I Believe That Robots Are Stealing My Luggage Saturday, August 30, 2003

A question in the "Blogger Help" menu on the side of my screen:

How do I edit what I've written?

I could write a book, baby!

An incredible exchange in Waugh this afternoon, too long to transcribe. Essentially, a character who was a stuffy object of fun (sort of like Brideshead, if you remember that book) has a scene where he gets to shine. And it's absolutely marvelous. I went on about this before, but that's what makes Waugh a great satirist, I think: He's generous, and scrupulous. His sympathies and interests may lie with dear old conflicted Guy Crouchback, but he never forgets that the rest of the cast isn't just there for show. He has a responsibility toward them, like a teacher who might not care for a particular student but gives the lesson his all nonetheless.

Here's a little thought game for you. I found out that a guy in my office, a self-styled rake of a certain age, absolutely hates Bill Clinton. I won't dwell on my dislike of either of them, but I thought it was hilarious that a guy who's been playing the Boomer Who Never Grew Up for so long should hate the guy who defined the role. So I ask you: What public figure you do resemble--but can't stand?

I haven't been able to think of anyone for myself. Mostly I just resent guys who arrived at the same writerly ideas I did but got there first. (Like, oh, doing a sci-fi novel in '30s gangster style.) Or maybe I'm like the fatheads and vulgarians at Aintitcoolnews, who are pure aesthetes if I ever saw them. They've devoted their lives to absorbing art, to use a convenient term, and indeed frame their experiences in terms of art. Read a review there sometime: Most of them start off with ten paragraphs of "I remember the first time I walked into the Hong Kong Action Video Store in my old neighborhood..." I can appreciate a good reminisce; but please.

To digress to aesthetics...when my friend divorced me over politics (see the first week, I think, of this blog) one of the points in the complaint was my shocking opinion of art; namely, that it should be beautiful, and that "messages" ruined the aesthetics most of the time. Didn't I know the point of art was truth? (This, by the way, from someone who once told an interviewer at jury duty that he didn't believe in absolute standards of right and wrong. Meow.)

The assumption behind his argument, I think, was that there's some bourgeois about the pursuit of beauty; as if I were some Drones Club booby hiring a string quartet to play in my sitting-room while the old girl who "does" around the flat hands out brandies. Or, more darkly, that high art is fundamentally oppressive, that arbitrary standards enforce an exlcusionary power structure and eventually lead to violence against the dispossessed, sometimes real, sometimes just critical. e.g., every ticket you buy to see "Mona Lisa" means another Egon Schiele on the bonfire.

My answer, which I was too flustered to make at the time, is something like this. People who want their art to be "true" don't know what truth is. "Truth" as it's used in art usually boils down to "unpleasantness": As if you don't know the reality of someone unless you catch him on the toilet. "Truth," by that measure, is a sucker's game. I think I can say uncontroversially that the past few generations have been racing toward the cultural bottom like greased pigs. The cutting edge of "truth" in, say, 1953 looks condescending and ridiculous now. Who takes Paddy Chayefsky seriously now? Or "The Man With the Golden Arm," an undershirt opera with heroin singing tenor? (Mort Sahl: "In the Fifties, to get a girl you had to be a Jew. In the Sixties to get a girl you had to be a Negro. In the Seventies to get a girl you have to be a girl.")

Not that I claim to know what the truth is. To paraphrase another whimpering aesthete, Mark Eitzel, I keep looking for it in all the wrong places: the sidewalks and the sky. But I'm pretty certain that it's not transient, and it's not ugly. Call me nuts, but I think if you create a piece of art that's genuinely beautiful, the truth will take care of itself. To subordinate yourself to the idea of beauty, to make yourself a pipeline for beauty to enter the world...that's more "true" than flagging the aggrievement of the moment.

The absolute truth: I am fading rapidly. Have a great weekend. You're all gorgeous.

@ 12:51:00 AM, ,

Francois Bebe! Friday, August 29, 2003

From "Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris." Frankie starts singing "I Get a Kick Out of You":

My story is much too sad to be told
But practically everything leaves me totally cold
The only exception I know is the case
When I'm out on a quiet spree
Fighting vainly the old ennui...

Then tosses in:

That's French.

@ 7:33:00 PM, ,

The Federal Egg Answering Room

This on a light-rail train between Bayonne and Jersey City, New Jersey:

When Ian left, Guy brooded about the antithesis between the acceptance of sacrifice and the will to win. It seemed to have personal relevance, as yet undefined, to his own condition. He reread the letter from his father which he carried always in his pocketbook. "The Mystical Body doesn't strike attitudes or stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice...Quantitative judgments don't apply."

I write about religion a lot here, and it occurs to me how strange it must be for people who know me. I don't think I've said a hundred words to most of my friends about what I believe. I commented on this before: This blog is partially a forum to let people know there's more going on upstairs than whining about work and jokes about poles (upper- and lower-case). Still, I'm concerned that this all comes off as tedious and more than a little pretentious. To remedy that, I offer a song from a sporadically hilarious movie:

Shut your fucking face, Uncle Fucka..
You're a cock sucking, ass licking Uncle Fucka..
You're an Uncle Fucka, yes it's true..
Nobody fucks uncles quite like you!

Shut YOUR fucking face, Uncle Fucka..
You're the one that fucked your uncle, Uncle Fucka..
You don't eat or sleep, or mow the lawn..
Just fuck your uncle all day long!

[farting] Hmm.. [more farting] hahahaha!
Canadian Man: What's going on hyah?
[more farting]

Fucka Fucka, Uncle Fucka Uncle Fucka Uncla Fucka..
Shut your fucking face, Uncle Fucka!
You're a boner biting bastard, Uncle Fucka!
You're an Uncle Fucka, I must say..
You fucked your uncle yesterday!
Uncle fucka, thats U, N, C, L, E, fuck, you
Uncle Fuckaaaaaaa.. suck my balls.

Whereupon Larry Hart and Johnny Mercer begin burrowing toward the Earth's core like Bugs Bunny ("Pismo Beach!"). But maybe Irving Berlin would've liked it. As he once savaged Cole Porter:

You're the burning heat
Of a bridal suite
In use,
You're the breasts of Venus
You're King Kong's penis
You're self-abuse!

Gotta run. I'll leave you with the headline of an e-mail I received this morning:


Reporter openings in China and Korea for the Far Eastern Economic Review

Sounds like a plan!

@ 9:51:00 AM, ,

Inflections and Innuendoes

Item! I found out yesterday that an old friend of mine with a keen critical eye reads this blog, which made me go back over the old posts and see how they held up. I was struck by how unsteady they seemed. When reading a piece of text, I tend to judge it by how confident it is, how consistent the language and tone are. It's like judging somebody's driving; if he's always braking hard and fast or lurching to pass somebody, you know you're in trouble.

To my eye, a lot of these posts are the work of a student driver. I don't really edit them, of course, since the spirit of the forum seems to demand unfiltered prose. But I'm shocked at how low my baseline is most of the time. The classic reportorial failing: I think my point is so obvious that I never just come out and say it. At any rate, I'll try harder.

Item! A friend of mine, who once turned down the most satisfying job I can imagine at the moment, sends along the following addendum to "September Song" below, a quote from the movie "Gladiator":

"Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to."

Good point, and much appreciated. If only I could mask my simmering rage with sexy vulnerability, like Russell Crowe does. Did you know Australia was settled by convicts?

Item! Another friend points out that my phrase of the moment, "grudging aesthete," is confusing. I gotta agree. I kept using it because it sounded good; what I was trying to get across was "somebody who appreciates the aesthetics of a situation, such as church, more than the stated intentions of an event" or even just "somebody whose aesthetics overwhelm all other judgments in certain situations, making them curmudgeonly." I can't tell if that makes me Jacques Derrida or Terry Teachout. I'll think of something better.

Item! We saw Mars last night. Just a smudge of color in the sky, like the sad little smear a bug leaves: So small and indistinct that you can't believe that just a moment ago it had legs and senses and intent. Mars looked particularly small given that I spent my entire day there. As ever, I'll skip the details. But the usual suspects left me hanging once again.

Item! Must get going shortly. I'll leave you with the poem that inspired the title of this post, the only verse I ever memorized:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadows of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

A friend of mine told me once the poem was about the presence of death; I hope not. That would be ordinary. I think it's about the inexplicable. As mountains abide, as rivers run, as snow falls, there's a blackbird, knowing but mute. Or maybe perception: The blackbird is the agent of consciousness. Or maybe it's all just aesthetics, thirteen lovely verses. At any rate, it's an elegant poem that I used to know by heart.

In contrast, in high school, I couldn't summon up six hundred words about the guy who wrote these supremely muscular stanazs:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Some aesthete. Discuss.

@ 7:13:00 AM, ,

But What Do You Really Think? Thursday, August 28, 2003

I never finished my story about Rosanne Cash.

I mentioned earlier seeing her at St. Ann's in Brooklyn Heights, and how disappointing it was to realize she was just another schleppy privileged New Yorker--somebody who goes to Starbuck's to read the Sunday Times, and doesn't bother changing out of the sweatpants she slept in. Her song "Western Wall" came on the iPod the other day, sung by Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.

It's a sweet tune, slow and soulful. The words, as usual are the problem:

I stand here by the Western Wall
maybe a little of that wall
stands inside of us all
I shove my prayers in the cracks
I got nothing to lose
No one to answer back

All these years I've brought up for review
I wasn't taught this, but I learned something new
I had to answer a distant call

At the Western Wall
I've got a heart full of fear
and I offer it up
on this altar of tears

Red dust settles deep in my skin
I don't know where it stops
and where I begin

It's a crumbling pile of broken stones
it ain't much but it might be home
if I ever loved a place at all
it's the Western Wall

I don't know if God was ever a man
But if She was, I think I understand
Why He found a place to break his fall
near the Western Wall

The thing that always stopped me was the joke in the first two lines of last verse. The first few hearings, it seemed like it was beneath the dignity of the song; it's a line you'd put on a bumper sticker, or in "Free to Be You and Me." (God is coming, and boy is she pissed, et al) Iconoclasm is all well and good (hear "Jesus: The Missing Years" by John Prine, or "Jesus Was a Capricorn," by, I think, Kris Kristofferson) but not when it throws a monkey wrench into a perfectly good song.

Or is it perfectly good? Let's step into the Wayback Machine for the answer.

When Rosanne sang it in concert, she prefaced it with a story about going to Jerusalem and visiting the Wailing Wall; threw in some joke about feeling humbled since she was "just a shiksa." Laughs all around. To unpack the moment, I think she was conveying something along the following lines: You in the audience--educated, well-off New Yorkers--are, like me, not particularly religious. When faced with people who genuinely, overpoweringly believe in God, we don't know what to do. That's what happened to me at the Wailing Wall; I saw all these people with strong faith, at this ancient spot, and I didn't know how to respond. I was "just a shiksa."

At the time, it irritated me for a number of reasons. But now I agree with her assessment. For Chrissakes, she's standing at the foundation of the Jerusalem Temple, where Solomon stood, where Jesus cleaned house, where the veil was ripped, where the revolt ended, where the world began. And all she can do is spin wistful little lyrics about her disappointing love life, her pallid upbringing, her neuroses. She could've written that in a Starbucks on Amsterdam Avenue. That's not humility. Being humbled changes you, it forces you out of your narrow perspective. Instead, she narrows the Wall until it fits into her blinkered, privileged New York frame. Not only is she "just a shiksa," she turns God into one, too.

So in the end, the bumper-sticker joke in the last verse isn't an artistic lapse. It's the theme of the song, spelled out.

I know, I know; it's all just the limitless bitterness of the grudging aesthete. But I have to fill the bandwidth somehow.

@ 4:27:00 PM, ,

You and Oblivion

More from Mr. Crouchback's funeral.

Guy's prayers were now directed to, rather than for, his father. For many years now the direction in the Garden of the Soul, "Put yourself in the presence of God," had for Guy come to mean a mere act of respect, like the signing of the Visitors' Book at an Embassy or Government House. He reported for duty, saying to God: "I don't ask anything from you. I am here if you want me. I don't suppose I can be any use, but if there is anything I can do, let me know," and left it at that.

"I don't ask anything from you"; that was the deadly core of his apathy; his father had tried to tell him, was now telling him. That emptiness had been with him for years now, even in his days of enthusiasm and activity in the Halberdiers. Enthusiasm and activity were not enough. God required more than that. He had commanded all men to ask.

In the recesses of Guy's conscience there lay the belief that somewhere, somehow, something would be required of him; that he must be attentive to the summons when it came. They also served who only stood and waited. He saw himself as one of the labourers in the parable who sat in the marketplace waiting to be hired and were not called until late in the day. They had their reward on an equality with the men who had toiled since dawn. One day he would get the chance to do some small service which only he could perform, for which he had been created. Even he must have his function in the divine plan. He did not expect a heroic destiny. Quantitative judgments did not apply. All that mattered was to recognise the chance when it offered. Perhaps his father was at that moment clearing the way for him. "Show me what to do and help me to do it," he prayed.

I slept about six hours last night. After I read that I felt like it had been thirty-two years.

@ 8:09:00 AM, ,

September Song

The "Sword of Honour" trilogy is named for a weapon belonging to a British knight entombed in Italy on his way to the Crusades; he died in some back-water duel (if I remember correctly) and never made it to the big fight. The trilogy's hero, Guy Crouchback, visits the tomb before setting out to enlist in World War II--he runs his fingers along the sword and asks for its blessing.

But, like the knight, Guy never quite makes it to glory. He gets bumped from the army several times, hangs around training, and goes on several forays that end in ignominy. He wants to do Great Things, but seems doomed to end up like his patron knight: dying before reaching glory.

I mention all this because of something that happened around 1996, about 6:30 in the morning, at my desk. Back then I was carrying not just a spare tire but a full set of steel-belted radials; and I kept them pumped as full as possible. On that otherwise undistinguished morning, I started having severe chest pains. I tried walking them off; I tried squeezing the flesh above my ribs; I tried concentrating on the story I was editing. Then it came to me, not in a flash but in a laugh. If you don't get to a hospital right now, they're going to find you curled on the floor staring up at a twenty-five-inch story about Coca-Cola earnings. Not even Guy Crouchback would go out that badly.

No heart attack, not just yet; just the garlicky whisper of acid reflux. The threat of it was enough to get me on the straight and narrow, foodwise. But the larger life question remained. At any given moment, if I dropped dead, could I honestly say: I was doing something good; I was doing something important. Or even just: I was doing what I wanted to do.

When I'm sitting in front of a computer, as I will be doing for nearly eleven hours at the office tomorrow, the answer is usually no.

Maybe it's time to stop waiting for signposts?

@ 12:18:00 AM, ,

Mars Needs Rich Wednesday, August 27, 2003

What an exchange, from "The End of the Battle." Angela's father has just died. Three whole human lives in these lines.


Angela Box-Bender was on the platform to meet the train. She had an air of gravity and sorrow.

"I say, Angie," her husband asked, "how long is this business going to take?"

"Not more than an hour. Father Geoghegan wanted to preach a panegyric but Uncle Peregrine stopped him."

"Any chance of anything to eat? I left the flat at six this morning."

"You're expected at the presbytery. I think you'll find something there."

"They don't expect me to take any part, do they? I mean carry anything? I don't know the drill."

"No," said Angela. "This is one of the times when no one expects anything of you."

Overwhelmed by things like that, I asked a good buddy what I should be writing. My science fiction isn't selling, and every time I plunge into the mainstream, I wake up an hour later with a medic forcing the water out of my lungs. My friend's take:

We each are CURSED by our own perspective and voice. Escape it to your detriment; you must obey it.

Here's the next question, then: What is my perspective and voice?

I'll leave you with a page, probably one of the best I ever wrote. It's a book about Mars, so I figure it's timely.


I’d gotten halfway across the field when he came out the front door. He had a week’s worth of beard on his chin and he was wearing the same pants he’d ruined at the beach.

I called to him without thinking it over. He ran.

The whole battleship sky fell on me. Even worse when he threw his arms around me and clapped me close. Everything inside me got squeezed together—all the sins I’d clawed out of the world and the last big evil I’d have to push through to finish the job.

“I been praying for you,” Fatso said.

“Somebody has.”

He felt my bandages bunching under my shirt and leaned back for a look. “You been hurt?”

I shrugged. “I been worse.”

He chewed that over. “Jack’s dead, ain’t he?”

“For good.”

Fatso looked in my eyes, squinting against the snowflakes. “I’m sorry, Tillie.”

I squeezed his arm and backed off a couple steps. I couldn’t have him watching me while I did it.

“Listen to me, buddy,” I said. My hands were shaking worse than my voice. “I need you to go across the road and get in the car that’s parked there. Tonight I’ll buy you a dinner on somebody else’s dime and lay it all out for you. But right now I need you walking away from here.”

Fatso breathed in a lungful of cold and let it out slow. “Why do you want my back to you, Tillie?”

“You gotta trust me on this one,” I said. “It’s the right thing.”

He sussed it at once. “Don’t kill him,” he said.

“I can’t promise that.”

At that he gave me his eyes. They were full of tears but full of business. “That ain’t good enough anymore,” he said. “If you’re gonna go in there and do him you gotta tell me why and you gotta tell me now.”

I gritted my teeth. “There are a lot of lives riding on this one getting done now.”

Fatso set his legs apart and folded his arms across his chest. Snow settled on him like he was a statue.

“You can either tell me,” he said, “or you can try and get past me.”

The old anger rose. He had to have his nose in everything. He had to make everything tough. He had to make me stand in the cold and go over all of it so that what? So that he could agree to do what he should’ve done from the start. Fifteen years he’d been doing this to me.

You had to hand it to Jack. Alone was better than this.

Remember this.

“Well?” Fatso’s bare arms trembled against the November chill. “What’s it gonna be?”

I took a step toward him. He dropped into a fighting crouch.

“Oh for Chrissakes,” I said. I rolled my eyes and threw open my arms.

He gave me a smile, a real twelve-year-old number. The whole gray sky rushed out of me.

“Of course I’ll tell you,” I said, clapping his back. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Thanks, buddy.” He gave me a thump in return. Something inside me got knocked out of place, but Mary could fix it later. “You don’t know what it means to me.”

I dunno why. The snow and his smile and a bullet in my heart. I loaded up my lungs and said, “You know something, Fatso? You and Mary. I love you two more than anything in this world.”

Fatso laughed right in my ear. “I bet you been saving that one up for a while.”

“Half my life,” I said.

@ 8:55:00 PM, ,

Turn That Heartbeat Over Again

Friday night, at the Steely Dan show, we were talking about pop bands, and which if any wrote lyrics that were as smart, shadowy and allusive as Walter and Donald's. I gathered up some of my best guesses and lent them to a friend at the office, who has made it his life's mission to violate copyrights on recorded music. Among the handful was Joe Henry, who I mentioned in a posting long ago, and a true mad scientist, John Cale. Cale, as you may know, took part in a several-year staring contest with Lou Reed (also known as the Velvet Underground); before that he was an avant-garde pianist and cellist; after that he put out some wonderfully crooked, and largely ignored, rock records.

I always thought Cale would be an interesting collaborator for Becker and Fagen. My friend described Steely Dan's songs as "the shadows of stories"; they leave out the details you need to follow the plot, but keep in the "color." You know that the kid was wearing a spangled leather poncho and alligator shoes, but you don't know who he is or where the action is taking place (calling the place the Custerdome doesn't help). Cale writes that way too, except perhaps with more of a William Burroughs cut-and-paste feel. This is a great example (courtesy Lyricsdepot):

With mistletoe and candle green
To Halloween we go
Ten murdered oranges bled on board ship
Lends comedy to shame
The cattle graze bold uprightly
Seducing down the door
To saddle swords and meeting place
We have no place to go

Then wearily the footsteps worked
The hallelujah crowds
Too late but wait the long legged bait
Tripped uselessly around
Sebastopol Adrianapolis
The prayers of all combined
Take down the flags of ownership
The walls are falling down

A belt to hold
Columbus too, perimeters of nails
Perceived the Mamma's golden touch
Good neighbours were we all

At first glance, it's a yard sale; belts and flags and holiday decorations all tossed on a card table and set on the sidewalk. But you look closer and realize that two-dollar earring has an emerald stud, and every comic in the box is "Death of Phoenix," airless in mylar.

So how do you square that with Cole Porter, or Johnny Mercer, or Hoagy Carmichael? How do you iPod from one era to another? By any standard, the old-timers were much more elegant and, yes, intelligent than modern writers. On the other hand, their subject matter didn't range far beyond good love and bad love, and there are times when my ears are too impatient to wait for those songs to start working. Or maybe I should say: There are times when I'm so dulled to nuance I can't appreciate their charms.

Not the worst problems to have on a Wednesday morning in a lousy century.

@ 12:36:00 PM, ,

Fragments Against My Ruin

I stayed up late, and made myself furious, trying to fix the archive links at left. Finally I punted and put in links manually. So they work, but they take more work.

An active evening. Finished up (I think) the editor queries on Black Sails. Finished up a story for work, with a reporter based in China. Negotiated more changes with reporters in Los Angeles. The result: a lot of half-assed work got done, and I exchanged maybe fifty words with my wife, even though we were sitting five feet away from each other the whole time. Something must change here. But, as my mentor said (see below), I may just have to tough it out for now.

Finished up book two of "Sword of Honour," began book three. Waugh has a real gift for the casually terrifying; he'll be steaming along, describing the boredom of army life, and then begin to follow a narrative thread. You'll wonder why the story is going on so long, and then as you get near the end you realize: Oh no; something terrible is going to happen to these guys (I should say "chaps"). My one complaint is that book two's climax depends upon two characters doing very similar things but in slightly different contexts. One character ends up praised for his actions; the other disgraced. And I can't for the life of me figure out why. Even the sum-up at the start of book three doesn't help.

At any rate, a nifty paragraph at the start of "Officers and Gentlemen." It doesn't mean much out of context, but it's good food for thought nonetheless:

Mr. Crouchback regarded his son sadly. "My dear boy," he said, "you're really making the most terrible nonsense, you know. That isn't at all what the Church is like. It isn't what she's for."

Off to sweat and labor.

@ 6:35:00 AM, ,

Hurry Up, Please, It's Time Tuesday, August 26, 2003

I changed departments a while ago. It's not a permanent swap, so I told the people at my old job not to take me off the e-mail circulation lists. The theory being, it's easy to get off one of those, trickier to get back on. So every now and then I get a note from people some sixty miles distant. Here are layouts. Here are the final PDFs. Here's a reminder about next week.

There's a thought in that somewhere, maybe even a Secret Thing. Must ponder.

@ 11:30:00 AM, ,

Signposts All Around

A long afternoon, capped by a run for the ferry that came up about five seconds short. I cussed the world, kicked the floor and read Mr. Waugh until the next boat showed fifteen minutes later. On dry land again, another drive, another loss by a nose: the light rail was pulling out just as I turned the corner. Another fifteen-minute wait.

On the train, I read some more -- Guy Crouchback is stuck in Greece! The Germans are advancing! -- and huffed up the stairs when we got to Bayonne. (A malefactor had set out a tin of peanuts that morning.) As I was crossing Avenue D, I heard a squeak behind me. My very own signpost! She'd been kept late at work, then had a class, etc. Walking home, for once, was wonderful. She was closer than Mars.

Then I logged on and discovered I didn't know how to answer the bulk of the questions put to me by the editor of Black Sails Over Freeport. A huddle with my co-authors leads me to believe I'll have to make it all up. No sweat: I'm a journalist.

Shortly after had a long talk with an old friend, the closest thing I have to a professional mentor. He listened patiently while I griped; I felt like a kid calling his parents and begging to come home from camp. He told me gently there was no easy answer, and put my complaints, which I will elide, in perspective.

And now there's today. Here's hoping.

@ 8:52:00 AM, ,

Hello, I Must Be Going Monday, August 25, 2003

Most likely nothing today--too much work, too much of it sensitive. Not much to report anyhow.

@ 12:54:00 PM, ,

Somebody Else's Favorite Song Sunday, August 24, 2003

The priest was a new one this morning, and I had high hopes. He looked like a Samoan: thick as a hill, short but not squat, an air of extravagant serenity. Then he got up to give his sermon, and began by saying, "Some of you may remember a movie called 'Lady Sings the Blues.'" You see, just as Joshua and the disciples were committed to God, so was Diana Ross committed to the role of Billie Holiday. OY VEY, in seventy-two point type across six columns. So began my retreat from the day.

The most interesting part of the service was the epistle reading, a selection from Paul. Paul Johnson, no relation, thinks the apostle essentially created the Christian relationship between worshippers and God, positioned the divine as an object of study for people. (I'm paraphrasing six months after reading that, so forgive me if I'm off.) But Paul is problematic, as today's reading demonstrated. It had some interesting bits about men loving their wives and being joined as one flesh; but as printed in the missal it included That Passage, about women subordinating themselves to their husbands.

So picture the scene: a churchful of old biddies, indigent loonies and one or two grudging aesthetes (including yours truly) following along in the booklet as the lector, an old biddie herself, reads the passage aloud. The whole church sees those lines; the whole church knows they're coming. The whole church also knows that not a single wife in those pews has taken a minute's worth of shit from her husband. This ain't the old country.

The lector began to speak; at least one grudging aesthete started squirming in the pew. And she skippedthe goddamn passage entirely.

There are provisions for this. The passage was "bracketed," making it an optional cut (as we say in the news business). But we have never, and I mean never, skipped a passage thus marked; not even on Easter, when the call-and-response runs to a hefty ten pages.

I was fascinated. Who decided to skip that section? Do the readers get instructions beforehand? Do they use their own discretion? And why didn't anybody mention what had been cut out and why? Wouldn't it be better to hear the line as it originally was, in the gloriously uncomfortable original, then get an explication of why we don't agree with it anymore? You could write a year's worth of sermons about how the church has changed its interpretations of old strictures, about how it has evolved and why, stuff that most of us in the pews would love to understand. Instead, we get a Stalinist elision--and, even worse, we all participate in it by keeping quiet.

Yadda yadda angry young man. Not a very Waugh morning. Not a very Waugh evening Friday; Steely Dan at Jones Beach with buddies. A nice set, but overall I thought they leaned too heavily on the oldies. Then again, the crowd was mostly oldies: boomers booming out of their T-shirts (not to mention hairlines). My friends and I were the only grudging aesthetes I could see. The guy in front of us spent most of the first three songs explaining to his wife why she should like the music. At least fifty people around us spent the first three songs arriving, then remembering they had to urinate. Not much dope smoke, but then again, there was a strong headwind.

But...I love those guys beyond all reason and will follow them as long as they have voices. Just like I'll keep getting up Sundays. I may not hear what I want, but there are bigger issues at stake.

Prayers and love for the madball. Ciao, babies!

@ 10:29:00 AM, ,