Month: April 2024

Lurking in Some Obscure Corner

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Like a shortwave radio attempting to tune into a remote overseas station, my threadbare synapses sometimes spit out static as I try to remember the point of story I’m trying to tell. 

Maybe it’s the cannabis, maybe the onset of dementia, or to harken back to Big Brother and the Holding Company, “a combination of the two.”

For the uninitiated, “A Combination of the Two” is the opening track of Big Brother’s album Cheap Thrills featuring the incomparable Janis Joplin. I had always assumed that the song was a live recording, but as it turns out, the audience noise and Sam Andrew’s introduction of the band, “Four gentlemen and one great, great broad,” have been dubbed in to create the illusion of a live recording. Well, it certainly had me fooled for over a half century.

BTW, the great Robert Crumb did the cover art.

In my novel Today, Oh Boy, as Will Waring is popping Cheap Thrills into his van’s 8-track tape player, he says out loud to himself, “Four gentleman and one great, great broad.”  Recently, when Rodgers Nichols interviewed me on his podcast Cover to Cover, he mentioned the allusion, said as a former radio DJ he really appreciated it.[1]

Anyway, what was my point?

Oh, yeah, forgetfulness.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

“Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

[1] You can catch the interview HERE.

Random Thoughts: Late Empire/Peggy Lee/ Bette Midler/ Tom Waits Edition

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Today in Manhattan in a dingy 14th floor courthouse with inadequate heating, lawyers will present their opening arguments in Donald Trump’s first trial of 2024. He’s accused, of course, of falsifying business records to hide $130,000 paid to a porn actress so that the American people would not find out that he and she had engaged in adulterous sex during his first run for the presidency. 

Pundits speculate that the prosecution’s first witness will be David Pecker.

David Pecker was then the publisher of the National Enquirer. When I was a child, I used to peek at the Enquirer at the magazine rack at Kramer’s Pharmacy in segregated Summerville, South Carolina. Back then, it published photographs of splattered suicides who had leapt from high rise windows and other violent images. I confess I’ve always had a morbid imagination.

This dark memory has engaged in the jukebox of my subconscious Peggy Lee’s rendition of “Is That All There Is,” a sad, decadent tune that sounds as if originated in a cabaret in Berlin during the Weimer Republic. I suspect that Tom Waits loves this song. 

To exorcise the tune, I’ve gone to YouTube and discovered this wonderful video of Bette Midler covering the song.  Here it is.

And also dig this: Tom and Bette doing a duet in which virtually every line of the song is a cliche.

I’d call this a successful exorcism.

The Age of Miracles Rambling Redux Blues

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Years ago I saw Barbara Walters interview Jack Nicholson on one of her specials. The British actor Hugh Grant had just been busted for solicitation, so Barbara asked Jack why someone as goodlooking and famous and rich as Hugh Grant would require the services of prostitutes.

Jack donned his patented devilish grin and said, “Peculiarities. Peculiarities.”

Which brings us to Louis CK.

I first caught Louis on the Letterman Show back in the days of VCRs when I prerecorded Dave for civilized midmorning viewing. If I remember correctly, Louis didn’t do standup that night but walked over and took a seat next to Dave. Louis started riffing on the entitlement of whiny airline passengers who carp about minor inconveniences while soaring o’er the plains of Nebraska where wagon trains once rambled through “Injun” territory in months-long treks. 

“You’re sitting in a seat in the air, for Christsakes!”

[c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.]

Earlier this evening, perched on a barstool at Chico Feo, I almost texted my wife Caroline, who is in New York City, to complain that my boredom was approaching John Berryman red alert levels:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, and gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself and its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

John Berryman

But I didn’t want to darkcloud any fun Caroline was having, and anyway, I got into a conversation with a travelling nurse named Elise who is doing preop duty for a couple of months at Roper Hospital where my late wife Judy Birdsong stayed every other two weeks getting 96 hours of continuous chemo during the first stint of her cancer. Yet, the thing is, I don’t have a negative feeling about Roper. I told Elise how I had come to appreciate the nurses there. They were absolutely wonderful. They knew/know life from a perspective of pain. They are brothers and sisters of mercy. 

I asked her what she was reading. She said she didn’t enjoy reading, had never enjoyed reading, that she would rather “watch things,” so of course I told her I was novelist, which elicited headshaking and a rueful chuckle. 

We continued to make small talk. I asked her superficial questions about her life, thinking I might create a character like her for a minor role in some future fiction, maybe a confidant. I appreciated her forthrightness.[1]

On my walk home, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” got stuck in my head, so I started singing it, walking along singing, checking out the afternoon’s fading, shimmering, almost nervous sunlight. When I-and-I am afflicted by these songs looping in my head, the only cure is to listen to the song as a form of exorcism.

Like Louis CK’s disgruntled flier, I had forgotten that I live in an age of miracles. Now I am sitting in front of my computer listening to Bob sing “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and reading the lyrics against the static background of the iconic Highway 61 Revisited album cover that – look – I’ve conjured from a Cloud and presented below.

But now I realize that for fifty years I have misheard the lyrics. For example, the first line isn’t “When you’re down in Wallace”; it’s “When you’re down in Juarez,” which makes a lot more since given that “Sweet Melinda speaks good English” and “the authorities just sit around and boasts.” In other words, the song is about being down and out in Mexico. I also mistook “Rue Morgue Avenue” for “Remark Avenue,” which I sort of like better. My favorite line from the song is “Well, I started off on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff,” which I always thought was “hardest,” which definitely would be better, going from burgundy to heroin, instead of going from burgundy to Jim Beam. 

Anyway, I’ve exiled my boredom to an ice floe in Antarctica. “It’s all good,” as the young people say after you’ve bumped into them and apologized.

[1] “Forthrightfulness” ought to be a word. 

Comic Strip Sloth

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Certainly some sociologist has studied why laziness is so predominant a vice among male protagonists in newspaper comic strips.  Alas, I’m too slothful myself to really attempt to find that research. My halfhearted Google search has yielded nada.  Yet, I’m curious: this comic celebration of lassitude must be indicative of something in the American character. 

I read the comics every day as part of my morning ritual, starting with “Andy Capp,” who lolls around the house on the dole while his wife Flo slaves away both at work and at home. Meanwhile, if Andy’s not conked out on the sofa, he’s gambling, playing football, hitting up acquaintances for booze money, brawling, or standing trial. Most nights, his nose aglow, he stumbles into the canal on his way home. 

In fact, if you pronounce his name with a Northern England accent it sounds like “handicap.” This strip has been around since 1957, it’s syndicated in 13 languages, so obviously lots of people enjoy his antics. Laziness delights!

Next I read Lincoln Pierce’s “Big Nate,” which has replaced “Dilbert” in our paper.

Nate Wright, the protagonist of the strip is a lazy, rebellious 6th grader who attends Public School 38. Like his distant relative Andy Capp, Nate spends much of his time in detention. He’s much more likeable than Andy, though. However, his nose is on the side of his head cubist-style, which bothers me for some reason.

I skip “Grand Avenue” and read “Zits” next. In this morning’s iteration, Jeremy’s mom is trying to rouse him from bed while he’s attempting “to mentally bend time and space,” so he “can be at school without leaving [his] bed.” His mom mentions that he’s still in his boxershorts.

Do you see a pattern here?

The next few strips I read don’t fully align with the laziness trope – “The Wizard of Id,” “Luann,” “Mary Worth,” and “Hi and Lois.”[1]

Which brings us to “Beetle Baily” who makes Faulkner’s Anse Bundren look like a human dynamo.[2]

Once again, “For Better or Worse,” Sally Forth,” “BC,” “Hagar the Horrible,” “Blondie,” and “Peanuts” don’t celebrate sloth, so that leaves us with “Dustin” and “Garfield,” who also epitomize lassitude. 

In today’s strip, twenty something Dustin announces at breakfast that he’s landed “a big job with a hefty salary, benefits, and a company car.”  His sister Megan asks, “April Fool’s,” and indeed today is the first of April.

Perhaps Garfield is the most famous of this lazy crew, a gluttonous cynic and egocentric extraordinaire. His half hooded eyes say it all. But people adore him. He’s a hot selling stuffed animal, and I’ve even seen him imprinted on beach towels. Bravo, Garfield!

So here’s the question: Why do we find these losers so amusing? Do they make us feel good about ourselves in comparison?  

Do comic strip creators despise puritanism, the Protestant work ethic, and all that jazz?

Don’t ask me. I ain’t got a clue.

[1] You know you’re really old when Mary Worth starts looking good to you.

[2] Here’s how Anse’s son Darl describes his father: “The shirt across pa’s hump is faded lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat stain on his shirt. I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it.”