Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Happy New Year!

Big storm!  Park closes early.  No traction in my truck, unsafe to drive.  One of the Rangers gives me a four-wheeled-drive ride home.  Jodie and I walk in the woods.  Snow is deep.  Wind is howling.  Dog is happy beyond happy.


"How 'bout throwin' some snowballs for me to chase?  What's that?  You want me to sit?  You want me to sit in this cold white stuff?"

"Okay ... whatever.  After all, you are one of my alpha males."

Monday, December 29, 2008

Poem for David (for George Dunlap)



In memoriam: David Asher 12/11/1950 - 12/29/99

There used to be a time when we were not accustomed to death,
-- there'd been just the occasional casketed grandmother,
or that hometown neighbor who had lived forever anyhow.
And the deaths from wars, and the highway deaths,
and the shooting deaths --
just headlines, abstract,
not really relevant in any particular.
Hardly death at all.

Then, in the eighties, in my forties,
we began pasting obituaries into our scrapbooks.
Eddie first, in eighty-three
-- just a kid, a twenty three-year-old kid --
followed by Tommy, followed by Kenny,
and then Harold and Howard
and Edmund and Joseph and Jay and Dennis and Peter,
and Raymond and Tony, and both Willy and Billy,
-- on and on, until,
most recently,
seventeen years after that manchild Eddie died,
Frankie ... even Frankie!

Thirty names!
A thousand names!
Fifty thousand dead! Newsweek said.
(And we're not done counting.)
Funerals and memorials, ashes scattered in winds.
Commonplaces. Acronyms.
Mourning becomes an avocation.

But not you, David!
That virus flowed all around you,
but not within you.
Your great deep voice and your great deep laugh
lived on, stayed with us, thrilled us,
And those eyes, David!
Where did you ever get those true blue eyes?
Those eyes that have to have caused
countless sighs;
those eyes that have to have
melted the hearts
of thousands of guys!

You gave us cheer. You led the cheers --
cartwheeling and double-splitting,
you made us applaud; you made us laugh,
-- a pom-pom could be
your epitaph!

So suddenly then, so unexpectedly,
comes a tiny explosion
in your head,
and the you that was you
is no more,
is dead.

How surprised I was to realize
when I got that call
that I was not, as I'd thought,
accustomed to death, was not accustomed to it at all!
Who would have thought that you would be
the next to die?
Who would have imagined that on the first night
of the improbably-sounding year of twenty aught-aught
we'd be crowded onto Ryder Street
toasting you with the faux-champagne
that your brother had brought?
"Here's to David!" we said,
and lasers of light
streaked across
a startled sky.


January 2, 2000

Recycled Cheers #3 from 2006


Recycled Cheers #2 from 1998


Sunday, December 28, 2008

Recycled Cheers #1 from 2004

I didn't get cards made this year so I'll recycle some.  This picture taken at Lobster Pot Restaurant in Provincetown in 1983 or so.

Cheers!

Saturday, December 27, 2008

V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul is one of my favorite writers.  His The Enigma of Arrival is one of my favorite novels.  He's a most meticulous prose stylist, absolutely precise.  A Nobel prize winner, he's no doubt one of the greatest writers of my time.  He'd say the greatest -- he's not a particularly modest man, nor is he, according to many accounts, a particularly nice man.  Today I finished reading this authorized biography:


Once, having changed publishers, the new publisher, Knopf, having advanced Naipaul "hundreds of thousands of dollars" dared have one of their copy-editors tinker with his submitted manuscript. It rather set him off:

I thought it might have been known in the office that after 34 years and 20 books I knew certain things about writing and didn't want a copy-editor's help with punctuation ... I didn't want anyone undoing my semi-colons; with all their different shades of pause; or interfering with my "ands," with all their different ways of linking.

It happens that English -- the history of the language -- was my subject at Oxford.  It happens that I know very well that these so-called "rules" have nothing to do with the language, and are really rules about French usage.  The glory of English is that it is without these court rules: it is a language made by the people who write it.  My name goes on my book.  I am responsible for the way the words are put together.  It is one reason why I became a writer.

Every writer has his own voice ... An assiduous copy-editor can undo this very quickly, can make A write like B and Ms C.  And what a waste of spirit it is for the writer, who is in effect re-doing bits of his manuscript all the time instead of giving it a truly creative, revising read.  Consider how it has made me sit down this morning, not to my work, but to write this enraged letter. 

Another time, on the phone, he "yelled angrily" at someone at Vogue about a piece they were set to print about him.  "'What is more,' [he] shouted, his slim frame trembling with irritation, 'I do not like the photographs taken by that jumped-up little photographer of the Sixties.'"

He was referring to Lord Snowdon, who had been Princess Margaret's husband.  I didn't quite know what the British term "jumped-up" means but have learned:  Full of self importance; arrogant.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Christmas in Wellfleet

I'd arranged to be alone on Xmas.  It's not my favorite holiday.  But then I heard from Abby. She was wanting to be alone too. I thought we'd be good at being alone together. We went for a great long walk with the dog.  It was beautifully sunny and warm. Through the woods for a couple of miles until we came out onto a high bluff over-looking the Atlantic.  I peered over the edge and thought oh good lord, but Abby spied a few steps to get us started and we found our way down the sixty-or-eighty feet drop to the beach. 

The beginning of the descent, zig-zagging through scrubby pines, reminded me of the girl in Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristess, who made similar walks from her widowed father's vacation house to the beach in the south of France.  I first read that novel in Indiana in 1958 when I had not yet seen the ocean; today that girl's walks are more vivid to me.

Walking north toward Newcomb Hollow we came upon the skeleton of a late-1800's shipwreck that had washed ashore late last January but which then was pretty much buried under sand over the summer and autumn. It must have become re-exposed during last weekend's high-wind storms.

Whatever.  It was a great walk.  Thanks Abby.  Thanks Jodie.  Good Christmas.


Jim Morrison, Pere Lachaise, Paris, 1991

His is, I suppose, the most visited site in Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise.  It's a smallish American-style granite marker tucked in amongst skyscraper-like mausoleums.  Embedded in the stone's face is a bronze plaque on which an epitaph, in Greek, says: "Truth to your own spirit."  Many fresh bouquets and pots of flowering plants are placed about.  Three lit votive candles, poems, and messages scribbled on scraps of paper adorn the concrete-framed rectangle of earth leased for his remains.  The walls of the adjacent mausoleums are literally covered with graffiti, messages of love to a poet who died young in a bathtub in a Paris hotel.  A ghetto-blaster amplifies, but not too loudly, a song recorded by an American rock group which called itself The Doors, having taken their name from the title of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

About 30 young people, smoking and talking away this warm day, are sprawled disrespectfully amongst or straddled upon the surrounding masonry.  One girl holds an acoustic guitar while a boy reaches around from in back of her, placing her fingers on the guitar's frets and strings, teaching her chords, perhaps chords to accompany:

The days are bright and filled with pain
Enclose me in your gentle rein
The time you ran was too insane
We'll meet again, we'll meet again.

Oh tell me where your freedom lies
The streets are fields that never die
Deliver me from reasons why
You'd rather cry; I'd rather fly.

I removed from my knapsack the sixteen postcards I'd written but not yet mailed.  From these I extracted the one addressed to my beloved Abby and the one addressed to my beloved friend Larry in Lansing, Michigan, who once, twenty years before, while we were both stoned to immobility, and it was two o'clock in the morning, and we were sitting on the floor of his astonishingly disheveled living room listening to Neil Young, had tears in his eyes as he described Jim Morrison as one of the few whom he considered to be his guardian angels.

"Him and Gram Parsons and Hank Williams.  And you are one too," Larry said that night, flattering me.

I pressed Abby's and then Larry's postcard against the marker; then I brushed them against the sacred earth.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

The reason for the season ....


It's his birthday, so they say, while we all know that it isn't really.

I'm not much of a Christian except that I would claim to be more Christian than most self-proclaimed Christians, and this picture of Jesus is one of my favorite possessions.  The paperboard Jesus is attired in actual red velvet and pure white linen against an ecru satin background.  The nimbus is a circle of real golden beads.  That's gold thread edging on his coat and at the neck of his linen undergarment.  It is absolutely exquisite, perfect, beautifully crafted.  It's barely imaginable that it was mass-produced but it must have been.

It hung on the wall of a Jewish friend's shack-like home.  I said how much I liked it; she lifted it from a nail and gave it to me.  "He's my cousin, you know," she said.  "Could be ... same genetics, all that ... you take good care of him, okay?"  She'd paid 50-cents for it at a yard sale.

Thank you Phyllis. You gave me a treasure.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Grace Metalious - Part II

On December 27, 1946, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, a twenty-year-old woman named Barbara Roberts murdered her father, Sylvester.  The Roberts family was prominent in New Hampshire politics -- it still is.  With the help of a younger brother, Barbara buried her father in a shallow grave in a sheep barn.  Some nine months later the body was discovered.  Barbara Roberts quickly confessed to murder.

As it turned out, though, there were fair reasons for her to have killed the bastard.  Her entirely believable accounts of being sexually abused by him over many years elicited a great amount of sympathy.  She was sentenced to but a single year in prison.

The central drama of Peyton Place is based on this incident.  Lucas Cross, the father, is depicted as an incorrigible drunk who habitually beats his wife and rapes his beautiful and lovely stepdaughter, Selena.  She becomes pregnant by him.  The town's good doctor, Matthew Swain -- against his principles, but full of a wonderfully touching sympathy for Selena -- secretly performs an illegal abortion.

Below is a picture of the actual grave of the real-life Sylvester Roberts.  It's in a cemetery in the village of Gilmanton Iron Works.


It's at the far end of a Roberts family plot.  I stood staring stupidly at this featureless area of grass.  An unmarked grave must be the ultimate retribution for black-sheepdom, a fervent gesture of disrespect, a silent declaration that one and one's time on earth brought such great shame as to make one unworthy of a slab of stone, unworthy, for eternity, of remembrance.
***
I come from a small town in Indiana. It's easy for me to imagine how the people of my hometown would have reacted to an outsider, such as a Grace Metalious, had she moved into our town, appropriated a story that involved a well-liked and respectable local family, and told it to the world. And, in the process, made a million bucks, and showed up in the center of town wearing a mink coat with nothing but skin beneath it -- as I was told Grace Metalious did in Gilmanton. No ... we wouldn't have liked her.

I understand why many in Gilmanton don't like her. But I'm not from Gilmanton. I have a really soft spot in my heart for Grace Metalious.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Grace Metalious - Part I (July 17, 1994)

I call the Town Clerk in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, one Betty Smithers.  She tells me that Grace Metalious is buried at Smith Meeting House.

"Is that a cemetery?"

"Yes."

"Is there any memorial to Grace in Gilmanton besides her grave?"

"What do you mean, memorial?"

"You know, like a plaque on the Town Green, or a sign at the entrance to town that says she lived there."

Betty Smithers issues a honk of derisiveness.  "No ... no likely ... it's not as if she's highly regarded in these parts."

"You're kidding me!  Peyton Place is great!  She was a big celebrity.  I'd think the town would be proud of the connection!'

"Well, let's put it this way ...  she didn't do the town any favors by writing that book."

"But it wasn't Gilmanton she was portraying in the novel, was it? The town of Peyton Place in the novel seems much larger than Gilmanton must be."

"Well ... who knows what she had in mind?"

"There's a library in Gilmanton, right?"

"Three of 'em."*

"Is there any special display devoted to Grace in any of them?"

"Nope."  That's a flat out punky nope.  I'm taking a liking to Betty Smithers.

"Did you know Grace?"

"Unfortunately."

"I'm kind of shocked!  I just assumed you people there would be kind of proud to have been put on the map by Grace ... so to speak, I mean."

"We were doing just fine long before she came to town."

"A couple friends and I are planning to drive over and visit her grave on Saturday.  Could we maybe get together with you and talk about Grace?"

"Depends ... first of all, you'd have to catch me in the right mood, plus you'd have to come on a day when I'm not going to be in a golf tournament.  I'll be on the golf course all day Saturday. Why don't you try Marian McIntyre?  She's the librarian.  She'd be a good guide."

I call Marian McIntyre.  She says she'd be glad to meet us.  I chat a bit with Marian.  She is more kindly disposed toward Grace than Betty Smithers.  "It seems pitiful now," Marian says, "because Grace was just head of her time.  If that book were to come out today it wouldn't be shocking at all ... it'd be like reading the Bible."

"I haven't read the Bible much," I say, "but I understand it can be pretty smutty in parts!  And Peyton Place is not really about Gilmanton, is it?  I mean, the town of Peyton Place is much larger than Gilmanton.  Why are some people in Gilmanton still upset about the book?"

"Well, yes, in some ways it is about Gilmanton and the people here.  I can point to a lot of characters in the book who are based on real people, people who lived right here, and let me tell you, some of them didn't appreciate it."

I would learn on my visit that, boy, is it ever based on some real Gilmanton people!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
*The town of Gilmanton, as it turns out, is composed of of 3 villages:  Gilmanton, Lower Gilmanton, and Gilmanton Iron Works (a unique name for a village); each village has a tiny library.


Friday, December 19, 2008

Snowstorm, 12/19/08

Happy birthday to Jodie.  She's nine years old.  She never seems happier than when she's running in crazy circles in the snow.  This storm ... four or five inches ... is the perfect present.  

John Cheever; First Parish Cemetery; Norwell, Mass.

It was a cold rainy day a few years back.  Abby and I couldn't find Norwell because there isn't really a Norwell ... it's just one of those vague geographical areas ... no "downtown" as such that we could find ... no nothing ... no reason to go to Norwell except to pay respect to a great writer.

Abby tried grave rubbing.  It's difficult in the rain, but I remember looking at her beautiful hand holding the paper against the stone.  It was, in a small way, valiant.

We had a great late lunch at The Milepost Tavern in Duxbury.  It's a warm and cozy place.   Then we headed just a bit west and found a motel.  It was one of those places that serves a continental breakfast.  Come morning, on our way down the corridor to the breakfast room, a man I knew in Yarmouth stepped out of a room with a woman who was not his wife.  He was very surprised to see me.  Sort of sheepish.  I didn't care of course except for a wish that John Cheever could write up the guy's story.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Fussy Soldiers

I've loved and saved this postcard Drew sent me on Oct. 27, 1980.  I'd forgotten how in the Army some of us who were trying to win Soldier of the Month or who were extremely fussy would cut out the tops and bottoms of #10 cans and insert one in each of our trouser legs to get that perfect and perfectly fake hang such as three of the guys in this photograph accomplished. It was really hard to do it so that the bottoms of both legs hung evenly.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Going Again

The Outer Cape Chorale's performance of Beatles music at a church in Provincetown Friday night was great so I went to see the same show today at a school's auditorium in Orleans.

The musicians below, left to right: John Thomas, keyboard; Chuck Griffith, piano (my friend from work); Susan Goldberg, bass; Mark van Bork, drums.
I wore my red Marlboro shirt.


After death, Millay's "Elegy Before Death"

                     Elegy Before Death

There will be rose and rhododendron
   When you are dead and underground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
   Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;

Still will the tamaracks be raining
   After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
   Grey sheep upon the warm green hill.

Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;
   Nothing will know that you are gone, --
Saving alone some sullen plough-land
   None but yourself sets foot upon;

Saving the may-weed and the pig-weed
   Nothing will know that you are dead, --
These, and perhaps a useless wagon
   Standing beside some tumbled shed.

Oh, there will pass with your great passing
   Little of beauty not your own, --
Only the light from common water,
   Only the grace from simple stone

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Friday, December 12, 2008

Culture Alert

I'm going to this tonight.  I've put on my Christmas-red sweater.



Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Thinking of Tom*

He shall not have gone quietly,
Nor shall he have died in vain,
For he spoke his news matter-of-factly,
And he shook his fist at pain.

He fought but did not count the cost,
He knew by grace just how it's done,
And he knew too that when something's lost
Something's also won.

Post-script:  Abby's brother, Thomas Francis Bennett II, coming to the end of a 3-year battle with cancer, died four days after this post,at  age 53.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Ellen/Lingo

Ellen phoned.  Ellen's back on the Lower East Side.  Back on St. Marks Place.  Back from California where she was visiting her grandsons.  I love this picture (taken by Robert Pirello).  It's from 1977 or so. Taken outside the Crown & Anchor (or, in the lingo, The Crotch & Ankle) in Provincetown, along the parapet there.  Maybe she went to the Backroom Bar that night and the DJ played Jet Boy Jet Girl.  I think I tinkered with this picture on an early color copy machine.

(More lingo:  There was a restaurant on Commercial Street named Rags & Roses.  We called it Fags & Roaches.)

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Amos Fortune

This is my favorite marker as well as my favorite epitaph.  I came across it in Old Burying Ground cemetery in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where I'd gone to photograph Willa Cather's grave.

Sacred
to the memory of
Amos Fortune
who was born free in
Africa a slave in America
he purchased liberty
professed Christianity
lived reputably &
died hopefully
Nov 17 1801
Age 91

(I'm ashamed of this but it took every bit of self-control I could muster to not swipe that little marble or granite cross that was casually leaning against Amos' stone.)

Friday, December 5, 2008

Edmund & Elena Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was brilliant and prolific.  A respected editor.  A reporter.  A novelist.  An extensive diarist.  An admired literary and cultural critic.  His friends ran the gamut from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Vladimir Nabokov.  Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of his many lovers.  Novelist and critic Mary McCarthy was one of his four wives.

His invitation to read at Lyndon Johnson's White House was "declined with a brusqueness that had never been experienced ... in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady," according to historian Eric Goldman.

Alright, Edmund!

He's buried down the road in Wellfleet's Pleasant Hill Cemetery.  His epitaph, in Hebrew, says, "Be strong, be strong."  Elena's, in Greek, says "The Immortal Soul".

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Jodie

When Jodie goes to the beautician's before the holiday season they take a picture of her and surprise us with a Christmas card.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Pink Clouds over Gull Pond/John Bayley/Solace

John Bayley, who wrote the beautiful Elegy for Iris, a memoir about his wife, novelist Iris Murdoch, mentions somewhere "the inevitable solace that right language brings."  Elegy for Iris thus would be solace beyond solace.

The clouds I photographed?  Well, these late November/early December days rush toward winter's solstice in ever increasing darkness.  The often splendid sunsets are a solace against the quick plunge into the sadness of a 430pm darkness.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Damned Neighbors

I like to take visitors to this grave in Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth Port. Legend has it that Mary Dolencie's neighbors didn't like the fact that she had what they thought were too many cats. Then when this stone was put in place they sued to have it removed. They lost (obviously ... and thankfully).


Monday, December 1, 2008

Emily Dickinson

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.


But the light pictured above was not winter afternoon light; it was Saturday morning light, what I saw next to my bed when I woke. Outside, it was beautiful and warm. The dog and I went into the woods.

At my recent physical check-up the good doctor said I should walk briskly 30 to 45 minutes every other day. "I guarantee you'll feel better," he said.

I hadn't told him I needed to feel better; I hadn't complained about a thing.

He's right though.

I meandered and got a little lost in the woods. Briskily lost. We'd set off at 730AM and got home just after 9.

There was a note on the table that said to call Rod. I called Rod. He and Abby came over later. We rode around the back roads in Rodney's big-assed Cadillac. It was another one of those perfect days.