Thursday, September 30, 2010

James Dean; 1931-1955

James Dean died in a car crash 55 years ago today.  Only 24.  I bought a copy of the picture below at the James Dean Museum in Fairmount, Indiana, eight or ten years back.  I like to tell people it is a picture of me; generally they don't recognize it as a picture of James Dean and don't question my truthiness.  I enjoy telling a lie once in a while, keeping in practice, and then -- maybe, maybe not -- following it up with the truth.

I've visited his grave in Fairmount, Indiana, three times; it isn't far from my own Indiana hometown.  The first time I was there was in the early sixties; fans had chipped away pieces of the stone.  It was replaced by the time of my second visit in 1991.  I like it that on that and on a later visit the stone isn't damaged, and there are smack-dabs on it. 



Thursday, September 23, 2010

Excellent Night

Jack & Mark on Nauset Light Beach

Full moon's eve.  Jack built an excellent bonfire.  Excellent company came.  The breeze was gentle and excellent.  Then, toward 730pm, Jack carried excellent water from the excellent ocean to douse the excellent fire.  Back at Jack & Jane's house we had Jane's excellent lasagna and a salad with someone's excellent Caesar dressing, followed by excellent multiberry pie from the excellent Sam's Deli.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Funny If It Were Not so Sad


Tip of the hat to www.buzzfeed.com where there are several other great pictures from papal-visit protests in London.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Hitch-22


The first chapter of this memoir is named "Prologue with Premonitions".  "When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps 'too soon.'  Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence  more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too 'late.'"


Too soon, one hopes, but ironic that shortly after publication, barely set upon his tour to promote the book, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.


There's some great writing in the book to be enjoyed.  Anecdotes, such as: "Stephen Spender was staying with W.H. Auden when the latter received an invitation from the Times asking him to write Spender's obituary.  He told him as much at the breakfast table, asking roguishly, 'Should you like anything said?'  Spender judged that this would not be the moment to tell Auden that he had already written his obitary for the same editor at the same paper."


Another:  When Hitchens' previous book god Is Not Great came out -- I had not recognized, when I read that book with great admiration, that on the dust cover's font, the 'g' of 'god' was (appropriately) not capitalized -- Salmon Rushdie "remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long."


When Hitchens was a young man his mother committed suicide, having taken up with a lover who seemed half-nuts, and who also committed suicide in his adjoining hotel room in Athens; this impels Hitchens to read a great deal on the subject, and much about its next-of-kin, depression.  At one point he finds himself in a diner in Hartford, Connecticut with William Styron, the author of Darkness Visible, a remarkable and short book that expertly describes what depression is like.  Styron, in the diner, mentions "a golden moment in Paris when he had been waiting to be given a large cash prize, an emblazoned ribbon and medal of literary achievement and a handsome dinner to which all his friends had been bidden.  'I looked longingly across the lobby at the street.  And I mean longingly.  I thought, if I could just hurl myself through those heavy revolving doors I might get myself under the wheels of that merciful bus.  And then the agony would stop.'"


Here an asterisk leads one to a touching footnote:  "At this diner we were served by a pimply and stringy-haired youth of appallingly dank demeanor.  Bringing back Bill's credit card he remarked that it bore a name that was almost the same as that of a famous writer.  Bill said nothing.  Tonelessly, the youth went on: 'He's called William Stryon.'  I left this up to Bill, who again held off until the kid matter-of-factly said, 'Anyway, that guy's book saved my life.'  At this point Styron invited him to sit down, and [the young man] was eventually persuaded that he was at the same table as the author of Darkness Visible.  It was like a transformation scene: he told us brokenly of how he'd sought and found the needful help.  'Does this happen to you a lot?' I later asked Styron.  'Oh, all the time.  I even get the police calling up to ask if I'll come on the line and talk to the man who's threatening to jump.'"


There are charming vignettes, insights, and astute observations throughout Catch-22.  After a lengthy and sympathetic discussion of "Beating, Bullying, and Buggery" in England's public (i.e. private) schools, Hitchens observes that "Repression [of sexuality] is the problem in the first place."  In a footnote he writes, "That is why, whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch.  Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite."


Decidedly left-wing in his youth in England, he became disillusioned later when he deemed the left's response to the fatwa against his friend Salmon Rushdie to be shamefully weak-assed.  And, despite a continued penchant for iconoclasm, he became, in some matters, right-wing -- going so far as to support, with specious reasoning, the invasion of Iraq.


He entertains with words; he turns great phrases; he's witty and clever; he's intellectual; he's an expert debater.


Despite what are, in my view, his political flaws, I admire him tremendously. 

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Mathew & Naoma Luckenbill



My great grandfather, Mathew, and great grandmother, Naoma.


At their grave in August with my cousin Jill's son, David; we are Mathew & Naoma's great- and great-great grandsons.


Saturday, September 4, 2010

Sylvia Plath - Part IX (I'll Be Down to Get You in A Taxi Honey)


Thanks, once again, to Peter Steinberg, over at www.sylviaplath.info, for keeping me informed about all things Plath.  I'll be there, just call my name, I'll be there.  And meanwhile I'll be sort of dying to know which one of Plath's lines they'll choose to inscribe on her stone.  Whatever one they choose (and who are they?) they'll have had to not choose a couple hundred others that would be equally deserving of the honor.  I wouldn't want to be on that committee that has to choose, but if I could just choose without being on any committee I would choose this one, from "The Moon and the Yew Tree":

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
with the O-gape of complete despair.  I live here.

Oops ... that's two sentences; I don't know if more than one is allowed.  And the visitors unfamiliar with her work would want to know right off that "it" is the moon.  And I don't think think the stone's size is large enough to accommodate so many words in a pleasingly large-enough font.





01 SEPTEMBER 2010


Sylvia Plath to be inducted in Poets' Corner

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine’s Poet in Residence and Electors have chosen Sylvia Plath as the 2010 inductee to their Poets' Corner. Plath will join such poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Tennessee Williams, last year’s inductee. The Poet’s Corner was established in 1983, and each poet has a stone engraved with a line from her or his work.

The Cathedral will present a program celebrating Sylvia Plath on Thursday November 4th at 7:30 p.m.; the formal induction will take place on Sunday the 7th at the 4 p.m. Evensong.

At this time, the Cathedral staff are still putting the details of the two events together with Marilyn Nelson, the Cathedral’s Poet in Residence. Confirmed participants in the program include Carol Muske-DukesAnnie Finch; and Karen V. Kukil. Additionally, several young poets connected with the louderARTS Project in lower Manhattan; former Poets in Residence; the Cathedral’s Electors; and many from the extended poetry community to attend.

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine is located at 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York 10025. This is in the area of Columbia University, whose Rare Books and Manuscripts Library holds a respectable collection of Plath first and limited editions; including rarities such as Sculptor (an off-print from the Grecourt Review that many consider a separate, monographic publication) and About Sylviaby Diane Ackerman and Howls & Whispers by Ted Hughes.

The event is free and open to the public. More information will appear here as I learn of it.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Gullible I and Gullible II

I - Angel's First Car


It was 1990 when I worked with an angel.  At least he looked like an angel.  That blond hair.  Those sparkling eyes that turned several shades to a deeper darker blue when he laughed.  Pale skin, seemingly translucent so that I often thought I could see the inner mechanisms of angelicism.  He was tiny.  He looked about twelve but had just turned sixteen.


I tended the bar.  Angel bussed the tables and swept the floor.  Only an angel could be as good a sweeper as Angel was.


I have to go back to the beginning of Angel's automobile history.  You know how exciting it is when a kid gets his/her first car ... it is automatically the high point of life up to that point.  High ideas of freedom.  Roads opening up.  Freedom!  Independence!  So Angel bought a car last spring, some kind of third-hand Dodge, ten years old.  Not the sixty-thousand dollar Acura he wanted but, still, his own car.


How proudly he led me to the window of the restaurant where we worked to point it out to me!  There it shone, angle-parked across the avenue.  I expressed suitable admiration, remembering my own pride in my own first car, also a Dodge, a 1932 Dodge sedan purchased in 1954 when I was fourteen, too young even to drive so that I had to have friends drive me around in it.  The car cost me $75; I had saved all summer for it.  I would buy a quarter's worth of gas at the filling station, which got me slightly over a gallon, and sit proudly shotgun while this or that older licensed friend chauffeured me up and down the roads of the small town I grew up in.  So in love was I with my car that I slept in it for the first few August nights that I owned it.


So, after work that night when Angel showed me his car, Angel intended to set out upon his first major outing.  He was going to visit a friend in a town about 30 miles north of where we were.  I began to worry.  All of a sudden, to me, Interstate 89 turned into a dark, foreboding, surreal stretch of mica-laced macadam, totally unsuitable as a path for an angel, moreso so late at night.  And Angel was so tiny!  It was a danger-laden route along which hungry wolves were baying at a full moon and just waiting for a nabbable angel to cruise by.  Angel could be eaten by them, or by monsters.  If Angel didn't taste just right he'd be spat out upon the rough berm.  Or, as fate might have it, a giant meteor might plunge from the atmosphere and smash plum-flat both Angel and the Dodge.


I wanted Angel protected from life's harsh elements, wanted his innocence honored, wanted his ethereal beauty to be forever free of tarnish and rot.


Looking twelve, it just didn't seem right for him to be driving into the night.


Couldn't he, I wondered, visit the friend tomorrow, in daylight?


My concern was aggravated when I learned that Angel wasn't even sure how to get to the town he wanted to get to.  It was straight up Interstate 89 for cripe's sake.  People who are not map-oriented and those who have no sense of direction drive me nuts anyway.  I learned to read a map when I was four; my older brothers and sisters, in the back seat of our 1936 Chevrolet, while en route to Mass twelve miles distant, showed me on a map how if one stayed on this Road 30 (as it was called) and kept going and going and going for hours and hours and hours, and then turned onto this road, and then onto that road, one could, after eight- or nine-hundred miles, end up in New York City.


Angel did not make it to his friend's home that night.


"I blew the engine," he reported when next I saw him.  His report flooded my mind with horrible visions of a stranded angel even as he stood safely before me telling me about it.  He might have had to hitch a ride and might have been picked up by a murderer.


However ... I didn't ask how he got the car towed and so forth, but he did tell me that his dad and he had since bought a new engine.


The next item I heard about Angel and his car was that he'd been in an accident in a nearby city.


"I rear-ended somebody on College Street," he reported.  "I was with these three buddies just going along at the speed limit and I heard somebody holler my name and I looked over and the next thing I knew I was ramming into a car stopped ahead of me.  It just happened so fast. I couldn't believe how quick it happened!"


Damage costs and details of the repairs (again by his handy father) were related.  A new front axle -- "We got one at the junkyard for only seventy five dollars!" -- a new this ... a new that.


My fears that Angel was just too little to have a car were shored up with this latest report.  Still I was disappointed for him when he brought to work a catalogue of mountain bicycles and showed me the six hundred dollar model he was buying now that, as he said, he was selling his car.


"Why are you selling your car?"


"It's just too expensive," he said, while not seeming flinched at all that surely no bicycle in the world was realy worth six hundred bucks.


My heart cried a little for Angel ... what a blow to his bloomable manhood to step down from cruising College Street in a car to ... yuck! ... a bicycle!  Something one had to pedal, for god's sake, just as a three-year-old has to pedal a tricycle.


I anguished at what I supposed to be a loss of Angel's self-esteem, anguished at the vision of him walking the corridors of High School and being pointed out as being car-less, owning no horsepower, owning no revvable engine, having no four on the floor.  Still, it didn't seem to be bothering him too much; I had to admire that he seemed to be taking it well.  And I knew too that growth and manhood would eventually come to him in more subtle ways, in ways deeper than car-ownership.


So it was on the following Sunday that Mark and I had brunch with one of the waitresses, Gina, and her boyfriend Gordon, at Emma's Restaurant out on the highway.  Gina was a waitress where we and Angel worked.  Gordon was her betrothed; he was in the State Police Academy.


"I was so mad at Angel last night," commented Gina.  "He was so stoned and when non-smoking filled up he was sitting at the bar reading Car and Driver magazine."


"Angel stoned?" I said.  "Definitely not!  It's not nice to even say that.  Mark doesn't know how good a worker Angel is and how straight-laced he is and he might think you're serious."


"Oh, George, I am serious!  You think Angel's so perfect!  Get a grip!  Believe me ... he was stoned!"


"Stop it!  You're kidding!  You're making this up!  Angel's an athlete!  He even has dreams of being drafted by one of the major league baseball teams.  He not the kind of kid who would risk damaging his body by ... what do you mean? ... stoned on what? ... you're saying he was stoned on grass?"


Gina rolled her eyes.  She turned to the future State Trooper and said, "We can tell George, can't we?"


Typically she didn't wait for Gordon to give consent or express dissent, but plunged right on.


"There's some things you need to wake up to ... Angel was D.U.I. when he had that accident on College Street ... that's why he can't have a car anymore," she said.  "You fall for every single one of his stories.  I don't know why he doesn't want you to know ... I guess because you guys are his bosses.  He wants you to think he's what you thing he is.  Believe me, he's not."


"I can't believe you," I said.  I said it disbelievingly.


"George!  It's time for you to start believing.  It's time for you to open your eyes!"


I looked at Gordon.  He seemed to be merely watching me, amused to see how I took this new assessment of Angel's character.  He did not dispute what Gina was saying.


I began to believe.


"So what happened?" I asked, almost tremulously, my brain flooding anew with yet another version of horribleness.  I imagined brutal city cops throwing a drunk Angel into a tank with other drunks ... scabies-ridden drunks ... low-down three-days-bearded drunks who had pissed themselves and who stank to high heaven ... horny drunks who would mistake Angel's angelic beauty for femininity and would, when the jailer's back was turned, de-flower Angel.  Brutally.  Without sentiment de-flower.  Imagining Angel getting rear-ended was horrible, horrible. 


"I don't know what's happening," Gina said in answer to my question.  "I guess he has a lawyer."


We finished up.  Mark and I picked up the check.  Gina left an eight dollar tip.  We all went out into the parking lot.  Gina, Gordon, and I lit up cigarettes.  Mark and I admired their brand new deep-blue Toyota Camry, just a few days old.


An argument ensued between Jody and Glen over which of them had already burned a hole in the upholstery of the driver's seat.


I thought of Angel all the way home.


I adjusted.  But I was undaunted by the truth ... Angel remained an angel in my eyes, though I did maybe open my eyes a little wider from then on, wanting to see for myself if angels really do step out back and get stoned while they are at work.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


II - Lap Dances


In New York City a few years back Abby, Drew and I had a motel out in Queens.  Each day we took lovely Lincoln Town car rides into Manhattan.  Only $30.  I sat in front every time and chatted with the various drivers.  I always try to sit in front and chat with the drivers when I'm in a city because they're invariably foreign and I like to ask they questions about where they're from, what is it like there, and so forth.  I like to hear their stories ... and the trivia gained, such as the time a cabby in Montreal who was from Bangladesh told me with great pride that the architect who designed Sears Tower in Chicago was born in Bangladesh (Fazlur Khan also designed the John Hancock building in Boston).


On our second ride the Ecuadorian driver spoke so proudly of his daughter who, he said, was doing extremely well in school.  "My Eeeenglish -- not so guda ... she'a speeka guda Eeeenglish!"  He was so glad to be living in the land of opportunity, and happily foresaw his daughter with a college diploma someday.  I was happy for him, proud for him.


When he dropped us off in front of our friend Ellen's apartment on St. Mark's Place I put an extra $25 with the tip and said that he was to put it into his daughter's college fund.


We thanked the man, exited the luxurious car, and pushed the doors shut. "You just paid for his next lap dance" said Drew.