Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Jim May is an Illinois treasure, and his book is a gem. Published in 1994, the volume comprises an introduction and eighteen short stories, which, if you allow yourself, you can hear May narrating in a sort of no-nonsense, life-on-the-farm voice that stays with you well after you finish a story.

Pressed into the chapbook:

p. 65

Like an approaching storm that stills the air and makes the flies bite in earnest, this new awareness of my own mortality demanded that I pay attention to it. It bothered me so much that the present moments seemed unimportant. I had not yet learned to live with death, had not made the necessary and eventual adjustments that all surviving people make, had not yet found a place to submerge this knowledge so that life could be lived. Instinctively I knew that I would have to make some kind of peace with my mortality because every farm harbors death as an equal partner, a dark presence with its own essential role in the business, its own steady job.

p. 75

I knew from studying the lives of the martyred saints that there were many things worth dying for, but during my eleventh year I was beginning to suspect there might be even more glorious and mysterious reasons to live. The possibilities enchanted my daydreams. Although our relationship was scrupulously chaste, I began to understand that there might be a future for me where earthly pleasures were allowed, even encouraged.

p.93

On the farm, his time was consumed by an unbroken strand of work with no two days the same. The gift bestowed by all this toil was a feeling of accomplishment, and the peace and pleasure that accompanies exhaustion. Work and life occupied that same space and there was no time to make acquaintance with the demons that inhabit idle moments.

_____________________

The Farm on Nippersink Creek includes "A Bell for Shorty." In 1989, May received a Chicago Emmy Award for his performance in a televised version of this touching tribute to his father.

Fine Art Friday

When I received my copy of Smithsonian last weekend, I thought, A-ha! My Fine Art Friday entry has been done for me.

From "Hopper" (Smithsonian, July 2007):

Painting did not come easily to Edward Hopper. Each canvas represented a long, morose gestation spent in solitary thought. There were no sweeping brushstrokes from a fevered hand, no electrifying eurekas. He considered, discarded and pared down ideas for months before he squeezed even a drop of paint onto his palette.

The article features several images.

The recommended daily allowance

The last time I saw such a mesmerizingly perfect family film was The Whale Rider. Inspired by events in the life of David Marenger, The Blue Butterfly features Marc Donato as Pete Carlton, a terminally ill ten-year-old with more than a passing interest in entomology. His mother (Pascale Bussieres) persuades Alan Osborne (William Hurt, reminding us -- again -- how brilliant he is), a popular entomologist her son idolizes, to bring Pete to the tropical rain forest to pursue the Blue Morpho -- Mariposa Azul. Doctors have given Pete only a few months to live; catching the rare butterfly represents his dream.

If you think you know how this will end, you're wrong.

Brilliant. Thought-provoking. Emotional. Interesting. All we could possibly ask of a ninety-six-minute film -- and more.

Don't miss this one.

By the way, I saw a Blue Morpho when Master and I went to New York. Here is one of my favorite images. (Click to enlarge.)

Common. Reader.

From Virginia Woolf's essay "The Common Reader."

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.

I love that: too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books.

“. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

Uncorrupted by literary prejudices. In other words, the unwashed, unlettered, germ-laden interlopers are welcome at the literary feast, eh? Heh, heh, heh.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.

Um, yeah. Apparently, huh?

He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. [Emphasis added.]

Yes! That's it! Precisely.

He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result. [Emphasis added.]

Yes, it may be, at that.

Read. Think. Learn. Write.

More Poppet-y goodness

Artist Lisa Snellings Clark sent me a short note thanking me for yesterday's Poppet mention. Apparently, she shares our love of Shakespeare. Check this out.
______________________

From A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act IV, scene 1:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom.

Happy Monday, folks. Read. Think. Learn.

Dream.

On the corner of my desk

:: Kenneth Branagh (Mark White)

In the United States he was lauded for his audacity in combining directing and acting, and in undertaking projects that brought to mind the work of Olivier and Orson Welles. It was felt that he was carrying out a worthy public service in trying to enlarge the audience receptive to Shakespeare, and there was general admiration for the fact that he was doing this at a young age. In England, by contrast, his rise had been accompanied by widespread criticism in the media. He had been castigated for his wedding, his autobiography, his appearance, his acting, his supposed arrogance in laying claim to Olivier's throne, and his character.

:: Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (edited by Scott L. Newstok)

In this respect, the account of this perverse triangle is not so much a series of lyric confessions as the preparatory exercises of a budding dramatist. Consider, for instance, the almost schematic thoroughness with which the theme of the fair-complexioned boy is contrasted with the theme of black in the woman. And note the dramatic kind of skill exhibited in the shift of his involvement from one to the other.

On the other hand, Shakespeare's plays do reveal a kind of imagination ultimately impinging upon modes of self-involvement that, as you prefer, could be called either suicidal or narcissistic.

:: The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (Nigel Cliff)

In a country whose total population was only ten million, traveling actors crossed each other's paths in the strangest places. So it was that in 1820, five years after they had battled their way to Kentucky, old Samuel Drake's two eldest sons arrived in Vicennes, Indiana, to play a summer season and there ran into a familiar face from Albany. The face belonged to a young runaway named Sol Smith, and it was under his unlikely tutelage that Edwin Forrest would later become a star.

___________________

"They're adorable... and sort of creepy."
Two Little Red Poppets.

And a Little Blue.

Artist Lisa Snellings Clark originally developed the two-inch Poppet sculpture as a pawn in a toy-themed chess set. "Not far into this project," writes Clark, "I decided it was the wrong time to make a chess set, possibly the wrong universe and that there were too many chess sets already. But I liked the little pawn. I recognized it."

So did I.

I first read about Little Red Poppets at A Fondness for Reading. I must have one, I determined.

And now I have two (and a Little Blue!). And a third Little Red Poppet is on its way to Aunt M-mv.

Like my well-read simians, I suspect my Poppets will crop up in photos periodically.

The Saturday Review of Books

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Fine Art Friday

Have you visited the Fine Art Friday archive?

July 21, 2007

Avoid the crowds. Choose standard shipping at Amazon and receive it on July 21, 2007 -- or it's free.

"I'm not sure I agree with you...

a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou."

Fargo fell off the AFI 100, and I'm not the only one wondering, "Wha-?!"

Roger Eberts writes in today's column:

Lists like these cry out to be disagreed with. Seconds after an advance copy was sent to news outlets, film critic Peter Debruge e-mailed me: "Of all the issues surrounding this list, my biggest question: Where did 'Fargo' go?"

What? "Fargo" not on the list? Unthinkable, considering that, well, I was going to name a title that has no business being on the list, but actually they all have a claim, even the few like "High Noon" that I personally don't much like. It's just that -- what? No "Fargo."

My affection for Fargo is well documented.
__________________________

I have here a heartfelt message from a reader who urges me not to be so hard on stupid films, because they are 'plenty smart enough for the average moviegoer.' Yes, but one hopes being an average moviegoer is not the end of the road: that one starts as a below-average filmgoer, passes through average, and, guided by the labors of America's hard-working film critics, arrives in triumph at above-average.

~ Roger Ebert
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There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.

~ Marge Gunderson

The payoff arrives in the last few minutes.

Be advised: Some of you will loathe and/or be offended by this. Just skip it, then, okay, folks? Because I don't want to hear about it. The rest of you: Never wear overalls.

'hadn't heard of this guy until today, but, then, that's no surprise. I often fall woefully behind on all things pop culture. He sure cracked me up, and, boy, I needed the laugh. Thank you, William.

When time permits, I'll find out what he suggests the overall-wearin' autodidact don instead. Not that I'd give up my overalls, but I'm open to suggestions.

Heh, heh, heh.

On the corner of the piano

Some review/advance reader copies are vying for my attention.

:: Meet the Annas (Robert Dunn)
Coral Press publishes only fiction about music. This is Dunn's third "musical novel," and it is in queue for poolside reading.

:: The Savior (Eugene Drucker)
Drucker, a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, offers this character study of a German violinist ordered to play for the inmates of a concentration camp. I first mentioned this here.

:: What Remains (Carole Radziwill)
Subtitled "A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love," this book narrates a marriage, an eventually lost battle with cancer, and a friendship cut short by a plane crash. As another reviewer has already mentioned, this story is sad even before one realizes Radziwell was married to Jackie Kennedy Onassis' nephew. More about her story here.

:: The Things Between Us (Lee Montgomery)
As in Radziwill's memoir (see above), cancer figures prominently in Montgomery's work: Her father succumbs to metastatic stomach cancer. The narrative also describes Montgomery's struggle to reunite her dysfunctional family.

In today's Chicago Tribune, Julia Kenner writes:

You don't have to love books. It's OK just to like them. It's OK to be a casual reader, a sometime scholar, an occasional consumer of print. It's acceptable to read a book every once in a while, for the simple reason that you happen upon one that intrigues you -- without quitting your job, selling your furniture and going back to graduate school in comparative literature.

Um, okay. Later:

Yet the arts often come swaddled in snobbery. There are critics, unfortunately, who encourage this snooty exclusivity: If you've not attended the symphony for a while, if your nightstand isn't stacked with literary classics, if you've let your Art Institute membership lapse, you're made to feel as if you really ought to just shuffle along to the ball game, beer in hand, and leave the highbrow stuff to the masters.

Such class-based bunk makes me bristle. The arts can be part of your life even if they aren't all of your life. Even a little bit of art matters.

But a little bit doesn't matter much -- or, rather, enough.

Or does it?

Eh, I'm not so sure.

What do you think?

You may need to register (free, painless) to read her article, "So go ahead and sue me: Just liking books is fine."

Pop culture

Adam Raymond, an editorial assistant for Radar magazine's website, sent me a note this morning:

Hi M-mv. I've got a quick, perhaps strange request. I write for Radar Magazine and I'm putting a piece together for our website about Rosie O'Donnell's poetry that she writes on her blog. I was wondering if you'd be willing to provide a review of a piece. I've pasted it below. [And he did. Here's a link to O'Donnell's poem.] We'd provide a link to your blog and it should be a pretty fun. You can just write a sentence or two or as much as you'd like. Ideally, this will appear alongside a few other reviews of the same poem from some of your fellow lit-bloggers. Thanks!

So, I spent a few minutes reading the poem, poking around O'Donnell's site, and visiting Radar.

Heh, heh, heh.

Adam -- may I call you that? -- I'm just a plain ol' book-blogger. I am not a critic; I am not particularly interested in what I suspect will be "fun" at O'Donnell's expense; and, truth be told, "Pop - Politics - Scandal - Style" are pretty low priorities here at Mental multivitamin. In fact, your message is the first I ever heard of Radar (although I did appreciate the image of David Hasselhoff on the opening page this morning -- the former "Baywatch" star holds a special place in our hearts).

As a relatively new and (very) amateur(-ish) birdwatcher, however, I'll offer this much: Blue jay eggs are usually brown-speckled against either a tan or greenish background. If Eddie picked up a blue egg, I think it was more likely a robin that attacked him.

You know...

i was attacked by a robin
when I was little

it was in the seventies
before the bicentennial

my mother was on the phone with maggie m
-- a cosmopolitan with a cockney accent --
she didn't hear my screams

i still have the eggshell

Heh, heh, heh.

How and Why

Do you remember these? Mine was a book-poor childhood, so, as you might imagine, I was grateful for these. More than three decades later, they have found a home in my daughters' hands, hearts, and bookcases.
_______________________________

When I finish writing tonight, seven thousand words remain until my deadline. This seems utterly doable, though; believe me: I'm not looking for your sympathy.

Lately, my work, my music studies, my teaching -- it all seems good, productive, right.

That's a wonderful feeling.

Feed your bibliomania!

Put it in your datebook:

Newberry Library's 23rd Annual Book Fair

Thursday, July 26, 2006, 12 - 8 p.m.
Friday, July 27, 2006, 12 - 8 p.m.
Saturday, July 28, 2006, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Sunday, July 29, 2006, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Browse among more than one hundred thousand donated books sorted into sixty categories for your convenience.

Admission is free. Parking is available at 100 W. Chestnut, 1025 N. Clark, or 100 E. Walton for $6 for up to six hours with Newberry validation.

For information, call (312) 255-3510 and/or visit the Newberry Library site.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Fine Art Friday

Statue of James Joyce

Music lessons and work will likely keep me busy tomorrow, so this entry doubles as my celebration of Bloomsday.

Two Bloomsday links
1. The James Joyce Centre's Bloomsday 2007
2. "A closer look at Bloomsday" (The Washington Times, June 10, 2007)

From the archives
My tour through Ulysses was led by a deft literary guide, a full professor who preferred his students to his study, a rare, rare breed, indeed. He took us by the hand (and some us by the nose) as we sometimes walked, often plodded, occasionally skipped through his favorite book in all the world. And those who could afford the annual pilgrimmage to Dublin, he happily ushered through the streets and narrows that his beloved Bloom paced.

As I have done each June 16 since taking Marty N.'s seminar on James Joyce, today I pulled down my tattered copy of the tome and reread a paragraph here, a margin note there, assorted slips of paper quoting Marty, and Chapter 18 in its entirety. Our discussion of "the 'Yes' chapter," all those years ago, was prefaced by a screening of Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan's performance of Molly Bloom's monologue. The stunned silence that followed the film's end was recalled to me today when I read this bit in the Times Literary Supplement:

This is particularly true of Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy, which may end on a “Yes” but is tragic in its implications. Here is a wakeful woman, beside her sleeping husband, left with nobody to talk to but herself. After an afternoon assignation with her lover, she feels compelled to m-st-rb-te repeatedly in the bed, because her visitor took all the pleasure for himself. The blank pieces of paper which she posts to herself seem like emblems of her lonely condition, just as her “yes” seems a desperate tactic to convince herself that life is better than it is. When the Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan performed the monologue in this way on an American campus in the 1980s, some elderly professors handed back their membership cards to the Joyce Association in disgust at her alleged blasphemy against a sacred text.

Not Marty. Like us, he was staggered by Flanagan's interpretation. Oh, what a discussion followed.

Yes, it's Bloomsday again. The sixteenth that I've marked. I grow old.*

You know, reading Joyce, hell, reading any of the "heavier" books, requires a time-space that few of us willingly make. Oh, the children, we chide. Ah, work, we moan. Oh, dear, the chores, the errands, the lawn, the home-improvement projects. We toss the books aside in dismay because they are no easier now than they were when well meaning English teachers and professors pressed them on us in our teens and early twenties.

Bulletin! They were never meant to be "easy."

Happy Bloomsday.
___________________

* From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Do you want me "to bring it all home"? Okay. Modernists Eliot and Joyce (and Ezra Pound) influenced, nay, arguably shaped twentieth-century literature. In a 1922 review, Eliot described Joyce's Ulysses as "the most important expression which the present age has found." It's no small coincindence that Eliot identified the "mythical method" in Joyce's work: "The Waste Land" was meant to be read as a mythic quest, too.

Hence, it is not remarkable that a discussion of Joyce might remind me that "I grow old... I grow old..." and that growing old in that meter might call to mind Eliot.

The reading life is rife with leaps and connections, links and consolations.

And lest someone think me a literary snob, I offer this from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye:

"'I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"

"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Here's another one. 'In the room women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you, sir?"

"Yeah -- it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."

"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot very much."

"Did you say, 'nonetheless'?"

Also from The Long Goodbye:

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

The company of books is unimaginably rich.

The material in this post was culled from previous Bloomsday entries.)

Words, words, words

Why has Houghton Mifflin's list of "100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know" been resurrected as if it were new news?

Back in January 2006, I posted about the list and offered folks a study aid -- words and definitions.

Even then, what, eighteen months ago, I was certain that it was old news (i.e., it had been posted elsewhere). After all, the pub date on the book is May 2003. It's a fair guess that the press release was intended to promote this "must-have for every grad, perfect for building vocabulary, quizzing friends and family — and just having fun," no?

[*Insert head scratching*] So why is the Sun-Times just getting around to it?

Well, if you missed my post or the study sheet the first time around.... Read. Think. Learn.

"Marry Not Marry"

From today's Sun-Times, Darwin on marriage: Wife 'better than a dog':

Under the positives of having a wife, his list included:

• "Constant companion (and friend in old age.)"
• "Object to be beloved and played with -- better than a dog, anyhow."
• "Someone to take care of house."
• "Music and female chit-chat."
• "Good for one's health."
• "Children (if it Please God.)"

Darwin's potential negatives also included:

• "Less money for books."
• "Terrible loss of time."
• "Erosion of "freedom to go where one likes."
• "Forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle."
• "Expense of children."
• "Anxiety... responsibility."

Heh, heh, heh. "[B]etter than a dog, anyhow." Good to know.

As I mentioned here, we couldn't be more excited about the new Field Museum exhibit. Master is (still) reading this, and the Misses have reread this in anticipation.

Ever up for a good philosophy book, I test-drove (i.e., borrowed from the library) Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes earlier this month. The authors, Havard professors Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, employ one-liners, jokes, puns, cartoons, and gags to explain, among other things, that Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything, and that angst is a basic human response to the very conditions of human existence: "It's enough to make you wish you were an airhead philosopher instead of an existentialist."

If you don't love philosophy or can't bear the occasional crude joke, skip this one. Master M-mv and I thoroughly enjoyed it, though.

Two excerpts:

p. 37 [Logic]

Recently, the clockwork argument has staged a comeback as the "theory" of Intelligent Design, which proposes that the supercomplexity of stuff in nature (think snowflakes, eyeballs, quarks) proves that there must be a superintelligent designer. When the Dover, Pennsylvania, Board of Education was challenged for including Intelligent Design as an "alternate theory" to evolution in their school curriculum, the presiding judge, John Jones III, ruled, in effect, that they should go back to school. In his often wittily written opinion, Jones could not restrain himself from poking fun at some of the defense's so-called expert witnesses, like one professor who admitted that the argument from analogy was flawed, but "it still works in science-fiction movies." Next witness, puh-leez!

p. 59 [Epistemology]

[D]espite the triumph of empiricism and science, many people continue to interpret some unusual events as miraculous rather than the result of natural causes. David Hume, the skeptical British empiricist, said that the only rational basis for believing something is a miracle is that all alternative explanations are even more improbable.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Arlington Park (Rachel Cusk) in Book World's sidebar.

Rachel Cusk. Rachel Cusk. I thought. Oh, yeah. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother. Meh. A little whinge-y, but elegantly written.

Arlington Park was but $4.60 at Amazon.com. Eh, why not?

If you read Tom Perrotta's Little Children with the same appreciation that I did (see our RDA here, and, yes, the film was remarkable, too (recommended here)), then give Cusk's novel a go. It's a quick, disturbing, thought-provoking, book; to say nothing of an unforgivingly lit portrait of "the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs."

Excerpt:

Upstairs the men had music on so that she couldn't hear the timbre of their conversation. She didn't fancy the look of any of them really, except Dave Spooner. Juliet's husband was all bandy legs and no neck, and Dom Carrington was a little too refined for her tastes: he looked at you with those eyes as if it really mattered what you said next, and then was silent for a minute after you said it, which Christine found disconcerting. Also, he had a little perfect look about him which contradicted Christine's sense of what the opposite sex should be. What was a man if not a rough thing you rubbed up against that gave you all your smoothness? A man should be a rough, splintered thing, solid, imperfect, abrasive, and thick-skinned, like a tree-trunk with rough bark. You needed to feel yourself purified by your contact with him and feel the attrition of conflct that sent you back smoother, polished, rubbed clean. But Dom was like marble. With a man like marble, like glass, where was the friction? Where was the sticking point that relieved you of the questing sense of irritation, the itch, the crawling, questing need for some roughness to find a purchase on? Dom would make you feel like a rhinoceros trying to relieve its itch against the stalk of a daisy.

Here's a link to BW's post on it.

Added a little later...
Hey! Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Waterfall makes some points on a subject that I often think about but nearly always refrain from discussing. And don't miss Bobby's comment to her post; it made me laugh.

Look, the next time you're inclined to identify yourself as a writer (or a runner or pianist or whatever), think about this: If you met a professional dancer, would you say, "Cool! I'm a dancer, too. Yeah, I like to move to the groove in my living room in the afternoons, and I even took first prize in the company picnic dance-off"?

No.

You would not.

Why?

Because you would sound ridiculous.

BENEDICK: "There's a double meaning in that."

Fine Art Friday

"Triple Self Portrait"

:: I showed the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.

:: My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I guess I am a story teller.

:: I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it -- pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers -- only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.

~ Norman Rockwell

This is the part where someone expects me to defend my abiding affection for and admiration of that alternately maligned ("Too sweet!") and celebrated ("Quintessentially American!") artist, whose name has become a sort of adjective for a version of American life that may exist only in our collective imagination.

Not rising to that bait. I adore Rockwell illustrations -- the subjects and the execution. To me, his art is like the writing of one of my favorite authors.

Crisp. Direct. Big-hearted. Insightful.

"Commonplaces never become tiresome," Rockwell once observed. "It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative."

May you remain curious and appreciative. I know I will.

From the archives: Profound and pedestrian

"I almost always cry at the end of a play," Donna admitted Saturday. (It is funny that I have never heard Donna speak, yet I know—or believe I know—her cadences well. And had she not written another word, I believe I would have been able to complete (or at least complement) her thought: Not because the play concluded tragically, necessarily, but because it had concluded at all.)

"But I cry tears of joy for the participants."

Yes. Theater is a catharsis, and we laugh and we cry and we clap as the experience draws to a close.

How can it be over already? we wonder. We just got here.

Miss M-mv(i) learned this sometimes painful lesson in May 2004.

She wept after a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, her first live-theater experience. "It's over already," she cried softly into my ear. "It was so. wonderful."

Oh, I know, sweetie. I know. It almost always is.
___________________________

My a.m. internet habits are no secret.

I check my email, look over Arts & Letters, give either the NYT or the Trib a glance, read Quiet Life, Semicolon, and Pages Turned, submit my work from the night before, and post at M-mv, if time permits.

Yesterday, I only got as far in my morning ritual as Quiet Life when the day beckoned to me.

"I almost always cry at the end of a play."

As I tidied the kitchen, I began to sing a bit from a much maligned musical:

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.

I don't know when it became popular to loathe Cats. Its poetry, after all, is no more or less ridiculous than, say, Carroll's "Jabberwocky."

I rather like it.

Ayup. I do.

Yes, I most certainly prefer

Mcavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.

to most anything, say, Jack Prelutsky concocts. It takes an admirable sort of poet to rhyme this sentence

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

to another, no?

Heh, heh, heh.
___________________________

When Mr. M-mv and I were undergrads, our student unions often offered two-for-one ticket deals for Broadway shows. During those lean, so lean, years of college and early married life, we managed to see A Chorus Line, Cats, and later Les Miserables (four times). Our seats were always excellent, and what I remember best about Cats was that the players frolicked in the aisles—they were thisclose.

I loved it!

My early theater experiences (high school and college) were, I guess, rather pedestrian: They're Playing Our Song, Evita, Forty-Second Street, A Chorus Line, Cats, The Fantastiks (off-Broadway), Les Miserables. Some Gilbert and Sullivan. Arms and the Man at a Princeton U. theater. School and university productions of Carousel and Carnival and Anything Goes and Plaza Suite and Suddenly Last Summer. Regional theater productions of Fiddler on the Roof and The Fantastiks. And so on.

But the larger-than-life-ness of the experiences were anything but pedestrian.

Later…

Sunset Boulevard at the Civic Opera House. Rent. Othello and other plays (familiar and not) at smaller theaters around Chicago. Hubbard Street Dance Company. The Joffrey Ballet. Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Project. Mamet at the Steppenwolf. (Oh, I remember the production so clearly—the young boy in the cast was surreally wonderful—but the name, the name....) Signal Ensemble Theater. Shakespeare Project of Chicago. The American Ballet Theater. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

"I almost always cry at the end of a play."

Oh, yes, I, too, almost always cry at the end of a performance because unless it's the most dreadful production on Earth, the point of theater (and dance and musical concerts) is live—this is happening right now, so anything is possible!—performance. So, as it ends, Oh, wonderful! we cry. You did it! You did it! Thank you! Thank you! I loved being here!

I cry, too, Donna.

I think that's what makes us human, my friend.
___________________________

Last night, Mr., Master, and I watched Logan's Run. Why? a few of you are, no doubt, wondering. Because it's a sci-fi classic in its own right.

And because I wanted to.

Logan 5 and Jessica 6 have made it to the ruins of Washington, D.C. They marvel at the wrinkles and gray hairs of the old man they meet, and the old man talks to them about his cats:

"[A] cat must have three different names. First of all, there's the name that the family use daily...."

And I thought, Yes, that's right. To a citizenry raised in a bubble, a manufactured city in which no one lives past thirty, this doddering old man's recitation from T.S. Eliot's The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats must ring in profound peals.

They don't know what cats are.

They don't know what old is.

They don't know what it is to be buried.

Or to fear dying without someone to bury (and remember) you.

To them, all of this is new, and immediate, and ever so much larger than life as they once knew it.

"Gus is the cat at the theatre door," the old man introduces one of his feline companions to this Brave New World's Adam and Eve. "His name, as I ought to have told you before, is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss to pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus."

Logan and Jessica nod, enchanted.
___________________________

MIRANDA: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!

PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee.

___________________________

There is, at the confluence of thought and experience, a moment of such clarity that we can hardly bear to look at it.

Life is both profound and pedestrian.

And I cry, too.

"The primary purpose of a liberal education...

is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure."

— Sydney J. Harris, American journalist and author (1917-1986)

More from the quotable Harris:

:: It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.

:: Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

:: Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, "Why not?" and the other, "Why bother?"

:: Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.

:: The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.

:: We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until... we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."

:: When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

People sometimes confuse infer with imply, but the distinction is a useful one.

February 18, 2009

The day my televisions will die. Will yours? Article here.

From this week's LA Weekly News, "Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted":

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

"[B]arbarians are vindictive."

With fellow sticklers and grammar geeks in mind, the following material was culled from several posts in the M-mv archives.

From The Underground Grammarian:

Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian [misuses the language]; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics.

An incomplete list of errors to avoid:

Explanation not explaination.

Voila! not Wallah!

Used to (and only if you must) not use to.

Vengeance not vengance.

A lot not alot.

Advice is the noun; advise is the verb.

Loan is the noun; lend is the verb.

A garment can be loose, and so can a woman, but we lose our place in a book when distracted by the latter. Do you see the difference? Please, you don't want to loose weight. That could prove dangerous to those around you. No, you simply want (perhaps, need?) to lose it.

Do not under any circumstances use cuz for because. Gentle readers, no educated writer over the age of, say, fifteen should regularly employ this or any other 'net shorthand in his or her writing. No, really. There is no excuse. None.

Too many exclamation marks. How many is too many? More than one tacked to the end of sentence? Too many. More than one exclamation per thousand-words? Too many. And, yes, I've erred here, too. I'll heed my own advice, ne'er fear!

Heh, heh, heh.

(Care to place a wager on how many folks will write in about that last exclamation mark? "You just broke your own rule!" Ah, well. It's a public blog. No telling who will click in, right?

And, yes, I know: "Barbarians are vindictive.")

Here's another site for grammar geeks and other guardians of the language. From "The Grammar Curmudgeon":

Nothing makes a confirmed curmudgeon crankier than misuse of the English language, especially if that curmudgeon has devoted his adult life to studying and teaching English – and even more so if he has spent countless hours editing bad prose. This site is an outlet for an old guy who is tired of hearing teenagers punctuate every sentence with a half dozen likes, baffled by the apparent inability of many presumably literate adults to distinguish between it’s and its, and a little tired of explaining to college freshmen why “Mary and me went to the movies” is wrong. I hope that, in the course of venting, I can also contribute some useful information – and perhaps even add a little fire and wit to that dull-as-proverbial-dust subject, grammar.

The Curmudgeon also blogs: "Curmudgeon's Corner."

Let us be the first to remark on this coincidence: "The Grammar Curmudgeon" (Rich Turner) hails from the same home state as "The Underground Grammarian" (Richard Mitchell).

The Garden State yielded a crop of grammarians.

Heh, heh, heh.
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M-mv on grammar, language, and writing:

On writing... and thinking (12.03.2005)

The writer's bookshelf (Part I) (12.02.2004)

"Rules are important, no question about it." (5.16.2004)

Your writing fool (4.24.2004)

The recommended daily allowance (4.13.2004)

"Scared silly by the Underground Grammarian" (3.23.2004)

Heh, heh, heh. "Ding-dong!" (3.22.2004)

Two things (3.8.2004)

Ayup. (2.1.2004)

Not for grammar geeks only (12.15.2003)

The recommended daily allowance (12.15.2003)

Hab SoSlI' Quch! (12.13.2003)

The Underground Grammarian (12.3.2003)

The recommended daily allowance (11.15.2003)

Fine Art Friday

My middle child's interest scientific illustration/wildlife art fascinates me. The work of John James Audubon (e.g., "Towhee Bunting" (1812) and "Purple Grackle" (date unknown)) and David Allen Sibley (e.g., "Collisions" (2005)) fascinates -- and delights -- us both.

Audubon's Birds of America is available online.

Recommended reading
:: John James Audubon: The Making of an American (Richard Rhodes)

:: The Sibley Guide to Birds (David Allen Sibley)

:: The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (David Allen Sibley)