Needs More Tigers Saturday, September 27, 2003

As Louis Armstrong said: Awwwwwwwwww, memory. I've been cleaning out my filing cabinet, so I can replace it with some stiff Swedish wood. Turned up some fascinating stuff; did I really write that many term papers in college? If so, how did I think of so many shitty titles? And better yet, why did I save them all?

Between all the term papers and half-written stories there were really only three or four things of any real value in the pile, and the only one that was absolutely irreplaceable was a letter from Anne Dick, the widow of you-know-who, who wrote to compliment my profile of her late husband. I never really kept the stacks in order, but I always sort of knew where the important stuff was.

Well, as I went through the scraps, the important stuff wasn't there. I turned up a couple of valuable business letters that I should've socked away in the first place, but nothing from Mrs. Dick. OK, no sweat; I went through everything again, slowly this time, including the bag of trash I'd set aside. Nothing. And it was ten thirty by now.

Still no problem. I didn't really do that good of a job sifting the last time. So I did it all again, and hope flared this time--her envelope, with the logo of her business out in California. But nothing inside.

I spent most of today tearing apart the stuff I'd already filed and fine-toothing my way through the rest. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I willed myself to remember the last time I'd taken the letter out; nothing would come. It must've been at least three years. An iron law of my life: If I don't make constant use of something, it vanishes. Books, records, anything--if I don't look it up, remind myself where it is, it takes whole days out of my life to find it again.

Then, somehow, I started to get flashes. A book. Did I stick it in a book? I flipped through my bios of PKD--the obvious place. Nothing. A halfhearted search through the piles again, but the idea of a book stuck with me. At the end of the day, just as we were about to go out to the movies, another flash: My buddy had held up one book when we were cleaning out my shelves: You wouldn't want to lose this one, huh?

Could I? Would I? I searched for it, a skinny little thing with a brown cover: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, by Snoopy. The truest account of the creative process ever written.

There it was, right between C.S. Lewis and Madeliene L'Engle, for no good reason. And right inside the front cover was my letter, folded twice. I knew it by the black square in the letterhead. The angels sang. Awwwwwwwwwwww, memory.

Off to the movies with a light heart. And what a movie it was! "Bubba Ho-Tep," the latest Bruce Campbell, and for an added treat Bruce took questions before and after. We got a parking spot right outside the theater, huzzah for small victories, and met some fabbo pals for dinner. Bruce was a charmer, the movie was a riot, the drive home hitchless. Now I type with my letter safe, my wifey sleepy and all the heavens in order.

One question while the stars are right: Phil! Was it you? If you know any more secrets, clue me in.

@ 11:30:00 PM, ,

The Old Man of the Town Friday, September 26, 2003

A treat today: lunch with Dad. I talk a lot about Walker Percy and Philip K. Dick and those types of guys, but if I had to narrow the field to one philosopher it would be my father. He isn't as quotable as the others but at least as wise. Like all the greats he keeps his smarts to himself and makes his life his statement of belief. He is modest, shy, generous and immensely gifted. He had a burger.

A measure of his generosity: He dislikes meeting people, hates making conversation, but came up to my office and let me show him off. Everybody loved him, of course, in his gray sweater and big glasses. How could you not? When we were kids he read stories to us and did all the voices. When he read "Black Beauty" he even neighed. You can still see that in his smile. I can, anyway.

Mom is different. Mom is verbal. She's spent her life reading and deconstructing and fending off assaults from bosses and in-laws. She cares just as much as my Dad does, but she knows she's the smartest one in the room, and she's usually right.

We talked about her at lunch, her and my sister and my uncle. He and my father were childhood friends who married sisters. I don't think I've ever heard my Dad mention my aunt; it shook me a little to hear him say, "If Jo hadn't died, the plan was, we were all gonna retire upstate." It didn't hit me until then: He knew her as long as he knew my mother. Christ, how did he feel about it?

He talked about his carving and the odd engineering jobs he's been doing since he retired; we walked around the cove and looked at boats. When the bill came he didn't want to wait for change so he left a ten-dollar tip. "I gotta spend the money sometime," he said.

More than anything else, Dad taught me quiet. Or rather he tried: Mom's way was more fun. Let's say he showed me that silence and stillness were virtues. If I live to be a million I don't think I'll have his self-possession and simple, precise wisdom.

I've been analyzed up and down by friends and enemies, cruelly and kindly, but one of the few assessments I remember is something my father said many years ago on a summer afternoon. I was working in his office then, a fat, taciturn college freshman, and he was giving me a lift home with another engineer. A couple of girls passed the windshield, and the other guy said something saucy but harmless. Then he chuckled: I guess I shouldn't say nothing with your kid in the car. My Dad barely exhaled; that's how he laughed. He watches girls, too, but he never says anything. Even now!

One more story, just to get some God in here. I was much younger, and we were watching "All in the Family." Archie and the Meathead were getting heated about religion. How can God allow so much cruelty and evil in the world? etc. etc. My father, who had not spoken the whole evening, and had not gone to church in my lifetime, said simply: "God didn't put evil in the world. People did." I needed to hear that at that moment, and I've come back to it more than I can say--more than Walker Percy, more than Chesterton or C.S. Lewis.

Happy New Year, everybody! Let's make it a good one.

@ 8:39:00 PM, ,

In 1929 I Sold Short Thursday, September 25, 2003

Wow, what a day. Complicated scary dreams, and then twelve and a half hours in the office. Or am I being redundant?

Nothing useful to say. Since I made a pledge not to talk about work stuff, I can't say anything about the intriguing job possibility that opened up in the midst of the craziness. That would be telling.

Off to scary dreams.

@ 9:55:00 PM, ,

Who Put My Diner in a Suit?

Is what a friend asks regarding the renovated Kiev. It's a question with larger resonances, particularly at this hour. I feel like I should be driving around in a Packard looking for clues.

Here's the problem: a dozen ideas and no minutes to build them. But no minutes isn't an absence of something; it's a presence. They stack up, no minutes do, like bricks of glass, until they've blocked out a path from your doorway to the train station to your desk. You can see what's going on outside the confines but if take a step toward that world you bump your nose and stagger on smarting.

Or is it that the minutes are there but I've got no will to use them? That's a trickier issue, and one for the men in long coats. Philip Larkin again:

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

@ 2:25:00 AM, ,

My Other Favorite Phil Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Another quick note, from one of the good guys, Philip Larkin:

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison --
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts --
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines --
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets -- and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension !
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you love both.

@ 8:06:00 AM, ,

The Daily Beast

Layoffs yesterday. Twelve people world-wide, including one of my best pals at the paper. You talk about signposts: This is the Burma Shave of signifiers.

Too disgusted, frightened and tired to write much more. Apologies.

@ 8:00:00 AM, ,

Well It Sure Beats Raising Cattle Tuesday, September 23, 2003

A very '90s moment on the light rail: A Guy Pearce-looking dude in a suit poring over a document titled THE HIGH PRICE OF HARASSMENT.

Well, Lisa, remember that postcard that Grampa sent us from Florida of that alligator biting that woman's bottom? That's right, we all thought it was hilarious. But it turns out we were wrong.
--Homer Simpson

@ 8:01:00 AM, ,

There's Something Bigger Than Phil Monday, September 22, 2003

A fond goodbye to Dr. Percy, for now. I'm at the end of "The Thanatos Syndrome," his sequel to "Love in the Ruins." It has some great moments, but overall it's not really a fantastic book: He telegraphs the ending and the characters are just mouthpieces for his ideas. At least in "Love in the Ruins" he turned it all into a bedroom farce. But it's the last thing he ever wrote, and fitting in its way: The theme is "the death-dealing Western world," as he called it elsewhere, and in particular abortion and euthanasia. (A guy who used to be my friend, before he stopped talking to me, accused me of cozying up to people who believed in a "culture of death." It wouldn't have bothered me so much if he had known who coined that phrase, and what it referred to.)

And, in the end, it's hopeful. The twentieth century, Percy has one character posit, was given to the devil as a proving ground, and when it ends things will right themselves again. Oy. If only he knew.

Anyhow, a couple of sendoff lines:

There's Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and super-tolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, hey were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.

And:

Why don't I like these new Christians better? They're sober, dependable, industrious, helpful. They praise God frequently, call you brother, and punctuate ordinary conversation with exclamations like Glory! Praise God! Hallelujah! I've nothing against them, but they give me the creeps.

A friend of mine asked me an important question today. But I was distracted, read the note too fast, and sent off a reply that, in retrospect, doesn't really make sense. That is the story of my life: I am an editor who reads things too fast, and a friend who answers before he understands the question. Anyway, he's a good guy and deserves much better than that.

So here's a better answer, or rather two.

1. Whatever you need, I'll be there. I've been down this road and I'd be happy to give you a hand however I can.

2. Whatever you need, listen to yourself. This is the most important door you're ever going to walk through. Don't hestitate on the step because you feel like you need to read the right books or sort it out all at once.

But suddenly I smell catshit. That's a sign of something, I'm sure. Anyhow, luck and love and goodnight.

@ 10:31:00 PM, ,

Even the Orchestra Is Beautiful

The usual. If I don't post anything over the course of a day, you can safely assume something ludicrous and irritating is going on.

You want to know why I love Walker Percy? Because he can be a Catholic, better than I'll ever be, and write the following (albeit in a character's voice):

Love your fellow man, the Lord said. That's asking a lot. Frankly, I found my fellow man, with few exceptions, either victims or assholes. I did not exclude myself. The only people I got along with were bums, outcasts, pariahs, family skeletons, and the dying.

The speaker then reveals that he spent a teenage summer in Germany being attracted to the glamour of the SS; and years later saw a hospital ward where children were put to death. And he is asked:

"Why did you become a priest?"

"Why did I become a priest." The priest at first seems surprised. Then he ruminates. ...

He shrugs, appearing to lose interest. "In the end one must choose--given the chance."

"Choose what?"

"Life or death. What else?"

Bingo, as they say under the church. So what am I choosing every day?

@ 8:53:00 PM, ,

The Elongated Peninsula

A sticker in the rear window of a car, at least as big as a cutting board:

R.I.P.
ALBERT
I'll Miss You!

The middle line in large greeting-card italics. I really hope this is in memory of a cat or parakeet or something else that has to be taught to defecate indoors. A Florida license plate. Maybe that explains it.

Nothing else to report. Joe Henry is wonderful, but no clear thoughts yet.

@ 8:42:00 AM, ,

The Ground Wants You Back Sunday, September 21, 2003

Joe Henry playing, and he does not disappoint. More on him later, but for now I'll just give you a verse from the title song, "Tiny Voices":

I can quit this anytime
It's just to help me sleep
It stops the tiny voices
And the strange hours that they keep
Who wants to hear them bleating on
And have to answer too?
Better to be dumb when I'm
falling for you.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a son of a bitch who knows how to write lyrics.

Anyhow. An afternoon with Logan and Jessica and Francis. In many ways "Logan's Run" is a test case for my feelings about science fiction: I love it but for the wrong reasons.

First things first. It is by no conventional measure a good movie. The future it paints is patently ridiculous; it was shot in a mall and looks it, and not even in the wackiest alternative universe would anybody wear those outfits. (Jenny Agutter in her green Kleenex, twenty years before J-Lo; poor dear Farah in a tinfoil miniskirt; funkmeister Michael York in a lounging tunic with sleeves big enough to hide Esquivel and Joe Meek both.)

The story, moreover, is sentimental and dopey and based on the same wrong assumptions all of its contemporaries were. Everything's running out, things are about to crumble, we'll have to create some new Leviathan state to save ourselves. In a review of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Martin Amis noted her reference to the Yeats poem "The Second Coming" (The center does not hold...what rude beach slouches towards Bethlehem to be born etc.) and observed tartly:

It doesn't seem to have occurred to her with necessary force that "The Second Coming" was written half a century ago. The centre hasn't been holding for some time now; actually the centre was never holding, and never will hold. Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fell apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity. It routinely assimilates and domesticates more pressing burdens that Miss Didion's particular share of vivid, ephemeral terrors.

And Saul David's terrors, and Norman Jewison's. In that light, "Logan's Run" and "Rollerball" and "Soylent Green" are fundamentally short-sighted, silly movies.

On the other hand, they've got that certain sci-fi something that makes them exciting. It was there in Jules Verne and "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" and "Forbidden Planet"; it's in every Philip K. Dick novel. The best way I can sum it up is: The tension of presenting something you know is absurd but daring the audience to play along in the joke. Yes, robots are silly; yes, blast pistols are ridiculous; yes, no woman in a million years would wear a vinyl bikini and a flowerpot on her head. But in the best sci-fi somehow that ridiculousness points to a greater truth. e.g., Robby the Robot tells us something about what it means to be human. What vinyl bikinis tell us about is a little murkier, although I think I need to explore the topic in more detail. In five-minute increments...

Your bed is adrift
It's come loose from the floor
The dead float up like dreams
I push them back with my arm like an oar
But your face is alive
Like a nickel cartoon
Shown on the wall
To light up the room

That bastard can write a song. But anyway.

I go into detail on this sci-fi stuff because I've been losing faith in the genre lately. The books seem exceptionally badly written, and I don't know how to approach the task of telling a sci-fi story anymore. Talking through these movies, and why I like them and why I don't, helps me remember what got me attracted in the first place.

In "Logan's Run," it was Jenny Agutter. I remember dragging my mother home early from shopping at Queens Plaza so I could watch it on Channel Five. (This in the days when you could still have an unaffiliated TV station.) Even chopped up for broadcast, the movie was sexy as hell--sexy as, in later years, Heinlein seemed (before I realized how profoundly hateful and death-dealing his philosophy was). Impossible to forget Jenny appearing in her Greek servant-girl outfit (or whatever the hell that was), with that gorgeous little haircut and big bright eyes...then Michael York grabbing her and saying, matter-of-factly, "Let's have sex."

(In the audio commentary, M.Y. reacts to Jenny's wet, spectacular nude scene by saying something like: "Ah. I forgot this was in here. Oh my." That reaction, twenty years after the movie was made, tells us more about the future than anything the director and writer dreamed up.)

To ping-pong a little, I've been trying to pin down the underlying assumptions of these movies. Sex is particularly interesting. As near as I can tell, the idea is that the sexual revolution continued and wore down norms of behavior; so marriages could be broken up by corporate fiat or cease to exist entirely, in the case of "Logan's Run."

But the movies are peculiar and conservative when it comes to imagining women's role in all this. Men are no longer gentlemen; they are pure predators, all want and nothing to domesticate them. (Although the Sandmen veer awfully close to Metrosexuality; check out that sauna scene.) But, in this model, women never got liberated. In other words, they lost the sexual revolution: Anybody can have sex with anybody, but only men can choose their partners.

What's up with that? Plain old Hollywood skeevery, I suspect. An industry run by horny old guys who love the license that liberation allows them, but don't want to extend that license to the other half of the population. Not too philosophical, but there you go. In this light, "Sex and the City" is weirder than Carousel and Soylent Green Tuesday combined. And nobody dies at thirty, either.

(Tangent: Rufus Wainwright, in a new song, just referenced a classic Johnny Mercer lyric:

Get me heaven or hell, Calais or Dover,
I was hoping the train was my big number
Taking the Santa Fe and the Atchison Topeka)

The movies kinda sorta take the line that this view of sex dehumanizes everybody concerned: It makes the men into animals and the women into "furniture," like Charlton Heston says. But there are no proto-Myron Magnets here: The movies don't criticize the overall defects of the sexual revolution, nor do they mind leering at the stuff they're theoretically condeming. (A Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks skit: Mel is a Greek film director, Mercurio Mercurichrome, talking about his new movie, "Rape": "People have to see the immorality...so they know not to do that." Almost as funny is the ending of the movie: "And then the Turkish army comes and rapes them all!")

As for religion, forget it. The corporations have wiped it out entirely in "Rollerball," it's been supplanted by youth culture and the big glass hand in "Logan's Run." It's still kicking around in "Soylent Green," in a way even Dr. Percy might approve of: The church is where you go when you can't go anywhere else, and it's the only place where people tell the truth.

Speaking of which, Father Pineapple this morning. He mentioned Leon Kass (!) in his homily, and had some interesting stuff to say about life and how to live it. I'm still puzzled by something: Why is it that I could go to church for years and years and feel angry and resentful every last minute (the priests stink, the crowd is a bunch of sheep) but as soon as somebody told me "You have faith" I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes? How come I can jump out bed now on Sundays, get dressed up without a fuss, and come out smiling no matter how dopey the sermon? What kind of faith is it that has to be pointed out by a third party?

Which is not to sound depressed. I dig it. Almost as much as Jenny Agutter.

@ 8:03:00 PM, ,

This Never Happened to Pablo Picasso

According to AOL, Ted Kennedy says the war is a "fraud." I guess that settles it.

A visit from the elves yesterday afternoon, nothing major but nice to see them. Next week the bulk of our new furniture arrives. I feel like I'm watching a new aircraft carrier slide off the dry dock: I can't quite believe it's not going to sink as soon as it hits the water. Which is not to overdramatize a new dresser and a couple cabinets.

Smarvelous evening: a party in the city. Mrs. WTJ looked gorgeous in a black ensemble: as smart and spiffy as a Toblerone. Plus she demonstrated her usual aplomb searching for a parking space and when she found one pulled off an astounding parallel job. Two inches to spare on either side, I kid you not. We husted across town first to pick up some sub rosa early releases, which I'm afraid to listen to because I dig the artists so much and I'm dubious about the quality. Report to follow.

Dinner at the "new" Kiev. It's a lot tonier than the old Kiev. Mrs. WTJ called it Ukranian Zen. The menu offerings have been slashed in half but each of them costs a couple bucks more. The meals arrived in human portions, instead of the Kazak ones you used to get, on a chic square plate with lots of room on the sides. Even the beets looked stylish. Not a bad meal, but I miss the cheap and cheerful quality of the old place. Judging by the empty tables, a lot of other people do too.

A fabbo party, thrown by two of my favorite co-conspirators from the office. A clean, well-lighted apartment with elegant wooden furniture from the mysterious East. Lots of cheeses and grapes and things to put on crackers. And drink! I had as much booze as I've had in the past three years, which left me amiably swooshy. A lot people I knew, whom it was swell to see, and it was great to meet the rest--including a guy working on nanotechnology at a major Northeastern university. He impressed me not only with his own work, which is very small, but because he actually understood what my friend in the Twin Cities is doing. Something with freezing molecules...if he hailed from a certain nation I'd say he was engaged in a Manhattan Project to rediscover the secret of ice.

At any rate, thanks to everybody for a fine day, the elves and Mrs. WTJ and my co-conspirators. The latter of which warned me not to blog about this, so I'll give it a rest.

@ 7:42:00 AM, ,