Fun for People with No Lives

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Time to Pop the No-Doz

Let’s face it; you enjoy taking grammar tests because they make you feel socially superior to Deplorables who say, “Between you and I, I think Melania Trump’s nude photo shoots were choreographed by the Deep State.”

So here’s a chance to fill five minutes of your otherwise angst-fraught day in a beleaguered Late Empire democracy located on a dying planet having fun with rhetoric.

Uh-oh.  That sentence has a misplaced modifier.  Can you find it?

Damn right, the dying planet is incapable of having fun, even with something as absolutely entertaining as parsing sentences.

To begin the frivolity, let’s stick with misplaced modifiers. Here’s an easy question: which of the following sentences doesn’t contain a dangling modifier?

While reading a book, Reginald’s dog chewed the Chippendale.

While repairing the chipped Chippendale, Reginald’s dog urinated on the Persian rug.

While steam-cleaning the Persian rug, Reginald’s dog clawed a hole in the screen door.

While Zika-virus-bearing mosquitos flew through the hole in the screen, Reginald adjusted his dog’s flea collar.

Wow, that was fun, wasn’t it?  Let’s try something a little different.  Read carefully each group printed below, and decide which one of the four choices expresses the idea most correctly and efficiently. 

Having picked up a meth addict via Tinder at the rave, Edith invited the meth head up to her attic.

When Edith picked up a meth addict she met via Tinder at the rave, she invited him up to her attic.

Edith’s meth addict Tinder pick-up at the rave was invited up to Edith’s attic.

Edith invited her meth-addict Tinder pick-up from the rave up to her attic.

The section below contains a series of short choppy sentences, resulting in a monotonous style.  Using appropriate connectives and proper subordination, combine the sentences to show the relationship of the ideas that apparently belong together. You should be able to combine all the statements into a single sentence. 

  1. Thank you very much for being here.
  2. I just want to thank some of the people.
  3. Senator, congressman, you’ve worked hard on these things.
  4. You’ve worked so hard on the kidney.
  5. The kidney has a very special place in the heart.
  6. It’s an incredible thing.

Extra Credit:  Who is the author of the above speech?

Okay, let’s close out by increasing our word power by doing some synonyms.

  1. RACK: 1 – a pair of breasts; 2 – din; 3- Elmer Fudd’s pronunciation of the 35th president’s nickname; 4 – torture; 5 – wrack
  2. SURLY: 1 – the fat, bald Stooge; 2 – absolutely; 3 – bodyguard-ish;  4 – carriage; 5 – Mid-Eastern tent
  3. TABOO: 1 – drumbeat; 2- Oedipal; 3 – taint;  4 – OMG, that’s soooooo gross; 5  – culturally uncool to the max
  4. TEDIUM: 1 – churchlike; 2 – inert gas; 3 – the aura a Tupperware Party emanates;  4 – size between targe and tmall;  5 – Another word for Ted Talk
  5. WAYLAY: 1 – dating app; 2 – stray; 3 – hold up; 4 – hold down; 5 – potato chip manufacturer

Okay, boys and girls, the fun is kaput, time for a libation, followed by soporific reclining, if you catch my drift.

Bring in the Clowns

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Probably no creative artist in history can match the universal adoration that Master Will Shakespeare enjoys (well, would enjoy if not dead for 403 years).  However, a recent biography claims that when his theatre company, the King’s Men, travelled to Whitehall to entertain James I, the actors actually served their royal patrons meals between performances.

Imagine the author of King Lear approaching some drooling Hapsburg-lipped hemophiliac with the greeting, “Hark, I’m William Shakespeare, and I shalt be thy server this evening.”

His much scrutinized signature?  An autograph unsought.

The fact is that Elizabethans and Jacobeans looked upon actors and playwrights the way we old folks do fire eaters and tattooed bearded ladies.  Amusing, perhaps, but not the sort we want visiting our homes.  Of course, nowadays, entertainers are the royalty: Sir Mick Jagger.  Sir Nick Faldo.  Sir Johnny Rotten (just wait).

Johnny Rotton sporting slimming vertical stripes

On the other hand, poets remain as impoverished as ever.  For example, when appointed, Poet Laureate Billy Collins taught at two different universities to make his mortgage. As my man, Willie B, whined so exquisitely in “Adam’s Curse”:

[. . . ] A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

[muffled sob]

Well, if you happen to be reading this post on lifted wifi in a drafty garret as you warm your hands over a burning pile of rejection slips, here’s a suggestion in how to augment your income.  Start touting yourself as a body language expert.

It’s as easy as lying.

Just apply the analytical process you use in interpreting poems to the dress, postures, and mannerisms of celebrities.  For example, courtesy of Us magazine, here’s body language expert Patti Wood on winsome Academy Award winner Sandra Bullock.

She is gripping the coffee cup very high up [. . .] That’s what you do when you really want to grab a hold of something and show your power.  She’s really making it obvious and playing toward the camera to show that empty [i.e., ringless] finger.

[snip]

Bullock also is wearing a black North Face jacket, black ball cap and scarf around her neck.

She’s chosen a heavily padded jacket and has it zipped up very high,” observes Wood. “The choice of her scarf, which is tied over heart, means that she is hiding her heart window and throat window, which is the communication window.”

As you might know (and congratulations if you don’t), Sandra Bullock’s story book marriage (as in Creepy Comics story book) to dashing motorcycle mechanic/television personality/daredevil Jesse James ended when she discovered hubby James had been trysting with “tattoo model and stripper Michelle ‘Bombshell’ McGee” [Wikipedia].  James’ previous, not-so-winsome wife, adult film star/producer Janine Lindemulder, had battled James the year before for custody of their daughter Sunny.  James, whose cocky sneer might outnumber Shakespeare’s pate in a Google image search face-off, has conceded having “made bad decisions” (i.e., committing adultery over an 11-month period with someone who goes by “Bombshell”) but blamed his transgressions on his abusive father, who once when 7-year-old Jesse tripped over a wire, “laughed at [him] and called [him] a dummy” New York Daily News.

No wonder Sandra has shrouded her heart window, opened the trench coat of her naked ring finger, and covered her communication window in tinfoil.

* * *

Poets, I guarantee you that Body Language Guru Patti got paid more for her analysis of Sandra’s ensemble than you did the last time you got published.  What was it? Two complimentary copies of the flimsy issue that featured your open wound of a love poem?

I bet we can do just as well as Patti Wood.  All we need is a degree from an on-line university, and we’re in business.  Let’s give it a shot.  Here’s a photo of disgraced Ponzi Master Al Parish in his glory days before the hook of law-and-order yanked him off the stage of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce production of No New Taxes. He’s in his eleventh years of a twenty-four year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Raleigh.  Bernie Madoff is also an inmate there.

 

Al Parish, aka Economan

Piece of (purchased cheese) cake:

Falstaffian in appetite, Professor/Post Courier columnist/ official Chamber of Commerce economist Parish wraps himself in regal purple to accentuate his ties to the powers-that-be.  Even though his 300-plus pounds of sidewalk dominating heft might catch the eye of the blind man selling pencils on the corner, grey and black swirling patterns on purple demand even more attention, screaming I’m comfortable in my 24-square yards of skin, parachute-sized fabrics, jumbo-sized Cadillac.  Note how jauntily he cocks the angle of his right jowl across the 12-lane highway of his lapel – lapels that steeply climb his belly, that Great Divide of his torso and legs.  He’s at once a king and sycophant, a mogul and court jester

 And yet – and yet – the ensemble displays Rorschach-like signals of chaos ahead, his left shoulder bearing a hurricane-like swirl, his tie twisted like a cyclone, both boldly streaked in ominous black . . . 

Like, I said, it’s as easy as lying.

Ode on a Tattooed Torso

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Last Sunday, after returning a rented golf cart, Caroline and I walked over to Planet Follywood for breakfast and then over to the Tides for a rum-infused tropical treat (her) and a hoppy yeast-born malt-based brew (I-and-I).  As we sat in a slice of shade in the corner of the plaza of the outdoor bar, a shirtless, bearded fellow walked past.  He had a picture of a spine tattooed over his own spine, flanked by a pair of wings tattooed on his shoulder blades.  “Wow, dig that,” I whispered.

We continued our conversation as the man and two of his companions – also shirtless and heavily tattooed – took a seat at a table about ten meters away, the wings-spined fellow facing us.

“What’s that tattooed on his chest?”  Caroline asked.  “Jesus?”

“Looks more like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins,” I said.

We talked about trying to take a surreptitious snapshot but decided against it.  It was then that the title came to me: “Ode on a Tattooed Torso.”

When we passed them in leaving, Caroline asked him whose face was tattooed on his stomach.

As we entered the cool of the bar proper, Caroline asked me if I had heard what he had said.

“Yeah, Jesus.”

“No, he said ‘Zombie Jesus’.”

That stopped me in my tracks.  “I got to get a picture.”

“Do you think he’ll be annoyed?”

“I’ll ask politely. If he says no, he says no.”

“Okay, I’ll wait here.  It will be less awkward without me there.”

So I retraced my steps and introduced myself, handed him my Hoodoo website card, explained that I wrote a blog and would love to take a picture and write about his tattoos.  “Of course,” he said, standing up beaming.  “That’s not the response I was expecting to get,” he said.  “I was afraid you might be offended.”

I wished I had asked him if many people were offended, but I didn’t, nor how he came to acquire such an animus for Jesus.  Fanatical parents?  Anger at the horrors of the world?  He seemed the opposite of angry, just another hedonist spending the Sabbath in self-indulgence.

So we went home and studied the photograph, which prompted several ideas.  First, this tattoo was testament to our First Amendment rights, which allow us to say or display ideas that are anathema to the majority.  As George Orwell put it in “Freedom of the Press,” [a]t any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

Second, it occurred to me how tolerant we US citizens are for the most part.  If our tattooed man lived in Saudi Arabia and went out in the public square sporting a tattoo of Zombie Muhammad, he’d be a corpse faster than you could say, “All praise be unto him.”

I decided to write the poem “Ode on a Tattooed Torso” modeled on Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” employing the so-called ten-line Keatsian Ode Stanza.  Although I intended the poem to be comic, a sort of parody, it became something a bit different: praise for a brave lost soul who uses his body as a canvas to display his obviously heartfelt but unpopular beliefs.

If you decide to read it, I highly recommend hitting the audio and to read it along with my voice.

 

 

Ode on a Tattooed Torso

With apologies to John Keats

In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger [. . .]

The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours . . .

TS Eliot, “Gerontion”

 

Thou rotund torso beneath that russet beard,

Thou iconoclastic mockery,

Sacrilege silently, rudely, crudely shared

Like profane Pompey crockery

Uncovered from a brothel.  Zombie Jesus

Thorn-Crowned, blood dripping from brow

Come not to save but to devour us,

The antithesis of the sacred cow.

Its human canvas confronting us

With an objective correlative. Wow!

 

Shouted obscenities spit gall,

But those unheard are often ignored.

Though Bosch-like, the tattooed Last Supper doesn’t call

Attention to itself above the Zombie Lord.

Faintly rendered, half-hidden, a thatch of chest hair

Obscuring bird-beaked apostles,

Like Leonardo’s originals leaning here and there.

We barely notice them, if at all.

And who would have the courage to stare,

To lean in, to take it all in, though enthralled?

 

O badass iconoclast! Fearless commentator!

I wonder what images adorn your balls.

Onan perhaps spilling his seed? The traitor

Judas hanging from a tree?  The walls

Of Jericho richly graffitied?

Thou russet-bearded wonder, profane wretch,

You walking act of art, when old age bleeds

Away that ink, may this verse your protest protect,

Your icon-injected flesh preserve, your rude screed

Freeze in time, though an inchoate protest.

 

Screaming’ Jay Hawkins

 

Neither in His Own, Nor in His Neighbor’s Eyes

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Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves . . .

                                            TS Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

It’s been my fate for the last twenty years or so to explore Heart of Darkness each spring with sixteen-year-olds.  The novella provides a rich cache – not of ivory – but of literary artistry, historical relevance, and profound prophecy.  I also find Marlow’s rebellious disdain for the soullessness of the people he encounters during his journey good role-modeling. By the end of his odyssey, Marlow has, as he puts it, “some difficulty in restraining [himself] from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.”  He resents the sight of his fellow citizens “hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.”  Marlow’s experience in the jungle has shredded the veil of illusion, or to move a bit westwardly metaphorically, he has stumbled out of Plato’s cave and can now see beyond the flickering shadows projected on the walls of his former existence.

Jeffrey Bren
Self-portrait watching television

The pressure of conformity weighs down adolescents like sodden woolen coats, whether it be the pressure to join a gang, the Fellowship of Christian athletes, or the circle around the bong.  Our narrator Marlow is a loner, the father of Nick Adams and Sam Spade (not to mention Philip Marlowe), an individual who remains true to his non-conformist core convictions.  As Marlow is telling his story to his colleagues on the deck of the Nellie, he’s also speaking directly to those adolescents – mocking hollowness and extolling independence and courage.  Given the barrage of images that assault young people each day through their various media –  images of air-brushed celebrities as insubstantial as Plato’s shadows, images of smiling actors succeeding at DeVry University, images of Vaseline-enhanced Big Macs beaming down from billboards – Marlow’s example of delving beneath the surface is more relevant than ever.

***

(To leaven the proceedings for a moment.  What do you think Marlow would think of this cover?)

Romance, Terror, and Exotic Adventure (rendered in 3.5-page sentences!)

***

TS Eliot in “The Hollow Men” quotes Heart of Darkness in the epigraph and employs Conrad’s symbol of the scarecrow to embody people without true convictions, people who go with the flow, behaving as the wind behaves, people who will say whatever it takes to get what they want – and then again, unsay it, with a mere shake of the Etch-a-Sketch.  The hollow men, the stuffed men.

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion . . .

In contemporary American politics, I can’t think of a better embodiment of those hollow men Marlow describes than Lindsay Graham.  If we’re going to draw analogies from “real life'” to Conrad’s novel, Trump comes off like Kurtz (albeit without his learning, Kurtz’s appreciation of and facility in creating art).  Kurtz sees himself as the center of the universe, as a god, a god worshipped by the natives as Trump is by his ardent xenophobic MAGAs.

Graham, on the other hand, obviously “behaves as the wind behaves.”

That was then, this is now.

“I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” a beaming Graham said on “Fox & Friends.” “We have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.” (19 April 2019).

Here’s Marlow on lying:

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies–which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world–what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.

But, like I said, Trump is more like Kurtz or Guy Fawkes from Eliot’s epigraph, “lost/ Violent souls.” Graham lies for the sake of power; I doubt if megalomaniacal Trump even realizes he’s lying.

I guess it’s possible that Trump will be caught one of these days doing something that upsets the populace and that Graham will do some reverse flip flops, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I guess it makes more sense to take Yeats’ advice:

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

 

The Gestures of Jesters

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Holy fools subvert prevailing orthodoxy and orthopraxis in order to point to the truth which (sic) lies beyond immediate conformity. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions

“Our nation demands the scrutiny of a completely disengaged observer like your Working Boy, and I already have in my files a rather formidable collection of notes and jottings that evaluate and lend a perspective to the contemporary scene.”   Ignatius P Reilly, A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy  O’Toole

In the literary landscape of the West, from the plains of ancient Troy to the streets of contemporary New Orleans, Wise Fools have thumbed their bulbous noses at decorum and provided contrarian views against the cultural status quo of their respective milieus.  Armed with wit, not weapons, these outsiders can see beyond entrenched hierarchies and customs, and historically, in the employ of a king or queen, court jesters (or licensed fools as they were sometimes called) could in frankness utter truths that a higher individual dared not.

On the literary side of the ledger, let’s look at Thersites from The Iliad, that bandy-legged malcontent, “a menial, a nonentity among dynastic aristocrats,” according to C.R. Beye.

But wait. What are these “dynastic aristocrats” up to? Waging a ten-year war to avenge someone’s wife running off with someone else’s husband. And ultimately, it’s the gods’ fault anyway, the Judgment of Paris and all that jazz. With the hindsight of a couple of millennia, waging a decade-long war because of elitist adultery seems even more foolish than the post 9/11 invasion of Iraq.

When the Iliad begins, the siege is at a stalemate because King Agamemnon, the alpha male of the Achaeans, has usurped Achilles’ war spoil Briseis. Even though Achilles is his best warrior, his LeBron James, Agamemnon gets dibs on (forgive me) Achilles’ booty because he’s higher on the totem pole. Achilles retreats to this tent to pout (the equivalent of LeBron benching himself) while swords clash and “night descends upon the eyes” of warrior after warrior slain in the service of trying to retrieve runaway Helen, whose face (aided and abetted by other body parts) “launched a thousand ships /And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”

Thersites recognizes the absurdity of the war and the unfairness of Agamemnon’s receiving “the lion’s share of the spoil” while “Achilleus (sic) does the lion’s share of the fighting.” [1]

Although despised by the soldiers, Thersites wisely advises them to abandon the war, to return to their homelands, to their own wives and children, so they can teach Agamemnon a lesson.

He confronts Agamemnon directly:

Your shelters are bulging

With bronze, and whenever we sack a city you always

Get the choicest booty, including whole bevies

Of beautiful women.  Can it be you still want gold,

The ransom some horse-trading Trojan brings out of Troy

To pay for his captured son whom I or some other

Achaean bound and led away?  Or would you

Prefer a ripe young lady to sleep with and keep

Shut up somewhere for yourself?  Truly, it hardly

Becomes their commander to burden with so many troubles

The sons of Achaeans.

Translated by Ennis Reese[2]

Perhaps because his physical hideousness has alienated him from the heroic slaughterers who surround him, Thersites recognizes the absurdity and unfairness of the heroic ideal.

***

Thersites also appears in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, one of the so-called problem plays. Like his ancestor in Homer, the 17th Century Thersites is hideously ugly but much wittier than his counterpart in The Iliad.  He’s a king of vituperation who out-Don-Rickles Don Rickles. Here he is suggesting that old, supposedly wise, Nestor’s mind has seen better days:

There’s Ulysses and old Nestor, whose wit was mouldy
ere your grandsires had nails on their toes.

When Ajax threatens to cut his tongue out, Thersites replies, “’Tis no matter! I shall speak as much as thou afterwards.”

And what a rich source of insults: loathsome scab, sodden-witted, scurvy-ass, idol of idiot worshippers, full dish of fool, idle immaterial skein of sleave milk, green sarcenet
flap for a sore eye, tassel of a prodigal’s purse, waterfly.  

Agamemnon, he says, has “not as much brains as earwax.”

Of course, the wisest of all of Shakespeare’s wise fools is employed by Lear.  Unlike the two Thersites, Lear’s Fool’s wit, though sharp and biting, is noble-minded. He loves the king and speaks frankly to him, trying to point out to Lear his own foolishness.

Fool: That lord that counsell’d thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me-
Do thou for him stand.
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

 Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast
born with.

Shakespeare, of course, did not invent the court jester, or licensed fool, as they were sometimes called.

Here’s a brief history from the blog Under the Tudor Rose:

In ancient times, courts employed fools and by the Middle Ages the jester was a familiar figure. In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters, who sometimes dressed as other servants were dressed, but generally wore a motley (of mixed colours or materials) coat, hood with ass’s ears or a red-flannel coxcomb and bells. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticize their master or mistress and their guests. Queen Elizabeth is said to have rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her. Excessive behaviour, however, could lead to a fool being whipped, as Lear threatens to whip his fool.

His is not an enviable position in that most dysfunctional of households.

Fool: FooI [i.e. Lear] marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They’ll have me 705
whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying;
and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. I had rather be
any kind o’ thing than a fool! And yet I would not be thee,
nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing
i’ th’ middle. Here comes one o’ the parings.710

The most famous of these fools was Will Somers, Henry VIII’s court jester.  Perhaps because of their unequal social status or that fact that Somers didn’t try to capitalize on his relationship with the king, Somers and Henry developed a genuinely deep friendship, though the most often quoted anecdote is that Henry threatened to kill Somers with his bare hands after Somers called Anne Boleyn a “ribald” and princess Elizabeth “a bastard.”

Family of Henry VIII, c. 1545. Will Somer is depicted in the right doorway, and Anne Parr’s fool, Jane Foole, appears in the left doorway.

After Henry’s death, Somers was reduced as a sort of a comical sidekick to Queen Mary.  His last public performance was at Elizabeth’s coronation.

The idea of a ruler employing a wise fool to leaven the ruler’s ego seems like a good idea to me.  Obama and Chris Rock would have made a dynamic duo, and how wonderful would it be to have Louie CK try to deflate his fellow vulgarian Donald J Trump’s gaseous ego.

Louis CK as the Fool and Trump as the King in the Hoodoo Productions dream staging of The Tragedy of King Lear

***

Although by far not the grandest, my favorite wise fool is Yeats’ Crazy Jane.  Yeats based her on a local character called Cracked Jane who wandered around County Galway when he lived in his tower, Thoor Ballylee, near Gort.  The great great great granddaughter of the Wife of Bath, Crazy Jane has nothing to fear from middle class censure so when a bishop chides her for her licentiousness, she provides him a little lesson on bodily matters:

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

`Those breasts are flat and fallen now

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.’

`Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,’ I cried.

‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart’s pride.

`A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.’

So let’s raise a glass to the dispossessed, those unworthies who wear white after Labor Day, who don polka-dotted blouses with plaid skirts, who, to paraphrase my favorite line from Apocalypse Now, are beyond our lying, timid moralities, who are willing to call a king or bishop or president a jackass to his face.   

[1]From “Thersites in then ‘Iliad’” by N Postlewhaite published in Greece and Rome, 35.2, October 1988.

[2]The best poetry teacher I ever had.

The Joys of Deafness

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When I was five or so, we lived across the street from a playground and tennis courts on Laurel Street in Summerville.  When no one was playing tennis, we would ride our bikes on the court and hear, quite clearly, a television blaring from across the street. The first time I noticed it, I asked my Aunt Virginia, only six years older, what was causing all that racket.[1]  She informed me that Mr. Whatshisname was watching The Edge of Night.

“Why does he have his tv on so loud?” I asked.

“Because he’s deaf, you nitwit.”

“Wow.  He must be really deaf.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”[2]

Flash forward sixty years.

Me (passing a student on a school stairway): How’s it going Lucas?

Lucas: Terrible!

Me: Great.

Or worse.

Me: sitting across from someone in a bar leaning across the table, trying to hear.

My companion: We just found out last week that Mom has inoperable brain cancer.

Me: smiling, nodding, saying nothing.

Of course, given my, as Dr. John might say, my lassitudinoushood, until today I had not done anything about my condition.[3] Although I sensed others’ irritation with my saying sorry and leaning over with a cupped ear, it was tolerable to me to spend the rest of my life following in the footsteps of the old drinker in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

“You should have killed yourself last week,” [the Young Waiter] said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. “A little more,” he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile.”Thank you,” the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his colleague again.

[snip]

“Another brandy,” he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in a hurry came over.

“Finished,” he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. “No more tonight. Close now.”

“Another,” said the old man.

“No. Finished.” The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head.

The old man stood up, slowly counted the saucers, took a leather coin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving half a peseta tip. The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity.

So anyway, I drove to North Charleston where I had my ears examined, and a goodly quantity of wax vacuumed from my right ear, which Caroline had correctly identified as my worse ear. I then took a hearing test in which I scored a 100% on spoken words but not so hot on frequencies, especially upper level frequencies.  The physician concluded that “I had a fair amount of hearing loss” and “would probably benefit from hearing aids” but seemed sort of “meh” about it.

So, I’m going to – forgive me – play it by ear.  If I can hear the cat loudly mewing outside my bedroom door while I nap, I’ll know I’m good.  If I hear her just audibly whispering a mew, I’ll go ahead and get hearing aids – but not until by Medicare B kicks in.

Why do today what you can put off till September?

[1]Even in those days, your beloved blogger had a way with words, despite having a speech impediment that prevented him from pronouncing the letters S and L.  According to my mother, on Sunday evenings when our television beamed Timmy calling his beloved collie to come, I would scream along with him.  “ASSIE! ASSIE!” 

[2]Virginia was quite a character.  For example, click here.

 

[3]My wife Caroline took the bull by the horns Quasimodo by the ear and made an appointment.

 

Lassitude

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Titian, Danae

Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring . . .

Alfred Tennyson: “Milton”

I’ve always sort of envied the industrious. My former neighbor Dale Petite, for example. Whether his compulsion for constant upgrading stemmed from a virulent strain of Protestant Work Ethic Syndrome, a wish to be alone, or an inability to relax, I cannot say. All I know is that while I lay on our deck in a hammock flipping through Victoria’s Secret catalogues, he could be heard hammering or chainsawing or pile-driving for hours on end. I can’t hope to reconstruct an epic catalogue of the projects he completed in the 7 years he was my neighbor; however, among those wonders were an industrial grade boat lift he erected on his self-built dock and a 1500 square foot bunker-like underground workshop[1] he burrowed into his back yard.

Thomas Hart Benton: Boomtown

Except for a few wretches afflicted with bipolar disorders, members of my family on both sides tend towards lassitude, and I myself do sorely suffer from a prevailing passivity that yields mildewed porches, un-replaced flood lights, income tax extensions, and never-sent manuscripts.  One might hope (or at least John Bunyan would) that with the ever-widening vistas of retirement opening before me, I would use my ample free time productively, but already I sense that this hope is probably a vain one.

My trifling nature I consider genetic. My maternal grandmother was so lazy she paid a boy to retrieve her paper from the driveway each morning. On the other hand, her son Jerry, whose ashes [2] rested next to a bowl of ticket stubs on a shelf to in my study for over a year, was the Dale Petite type, though not as successful in his grand schemes (e.g., attempting to transplant 80 year-old house-high camellias from his backyard to the front).

So, in the nature/nurture argument, I give the nod to nature – certainly Jerry’s parental units were not go-getters, and his industriousness must have been the product of some recessive gene.

Gustave Courbet:  Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine

Of course, given the Protestant bedrock upon which this mighty nation stands, idleness is the devil’s workshop (i.e., if like Milton, you consider every non-Christian deity demonic).  The Buddha – though not a deity – never seemed much in a hurry, nor did, come to think of it, Jesus himself.

When [Jesus] had heard therefore that [Lazarus] was sick, {Jesus] abode two days still in the same place where he was.

snip

Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him.

The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there.

Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.

snip

And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?

from John 11

Uh-oh. I see a malpractice suit coming.

Duccio Di Buoninsegna: The Raising of Lazarus

Chill thy selves.  No problem, brothers and sisters.

* * *

Of course, we ain’t got the get-out-of-jail-crypt-free card that Jesus had up his sleeve. Laziness is not our friend. Nor is, by the way, compulsive project completion. It’s the Middle Way we should be seeking, but nowadays technology has amped up the exchange of communication so profusely and instantaneously that seemingly every work minute is spent juggling a proliferation of disparate responsibilities that require further bureaucratization to harness, which, of course, creates even more avenues of endeavor as self-inseminating bureaucracies breed ever more complex matrices of responsibilities because it’s not enough for a corporate entity to be competent but it must also be forever improving, soliciting feedback, raising standards . . .

Yawn.

John Bonner: Waiting in Mass Ave T Station

As my erstwhile pal Ed Burrows pointed out one happy hour, human beings’ nervous systems, which are essentially identical to the nervous systems of our earliest ancestors, are not equipped to be bombarded by a never-ending barrage of flashing lights, honking horns, quick-cut images, thumping basses, distant sirens. In our pockets and purses we carry tiny devices with which we can communicate but which detonate like little time bombs throughout the day and night.

[cue blood-freezing scream]

Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us”

William Holman Hunt: Our English Coasts

I do wish we could relax a bit more in our workplaces. This never-ending ascent in effectiveness defies the arc of aging. No way could I summon in my last years at Porter-Gaud the energy I possessed in 1985 when I greeted my first class there, nor in my latter years did names and places come to me as quickly, and I’ve been around long enough to know that the latest pedagogical hula hoop is destined someday for the attic. It was just as well to let me muddle along pushing active verbs and introductory subordinate clauses. You can’t do much harm there.

And, while I’m at it, allow me one more desire. May my lassitude never devolve into ennui, may my lassitudinous expression be that of Titian’s First Danae (this week’s covergirl) rather than the expressions of the women below (nor, come to think of it, the expressions of the dogs).

Vittore Carpaccio: Two Venetian Ladies

“This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.”

Stendhal

[1]also suitable for surviving a nuclear winter

[2]My mother didn’t want Jerry’s remains in her house, so my late wife Judy Birdsong placed them in the back of her Highlander and toted them around for a week or two but finally hauled them upstairs into my study where they languished until my brother Fleming came by one afternoon, hauled them into one of my kayaks, and spread them in the tidal creek behind my house.

Summer Solstice Musings

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Ah, after the pyrotechnics of last night’s lightening strikes and Aeolian blustering, the longest day of the year has arrived with its magical moon that will drive the devotees of Dionysius from their dorms into frothing streets of the Holy City – but, no, wait, hold on; it’s the summer solstice! The College is out until August.

Praise Zeus!

That’s right, those dim-witted imbibers and garden urinators have returned to wherever in Off they’re from – Jersey City, Peoria, Cincinnati, Charlotte – and we say good riddance, especially if we live on Warren or George or Society Streets, where those sons and daughters of Belial are wont to dwell, reverberations from their self-indulgence echoing into the wee hours, disturbing the sleep of respectable burghers who live a life of not-so-quiet desperation, thanks to Bacchanalian cries of the inebriated.

In Courts and Palaces [Belial] also Reigns
And in luxurious Cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest Towers,
And injury and outrage: And when Night Darkens the

Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

Paradise Lost, Book 1 497-502

Jacobus de Theramo, Das Buch Belial. 1401.

Happily, Caroline, Brooks, and I-and-I live far from that madding crowd in our little jungle paradise on the backside of Folly Island, 10 blocks away from the front-beach Center Street shit show. Things have quieted since the alcohol ban seven years ago – a half-ton less of detritus is strewn about the sands, according to officials. And Folly Gras is a thing of the past, and a recent city ordinance has banned outdoor music after ten.  It seems our city government is trying to change Folly from “The Edge of America” to “The Beige of America.”  Whatever the case, I’m certainly in favor of less litter.

Hit it, TS Eliot:

The [beach] bears [fewer] empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony to summer nights.[1]

“The Waste Land” 176-9

our front yard

trash from the past

Yet, there’s something about the ripeness inherent in the summer solstice that cries out for revelry – the shedding of clothing, purple-stained mouth[s], ecstatic exclamations of pure joy.

It’s a day to celebrate Paganism – those all-too-human gods and goddesses – and their tolerance of the wild hair, their sanctioning of frenzy, their cult of fertility – latitude not afforded us via Hebraic mythology.

Santorini

Susya, a Palestinian Village

So beware, neighbors.  This evening you might hear some moon-howling, some blaring Zydeco music, the thumping of crazed dancers doing the Wa-wa-tusi:

Wow!

Ow!

Uh!

You know I feel alright?

Hah!

Feel pretty good, y’all

Uh-hah!

[1]Not to mention beer cans, dirty diapers, used condoms, discarded panties, fast food bags, abandoned flip flops.

 

The Fringe Benefits of Teaching

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old school room

I cringe whenever I encounter anyone cluck-clucking about the plight of teachers, those noble souls who have forsaken the glint and bling of wealth to follow their calling [quiet fanfare]: educating rising generations of young Americans!

I wonder, did a god/intuitive-inner-voice whisper vocation into my high school Spanish teacher’s ear one monumental day in first or second grade after she had plopped her plump seven-year-old self into the seat of one of the tiny desks arranged in rows facing a green board riveted to a concrete wall painted a pale urine-tinged yellow inside of whatever squat penal-red brick elementary school she attended?[1]  Did she hear an inner voice? “Be a teacher!  One day you can wipe the noses of and teach the alphabet to little boys and girls just like you.”

Bet not.

Perhaps my high school Spanish teacher’s decision to enter the profession came later when some energetic young man or woman teaching Español Uno initiated her into the exotic world of piñatas and “La Cucaracha.” This teacher may have inspired the future Sra D____ so that she modeled her life after her mentor’s and became a high school Spanish teacher.

It’s possible.

But more likely, she was very good at Spanish, received positive reinforcement, fell in love with the language, then the culture, so she wanted to study both.  Not talented and/or wealthy enough for the bigtime world of serious postgraduate scholarship, given the choices that lay before her, she took up teaching, the road not less traveled.

No matter what had prompted Sra  D____ to take up teaching, when I suffered through her Spanish II class ( 48 years ago), something had gone wrong with her work ethic. From Michigan, married to a sailor stationed in Charleston, she looked twenty-five or so.  Sour-faced and an acetic-tongued, she plopped down behind her desk each morning, leaned over, and clicked on a tape recorder (one that had to be hand-threaded).

For the entire class period, we echoed in unison the tinny foreign sounds emanating from the machine’s dime-sized speakers.  Cheating on tests was so rampant in her class that a couple of boys audibly hummed the Mission Impossible theme whenever they extracted cheat sheets of conjugations from beneath their artificial alligator belts.

One day a friend, Sharon Mallard, leaned over and whispered, “You could train a chimp to do what she does.  Have it come in every day and turn on the tape recorder.”

James Grafsgaard Gran Flamenco

***

I don’t mean to imply that many teachers aren’t underpaid, only that some are overpaid and others fairly paid.  For me (albeit underpaid), the fringe benefits of teaching more than compensated for the monetary rewards of professions that demand year round onerous office hours (e.g., law/medicine/engineering) or that deal in the ultimately trivial enterprise of merchandizing non-essentials (e.g. 5000 sq. ft. houses for families of four).

If indeed time is money (rather than time’s being a chain of chemical reactions flashing sentient beings deterministically through a process that ultimately culminates in their demise), then the free time that teachers possess is a treasure trove, not of accumulated cultural artifacts, but of hours of freedom to pursue pleasures – in my case, reading, writing, traveling – pleasures that ideally made me richer in experience and knowledge and therefore theoretically a better teacher.

Because we periodically changed what English classes and grades I taught at my school, my job demanded that every few years I reread Great Expectations, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, Heart of Darkness, Song of Myself, Steppenwolf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hamlet.

The horror, the horror!

As I grew older, I cross referenced my interpretation of those texts with earlier readings, discovered previously unnoticed nuances, explored criticism that might prod me to read something of Nietzsche’s I hadn’t (e.g., Beyond Good and Evil) or something of Jung’s I hadn’t (e.g., “The Difference between Eastern and Western Thinking”)

Of course, grading essays was burdensome; however, at least I was dealing with something I actually love – words – and helping a young person acquire a valuable skill, [i.e., writing (i.e., diction, syntax, logic, illustration, mechanics, etc.)].

As self-serving as it sounds, I wandered into teaching not because I heard a calling (how awful it would have seemed to me at 16 to spend forty more years in high school) or because I particularly liked children (I didn’t), but because I wanted employment that provided me a comfortable living with enough free time to cultivate my own interests.

What I didn’t know when I stumbled into my first classroom at Trident Tech was how much I would enjoy interacting with students.  There I taught ex-cons, single mothers, semi-English-literate Philippine-born Navy veterans, frugal intellectuals, and curious grandmothers.

In the far different situation at Porter-Gaud, my students enriched my life in ways that are too numerous to catalogue.  Of course, I taught a few pains-in-the-ass as well, but I can’t ever remember encountering a former student anywhere (even one who failed senior English and didn’t graduate with his class) who wasn’t glad to see me or I to see him or her.

Moral: Don’t pity teachers; envy them.

[1]One critic* notes: Not only does the sentence effectively capture the visual ugliness of a typical public school setting but also the sheer boredom of school routines, with those dreary participial phrases stretching out like the periods of the day, a Bataan Death March of detail: Oh, when will the sentence, like the school day, ever end?

*I.e., I-and-I

 

How to Talk Mac Rebennack’s Oola-Ma-Walla-Malla Argot

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Here’s a brief glossary of perhaps unfamiliar words and phrases from Mac Rebennack’s autobiography Under a Hoodoo Moon.

ax– a musician’s instrument, derived from Mafia lingo, according to Rebennack

B drinkers – uncool bar customers

belly rub – a dance

bomolatchee –  a huge reefer, e.g. a Rasta spliff.

bonnaroo – cool, great, swell

boost, booster – to shoplift; a shoplifter

Chang Moi rocks  – a type of heroin

companfonkilation  – merging two songs and pulsing them with syncopation

Of all the songs on the album, the one that probably gave me the greatest kick was “Litanie des Saints,” my compafonkification of two pieces of music, Louis Gottschalk’s classical “‘Bamboula, Danse des Negres” and the chants I heard at various gris-gris churches over the years.

 

decks of gage – stacks of rolled up joints

desitively – positively, absolutely

dope sick – needing a fix

When we started working on the record, Wayne told me, “I can’t work no more like this.  I’m dope sick.  I need some serious money.”

down-goings – a play on “what’s going down” but in the sense of the process of sinking into further trouble

dry hump – a dance

ear bead – a blind man locating someone’s bodily presence

Ray [Charles] got an ear bead on him [and] knocked Charley on his ass.

Fess – Professor Longhair

Professor Longhair

fessee – the argot of professor Longhair (see propedeller, propelacter, e.g.)

festoon – Professor Longhair’s term for fun

flusturations – incidents that frustrate and fluster

One of the flusturations of this job was that when I delivered something I thought was good, many times Johnny didn’t put it out.

Fonk – Literally, “a syncopation on or around a beat.”

 Fonky, fonked– a derivation of funky, but more emphatic, more positive, having the positive vibe associated with fonk.

In the bat of an eye, I’m out on the fonky streets of Fort Worth, smelling rawhide and cowpies, headed for the airport and blue skies.

This approach fonked up the more abstract northern jazz sound.

funksterators – funk creators, musicians that play funk

forever-and-one-year – a long prison sentence

frolic presto – to play music fast

Come on, boys.  Let’s frolic presto.

funky – the music of funk, cool, but less emphatic than fonky.  Rebennack uses both spellings, but fonky seems richer then funk.

get a sick off  –  score narcotics to counteract withdrawal

He needed to get his sick off.  His habit was an oil burner.

goofer dust – a hoodoo concoction

a combination of dirt from a graveyard, gunpowder, and grease from [church] bells; if you throw it into somebody’s eyes, it’ll blind them, and throwing it behind them while they’re walking will put a curse on them.

gris-gris – New Orleans styled voodoo, magic

hang paper – forge checks

hipped – turned on to new information

He hipped him to the fine points of hustling gigs.

in need of a little brain salad surgery – needing to get high

jingle jungle – the business of writing jingles for advertisements

junk-a-dope-a-nals – any intoxicatingy pharmaceutical ending in “nal”

A lot of them went for goofballs: Nembutal, Seconal, tuinal, phenobarbital.  The nals we used to call them – the junk-a-dope-a-nals.

lushing – drinking, doping

making cake – earning money

marble-lized – immortalized

“I think I marble-lized you.” Rebennack to Queen Julia Jackson after dropping her name in a song.

marygeranium– of or relating to marijuana

The truth was, I think my mother unconsciously dug reefer, or at least enjoyed the idea of a marygeranium high.

methodonian – an addict who has transitioned from heroin to methadone

ministrations – technical applications

We were all loaded and Rose was screaming and the doctor was doing his ministrations and it looked like the child was just about to come out when the doctor turned to us, real annoyed, and said, “Man, y’all can’t be smoking and doing all that shit in here, Get out!”

mootahs – reefers

muscle – bouncers

They had their own muscle working in the clubs or out on the street.

oaks and herbs – splendid, irie, as the Jamaicans say

And the second one said, “Everything’s oaks and herbs” – which means everything’s cool because they had smoked lots of herbs.

ofays – white people

The source of their bigotry seemed to be that the West Bank ofays were scared that black guys would take off with their women.

 

one-to-too-long-a-time –  any prison sentence

Now he’s in Angloa Penitentiary doing one to too long a time.

oola-ma-walla-malla language – specialized argot created by cats to confuse squares

‘plexed out – seriously frustrated by

They were truly down characters and kept me from getting ‘plexed out behind all the changes.

pluck – booze

He was a garbage head, a cat who would drink cheap pluck, smoke a bag of reefer, pop all the pills he could pop, then chase it all down with a shot of dope.

propedeller, propelacter – a drum pedal

“John, that ain’t what I want you to play on your foot propedeller.”

John said, “Whaaat?”

Fess said, “You know, I want you to propel the groove with your foot propelacter.”

rum-dums – winos, sots

One night a couple of rum-dums got into a fight and started throwing cans of corn and tomato juice around and busted up the store, making a hell of a gumbo in the process.”

shucker – a pretender

My voice was low and froggy; Shine had a husky voice, too, but was a real singer, not a shucker like me.

slotted – transitioned into a niche

I slotted into a different musical groove.

spew – a drum fadeout

stone – solid, set in stone, unalterable

There was a whole language and lifestyle that went along with being a stone dope fiend.

Leonard just didn’t have the stupidity to become a dope fiend or a weed or pill head; he was never anything but a stone character.

Cutting the album [Gumbo] was a stone kick from first to last.

tighten – to pay back owed money

Tomming – being an Uncle Tom

tragic magic  – heoin addiction

trashers – rock stars who wreck hotel rooms or ballrooms

traumatical – traumatic

All of this was very traumatical for me.  I’ve seen friends’ throats slit, my partner on the morgue table, kids getting turned out – it’s all very heavy, and a lot of it was stuff I’d forgotten until just recently when I went through rehab.

tricknology, tricknologists – the act of conning, fooling someone; con men, scam artists