A wise man told me earlier this week, "You're 24. Start acting like you're 24!" Blunt but true. So now I'm learning to control my emotions a little better, talk less, take stricter command of my finances...and learn a valuable lesson about pleasures in moderation.
Ever since preschool, one of the simplest and best joys in my life was reading a book while eating. But over the years, the following things happened...my love of literature grew to a point where I learned the best way for me to read a book and extract the most riches in thought and sentiment from it, while thanks to my mother and friends, the latter an ever-growing group, I discovered the joys of savoring your food as slowly as possible and in cooking and taking communal meals.
Tonight, I had a bowl of chili to eat on my lonesome and I pulled out Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel for company, and I was not fully enjoying the experience until the neurons in my head sent me a message: my ability to gain pleasure from reading and my ability to gain pleasure through sensible eating had both evolved so fully that I could no longer appreciate them in combination! They needed their own space!
For the first time in twenty years, I have lost all desire to read while eating.
I wish I had arrived at this point sooner, remembering all the years in high school and college sitting alone with a book or feeling ticked off when I had to eat with others. But I am becoming my best self in my own timeframe, and I think I've got a good half-century to catch up on all the human connection I may have missed.
The catch is that I have come to greatly enjoy reading and drinking. Coffee, tea, beer, wine, and diet soda are all flavorful enough to be greatly pleasurable, but simple and less space-taking enough to be enjoyed in tandem with a good book! So from now on, reading while drinking (though not to the point of alcoholism) is the way to go, and reading while eating is a closed chapter, pun intended.
By the way, the Russians are driving me crazy these days. It is not prejudicial for someone to make objective claims about your conduct in World War II! I'm happy you won as much as you are! I just wish you hadn't killed million upon millions of dissenters from Stalin's hard line in the process!
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Bleak House: Apathy Triumphant and Opposed, from the Old to the Young
This is a cliched illustration, but we NEED the original Cruikshank from Chapter 32
78
Krook is “perpetually full of gin” and carries within him “a portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.” If Krook is the novel’s direct representative of both Chancery and social apathy, it follows that he must also be apathetic towards himself. By continually being under the influence of alcohol, and gin was a strong drink marketed for the lower classes above all, he shows little regard for his well-being. It is in accordance with John Stuart Mill’s end-of-decade dictum in On Liberty, that Krook in this case harms no one but himself. “Portable hell…” it sounds reminiscent of Pale Fire (which I haven’t read yet).
Tony Jobling, or Weevle, takes the same room in which Captain Hawdon committed suicide. Weevle moves into a room full of death, in a house full of death, and in the great Chapter 32, “The Appointed Time,” will use Hawdon’s death to perpetuate another death in his plan to assist Guppy’s pursuit of Esther by securing Hawdon and Lady Dedlock’s letters from Krook. Weevle has ingratiated himself with Krook, and given him more gin.
“Mark the candle heavily burning with ‘a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.’ No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.” A candle is a long, thin object. A cabbage head is bulky, more expansive, the latter quality shared in more delicate style by the winding-sheet. Dickens uses these words to set up the controlled explosion which ends the chapter.
80
Krook’s death is a return to the fog of Chancery from which he came. “The evil within a man has destroyed the man…the metaphor has become a physical fact.” Nabokov carefully recounts all of the events for this sequence, and shows how “The Appointed Time” is an apt title for this chapter. (That is Mr. Rostan, not Mr. Nabokov.) In all of Dickens’s descriptions of Chancery and the neighborhood thus far, he has used imagery of fog, smoke, soot, a “soft black drizzle,” none of it especially heavy on its own but always there to the point of overpowering weight, and all ephemeral, thoughtless and uncaring of whom it subsumes. The atmosphere around Chancery represents Chancery, and thus represents Krook. The difference is that Chancery by its perpetuation shows a regard for itself. Krook now shows no regard for himself, per his alcoholism. The extra apathy is already weakening him when he is given more alcohol…more apathy…as part of a plan to commit what will be a malicious act (for Lady Dedlock, whom Mr. Guppy is not thinking about, and Weevle is only carrying out Mr. Guppy’s orders, so even more apathy here). The quantity of sin is enough to finally have Krook’s portable hell become the actual hell to which he returns in that same smoke. He has died at the appointed time when all of the apathy grows too much for him to bear.
81
Mr. Guppy and Weevle’s “rapid, colloquial…jerky” dialogue contrasts the “eloquent apostrophic tolling” of ‘Charles Dickens’ the narrator. Part of Dickens’s greatness was an ability to keep his characters separated and distinct. This extends to his own third-person narrative voice (or is it third-person…see later), an eloquent, omniscient tone which for all his loquaciousness and verve (and in the end of 32 indeed apostrophic, addressing an imaginary judge), is kept apart and distinguished from Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Turveydrop, and the other grandiose figures.
Dickens’s style is representative of his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, above all History of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s famed book came out simultaneously with the second half of Dickens’s novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers. In Bleak House, Dickens shows an exposure to the Carlyle who wrote Revolution and Sartor Resartus. There is a witty verbosity, an earnest defense of what the author sees as good and attack on the bad, and a relentless depiction of character. Apparently, Dickens and Carlyle were good friends, the latter helping inspire A Tale of Two Cities, and immediately before Bleak House Carlyle published his Latter-Day Pamphlets, critiques of the current society and its institutions, including laissez faire capitalism…another great form of apathy. It may be that Dickens was absorbing Carlyle’s style as the two shared opinions.
The names surrounding Chancery are apropos. Krook lives in his name what the people surrounding Chancery really are…the unlawful. Miss Flite is concerned with freedom, of birds soaring above the madness, while she is on a permanent “flight of fancy.” And as Dickens keeps evoking the fog and mud, so the lawyers in Chancery keep reducing “MY Lord” to “M’lud” to “Mud.” As with that great figure in fiction, the idiot-savant who sees all clearly in his lesser mind, the lawyers whose wits are dulled by Chancery refer to its heads as exactly what they are.
83
Krook and Chancery both meet logical ends. Krook dies when the apathy which characterizes Chancery takes full control and returns him to the fog. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is finally resolved when Chancery, in turn, is overwhelmed by itself. The lawyers’ fees have over time eaten up the entire cost of the estate, so there is nothing left to sue over…the case is absorbed into the same fog as Krook, apathy now working its way over a controlled period of time. Thus the end of the suit is less dramatic than Krook’s death, but it carries the same logic and the same absurdity. No wonder the lawyers laugh upon hearing the final decision: they have defeated themselves! But as Nabokov sagely says, “Only the dead do not laugh.” Richard’s reaction is sorrow and regret that he has gotten caught up in the absurdity, and it is by this that God gracefully allows his forgiveness by Mr. Jarndyce and Ada
John Jarndyce calls a child “the finest creature on earth,” and for Dickens it was so because children were good, innocent, not yet wise to the worst of the world, and Nabokov says he was at his best documenting the simple pathos and cruel miseries of children.” We now leave Chancery behind to come to the child theme, which is crucial to Bleak House.
In my introduction, I discussed how being oversaturated with Dickens caused me to lay him aside for a long time, but Nabokov is right, and it is a beautiful torture that this is the case: Dickens’s most known and most clichéd trademark was also what he did best. The entire world knows (or should know) about not just Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim but also Smike, the young David Copperfield, Pip, and those two lovely Little girls Nell and Dorrit. In writing their melodramas and tragic or gloriously uplifting endings, he WAS perhaps the best English writer since Shakespeare. The secret was his ability at making things RELATIVE. I compare this to when I watched Nanette Burstein’s excellent documentary American Teen, where my irritation with her subjects’ goals and drama and sadness over “unimportant things” gave way to epiphany that when I was in high school, I cared about those “unimportant things” just as much. Dickens knew that for a child just learning about the world, they had cares, joys, loves, hopes, and fears very different from those of adults, and he wrote about these emotions with empathy and realism. Empathy…that is what Dickens’s best children possess most of all. They are loyal, generous, and loving to mankind because they haven’t “learned” enough to know it’s possible to be otherwise! They are the natural opposition to the apathy of Bleak House, which is why not only in this novel do they suffer more trials than Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey combined would have ever wanted to go through…but also why he was able to create one of the greatest comic villains of all literature…whom I shall get to in the next post.
For right now, all I can say is that all of the negative sides of humanity in Bleak House are always countered by the gentle goodness of its “real” children, and that our heroine Esther and her two best partners, Allan and Mr. Jardnyce, are the adults who have held fast to that goodness and go out of their way to practice empathy…especially towards children from Jo to Ada who are afflicted most of all.
Krook is “perpetually full of gin” and carries within him “a portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.” If Krook is the novel’s direct representative of both Chancery and social apathy, it follows that he must also be apathetic towards himself. By continually being under the influence of alcohol, and gin was a strong drink marketed for the lower classes above all, he shows little regard for his well-being. It is in accordance with John Stuart Mill’s end-of-decade dictum in On Liberty, that Krook in this case harms no one but himself. “Portable hell…” it sounds reminiscent of Pale Fire (which I haven’t read yet).
Tony Jobling, or Weevle, takes the same room in which Captain Hawdon committed suicide. Weevle moves into a room full of death, in a house full of death, and in the great Chapter 32, “The Appointed Time,” will use Hawdon’s death to perpetuate another death in his plan to assist Guppy’s pursuit of Esther by securing Hawdon and Lady Dedlock’s letters from Krook. Weevle has ingratiated himself with Krook, and given him more gin.
“Mark the candle heavily burning with ‘a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.’ No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.” A candle is a long, thin object. A cabbage head is bulky, more expansive, the latter quality shared in more delicate style by the winding-sheet. Dickens uses these words to set up the controlled explosion which ends the chapter.
80
Krook’s death is a return to the fog of Chancery from which he came. “The evil within a man has destroyed the man…the metaphor has become a physical fact.” Nabokov carefully recounts all of the events for this sequence, and shows how “The Appointed Time” is an apt title for this chapter. (That is Mr. Rostan, not Mr. Nabokov.) In all of Dickens’s descriptions of Chancery and the neighborhood thus far, he has used imagery of fog, smoke, soot, a “soft black drizzle,” none of it especially heavy on its own but always there to the point of overpowering weight, and all ephemeral, thoughtless and uncaring of whom it subsumes. The atmosphere around Chancery represents Chancery, and thus represents Krook. The difference is that Chancery by its perpetuation shows a regard for itself. Krook now shows no regard for himself, per his alcoholism. The extra apathy is already weakening him when he is given more alcohol…more apathy…as part of a plan to commit what will be a malicious act (for Lady Dedlock, whom Mr. Guppy is not thinking about, and Weevle is only carrying out Mr. Guppy’s orders, so even more apathy here). The quantity of sin is enough to finally have Krook’s portable hell become the actual hell to which he returns in that same smoke. He has died at the appointed time when all of the apathy grows too much for him to bear.
81
Mr. Guppy and Weevle’s “rapid, colloquial…jerky” dialogue contrasts the “eloquent apostrophic tolling” of ‘Charles Dickens’ the narrator. Part of Dickens’s greatness was an ability to keep his characters separated and distinct. This extends to his own third-person narrative voice (or is it third-person…see later), an eloquent, omniscient tone which for all his loquaciousness and verve (and in the end of 32 indeed apostrophic, addressing an imaginary judge), is kept apart and distinguished from Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Turveydrop, and the other grandiose figures.
Dickens’s style is representative of his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, above all History of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s famed book came out simultaneously with the second half of Dickens’s novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers. In Bleak House, Dickens shows an exposure to the Carlyle who wrote Revolution and Sartor Resartus. There is a witty verbosity, an earnest defense of what the author sees as good and attack on the bad, and a relentless depiction of character. Apparently, Dickens and Carlyle were good friends, the latter helping inspire A Tale of Two Cities, and immediately before Bleak House Carlyle published his Latter-Day Pamphlets, critiques of the current society and its institutions, including laissez faire capitalism…another great form of apathy. It may be that Dickens was absorbing Carlyle’s style as the two shared opinions.
The names surrounding Chancery are apropos. Krook lives in his name what the people surrounding Chancery really are…the unlawful. Miss Flite is concerned with freedom, of birds soaring above the madness, while she is on a permanent “flight of fancy.” And as Dickens keeps evoking the fog and mud, so the lawyers in Chancery keep reducing “MY Lord” to “M’lud” to “Mud.” As with that great figure in fiction, the idiot-savant who sees all clearly in his lesser mind, the lawyers whose wits are dulled by Chancery refer to its heads as exactly what they are.
83
Krook and Chancery both meet logical ends. Krook dies when the apathy which characterizes Chancery takes full control and returns him to the fog. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is finally resolved when Chancery, in turn, is overwhelmed by itself. The lawyers’ fees have over time eaten up the entire cost of the estate, so there is nothing left to sue over…the case is absorbed into the same fog as Krook, apathy now working its way over a controlled period of time. Thus the end of the suit is less dramatic than Krook’s death, but it carries the same logic and the same absurdity. No wonder the lawyers laugh upon hearing the final decision: they have defeated themselves! But as Nabokov sagely says, “Only the dead do not laugh.” Richard’s reaction is sorrow and regret that he has gotten caught up in the absurdity, and it is by this that God gracefully allows his forgiveness by Mr. Jarndyce and Ada
John Jarndyce calls a child “the finest creature on earth,” and for Dickens it was so because children were good, innocent, not yet wise to the worst of the world, and Nabokov says he was at his best documenting the simple pathos and cruel miseries of children.” We now leave Chancery behind to come to the child theme, which is crucial to Bleak House.
In my introduction, I discussed how being oversaturated with Dickens caused me to lay him aside for a long time, but Nabokov is right, and it is a beautiful torture that this is the case: Dickens’s most known and most clichéd trademark was also what he did best. The entire world knows (or should know) about not just Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim but also Smike, the young David Copperfield, Pip, and those two lovely Little girls Nell and Dorrit. In writing their melodramas and tragic or gloriously uplifting endings, he WAS perhaps the best English writer since Shakespeare. The secret was his ability at making things RELATIVE. I compare this to when I watched Nanette Burstein’s excellent documentary American Teen, where my irritation with her subjects’ goals and drama and sadness over “unimportant things” gave way to epiphany that when I was in high school, I cared about those “unimportant things” just as much. Dickens knew that for a child just learning about the world, they had cares, joys, loves, hopes, and fears very different from those of adults, and he wrote about these emotions with empathy and realism. Empathy…that is what Dickens’s best children possess most of all. They are loyal, generous, and loving to mankind because they haven’t “learned” enough to know it’s possible to be otherwise! They are the natural opposition to the apathy of Bleak House, which is why not only in this novel do they suffer more trials than Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey combined would have ever wanted to go through…but also why he was able to create one of the greatest comic villains of all literature…whom I shall get to in the next post.
For right now, all I can say is that all of the negative sides of humanity in Bleak House are always countered by the gentle goodness of its “real” children, and that our heroine Esther and her two best partners, Allan and Mr. Jardnyce, are the adults who have held fast to that goodness and go out of their way to practice empathy…especially towards children from Jo to Ada who are afflicted most of all.
The Four Great Concerns of Fiction
With all credit going to Gerard Genette, Vladimir Nabokov, and Terry Eagleton. Only the mistakes have been mine.
RHETORIC
What is the meaning, conscious or subconscious, the author wishes us to extract from this book, and how does that meaning relate to plot and theme?
STRUCTURE
How does the author introduce, develop, and conclude the main plot and the subplots? Introduce and develop the characters through to the conclusion of their arc? Introduce and develop the themes of the novel?
How do the plots, characters, and themes interact with each other?
How does structural development and interaction add to or create rhetorical meaning?
STYLE
What are the author’s mannerisms in grammar and vocabulary? How does the author write dialogue and description? What are their preferred uses of imagery, comparison, and literary device? How does style add to meaning?
NARRATIVE
What is the order of the narrated events? Are the events narrated chronologically (analepsis), simultaneously, in anticipation (prolepsis), or anachronistically?
What is the frequency of the narrated event? Once (singular, “Today I went to the shop.”), n with one narration (iterative, “I used to go to the shop.”), once with n narration (repetitive, “Today I went to the shop, he went to the shop, etc.”), or nce with n narration (multiple “I used to go the shop, he used to go the shop, I went to the shop yesterday, etc.”)?
What is the duration both of the narrative time and the narrated time? What is summarized, elided, or expanded? When does the author choose to stop time? (“Five years passed” takes a second to read. Ulysses occurs over 24 hours, but it takes longer than that to read.)
In terms of mood, first, what is the narrative distance? Is the speech narrated, transposed, or reported? Is it a diagetic recounting or a mimetic interpretation? Is the speech direct, indirect, or free-associative?
Second, what is the narrative perspective or focalization? Does the narrator know more than, less than, or the same amount as the characters? Is the narrator omniscient (non-focalized), a character or characters recounting the events from their own possibly moving position (internally focalized), or someone knowing less than anyone else (externally focalized)?
What is the narrative voice? Is it intradiegetic (inside the text) or extradiegetic (outside the text)? Is it heterodiegetic (narrator absent) or homodiegetic (narrator present)? If the last, is the narrator also autodiegetic (the principal character)? For all cases, are the events being narrated before, after, or while (as in the epistolary letter) they happen?
Finally, what is the difference between narration and narrative? Between what someone is telling and what is being told? And how do all of the above incorporate into the structure and style to create a rhetorical meaning?
What is the meaning, conscious or subconscious, the author wishes us to extract from this book, and how does that meaning relate to plot and theme?
STRUCTURE
How does the author introduce, develop, and conclude the main plot and the subplots? Introduce and develop the characters through to the conclusion of their arc? Introduce and develop the themes of the novel?
How do the plots, characters, and themes interact with each other?
How does structural development and interaction add to or create rhetorical meaning?
STYLE
What are the author’s mannerisms in grammar and vocabulary? How does the author write dialogue and description? What are their preferred uses of imagery, comparison, and literary device? How does style add to meaning?
NARRATIVE
What is the order of the narrated events? Are the events narrated chronologically (analepsis), simultaneously, in anticipation (prolepsis), or anachronistically?
What is the frequency of the narrated event? Once (singular, “Today I went to the shop.”), n with one narration (iterative, “I used to go to the shop.”), once with n narration (repetitive, “Today I went to the shop, he went to the shop, etc.”), or nce with n narration (multiple “I used to go the shop, he used to go the shop, I went to the shop yesterday, etc.”)?
What is the duration both of the narrative time and the narrated time? What is summarized, elided, or expanded? When does the author choose to stop time? (“Five years passed” takes a second to read. Ulysses occurs over 24 hours, but it takes longer than that to read.)
In terms of mood, first, what is the narrative distance? Is the speech narrated, transposed, or reported? Is it a diagetic recounting or a mimetic interpretation? Is the speech direct, indirect, or free-associative?
Second, what is the narrative perspective or focalization? Does the narrator know more than, less than, or the same amount as the characters? Is the narrator omniscient (non-focalized), a character or characters recounting the events from their own possibly moving position (internally focalized), or someone knowing less than anyone else (externally focalized)?
What is the narrative voice? Is it intradiegetic (inside the text) or extradiegetic (outside the text)? Is it heterodiegetic (narrator absent) or homodiegetic (narrator present)? If the last, is the narrator also autodiegetic (the principal character)? For all cases, are the events being narrated before, after, or while (as in the epistolary letter) they happen?
Finally, what is the difference between narration and narrative? Between what someone is telling and what is being told? And how do all of the above incorporate into the structure and style to create a rhetorical meaning?
Friday, July 24, 2009
Commencing the Diary
Most of the commentary in this and similar future posts wil be found on Arts and Letters Daily (.com), for which I thank that wonderfully generous man, Jordan Beck, M.A. Chicago '09. May he and Rebecca be living a hard-working, blissful life and eating plenty of homemade kugel.
John Harris's Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House is aptly named. A comprehensive but not mind-numbing chronicle of the 42nd presidency, Harris's thesis is that Clinton earned popularity, re-election, and the staving off of being forced out of office during the impeachment trials by a leadership style which wasn't truly bold or visionary...he tempered his vision after two years of clashing with Republicans. Rather, Clinton "survived" by not seizing control of situations but reacting to them, carefully deliberating and seeking a consensus in decisions. With perception and fairness, Harris credits this learning process and its results with Clinton's successes (foreign policy, Kosovo above all, and the balancing of the budget by adopting many different plans following the defeats of his economic stratagem and health care bill) and his failures (the aforementioned early plans, his reaction to Whitewater. his inability to handle Bin Laden). Harris also fills the book with lively biographical portraits from Clinton to the shadowy Dick Morris to the troubled Vincent Foster, and in the end comes out just ahead for the Clinton style...the implication in one of the final chapters is that the greatest chance ever for Middle Eastern piece was lost when neither Barak nor Arafat could stomach the bargain Clinton labored for in 1999. The book even convinced me that Bill and Hillary were meant to be together for life. I can't remember where I read it was the best book of his presidency, but it's a fine one for any politico to peruse.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew is another must-have for a certain audience, as Daniel Pool explains everything the lover of Victorian lit might be confused over--money, titles, government structure, servants, etc. There is a subtle exploration of the coming of modern society after 1830, and it also left me with a new perception on Trollope, who for all his realism never stooped as well as Dickens did to documenting the lower classes.
I cooked chicken and biscuits for the family today...an absolutely delicious and much-praised meal. Warmed my heart to finally be able to cook for them, and to stick to my guns when Mom and I differed on a technique I had in concluding the recipe. (Turns out we were both right, but I was distracted enough to make the wrong vegetables.)
Hugo Chavez has something of a point when he accuses the Israelis of getting closer to the status of those who almost slaughtered them. But his reaction to the Tiferet Israel synagogue desecration removes every last shred of credibility he had as a revolutionary. You CANNOT preach democratic socialism while practicing anti-Semitism, anti-homosexuality, and religious intolerance, toadying to corporations, and controlling the media. Say what you will about Berlusconi (another media maven in charge), he has not yet stooped to blaming problems on ethnic and religious minorities.
Lenore Skenazy is called "America's Worst Mom" because she let her nine year-old take the NYC subway alone. I call her an optimist who thinks we are being overly protective by forgetting common sense...and as someone who finally got to leap across a river on stepping stones, I wish I'd had the days when children could roam free until dark having somewhat troublesome adventures and no fear on either side.
AND TO LAY DOWN WITH DREAMS IN MY HEAD...Bjorn Lomborg of Copenhagen has this brilliant point when responding to Paul Krugman's assertion that those against Al Gore's plans for controlling carbon in the name of global warming are as treasonous as McCarthy accused those he baited of being in the 1950's. Their pet project, Waxman-Markey, will cost current taxpayers billions upon billions, with NO RESULTS VISIBLE for ANOTHER CENTURY, and that will be a 0.11 degree Celsius drop!. I'm all for environmental saving and live as green as possible, but for projects like this, we need to keep a free exchange of voices going to find the best solution, and somehow, bickerin over 0.2 degrees in the F which our grandchildren may never even see is not enough to be accused of disloyalty over.
John Harris's Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House is aptly named. A comprehensive but not mind-numbing chronicle of the 42nd presidency, Harris's thesis is that Clinton earned popularity, re-election, and the staving off of being forced out of office during the impeachment trials by a leadership style which wasn't truly bold or visionary...he tempered his vision after two years of clashing with Republicans. Rather, Clinton "survived" by not seizing control of situations but reacting to them, carefully deliberating and seeking a consensus in decisions. With perception and fairness, Harris credits this learning process and its results with Clinton's successes (foreign policy, Kosovo above all, and the balancing of the budget by adopting many different plans following the defeats of his economic stratagem and health care bill) and his failures (the aforementioned early plans, his reaction to Whitewater. his inability to handle Bin Laden). Harris also fills the book with lively biographical portraits from Clinton to the shadowy Dick Morris to the troubled Vincent Foster, and in the end comes out just ahead for the Clinton style...the implication in one of the final chapters is that the greatest chance ever for Middle Eastern piece was lost when neither Barak nor Arafat could stomach the bargain Clinton labored for in 1999. The book even convinced me that Bill and Hillary were meant to be together for life. I can't remember where I read it was the best book of his presidency, but it's a fine one for any politico to peruse.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew is another must-have for a certain audience, as Daniel Pool explains everything the lover of Victorian lit might be confused over--money, titles, government structure, servants, etc. There is a subtle exploration of the coming of modern society after 1830, and it also left me with a new perception on Trollope, who for all his realism never stooped as well as Dickens did to documenting the lower classes.
I cooked chicken and biscuits for the family today...an absolutely delicious and much-praised meal. Warmed my heart to finally be able to cook for them, and to stick to my guns when Mom and I differed on a technique I had in concluding the recipe. (Turns out we were both right, but I was distracted enough to make the wrong vegetables.)
Hugo Chavez has something of a point when he accuses the Israelis of getting closer to the status of those who almost slaughtered them. But his reaction to the Tiferet Israel synagogue desecration removes every last shred of credibility he had as a revolutionary. You CANNOT preach democratic socialism while practicing anti-Semitism, anti-homosexuality, and religious intolerance, toadying to corporations, and controlling the media. Say what you will about Berlusconi (another media maven in charge), he has not yet stooped to blaming problems on ethnic and religious minorities.
Lenore Skenazy is called "America's Worst Mom" because she let her nine year-old take the NYC subway alone. I call her an optimist who thinks we are being overly protective by forgetting common sense...and as someone who finally got to leap across a river on stepping stones, I wish I'd had the days when children could roam free until dark having somewhat troublesome adventures and no fear on either side.
AND TO LAY DOWN WITH DREAMS IN MY HEAD...Bjorn Lomborg of Copenhagen has this brilliant point when responding to Paul Krugman's assertion that those against Al Gore's plans for controlling carbon in the name of global warming are as treasonous as McCarthy accused those he baited of being in the 1950's. Their pet project, Waxman-Markey, will cost current taxpayers billions upon billions, with NO RESULTS VISIBLE for ANOTHER CENTURY, and that will be a 0.11 degree Celsius drop!. I'm all for environmental saving and live as green as possible, but for projects like this, we need to keep a free exchange of voices going to find the best solution, and somehow, bickerin over 0.2 degrees in the F which our grandchildren may never even see is not enough to be accused of disloyalty over.
Bleak House: I’ve Got the Feeling…Oh, No, No
The Picture of Apathy
76
"When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given the birds their liberty." The closing sentence in the penultimate chapter for Esther. Miss Flite frees the birds only when youth, hope, and beauty have triumphed. Mr. Jarndyce has no need to think of the suit ever again, Richard and Ada are reunited in his death, and Esther has found a husband who loves her and her true place in the world. However, yes, Richard has to die. Miss Flite is not evil or malicious herself—she IS one of Esther's most-loved acquaintances, after all—but her complicity in the murkiness of Chancery requires some necessary side effects to her breaking free of it, and Richard's fate has become bound to hers, and his youth, hope, and beauty are fair game. (Also, after Miss Flite releases the birds into the world, Esther apparently receives Beauty again, going by Allan's last words.)
Krook advertises that he will buy and resell bones and wardrobes. Used clothing is rags, so he sells the same bones and rags which Chancery turns its suitors into. The rest of his shop is rotting junk, like rotting laws. Nabokov draws a tight line between Krook and Chancery. On the surface, Krook is a typical Dickens eccentric like Jingle or Micawber, a rumbling, outsized, ultimately harmless personage who keeps a rambling warehouse and tends to his cat. However…
77
"Krook calls the Lord Chancellor his brother—his brother in rust and dust, in madness and mud." Krook is the symbolic representative of the social ills plaguing British society. He looks like a sick man, white-haired, gnarled, and misshapen. The implication of his warehouse is that he will give people pennies for their goods to ensure he makes a profit by selling what is really junk back to others who probably deserve better but can only really afford his wares…he continues a vicious cycle of social oppression just as Chancery is a vicious cycle of legal (and social as well) oppression. And as mentioned, everyone who comes into his warehouse either dies or goes insane. The real tragedy is that Krook never comes across as any more devilish than sweet Miss Flite. He has found a niche where he is on the top rung of a system and has no interest in halting its perpetuation…just as the Lord Chancellor is in charge of an outmoded, fiendishly complex system that works well enough for him and the lawyers under him for no thought of change to enter his head.
Apathy is one of the great sins in the Dickensian world view, and Bleak House is in part a portrait of a world where few take the time to truly understand others. As maddening as Esther can be, Dickens likes her and elevates her because she has empathy for others. Allan Woodcourt and Mr. Jarndyce fall into the same category, and the Dedlocks are redeemed by empathy. The villains of the book are either unthinking (Krook) or deliberate (Skimpole and the Smallweeds) or just turn out that way by cynical nature (Mr. Tulkinghorn, who does not set out to wreck peoples' lives but does so anyway in the name of legal business…has there ever been anyone since Shakespeare who makes a case for killing all the lawyers as well as Dickens?), but they share one trait: a cool unwillingness to think of others. Even philanthropists like Mrs. Jellyby suffer from apathy, performing their acts out of self-righteousness and not Christian charity. The three plots of the book all turn around apathy. The murder happens because Mr. Tulkinghorn refuses to consider the points of view of all his potential killers, the children, Jo and the Necketts above all, are tortured or die from people making self-interested decisions (Skimpole is the worst), and Chancery is the apex of apathy, a court system…and law is for the protection of the people…where the aggrieved are barely allowed to speak and the most impersonal spokesmen of all do everything. Krook seems to have very few thoughts in his head and never does any act, good or ill, for anyone. A fine brother for the Lord Chancellor!
Richard identifies the bones in Krook's warehouse as a potential assemblage for a Chancery client…the same sort of man he will become in the end thanks to a "temperamental flaw in his nature" which leaves him jobless and ultimately obsessed with Chancery. Let me illustrate this point with a personal story. One of the best and most loving friends I have ever had has a rather notable father whom my Dad really doesn't like. Last year, my friend went out of her way to do something extraordinarily heartfelt for me, and when Dad heard about it, he said he would try not to openly criticize her father in the future, because the way he raised his daughter meant he did one thing right in his life. Similarly, Dickens does not want us to think of Richard as a figure to despise, for he does at least one thing right: he is genuinely good enough to win the love and devotion of Ada, the sweetest figure in the story, who believes in him and ultimately has her beliefs confirmed. But Richard is indeed a collection of bones: he has many qualities, most of them decent, some very good, but the flaw is that he lacks a connecting tissue (like skin) to bind and focus his qualities together. Thus he is restless and impetuous, rejecting medicine, law, and the army in turn, then deciding that the only way to take care of Ada (he always carries empathy for Ada, which keeps him on the right side of Dickens) is to win the suit, separating him from Mr. Jarndyce and putting him on the path to the boneyard.
When Krook is introduced, Esther sees something in his eyes "as if he were on fire within." If this isn't the most clever foreshadowing imaginable for an event we could never have predicted, tell me what is. Krook is on fire—hellfire—for his continual ignorant sin, and the reckoning comes in Chapter 32 when he comes into possession of some of the most destructive artifacts in the novel, the letters between Hawdon and Lady Dedlock, letters to pure for a sullied man to touch or deal with.
Krook and his cat, a tiger of a pet, are "waiting for the birds to leave their cages," for "only death can liberate a Chancery suitor" such as Gridley, Richard, and Tom Jarndyce, whom Krook quotes as comparing the suit to "a slow fire." I think I've said enough about Chancery leading to either liberating death or, worse, liberating insanity, but two points stand out: Krook's deliberate equation of Chancery and burning, and the cat, a beast who scares Esther and the natural predator of the bird. There is always a chance the cat can get into the cages, and Dickens further compares the cat to those other oppressors, the dry, money-minded Smallweeds who help in the persecution of the helpless good.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Bleak House: Miss Flite’s Birds and a Broadway Heroine
Stephen Sondheim...iconoclast, genius, and follower of Dickensian Thought (No wonder he loves English crosswords!)
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"a soft black drizzle": Dickens uses this phrase to describe the smoke from Chancery's chimneys, the same smoke which Krook will die in. The phrase is even more appropriate for Krook, whose spontaneous combustion occurs indoors in a gentle smokiness noticed only by its burning. The use of such an apt comparison for a place which will be bound to a person for whom, several hundred pages later, the comparison will re-apply is not an accident. It is Dickens at his most all-seeing.
Dickens creatively uses alliteration in Chapter One. Dickens's opening description of the mud uses the cliché of "slipping and sliding," but he follows with "Chizzle, Mizzle, and Drizzle," the law firm,m who are "shirking and sharking." Nabokov points out that shirking and sharking are not just proper descriptive words for how lawyers struggle to gain control of legal situations, but they also can be used to describe how people move through mud, the mud of the streets of London or the metaphorical mud of Chancery.
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The connection between Richard and Miss Flite. When Richard, Ada, and Esther meet Miss Flite outside Chancery, the first word out of Richard's mouth being exposed to her trademark rambling is "Mad!" It is an apt description obvious to anyone with sense. Richard will by novel's end be living in the same quarters as Miss Flite, call her a friend, his reason lost by the same exposure to Chancery which has affected her.
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Miss Flite continually uses the words "youth, hope, beauty," which turn out to be the names of the three of her many pet birds. Miss Flite adores birds and seeing them fly, but keeps her multiple pets locked up in cages. Her explanation makes twisted sense…she is IN Chancery but does not understand it, is not OF it, as I mentioned in the previous part of commentary. In an attempt to gain more of an understanding of Chancery, which drove her to madness, she decides to wield the power of a judge (in the same establishment of the similar pretender Krook, the "Lord Chancellor") by keeping the birds in cages until the appropriate time to set them free. Like the suitors in Chancery, it is highly doubtful the birds' time will ever come under such a combination of sense and nonsense. For Miss Flite has sense. In that same first meeting with Esther, Richard, and Ada, she lists youth, hope, and beauty in the same breath as Chancery and Conversation Kenge, the garrulous attorney who brings the heroine and her allies into the business. Her last words are "Ha! Pray accept my blessing." Miss Flite knows that youth, hope, and beauty stand very little chance of winning over a system which cares for nothing but intricate logistics based in arcane knowledge (the opposite of youth). She identifies with this by practicing similar oppression, holding the birds with virtuous names in cages. Also, that keen natural observer Nabokov knows the symbolism behind the three species of birds she keeps: larks represent youth, linnets hope, and goldfinches beauty.
(Almost 130 years later in 1979, Stephen Sondheim used this same imagery in his masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Johanna's solo, sung in the room Judge Turpin keeps her locked in and from which Anthony first falls in love with her, is "Green Finch and Linnet Bird." Hope and beauty, the two qualities she and Anthony possess which Todd, Turpin, Mrs. Lovett, and the others lack…and note the GREEN finch. Green for jealousy, the jealousy which drives Turpin to take control of Johanna and her mother and send Benjamin Barker to the fate which sparks the murders. Sondheim and Dickens know how much sadness can be mixed with the best qualities in life.)
Caddy, another captive child, has a meeting with Prince in Miss Flite's room. A foreshadowing of the hopeful-tragic ending of Bleak House. Caddy and Prince, who is in his own way locked into a mode of living, have a great pre-wedding tryst in the Miss Flite's room precisely because of its oppressive qualities, but there they find a measure of freedom and strength. An oblique hint that the birds will one day be free.
Krook lists the names of Miss Flite's birds for Esther, Ada, Richard, and Mr. Jarndyce but leaves out "Beauty," and beauty will be the one thing Esther loses in the book. And of course, Esther's loss is solely due to her unselfish nature at odds with Krook's money-grubbing and Chancery. "Beauty" may slip Krook's mind because he has no notion of what the word really means, spending all of his time with oppressed suitors and unhappy and/or crazy people. There are twenty-six birds altogether (An alphabet of negativity…a comprehension?) and Krook names twenty-five. His audience possesses twenty-three of the names when we think about it before the novel is over, the exceptions being "Wigs" and "Rags," unless we can say for sure Jarndyce wears a wig (as was custom, especially in the courts) and at one point Esther may have rags while tending to Jo and then nursing herself.
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"He never thought…what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind." Leaving out a few typical histrionics, Esther's sad observation of the link between Richard and Miss Flite is accurate. Youth, hope, and beauty are subsumed to her and the powers of Chancery. Richard sees Miss Flite every day, does good deeds for her, and takes pity on her, but the good feeling he uses in describing this to Esther implies that he sees her as anyone would see a figure of sympathy…sympathy in the brutality of Chancery. I personally admire how Dickens uses the word "hungry." Krook's warehouse is indeed a consuming monstrosity, eating youth, hope, and beauty and sewing death (Captain Hawdon and Krook himself), depression (Mr. Gridley), and insanity. And Miss Flite takes a propriety interest in all who pass by her. Not Krook, her landlord, but certainly with Richard and Gridley, whom she grief-strickenly cries out died without her blessing.
The Last Days of Hedonism: July 2-5, 2009
This piece is for Miss Berman, Mr. Eaton, Mr. McWilliams, Mr. Pintar, Mr. Strauss, Mr. Wright, and particularly Miss Hogg…and Mr. McWilliams gets a dual thanks for inspiring the style.
JULY 2: I wake up at 4:15 a.m. after less than five hours of sleep, clean up, and rearrange my bags one last time for maximum comfort, wisely choosing to switch my portable bag from a large over-the-shoulder to a backpack but leaving my camera behind in the process. I worry that Samantha and Julie might leave our problematic front door open so I tape a note to their door telling them not to leave through the front but use the easily-locked back. Typical Rostan style, I scratch out the bottom and rewrite the whole thing. Mike and Tyler already up with a little coffee and fruit salad, we load up the car and go. We don't actually get on the road out of Los Angeles until 6:20, after a stop at the Shell near Temple to fill up with gas and oil (Mike pours his own oil), a second stop to pick up Matt and his own provisions, and a third stop so I can acquire cash-on-hand from the Silver Lake Bank of America. Once on the freeway heading north, I come across a quote from the architect John Lautner I'd written last August, "I am a realist, but change is the only thing that's real." Per what appears to be a Big Sur tradition, breakfast is bought at the Van Nuys Burger King, where I eat a ham omelet sandwich which tastes oddly sweet. Mike is behind the wheel…he'll be behind the wheel for the entire weekend and drive with both flair and sensibility which I, a driver with a low opinion of his abilities, admire in the extreme, and I think he might have a shot at Le Mans. Tyler dozes in the back for a while. He just got new glasses, and as Adam's spectacles make him look like Peter Sellers, Tyler's lend him a resemblance to the young Michael Caine. We pass the hills of Malibu, the fog of Camarillo with the peaks rising above, Santa Barbara (with its six miles to Summerland sign and the sunglass-wearing saluting Santa), and Mariposa Beach, where sunlight finally streams out to a flourish from Devendra Banhart and Amy MacDonald. Tyler's awake by now and we launch into the three main conversation topics this weekend: art, life, and the opposite sex…Tyler's onetime semi-flame Erin joined the last great Big Sur excursion, and there is mutual agreement that her not being here for this ride is suitable. We put on Akron/Family as we make the final transition from the inner grasslands to the dramatic coastline, acquiring more gasoline and pausing at an Elephant Seal beach where this time I don't have to walk several miles and an observation point where I stand on a cliff's edge for a few minutes, looking at the rolling blue Pacific with brown plants below and green and yellow hills surrounding and a smell of cinnamon in the air, and I am so happy the guys, Tyler especially, made sure I had a final chance to come here. Mike steers around the winding highway while we make lousy double-entendres and sing hundreds of songs in snippet form, from 1960s pop to 1990s alternative to things we just make up, Matt's ballad of the "Motorcycle Man" the most inspired of all. Half an hour from Big Sur, we slow down, first so Mike can relieve himself, then at a construction site on a very tight section of freeway, where a Caltrans employee volunteers his approval of our packing and shares that back in his army days he was briefly married to a stripper. Repeat, volunteered. Finally we arrive at Big Sur ten minutes before noon, a land of distinct, deliberately rough architecture for motels, art galleries, and restaurants (though the logs don't seem to fit the Henry Miller Library) and giant, giant trees, not redwood-class but reasonable enough. A few weeks before I had attempted to reserve us a campsite only to find them all filled up due to the holiday weekend. Pfeiffer, Fernwood, and Andrew Molera are full but the clerk at Molera, a very disinterested man, hands us a sheet of nearby, usually more open sites and suggests Bottcher's Gap. We shoot up the coast, more spectacular now than before (when I was seeing so much spectacle I though the whole thing was getting banal), cross the Bixby Bridge to the strains of some ultra-trad country, and turn on the Palo Colorado. What follows is a 7.4 mile uphill drive through forests and curves, occasionally passing the most rundown shacks imaginable, shacks we assume cost half a million apiece. After a few minutes wondering if we'll ever see civilization or signs thereof again, Bottcher's Gap with cars and clearing. A State Park caretaker with small potbelly and large beard tells us to take our pick and we choose a spot overlooking the valley with picnic table and grille. Setting up the camp (I use a little too much water to clean my shoes), we discover Matt forgot to bring the tentpoles for his tent, so we decide three of us will cram in our tent while Mike sleeps in the Volkswagen. Camp is ready, jelly and peanut butter sandwiches consumed, the other vaguely hippie-looking hikers and jugglers are gone, and we decide to hike down to the Little Sur River along a trail the caretaker pointed out. All downhill for a change, on a wide, dusty path, and we take an easy pace while musing on how we wish Adam and Chad were here…this is the anti-Vegas…and why Holly should or shouldn't have been here and how Kate probably couldn't have tolerated it here with the flies which are NOT LEAVING US ALONE. There's one particular vista where a giant tree-covered mountain splits the middle of two others, the Pacific shines like ice on the reservoirs of Mahoning County in the distance, and the sky is azure and never-ending. A passing couple informs us the Little Sur is ten more minutes down. It turns out to be the trail to the Little Sur off the main one, a thin, steep descent which doubles back twenty times or so and requires scampering over the hulks of trees which collapsed in the wildfires and under some natural archways, but oh, it is beautiful, the hollowed out black trunks straight from Disney forests and Pan's Labyrinth and more trees turned sheer red and orange from exposure to the flame. At the bottom…oh, the bottom, the natural clearing next to the gently rapidous river holding no attraction for us and we keep going to a point where there's wide open space on the other side…and plenty of rocks. I pull of my shoes and socks and soon I'm leaping from one stepping stone to another, after a lifetime of only seeing this done in cartoons. The guys strip down to their underwear and dive straight in. I'm more cautious (of course), but I'm reveling in the wonder of it all, a land which feels like God's country for the explorer and the dreamer. We sit on a giant log next to a single orange flower and a few white buds breaking the monotony of the trees, some alive, many others ready for a caber toss, Mike plays his portable guitar, Tyler and Matt share stories, I listen, we dress, we smoke a little weed, and climb back up. Mike does double climbing when he finds an especially awesome tree similar to the one Aunt Susie had in her backyard in Highland Heights. It's getting on 5:00 now, the sun sinking lower in the sky, and when we return to the triforce of a vista we stop for ten minutes to climb to some higher ground and admire where we are and how different it is from Los Angeles. Tyler takes a bad leap down and rips his only pair of jeans and skins his knee. Matt has more pants above, and I'd like to think my marching us on to the beat of the theme from The Great Escape helps pull us through. Back at camp, Mike and I gather more wood for the fire as the bugs keep flying around. Dinner is roast chicken with onions and potatoes, carved up and served on buttermilk bread, with two bottles of Burgundy Pinot Noir acquired for three bucks each from Trader Joe's to wash it down. Mike brought the food, I brought the wine. Everything is delicious. A single man with his own bottle of wine and a corkscrew (we forgot one) is next to us, and we invite him over. His name is Charlie, a slightly paunchy man with an easy, friendly smile, who's actually from Pittsburgh. He graduated from Penn State the month before with a degree in electrical engineering, and is now camping alone through California for a few weeks before starting grad school at Yale. He's a little bit of an interloper, but soon the red wine and our general drowsiness goes to our heads and we don't mind. There is time for a Frisbee game on the high plateau next to the campground, and then we sit on the edge of the plateau and watch the sky turn purple and the sun set over the green peaks and drops and it is so dramatic better than Arizona border and Carmel sunsets and I quietly thank God I am here with these people. There really are NO WORDS. We pass a bowl and I successfully use a lighter for the first time in my 24 years. At the campsite Tyler grabs a guitar and spends half an hour coaxing one riff after another from it with his beautiful, hypnotic strumming and we stoke the fire and watch people with bigger tents and more provisions set up shop next to us. If I wasn't in Big Sur I would have been at the St. James Men's Group and I quietly sing our theme song, "God is so Good." 10:00 quiet hours and we scrunch into our tent and sleeping bags and wish each other good night while I lie awake in the heat, the wine and Tylenol doing nothing for me.
JULY 3: I wake up at time immaterial and immemorial, but early enough to say good-bye to Charlie, making an early start, and watch the colorless void move to pale blue turning deep and rich as velvet in the sunrise. The bumps and scratches I'd heard the night before were courtesy of Matt, who couldn't take the compression and slept outside. I read Newsweek to pass the time while awaiting the others, and discover not only that I've read six books on their "what to read now" list, including three in the Top Ten and the number-one (The Way We Live Now), but also a poem by Kay Ryan called "Ideal Audience" which reminds me of my housemates the same way the Grateful Dead's "Playing in the Band" does. Of course, when Tyler, Matt, and finally Mike rise and shine (Mike can sleep through anything), Tyler rips the page with the poem out so we can kindle the fire. We grill bagels and eat them with fruit and cream cheese, pack up the tent, finish the dwindling water supply (there wasn't enough to make coffee), and are on the road again around 8:30, half an hour from when Mike arose. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan takes us through the 7.4 miles downhill, and we wonder how the oxen who helped build these roads managed as we slip around trucks. We sing along with the young Dylan and fret on how three nice-looking girls arrived as soon as we were leaving. Forty minutes later I'm in very familiar territory: Monterey and Carmel, where Beth and Andrew took me and the parents two years ago…they're in England, the one time I was able to come up to San Francisco. We grab lattes from a Peet's and then set out on the two hour straightaway up the 5 to San Francisco, and I am almost quivering with excitement...last time, I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and saw Coit Tower and City Lights but little else. The only worry is in where exactly I'll be sleeping. Matt has friends on Haight Street and Mike has Lauren's house outside the city but we're all counting on some arrangement with Tyler's longtime friend Liz. We call Chad and Adam as soon as reception is established. They left with Kate early this morning and are fast approaching San Francisco. We put on the Department of Eagles, Kid Koala, then Harry Chapin, and shoot down a boring stretch of road which resembles the Ohio Turnpike, stopping only in the upscale community of Casa Del so Mike can pee on a long, winding driveway. After a few red convertibles and skirting Palo Alto, we clock into San Francisco, California at 11:37. It's Tyler's first visit here (same with Adam) although he almost moved here, and he immediately judges it to be similar to Boston. Wonder of wonders, Mike finds a no-limit parking spot after dropping Matt and his things off, and we cover our belongings with tarp and set out for THE Haight-Ashbury, a locale I have only dreamed of since elementary school. Matt catches up with us fast, and the entire group is reunited at the Haight-Ashbury Music Center, a room full of guitars and more percussion than anyone should know what to do with. I am a little surprised how warm my heart gets when we're all together again. I tell Chad how much I wished he was there yesterday, and Adam and I quietly celebrate that the trip we talked of all last year is finally happening…it may not be Disneyland, but it's cool enough. Adam is clean-shaven again probably due to Kate's insistence, and we're all hungry. We pick the People's Café—we like the name—and I order a fish sandwich just to make sure I get to eat fish ONCE in San Francisco. It's delicious but so messy a chunk of fish falls onto the floor at first bite. Chad unnecessarily apologizes for this and Mike in turn tells me I have mayo smeared in the corner of my mouth, and I lose my temper. Immediate shame. Thankfully, by now we know each other so well that Chad and Mike know I have NO ill feelings towards them and they happily tell me I have nothing to apologize for. Chad loves San Francisco, pointing out that you can find an arts center anywhere you live, but why would you want to live in Omaha? We poke through some stores, including Ever After, owned by a woman whose relationship with her used books (one of which is a graphic incestual text) is like Jack Black and John Cusack's to used records, only more gritty and nasty, and Aardvarks, where I would have bought a 1982 Air Supply world tour shirt if it wasn't $45. The Julian Lennon is $75. After a stop in Held Over, we walk straight down Haight, past the weirdly incongruous but older Amoeba Music and a movie theatre showing Truffaut and The Secret of the Ooze, to Golden Gate Park. The women are beautiful, mostly dressed in black and with soulful eyes, and I can ignore the tattoos and piercings a little easier. The man who ate by us at the café is selling art on the street. Mike leaps around a mural. In the park, we find an open grassy plain and start up seven-way Frisbee, Chad trying to take pictures while playing. Kate is fascinated by his camera and he begins what will be a weekend-long tutorial in how to use a top-of-the-line digital, which will yield beautiful pictures from both parties. All our worries and stresses vanish with the rapidity of me clanging into a maybe-homeless man's shopping cart full of recyclable cans to make a catch. Adam flops on the ground, Matt and Tyler look cool as ever, Mike looks like a member of Little Feat or a similar 1970s act on Warner Bros. Records. After hearing a loud, obscene argument between two other people we leave the Park (though Chad lingers at some walking signs he judges as masterpieces of graphic design…he has the most extraordinary eye and he's a natural teacher) to catch a bus to the Mission district, stepping into "the real San Francisco," only it's so real and not hipstered enough that we can't find the head shops or dealers we'd been looking for. The most exciting things that happen are 1) we see some absolutely beautiful churches and quirky shop signs 2) we see a gigantic armory-type building with no identification and 3) my hat blows off my head and I run fifty feet to get it. Keeping up our walking, fueled only by lunches and a shared potless brownie, we get to Philz Coffee on the outskirts of the Castro. Liz stepped out on her break a minute before, so we go to a gay bar with the most stereotypically gay music-filled jukebox possible, share beers, grab a free map (which happens to be gay-oriented, just like the "Happy Penis" health signs on the buses), and return to Philz. Liz is back, a plump, pretty girl with laughing eyes and a tasteful nose ring. Around hugging Tyler, selling two lbs. of two of the twenty varieties always for sale, and laughing about how San Francisco's hipsters would go crazy without music, Liz says the magic words. Only one of her roomies is in town, so we are all welcome to share her six-bedroom house. She gets off work at 8 and insists we spend some time at Dolores Park beforehand. Dolores Park not only hosts the San Francisco Mime Troupe (RIP Bill Graham) but also allows you to drink, smoke, and whatever with no fear of punishment unless you break John Stuart Mill's principles. After loading up at 7-11, we find the park and sit down in a circle to enjoy this beautiful afternoon. I sip my Foster's, share a little marijuana, and watch Adam and Kate snuggles while the others settle. Not much talking, but no words are needed. Chad has two giant beers, as he intends to enjoy himself fully (as fully as he can) and temporarily forget the Holly situation. We actually have a deep conversation about Holly, while Adam and Kate have a typical argument about how historical people died…I could make a million bucks if I just transcribed their conversations each day and based sitcom scripts around them. Matt describes downloading Marc Bolan's TV show. I tell Kate about Bill Graham, and she has the quote of the day: "Wouldn't it suck to be in a concentration camp?" That also might have been Adam, but I don't know now. People walk by selling marijuana, shooters, pot brownies, etc., and then a young black man on a fancy Fat Tire limited edition 2009 bicycle says the words we all wanted to hear, Chad especially. We turn down the morphine but Chad acquires nearly ¼ ounce of mushrooms…the irony is we'll not seriously ingest them.
More to come…
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