Yes, but what does it mean?

I am reading a book by Neil Gaiman called American Gods. It's a novel that deals with mythology and its place in America now that we are a society so immersed in technology and information. I'm enjoying the read so far, not least because it has confirmed two truths for me.

One, and I'm quoting Gaiman here, is that there is a phenomenon where "you only ever catch one episode of [TV] shows you don't watch, over and over, years apart." I had always suspected this was some kind of cosmic joke I was imagining, but now that he's writing about it, I realize that at least one other person has experienced this happening to him.  For me it's an episode of Wings where two of the characters get married. Although it's been a while since I've come across a network playing Wings reruns, chances are if I did it would be that episode.

Two, that you can go your whole life never knowing something or someone existed, but as soon as you learn about it, it becomes immediately ubiquitous. For example, I had never heard of Louise Brooks until a week ago. She had always existed, but I was never aware of her. Now, as soon as I read her name in this American Gods book, she's all over the place.  Is it just that I'm more aware of her name being mentioned?  Possibly.  But it's pretty strange that a friend of mine brought her up in conversation, randomly, at this particular time.  On the other hand, my friend was saying that her face is up on a mural on the outside wall of a school in Los Angeles that I've probably driven by at some point.  But while watching TCM the other night, Robert Osborne referred to Louise Brooks in connection to another film that was airing.  So yes, you could probably come up with a solid argument against it, but I'm convinced that this is a real thing.

I'm close to finishing American Gods, so I'll let you know if anything else is illuminated.  I just hope it's not another In the Woods-ian epic disappointment at the end.  You'll be getting a full rant from me on that one one of these days. 

French Movie

-David Lehman

I was in a French movie
and had only nine hours to live
and I knew it
not because I planned to take my life
or swallowed a lethal but slow-working
potion meant for a juror
in a mob-related murder trial,
nor did I expect to be assassinated
like a chemical engineer mistaken
for someone important in Milan
or a Jew journalist kidnapped in Pakistan;
no, none of that; no grounds for
suspicion, no murderous plots
centering on me with cryptic phone
messages and clues like a scarf or
lipstick left in the front seat of a car;
and yet I knew I would die
by the end of that day
and I knew it with a dreadful certainty,
and when I walked in the street
and looked in the eyes of the woman
walking toward me I knew that
she knew it, too,
and though I had never seen her before,
I knew she would spend the rest of that day
with me, those nine hours walking,
searching, going into a bookstore in Rome,
smoking a Gitane, and walking,
walking in London, taking the train
to Oxford from Paddington or Cambridge
from Liverpool Street and walking
along the river and across the bridges,
walking, talking, until my nine hours
were up and the black-and-white movie
ended with the single word FIN
in big white letters on a bare black screen.

Blueblack and cracked

Tonight there is going to be a low of 39 degrees, and I am sitting here in my puffy jacket because there is no heat in my apartment.  We're in the process of moving, so it's only a temporary arrangement.  But in the mean time, I am so grateful for a little invention called the hot water bottle.  The hot water bottle is ingenious in its simplicity.  It's even better if you have an electric kettle to boil up hot water in a jiffy.  You know how when you get into bed, it takes a few minutes for the chill to wear off the sheets?  Not so with the hot water bottle!  Just tuck it in while you change into your pajamas, brush your teeth, and then snuggle up beside it.  Not only will you have the warmth from the bottle itself but the spot where it was sitting will remain cozy and hot.  It's all you can do to not say, "Ahhhh," I promise you.

It's funny how it's not really necessary to improve upon some things.  The guy who invented this rubber incarnation of the hot water bottle at the turn of the last century got it right.  I had to look him up.  His name is Slavoljub Eduard Penkala.  Apparently he is the same guy who invented the mechanical pencil and the first solid-ink fountain pen. He had over 70 patents!  Well done, Slavoljub.  My chilly old bones thank you.

Speaking of cold, does anyone remember the following poem from high school English class?  Right now I'm finding the "blueblack cold" easy to identify with- it's such a great description.  It's taken for granted, but the simple act of getting up and facing that cold, starting the fire so his family can be warm, is a tremendous act of love by the father.  It makes your heart ache as you realize along with the speaker what love is truly made of.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

But the sauce brings the dish together!

My sister was in town over the weekend.  We didn't do much except eat food and hang out with old ladies we're related to.  Now every time someone comes over to my grandmother's house, she hands them this book about how to never be sick again.  She presented it separately to me and my mother.  Now it was my sister's turn.  At one point, my grandmother was watching football and I got up to take a phone call, so my sister was left with the book.  When I came back, she had sped-read half of it and glanced up only to inform me that eating protein and starches together will kill you and fruit should not be eaten with anything else or it will turn it into a toxin.  

 

My sister was totally into it.  She said in Italy this is why they have the pasta course separate from the meat course.  I was like, but how far apart do you have to eat them?  Is it 20 minutes like swimming?  Do I eat the gnocchi first or the chicken marsala?  Does that mean no tomato sauce?  She said she didn't know, but the tacos I ate at lunch were currently rotting in my intestines.  

Here is what else she told me:  Drinking non-organic coffee means I'm consuming 200 pesticides*, over-the-counter pain relievers like Advil are poisoning our bodies, and I'm not getting enough Vitamin D.  I refuted that last point.  I am nothing if not diligent about taking gummy multi-vitamins for adults every morning with my pesticide-ridden coffee.

 

I guess I am pretty resigned to the fact that everything good in life causes cancer, so the next time she visits me, I told her I'm making a four food group pilaf.

 

And because it's been a while since we had a limerick, here is one for my sister:

In restaurants, there's nary a clue
of the mine field on the menu.
But quarantining your meats
away from your wheats,
leaves your insides like new and not goo.

*This may be an exaggeration.  The pesticides are making my brain foggy.

Does anyone ever say "no" when asked if they like music?

I am a sucker for strangers suddenly becoming united through a shared experience, especially when it involves music.  Stopping to witness a busker outside a subway station playing classical pieces on a set of crystal water glasses or getting a karaoke serenade by an undercover Jewel, these equally thrill me.  In this case (yes, it is a T-Mobile commercial), it's the welcoming of new arrivals at Heathrow airport with spontaneous singing.  



It's just something that makes people pause in their everyday lives and connect with each other.  It often results in the quick draw of a camera phone, but it also makes you glad to be alive.

In honor of the upcoming holiday season, here is a "Random Act of Culture" brought to you by the Opera Company of Philadelphia.  (Did you know that their Macy's has the largest pipe organ in the world? )





The Guitar

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

-Federico García Lorca

Air - Color TV

There is a sign on Olympic Blvd that I have passed hundreds of times, and each time it fascinates me.  It's nothing special to look at.  In fact, it's kind of ugly.  Behold:

 

I love it because it advertises color TV as if that is still a major selling point.  It makes me wonder what else this motel could brag about: a remote control connected by cable, hot water, deadbolt locks? I realize that this sign must be pretty old, a relic of days when a color TV was something new and special, but these days I think a 15" black and white TV would merit more of a mention.  

I was curious to see when color television sets really came into wide use.  I found a nifty "invention of television" timeline that laid it out.  Apparently, the first color television broadcast was in 1946.  By 1967, most broadcasts were in color.  And by 1972, half the TVs in homes were color.  So I'm going to guess that this sign is left over from the late '60s or early '70s.

The motel itself has only one review that I can see online, and it is scathing.  I don't expect I'll be recommending it to any visitors, but I'm glad it's still around just the same.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is OzymandiasOzymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall., King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Meanwhile an engine revved, the neighbors yelled, rap music played, a horn honked, and the taco truck passed by.

I drove down to visit my grandmother on Saturday.  Say what you will about the suburbs, but the thing that immediately strikes me when I go there is the quietness of the neighborhood.  Her backyard feels like an oasis.  Actually, it reminds me of the secret garden.  Not that it's not well-maintained, but that it's stuck in a time long past.

My grandfather loved fountains and he put two of them in the backyard way back in the '70s.  One is a lion's head on the far back wall that used to spout water into a ceramic pool.  The other is much larger and looks to me like a chess piece.  The bottom part where the water used to flow is surrounded by a short wall.  When I was little and we would come out to visit my grandparents, I liked to play by that fountain and pretend that the wall was the gazebo in The Sound of Music.  I would skip around on it singing "You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen."  Sixteen seemed to be a magical age, full of possibility.

This past visit, I was in the backyard looking at those fountains sitting thirsty.  They are surrounded by enormous lemon and orange trees that are currently bursting with fruit.  Those trees, as old as the fountains, made for a nice paradox.

While I can still recall the sound of water spilling through the fountains-- a calm yet lively sound-- these days I can also appreciate the silence.

Shark's Teeth

Everything contains some
silence.  Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it.  An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.  Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

-Kay Ryan

Why I love grocery shopping

Ever heard of the idea of eternal return?  It has been referenced in countless works in pop culture.  It's in The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and The Never Ending Story.  It's in the first line of Peter Pan and a major theme of the excellent TV show Battlestar Galactica.  It is the idea of cyclical patterns in the universe.  "All of this has happened before and all this will happen again."  Sounds very dramatic.  And poetic.

In a similar way, it's like saying that history repeats itself.  And in yet another way, it's like reading something from a long time ago and being surprised to learn that we can identify with it.  I remember being shocked in reading The Canterbury Tales.  Some of those characters could have made themselves at home at any trailer park.  Because the way human beings behave now is not so different from the way they behaved hundreds or thousands of years ago.  We are still innately selfish, we still make war, and we still do stupid things in the name of love. 

So when I was reading this poem by Allen Ginsberg, his feelings about the world he was living in are not so different from the way people view the world today.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

To understand this poem, you have to understand that Ginsberg liked to invoke Whitman when he was writing.  Whitman was almost like his muse, and Whitman's poems were usually of an observational nature.  He connected to things, people, nature, which is what he's doing in the supermarket in this poem.  He's interacting with the products, with the grocery clerks, while Ginsberg watches from a distance.  Ginsberg feels disconnected from all these things going on around him and all the people.  He can only connect with poets who have long since died (García Lorca was a Spanish poet who was murdered in the Spanish Civil War).  At the end of this poem, Ginsberg longs for the past and these poets' idealized versions of it that they wrote about.  In the supermarket, where he is "shopping for images" (Oh, Allen, I've been there),  he is bombarded by the busyness, all the choices of "neon fruit," and "brilliant stacks of cans," but he can't find what he wants.  He feels lonely and separate from the modern world.

Upon reading this, it made me think about how accurately that still portrays America today.  We are often listening to our iPods or on our cell phones when we are shopping.  We do this when we drive or ride the subway.  We avoid connecting with the people around us, whether it's out of fear or selfishness.  Sometimes if we're caught sitting at a table with a group of people all on their blackberries, we stop and reflect on this and someone will say that they yearn for a simpler time.  What simpler time was that?

im me, e.e.

Sometimes I wonder what E. E. Cummings would think about the way we live now.  The man was not even ahead of his time.  He was right on time.  He paved the way for experimenting with form and punctuation in writing.  He certainly gave angsty teenage poets a way to express themselves ("capitalization, you're not the boss of me!").

If Mr. Cummings were still alive, would he delight in our poor email composition skills?  Would he laugh at our shortcuts (lol, btw, wtf)?  I wonder if he would embrace text messaging.  I like to think he would start an internet meme equal to "I can has cheezburger?"

At the very least, I think he would smirk at the fact that the MLA Handbook says that one space after a period is now more acceptable than two.  What is this world coming to?

if you like my poems let them

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
"Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants."

-E. E. Cummings