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Heeding Andrew Marvell

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Heeding Andrew Marvell

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

                                    Andrew Marvell – from “To His Coy Mistress”

One of the entries in the epic catalog of my character flaws is a lotus-eater-grade tendency towards lassitude, which I’ve written about HERE.

However, in the last two weeks I’ve been on the go-go-go, on a tear – touring Mexico City, hosting family and friends, signing books, reading from Today, Oh Boy at its book launch, attending the reading of an original play in a private home, and dancing to the music of the Krushtones.[1]

Mexico City

Caroline had booked the trip before we discovered that T,OB‘s publication date was to be 31 March, the day before our departure. Buxton Books scheduled the launch for 11 April, so the trip didn’t interfere with promotion.[2] On the other hand, ex-pat son Ned booked a flight to Charleston that arrived on 4 April, three days before my scheduled return, so I came back a day early while Caroline and Brooks stayed on in Mexico City, which is 2000 miles higher than Denver, the Mile High City. Hey, but none of us suffered any altitude sickness, so praise Huitzilopochtli!

We traveled with Celeste Joye and her husband Tom Foster and their daughter Juliette. The short-term rental they had booked was a falsely promoted malodorous, sofa-stained apartment without hot water. The rental is located the floor below at kick-boxing studio where a cousin of Cujo barked ferociously.  

Not succumbing to the languor that would have me holding my nose (literally) and staying there all week, Celeste and Caroline scouted out new digs, called and cancelled, and we ended up staying at the swank Camino Real, which boasts a 007 early-60s vibe.

When I travel, my above-mentioned lassitude demands that I engage in only two tourist activities a day, one mid-morning and one after lunch; however, Celeste, Tom, and Caroline were go-getters, and the days and nights were filled with sight-seeing which featured a guided tour of Aztec ruins and a guided tour of Museo Nacional Antropologia.[3]

We also ate a various top tier restaurants, had drinks at Tenampa, a mariachi bar, and saw the Ballet Folklórico perform in a beautiful performing arts center.

But, as Andrew Marvell was wont to point out, all good things must end.[4]

Hosting my Family

Last week was the first time that my two sons had been home at the same time since 2018 – Harrison, his wife Taryn, her mother Susan, and grand-toddler Julian rented a house on Folly, and Ned and his love Ina came all the way from Nuremberg and stayed with his at 516 East Huron.

Also, I had the pleasure of having lunch with a childhood friend John Walton whose mother and my mother were best friends growing up and always.

But dammit, but that too had to end with Harrison and crew flying out Wednesday and Ned and Ina Friday.

The Book Launch[5]

I’ve already gone on enough about the launch. The curious can access the reading HERE if they have “world enough and time.”

Seeing Is Believing 

The indefatigable Eugene Platt and his wife Judith hosted a soiree of sorts in which a cast of seven or so readers performed his play-in-progress Seeing Is Believing. Based on the account in the Gospel of John, the play is set post-resurrection and consists largely of Andrew and Thomas walking to a “safe house’ where Jesus appears and puts a screeching halt to Thomas’s skepticism. 

If I were Eugene, I’d produce it as a film instead of trying to get it produced as a play. Staging a fifteen-minute walk would be challenging, but you could really do some interesting things on film.

I bet some religious-minded film student at SCAD would find it interesting.

The Krushtones

What can I but enumerate old themes? I love me some Krushtones, who play at the Sand Dollar around 15 April every year. I couldn’t believe how fresh and practiced they sounded.

If you’re interested in learning more about this killer cover band and the Sand Dollar Social Club, click HERE.

THE END

Sometimes, Mr. Marvell, endings aren’t all bad. For example, I’ve finished writing the first draft of this blog post, and my dear readers have finished reading it and can get going on something more productive, because, as you have pointed out so eloquently: 

 [. . .] all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity.

So, carpe diem, y’all. Hubba-hubba-hubba, swish-boom-ba-ba-ba-ba-Barbara Ann.

[1] Not to mention doing our taxes.

[2] After zooming to number 570 on Amazon’s Young Adult and Teen Historical Fiction category, it’s now dropped into the 900s. C’mon people. I’m a senior citizen on a fixed income!

[3] I’ve been told my Spanish accent isn’t terrific. BTW, I’ve never been much for guided tours, but I must admit you learn a helluva lot more.

[4] E.g., “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”

[5] Thank you, Polly and Julian Buxton!

Late Life Hullabaloo

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I’ve written on Hoodoo previously that I don’t blame young people for holding golden-agers, i.e., senior-citizens, i.e., their elders, i.e., old farts in contempt as we shuffle along taking tiny steps, fumbling for our checkbooks while striking up conversations with grocery store clerks, or poke along doing 45 in passing lanes, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of Late Empire capitalism.

Even I-and-I, a forgetful 70-year-old, have been known to disparage my fellow geriatrics when their egocentricity (or declining faculties) don’t take in account the needs of others. No doubt I get on young people’s nerves myself, an overly dressed gadfly Oscar Wilde wannabe nodding my head and droning on about myself on barstools and in dentist offices.

Yet here I am in my twilight the author of a little ol’ bagatelle of a YA novel written on a 12th-grade-plus reading level, and I’m shamelessly promoting it as if it’s the great American novel.  Three newspaper articles have appeared that focus on my late life productivity[1], and I’ve also appeared on midday local television program talking about me, me, me, not exactly a fascinating subject.

Ultimately, it’s much ado about not much.

Yet it does give me something to do and to dread.

My sons and their significant others are coming to the book launch[2] (Harrison and Taryn from Chevy Chase, Ned and Ina from Nuremburg), Old and new friends will be there. Eugene Platt, who has recently published his collected poems Weaned on War will introduce me, an honor for sure. I see the launch as a sort of funeral I get to enjoy before I die.

However, I do want to set it down here that I’m a little ashamed of myself for all this hullabaloo. There’s something a little tawdry about it, a little needy. 

Rather, I should 

like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult

or better yet, as the young people say STFU.

Cheers!

[1] I’m also, to use a polite term, a digital collagist.

[2]Buxton Books, 120 King Street, 11 April 2023 6 PM rsvp@buxtonbooks.com

On Desert Islands, Independent Bookstores, and Joanna Hershon’s Latest Novel

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desert island wes

We’ve all been asked the desert island question, what recordings we’d choose, what three books we’d take if limited to that magical number.[1] Although being stuck inside the house with the Chico Feo blues again is vaguely akin to being stranded on some palm shaded atoll in the South Pacific, many of us do possess (unlike Robinson Crusoe) the ability to order out, whether it be rib-eyes from Omaha, Toots and the Maytals from Apple, or Grady Hendrix’s latest novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

grady

This quarantine offers those of us who have been idled a chance to catch up on our reading. I know that eBooks are all the rage, but this old curmudgeon prefers printed paper, to strum pages with his thumb, to be able to reckon the heft of the tome and how much is left.

Recently, the excellent local independent bookstore, Buxton Books, hosted a poetry reading featuring David Tillinghast, a former professor of mine. Although Amazon is cheaper, that faceless conglomerate doesn’t provide the opportunity to meet authors and hear them read aloud from their works. In this age of e-tail, independent book and record stores need our support, but during the pandemic, even more so. The next time you order a book, please consider ordering from your local bookseller.

My most recent acquisition from Buxton Books is Joanna Hershon’s latest novel St. Ivo, which is being released tomorrow (14 April 2020) by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I met Joanna and fell in love with her work when she came to Porter-Gaud School as our visiting writer in 2009. At the time of her visit, her most recent novel, The German Bride, had not been released. Joanna was kind enough later to mail me a copy, and, man oh man, the novel transported me right out of my reading chair to 19th Century Berlin and eventually to our own wild, wild West.

joanna

Joanna Hershon (source Good Reads)

 

Here’s a snippet from the thank you letter I sent her:

The breadth of the book is remarkable. You’re able to concretely conjure the sights and smells of Berlin, the passage overland, the starkness of Santa Fe, the Shein Brother’s store, and the stage couch’s journey.  Indeed, the last part of the novel, the trip to San Francisco, is a tour de force.  You turn something inherently boring – a slow crawl over virtually featureless terrain – into a psychologically fascinating page-turner.

I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of St. Ivo, and once again, Joanna’s work has captivated me. She possesses the ability to create a tangible world of sights, sounds, odors, and actions while creating characters who come alive on the page. As her characters negotiate that vivid outer world Joanna has created, the reader is also privy to the rich inner world of their memories, aspirations, and fears. The novel is suspenseful, mysterious. I can’t express it better than Nell Freudenberger’s dust jacket blurb: “Vivid and cinematic . . . St. Ivo has the eerie quality of a fairy tale, as if something inexplicable might be waiting around the next bend in even the most familiar path.”

Oh, yeah, and the prose, at once beautifully crafted yet unobtrusive. Here’s Sarah remembering getting her first pair of glasses as a child:

The case was blue. She wore them on the trip home. While sitting in the back seat of the car, she looked out the window. It was as if the world had suddenly announced itself in every leaf on every tree. She hadn’t realized that one could actually see the shapes of leaves, that it was even possible from a distance. The ordinary view was crystalline suddenly and all too much. She remembered now the sound of her father’s gravelly voice and the static on the radio; she remembered returning the glasses to their blue suede case. She’d closed her eyes for the rest of the trip. This, she realized, was how she felt just then.

So afford yourselves a chance to take an imaginative trip, for a few hours to get out without the chance of contagion, to enter a vivid world whose dangers will thrill you without actually endangering you.

st ivo cover

[1] Shakespeare’s complete works (duh), Joyce’s Ulysses, Norton’s Anthology of Poetry.