting for some of our regular tv programs to renew themselves and so many of the ones other people are now watching are either on one of the premium channels like HBO or are shows that for one reason or another don’t appeal to us. We quit watching Bates Motel because it got too stupid, and Legends seemed more complicated than we wanted to unravel, and too many of the well-reviewed shows feel obligated to have their characters sort of mumble their lines. This last complaint explains why we like shows that give us uncomplicated plots, likeable characters, and dialogue that doesn’t sound like hissing snakes: Blue Bloods, Rizzoli and Isles, CSI Las Vegas, Major Crimes, The Mentalist, and Perception. You’ll notice the lack of comedies on that list, despite the fact that there are quite a few critically acclaimed shows like Modern Family and New Girl. Other than The Big Bang Theory, which we watch faithfully, even in countless reruns, we never got started with any others and are too lazy to jump into them in mid-stream. Just nothing on last night, so we watched a NetFlix oldie, Tom Hanks doing his thing in Forrest Gump.

We’d seen it when it first came out in 1994 but had forgotten most of what we’d seen way back then. At our age, twenty years can blank out most of what we remember in life as well as in movies. It was an enjoyable way to spend two and a half hours. We could see why it won best picture of that year and why Hanks won best actor. I was going to say all the usual platitudes about this film, but then I went on line to find what others may have said, and I found an outrageous, hilarious, insightful review that made me feel like a simplistic bumpkin. For nearly five years I’ve felt like I was writing a clever, useful blog with movie and book reviews, personal observations, comments on local, national, or world affairs. But now Lindy West has put me in my proper place, right alongside Forrest sitting on that bench waiting for a bus to take him back to his one love, Jenny.

I’m not “izackly stoopid,” but after reading what Lindy West said, that’s how I feel. If you’d like to read her review, click on this link: "Run, Forrest, Run!"

Sharon Bolton's Lacey Flint

I’m now reading two English writers, both women, both excellent, both specializing in thrillers. I found the first, S. J. Bolton, by way of Entertainment Weekly, which gave her last book, A Dark and Twisted Tide, an "A" rating. That’s all I need, an "A" rating of a new thriller. So I did what I always do, found all the books she’d written, seven in all, and ordered them through Amazon and then read them first to last. I guess, as I might have expected, the writing, impressively good even in the first, improved in each one. The first three were stand-alone novels, quite bloody, quite frightening, quite complicated. And she somehow managed at each chapter ending, even the temporal breaks within chapters, to leave us with a tiny cliff-hanger. You know, the old, “Oh, no! Don’t open that door!” bit so typical of horror movies. It nearly exhausted me by the time I finished each one. With the fourth, Now You See Me, she introduced me to a character she’d continue to use in the rest of the books, one of the strangest yet most admirable women in fiction. Lacey Flint works with the London police and has layer after layer of secrets from her past, layers that unfold as we see her in the four works in which she’s the main character. In Now You See Me, she’s confronted with a copycat killer, duplicating the Jack the Ripper victims. Many twists and turns that peel away one of the secrets from her past. In the second Lacey Flint, Dead Scared, she goes undercover as a student at Cambridge, where a series of suicides seem to indicate that someone is leading these young students into killing themselves. In the third, Lost, we’re first acquainted with the bloody, muddy Thames that plays such a role in this and the last installment. Barney is a young boy who lives next to Lacey, and when young boys are being kidnapped and then killed along the river, he tries to solve the mystery. And Lacey tries to solve it, along with protecting young Barney. All through her novels, she uses the hidden recesses in cathedrals and mansions and old buildings along the river, all spooky places so English in a way not available to American writers. The Thames is the main setting of A Dark and Twisted Tide, with Lacey now assigned to the marine police that patrols the river, and against the advice, even commands, against swimming in the Thames, she tests herself against the river more often than anyone knows about. And here we find all the hidden nooks and crannies along the shore, secret inlets leading into sewer ways and old abandoned buildings. And I’ve now caught up with another author, waiting for her to write another and another. But, thankfully, in reading through her bio, I learned that she was a friend of the other thriller writer, Belinda Baur, so naturally I went to Amazon and ordered all the books by Ms Baur, about whom and her books I’ll reserve for another post in a few days. But before I leave you, how about just a taste of Sharon Bolton’s writing style: “The river scared Nadia. Even here, high above the city, it unnerved her. The rivers she’d known before hadn’t been like this one. In the countryside she’d left behind, rivers were fast and shallow, clear as glass and cold as night. They bounced over rocks and hurried through reeds, splashed and sparkled in the sun, gleaming like star-shine in the darkness. This river was massive, brown as old blood and unthinkably deep.” Isn’t that nice?

Once

A week ago I wrote about falling in love with Keira Knightly, the young lady in Begin Again.
Quite a few of the reviews of that movie compared it to a film made in 2006, one also featuring a young man and woman who make beautiful music together. So I requested it through Netflix just to see if what they were all saying was true. Yup, it’s true. Once is a better movie than Begin Again. And, fickle fellow that I am, I threw Keira under the bus and pledged my love to the young lady in Once. In his review, Roger Ebert says this of the Girl: “She has the kind of smile that makes a man want to be a better person, so he can deserve being smiled at.” Her name is Marketa Irglova, only seventeen when this was made, and cute as a button (although I’m not sure I ever saw a cute button). She plays the Girl (no name used), having come to Ireland from the Czech Republic with her mother and young daughter. The Guy (no name used) works for his father repairing vacuum cleaners during the day and plays guitar and sings on the street weekends and evenings. The Guy (Glen Hansard) is a scruffy mid-thirties fellow who loves his music and loves to sing his songs, playing an acoustic guitar that’s every bit as scruffy as he is. The plot is simple. Girl sees him playing on the street, tells him she thinks he’s really good. They stroll, telling each other of their mutual attraction to music, both writing and performing, he on guitar, she on piano. She helps him actually get around to making a demo disc of his songs. The attraction between them keeps growing but is never realized. Her husband shows up and moves in with her; he leaves for London where he’ll peddle his demo disc and reunite with the girl who had betrayed him. No “they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after” ending here, just a poignant feeling that they will always stay connected through their music. I guess my living out here in the West has kept me from staying in touch with Broadway musicals, because Once in 2011 was turned into a highly successful musical, first off-Broadway and then on Broadway, winning the Tony for best musical of 2012. And I’m a faithful viewer of the Tony Awards and I didn’t remember this show’s winning. And in 2007 the centerpiece song from the movie, “Falling Slowly,” won the Oscar for best original song. So I’ve finally caught up with myself. If you’re as ignorant of this film/Broadway musical as I was, go to Netflix and get Once. You may, as I do, want to see it more than once.

Emoticons & The American People

I seem to be blog-weary. Nothing beckons me to write about it. Not that there aren’t still any number of things to write about. I’m just weary of most of it. What more could I say about the Middle-East mess? What new insights into the immigration crisis? Weather? It’s a weird conglomeration of craziness. Technological advances? It’s all happening so fast my head spins, and when a head as old as mine spins, there’s disaster dead ahead. I just discovered an on-screen keyboard on my new computer that has a wild variety of emoticons. Now, why would I or anyone else need a bunch of emoticons at his fingertips? Has our texting shorthand led us to a place where no one has to actually say what he thinks or feels?

There, I feel devilish and angry and I think I’ll have

a dirty martini before dinner, a dinner of chicken, maybe. See, my head is spinning dangerously fast.

All right, I still have books to talk about. Last week I pulled out an old faded. green-covered book that a fellow teacher back in New York gave me a long time ago. He said it would help me better understand our country and the people that make it what it is, help me better understand our history, help me gain insight into the American lit I was teaching. Did I ever read it? No, I stuck it in my library where it remained hidden for the nearly thirty years since he gave it to me. Now I wish I’d read it when I was teaching. The American People by Henry Bamford Parkes, written in 1949. Parkes is an Englishman who felt he had a better perspective from across the Atlantic to evaluate the American people. It’s an admiring examination. In his introduction, he says, “What does it mean to be an American? What are the special characteristics of American civilization, and in what ways does it differ from the civilization of other nations? In order to answer these questions it is necessary to turn to American history. For the character of a nation, like that of an individual, is the product of its past experience and is revealed best in its actions. In this book I have attempted to explain the historical forces that molded the American character and to show how that character has been exhibited at different periods both in thought and behavior.” He sees us as a unique race of people, formed from immigrants from all races, mostly from poor or middle-class people who came here mainly from Europe, but other diverse parts of the world either willingly or unwillingly in the case of the Blacks from Africa who were brought here into slavery and the Chinese workers imported into near-slavery to help build a cross-continental railway system. We were shaped into a people with eternal optimism about the future and an ingenuity born of the need to conquer a continental wilderness. In other words, the Ugly American wasn’t just a product of the 20th century. We were boastfully ugly way back in the 18th century. The experiment in Democracy was refined here and today is a model for freedom and the good life, despite the ugliness of nearly three hundred years of slavery, continued racial bigotry, the near tragic split between North and South in the Civil War. I’m glad I finally read this book. I regret not having read it way back when it would have helped make me a better teacher. Just one of my many regrets.

There, now I’m not so weary. See, that’s me smiling in my emoticon way.

Begin Again

I’m a fickle lover of film and the ladies who inhabit the film world. As I’ve said fairly often in this blog, I fall in and out of love with actresses over and over, going all the way back to Liz Taylor when she and I were young and the world loomed ahead of us, and Gene Tierney in Laura, and on to Julia Roberts and Scarlett Johannson. Odd that I never fell in love with Debbie Reynolds, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, or Shirley MacLaine. Debbie was just too feistily energetic for me; Marilyn was lovely enough for me to have a copy of that famous nude picture when I was in Korea but not enough to win my heart; Judy portrayed my early fictional love, Dorothy in the Oz series, but she just wasn’t my type; and Shirley had too many freckles. See how fickle I am? We went to see Begin Again, and again I fell in love, this time with Keira Knightly. I first saw her in Pride and Prejudice in 2005 and tipped seriously to the left. Her beauty is so unique, with that uniquely funny little smile and crinkly nose. And I was smitten. But then I didn’t see her in any of her films for almost a decade, and my initial attraction vanished. Until Begin Again. Seriously smitten this time. Gretta (Keira) and her lover/boyfriend Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) have just returned to New York after Kohl has won international fame for his singing and songs (most of which were written by Gretta). He’s there to promote a new album, and she’s just along for the ride, a ride which gets seriously bumped when she finds out he’s now in love with an assistant at the record company. She plans to return to England as soon as possible, but runs into an old buddy from back home who lets her stay with him until she leaves. And then she runs into Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck musical agent/promoter who’s just lost his job, drinks like a fish, is pretty much broke, drives a Porsche that had seen better days, has an ex-wife Miriam (Catherine Keener) and daughter Violet (Hailey Steinfeld) who don’t much care for him.

In a sleazy performance bar, he hears Gretta reluctantly singing one of her songs at the insistence of her English buddy. The bar crowd ignores her, but Dan is enraptured, hearing in her performance the new voice/song writer he needs to carry him back to the top (or at least up a step or two) of the music business. And there you have it. A fairly predictable plot, but a really great way to spend an afternoon listening to songs, the lyrics of which actually make sense set to lovely music instead of repetitive howling or rapping. Mark Ruffalo is excellent as the rough-on-the-edges promoter, a role he seems to excel at. Keira Knightly, thank heavens, decided (or maybe the director decided for her) not to lip-synch to someone else’s vocals, instead doing a very serviceable Norah Jonesish job on three or four songs. Adam Levine, in his first film role, surprised me with his voice. I knew him only from the few times we watched him as judge on The Voice. His version of “Lost Stars” at the end of the movie renewed my faith in modern music and modern singers. Then there’s my love for Keira.

In Pride and Prejudice, she was as beautiful as makeup artists can create beauty, and in Begin Again, she was just plain Keira, warts and all (a nod to Oliver Cromwell), and I and a bunch of other male viewers fell in love with the interior Keira and not just the exterior Keira. Go see this movie, and in a time when there isn’t all that much to feel good about, you’ll feel good for a long time. And you might even fall in love with her just as I did.

Bad Shots and Stupid People

I watched with interest the Deutsche Bank playoff tourney over the weekend, and saw Billy Horschel hit a shot on the 18th that will haunt him for the rest of his career, a really fat iron from 212 yards that came up at least fifty yards short of the green and into the front hazard. All he had to do was hit it on the green, two-putt, and go into a playoff with the eventual winner Chris Kirk. The only other truly ugly shot I can think of is that wedge that Fred Couples hit on the 18th in a Ryder Cup match at the Belfry in 1989. He and Christy O’Connor Jr. were tied going to this last hole and smooth Freddie hit it forty yards right of the green to lose to O’Connor one-up. That’s what pressure can do to a golfer, and Freddie showed it in 1989 and Horschel showed it on Labor Day 2014. Oh, yes, and lest I forget, there was that double-hit pitch shot by T. M. Chen in the 1985 PGA, in which poor Mr. Chen lost to Hubert Green by three strokes. Oh, my, was that an ugly shot. The other thing I noticed in this week’s Fed Ex tournament: the truly stupid things one or two spectators would scream out whenever a golfer hit a shot—“Bobalooie!” “Mashed potatoes!” “In the hole!” “Bombs away!” “Yabbadabbado!” “Barracuda!” and my favorite in light of the winner Chris Kirk, “Captain Kirk!” It seems that these truly stupid people are taping the tv coverage, and to make sure they win their five or six seconds of fame, they scream out these nonsensical phrases so that they can later point themselves out to friends and relatives. “Yeah, hey, that’s me you’re hearin’!” Golf security should escort these stupid ones to the gate and send them on their way. They fall into the stupid category along with the guy who ate thirty worms, thirty cockroaches, and a hundred millipedes,

the guys and gals who thumb their noses at world hunger by shoving down a hundred or so hot dogs in a gluttony contest, the young woman on welfare who thinks it’s just wonderful to produce twelve or thirteen children by a wide variety of fathers, the young man who just has to play video games with his car, zipping back and forth from lane to lane and then screaming through a red light, just to gain ten or twenty seconds on the field,the parents who give an Uzi to a nine-year-old for her to play with at the gun range. I’m sure I’m missing a bunch who could go on this list, but you get the idea. I wish there were some hex we could put on them to have male genitals wither away and drop off or have female genitals mysteriously sewn shut. I’d even scream “Yabbadabbado!” when that happened.

A Most Wanted Man

We went to see A Most Wanted Man, more because it was Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s last movie than because it got good reviews. And to say that we were confused by John Le Carre’s story would be an understatement. Hoffman, wildly (widely?) overweight and scruffy, in a growling monotonal German accent, played Gunther Bachman, head of a secret anti-terrorist group based in Hamburg, Germany. He was a man beset with the weight of his task, to root out terrorist plots similar to the 9/11 attack on the US in 2001. Not to be flip about Hoffman’s death by accident or suicide, I think what may have contributed to his death was that he ran out of cigarettes. In the movie, he smoked constantly, apparently non-stop from beginning to end. Issa Karpov (Grigorly Dobrygin), a young Chechen Muslim has entered Homburg illegally, seeking asylum from the torture he endured in a Russian prison. He wanted to retrieve the fortune his father had accumulated in the European drug trade, wanting to use the money to buy his asylum. He takes temporary refuge with a Muslim family, arranging to contact a lawyer specializing in such matters. Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams) meets with him and agrees to help him get the money from Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), a banker Issa’s father had known, The rest of the plot involves Bachman’s using Issa’s money to be given to Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a moderate Muslim collecting money for charity. But Bachman is certain that part of that money goes to terrorist groups around the world. They erect an elaborate plan to see if that is true. Whew! I’m confused just trying to write about it, let alone understand the plot. This was a slow-moving movie, the tension building slowly with no action scenes, the viewer more interested in watching Hoffman disintegrate both as Gunther Bachman as well as Hoffman himself. I don’t know whether to recommend this film or to say stay away from it.

If you’re interested in watching a great actor do his great thing, then go see it. If you’re looking for a fun way to spend two hours in a theatre, pass this one by.

The Boys

I seem to have lost nearly all my readers. Just a week ago I was getting traffic of 100 to 150 a day and now I’m down to less than ten. Ah, fickle readers. I guess I should simply ignore the numbers and write things for only myself.

Here’s a short collection of our boys that no one but me and Rosalie cares about.

Tuffy and Tiger have become more individualized than they were when younger. Tuffy walks and runs like a wolf, with head down and shoulders up, while Tiger has head up and shoulders down, and his tail is always straight up and flapping like a propeller. We call him Happy Tail. Tiger has among the white whiskers one black cheek whisker on his right cheek and Tuffy has one on his left. Tuffy is more a loner than Tiger. In early afternoon, we put down three plates with a tiny bit of moist food, more as a treat than a meal, and Tiger and Charlie will eat theirs near the refrigerator. Tuffy eats his at the edge of the dining room.

They have their individual sleeping places, Tuffy on the lower shelf beneath our coffee table and Tiger at the raised edge of carpet between our back room and dining room, usually with left front leg resting on the raised portion like someone bellying up to the bar. What about Charlie? He’s usually found sleeping on one of the dining room chairs or in our bedroom closet, where Tiger sometimes joins him.

We call them the gay guys. Tuffy seems to be looking up most of the time, examining whatever he can get up on to chew on a curtain cord or knock something breakable to the floor. Tiger can jump higher than Tuffy. In fact, we have a house plant that we keep on top of the freezer in the laundry room, thinking it will be safe there. Wrong. Tiger somehow, when we’re not looking, can now leap up there to chew off bits of tasty plant. To do that he has to leap vertically four and a half feet. I want to see him do that someday, just to verify that four and a half foot leap. We love them all dearly, but oh how they can put us on trial.

Backyard Showers

We’ve been having more rain than usual in the past few days. The local meteorologists keep saying that it came down too fast and too much to do any good, since the ground was already too saturated. Well, where do these dummies think the runoff water goes? It goes into lakes and reservoirs where it will be stored until needed. Then there are the dummies who still think they can drive through water running across the road. We see them all the time, cars or pickups stranded in the rushing water, firemen or policemen having to rescue them before they and their car or pickup go zipping down the waterway. And the temperatures have dropped into the mid-nineties and all our trees and flowers look wonderfully refreshed. I sit on my back patio and admire our soaring arbor vitae trees along the back property line,

our orange and grapefruit trees now dropping last year’s crop for the doves, quail, and grackles to feast on, our neighbor’s violet-flowering bush.

A large yellow butterfly who apparently lives in our arbor vitae keeps flitting back and forth across our yard. She’s not Millie Monarch but she’s the same size. I’ll call her Saffron, or maybe Sunshine. Does she migrate north like the monarchs or does she live out her life here in our backyard? I’d hate to one day find a deceased Saffron or Sunshine lying beneath one of our citrus trees. Our animal friends aren't nearly as numerous as they once were. We're down to only two cottontails who like to cool off by lying in the moist soil under one of our orange trees. We have one cardinal that signals his presence with that unmistakable cardinal whistle. The doves have finally shut off their annoying mating coo-coos, the quail parade through but in far smaller numbers, and the grackles are starting to molt. The grackle has to be one of the ugliest birds in the avian world, and when they molt and lose their tail feathers and most of the feathers around their necks, they look like they should be in hell, cawing and squawking at all the hellish residents. Right now, as I look out the window near my computer, the sun is out, the air is still, the temperature a wonderful 76. And Saffron or Sunshine just did a fly-by. All’s right with the world.

Concrete Poetry & e. e. cummings

How about a quick examination of concrete/shaped/visual poetry. It seems that not everyone agrees on the differences between these terms. So, I’ll give you a brief explanation as I understand it.

Concrete poems depend almost entirely on the visual aspects as seen on a page and are often paired with drawings or photos that enhance the poet’s meaning. Concrete poems can be a fun exercise, and children are often given this assignment as a way to stretch their imaginations, cute but without much poetic value (their poems, not the children).




Also, concrete poems, when read aloud, lose most of their intended meaning. For example:

Shape poems arrange the words of the poem into a pre-determined shape. Shape poems go back as far as poetry itself. For example, George Herbert in the seventeenth century, wrote “The Altar” in the shape of an altar.

Other traditional shapes are the cross, egg, taper, diamond, lozenge, etc. And then there’s visual poetry, which seems to be a term that incorporates all visual poems.

Some concrete poems simply can’t be read aloud. So far so good? All this is leading up to an examination of one such poem by e. e. cummings, one that depends almost entirely on how the words and punctuation marks are placed on the page.

The poem is a clever use of spacing and punctuation to get across a universal experience, but it doesn’t have much meaningful substance, sort of like most of the poems by the imagists. If you’ve ever been in a grassy field on a warm summer day, you may have seen something in the grass that doesn’t at first register. But then you notice movement as this something gathers itself for a leap, which it does, and then your mind sees it for what it is—a grasshopper. The words are split up by parenthetical marks suggesting blades of grass. The capital letters in the fifth line suggest surprise or alarm. And then the leap, or leaps, during which our surprise or alarm goes down. Then the grasshopper rearranges itself, probably gathering its legs under itself, with the final semicolon suggesting that it will do it again, leap that is. Clever, as are many of cummings’ poems, but no deeper than the grass hiding the grasshopper.

Cummings is such a good example of what modern poets were doing in the last century—breaking with tradition, avoiding poetic diction, using traditional forms but then twisting them into new forms. If you’ve never read any of the poetry of e. e. cummings (his way of saying he’s not important enough for capital letters), you should find him and taste him for yourself.

Teaching Poetry

I enjoyed teaching poetry more than any other aspect of the English curriculum. Maybe my students didn’t enjoy it as much as I did, but that was their problem. I taught it anyway. And I made them memorize poetry, another thing they didn’t enjoy as much as I did. I know a lot of them used little cheat sheets when it came time to write out the poems they’d memorized, but that didn’t bother me. They’d had to write the poems out on the cheat sheets so some of it might have sunk in. And the ones who actually did memorize their selections probably can still say them now, even forty years or more later. My high school English teacher made us memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English no less, and I can still get through most of it. Frost was always the easiest to memorize, also the easiest to teach. So many memorable lines: (“Mending Wall”) “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” (“The Road Not Taken”) “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both,” (“The Death of the Hired Man”) “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in,” (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) “And miles to go before I sleep.” A lot pf the poems I taught have stuck with me and are worth examining again. Archibald MacLeish gave the early twentieth century imagist group their poetic dictum in “Ars Poetica,” giving us three images to make his point and concluding with “A poem should not mean / But be.” The imagists concentrated on images, not meaning, believing that figurative language brought out feelings in the reader instead of pointing out truth or some philosophical doctrine. William Carlos Williams gave us the most famous (or maybe infamous) of the imagist poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” “So much depends upon,” he tells us, that image of the rain-glazed wheelbarrow and the white chickens. And he’s driven readers crazy for years. I’m more inclined toward poetry that also has something to say as well as something to show us, such as John Crowe Ransom’s “Blue Girls” in which he warns us about the brevity of life and youth and beauty:

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.

Another by Ransom that echoes T. S. Eliot’s warning in “The Hollow Men,” in which the world ends, “not with a bang, but a whimper.” In “The End of the World,” Ransom envisions the world as a circus, with all the meaninglessness of near-comical circus acts, ending with the top being blown off and the frightening image above of an immense bird of prey, black skies, and “nothing, nothing, nothing--nothing at all.”

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

The poet uses a combination of the English and Italian sonnet, English by the rhyme pattern and Italian by the octave/sestet split. Two paradoxes stand out: an armless ambidextrian and this huge bird which is really nothing. All the circus images are in the tradition of Theatre of the Absurd, funny but also frightening, saying something about the absurdity of life on earth. The other thing worth mentioning is the unnerving staccato of the sestet, “there” repeated seven times and “nothing” repeated four times. I loved teaching this poem, and most of my students, still babes-in-arms, probably hated its dark pessimism.

I could go on and on, and may just do that further along in this blog. If anyone is interested in any of my other babblings about poetry, you might go to the archive log at the bottom of this page and find Poetic Forms on March 5 & 6, 2010; Poetic Forms (the sonnet) on September 25, 2011; Robert Frost and sonnets on December 19 and 20, 2011; Emily Dickinson on February 13, 2012; e. e. cummings on February 14, 2012; Edna St. Vincent Millay on February 15, 2012; and Longfellow and Ogden Nash on October 23, 2013.

The 100-Foot Journey

I wasn’t sure if I was up to seeing The 100-Foot Journey. It seemed, from the previews, like it would be another The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Helen Mirren sort of reprising Judi Dench. Despite a few misgivings, we went to see it. I was wrong on all counts. It was about an Indian family who make their way to France to start life over after a fire in their Mumbai restaurant destroyed nearly everything they owned and killed the mother. An interesting plot concept, and one that played out without any surprises. This film was more like a fairy tale put out by Disney than an examination of real life. Very charming but not at all surprising. And the food, oh, my, the food. The tastes and aromas almost ooze from screen to audience, making the popcorn seem rather pedestrian. Back to the fairy tale part. Apparently France doesn’t have any rodents or flies or mosquitoes. And the mountainside forests were Disney-like parks, and the village like a pristine Disney set. Very charming but not very realistic. The two restaurants, an award-winning French restaurant one hundred feet across the street from the Indian restaurant that Papa Kadam (Om Puri) opens, are both resplendently pristine. And the fight between Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) and Papa Kadam is amusing as each tries to outwit the other in their fight for customers. Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal) wants to become a renowned chef known for more than his skills with Indian foods. Mr. Dayal has to be the handsomest young man since Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks. His rival chef from across the street is Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) but it’s Disney-obvious they will end up on the same side of the street. This was a rewarding way, a succulent way, to spend two hours watching gorgeous people in gorgeous settings. I wouldn’t want to see it again, but I’m really glad I saw it once upon a time.

Lawrence Block & Hit Me

I seem to keep repeating myself, repeating blogs, that is. I know I once wrote about Lawrence Block and his Matt Scudder series, also his Hit Man Keller series. What more can I say other than these two characters are among the very best in the detective/thriller genre. I’m in the middle of the latest Keller, Hit Me. It may be the latest, but it isn’t very late since I first read it more than a year ago. Like all great writing, a second or third reading can do no harm. I’m struck once again by the quiet way he tells the Keller stories, by how quiet and sensible Keller is, this good, sensitive, sensible collector of stamps is. He also has spent most of his life as a contract killer. But somehow Block has created a character that we can side with. Maybe not agree that what he does is all right, but we still like him. It may help that the people he kills are not nice people, usually someone connected with the mob.

Now, about the quiet style with a touch of dry humor. “What do they [monks] do, anyway?” asks Dot, Keller’s contractor of his jobs. “Pray,” Keller guessed. “Bake bread. Make cordials.” [Dot] “Cordials?” [Keller] “Benedictine? Chartreuse?” [Dot] “Monks make those? I thought that was Seagram’s.” [Keller] Monks started it. Maybe they sold the business. I think basically they pray, and maybe work in the garden.” [Dot] “The garden-variety monks work in the garden,” she suggested. “The laundry-variety monks keep themselves occupied with money and kidneys. See, the abbot was in cahoots with all the politicians.” [Keller] “Felonious monks,” Keller said. “Dot? You don’t think that was funny?” [Dot] “I chuckled a little,” she said, “the first time I heard it.” [Keller] “I just made it up.” [Dot] “You and every newscaster in the country.”

Keller’s views on gun control. “Keller wasn’t that crazy about guns. They were noisy, unless you used a suppressor. They left nitrate particles on your hand, unless you wore gloves. Sometimes they jammed, and sometimes they misfired. And, unless you got fairly close to your target, there was always the chance that you would miss. If you were close enough to rule out a miss, well, you were probably close enough to get the job done without a gun.”

An overheard conversation between two of his fellow philatelists: “Some days,” he said “all I want is to move everything in my life from the in-box to the out-box.”

A conversation between Keller and his wife Julia: [Julia] “Do you even know what baptism is?” [Keller] “Isn’t it to make you a Catholic?” [Julia] “No, darling, guilt is what makes you a Catholic. What baptism does is rid you of original sin. Do you suppose our daughter is greatly weighed down by the burden of original sin?” [Keller] “I don’t even know how you could go about finding an original sin these days.”

Block has said that he's retiring after nearly 150 novels, that Hit Me will be his last novel, not just in this series but last of all. What a shame. I'll miss the people of Block's world, especially Matt Scudder and John Keller. But I can always go back and reread them, right? There are five novels in the Keller series. If you’ve never read any, you could do much worse than to begin with the first, Hit Man. You won’t be disappointed.

Arizona Sports

Arizona sports seem to be in a good place, despite the Diamondbacks’ more than mediocre season. The WNBA Phoenix Mercury are on their way to a championship; the Arena Football League Phoenix Rattlers will be playing the Cleveland Gladiators for the league championship in two weeks; the Cardinals looked really good last weekend in their preseason shellacking of the Texans; and the Suns will be a true contender next season. All’s nearly right with the world.

And then there’s Roaring Rory winning his third start in a row, last week’s PGA Championship in Soggy Kentucky. And how has he done it? By out-gutting the contenders on the final nine holes on Sunday. Poor Ricky Fowler has gotten close in all four majors but can’t quite make it up that final hill. His time will come, though. And Phil came close, but no cigar. And Tiger simply has to hang it up until next spring, and even then he may not make it even halfway back to his former glory. Meanwhile, Rory may just go on winning tournament after tournament. That would really be something to see. So, golf is back in my life, but only in the watching of the PGA, the up-coming FedEx playoffs and the Tigerless Ryder Cup, but still no playing of golf. That may be in the future or it may not. It all depends on my unreliable body. As William Carlos Williams so aptly and famously said it:

"so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens"

Memory Lane

How odd the way the memory works. I just read a review of the new Helen Mirren movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey, in which the reviewer says that the food preparation and the eating thereof was almost sensual, the tastes and aromas escaping through the screen to the moviegoers. That led me to my remembrance of things past, just as I remembered it from Proust’s novel of that name, that one can be carrying on with the day’s affairs, when suddenly an aroma or a taste will assail him and take him back to a time in his past. He has no choice but to go back. That made me think about all the tastes and smells of my youth. Foods my mother prepared for me: melted American cheese over crackers, creamed tuna on Chinese noodles, bread pudding, lemon meringue pie, milk toast whenever I got sick. My mouth can still taste that dish: two slices of toast in a shallow bowl, generous butter, a bit of pepper, then warm milk poured over all. It almost made getting sick worth it. That takes me to the tastes and aromas of my sick childhood—the Vicks Vaporub on the chest, the mentholated steam enveloping me in the sheet tents she would put up over my bed, the hateful spoonful of Castor Oil, the invariable and delightful spoonful of Castoria. It didn’t seem to matter if I was constipated or not; I still got the Castoria. On to other tastes from my youth. The candy bar I most remember is the Powerhouse bar, chocolate-covered white nougat, huge in my memory, probably twice as big as candy bars today. And the 7-Up bar with its seven different ingredients encased in chocolate—coconut, caramel, buttercream, mint, orange, nougat, and always the best saved for last, the Brazil nut. The Mascot Theater where we’d meet to see the Saturday double feature, and the treats we’d buy—an orange or raspberry or grape pushup, maybe a fudgsicle, a box of popcorn (or if I couldn’t afford popcorn, then a one-cent box of old maids). Tastes from later in my life, the unmistakable pizza burger from Dean’s Drive-in, the hot hot chili after a high school hayride, the stuffed peppers or pigs-in-the-blanket. If you ever want to take a memory tour of your youth, just think about all the tastes and smells from back then. You’ll be transported immediately.

Confusion & Tiger Recant

I’ve been told by a few of my readers that it’s become too complicated to comment on any of my blog posts. I miss the comments. I found out that you can click on the blue comment at the bottom of any posts. A comment box will appear. Just type in the comment, then scroll down the “Comment as” and publish it as anonymous. I look forward to hearing from you, even if anonymously.

I’m still confused by what’s happening between Israel and Gaza. What exactly does Hamas hope to accomplish by bombing Israel and sending troops through tunnels into Israeli territory? If too many Gazan civilians are being killed, why not simply stop the fighting and killing? I’m confused by Vladimir Putin. Why is he willing to sacrifice the Russian economy with his position on the fighting in Ukraine? Is it just for the power? Is it just so he can thumb his nose at the rest of the world? When will we all be willing to stop senselessly killing each other to gain something that’s not really a gain, but only a loss? Why not just live where we live? Why not allow others to believe as the want to believe? See, I’m still confused.

I guess I’ll have to recant my previous recantation about Tiger. He showed up to play in this week’s PGA championship. I was certain he wouldn’t. But after watching him play his first round, I think he’d have been better off skipping it and just waiting till next year to make some sort of return.

Boyhood

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a remarkable film, remarkable in its unremarkableness. It shows us a twelve-year span in the characters’ lives, from the time when Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grows from seven to when he’s an eighteen-year-old college freshman. It’s the portrait of a stepfamily much like so many families today, divorced parents amicably agreeing to share responsibilities and visitation time, with minor ups and down, some disappointments and some successes, filled with moments that are the stepping stones of our lives, moving from here to there. Mason’s new college friend says to him at the end of the film, “They keep telling us we’re supposed to seize the moment,” and he says to her, “The moments seize us. We're always in a moment.” Carpe diem in reverse. We watch these people in twelve annual episodes, all the characters aging just as the actors age, all episodes seamlessly blended so that we’re only aware of the passage of time by tiny changes—different hair styles, newer cars, increasing wrinkles around the eyes of Mason and Sam’s mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), barely noticeable physical growth of Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). It’s an amazing trip we take with them. One of the funniest scenes takes place in a fast-food restaurant, when their father (Ethan Hawke) decides to have a sex talk with his daughter and she can’t believe he’s telling her about condoms and safe sex. It’s a conversation many parents have had with their children, just as awkward for us as for them. I may have to see it again, just to watch how Linklater managed to pull it off. He may want to shoot a sequel called Manhood, but that’s pretty unlikely inasmuch as the actors probably wouldn’t want to go through another twelve years with each other. If he did, though, I’d certainly go see it.

Old Books & Annie Dillard

Every now and then I look at a print I have on a wall of my workroom and smile because it says exactly what I feel about books: “Books to the ceiling, books to the sky. My piles of books are a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”

In the past year I’ve either sold or given away most of my mile-high pile of books, but for reasons I can’t explain, I’ve kept some that date back to a time when I was young and foolish enough to think that I still had a lifetime to collect and read books. In 1958 I joined a book club called International Collectors Library and bought seven handsomely bound books of classics, each with an attached ribbon one could use for a bookmark: War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Of Human Bondage, Gone with the Wind, Madame Bovary, The Moonstone, and The History of Tom Jones. I’ve read five of them, but not War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. Too intimidating for me, I guess. I have the never-read James Joyces, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both of which were really intimidating. I have one by Stephen King that I bought about ten years ago, Insomnia with its nearly nine hundred pages. King has always intimidated me with the length of his novels, and this one I just know I’ll get around to . . . some day. I have all the Hemingway novels and a collection of his short stories from Scribners, all bound in blue. Did I buy them through a book club or separately? Could have been either since I’ve been in and out of more book clubs than I can keep track of. I have a lovely book by Samuel Eliot Morrison called The European Discovery of America that I bought in 1971. If ever a book deserved the word “tome,” this one does. I think I was always going to improve my knowledge of American history, but I never got around to doing it. But I still have it and can at least pretend I will someday forge through it.

In 1974 I bought Annie Dillard’s delightful Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a sort of philosophical echo of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. I read it, I marked passages that impressed me, and I’ve kept it because of all the marked passages and the way it made me feel forty years ago. I just re-read the opening passage, and now I know why I’ve kept it all these years:

“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’s stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with is front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.

It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . ‘Seem like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’ ”

If you’ve never encountered this book by Annie Dillard, you should find it and read it. I’d send you my copy but I don’t want to part with it, part with all my marginal comments. In fact, I’ve kept all the books I’ve ever marked up with marginal comments. I guess I don’t want any other eyes to see my marginal thoughts, for fear they might think them mundane and silly. But then, this blog contains marginal thoughts and I don’t mind sharing them, so why can’t I part with marginally-marked books? I don’t know. I’m odd, books are odd, book lovers are odd, and life is odd. “And don’t nobody know why.”

Mercie

Bonjour, mes amis de France. Je tiens à vous remercier de votre intérêt pour mon blog. Je peux toujours utiliser de nouveaux lecteurs. Je souhaite seulement que je pourrais remercier chacun de vous individuellement, mais ce n'est pas possible. Encore une fois, je vous remercie beaucoup.

Tiger

I now have to recant all that I’ve said in the past year about Tiger’s return to golf, that he would not only get back to his winning ways but would surpass Nicklaus’ 18 major wins. After watching what he did in this week’s WGC tournament in Akron, I and the talking heads and all the Tiger haters around the world now agree that he will probably never return to his winning ways, will never win any more majors, will very likely never again play on any Ryder Cup or Presidents cup teams, may, in fact just quietly disappear with Lindsey into one of his mansions or his mansion-like yacht. I guess that wouldn’t be so bad. But I will miss him, and the world of golf will miss him, even the haters. He has almost single-handedly raised the amount of money for which the tour players now compete, has hugely increased the number of spectators at events and the number of people watching golf on tv, has forced the young players who want to be winners to get themselves physically fit. I hope his doctors can fix his back enough that he’ll be able to play again next year. I just wish he’d stop being so infatuated with swing speed and explosiveness. I wish he’d swing at 80% and forget about distance off the tee. I wish he’d take a lesson from Steve Stricker, whose silky swing can go on for years and years. Tiger could win again with an 80% swing and not have to worry about knees and hips and backs. But for now, I guess I’ll have to switch my allegiance to the young, very fit bomber from Northern Ireland, Rory McElroy. I wonder how long Rory can continue to swing as violently as he now does. He needs to take a lesson from Tiger’s book about causing such stress on the body parts.