Unprintable Version

Why Halloween Scares Me

I always experience Halloween as a craft project which I lack the imagination,  perseverance, and facility with scissors and glue to complete. And where do people get the stuff for costumes? I look at my closet and see twenty oxford shirts.

My Favorite Oxymoron: The Leaf Fortress

Notes on Kevin Kling's The Dog Says How

Of all the writers given to speculating about what it means to be a Minnesotan, Kevin Kling is my favorite because his work has the smudge of the real and the weirdness of the human. He comes off as one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet*–and people who know him confirm this–yet he empathizes with Richard the Third, Shakespeare's most stunted villian.

When he is speaking to an Egyptian cab driver in Minneapolis who tells him that Egyptian is like music, Kling unwisely points out that our dialect is like music, too.

And while he could have crafted a folksy aphorism for the same purpose, Kling's one-sentence primer on how to speak white rural Minnesotan is a bit of microjournalism, something he overheard at an actual convenience store, and an illustration of our melodic open os:

"I ain't gonna pay no dollar for no corn muffin that's half dough."

Say that five times a day for a while and you'll just sorta become a Minnesotan.

*A phrase which raises the possibility of guys so nice you wouldn't want to meet them, evidently because they would make you feel bad.

 

OMG

Viewer Voices: Where We Respond To The Opinions Of Our Uninformed Viewers

The sad attempt at using the new language, the gravitas-is-my-business anchor, the ADD graphics, the inane half-literate opinions, the entitlement to said opinions, the quickly intensifying screen rage, the quickly descending rhetoric: everything underlines the joke. 

OBJECTS IN MOTION

On Saturday night, the party next door involved a ramp.  They were on the well-behaved
end of the people-who-think-a-party-needs-a-ramp spectrum.

The speaker's stand at the book launch for Mary Ludington's wonderful, though Albert-less The Nature of Dogs.  Note dog bowl. There was yowling and yapping, and the dogs made noise, too.

This is what the Gold Medal sign looks like, if you've just been at a party with a bunch of opinionated dogs, and  you're standing outside the Loft when a skateboarder surprises you.    

Sax Education

I’d always assumed Coltrane was a natural. Ben Ratliff’s wonderful study makes it clear that he wasn’t.  He wasn’t a particularly remarkable high school or navy musician. But when he got out of the service, he practiced all day in his shorts in the summer heat; he sought out handwritten transcriptions of solos; he went to the Philadelphia public library and checked out classical records to study harmony.

A decade later, an established star, he would practice with Wayne Shorter.

Coltrane and Shorter sat together near the piano, with their saxophones out of their cases. Coltrane laid his whole forearm on the keyboard: dronggg. “See how many of those notes you can grab,” he said to Shorter. Shorter played as fast as he could,trying to match the notes hanging in the air. Coltrane asked Shorter to do the same for him.

What if writers did a similar exercise: Here's a photograph. Say everything you can about it.

Third Personal

Maybe five years ago, I was sitting in my Mom’s assisted-living apartment. She said, “In the next five years, I’m going to lose my mind. It would be interesting to keep a journal of that.”

She has since been hospitalized for vertigo-inducing changes in blood pressure, moved to a nursing home, suffered a heart attack, a stroke, and another heart attack. She sees only shapes. She leaves her room now only for Mass.  She is not abandoned. All of her five kids see or call her and the staff at Saint Anne’s are wonderful.   But she knows she will never again take a walk for pleasure and never again read a book.

But her prediction has not come true. She still has her mind. She came back from her stroke, by simply speaking as rapidly as possible immediately afterwards. She essentially rebooted herself, from sheer groping instinct and decades as a nurse. But one part of her brain did not survive the stroke. Her pronouns have gone. She refers to everyone as “she.” At first, I noticed she called Albert the Greyhound “she” but, being a bit of a metrosexual, he gets that. Then I noticed she applied to it me, my brother Dennis and to the farmers she knew in Rollingstone.   

Then, ten days ago or so, I had an afternoon free and drove to Winona to see her. I can’t remember what we were talking about–maybe the line between someone who drinks too much and an alcoholic–and my dad came up. (He was on the good side of the line.) But, as she looked at me, or a blur in the space I occupied, she referred to Maurice Fenton as “my husband.” For all of my life, she always would refer to him in this context–talking one-on-one to me about our family–as “your Dad.”   She would use “my husband” with a kindly volunteer.

Beneath the sadness that flowed under the moment, I realized that pronouns, seemingly so technical, give us the categories and connections that help us hold on to the world. I allowed myself to feel the brave curiosity of a woman who would record her mind’s dissolution.

Don't tell me what the poets are doing. Don't tell me that they're talking tough: Canadian Halloween Haiku

The Canadian Writer's Collective is having a Halloween haiku contest.  My favorite,  especially for the last two lines, although the lack of a hyphen bugs me:

a friendly menace
hoards of waist high archetypes
shout ultimatums

Shakey Cam: Some Highly Unreliable Thoughts On Recently Viewed Movies

Our Friday night ritual is to flop in front of the two most entertaining things in the place: the hound and the TV.  Recently we’ve seen . . . 

Hot Fuzz—like Shaun of the Dead, a parody of a darker genre;  in this case, with the sweetness of a romantic comedy, which is especially funny since it’s a parody of the hyper kinetic, overly scripted (quips and kills), special-effects shamelessness of the buddy cop movie. Plus a little of the too serene village movie.

Fay Grim–I vaguely remember thinking “this is confused” but am now confused as to what confused meant. Maybe it had trouble deciding how seriously to take itself or maybe it was just confusing in the way that every Michael Caine-esque movie is confusing. I also remember thinking, “it’s worth it to see Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum act.”

Two Days in Paris–actually left the apartment for this, so I couldn’t poke the dog if I was bored.  Adam Goldblum and Julie Delpy reminded me of the good parts of Annie Hall, which is saying something. Since Delpy is French, she can make fun of Parisians without seeming provinicial.

Avenue Montaigne –The script and acting are just smart enough to allow you to guiltlessly watch the beautiful scenes of wealthy, artsy Paris.   

Holy Jumpin' JPGs, Batman!

This is the kind of happy obsession that the web sometimes seems to have been built for.  Found while doing "research" for my 60s memoir.