30 November, 2005
Storytelling
The following newsblurb was sent to me by a dear friend and coworker - code name "Deep Butt" (a.k.a. Dirty Sanchez). He found it at breitbart.com (I haven’t a clue or a care what this website is or espouses) and intrigued me muchly.
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SEATTLE
A man has pleaded guilty to trespassing in connection with a fatal horse-sex case.
James Michael Tait, 54, of Enumclaw, was accused of entering a barn without the owner's permission. Tait admitted to officers that he entered a neighboring barn last July with friend Kenneth Pinyan to have sex with a horse, charging papers said. Tait was videotaping the episode when Pinyan suffered internal injuries that led to his death.
Tait pleaded guilty Tuesday and was given a one-year suspended sentence, a $300 fine, and ordered to perform eight hours of community service and have no contact with the neighbors.
The prosecutor's office said no animal cruelty charges were filed because there was no evidence of injury to the horses.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/30/D8E700JG0.html
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Oh... my... god.
From a very early age, I have been an addict of good storytelling. From childhood’s picture books, to the assigned canonical literature of adolescence, to today, when I consume vast quantities of mostly well written fiction, I look first to narrative for entertainment. I’m often rather embarrassed to mention my favorite authors within my circle of erudite and endearingly pompous friends. It seems the establishment doesn’t hold David Sedaris, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Garrison Keillor in high esteem for the quality of their craft; but hot damn, can thum foke tell a story! I am forgiven, though, because my tastes run the gamut, as a glance at my crammed shelves will reveal.
After my blissful and all-too-short undergrad days at DePaul, I quickly hit upon the idea of pursuing a PhD, and tricked a very good school into admitting me. My brilliant plan was to become a professor, and get paid to enjoy stories (literature) and tell (teach) them to our nation’s youth. I was crushed when I found out that Academia simply isn’t interested in narratives – at least as they appear in the books people read. One is rather expected to invent a story that supposedly lies within the book, for example about how character X’s actions in this scene bespeak a longing for carnal congress with mummy dearest. The worst kinds of idiotic ramblings about nit-picky picayunish details even the author wouldn’t get – AH! That’s EXACTLY what makes them important! – turned these mental masturbators on. I really wanted to be one of them, but instead I almost turned away from books altogether. Luckily, I’ve found my way back.
I’ll try not to get parabolic here.
This story of the horse actually mimics an episode in the book I'm reading now (titled, inexplicably (so far), The Hippopotamus). Stephen Fry sets it up brilliantly, making it seem as though the young child is simply a strange pervert with very loving feelings for a denizen of the stable. It is gradually revealed that the child has the power to heal, chiefly via a laying on of hands, and this particular ailment was internal - requiring insertion. A brilliant plot twist, simultaneously making me want to be a writer and convincing me I'll never have quite enough wild imagination to succeed.
Never mind. I’ve run out of things to say – I can’t remember what I was going to say next.
29 November, 2005
Please
26 November, 2005
Blue Balls
22 November, 2005
So the story goes...
So far, the only title I've thought of is "Excresence."
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“I just wish there was something like a plot-compendium, or plot-pile, where I could pick up a plot, a kind of structure to hang some writing on,” Squontius Threbbadum said to Hilda Harks.
“You know, writing these days doesn’t have to have plot,” Hilda replied. “Plenty of authors are quite successful weaving literature out of mere words.”
“You call that weaving? It’s more like excreting, and I don’t know why anyone would call it literature.”
Hilda pulled her precious old laptop, which she had spray painted yellow in an experimental gesture of love, closer to her on the table. As Squontius tapped his foot and babbled on about postmodern excrescence, Hilda noisily banged away at her beat-up keyboard. In an almost rhythmic pattern, it made an audibly springy kind of sound whenever she hit a key in the upper right hand corner, where it had come away from the scratched and gouged laptop cover. “Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value,” she said.
“Imaginative… creative… hmm… recognized…” intoned Squontius. “So, literature is subjective, then. According to you.”
“No, dictionary.com, not me,” said Hilda, eyes still on the screen, scanning an ad by Google on the right side of the screen. “Literature Essays,” said one ad, “Thousands of Topics to Choose From. Check Out Our Free Online Samples.”
“Oh, well, such an oracle as that, such an online - "
At this moment, a large white Chevrolet, a solidly built though ill-maintained late eighties model, came crashing through the large window of the ubiquitous chain coffee shop where Squontius and Hilda were seated. In a flash, glass, metal, blood, and scalding hot green tea were everywhere. Hilda’s reactions were human, and thus just a bit late: she swooped up her precious yellow piece of equipment in a loving attempt to spirit it out of harm’s way, but felt with a sigh that the bright yellow back was moist and slightly sticky.
The car had just missed her.
Squontius and his chair were gone, along with a garish display rack groaning with holiday CDs that seconds before had taunted Hilda, its reflection becoming clearer and clearer as the early fall light faded. Hilda looked down and lifted her feet just in time to avoid an advancing pool of blood. Cradling her still-open laptop on one arm, and staring at the mess on the floor before her, Hilda retreated slowly towards another offensive display rack. Nearly oblivious to the sounds of pandemonium around her, Hilda continued to stare at the table where the crazy car had narrowly missed her. Something wasn’t quite right. It was entirely appropriate that the accident had erased the depressed and whiny Squontius, and that grating display stand as well, but still… what was… hmm…
With a sigh, Hilda closed her laptop, and at that instant, the car disappeared, glass and metal leapt off the floor, the window onto the street was healed, and her mug was full of fragrant green tea again.
Thanksgiving
As the blue line tunneled toward work, I thought to myself after he got off. It's not going home for Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, that's exciting me today. It's rather a realization that the rough edges seem to be wearing away from our relationship, those jagged shards of uncertainty that cause me so much hesitation and grief. It's taken a while, but I think I am starting to get comfortable.
One more thing to be thankful for.
21 November, 2005
Fry-ing Law
Well christ, how wrong could I be? While Fry has reportedly taken a vow of celibacy for many years now*, Law has allegedly poked the nanny. You never can tell. Perhaps this is a photo of an ideal world?
* Though I never found the alleged site with Fry's writing (his "official" site is ridonkulously anemic and vapid), I did recently hear or read that dear Stephen had "come off", so to speak, his stint of abstinence.
18 November, 2005
Well... at least it's Friday.
I feel that in fairness I should interject here that what I enjoy most of all is to look into his eyes when we talk, and see the look on his face, almost surpised, when he says he loves me. No amount of emails, however florid, could make up for that.
He didn't email. I was not too surprised. As I booted my computer I had half expected to be surprised. I don't know why... perhaps I selfishly expected that I had effectively conveyed my petty need for trivial caresses like this. These may be small irksome things to me, but there is no way they will ever matter to him, as I've learned from his half-hearted apologies in the past. It's easier for him - and I agree with this technique - to dismiss such quirks as irrationalities. It is an idiotic need I can't suppress, no matter how I try. Amazing, I think to myself, that a poet could be so unreceptive to innocent blissful manifestations of deep love. I need to stop expecting. I need to go limp and passive and quell some passion.
17 November, 2005
La basse cuisine, or Yay! Thanksgiving!!!
This snippet from the Tribune tickled me today, as I prepare to go to my ex's going away feast hosted by the inimitable Maiko, who says the first course will be a delightful salad with bacon, oysters fried in bacon grease, and a stunning dressing, the details of which I have forgotton, as my mind went blank at "oysters fried in bacon grease."
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Splitting the haute cuisine scene
Garrison Keillor, Tribune Media Services
November 16, 2005
The pleasure of fine dining has pretty much worn off for me, I must admit. I realized this the other day when I sat in a French-type restaurant and gazed at the menu and felt a craving for a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili. Not a gourmet chili made from beans imported from Chile, but the kind that comes in a can, thank you very much. The kind you used to get at Woolworth's lunch counter.
Grilled cheese sandwich
Toast two slices of bread.
Place slices of cheese between toasted slices.
Nuke in microwave for 10 seconds.
Eat with chili while reading the paper.
I look at the hundreds of cookbooks in our pantry--Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, James Beard, the Moosewood collective, Craig Claiborne--relics of a former life, back in the '80s when men who were bored with dirt-track racing and elk hunting discovered that you could lord it over other men in the kitchen, and cooking became a macho event.
I had a Harley-Davidson food chopper and cheese grater and carried a two-stroke rotary-turbine garlic press in a holster on my belt. I spent hours in the kitchen, whacking together remoulades and seviches and road-seared armadillo cheeks on a bed of lichen with an effusion of asphalt and twirling it over my head--Perfecto!--and women looked at me in wonder: Their husbands could barely boil water, and there I was, Master of the Feast, pouring a fabulous sauvignon blanc, nattering about the right way to blanch snow peas. A man who knew how to blanch!
But that was back in the '80s, when people went in more for self-expression. We all smoked cigarettes then and everybody was making black-and-white movies about train tracks or writing imagist songs or tying up a bundle of old newspapers and entitling it American Prose Rectangle No. 1 and showing it in a gallery. So it was natural for men to take up cooking.
Back in those days I shopped at a spice store that carried 24 different kinds of oregano and I assembled an awesome collection of German knives. I got into arguments with other men over the comparative virginity of our respective olive oils. I sneered at a man's salad once because his shaved parmigiano wasn't the right parmigiano and I happened to have some of that parmigiano on me and I showed him how to shave it thin and translucent as parmigiano should be shaved and he shoved me away and we rolled around on the kitchen floor, punching and kicking and gouging each other. Now we're best friends. Once I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He told me that my dressing needed more vinegar. He was wrong about that. Dead wrong.
And then one day it was all over. I threw a dinner party for 12 and made gazpacho and risotto and tacos and osso buco and a gateau of Jell-O with marshmallows and served it with a Barolo, and when the guests left, delirious with pleasure, I put my whisk away and never looked back. It simply wasn't fun anymore. A man comes to a point in life when he decides that he doesn't have to make the best risotto in town. It's not important.
People still ask me what is the secret of my risotto, and I tell them, "I got over that. That part of my life is behind me now."
The simple truth is that I like Spanish rice. Macaroni and cheese is good, the manna that God gave to the Christian people in the wilderness, which is where we are still living. And those dried soups you buy in large bowl-like containers. You fill with water and nuke it and you've got soup. It's good.
And so for Thanksgiving, I am serving a pressed turkey loaf with instant mashed potatoes and yams that come in a cooking pouch and canned cranberry, which is better than anything you can make yourself. And mince pie from the bakery, with Reddi-wip.
As the Psalmist said, it is God who hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Come unto his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise. For the Lord is gracious; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth from generation to generation.
In other words, get over it. Lighten up. It isn't about food.
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Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home Companion."
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
16 November, 2005
Check Into Cash
If you haven't seen it, the spot goes a little something like this: A woman is at the "car repair shop," apparent by the decor, and says, peering oddly into the distance, "My car is fixed, and I don't have enough in my account to pay the mechanic," whereupon some halfwit says, "Check into cash!!!" while making a check mark in the air with his index finger. This is so intoxicating to the poor lady that she apes him exactly. We are left to assume that everything gonna be alright.
The jingle goes like this, with guitar licks awry in the background:
"We cash your personal check, and then we hold it till your payday...
You got a money may day!!!
(Husky whisper) Check in to cash!!!!! "
On the upside, I guess I have to point out that the people portrayed are all in the apparent pursuit of necessities: the woman with the broke down jalopy, the unfortunate grandma at the groceria, and one or two other situations. These people are not shown in line at the crack store, or walking out of the 7/11 with a cleverly disguised bottle of hooch.
I just love the place because they have birthed unto us a sublimely hideous jingle, one that I hope will haunt me for the rest of my days.
15 November, 2005
Winter
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Rêve pour l’hiver
L’hiver, nous irons dans un petit wagon rose
Avec des coussins bleus.
Nous serons bien. Un nid de baisers fous repose
Dans chaque coin moelleux.
Tu fermeras l’œil, pour ne point voir, par la glace,
Grimacer les ombres des soirs,
Ces monstruosités hargneuses, populace
De démons noirs et de loups noirs.
Puis tu te sentiras la joue égratignée…
Un petit baiser, comme une folle araignée,
Te courra par le cou…
Et tu me diras : "Cherche !", en inclinant la tête,
- Et nous prendrons du temps à trouver cette bête
- Qui voyage beaucoup...
07 November, 2005
Stephen Fry says "Don't Thank Your Lucky Stars"
I have mentioned once before in this space the great Canadian magician, James (‘The Amazing’) Randi. Randi’s renown as a conjuror is exceeded only by his reputation as an investigator of alleged ‘paranormal’ phenomena. He has just completed a series for Granada television in Manchester in which he concentrates each week on a different field of supernatural endeavour – psychic surgery, dowsing, ESP, astrology, the spirit world, psychometry, graphology, and so on. Randi has always claimed that he would be delighted to find himself confronted by evidence of any phenomenon that could not be explained by reason, existing science or the laws of probability. He has never yet, in a long lifetime dedicated to exposing fraud, misapprehension or credulousness, seen a scintilla of evidence that suggests that there is any truth behind any of the claims made for the existence of ghosts, telekinetic powers, clairvoyance though palmistry, the tarot or tea-leaves, mediumship, horoscopy or any of the other fantastic systems the hungry human imagination can devise. The human mind, after all, is remarkable enough in its ability write symphonies, build suspension bridges, invent a thousand types of cork-screw, predict to the minute the appearance of comets in the sky and devise new daytime TV game-show formats, without us having to pretend it has unproveable, unknowable, and untestable powers to receive spirit messages from Red Indians or read character from birth-dates as well.
As a conjurer, Randi is perfectly placed to see how the practitioners of these dubious mysteries achieve their effects. He shares, after all, the same techniques. I do not mean by this that all who claim powers of prophecy or insight are deliberate shysters and frauds, although many are (Randi has shown, for instance, how it is that a spoon may be bent by what appears to be only the gentlest stroking), I mean that conjurors and paranormalists alike rely on human nature to do their work for them. I have often seen someone describe a magic trick in these terms: ‘He gave me a sealed envelope, got me to shuffle a deck, choose a card, remember it and shuffle it back into the deck. I opened the envelope and it contained my chosen card which was then discovered not to be in the pack.’ Almost no card trick works like this, but that is how the audience remembers them. What is left out is that the conjuror actually put the sealed envelope under a book, for example; he shuffled the deck too, before and after the selection of the card, he then gave the envelope to the subject to open after the card had been selected and looked at. These crucial details are forgotten and only the effect is remembered. Conjurors absolutely bank on this selectivity in human memory, this preference of ours for recollecting the miracle itself, not its set-up.
[to be continued]
04 November, 2005
Mommy says I'm a genius
I've felt so mundane, ho-hum, and unworthy for so long now, I can barely remember the time when I believed in the "gifted child" rhetoric. I never beleieved anyone could be "smarter" or more intelligent than others. I had this idea that some minds were simply exercised more than others. When I was much younger, my mind could do chin-ups hanging on with only its pinky... but it didn't. It loved recess, and was king of the playground. It played on the merry-go-round, spinning it faster and faster, to the reckless point where I am very lucky I didn't hurt myself. A lifetime of such frivolity has naturally left me with very bad habits. Very recently I saw my thirtieth birthday approaching with horror, as I have not yet accomplished anything, and I have yet to "become something." It is so much easier to lounge around life's velvet couch, to meander through the prairie of time, admiring and smelling all the flowers, but picking few. Oh, what a waste of that small patch of prairie, akin to paving it over with a parking lot for a non-existant business. So, every year or so, this guilt sets in, and I promise myself I will do something with my life. And what I do is nothing, or next to it; there are so many different flowers, and I know I have only so much time on that couch.
That's why I started doing this blog, despite all my bletchery in the first post. Here, at least, something will be preserved, and maybe the fact that something is inescapably there will foment something a little more moving inside me. I can only hope it moves more than my bowels.
Grad school and especially law school taught me that none of us is special. We really differ only in the degree of skill with which we play to our various audiences.
03 November, 2005
Ode to the hot dog: Frankfurters, wieners, hotdogs, and buns
When I was much younger, I found the hot dog rather boring. It didn't excite me as it does now. Through the years and the many places I've lived, I find new expressions everywhere on a hot dog bun.
Some of the most memorable were several I downed at the old Cleveland Stadium at Browns games in the Bernie Kosar days. I hope that the Brown's new stadium has the onion machine, where a satisfying crank of the handle leads to a stream of chopped white onions. I hope also they still have that glorious brown mustard, so close to Dijon. I never thought I would see a sporting event devoid of yellow mustard. Second place on the memory banks were the two or so hotdogs that I inhaled at Yankee stadium. The dogs themselves were merely average, but the buns were intriguing, looking like a piece of white Wonder bread folded arouns the dog. Rather disconcerting, but the liberal availablity of Sabrett's onion relish was distracting enough to keep my mind off it.
New Year's morning in London, around 1 am, walking from Parliament to Russell Square: Shaftesbury Avenue, streams of drunks annoying the few cars stupid enough to venture out at this time on this day... my feet hurt... I'm so hungry from our earlier pub crawl... I'm also so thourughly sick of the food in London... and all of a sudden, there, in a little square in front of the theatre playing "Woman in White," the unmistakeble smell of onions grilling.. wafting through the throng... I'm in a frenzy, trying to find it - I had never seen street meat in London before, and this smell was indescribably welcome, like manna from heaven. Putting aside my fear that my nose would lead me to some strange 'ethnic' concoction from London's teeming and kaleidoscopic immigrant multitude. HOT DOGS!!! I was so happy to find that incomprehensible man selling those quasi-sausages that I don't even rememeber how much they cost. It truly was one of the worst hot dogs I have ever had - bland, mushy, and only lukewarm - but it was so welcome I almost didn't care.
Gray's Papaya on 6th avenue in the village... I drool just thinking of the aroma, and the dilemma of which fruit juice concoction arises; I'll just go with the papaya to be safe... or how about the pina colada? One way to avoid the whole embarrasment of choice is to hit a dirty water street cart. I go for sauerkraut, ketchup, and mustard. I have the urge to moan aloud with each toothsome, textured bite.
Regrets: I still have not tried a lucky dog in New Orleans. Every time I would pass one of those goofy carts, I couldn't help imagining Ignatius Reilly, struggling to make it in the world at his first job, consuming the entire contents of his cart.
Looking back on the verbosity my fingers just farted out, I notice most of my hot dog memories come from New York. But I'll always have the orgy on a bun that is the Chicago hot dog.
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Chicago hot dogs
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By Charles Leroux
Tribune staff reporter
August 30, 2005
Not much in this world is perfect.
The Chicago hot dog is perfect.
Boiled or steamed, not grilled, it lies regally in a lightly steamed poppy-seed bun and is annointed with:
- Diced onion
- Tomato wedges
- Pickle relish the color of Kryptonite
- Yellow mustard
- A few sport peppers
- A dill pickle spear
- A shake of celery salt
There's your classic Chicago style dog, a perfect teaming of tastes and colors and textures. Also there's a bonus, the "snap" as your teeth sink through the casing -- like Chicagoans themselves, a little resistant at first, and then so welcoming.
We don't have to mention, no ketchup! None! Ever! Do we?
Some readers nominated the genre; others, specific local shrines -- Fluky's, Murphy's, Byron's, Gene & Jude's, Superdawg, The Wieners Circle, etc. -- though with about 1,800 local hot dog stands insuring that you're never more that about a half mile from heaven, a pilgrimage isn't necessary.
So far this year, there have been 231 mentions of "hot dog" in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. We've reported that Vienna Beef Company Co. -- dating back to two Austro-Hungarian immigrants selling franks at the 1893 World's Fair -- signed a deal with Target to sell Chicago-style dogs in 1,350 Target food courts nationally, a blessing for America.
We reported that executives from Vienna (the one on Damen, not the one on the Danube) joined with executives from the company that bakes S. Rosen's buns to put right an age-old inequity. For generations, dogs have come eight to a package while buns were packaged in dozens or half-dozens.
The companies agreed on an eight-pack standard. Justice is served.
A handful of "hot dog" stories this year were obituaries. The loved ones of departed Chicagoans who once owned or even just worked at hot dog stands wanted that connection to a Chicago icon mentioned in print.
The late Margaret Robertson, born here in 1927, retired with her policeman husband, Bob, and opened Margo's Chicago Style Hot Dog Stand first in Colorado Springs and, later, in Temple, Texas, missionaries of a sort, spreading the truth.
Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune
The Big Oy Vey
Recently, spending a lot of time on blogs hosted here at blogger.com, I've come to like their formats and features, so I'm moving here. I remember clearly the day in early October when I printed out Lulo's blog and read it on the commute home, on the walk from the train, up the stairs, and straight into my reading chair. So many little windows on different facets, openings otherwise obscured by decorum or deceit, or by the time it takes to get to know someone. The move may take me a while, though I really have comparatively little to schlep - or little that will be schlepped, as aforementioned - but I'll start with the beginning from the old home:
"Blech. Bloggery. Since everyone else does, why oughtn't I? I'll just use this to collect all the crap I've written and kept - for whatever reason. This is my insurance against yet more dead computers."
