I Would Guess She's in Detroit Saturday, January 24, 2004

J&R Music World, a big retailer near my office, has decided to ruin my life by opening a used-record bin. A quick survey at the end of last week netted a big stack of disks, most of them as crappy as I figured they'd be, but some real finds. Chief among them: Bobby Short plays Noel Coward and Cole Porter. Bobby Short is a joyous cabaret singer whom I just missed seeing several weeks ago; you know the other two. The songs are like champagne. Witty and worldly, airy and dazzling. How anybody could get a laugh out of Rudy Vallee's name is beyond me, but Cole and Bobby pull it off.

Much, much good work today. Tasty stuff. More later.

@ 8:17:00 PM, ,

Take My Five Dollars! Thursday, January 22, 2004

Spotted this morning on the way to the train: a hand-lettered sign taped to the interior wall of the Bayonne Community News:

Headlines Should Not Be Hy-Phen-Ated

Then, on the train, nearly finished Evelyn Waugh's "Helena." There's a wonderful passage toward the end where Helena, lately baptized, attends an intricate Christmas mass in Bethlehem. As she thinks about the Three Wise Men, the story turns into a reflection on faith, art, Waugh and all of us cranky aesthetes:

'Like me,' she said to [The Wise Men], 'you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way....

'How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

'You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

'Yet you came, and were not turned away....

'You are my especial patrons...and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents....

'For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.'

It last for two pages but speaks more clearly and more truthfully about faith and the human condition than fifty volumes of Da Vinci Codes or Gnostic Gospels or Blade and Chalices. Balls to them all.

@ 8:17:00 AM, ,

Divine Decline and Fall Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Cold, cold, punishingly cold. Warming me up on the train rides: Helena, by Evelyn Waugh. A tiny book about the mother of the emperor Constantine. Reading it is like hearing a favorite song covered from an unexpected angle--you never would have thought it could be approached that way. With Helena, who would've thought that the scandals of Rome--the back-stabbing, chattering and coups--were of the same sort as 1930s England? Waugh makes it his own, and as usual leaves me scratching my head at his talent. And his passages knocking Gnostics, and quietly sympathizing with Christianity, is remarkable.

Long ride behind, long day ahead. Onward!

@ 8:17:00 AM, ,

Born to Hum Sunday, January 18, 2004

Duh. Everybody should buy this book, which came out a couple of weeks ago. It was many months in the making, and reflects well on everybody involved (if I may say so).

Just finished a short story! Hooray for life. Here's the first paragraph (which may change):

Stan Tyrker was an elevator man. He wore brown polyester slacks, a black-and-grey sweater and enormous glasses. He had a large kind face, pitted with acne scars and crowned by white hair. He had false teeth and it hurt him to talk, but not to chuckle, which he did often, almost noiselessly, with a kind of hiccup. The mug on his desk, which was full of pens, said that elevator men did it up and down. Somebody else had bought it for him.

Now back to the first Secret Thing, which as I said earlier, is a game but, for all you eagle-eyed readers, not an adventure. Secret Thing #2 is a long-running project with a friend who holds fast the Last Homely House on Staten Island. This is gonna be a good year, or I'll die trying.

Title courtesy Erin McKeown, a spunky folky with a number of wunnerful songs.

@ 8:53:00 PM, ,

Six Months in a Leaky Boat

Finished LOTR, and I miss it like anything. Tried to keep the spirit alive by reading another book on Catholicism in Tolkien, "The Gospel According to J.R.R. Tolkien." I wasn't thrilled to see the first blurb on the back was from the author of "The Gospel According to the Simpsons"--but this book was significantly better than the last religion-in-LOTR book I read, which had one good idea smothered by plot summaries. This one goes beyond surface similarities and and metaphors and gets deep into Catholic philosophy--in some sense, it's a book about Catholicism that uses Tolkien as a way into the subject. One of my favorite observations: The author suggests that Tom Bombadil, for all the speculation around who he is and what he means, is actually a symbol of the unknowable. He isn't there to answer the reader or satisfy a question for him/her; he's there to "amuse God." That's a nice idea--and perhaps the proper object of fiction as a whole?

Moved from that to a collection of reviews by Richard Grenier, a critic for Commentary magazine in the 1980s. Sorta like Stanley Kauffman at the New Republic--almost terrifyingly informed, doesn't seem to like movies as such. But dead-on in most cases.

A great quote about a certain variety of intellectual:

History has played a dirty trick on these people. Everything about their taste, temperament, manner of living and grand behavior marks them out as members or votaries of the aristocratic camp. In an earlier age they would have displayed undisguised contempt for the populist, egalitarian democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville so admired. But here they are marooned in the modern, democratic age, which offers so little support for aristocratic beliefs. By a dazzling leap that blinds them to their own hypocrisy, they have therefore contrived to turn everything on its head. They will prove their superiority to other people not by claiming bloodlines, or in any of the old rank-differentiated ways, but by earnestly endorsing a morally superior principle, such as, let's say, reorganization of the world to ensure the total equality of all human beings.

This has the advantage of being quite unattainable, of course, so Gore Vidal will continue to enjoy his seaside mansion on the Amalfi Coast, as Mary McCarthy enjoyed her quail's eggs, unavailable in most peasant communities.

Title of this post comes from the Finn brothers. Everything they've done is wonderful, but somehow it's hard to think of them as really great songwriters. It's the lyrics, I think: Perfectly suitable for power pop but unmemorable as poetry. But power pop is groovy too.

@ 10:06:00 AM, ,