CLUMPS AND VOIDS

Always and forever, Peter Schjeldahl

2011-04-05T19:44:00.009-05:00

Schjeldahl on the Frick's (newly-cleaned) Rembrandt self-portrait:

"Bankrupt by the age of fifty-two, the artist casts himself as a sick and tired potentate of the studio, enthroned in an archaic golden-yellow jerkin and a floppy black hat. .... The artist doesn't doubt his powers. How could he? But, in disgrace, he seems to wonder what they're worth. He isn't much good to himself any longer. He's ours, if we want him -- in a fire sale of the soul."

2010-11-13T16:03:00.002-06:00

The hive-mind is smoking

Norton Search suggests the following completions for "is o":

Is Obama the antichrist
Is oatmeal gluten-free
Is Obama a muslim
Is Obama a socialist
Is Obama the anti christ
Is Obama a mason
Is Obama a good president
Is olive oil good for you

--------------------------

Does no one care if the man is gluten-free?

2010-11-06T12:21:00.005-05:00

Unattainable goals: short story writing and pie crusts

"The great Irish short story writer Frank O'Connor thought it a pure form, 'motivated by its own necessities rather than by our convenience'. I am not sure whether the novel is written for our convenience, but it is probably written for our satisfaction. That is what readers complain about with short stories, that they are not 'satisfying'. They are the cats of literary form; beautiful, but a little too self-contained for some readers' taste. Short stories are, however, satisfying to write, because they are such achieved things. They become themselves even as you write them: they end once they have attained their natural state."

(Anne Enright, The Guardian)

2010-11-02T12:03:00.005-05:00

Quote of the Day

"In the 1970s he would weave his way down the front steps and out of the Museum at about the time that most of us were having our afternoon tea break. He had that rather delicate, cantilevered gait of the experienced toper. I could never work out the origin of his accent; it could have been Irish -- but then again it could have been Scottish. He had the deliverate delivery of the habitually sozzled, a series of short barks separated by significant pauses. When he spoke, his sentences always made rather ponderous sense. But in this condition he could perform the delicate slicing necessary to age whales."

Dry Storeroom No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (Richard Fortey)

-----------------------------------

Typo of the Day

Codnition: piscine telepathy.

-----------------------------------

Best-named fund-raiser

THE MOTH BALL

2010-10-28T10:51:00.003-05:00

Quote of the Day

"I wonder, though, if there is a little saint you can apply to, if you’re a person with holes in them? I can hardly expect the Trinity to care about my perforations, and I see the value of intercession by some lesser breed. Sebastian, shot full of arrows? It seems like overkill. There is a term for what is happening to St Teresa in Bernini’s sculpture; it is ‘transverberation’. But she was pierced suddenly by the fiery lance of God’s love, whereas I was pierced by prearrangement, in a hospital just off the M25."

(Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books.)

2010-09-13T22:02:00.004-05:00

Observation

A heart rolled in styptic
is no turkish delight -
clotted posey of staunched empire
not Ottoman rose attar

2010-09-10T21:20:00.002-05:00

Quote of the Day

"Time, her father was saying, looking upwards and scratching his chin through his beard, time has tiny flaws in it, tiny slippages, that in the very beginning hindered the flow of formlessness and created form. In the same way, he said, that your nails catch on something made of silk, with little hooks you did not know were there until they snagged. 'Do you see?' he asked. Flaws in the matrix, temporal discrepancies. So at the start, when there was still nothing, the world was, you could say, hindered into existence."

(The Infinities, John Banville)(A loveable and thus, given the author's previous works, disturbing book)

2010-08-31T12:00:00.012-05:00

Seasonal Rotation of Catchphrases

Use:
Replaces "[o]ther than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Citation:
8/31/10 Telegraph article. A man, sent by wife to kill spider behind toilet, sprays much aerosol insecticide. When burned-out light bulb thwarts ability to confirm kill, he ignites cigarette lighter and thus explosion, resulting in burns, ambulance, and quite the Bank Holiday.

Original context:
Picture caption for photograph of large, unrepentant arachnid.

Phrase:
"It is not known whether the spider survived."

---------------------------------------

Use:
Replaces a variety of unpleasant phrases (most innocuously "up the wazoo") to suggest the painful insertion of onerous items and responsibilities.

Citation:
The Road to Wellville, T.C. Boyle (ch. 8, Changing the Flora)

Original context:
Dr. Kellogg somewhat vindictively prescribes a voluminous and mechanical colonic irrigation for an annoying spa patient.

Phrase:
"[T]aking the full gallonage".

2010-08-29T15:50:00.002-05:00

Quote of the Day

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."

(Cakes and Ale, Maugham)

2010-08-28T10:31:00.036-05:00

Mental Status Report

REGRET

I surely would never have been as brave as the T-P staff, but this LAT series on their Katrina reporting recarbonates my old journalism juices.

"We got within two miles of my house, at the edge of an ocean of water. I put on a life jacket, climbed into the kayak and shoved off down I-10, taking my usual freeway exit, steering the tiny boat past the rooftops of my neighbors' homes, hoping they all had made it out alive."

Also galvanizing is Jeff Antebi's photo-essay on Port-au-Prince after dark (Paris Review). He walked the vast areas of the city that even pre-earthquake lacked electricity, lit only by bonfires:

"Some of the fires are tiny, small enough that they’d require only a little bit of fuel to ignite. Others are massive, and engulf the middles of large intersections. I never see any Haitians tending to them—the fires seem almost like sentient creatures coming alive of their own free will, and staying awake as long as they care to.

What was a lively marketplace in daylight is utterly apocalyptic after dusk. Shoddy wood structures that held wares an hour ago are now makeshift whorehouses, white sheets thrown over planks. Teenagers-turned-street-pharmacists hold up buckets filled to the rim with long-expired prescription drugs."

Verified and freely-disseminated facts are objects of public utility and beauty. The private utility and lipgloss-on-pig manipulation of much legal fact-finding hardly feels a life's work, in comparison. Of course, now journalists apparently have no life's work. The rest of us must dash between the flicker of bonfires, as Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell and their ilk extinguish the light with copious streams of piss.
-----------------------------

REASSURANCE

The Paris Review interviews Ashbery in 1983:

"This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too."

------------------------------

DISAPPOINTMENT

The Body purports to be the theme for the upcoming iteration of lectures and events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Organizers every year manage to shoehorn an off-topic talk by an academic from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, the result of some dark pact with a provost at the Quadrangle Club. I thus was surprised by the pertinence of the listed Divinity School lecture on The Lingam Made Flesh.

The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

2010-08-23T10:11:00.007-05:00

Changes

Signs have aligned in the last week. The backyard fountain, tired of aerating fledgling corpses and mosquito eggs, died. A neighbor's pumpkins once again have thrown vegetal arms of invitation over the fence. Do I accept the characteristic swelling with the melon-flowers, or save the ersatz trellis from collapse? Autumn clouds steam in, imbued with November grey yet still pneumatically inflated with Summer. A jocular woman with curves squeezes into a man's suit, and age then shrinks her to fit.

Windows open, the insects are now more muted than with the windows shut. Cicadas no longer scream their slasher-movie soundtrack. The hum of life is sinking, down to the height of the grass. Even the basement cricket - who has been using a wet-bar sink for amplification - takes no more requests for his toilet-paper-and-comb waltz.

-----------------------

Two aging galoots on bicycles this morning, sporting dingy wife-beaters and silver hair. One screams: "How the fuck did YOU get paid?? Jimmy didn't get paid! Frankie didn't get paid!" Perhaps coincidentally, the paid one was wearing a helmet.

2010-08-16T10:59:00.012-05:00

ALARM-CLOCK, LAST CHANCE, LA LA LA

Warmest recorded year, Russian wildfires and wheat failure, Pakistan's unprecedented flooding with cholera chaser. Each new shudder of the Earth prompts a millisecond of recognition that we are mid-cataclysm, before we sag and return to standard programming.

The work of Amy Clampitt is just as resistant to disaggregation as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, yet lines from both have been swimming through my head.

[T]he seethe of entity
undoes what's done,
the sieve unselves,
the drift within
proceeds from dark
to dark, from rift to
rift, from mooring
to castoff
off uncharted
continental shelves

(Continental Drift, Clampitt)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

(God's Grandeur, Hopkins).

2010-08-05T18:18:00.003-05:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience - and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought." (The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist)

2010-07-29T10:04:00.058-05:00

YET ANOTHER LITERACY RANT

School Library Journal habitually fails both as journalism and industry publication. But despite the buffer of low expectation, this article made my head explode.

SLJ wholesale adopted the press release on a recent Canadian Council of Learning report, without challenge or other viewpoint. And it is a doozey of a report. CCL notes the vast reading fluency gap between male and female students, and that the boys already prefer comics. Its conclusion - entirely unsupported - is: librarians must provide MORE comic books for boys. But let us follow la rue de weasels.

"The [CCL] report says comics serve as an effective gateway to reading prose-based works and contribute to visual literacy, as well as the ability to understand and respond to a visual image. Comics also can help develop many of the same literacy skills as books, such as how to follow a sequence of events; connect narratives to the reader's own experiences, predict what will happen next, and interpret symbols.

Even before children are ready to read text, comic books can give them practice in understanding material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, and inferring what happens between individual panels in a story, the report says, adding that thanks to their strong visual element, they're a [sic] used as teaching aids for second-language learners and students with learning difficulties."

([Sic] reflects where School Library Journal mistranscribed its wholesale adoption - here without quotation marks - of the CCL press release.)

This is no gateway, but peering through a path barred. "Visual literacy" is not reading. You aren't literate because you "interpret symbols," unless said symbols are written language. Comics are neither the same path or an intersecting road: they are a parallel track to nowhere. Watch what happens as kids age. I've worked for years with boys who are reluctant readers. An exclusive diet of comics virtually always indicates not preference but crutch; comics lead not to text but (absent active intervention) more comics.

Want data to support that anecdotal? One spandrel of the dreaded Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader ("AR") Program is copious data on what kids in fact have read. For the 2008-09 year, the AR database compiled the books read by 4.6 million kids. Third grade is when kids should move to chapter books, with sufficient fluency to read for content rather than decode. Among boys in third grade, Wimpy Kid series books were the first, second and third most popular reads. This is true again in fourth grade, with Captain Underpants (a comic with even fewer and more easily ignored words) books as an additional four of the top ten. Fifth grade: Wimpy Kid takes slots 1, 2 and 3. Sixth grade: Wimpy Kid in slots 1, 2 and 3. Among sixth-grade girls, in contrast, the three most-often read books were those in the Twilight series. Seventh grade boys rank Wimpy Kid at slots 2, 3 and 7. Eighth-grade boys: Wimpy Kid remains the fifth most-read. Most districts do not continue AR in high-school, so the data for grades 9-12 is relatively scant.

Does this data suggest that boys are springboarding from comics to text (of any kind)? Nope. Boys are clinging (sometimes hysterically) to comics like floats. They want to give the appearance of swimming, without expending effort. Many of these kids fear that they would sink in a book, which then becomes a self-fulfilling fact as they go longer without developing fluency.

SLJ appears these days the PR-arm of purveyors of comics to boys. Another article today heralds an elementary school librarian in San Diego selling the same message, indeed at Comic-Con. She would dilute even the most mundane aspects of reading, suggesting that "media specialists make access to comic books easier by letting students place their names on a sign-up sheet rather than go through the lengthier check-out process."

Like the transcontinental railroad, this parallel track is simultaneously being laid from the college end.
On Amazon, Wuthering Heights, Poe's stories and Frankenstein are marketed as "Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classics." Likewise, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, and War of the Worlds. We no longer learn to read fluently to enjoy complex writing and thought, which fluency reflects on tests. Rather, we avoid such writing entirely, and substitute test-prep flash-cards.

Why any SAT vocabulary testing at all? I fear a Wimpy SAT in my lifetime, with "literacy" entirely redefined. An acquaintance recently was instructed by her flight attendant to "turn off your books." We may already have done.

2010-07-27T21:25:00.005-05:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking -you light one line with the glowing ember of the last."

(The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker)(An amusing book about a poet unable to write the forward to his anthology, whose riffs of self-pity contain solid advice and apercus)

2010-07-23T08:52:00.007-05:00

HEALTH UPDATE

Yet another reason to avoid events under the aegis of Robert Bly and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement. The beating of animal-hide drumheads may be intended to render testosterone airborne, but you may find yourself inhaling a different spore.

Gastrointestinal anthrax: yikes. Admittedly, Frazer is chock-full of dismemberments. Yet there is no mythopoetic glow to a bowel resection.

2010-07-18T13:55:00.013-05:00

Bobbing Flotsam

1. In The Believer's interview of Michael Silverblatt, he lauds Susan Sontag as an improbable agony aunt.

2. Add to list of great band names: Buddy Sarkissian and His Mecca Four.

3. In a nearby park, the outfields of kitty-corner baseball fields are respectively marked with an arc of orange and of blue plastic-mesh fencing. From one vantage point, you can see an interstitial area which glows cobalt. Alien skittles?

4. How did Sarah Jessica Parker managed to escape undefiled from the cynical and tawdry Sex and the City (series and movie progeny)? During her DVD commentary on The Family Stone (don't ask), she utters a a natural and heartfelt "heavens to Betsy."

2010-07-16T08:39:00.006-05:00

SINNED AGAINST, AND SINNING

The Vatican seeks to redeem itself with a new law on handling that grave ecclesiastical crime of raping children. So grave is that crime, in fact, as to land in the same category as attempts to ordain women.

O to be a fly on the wall during these discussions. I imagine an enormous punch-bowl, filled with holy water, Night Train and pot-luck prescription meds. "Without children, there is no scandal! How do we put the noli noli noli on Eve?"

These guys are high, and determined to kill their own hierarchy. Zombies with hookahs, illumined by gilt.

2010-07-12T14:56:00.007-05:00

Senseless 1920's Novelty Tune

If we were brains inside a jar,
would you still talk to me?
Would both hippocampi
remember we'd been happy?

Though soaked in brine, would you be mine
throughout eternity --
trade a little lab glass
for that plot of crab-grass?

Corpora callosa
turn callous, but not us:
twin apples of our non-existant eyes--

Let's reach a lower limbo than
we ever shim-shimmied:
formalin-fixed sweeties,
limbic-locked you and me.

2010-07-11T14:08:00.008-05:00

NeuroRiffs

Sclera is a continuation of the brain's dura mater, and the pupil a hole into the brain. Eyes should serve as the brain's fifth-column inside reality. Alas, they rather act like Quislings, generating reports which are piecemeal, upside-down and substantially confabulated.

The brain is an electrical storm modeled in jello: a fifth-grade science project assembled on the last day of winter break.

Kudos to axons, which sheath themselves not in mink but myelin. Fat: the eco-friendly and sustainable choice.

2010-07-10T12:42:00.002-05:00

CLOUD WATCH

"Bullocks chew an endless cud in the fields. Their hot breath hangs at their nostrils as they breathe out their own local weather systems in the twilight, making clouds from a cast of their lungs."

A Year on the Wing, Four Seasons in a Life with Birds (Tim Dee)

2010-07-07T08:21:00.002-05:00

ESTEEM-BUILDER WEDNESDAY

"'Who are you?' the minstrel asked.

'I am the Golux,' said the Golux, proudly, 'the only Golux in the world,
and not a mere Device.'"

(The 13 Clocks, Thurber)

2010-07-05T22:10:00.003-05:00

READ BENEATH ROCKET'S RED GLARE

The Quickening Maze walks through seven seasons at a small English family-run madhouse in Epping Forest. Resident - and unpublishable nature poet - John Clare cycles through delusional bouts as a pugilist, friend of gypsies (with their hedgehogs cooked in clay), and Lord Byron. The owner/ physician ingratiates himself with Alfred Tennyson and his resident brother, only to then squander the Tennyson inheritances in a doomed, monomaniacal manufacturing scheme. Margaret is instructed by an angel, and raped by attendants.

The book is slow, quiet, odd: full of hands and the smoke of charcoal-burners. Details come into focus with the monocular vision of the mad. The pervasive sadness arises from the facts as told, not their historical basis.

"Mary's mouth was tired. She felt as if she'd spoken for days, for weeks, her spit thickening to a paste, her tongue always lifting and falling to spread the Word. She had lost the ability to sleep. At most she experienced a quick splash of black in the depths of the night before waking again, already praying and speaking. As she walked, the world bulged towards her, close and particular, full of signs."

"Peter Wilkins was an old attendant. His heavy face was pouched and drooping. The lower lids of his watery eyes hung so low that they showed a quarter of an inch of their red lining like a worn-out coat with failing seams. He had had his fill of restrainings, bathings, arguings, and had now taken upon himself the duty of keeping the gate."

2010-07-04T17:42:00.002-05:00

CHEERS TO THE GHOST OF SAMUEL BECKETT

I will no longer curse shorts-season and my bony, transparent legs.

Let us retroactively pray for that TWA stewardess, mugged by Sam for her travel bag and watch.

Muse: still on strike

2010-04-25T16:33:00.002-05:00

ACCESSORIES

Conversion to clutch-bag
of the last beehive
annoys, with wax smudge
on linen skirt

Dump a few dying drones
on the glass counter --
purse lips, complement
apocalypse

Grey - waif, pink frivolous,
red a futile summons:

not everyone can wear black
though every body will

Some times one wing still moves
and quarter-sized circle
sculls spilled poudre visage,
ever counterclockwise

M Objects

2010-04-17T20:24:00.022-05:00

The amusement park was hot and littered. Nothing twirled. I revolved ponderously in one of Santa's snowballs: cramped, sticky, gritted. The park was moribund, aimed at seven year olds. At ten I should have craved more speed, but did not. People got hurt when things moved fast.

Before we left, my parents danced on a raised platform, bordered by rope like a fight-ring. The dancing was dangerous. Mother had hissed enough times, "don't play with your father when he's been drinking." My face once had collided with the sharp edge of a wrought-iron stair-rail. The metal corner subsequently had acquired a stiff pad of green upholstery fabric, with the black stitching of a monster. My own stitches were clear.

If she was dancing with him, maybe there hadn't been too many beers. But I felt no surprise when he fell, almost gracefully, right into the five-piece band. Other dancers laughed. The collision wasn't all that loud. The tam-tams were down, but the drumskins unruptured. It still seemed that things might stay okay.

Once pressed into the enormous back-seat of the Buick LeSabre, I realized that we were in trouble. We were moving too fast. We stopped in jerks. Every move landed us on the same dusky, then dark road. My mother stared ahead, and chipped, "let me drive, Bill." No audible answer, of course, merely angry acceleration. It was just another night of Beethoven's Ninth. Ask him to turn it down, and ba ba ba BUM: the entire German chorus swelled.

We were two hours into the 30-minute trip. I sat at the left window, Mary at right, with Tommy in the middle. We were trying to get home, but we couldn't. Dad was driving and Dad was drunk, again.

We were turning too many corners. We were braking too late. Every muscle stood in relief, as I braced against the coming crash. I started at the back of my mother's head just as fixedly as she stared at the road. Why hadn't she checked to see if we were scared? Did she even understand that this was serious?

The distances inside the LeSabre were expanding. Our parents drifted, then became obscured. They were far away in a different misty claw of the Crab Nebula. The front and back seats were separately swirling, in different directions, drawn to opposing galaxies.

Tom at three was propped up, but asleep. I looked at my sister; we wordlessly joined hands to create his seatbelt.

Suddenly my father peeled into an empty lot. He pulled himself out, and leaned his bones (heavy for such a small man) against the car. "Goddamned North Star," he said, with a baleful glare at the florid night sky. And with that, I knew that we would stay lost forever.

My father lately had become interested in astronomy, one of his sequential nature enthusiasms. He owned no telescope, but many books. H.A. Rey's The Stars depicted the constellations as stick figures. I found the illustrations impenetrable and thus hateful.

As with all of his interests, I refused to participate: my guerilla action in parental war. I would not locate Sirius, the bright Dog Star. I would not imitate the distinctive cowbird. I would not, despite my father's increasing incredulity, ever correctly identify the Shagbark Hickory. "But," he would argue, "it's ... shaggy."

As he now muttered, my mother finally twisted her face to us. "Get out of the car," and she headed toward nearby lights. He growled -- something. "It's ten at night," she snapped, "and they are hungry." Who, I wondered, could she be talking about?

It was my first smorgasbord. After hours in the dark, the restaurant's glare -- multiplied by stainless steel pans -- was both clinical and alien: a UFO operating room. Whatever foods there were had been molded abstractly and arranged randomly. After yam-shaped meat came chop-shaped cake. Even the customers were arrayed at endlessly long tables without demarcation. You couldn't tell where anyone's family started, or stopped.

The mood changed there. The darkness continued to lift, even after we returned to the car. We traveled on highways, with more lights. We drove in smoother and gradually-broadening circles. My sister and I did not resume our arm-lock, but dreamed in window refractions. My mother relaxed her visual grip on the road. Her spirit seemed to float outside -- following but reluctant, tethered perhaps to the radio antenna.

There was less traffic. The night was quiet. We would not die. We even would see our house again. But first we had to orbit for a while.

"Time to take another peek at old Polaris." This time he managed a neat stop in the emergency lane. I craned my head outside, but saw only sodium vapor coronas. He squinted upward briefly, and then he drove us in a straight line back home.

--------------------------

An old snippet of kids and back seat mysteries, posted in salute to the back seat at slow reads.

Seals and scurvy

2010-04-11T15:16:00.016-05:00

This winter well-exceeded dim Chicago's average greyness. Repeated week-long stretches without sun were beatings with a phonebook: all injuries internal. Now Spring's light brings both relief and trouble, a tornadic swirl of turbidity.

The perfect antidote has been Gretel Ehrlich's dream-time descriptions of consciousness in Greenland's all-or-none sun. In This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, she writes of the Summer that:

“I lay on the floor with my eyes wide open. Undoubtedly I was short on melatonin. There was no night in me. I felt lit up, translucent, as utilitarian as a light bulb. Perhaps the best way to sleep in this season was to stay wide-eyed and stand like a horse. To shut my eyes against light was to go against the rhythm. I imagined my body as tympanic, a composite of clocks, hundreds of ticking mechanisms buried inside my eyes, in cardiac cells, and under my skin, all pointing toward the sun, all beating and oscillating synchronously and keeping me wakeful.”

Ehrlich's own years of Greenlandic visits are deepened by her inclusion of the detailed journals of Dane/Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, who traveled across Greenland, and then Arctic North America to Siberia, in seven expeditions from 1910-1935. (Oh to add Rasmussen's journals to the Lewis and Clark shelf.) Rasmussen's reportage of native peoples steals stories from history's tomb:

"Sleep and death are allies. When someone sleeps their soul is turned upside down and they hang on to the body by the big toe."

“Greenlanders thought the aurora borealis represented the souls of stillborn children kicking their umbilical cords.”

“Before being Christianized, East Greenlanders believed that a human being had many souls that resided in every limb and joint, all over the body, and were shaped like miniature people the size of a thumb. The souls in the throat and groin were larger than the others: they must have known that singing and sex were demanding human needs."

Ehrlich doesn't seek to retrace Rasmussen's steps, so the ur-journey-within-journey author remains (for me) Tim Mackintosh-Smith ("TMS"), who retraced the peregrinations of Tangier-born Ibn Battutah in books including Travels with a Tangerine. Although the Ibn was a traveler of the Middle Ages (covering 75,000 miles between 1325-1354), his footsteps oddly were the more replicable. Even TMS is surprised by this.

One piece, of course, is each author's language (and culture) fluency. Ehrlich speaks only some words of Greenlandic (although her gestural abilities must be beyond compare.) In contrast, TMS had landed in Yeman with a fresh degree in Classical Arabic from Oxford, and there remained. Seventeen years later, he was fluent in language, mores and qat-consumption. Every few pages, he recounts an instance in which someone seeks to drag him to a mosque, refusing to accept him as non-Muslim.

Ehrlich cannot return to a time before market economies and marketed religions, when sleds had peat-moss runners and frozen-fish handles. Structures built even by post-Rasmussen visiters had crumbled. At best, she finds Rasmussen's (now demented) 90 year-old son, born of an Inuit traveling companion and then abandoned upon R's return to Danish wife and family.

TMS, in contrast, often locates still-extant shrines and tombs, in Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey, through the Ibn's own words. (The Ibn's travel-book is -appropriately grandly - titled An Armchair Traveller's Treasure: the Mirabilia of Metropolises and the Wonders of Wandering.) Even more startling, TMS repeatedly encounters people at those locations who themselves recite the Ibn's descriptions, from memory.

TMS gleans the benefit of culture in which time is tethered to burial sites. As TMS notes, "[f]or many Muslims, tomb visiting is something to be done regularly, like changing the oil in a car: it ensures the smooth running of history."

Art Criticism as Art

2010-04-09T16:13:00.023-05:00

Peter Schjeldahl's art criticism each week in The New Yorker is a slice of pound cake, glossy with magazine stock and fine butter. The density of the writing instantly reveals him as poet; he ostensibly ceased writing poems at age 30.

A characteristic bit:

"If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one contemporary art work, it would be a picture of a starry sky, a spiderweb, or a choppy ocean by Vija Celmins - a smallish painting, drawing, or print that is somber, tingling with intelligence, and very pure. I imagine that the work's charge of obdurate consciousness would give my sanity a fighting chance against the island's lonely nights, insect industry, and engirdling, unquiet waters."

His professed love of Ashbery is also occasionally evidenced: articles can glint like suspended assemblages. But given his other touchstones (Blake and Pope) and alertness to language (Pollock is "dribble" not "drip" painting), I overcame Ashbery-ennui to spring for his collected Let's See. Indeed, I paid full price for this hardback of magazine articles, and regret the purchase not one whit. (Save for loathsome dust-jacket: John Currin painting.) Is there higher praise?

Rich reads are scarce these days. So much writing consists of loose crochet, sentences as air-filled as BSE brain tissue. Any actual matter is microscopic. I'm reminded of Fred Allen's saw: "you can fit all the sincerity in Hollywood in a flea's navel, with room left over for three caraway seeds and an agent's heart." Give me not crochet but knit goods, yarn tension that generates heat. Give me not a sweater, but carapace.

(I v. much wish that I hadn't thought of Fred Allen, as find that he is misquoted across the internet. Worse than porn sites are the citation-free, fake quote compilations. Now I must track down the source, because it isn't "fruit fly's navel" or "producer's heart." Timing, people: Allen was a master.)

Dense composition in the wrong hands is, of course, frightful. Those of us who bake black-hole souffles can but cheer Schjeldahl's skill. Because my heart is small, I did seize upon his admission that "north of two thousand words I start to lose all sense of structure and seize up."

He doesn't hone aphorisms, but is generous with apercus:

"Beauty makes a case for the sacredness of something - winning the case suddenly and irrationally. It is always too late to argue with beauty."

"Calder doesn't seem to derive forms from nature so much as fumble to reinvent nature from hearsay."

"Each of Manet's paintings raises its subject into a present time that forgets the past and ignores the future. Each is a lesson about dying: don't."

Humor also is integral, and often dissipates any disagreement that one might have with his conclusions or choice of subject:

"When you are in the mood for him, Beckmann can look like the best modern painter in an alternate universe -- a place not ruled by the Francophile cosmology that became American holy writ by way of MoMA during the century's decisive decades. Beckmann himself was always in such a mood."

Julian Barnes: hideously quotable

2010-04-01T21:36:00.003-05:00

Again from Nothing To Be Frightened Of:

"God is dead, and without Him human beings can at last get up off their knees and assume their full height; and yet this height turns out to be quite dwarfish."

"We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier."

The Memoir, Defined

2010-04-01T19:29:00.004-05:00

"This is not, by the way, 'my autobiography.' Nor am I 'in search of my parents.' I know that being someone's child involves both a sense of nauseated familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance -- at least, if my family is anything to judge by. ... I don't think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I'm doing -- which may seem unnecessary -- is trying to work out how dead they are."

Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Julian Barnes)

Thy Name is Woman

2010-03-16T20:03:00.003-05:00

Today's gender-war report, from our correspondent seventh-grade boy. "I was in a fight with five girls, and any one of them could whip my ass while she was texting."

Suburban Haiku

2010-03-13T15:17:00.003-06:00

Three small poodles pop:
brisk white roil of kernel-corn
in picture window

Nota Bene, from Dame Muriel

2010-03-08T09:17:00.007-06:00

How obscurely pleasing that this is the most popular watch sold on Watchismo.

But give me death, or a wrist-reminder of same, rather than the hourly snarks provided by the same manufacturer's Mantra design. Who needs mechanized calibration of one's self-esteem? Surely Nature provides sufficient organic curbs: seventh-graders, ingrown toenails, rejection in the personal ads, the great humming hive of the more-successful and their waxy drones.

I am convinced that the Mantra originally was a DARPA project, a third-generation torture device. Waterboarding is but apple-bobbing, in comparison.

Thoughts expressed in a dead language

2010-03-06T22:59:00.007-06:00

What I would have murmured to a fellow-speaker, during a memorial for a neighbor who dropped dead (at age 60) while walking his dog.

1. When did Episcopalians become so lurid as to invite congregants to dip into the cremains of the deceased? What is the etiquette, when you never had so much as shaken his living hand?

2. Returned to dust, will we be sneered at by stones, patronized by the earth as late arrivals? Will that final mingle be utterly impersonal, like the World's Largest New Year's Eve Party?

3. Reading the Facebook pages of poor high school kids yields death-sentence names. Someone named Fenyx screams in the fire, never to rise from the ash.

Decoding

2010-02-17T18:12:00.006-06:00

Here is a fourth grader's thank-you note, for the history books that he scored at our Border's field trip. He is quite a sly and darkly witty kid. So perhaps he is chiding my interventionist approach to their selections. Or making an infra dig allusion to Italy as an Axis power. On the other hand, he may not yet be quite clear on this Hitler person.

Too poor to start a school

2010-02-14T20:12:00.016-06:00

But ranting is cheap.

Tomorrow I troop to Border's, with a (softly) screaming horde of 4th and 5th graders. What a perverse world: their best book access consists of a highly mediocre chain on bankruptcy's edge.

I love this age group, as they well know. The 6th-8th grade crowd, on the other hand, presently view me askance. Ain't no stink-eye like junior high. And who could blame them? Their parents are happy, their teachers are happy. Cue Ms. Bfstplk and her dark cloud to every week hector and nag, denigrate and disturb.

-- What is the posted word of the day? Look!
-- Have you talked with your parents about high school?
-- You won't test into a good college without a good high school education.
-- Challenge yourself, because your school won't.
-- Good grades don't mean that you were taught the requisite content.
-- You need to read 1984.
-- Show me Haiti on the map.
-- Comfort reading contains no SAT words.
-- You can't buy a Wii on a McDonald's wage.

It's difficult to bask in pleasure-reading, when I am terrified for them. The high-school option in their suburb is a cesspool. If they moved to Chicago, they could qualify for genuinely-fine selective-admission public schools. Of course, such admissions are predicated upon 7th grade ISAT scores, and oy the competition: kids whose elementary schools had 12,000 books, who attended summer enrichment, who heard SAT words in the crib.

And my kids?

ITEM: The following is an actual vocabulary list assigned to the honors 7th grade English class: behavior/maintain/display/clean/freight/escape/season/chimpanzee/
receive/achieve/velocity/migrate/bright/reply/prize/playwright/odor/forfeit/phase/grateful. This is the challenge posed to one of my most fanatical and fluent readers, who in fourth grade was writing her own stories, with titles like "Cerulean v. Pink."

ITEM: The Bluford Series is a loathsome product, consisting of violent, tawdry urban stories. The publisher markets the books - written at a 5th-6th grade level - for reluctant readers. A good 6th grade reader requested that I purchase some "high school" books, and then identified this series. Because that is what the high schools hand out.

The angry kids are awake, but risk school sanctions and the criminal justice system. (The brightest kid in Harvey gets threatened with detention twice a day, I think.) The happy kids don't lead with their chins, but will flush dreamily down the drain. The immigrant parents don't understand how to spot and cross the unmarked borders.

Hell.

JPEZ

2010-02-14T11:40:00.005-06:00

The closet monsters of childhood don't disappear as you age: you pull up a chair, and join their club.

Perhaps we should raise Calder's ghost to preside over the final revisions to the DSM-V. Axis here, axis there, multiple weighted factors: we're all mobiles, subject to the breeze.

With a dusting of snow on the existing glare ice, I see tracks, then a long line and a dot. How reassuring that even rabbits skid on the ice.

Absent standing water, the neglect must be deemed benign

2010-02-03T22:30:00.007-06:00

Mary Karr interviewed in The Paris Review (109):

Q: "Did your mother push you to be a writer?"

A: "It wasn't like Mozart's daddy -- she wasn't a stage mother. She wasn't that invested in child rearing. I was like a terrarium lizard you checked out from time to time with distracted curiosity."

Home Sweet Home

2010-01-17T20:07:00.003-06:00

From The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge):

"Mrs. F. is a kind of mother on draught, you pull the pull & she appears with tea, Sanatogen, hot water to stupe a stye, every variety of abstract succour & a heavy sane willing presence altogether. I am made free of the kitchen regions, which is better than a million golden gas-rings, & my collapses into an atmosphere of home-made jam & the Weekly Telegraph are encouraged without being solicited."

Plain View

2010-01-16T23:33:00.021-06:00

Normalcy is an annoying puzzle for the self-taught: no box photograph or corners, no estimate of piece-count. I spent years as a lawyer reassembling past events in moment by moment chronologies, using daytimers and phone-records and credit card receipts. Why isn't normalcy discoverable?

Forensic assemblages of photographs and clippings, multi-colored arrows and QUERIES! on tackboards avail not. The only true guidance lurks in half-heard conversations, averted eyes, gracile chimpanzee gestures. Normalcy is a foreign-language film, viewed from the bottom of a popcorn box.

Walking next to the wall and in the shade, you pretend that you pass as an untainted Jane. And then you read Facebook.

My mother's wedding ring lived in an unused sugar bowl, on the spice shelf in our kitchen. Everything else lived in the bottom drawer of Mary Ann's bedroom dresser: kid drawings, popsicle sticks, school pictures and, it turned out, the letters which revealed the existence of my half-brother. Letters which exposed that our move to Illinois had not been voluntary, but rather an employer's drop-kick of a low-level married manager who knocked-up his secretary.

I never read the letters, even after Mary Ann had accused me of snooping. I gathered that there was evidence of a Big Bad Thing, and so avoided the drawer. What with the drinking, fist-marks in doors, two siblings with the simian crease of Down Syndrome, I must have been relieved that one secret could be so easily contained.

In my early 30's, she finally spilled. She had to explain, after all, why she had just changed their phone-number. The half-brother existed; the half-brother was engaged; and his future father-in-law kept calling the house. The FFIL's goal was to promote bonding, and ease the half-brother's sense of abandonment. Or to shake loose cash for wedding expenses. As my Dad was then gaga with Parkinson's, Mary Ann moved to an unlisted number and out of their bedroom.

The Big Bad Thing was contained once more. This solution was so nifty that it led my father - nuts and hopped up on L-Dopa - to then molest my sister. Which Biggest of All Possible Bad Things my mother neatly managed to ignore.

For years, I had regular dreams in which I visited home, to find only a smoking crater. My Dad is long dead, my mother dead and the house sold in 2005, but the crater still glows now and again. The image isn't quite as adaptive as when it constrained me from dynamiting the house myself, but it does satisfy.

But back to the Facebook epiphany, a statistically-unlikely phrase. A high-school friend has posted virtually every class picture from her elementary school days. And surprise: we did not first meet in high school, but rather had been third-grade classmates. I would have known this, had I ever retrieved those school photos from the bottom drawer. I would have examined and now possess my past.

I'm still walking, or weaving, away from the crater. It would be a kindness to pretend that my path is linear, and that you cannot smell my singed hair.

2010-01-10T20:44:00.003-06:00

JPEZ

An open marriage is a clam-shell, confident that it can transmute - or at least shellac -- the irritants of third-parties.

When you find yourself pondering the relative barter value of white versus red wine, you can stop calling it a "recession."

Peak oil, potable water and population cannot be finessed by any juggler, but must be thrown -- necks bared -- to the geek.

2010-01-09T11:30:00.015-06:00

SOLUTION NO. 6 TO HUMAN EXTIRPATIONS

We must extend Cheney's health-care plan -- every unguent, resin and advanced electronic -- to Dame Margaret. In today's Guardian, Atwood addresses her work with BirdLife International, and what we've forgotten birds mean to us.

"For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn't, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call "the bird's eye view". The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they'd seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing."

A history professor friend cites findings that Americans' frenetic relocations do not evidence economic/social mobility, but rather disguise the systemic failure of mobility attempts. What if we never had developed flying machines? Would we then perforce recognize the limits of our land?

Our fling with flight these days fuels delusional escape fantasies. Young adults jabber about space-travel: water on the Moon, colonizing Mars. The drunken stadium chants for a Hail Mary Pass.

If humans could accept Earth-bound status, surely we would more appropriately treasure at least the birds. Extant feathered beings who can fly seem more deification-worthy than religions' ghosts. Perhaps our transit to invisible gods was primarily an act of self-recognition: our nasty tic of destroying all in sight.

We are not creatures of sky, but of dirt. Apart from the occasional fall from a tree, we should cede flight to the impossibly beautiful experts. If nothing else, no full-body scan is required to walk the Good Earth.

REMIX

2010-01-02T12:50:00.011-06:00

Night Sledding

Unwitting locals dress us
as clowns, in checks
and stripes

Cerise and turquoise scarves:
bar codes woven
out of sight,

tessellated hat's tassel -
one's (absurd) transmitter

Our dented silver saucers
- do not worry -
need not fly

for mortar/pestle action
grinds a granular refrain:

unterra tessitura
to Mother Tesseract

2010-01-01T19:54:00.003-06:00

Sled Hill

Striped scarves are bar code,
tassels - transmitters

Dented silver saucers
of course don't fly themselves

but - pushed by locals
down the frozen water -

grind a granular
refrain to Mother Ship

2010-01-01T16:49:00.006-06:00

JPEZ

Adulthood only seems a relocation program in which to hide from former selves; the body remains a disgruntled informant.

Human personalities should be coded like viruses, and warnings issued when a rapid mutation rate signals high virulence.

2009-12-28T15:28:00.008-06:00

GEOMETRY FOR DUMMIES

In a non-collinear
bravery of three,
house finch flush
from viburnum

Three faces of Eve
stained with varied fruit

You are oblique, I acute--
the spouse is obtuse

Triangulations ratchet,
so posit a wheel--
to crank, crash:
a textbook burn

2009-12-24T20:51:00.013-06:00

INTERVENTION SOUGHT

This is Amazon cum Sotheby's catalog for someone of my current means, but heavens I want Thames & Hudson's astounding six-volume set of van Gogh's letters.

Where is Lady Equity? My days are suffused with the painful realization that I'll never live with the faceless sower (Sower 1888). I will never sit for an hour as the olive tree refugees drag their bundled roots across a merciless landscape. I cannot ditch my neurasthenic jade plant, in lieu of seething cypresses or a medusa-haired mulberry tree or lilac.

Amelioration of pain surely is a human right. I would promise to never again request even an aspirin, or socialized medicine.

2009-12-23T20:33:00.006-06:00

WEATHER REPORT

Sleet-glazed snowman twists
divining twigs, shakes mittens -
anhydrous hydrangea heads

2009-12-22T12:13:00.002-06:00

STANZA OF THE DAY

The spirit moves, but not always upward,
While animals eat to the north,
And the shale slides an inch in the talus,
The bleak wind eats at the weak plateau,
And the sun brings joy to some.
But the rind, often, hates the life within.

from Meditations of an Old Woman (Roethke)

2009-12-20T20:58:00.009-06:00

DISCREDITABLE LIP CURLS: HAND ME THAT FAN

I.

Margaret Atwood is utterly brilliant, witty, a tremendous novelist and an embarrassingly poor poet.

II.

Madonna's eyes now drift like separate Madagascars (Madgagascars?) from the main continent. What a public service! Women who lack limitless wealth and recuperation time for plastic surgery, i.e. all women, are now freed from the Big Lie. The limitations period of youth indeed cannot be tolled.

III.

The emails of an acquaintance have morphed to include a tagline quote from Mother Teresa: "I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love." I find this contention as dubious as the existence of a runner's endorphin high, although I may well be dually-discounted as cynical and pain-avoidant.

Even more disturbing, however, the Yodaesque quote has twined like kudzu into my acquaintance's writing. For example, "I want to be done with all insincerity forever and forever. What more painful, troubling insincerity could there be than to not birth and share the fullness of who we truly are into the world."

I am reminded of this exchange from Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night:

-------------------------------------------

"She even wrote a book."

"About agapemones?"

"Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax."

"Oh, lord! I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar."

"It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid. But which of them causes the other, or whether they're both symptoms of something else, I don't know. What with Trimmer's mental healing, and Henderson going nudist--"

"No!"

"Fact. There she is, at the next table. That's why she's so brown."

"And her frock so badly cut. If you can't be naked, be as ill-dressed as possible, I suppose."

----------------------------------------------

BEST REPRINT OF 2009?

2009-12-15T12:04:00.006-06:00

Thanks to the New York Review Children's Collection for reprinting Thurber's The Wonderful O (1957), a delightful, feverish and slightly drunken word-chant masquerading as a children's book. Pirate Black comes to the Island of Ooroo, burning with a hatred of the letter O, after his mother's death-by-porthole. With his attorney Hyde, they ban the letter through mayhem and court (curt) test cases.

"Why not get rid of all the flowers?" demanded Black one day. "After all, there is an O in flowers."

"I thought of that," said Hyde, "but we must spare collective nouns, like food, and goods, and crops, and tools, and I should think, the lesser schools. I have taken the carpenter's gouge and boards. It still leaves him much too much, but that's the way it goes, with and without O's. He has his saw and ax and hatchet, his hammer and his chisel, his brace and bit, and plane and level, also nails and tacks and brads and screws and staples. But all he can build is bric-a-brac and knickknack, gewgaw, kickshaw, and gimcrack. No coop or goathouse, no stoop or boathouse."

It ends happily. Hyde is killed during his attempted escape, crushed by a collapsing O in a loophole of the law.

A recorded version is listed on Amazon, but I can't risk evaporation of the spell.

2009-12-08T13:48:00.006-06:00

TAKE COPENHAGEN TALKS WITH A DASH OF DEAN YOUNG

From Dear Friend:

What will be served for our reception
in the devastation? Finger food, of course
and white wine, something printed on the napkins.

We were not children together
but we are now. Every bird knows
only two notes constantly rearranged.

That's called forever so we wear pajamas
to the practice funeral, buckeroos
to the end. We make paper hats
of headlines and float them away.
------------------------

And the final lines our epitaph:

All that a human is made of is gold,
very very little gold.

Scattered, which is to say Seasonal, Thoughts

2009-12-01T10:43:00.010-06:00

Tupperware containers are like pallets: objects which create their own diaspora. To echo the insufferable Patek Philippe ad, you never own tupperware but merely hold it for the next generation (of cookie-eaters).

--------------------------------

The handprint turkey
lacks harem or lek --
a right-hand tracing
can but exit stage left.

--------------------------------

The Village disaster sirens were tested at 10:30 on December 1st, as per usual first Tuesday practice. After the disorientation of the long holiday, I thought: "Thank God! We're back to normal."

-------------------------------

Just before Thanksgiving, I with two friends heard Barbara Ehrenreich speak on her current and immediately prior books. She thus contrasted the historical human need for ritual public expressions of joy, most notably dancing, with our current oppressive (and commercialized) insistence that individuals must think only happy thoughts.

The three of us then listening are descendants of Irish, Irish and Irish/Kashub. In other words, we all pour scotch on our Cheerios. We're now daring each other to engage in entirely uncharacteristic bouts of public dancing, to test our joy quotient. As feast and market days are hard to trip across these days, surely this means folk-dancing. Am I the only one for whom rick-rack at the bottom of a swing-skirt = despair?

The only entity to find rick-rack festive is the handprint turkey.

New symptoms of derangement

2009-11-18T22:01:00.004-06:00

In the early darkness, each city bus is an illuminated stage-set: Nighthawks on wheels, dioramas scuttling to museum-safety.

------------------

I dreamt a topical treatment for scurvy: patients enter a bouncy castle, and collide with oranges.

-----------------

To feel sufficiently under the weather is to become the weather.

-----------------

A litigator's philosophy: death is the ultimate Exclusionary Rule.

-----------------

Quote of the Day/Irish Edition

2009-11-13T13:49:00.005-06:00

Author Cormac McCarthy during WSJ interview describes his research for The Road . "I have these conversations on the phone with my brother Dennis, and quite often we get around to some sort of hideous end-of-the-world scenario and we always wind up just laughing. Anyone listening to this would say, 'Why don't you just go home and get into a warm tub and open a vein.'"

WSJ: Brotherly conversation just turns to the apocalypse?

CM: More often than we can justify.

Hire More Horsemen

2009-11-04T20:44:00.005-06:00

The Association of Booksellers for Children just published its ABC Best Books for Children catalog. It lists The Carbon Diaries 2015 with the following header:

"HERE COMES THE APOCOLYPSE".

CHANNELING ROY BLOUNT

2009-11-03T09:24:00.016-06:00

Of course the world revels in the American robbers who disguised their faces with masks and beards: drawn with permanent marker. National pride militates that we reclaim this rich material, and recast in our native tongue -- country songs.

I used the permanent marker
because I thought that you were mine

I scribbled on your torso--
thought you'd stay between my lines

But the package didn't warn me!
Beware the oxidants!

Not to mention that roadside bar,
peroxide bleach low-rents

I used the permanent marker,
but she scrubbed you head to toe

You think you are your own clean slate,
but the future you should know

She is stocking up on colors!
Not one of them flesh-tone!

Brace for the mirror! Skip that shave!
Dot-stubble now spells "owned"

2009-10-31T18:51:00.007-05:00

This morning's door-tag:

Isn't this a tad imperious, even for the U of C? The great seal, the Study for which University of Chicago is adequate identification, the declarative use of "will": all reduced me to serfdom before the second cup of coffee. I started to murmur condolences to my castrated dog on the approaching droit du seigneur.

The Latin motto Crescat Scientia Vita Excolatur is, roughly translated, "knowledge grows when no one is treated as human." At the U of C, even the social sciences aren't soft.

2009-10-30T15:31:00.003-05:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them."

Wolf Hall (Mantel)

2009-10-08T12:06:00.004-05:00

HOME TRUTHS

"Recession" is spelled with a D

Two guys tuckpoint a window-well while blasting their ubiquitous contractor radio, tuned to the local NPR station.

The art of persuasion is dead

The square, white panel truck is labeled SEWER AND PLUMBING REPAIR, but I can't quite discern the painted detail until we stop at a light. An outlined slice of bread is smeared with brown, and surrounded by flies.
Logo: "Your shit is our bread & butter."

The quotes were in the original, so I fear matching letterhead.

And toast.

The end of the world is a journey

A junior high school librarian, located in a wealthy Chicago suburban district, just lobbed this query to her librarian peers. What to do when the principal installs a large-screen television in the library, to play CNN throughout the day? Does she have standing to object even if he agrees to mute the volume?

2009-09-27T15:42:00.008-05:00

NO MORE FREEBIES

In 2005, I ran a 5K with no training apart from a weekly run on the treadmill. Time: 27.24. Over the last year, I've done nothing except walk the dog. But puppy-wrangling consists of 90 minutes a day of brisk walking/occasional jogging: how out of shape could I possibly be?

Cue Fantasia, in which dinosaurs die to the discordant Rite of Spring. This weekend's race: 29.19.

No analogies were required. I was lapped by life and, even worse, by college trixies who never stopped prattling. At Mile 2, I was passed by a nine-year-old and his effortless coach/Dad.

I wasn't one whit more fit in 2005, of course. I had but captured one last moment of easy, when not everything need be earned. Such is the 50's transition, a bridge to a dry land of hard work. No retreats: the bridge once crossed then crumbles into a precursor of the great abyss.

I suspect that the end of easy is dire news indeed for those things that can arrive in your life only in the form of gifts. No diligence earns an intimate human relationship, contrary to gym memberships and Lexus ads.

Better, I suppose, to thus dwell on those equations in which work still multiplies. On to ignominious basement sweats and actual street training. And perhaps -- because age isn't the only unfair bitch --some anonymous Little League fliers for the nine-year-old.

2009-09-24T20:16:00.011-05:00

IGNORE THAT SOUR WOMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

A new acquaintance gravely listened to the spiel on my nfp, and then asked "but what do you do all day?"

Not enough. A disproportionate amount of begging. An extraordinary amount of heavy lifting. So much in the trenches, and in the moment, work that high-powered friends are disappointed. Surely I should turn all those law-related skills to appropriate work such as legislative lobbying, right? Why do I sit on floors and talk with kids? Shouldn't I have a book out by now?

So I need pictures like these. We just reopened this reading room in Harvey, Illinois, a dirt-poor southern suburb of Chicago. Our first Harvey quarters in early 2006 were located in a 1940's no-tell motel building which, with two trailers, constituted the site facilities. In the town of Harvey, the library has no new books, and few old ones. How improverished can it be? The library had no capital fund to fix a roof that would have destroyed the computers and books. The library is so poor that in 2009 it advised its more than 80 percent African-American community that it must defer any celebration of Martin Luther King Month.

In Harvey, the public schools lack a library. Any extant books are invariably out of print.

In Harvey, you are a 30-minute drive to any decent library. You are a 30-minute drive to any real bookstore, even assuming that you had (you don't) any money.

Thus even this modest reading room is magical for kids who have never been to a library, or to any library with this many new books, or to any place pleasing to looking at, or to even one corner of the world that is quiet. You can read by yourself, or hear read-aloud, or join a bookclub. You can listen to audiobooks, or a CD of the birds of Africa, or read chapbook poems by Sarah Bennett, or examine a Peters Projection map. You can talk with the puppets, or memorize a poem. Or you can drag a friend in the door, and push him to ask for his own copy of this really great book that you just finished. And even though that lady is a real sour-puss, you know that she will say yes.

Unless you are asking for The Wimpy Kid, which ticks her off, big-time.

2009-09-24T20:13:00.000-05:00

2009-09-24T20:09:00.000-05:00

2009-09-24T20:05:00.000-05:00

2009-09-20T09:42:00.006-05:00

SENSATE

This morning in the small "e" estate section of Oak Park, an orange sweater was neatly folded over a tall iron security gate, blue Ralph Lauren logo visible. The manse and coach house together fill the quarter-acre lot. One gate is risibly emblazoned "Deliveries at East Entrance": one could easily fling the package there with one hand.

To the neighborhood garage band on its ninth iteration of King of Pain: sure, there's a little black spot NOW.

On the passenger side of a battered pick-up truck, the ground was covered with a fusillade of cheerios.

2009-09-05T19:08:00.004-05:00

COMFORT'S IMAGINARY FRIEND

Corrupted Yiddish yields Joy:
never unalloyed
but pre-tarnished--
shallacked with occlusions
of grit
(aka truth's varnish)

and hidden in such plain view
as to vanish,
Easter eggs concealed
by a hung-over Dad
strayed way off script

You must scan peripheries:
not wedding rice, but pigeon
Not fireworks, but hippie teen--
white midriff a horizon,
tramp-stamp its setting sun

2009-08-30T22:30:00.020-05:00

COURSE OF IMPROVEMENT

Mille pardons, M. Coué
but every day
in every way
I’m getting bitter
and battered

I would barter
for better and better,
self-Mesmer
into cozy oblivion

swallow that placebo egg
- voila! just laid -
cluck, chuck my own chin
fascinate physiology—

Mirrored is not hypnosis
but only phiz,
mid chartreuse post-its:
chicken-scratched
molt of vérité

2009-08-25T11:46:00.010-05:00

JPEZ

Tedious people should keep accessories and hair simple. Not too long into the evening, a clever tie or long braid evokes the garrote.

Complementary colors hold hands under the desk, and subvert all decorating schemes.

Awash in the homogenization of human structures, sometimes we need signage to remind us of nature's diversity. "Don't park under palm trees," dangles from the Florida rental car mirror. "Caution: Mountain Lions," warn the signs in Atascadero. And that terse plea to Icelandic hikers: don't fall through the Earth's crust.

2009-08-19T13:22:00.002-05:00

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS, EXPLAINED

Wrathful six-year-old soccer player, fists raised to the sky:
"Our field is cursed!"

2009-08-16T21:18:00.006-05:00

UNENFORCEABLE PROMISE

The party of the first part
to this most personal service contract –
departed

Scratch that clause
on successors and assigns

Our vow to love forever?
Void ab initio
per the statute of frauds

- not to impugn or imply
a deceptive intent

The existence of mutual mistake
- a flaw in formation -
is not material

yet loop-de-loops
through my head

A closed track clacks and shuttles
an infinitely regressive plea
v. renvoi

-----------------------------------------------

This was prompted by qaartsiluni's upcoming Words of Power issue.

2009-08-12T14:47:00.005-05:00

WITHOUT NEWSPAPERS, LESS ACCESS TO
CHARACTER NAMES FOR THE NOVEL THAT
I'LL NEVER WRITE

Meet Mortell D. Flowers.

When not aburgling, Mr. Flowers prepares rubbings of eroded headstones, and flits through the long grass in Victorian poetry.

2009-08-11T22:07:00.033-05:00

FRIDAY NIGHT FISH STICKS

Beer rings on chaise table -
burns of third-degree

and that ersatz béarnaise
of Miracle Whip
a potassium flare

We know the score
of his cholesterol,
the heart surgeon's name
Shamarani

but we can't name this curse -
or why it steams gray
haze at its fumaroles

the vents from nowhere,
disguised as charred toast
or mulch combustion
Shamarani

Wait for an eyebrow -
dinner mouths clench -

that tone, snaggled tines
of free-with-coupon fork
to strike a spark

Ask al-Shamarani
how forty sacks of leaves -
blotto-rototilled -
can rot-defile winter

Concealment by earth
is case by case

What bribe shall we offer
Shamarani

2009-08-09T16:25:00.010-05:00

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE NEW YORK TIMES,
NEW YORK TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES

Me.

Why does the NYT provide absolutely no perspective on climate change?

Rhetorical, I know, as these cads rather devote themselves to propaganda and political assassination. I dropped my subscription after its 2006 Clinton hit piece proving that Bill can't be screwing Hill. But I digress.

One week the NYT runs a map like this one, reflecting what disappears as ocean levels rise one to fourteen meters. This week we're served a puffball piece intimating that (a) climate change is a military problem; (b) our military is all over it, and - most heinously - (c) the United States itself will suffer no physical impacts.

The planet will melt, while we watch unscathed from our observation deck. The world is on our plasma screen. TiVo the apocalypse, would you: I have plans tonight.

Displaced Bangladeshis fleeing into India to escape rising water and famine? How about refugees from NYC, Houston, the Bay Area, Florida? No mention that U.S. coastal cities are petrified, and scrambling for (ineffectual) solutions. No mention of uninhabitability long before water is in the street, due to storm surge and salt-water contamination of aquifers.

Some might say that an educated reader can remember prior content and provide her/his own perspective. Right, just as people easily embrace the inevitability of their individual deaths.

In 2007, the Chicago Humanities Festival devoted its entire line-up of lectures to climate change. Surrounded by sane-looking folk and hearing an entirely-credible and searing summary by Elizabeth Kolbert, I felt hope.

Then came the questions. Most people wanted to be assured that the darkness of nihil will fall only post-them, and their interim responsibility extended no further than lightbulbs. One woman - I would not lie - boomed: "I am a high school science teacher. How can I interest students in this material? They don't care about coral reefs."

I since have adopted four new guidelines.

1. Talk to at least one person each day about climate change. Argue, deny, roll your eyes; I'm tough.

2. Give away as many copies as I can of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and relentlessly importune people to read it. Ten bucks buys you a terse, brilliant summary of the science and what it means. Boiled down: climate scientists don't understand why you aren't wet with fear, because they are.

3. As the world is ending, I drink only good wine.

4. When rebutting in a public forum, do not grab the microphone until voice has stopped shaking in anger.

2009-08-05T10:06:00.006-05:00

STRUGGLING NEWSPAPERS: RETAIN THE ADVICE COLUMNS

Two of the Shedd's beluga whales are pregnant, a state discovered upon their return from a brief sojourn at the Mystic Aquarium during Shedd renovations.

Ann Landers thus has once again been vindicated. For years she had counseled barren women to "just relax". Take a nice vacation with the hubbie.

Note the equal wisdom of Ann's no-underwater-nooky rule. Aka the need for contraception doesn't end at the waterline, Mister.

2009-08-04T19:23:00.002-05:00

SETTING SUN ON THE VERIZON

The fledgling cardinal is set on both vibrate and LOUD RING, but heartless Mom refuses to take his call. Once those wings work, you are neither friend nor family.

2009-08-02T20:24:00.005-05:00

ACRONYMS AND OTHER OBJECTS IN THE WRONG HANDS

At some point during the 90's, I spent time interviewing witnesses in Centerville, Iowa. The local plant manager steered me to the best place in town. The Motel 60 & Villa even boasted a jaccuzi hot tub.

In addition to the occasional business traveler, the Motel did a big business among hunters. Breakfasts, it was posted, would start at 4:30 a.m. during hunting season. The jaccuzi hot tub, however, would not be available to guests during that time.

Unfortunately, the Motel 60 & Villa now features a separate game-cleaning room and freezer, so I cannot document this memory. So much for a riff in which the hot tub stars as Berton Roueche denouement.

I did find this from The Daily Iowegian.

Hush, little deer fawn, don't you cry. Daddy's gonna BLAM BLAM BLAM.

2009-07-26T20:52:00.009-05:00

HISTORICAL SURVEY OF LITERACY

Caliphs prevaricate
as snakey ampersands uncoil -
vitiate attestments

conceal themselves as waves
on Samarkand tiles:
every body lies

Burked black Etruscan glaze,
non-royal thumbs,
shill couriers gallop, gallop -

Misted mirror's post-it
not truer Revlon kiss:
print glib as lips

2009-07-07T09:16:00.005-05:00

CONSULT THE DICTIONARY

CHARM: A suite of skills, including the ability to immediately mirror the syntax and vocabulary of another.

EMOTIONAL AGE: The adult human heart would best be served by a topical application of acne cream.

INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP: Reciprocal permission to occasionally bore.

2009-07-06T14:33:00.003-05:00

ANATOMY LESSONS

To live sanely despite the societal surround, we depend upon the brain/crud barrier.

The dura is a limestone filter, leaching impurities of thought.

Metacarpels envy femur, can embroider but not emblazon pirate flag.

2009-07-01T21:45:00.010-05:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Everyone's story has a Minotaur."

Margaret Atwood, in 11/2/2000 Bookworm interview

2009-06-29T09:00:00.003-05:00

ENGLAND: GUILTY OF JIVE

A group of spherical rocks named In Mind of Monk. To quote the London bike messenger who narrowly missed me as I stepped off the wrong curb, "Clever."

2009-06-28T14:29:00.010-05:00

GOD BLESS THE U.S. MAIL

I received this recent invitation, from my garage mechanic:

Can't you imagine the husband and wife, wracking their brains late at night for money-making schemes. "My darling, we lack synergy. I want to run a spa, and you own a garage, a body shop.... Wait!"

I imagine that the hydraulic lift came in handy for BMI calculations. (Although use of the word "reading" indicates perhaps a more intuitive approach to the numbers.) But what is the optimal jack height for a foot massage? And the "image consulting" makes one shudder: You are an Autumn, and a Synthetic Motor Oil.

2009-06-22T20:29:00.006-05:00

Five minutes of joy.

And of arse-kicking regret. I went to hear Grappelli at the end of his career, only to leave more than two hours into a jive folk group opener. Fool! Biggest regret of my life as a listener. Runner-up: passing on Jimmy Smith's Easter show. The King of the Jazz Organ in a room packed with his fervent bevy of female admirers, each and every one wearing an enormous hat: the ex kvelled for months.

Amendment: Video also features possibly my favorite jazz pianist (tie with Kenny Drew, Jr.) McCoy Tyner, who I heard live several times while he was still in his prime. Most sets included Giant Steps as a Coltrane homage. It must have been quite the Battle of Normandy training ground, playing with both Coltrane and drummer Elvin Jones.

2009-06-22T15:51:00.006-05:00

BATHYSPHERE

The years are stacked in thermoclines,
this tour perforce one way
As winch is surely not divine,
tug not at lagging chain

Once Paris briefly rained baguettes
but then a Baltic state:
dim, chill; meals of mingy glitter
fallen from an upstairs plate

Scant mercy when your hull succumbs,
becomes gelatinous
With exposed heart a muggers’ crew,
tip love's shadow vertical—

Closet nightmares all invert
for monsters here festooned
as bioluminescent goons:
ferris spokes revolve a maw

Stare down or up, cold light or none,
plain or sky: abyssal
The cratered moon a green globe sponge,
stars innumerate yet brittle

2009-06-18T14:43:00.004-05:00

CRUMPLED PAGES

We each bob at the end of a kite-string, flown by hands from the grave.

The societal protective coloration which once was good manners now consists of porn references.

Nothing is sadder than a folie a deux, minus one.

------------------------

"The cast of mind is westward, to land's end and the sun sinking into the sea. To such geography the sun, whether a god or not, is godly, and the feminine principle turns up mainly as trouble-making, that is in the figure of the witch. This might apply to California too, only it's not Celtic and it lacks saints. It is hard to be a first-class witch without a saint nearby to keep you stimulated."

The Oysters of Locmariaquer (Eleanor Clark)

2009-06-17T19:36:00.052-05:00

WATER RISING

Reading Mattheissen's Shadow Country , daily (not gaily) mopping the flooded basement: I've spent many recent hours mulling the higher ground.

Shadow Country reimagines the Ed Watson legend, but its foreground details the settlement of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands from post-Civil War though the frenzied and corrupt land development of the 1920's. For descendants of escaped slaves, white felons on the lam, survivors of the Seminole Wars, plume-hunters and assorted drifters, this higher ground of course was but relative, beset as they were by heat, hurricane, mosquito, water moccasin, alligator and briney poverty. Geographically the higher ground was even more mingy, consisting of those islands formed by Calusa shell middens. The largest such island was Chokoloskee, with a highest point of twenty feet above sea-level.

Higher ground, of course, is narcotic. Immediately one forgets the narrow dimensions of the foothold, the immense area and depth of the waters from which one escaped, the illusory nature of escape.

Every few months, my non-profit mind becomes a swirl of "why don't people." Why don't they read to their kids, obtain a library card, sign up to receive free books from my group? The solution is always to review this summary of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy ("NAAL").

The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics ("NCES") tested 19,000 adults (ages 16+) in three aspects of English literacy: quantitative, documentary and prose. NCES extrapolated those results to the 222 million such adults.

Two percent (4.4 million people) were eliminated from the findings, as foreign speakers who could not be tested. An additional three percent
(6.6 million) could recognize some letters, numbers or words; were alternatively assessed, and are included in the study's Below Basic category. Thus five percent of adults - 11 million people - are illiterate in English.

Descriptions of the assessment categories appear at page 16 of the linked summary. You will note that NCES refused to call the highest category "advanced," as unrepresentative of the skills. The highest category rather is "proficient." For prose, "proficient" equates to an ability to compare two dueling newspaper editorials.

Here are the prose literacy results. I cannot truncate the white space below, so scroll down for the chart. (No computer-literacy cracks!)

LITERACY LEVEL	MILLIONS	PERCENT
Below Basic	30	14
Basic	63	29
Intermediate	95	44
Proficient	28	13

Each category incorporates, of course, a range of scores. A better grasp on the skills gap can be gained by comparing Report Figures 3 and 9. Figure 3 illustrates what is termed a "moderately" difficult task: using a simple sandpaper selection guide. Figure 9 then reports the actual success for that task in each category. Of Below Basic scorers, only 8 percent could read the chart. At Basic, 39 percent. Intermediate had a 76 percent success rate, and Proficient scorers a 97 percent rate. Of course, the respective population sizes means that only 56 percent of adults can read that very basic chart.

From the right angle, are the alligators smiling?

2009-06-17T18:32:00.007-05:00

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM HERR KEPLER

The science-related name of his Nibs entitles this site to a nifty
badge from the Science Scouts bloggers of Science Creative Quarterly.

Alas H. Kepler has been unable to force Blogger to accept the badge url as a gadget, and so is ignominiously reduced to linkage. He has slunk to a corner, and is muttering furiously his nom de neighborhood -- Kibbler.

2009-06-16T15:24:00.008-05:00

FIN DES SIÈCLES VARIÉS

1. In a world with Martha Stewart's craft-closet of cupcake wrappers, Jay Gatsby's ties seem as spartan as vegan sandals.

2. Failed flirtation with younger person: maimed by a ma'am.

3. Simon Doonan in The New Yorker: "Cinquante-six. Ever since I passed fifty, I'm aging in French. It's more glamorous."

2009-06-13T15:42:00.010-05:00

TEMPORARY ASSUMPTION OF CRITICAL STANDING

John Ashbery's poetry self-disarticulates like a teenage lobster into cutting. I've always thus assumed that his true talents lay in the visual arts. Thanks to The Paris Review for the disabuse.

The poetry at least contains an occasional grig-like phrase, with sufficient energy to sproing to freedom in one's polypropylene frisee. The collages, however, redefine "inert." More coherent work issued from my childhood CCD classes, despite the multiple hindrances of safety scissors, censorious lay-teachers and source images from Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal.

Ashbery is a serial offender, and this latest act can but be construed as a plea for help. Stop him stop him before he publishes again.

For collage as an art form, see the Scissor Dances of Dr. Omed. Liquified then centrifuged brainstem, chilled and served in martini glass with tiny live crayfish as silt-dweller garni: yum.

2009-06-07T10:23:00.002-05:00

GREETING CARD

Hope floats -
a languid, ludicrous buoy:
bears no expectations
marks the lane
in which despair -
flipturn birth to death -
laps the murk
with killer swimmer's thighs

2009-06-01T09:15:00.004-05:00

JPEZ

A question for those with multiple language fluencies: how long before you regularly understood not only denotations but connotations?

This vintage advertisement is propped on my kitchen counter for one reason: I love its rising note of hysteria. You know that when the fairy reaches "floating," she will rip every single ringlet out by its roots.

"Floating" itself is a transitory and non-sustainable state, rife with apprehension. As a pratsplash waiting to happen, it also connotes the anticipatory derision of the onlooker. Here is a masterful use, from the London Review Blog:

"Right from the start of the MPs’ expenses – sorry, ‘allowances’ – scandal, I think we’ve all had personal favourites. The multiply-flipping Labour ministers may edge the contest in terms of the outrageousness of what they’ve done, but the Tories have had the upper hand in terms of vivid details. The wisteria was good, the manure was better, the moat-cleaning was better still, and then best of all was the £1645 floating island for Sir Peter Viggers’s duck pond. ... The model of duck house is called a ‘Stockholm’, apparently because it’s based on a building in Sweden. It’s five feet high. I don’t know why ducks like it or need it, I don’t know why it floats, I don’t know how they manage to make it cost £1645 but I do know that the the whole story just feels magically right."

2009-05-27T19:38:00.004-05:00

LETTER TO THE EDITOR/OTHER PEOPLE KNIT

Dear Sirs:

On 5/27/09, the Wednesday Journal reported that Sciortino and Sons had ruptured a gas pipeline after ignoring state law. You simultaneously illustrated the first tenet of print journalism: any FUBAR article requires double the copy-editing.

Mr. Dwyer wrote that Nicor took 20 minutes "to literally 'squeeze off' the 4-inch diameter PVC gas line with a large portable vice." Alas even those vices with the tightest grip lack any industrial use. "[A] large portable vice," even if we elide past the squeezing, belongs in an entirely different sort of publication.

I look forward to Mr. Dwyer's report on the filling of potholes with the Seven Deadly Sins.

2009-05-25T14:30:00.002-05:00

CRUMPLED PAGES

Hope is the thing with feathers, stuffed and mounted in the den.

Peristalsis: the hint that humans were never designed to experience inner peace.

Three incongruous adults in a car signals a drug transaction. Two incongruous adults: a marriage.

----------------------------

"She had the look of a trunk person: delicate, wistful, a little withdrawn. I've known many truck people and I'm convinced they accumulate trunks in order to have places in which to hide themselves away when the world becomes too much -- as sooner or later it will."

Cadillac Jack (Larry McMurtry)

2009-05-20T16:49:00.006-05:00

LOST TELEPLAY FOR NORTHERN EXPOSURE

Dream sequence

Joel Fleishman is standing with Ruth Ann in front of a tombstone.
She is wearing a black poncho.

JOEL: What is this?

RUTH ANN: Your grave, Joel.

JOEL (squints): God - the font is minuscule.

RUTH ANN: Perhaps this will help. (Hands him a magnifying glass.)

JOEL (Peers through glass; periodically looks up in indignation)

"Joel Allen Fleishman. Died in Alaska. Buried in his Ralph Lauren paisley comforter with matching sheets. Never earned a real salary or paid student loans. Displayed insufficient medical skill in the following instances..."

HEY! This is a memorial? What about griving? Respect and remembrance?

"Drew insufficient joy from living, vide never schtupped..."

This is outrageous!

RUTH ANN: I guess that's the difference between a tombstone and a resume, Joel.

JOEL (looks around): Where are we, by the way?

RUTH ANN: Hell, of course.

JOEL (spluttering): Hell? Hell-hell? Dante and circles like the Guggenheim? But I was a good person!

RUTH ANN (examines Joel skeptically)

JOEL: Relatively! I never squished honeybees. I gave to the United Negro College Fund. I was a doctor!

RUTH ANN: I'm sorry, Joel. The influx of baby boomers forced us to adjust the curve.

JOEL: What happens to me now? This area looks brimstone-free.

RUTH ANN: Well, you would have been devoured by wolverines, but you don't know what they look like. Your choices are: eyes pecked out by plovers, knees gnawed by martens, or sanity loosened by loons.

JOEL: Is this hell, or Yangzee's take-out?

RUTH ANN: I forgot. You can spend eternity in a Chinese restaurant, hopped up on MSG, arguing with a waiter who purposely misunderstands the word 'Chablis'.

2009-05-17T21:28:00.007-05:00

RANT DU JOUR

Desserts are grand, as long as I have ordered one. Unsummoned sweets, however, trigger not my salivary glands but rather bile ducts, and have ever since law school.

The precipitating incident occurred as I interviewed with a Chicago firm (send SASE for the name) with a poo-poohed reputation of shunning lady lawyers. During a turgid lunch (itself no advertisement), the male partner haled the dessert cart. Without consultation, he commanded a round of lemon chiffon pie – for everyone.

The female associate, to my horror, acquiesced without comment. I declined. I loathed lemons. (Before each grisly gym dance in high school, I had dabbed a particularly vile citron-scented cologne everywhere but my braces.) The partner insisted. The waiter, a comrade, leered. I thought, “I am a confident, professional woman of the 80’s”, and ordered the always consoling chocolate cake.

The waiter served – lemon chiffon pie.

My anger at this puerile power play was genuine and just as ineffectual. I did not touch the pie, but received an employment offer. I declined the job, alas, politely. What I did gain, however, was the sudden perception of another type of dessert waltz, one so inherent in the restaurant experience as to be imperceptible.

We can call this dance “sweets for the demurring sweet.” Perhaps every woman alive has been dragged by her psychic hoop-skirts through its steps. One: waiter removes entrees. Two: male dining companion (“MDC”) orders caloric dessert resembling the Alien, and Three: woman quite audibly states, “[n]othing for me”. One: waiter tilts head, as if at a dog-whistle. Two: waiter lowers monstrosity to the table, and Three: distributes an extra spoon to the woman.

Over the years, I became increasingly grit-toothed over this practice. I fulminated against uncomprehending service persons. I waved ostentatiously-unused spoons. I inveighed against this obvious conspiracy to drive women insane, one tart at a time.

One evening, my usual MDC extricated himself from his dish’s caramel maws to lob some sticky queries. Had I truly identified a phenomenon? Why did it occur? Was it gender-based, or rather governed by who paid the bill? Even if gender-based, what was the big deal?

My considered response was a sputter. He thus proposed investigation (and hoped for Major Drama).

We proceeded to survey Chicago restaurants along the expense, trend and sanitation spectra. Each, of course, afforded its own special touches. Desserts were placed in different table quadrants, dead-center being most obnoxious. Utensil handling ranged from the tacit, to the murmurous (“…in case you need an extra fork”), to utter smarm (“Oh, honey. Doesn’t someone want to share?”)

But the offending practice was indeed rampant. The sole exceptions were corner coffee shops, which generally allowed each to cleave to his own. (Malts must excite Gombe-like territorial display.)

Further, the potential non-gender factors were demonstrably irrelevant. We enacted a variety of scenes. We alternated who ordered the wine and the meal, proffered plastic payment, or loudly proposed late-night bondage. It mattered not. Specials were litanized and entrees uncovered: he ordered dessert and I received implements. Wham, bam, eat-this-although-you-specifically-declined-it ma’am. Need I add that when my MDC abstained, he never received tools or urgings to share my plate?

As for the reasons whyfor, the nature source of information – the servers themselves – either feared kneecapping or had mislaid their manuals. Not one could explain this stylized override of a customer’s command.

My best guess is this: society weirdly tells us that a woman’s worth adheres in her appearance. She must be attractive, which means (until all shrivel away in anorexic agony) that she must be thin. Although all women do consume more than air, many feel guilty when caught in the act. Many feel that eating constitutes an admission that they aren’t doing their part to achieve the impossible. So the waiter who slides an extra spoon is allowing a woman to talk a good story, to not order cake yet eat it.

So how can I resent what is merely a dance of charity, an allemande-left around confrontations with futility. After all, no one craves titters when mitigating guacamole with diet pop. And aren’t restaurants in the prickly business of pleasing?

I haven’t progressed much beyond my initial sputter. I can suggest only that the practice presumes a woman’s true wish, and then seeks to satisfy it. This is also the accepted manner of dealing with small children and dogs. No wonder that I instinctively revert to the petulant two’s – “Noooo want ice cream!”

Women, however, do not face the linguistic barriers posed by youth or phylum. We are neither sear-suckered toddlers – who silently need to pee, nor beagles – ditto. We are adults, unfortunate beings who bear the burden of articulating our desires. That burden remains even when faced with conflicting choices.

That charity, and mind-reading, are misplaced can be seen if we imagine a world in which waiters did not play both speaking roles. Perhaps women would conform their behavior to their diets. Or perhaps once deprived of surreptitious bites, women would decide that diets, and the warped fiction of female as ornament, are hooey. Perhaps men would finish an entire dessert, and shake the half-a-mint-julep homicidal longing described by Ogden Nash. Perhaps the lemon chiffon would land where it may.

2009-05-17T10:29:00.003-05:00

CRUMPLED PAGES

1. "Vegan," when construed with its Vedic root, means starvation.

2. Life is Death's glide-path.

3. Mid-life crisis relationships so often settle for sex at the expense of sensibility.

--------------------------------------
"The worst of being a parent is my fate, then: being an adult. Not owning the right language; not dreading the same dreads and contingencies and missed chances; the fate of knowing much yet having to stand like a lamppost with its lamp lit, hoping my child will see the glow and venture closer for the illumination and warmth it mutely offers."

Independence Day (Richard Ford)

2009-05-11T12:00:00.015-05:00

COLLEGIATE SCULL

Regatta on the Cal-Sag:
flotilla to foil Dutch Masters
despite rowers named Toonstra
and Vroom

The channel is nominal -
bargeway (once a scraped canoe)
from Sanitary Ship Canal
to toxigenic former slough

No Maastricht flint, graphic kine
gold light teratogen-cast:
low-country ancestral kin
were lured by unrelenting flat

Boats rest on spill, emulsed varnish
of imperceptible pulse
any fish - reflected car glint
from Camelback Pratt through truss

Our photographs, painted by Cuyp
a gull in every view -
the V of oars and bridge supports
blown across the clouded brew

2009-05-10T12:23:00.003-05:00

EMAIL EXCERPT

FYI the storms denuded the crabtrees,
the birdbath water is thus now bepetaled--
the starlings stride into it
like depraved Romans

Next: grapes
and tiny iridescent togae

2009-05-10T11:28:00.007-05:00

JPEZ

1. Triathlon watches, with their displays of heart rates and split times, measure performance. My pedometer merely quantifies kvetch.

2. Life is most aptly measured not as velocity or acceleration, but as rattlebone jounce.

3. Just as unpredicable as another's sexual practices is his/her taste in music.
External manifestations are useless: we can deduce nothing from a marriage or iPod. Rhythm is the deepest layer of secrecy.