Category: literature

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Athens, Jerusalem and Gillette

I’m here in the Real O.C.! I haven’t seen Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows anywhere, nor Kristin Cavallari’s roots, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

During the flight, I watched No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I’m ruminating on that one, and might write a lengthy, rambling take on it next weekend. Harass me about it, so I can formulate some more.

Also, I read a pair of short columns that I think you might like, and that seem somehow intertwined. I haven’t gone to Arts & Letters much lately; not sure why. But Amy hit it this weekend and came across both of these pieces, so all credit goes to the official VM wife.

The first is a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which explores Bloom’s visions and revisions on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments:

Bloom interprets the trinity as an essentially polytheistic “structure of anxiety” in which God the Father—whom Bloom finds “lacking in personality”—is a mere shade of Yahweh. Yahweh, “the West’s major literary, spiritual, and ideological character,” has not, according to Bloom, “survived in Christianity.” In J’s portrait—the earliest biblical layer—Yahweh is “anxious, pugnacious, aggressive, ambivalent,” not to mention all too often absent. But unlike Jesus Christ and God the Father, he is emphatically not a theological God. Indeed, Bloom asserts that “no God has been more human.”

The other piece is about wet shaving, Homer, and the possibility of redemption. I can’t begin to do it justice.

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Toddling with Mr. 3000

Off to Chicago for the BIO Conference. I’ll try to get Bernie Mac’s autograph at his plenary session.

I’m also hoping to get out and meander in the city for a bit. I was in Chicago in March 2000 for a small conference, but that was my only visit. I remember that the architecture in the core area (I forget what it’s called: the Loop or something?) was interesting because, while grand, it didn’t have the sheer vertical overwhelmingness of NYC’s major buildings. It felt more welcoming, in the way that the buildings seemed to sweep away and up, rather than upupUP.

Anyway, if I take any good pix, you’ll be the first to know.

Also, I just finished re-reading the Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV 1&2, and Henry V), and have decided to make my next couple of readings “books other people really like and told me to read.” So I’m taking along Geek Love (my wife adores it) and Clockers (my buddy Mark contends it’s like good Charles Dickens, with crack).

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Long Last Love

Journalist and screenwriter Josh Friedman wrote a beautiful piece about his self-composed eulogy, necessitated by his recent cancer surgery:

[W]e all know that there’ll be a last time we do everything and that time and that day may be closer than we think. There’s already things we’ve done for the last time, maybe because we don’t do those things anymore, or maybe they don’t do us. I won’t anchor the 400m relay again, despite the fact that leaning into the curve of a black asphalt track with the baton in my hand, the finish line in front of me and the field behind me is the closest I’ll probably come to heaven.

Of course, I’ve had an asthma attack while losing my virginity for the last time, so maybe things even out.

These are lasts long lost, but they’re buried in the shallows and you don’t need cancer’s sharp edge to dig them up. We all straddle the past and future, and the present’s jammed up our ass like Tom Sawyer’s fence picket.

Read it all.

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The Morning After

We’re married! The wedding was wonderful! The guests danced, ate, drank, and otherwise made merry! I have NO pictures yet! (but as soon as we get them, I’ll start posting stuff)

As wonderful as the whole evening was, as great as our first dance was, as lovely as Amy looked in her wedding dress, the hands-down best moment of the evening came after we left the venue.

The photographer wanted to shoot some pictures of us outside, with Jackson Square in the background. When he was done, Amy & I walked over to our hotel, passing the Cafe Du Monde. A ton of people were having late-evening beignets and coffee at the open-air cafe. Someone saw us in tux and gown and shouted, “Congratulations!”

Then another. Then another. Then the entire cafe was applauding and congratulating us as we walked by. I stopped and gave Amy one of our great husband-and-wife kisses, which led to a great cheer from the cafe-goers.

It was magic.

Wedding bonus: Here are the readings we asked our friends Scott and Cecily to perform before we got to the vows:

Amy’s reading

Excerpt from a 1950s home economics textbook titled The Good Wives Guide

Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.

Prepare yourself: Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking.

Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.

Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to see him. Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first. Remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquillity where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit. Don’t greet him with complaints and problems. Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.

Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low soothing and pleasant voice. Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity.

Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.

A good wife always knows her place.

–Author Unknown

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

–Ogden Nash

Gil’s reading

Laughter

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

–Pablo Neruda

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Mind reading

Whew! I found a reading for my wedding on Sunday! Being all literary and such, it was pretty difficult for me to come up with something good (I’ll post it sometime after the wedding). In my neurotic way, I felt pressure to come up with a Really Good Reading. The search reminded me of an article I read once about how difficult real writers find it to do things like write a note for their kids’ schoolteachers.

Anyway, it’s a Really Good Reading. The friend who’s going to read it on Sunday tells me she cried when she read it this morning. Amy sez she got choked up, too. Dames. . .

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Mo’ Woe

In January, I wrote about Anya Kamenetz’ book, Generation Debt, and Daniel Gross’ criticism of it. I was mean (enough to warrant a smackdown challenge from Mrs. Kamenetz), but hey. Buy a dog.

Today, we have more criticism of the book, by Kerry Howley at Reason:

Kamenetz, a 2002 Yale graduate, is the latest spokesperson for a paroxysm of anxiety among “emerging adults.” But you don’t have to accept Kamanetz’s absurd thesis—that a group of people among the healthiest, wealthiest, and most educated in human history deserve your pity—to get angry about the way their prosperity has been manhandled. The term Generation Debt is nothing if not apt: Young Americans come of age in a world where heaps of their as yet-unearned cash has already been promised away. They are embodied I.O.U.s to Medicare, to Social Security, to extended obligations in foreign countries with unclear objectives and no end in sight. A glance at the latest projections for, say, Medicare Part D is fair game for some righteous anger.

As a bonus, Chris Farrell at BusinessWeek has an article critiquing the arguments of another book in the “WAH! We’re going to be poor” cycle, Tamara Drout’s Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead:

Drout takes a hardline stand in her book. She argues that the younger American generation faces a life of “downscaled dreams.” The traditional middle-class life is out of reach for more and more young people. Going to college, owning a home, and having a child — or two — is increasingly expensive. Paychecks are increasingly meager, so more and more, the younger generation is taking on onerous debt. “They will be the first generation who won’t match the prosperity of their parents,” Drout writes.

Considering that a staple belief in American society is that each generation ends up a bit better off than the previous one, Drout’s charge is remarkable. And it’s also largely nonsense. For instance, she laments that recent college graduates, already burdened with student-loan obligations, have to rack up steep credit charges to furnish their apartments and buy a wardrobe for work.