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Scroogey Thoughts On A Christmas Carol

Reading A Christmas Carol, I can see why people who don’t like Dickens don’t like Dickens. It plods to its conclusions like a powerpoint.  It’s sentimental and moralistic. And, yes, there are the overelaborate metaphors, the show offy lists.

And then there’s this:    

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon change for anything he put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
    Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I think I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

I am familiar with this style from my college days. I didn’t study it; I practiced it. It is what happens when you have three pages of material for a five page paper and it’s two in the morning.

But then, in Saint Paul years later. you you get a phone call from a friend who will say, “It’s really nasty out. I think I saw Albert actually pulling Ellen across the street because he wanted to come in” and then you will look down at the Dickens and see the phrase “misanthropic ice” and remember that you are someone who loves Dickens.   

R.I.P. Carol Bly

I’d meant to argue with her more. In our oblique local culture, Carol Bly was direct. I disagreed with her deepest assumptions about politics. She believed that conservatives were not simply wrong, but less evolved than liberals.  (On the other hand, I recently exclaimed, “Awesome! A Gerald Ford stamp!”) But Carol Bly’s insistence that the fiction we create should include politics has led me to think about what including politics in fiction might mean. I don’t think she would agree with the conclusions I’ve come to, that politics is almost always ironic in fiction, that it is undercut by the delusion and self-interest and instability and opacity and forgiveness that fiction explores. (Then again, that might just be the kind of sloppy opining that gives blogs a bad name.)

Her directness helped me in other ways. She was an early supporter of my literary magazine Two Cities, subscribing immediately and writing me notes about what I could do better. She critiqued a story of mine and told me that, if you write one story about someone, you always have to ask, “why this day?” The point may be obvious, but I didn’t know it then and always remember it now. She cared about writing and how it was taught and took on the workshop early.

She was less effective, and less celebrated, than she might otherwise have been because her natural mode was the lecture and to lecture is to condescend and to condescend is, in some small way, to make an enemy. Her weakness was not that she cared but that she seemed to assume that she was the only one who cared. 

Lecturers aren’t good listeners and she had, to my own imperfect ear, a tin ear which made her more personal pieces goofily endearing but which hobbled her more polemical pieces. 

She cared about outstate Minnesota and, in Letters From The Country,  treated seriously what others have treated sentimentally.  I hope this book lasts. The personal essay was her first and best form. The “personal” gave her writing detail and her voice humility. The “essay” honored her directness.   

The start of an essay I had left bookmarked for years until I picked up the book this morning: 

I have been thinking about the positive side of Minnesota blizzards. Another of the blessings is that extended-family occasions come to a halt. Thank goodness. The extended-family dinner is a threat to the pleasure and ease of the American farm family, yet it is hard to say so.

And this, about the small town in rural Minnesota where she lived with Robert Bly:

Before a storm, Madison is full of people excitedly laying in food stocks for the three-day blow. People lay in rather celebratory food, too. Organic-food parents get chocolate for their children; weight watchers lay in macaroni and Sara Lee cakes; recently-converted vegetarians backslide to T-bones. 

Vince Guaraldi's Falling Snow

Has any music better approximated the feeling of watching snow fall, even the whisper of dread at having to drive in it?  (It's snowing in Saint Paul now.) I try to listen to the Christmas music on the oldies station but I cannot stand its Burl Ives smarminess for more than half a song. This and Etta James' Christmas album are what I want on this time of year.   

Nina's Coffee Shop

Nina’s is what a neighborhood coffee shop is supposed to be.  It absorbs and invigorates its locale. Common Good Books is downstairs; art, often from College of Visual Arts students and grads, hangs on the walls, and soups from Zander are on the menu. It’s a high ceilinged place, with walls of peach-colored brick from the late 1800s when Western Avenue really was the western border of Saint Paul and Nina was a madam. Windows the size of walls look out on Cathedral Hill.

More importantly, this is where people gather–for their French lessons, for their English as a second language groups, for their client meetings. When you walk past some nights, the illuminated laptops can seem almost votive.   

The place doesn't have the "Go back and read some Sartre and I might consider serving you" attitude you might expect from a coffee house across from an art school. The staff is genuinely friendly. If you show up hungry, I can recommend the rosemary egg salad or the pulled pork. I know some people who know some people who eat some scones and they report that the ginger-fig-walnuts ones aren’t bad.  Surprisingly for a coffee house, the coffee used to be bad, but now it’s pretty good. The sheer gregarious roar of the place at lunchtime can make the more demanding work meetings a problem. And they do have the standard-issue unreadable chalk menus for their coffee drinks. But at this time in history, do we need to be told what a latte is?

". . . she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree."

I know this sounds crazy but the humor in Jane Austen reminds me of the humor in the Andy Griffith Show: a slight pressure against the normal. It is spiked, but warm and forgiving. Jane Austen, sometimes through surrogates, is Sheriff Taylor; Marianne, Deputy Fife. 

Howling Dog Alert

This is the official entry of our friend Michele in the space150 talent show. The hound is Gobi, who we think of as Albert's sponsor.  When we met Gobi, we thought he was so cool, we got Al.  Please note the ear flip at the end. Michele and Keith refer to this as "going all Pope." By going to you tube and rating the video, you vote in the talent contest.

Wild and Quasi

It's been a very busy week–one of those rare weeks (for me) where you actually forfeit large chunks of REM sleep and the work done between midnight and two a.m. proceeds from trudging productivity to nodding near sleep to a fearful jolt awake. I did learn the possibly useful  words "b-roll" (the supplemental footage in videos) and "quasi-paper" (what lawyers call pdfs and other files with metadata stripped away).

bel·low v. "to give a bull's loud roar"

I found the beautifully designed, electrically-bright new Paris Review Interviews in my stocking recently.  This, from Saul Bellow: "I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things i knew intimately.  Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable."  Earlier: "When I began to wrote Augie March, I took off many of these restraints. I think I took off too many, and went too far . . . "

For the record, I liked The Dangling Man a lot and couldn't get through The Victim. I also have never read Herzog and am now asking myself why. 

Best Two Word Synopsis of MacBeth

A friend of ours is teaching MacBeth to his junior high school class. When they complained about the difficulty of the play, he had them put their heads on their desks and asked who didn't want to continue. Only three raised their hands. 

Upon encountering the line, "he unseamed him from the nave to the chops," one student took a second to vizualize what was being described and blurted, "He gangster."

Note: The poster is from a Royal Shakespeare production. I know with books using the cover is a tacit fair use. Is this true with theatrical posters?

New Standards at the Fitzgerald

The New Standards show was always generous, often funny, and sometimes transcendant.

I took down the original post previewing because the You Tube code was mucking up my site in ways I didn’t have time to figure out, which meant that Minnesota J’s comments about the band –which I read as  combination of bafflement and outrage at a jazz version of London Calling– got deleted, along with my response.  (See Joel’s post on Hotel Zero.) 

The version of “London Calling” they lead off the show with found something authentic in the song–the piano and stand up bass caught the martial insistence of the original and Chan Poling’s vocal caught some of the strangulated quality of a retrospective call-to-arms (“I was there too, you know what they said? Some of it was true”).

But the highlights of highlight-filled show were a stinging, Sinatra-esque “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” a stark “Watching the Detectives” where the lyrics were newly strange, the encores of “Angels We Have Heard On High” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and two absolutely beautiful numbers by Haley Bonar.  Oh yes, and  the cover of “Toxic” (E looked it it up: Britney Spears) and the title song from Dan Wilson’s new album and the appearance by the lead singer from Soul Coughing who did a goofy little rap.    

One ( literally) unfortunate note:  Eleanor Mondale can’t sing, but that’s cool.  She emboldened the rest of us.