Golden Rule Economy

The Golden Rule is common among major religions, yet missed the financial industry. Simply stated, What goes around comes around, and sometimes with a vengence! Jesus put it eloquently, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and Buddha, “Do not hurt others with that which hurts yourself,” and in Hindu, “Do nothing to others which, if it were done to you, would cause you pain.” Where is it written, Thou shalt pay off large returns in a Ponzi scheme?

Bernard Madoff reminds me of another historic figure who also fudged his numbers, Gregor Mendel. Mendel was not a Wall Street money manager; he was a monk. He cooked his books around pea plants to make trait predictions, which gave rise to Mendelian Genetics. He had the right idea, but not necessarily the numbers to back it up in his observations. Nonetheless, his theory is all kinds of useful.

My hope is something similarly good will come of the Madoff scandal, and not just the discovery of another 20 dozen investors who did the same thing. My hope is that we step forward with caution where we put our faith. Sometimes there’s safety in numbers; sometimes you all go down together.

High Notes - Soprano Mentality

Now’s the season I pretend to remember baking skills I haven’t used all year. I work with one hand tucked in the small of my back, as if waiting for someone to arrest me for what I’m doing in the kitchen. That’s the hand that always wants to help, but I burned the fingers off my childhood, so I keep that hand behind me, a painful memory.

Meanwhile, my mitted hand pulls baked goods from the oven, deftly as if I worked in a patisserie every day of the year. Me and Betty Crocker, we’re like this! (Fingers tight together.)

My other seasonal diversity is hitting the high notes. By this time in the year, I have an exact count of how many E’s and F’s I have before Christmas, notes I haven’t used since Easter, they suddenly emerge at the top of my treble clef.

I sing soprano, not terribly high soprano, but high enough for church choir. It’s not very difficult, you just have to hit notes in the upper range with some modicum of confidence. Success has nothing to do with it. In soprano mentality, success is the same as confidence—confidence is success. It’s like marketing: if you are loud enough, then you are successful, then you are a soprano.

A soprano’s job is easy: bloodhound the melody, lie in wait for a high note. Anyone who can carry a tune can sing soprano, even if you sing it an octave lower. The melody is the soprano part. It’s what children learn to sing. Those who progress into further music mastery become altos, tenors, and basses.

Sopranos only listen to themselves. All other parts are there to make sopranos look good.

The only time a soprano will sing harmony is if you call it a descant.

Don’t ask sopranos to hit a high note, then cut-off after a quarter count. They’ll mutiny a birdseye. A dotted half note becomes a double whole note with ellipses.

A decrescendo in soprano range is more difficult than teaching Clydesdales to moonwalk.

Diction is for the alto section.

How many sopranos does it take to screw in a light bulb? …Can you repeat the question?

The fastest way to compliment a soprano is tell her she’s pretty. You can tell her she has the voice of an angel, but she already knows that. She’s using her voice to draw attention to her looks. If you notice her looks, then she knows you’ve noticed both.

I like to sing, but my voice is not good. I have to play with pronunciation, jump to vowels quickly. Even in speaking, I lack diction. (Perhaps that’s why I type?) I can’t just sing a note without learning the ramp to it and figuring out how I’m going to throw the sound into the back of my throat for roundness. I’ve asked God that if I go to Heaven, I’d like to have a better voice. For now, I try to do the best I can on Earth, to learn what I can about singing, and keep practicing. I pray that God will grant blessings on those who have to hear me, that they may understand I am a work in progress with Him. It’s just so difficult to overcome soprano mentality!

Fun With Numbers

The Book of Numbers is divisible by laws and rules, accounts of wilderness wanderings, and a talking donkey, sort of a precursor to SHREK. Numbers is also a book of counting, containing two censuses of the Hebrew people.

Counting books are good for children. Hebrew people had a lot of children, and a lot of children to put to bed every night. It is my contention that Jewish history laboriously records the begats to encourage slumber in the many descendants of Abraham.

Numbers is the fourth book of the Old Testament in the Bible. It has thirty-six chapters. Thirty-six is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 18. Still awake?

I suggest a Venn diagram as the best graphic representation to illustrate the Hebrew emigration from Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. Draw two circles that overlap. One circle is Egypt, the other circle is Canaan, and the overlapping portion is the wilderness.

Moses led the people in the wilderness for forty years, that’s a good, hard number. We can build equations around that. The place where the circles intersect, the wilderness, is forty years. In the Egypt circle, the Hebrew residence could be represented as:

The time of Moses – The time of Joseph = Hebrew residence in Egypt

However, we’re dealing in B.C. years which run backwards to modern thinking; therefore, reverse the equation so you don’t get a negative number, thus:

The time of Joseph B.C. – The time of Moses B.C. = Hebrew residence in Egypt

In the Canaan circle, the Hebrew residence could be represented as:

Forty years + (The time of Joseph B.C. – The time of Moses B.C.) = Hebrew residence in Canaan

Yes, that’s very nice isn’t it? I just love ancient algebra.

We can also represent the demographics in our diagram. In the Egypt circle, obviously we have Egyptians, then right on the line where the circles intersect, we have dead Egyptians when they tried to cross the Red Sea to follow the Hebrews into the wilderness.

Also in the Egypt circle, we have the Hebrews born in Egypt.

In the wilderness overlap, we have

Egypt-born Hebrews + Wilderness-born Hebrews = Hebrew Wilderness population

In the Canaan circle, we have

((Egypt-born Hebrews + 40 years) x rate of mortality) + ((Wilderness-born Hebrews + n number of years wandering < 40) x rate of mortality) + ((Begotten of both or either of the first two variables) x rate of mortality) = Hebrew people living in Canaan

That last equation can be factored further into Hebrew Men and Hebrew Women between parentheses for multiplication.

Thus we have variables built into equations for a census, not only covering general numbers of people, but also breaking down into approximate ages relevant to 40 years. We don’t have to know all of the variables to deduce the populations for any given time period. We can track populations across time and over geographical locations, right up to

One B.C. - (days < 40 weeks) = 0 A.D.

The most important census of Christianity falls in the New Testament. What if Jesus had been born at home in Nazareth instead of Bethlehem? I don’t know what the Hebrew custom for childbirth was at the time, but I’m sure it did not involve the mother being alone without help. And what did Joseph know about birthing babies? He was a carpenter, not a shepherd or a nurse midwife. Not only was Mary in a barn, but she was away from the comfort and aid of her home and family.

The census of Caesar Augustus forced the extremely humble beginnings of Jesus.

Go Bananas!

Someone told me that bananas are a smart food because they’re good for you if you need to go AND they’re good for you if you need to stop going. Maybe my uncle told me that. Maybe not. I do know that bananas are the perfect food to span the ages from infant who has no teeth to grandpa who has a heart condition.

Bananas are a year-round food in my grocery store. They come pre-packaged, just peel and eat, you don’t have to rinse them or refrigerate, and you can grab a single or a six-pack. I don’t know what the nutritional value of a banana is, but it’s got to be higher than a Snickers bar, yet a banana fits just as nicely in the grasp of your hand.

Clearly there are advantages to bananas over other foods. Probably they’re the primordial fruit of Adam and Eve, before the snake corrupted early hu-man and early hu-woman with the apple.

However, bananas have a limited shelf life, or countertop span in the case of my kitchen. From the time that first freckle begins to show, bananas are strictly verboten as edible substance in my household of fruit-critics, unless they are baked in banana bread.

I had a professor who ate his bananas only black. People used to put bananas in his mailbox while he was on sabbatical. He’d return to a collection of black-ripe bananas waiting for him right next to grant proposals and dissertation drafts.

Theoretically all the sugars don’t develop until the skin darkens, but I like bananas golden yellow. They seem starchy to me beyond that. Nevertheless, black is when you bake them into bread. They’re a little nothing while they’re still freckled, and they’re a lot of nothing in bread before they’ve gone spotted, yielding small to no flavor to the bread. The bananas have to be black for bread baking.

I imagine it’s like onions: even the strongest onion will mellow into sweetness as it cooks into translucence. Try baking onions in muffin tins with butter and cinnamon on top.

Regardless, banana bread is the best way to share a rotten banana.

Hair, The Non-Musical

I was having a good hair day first thing this morning. Then the lady walking the portly dog said to me, “We’re getting two things done at once: having a walk and taking a shower.” Yeah, I had my exercise shower all right. Not even running at that point was going to save my hair. My hair was reduced to rags flattened against my head by the time I made it home. Then the sun came out. Of course.

I used to make fun of my mother’s hair, and then I inherited it. Who needs the Weather Channel when you have hair like mine? If seventy-five percent of my head is curling, that’s your chance of rain. If it’s mostly frizzy, then you’ll have humidity. On rainy days it curls; it makes proper, even curls, but only when it rains all day.

Rain water does wonders for my hair, as does ocean spray. Despite the wind, a day at the beach finishes my hair with consistent body and wave. I’ve often considered throwing out all forms of hair product and filling a spray bottle with seawater.

One day a lady stopped me to say what nice naturally curly hair I had. She knew it was naturally curly because no licensed beauty professional would set a perm like that, with half the curl doing what it’s supposed to do with purpose and placement, then another large wedge of hair flying up like it’d been absent from school that day.

People who lose their hair during cancer treatments can have their hair grow back very different than when it left them. That’s been my experience with motherhood. Of course I have two-son’s worth of gray hair. Everyone says boys are so inexpensive, but those folks don’t pay the emergency room bills. I earn those grays quite honestly. They are a mark of accomplishment and I don’t dye them. I’m going for the Eileen Fisher model look, except mine’s not silver; it’s gray.

When I had younger hair, I asked my hairdresser what color hair I had. I’d been in the grocery store looking at dyes to figure out what fancy name my hair color was called. My hair dresser told me that people with my colored hair usually dyed it.

The beauty, the splendor, the wonder….

America A La Mode

My house was stuffed with apples the day after Halloween. I’d bought apples, and I’d bought extra apples for bobbing, and someone else had bought apples too. I had more apples than candy when All Saints Day arrived.

Apples, apples everywhere and not a drop of cider.

How do you like them apples?

So I decided to cook them. What could be more American than apple pie?

Apple pie is not listed in the South Beach Diet, nor could I find it in the myriad of church lady cookbooks—kind of makes you wonder about the Communist affiliations of these culinary guides? Yet behold, JOY OF COOKING has apple pie, page six hundred of my hand-me-down edition. Easy as pie, except it took a solid hour of nothing but chopping apples!

Pie IS easy, and pie crust is fragile as a campaign promise—easily made, easily broken. The election is over, and we shall just have to see how the filling of the next four years turns out.

Meanwhile, I wonder can you eat apple pie with wooden dentures? Did George Washington like cheese on his pie, or was he lactose intolerant? Perhaps he preferred cherry pie; after all, he chopped down a whole dang tree of cherries!

I don’t think this is the America George Washington envisioned; however, he and the fellow founders did make provisions to change this country as appropriate for its citizens and by its citizens. If you don’t like America, you can always change it. That is the beauty of freedom.

“That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst posses it.”
This quote from Goethe’s FAUST is the opening inscription in JOY OF COOKING.


By the way, why does the National Mall NOT have a shoe store?

Captain Jack Syndrome

This is a rerun from February, but as it's Halloween, it is appropriate now.


Last Halloween, I rode the hay wagon with a pirate. A full-grown man, dread locks and eyeliner—Captain Jack Sparrow, incarnate with Captain Morgan. He swilled rum in a goblet and had beer bottles stashed between the bales. He had to sit on the back of the wagon so he wouldn’t set the hay on fire with his cigar.

Johnny Depp has given us a new male psychosis: Captain Jack Syndrome. It’s what Peter Pan would have grown into if his nuts hadn’t been clipped off in a flying harness. Those early theatrical flying harnesses are the reason it’s tradition to put a woman in the role of Peter Pan. No matter what sex you send into the fly space of a stage, it’s going to come down in castrati range.

The play, PETER PAN, debuted in London in 1904, and introduced a new myth into modern culture: the boy who won’t grow up. Historians can argue, but I’m guessing childhood was a relatively new fad with the rise of the middle class. The new middle class economy of the Western World afforded families enough disposable income to allow offspring a luxury between infancy and the workhouse.

The Disney animated feature film was released in 1953. Then Disney released a live-action film in 2003 by the same title, and FINDING NEVERLAND in 2004, which explores the story behind the story, starring…Johnny Depp.

Who else has played this role? Robin Williams, as an amnesiatic Peter Pan in HOOK, who faces the formidable profile of Captain Dustin Hoffman, who later plays a the formidable theater manager in FINDING NEVERLAND—a wonderful continuance of overlapping metaphor of reality with the fiction, mimicking the tradition of the role of Captain Hook being played by the same actor who plays Father Darling. And Kevin Costner…yes, I said Kevin Costner, in WATERWORLD. Everybody thought WATERWORLD was an over-budgeted flop; they didn’t realize it was a futuristic remake of PETER PAN.

Peter Pan committed suicide in 1960. Peter Llewelyn Davies threw himself in front of a train, unable to reconcile himself as a person, and a fictional character. He failed to remain in Neverland. He landed.

Only in honesty do we have lies. Perhaps truth is a lack of memory.

Childhood is the formative period. But humans live a lot longer now. When will other stages of life be recognized as formative? What about middle age? If you have a survivorship of your fifties, shouldn’t that hold formative significance? I wonder if dementia and Alzheimer’s are symptoms of our recent past of more limited lifespans. Maybe over the next thousand years, mental disorders associated with aging will decline as we make the lifestyle shift into longevity. Or, maybe only in childhood is where we make memories; whereas, as adults, we forget how to make them, except around formal occasions like weddings and anniversaries. Legal events only.

Boys do grow up. Their bodies, despite their minds, take on mature form. Scientists have found the human male has closer genetic affinity with a chimpanzee than with a human female. Any woman could tell you that. Men make terrible house pets. If you want to live with someone who will obey, get a dog. Or how about a fish, if you’re seeking a quiet companion who will stay confined? Men are men. And sometimes they’re Captain Jack.

Transformers - Robots in the Eye

Sitting through TRANSFORMERS is like watching fluorescent light bulbs going on…going off. Like waking up from the same bad dream, then realizing the dream is still there.

I’ve seen the movie before, I swear I have, but I don’t remember it even though parts are familiar. I thought maybe if I watched it all the way through just once I’d be able to remember from here forward, but my eyes shut anyway.

The movie lacks pacing. It’s all go without enough funny lines or character depth to keep me conscious. It moves in a blur of action where even the transformations are smeared through a million pixels. The mechanical details are left to the toy designers. How the machines attain a multi-storied mass from a two-door sedan remains mechanical genius.

With the exception of the introduction scene, the good bots are indistinguishable from the bad bots. The Autobots behave as much like thugs as the Decepticons, taking over the lives of humans to suit their purposes. The Autobots don’t kill humans, but apparently abduction, grand theft auto, and general terrorizing aren’t on their no-no list. All this is to give preservation to a box that resembles a miniature Borg—you assimilate with the Allspark and it kills you, as with Optimus Prime.



As I mentioned above, the mechanical details of transformation are left to the toy designers. Not only does Hasbro have to create a duel-function toy, they have to make it transform in three-D, and it actually has to work.

What could be a better concept than two toys in one? It is efficiency and ingenuity combined at their finest. And if you lose the directions for how to transform it back, you could be forever out with your blaster arm hanging open as a car door.

Children, of course, can memorize thousands of intricate, sequential steps which do not require triple-strength reading glasses for the Japanese print. Children will only bring the toy to you once it’s one-third helicopter, half faceless robot, and partially functioning as a Betty Crocker oven. Transformers are marvelous Christmas gifts because they can keep a parlor full of adults occupied all day. See if Uncle George can get the chopper blade in. If not, take it to Aunt Gladys to get the broiler function to turn off.

At least Transformers don’t require batteries, only aspirin.

Biblical Elephants

This week I was visited by a Jehovah’s Witness, little man who laid his hand atop his Bible and declared how it had opened his eyes. I certainly believed that! He was the most bug-eyed man I’d ever met. Two ice-blue orbs, one shot off sideways and he barely ever blinked. When the good Lord opened the eyes of this man, He meant to keep them open! Little bug-eyed man stuck his mouth in the door and he just didn’t stop talking. End times, he said, and the answers are all in the Bible, all in the Bible, the answers are there.

After I respectfully declined a second visit from the habituators of Kingdom Hall, I came inside and began to contemplate the upcoming election. I opened my concordance and looked up donkeys and elephants. THERE ARE NO BIBLICAL ELEPHANTS! Jesus did NOT make his triumphant entry into Jerusalem paramount on a pachyderm. If all the answers are in the Bible, then God is surely a Democrat.

Here is a brief history of Biblical donkeys:


Balaam’s Donkey – Some say there’s safety in numbers, but in the book of Numbers from the Old Testament, there’s a talking donkey (Chapter 22). It’s like Shrek, really.

Mary’s Donkey – The donkey had to bear a nine-month pregnant woman all the way to Bethlehem just so Mary could give birth in a stable environment.

Jesus’ Donkey – Actually this was a juvenile donkey who probably developed premature arthritis from having to bear such a load at such a young age. He marched Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem, tripping over palm frond and hearing people yell, “Hose, Anna!” and yet he never saw the water girl.


Donkeys appear throughout the Bible, dead and alive, talking and mute, and even as the weapon of choice for Sampson who slew a thousand men with a donkey’s jawbone. The value of a donkey is certainly inherent in the commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ass” (Exodus 20:17).

Tina Fey Moment

I’m no Sarah Palin, but I had my Tina Fey moment. Friday night was the rehearsal for the charity fashion show. Final script was due at seven, my laptop was malfunctioning, I hadn't fed my children, and my husband wasn't coming home.

It's good to have a writing gig. Be even better if it were a paying one. Still, the ladies were very pleased with my descriptions of their outfits. One of them turned to me and said, "What did you do, major in English?"

Well, as a matter of fact….

I know nothing about clothes, but I’ve been in worse shape. I’ve written about growing turf grass and ghosted articles for important people who are highly articulate, but don’t perform well on paper. You don’t have to invent the words; you just have to arrange them. It doesn’t matter what you say, so long as you produce a memorable sound bite. Sarah Palin knows that, and Tina Fey capitalizes on it.

Good luck, candidates! May you be worthy of your speech writers!

The Mentalist Case

THE MENTALIST comes off as “The Minimalist” in its capacity for primetime entertainment. I thought it would be a show of clues and intrigue, kind of like CSI, which allows the viewer to piece together what’s going on. Instead, the telescoping is so strong in THE MENTALIST, you’d better take caution if you’re watching it in HD.

The concept is solid—the idea of the main character who is NOT a genius, but suffers a severe case of synesthesia, with a side helping of sleight-of-hand. He’s interested in magic with a good looking smile, and has mischief at his elbow. He’s also good at flushing a rabbit from a hat. But he’d do equally well in a competing time slot against BLUES CLUES. Honestly, CBS has him scheduled in the wrong venue. It’s like mistaking NATIONAL TREASURE for anything but a kids’ movie.

I am interested in THE MENTALIST because he gives credence to picking up every single detail of a day. He harvests the smallest items and pours them into the purpose of solving crime. He justifies paying attention to the marginalia of life. I do that! I thought they’d made a show about me! Turns out I don’t have to sue for rights.

Opening episode the pilot crashes. The most effective way to weaken a story is to throw in a therapist. MASH did that to end eleven seasons. Bob Newhart could get away with it because HE WAS the therapist. Deanna Troi was tolerated aboard STAR TREK’s ENTERPRISE because she kept abreast on the show. But even on TWO AND A HALF MEN, the exploits of Charlie Harper flat line in scenes with his therapist. (Not when Rose plays unlicensed psychologist, or when Berta gives him advice.) So I will give the Mentalist credit for lying to his therapist, and yet the scene still lingers beyond the point of interest. AFTER the session, we learn that the therapist murdered the Mentalist’s wife and child! This would have been interesting to know BEFORE he went in and talked to the guy. “You’re late; draw your weapon!” encapsulates the pacing of the entire episode, before it denouements into circumstances so sappy that even Horatio (“H”) of Miami’s CSI couldn’t upstage the melodrama.

I’m trying to like THE MENTALIST, I really am. I figure he is like me: turbo attention to detail, unarmed.

Crockery

Ah the electric potato peeler, the sandwich grill, the fondue set—the wedding gifts which mark the bounty of your first married garage sale. Maybe you use them once before you write the note—“Thank you so much for the lovely crystal bowl. I’ll think of you every time I dust it. And it goes so nicely with the matching seven others we received.”

The clay cooker I actually used. Maybe it was because I was a new bride and unafraid to try anything. In the kitchen.

First you soak both halves of the clay cooker in water, to allow the clay pores to absorb the moisture. Then as you heat the cooker, you essentially steam cook the food inside, very healthy for you and it seals in the juices and the flavors. It’s especially marvelous with sea bass…. Sorry, I got lost there in the reverie.

So why did I stop using my clay cooker, you may well ask. As you use the clay cooker, it turns colors: black and orange and deeper orange. The terra cotta becomes splotchy, which it’s supposed to do, but that scares me.

As a good little archaeologist, I learned that all ceramics fail eventually. Even CorningWare. However, I’ve never personally known CorningWare to fail, so I figure in a single lifetime, the CorningWare I received at my wedding will outlast me. The clay cooker, on the other hand….

Let’s put it this way: as an archaeologist, I never found a whole pot. I found pot sherds of Sand Tempered Plain and the occasional exciting St. Johns Checked Stamped, but never a piece larger than my hand. THEY ALWAYS BROKE. I don’t know how to emphasize to you that the original peoples of Florida ate sea catfish as much as their clay pots always broke. Perhaps if I didn’t know this fact first hand I’d feel safer putting my cooker into the oven.

Futhermore, you don’t preheat the oven. You place the clay cooker on the cold oven rack, THEN turn the oven on. Everybody knows you can’t shock clay or heat it unevenly; otherwise, the stuff will fly apart like a raw egg in a microwave. Firing kilns are brought up to temperature gradually on a steady increase. However, you put a clay cooker in an electric oven and guess what? That hard, hot element kicks on and shuts off, kicks on and shuts off, jeopardizing the fragile ceramic nature of a clay cooker. This may work more gradually with a gas oven, but I don’t have a gas oven. Thus I live in living fear of opening my oven door…and ruining yet another meal. With my clay cooker, I cannot rest a-sherd.

Smashing!

Most people try to avoid collision; at CERN, they’re seeking God.

It’s hard to talk about Big Bang without an exclamation, but in science, there are a lot of question marks. The beginning of the universe is one of them. Scientists working in Europe have gone underground to look for answers. They’ve been tunneling for over twenty years, and they’re only going around in circles.

If you thought Michael Phelps was fast, try seventeen miles 11,000 times per second, approaching the speed of enlightenment.

Collision may be cause for con-CERN; however, we would never have the Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup if it weren’t for the peanut butter running into the chocolate bar, and the chocolate bar running into the peanut butter. Sometimes collision is good. Sometimes it’s delicious. It could mean the end of the world.

Modern chemistry says things are made up of more than mere earth, wind, fire, and water. Water, for instance, is made of two hydrogens to one oxygen, and you may need to drink a lot of it if you use the NaCl shaker too much. Yes, science has rearranged the alphabet into the periodic table of elements, but it still comes down to a tool of description.

Each square of the checkered table has a little number indicating mass. Everything has mass. Even gas has mass. This is the curiosity. This is the question. When you think of the spirit world, or non-existence, non-mass can be a primary function. So if existence equates with mass, what lends mass to existence? Nuclear physicists posit there is a Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which gives mass to everything.

The world might end later this month when they do get those beams up to full speed and collide them, but I never could get the hang of September anyway.

May your day be fused with many happy occurrences!

Albert Bierstamp

To squeeze a Bierstadt painting on a postage stamp is mail fraud. His works ranged over six feet by ten feet, yet he’s been reduced to a one by one-and-a-half inch frame.

Albert Bierstadt painted canvases appropriate to the size of the American West. Founder of the Rocky Mountain School of Painting, his work is criticized for unrealistic lighting. Presumably those critics have never been to the Rocky Mountains, where light does bounce around clouds, off rock faces, a little stream here, a larger pool there, illuminating all kinds of depth in features you never thought possible. Okay, maybe Bierstadt gave the romance of sunset or storm, but I gotta tell ya, those storms are fast and violent and they move over the landscape quickly and dramatically and frequently. And sunsets do occur just about every day. Bierstadt captures the primordial, natural setting, where small detail stands out, even among grand majesty.

Despite his critics, Bierstadt was hugely successful even in his own lifetime. He made twenty-five thousand dollars off one painting. One painting. In the late Eighteen Hundreds! Now he’s offered on a first class stamp for forty-two cents. Talk about your downsizing—sheesh.

You cannot fit the American West on a postage stamp. You have to go there, and if you cannot go, standing before an original Bierstadt painting is a wonderful next-best-thing.

Fast Food

God invented fast food. From the time of Eden, to when Sir Isaac Newton got pelted on the head with an apple, we were doomed to the drive-thru lifestyle.

(Stupid Newton, though, instead of founding McDonald’s, he discovers gravity. Yes, gravity has over three billion served, but how much profit did Sir Isaac make from it? Even Fig Newtons come nowhere close to burger revenue.)

Eve had the right idea. Ever since that night in the garden when Eve said, “Oh honey, let’s don’t worry about inventing fire tonight. We can just eat these apples right off the tree!” Ever since that night, she recognized that FOOD REALLY DOES GROW ON TREES!

You cannot make a home-cooked meal between soccer and PTA. However, bananas come pre-wrapped in their own peel, grapes are already bite-sized, and an apple fits nicely in your hand. These foods are fast, portable, pre-packaged and require no refrigeration.

I’m not so much an advocate of “Slow Food” per se, as I am promoting what’s already at hand and up to speed. You don’t have to change your pace to eat right.

Condiments of the House

Fay was such a luxurious storm—water and electric the whole time, but enough rain to go canoeing in our front yard. Best depression I’ve ever had!

Everything in the house was clean—AT ALL TIMES! Standard hurricane preparation is you wash ALL your clothes and all the dishes before the storm. You don’t want to be two days into no power wearing dirty undies and have a dishwasher full of yuck. The shopping goes without saying. Weather veterans know to have supplies on-hand before open season on high winds. Of course I cleaned the bathtub too, I mean who wants to jump into a dirty bathtub and die of germs instead of a tornado?

The one thing you absolutely must must have on-hand is condiments. Running water, electric, phone service, and cable will be restored before you can get ketchup. I guarantee, your state, local, or federal government will ship gasoline to your area before they put a priority on mayonnaise. I am not joking. I’ve seen it. After hurricanes you can go to the grocery store, and yes, you can get water, you can get ice, bread, meat and cheese, but the first thing to be wiped out on the food store shelves is condiments. It’s the first thing everybody throws out of a warmed refrigerator. Fast food joints have to lock up their mustard packets because people steal them from behind the counter. One sauce per customer!

Ambient Poise

I’d be a terrific Northerner if I could ever get over being Southern. The quiet forces of snow-covered mornings and brittle-edged woods—those forces appeal to me. So does George Winston.

Winston is an artist you can listen to and forget you’re listening, while your mind wanders off into landscapes he paints with music. He plays piano solos as if to an audience of one. His DECEMBER album is based on snow, but as I’m from Florida, I see rain, dripping rain, running rain on gray days when you don’t have to go anywhere, when you can stay inside, drink coffee, think. The Monks of Santo Domingo may be great for a hangover, but George Winston makes space for contemplation.

I live in a little book-lined cottage in midst of a piney wood with smooth streets through a well-spaced neighborhood. In the springtime, I can open the windows and let birdsong fill up the house until it feels like the roof will lift right off. Sigh. Winston’s pianosong chimes in with the birds and blends the music of the outside with his own, and distracts me from the less aesthetic ambiance of my neighbor harvesting every single last tree in his yard, or the garbage truck growling down the road, or the housing development going up a mile away to provide more human noise and less bird habitat.

I’d love to hear the birds and they’d be fabulous, but I’m too well distracted by the mechanics of human life. I can’t listen to just nothing because there is no just nothing. Noises are like noses, but without the “I” to see what they’re sticking into.

George Winston solves my soul’s quest for free range.

Ironic Column

I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, well, I started watching, then I flipped to a feature length film, and when I came back, the Chinese delegation was just finishing the parade of nations. Ah, perfect timing. I saw the Chinese guy declare that this was going to be a “green” Olympics, then they set off all those fireworks and the carbon credits went up in smoke.

Yeah, I’ve been watching Phelps too. I feel bad for him, though, I mean here’s this guy shattering world speed records, and yet you can see the feet of a monitor WALK beside the pool to the golden finish. I mean those times seem so impressive and certainly faster than anything I could swim in probably one lap. You can see Phelps’ arms sprinting, scooping the water into him and making his body flow over it. It’s beautiful the way he moves in perfect economy, in graceful indulgence with a thirst for speed…and then you see these pant legs in the background, they’re not even jogging, they’re walking. That’s when you realize monkeys weren’t really meant to swim. At least with the bicycle races, there are cars to chase them.

So China has broken with the Grecian architectural traditions of ionic, Doric, and Corinthian. They’ve put their own style into that red, flaming Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Would they call it the “Ice Cube” if they hosted the Winter Olympics as well?

Wild Strawberries

Only in honesty do we have lies. Truth is a lack of memory.

Can fact only happen once? Does memory change fact? Is it necessary to remember? Why?

Author, Milan Kundera, is obsessed with lost lessons of war in forgetting. My theory is that war becomes less about the struggle of opposing ideologies/economies/religions/whatever than it is about the conflict of generations. Memory is the cause of war. What we primarily learn from history is an appetite for what to become, what to beat and be better than. Every war is to end war, and the veterans of one war pound their chests with pride until it becomes the drumbeat of the next army.

Some of us don’t want to grow up into war. Some of us don’t want that.

I remember wild strawberries. From my childhood. Once, when I was lost, not terribly lost, I just couldn’t match up the trail I was on with the map…. I was coming down a mesa in Wyoming. It’s nothing but sagebrush. Unless you’re in a canyon, you can pretty much see where you need to go, only sometimes you can’t figure out how to get there. Like writing essays. Anyway, I was low on water and I came across these strawberries, the tiny plants only conspicuous by their bright red fruit, small but potent. They packed more flavor in dime-sized portions than you could get out of Jolly Rancher candies. They were better than Swedish meatballs anyway.

Wild Strawberries, SMULTRONSTALLET, is a film about conflict of the generations set out in black and white. In the end, it is about a gray old man—his acceptance of death and of the next generation, peaceful acceptance which brings happiness. It is one of Ingmar Bergman’s best known films.

Bergman says in an interview that "Anonymity is unthinkable," then he goes on to say how desirable it would be. The Internet is the answer to that—desirable anonymity. The Internet could be the answer to global warming also.

Bergman died a year ago. I choose to remember him today.

La Mancha Man

I’ve been traveling the rituals and festivals of Spain in a big, over-giant book. There’s more than a hundred celebrations—when do those people work?—including a festival for married women and a festival for single ladies, a festival for mayors’ wives, even a festival for night favors. !

Many of the celebrations involve burning something—burning brooms, burning statues, burning trees, burning bulls. In fact a lot of the festivals involve bulls, from the running of the bulls, to various forms of taunting, including enticement of bulls to jump into bodies of water. Apparently since the earliest Minoans, bull sport is kept alive on the Mediterranean in the country of Spain.

The most remarkable aspect of all this pageantry is the absolute cleanliness of the elaborate costumes. Through the muddy countryside to dusty city streets, right down to the detail of white socks on the children, these people are clean. Whether they are men in white lace skirts in Saint Fatbelly’s Festival, or a clown being “stoned” with potatoes, the colors are true and the whites are white. The only exception is the Tomato Battle, of course.

Spain’s motto is PLUS ULTRA, “Further Beyond!” Indeed. The origin of Don Quixote makes a lot more sense after reading this book. He is the ultimate Mancha Mancha Man!

Homeland Security

We were so distracted by Homeland Security we took our eye off home and land security. The Federal Government gave us a Greenspan that stretched our credit limits to the subprime.

If it comes down to growing my own vegetables I'll starve. The fastest way to kill a plant is to give it to me. Plants are basically vegetable matter stuck in dirt instead of a pretty water vase. Disposability overcomes their nutritional value in my hands. I can wither a houseplant at a glance. Imagine what I could do to a whole food crop!

Demolition—that’s the business to be in right now. Mashing down houses abandoned by residents, stripped by bandits, ruined hulls too expensive to fix versus the cost of bull dozing.

And secondly—fixed-term marriages. A five-year, or a twenty-year marriage. Sort of like a savings bond, it gains interest as it approaches maturity. As the officiate, you get paid for the marriage license and divorce fees up front at the beginning, which bites off any cost of inflation for the happy/unhappy couple, then the marriage dissolves at the designated time. It’s really just an elaborate prenuptial agreement, where all current and future assets are divided upon at the commencement, instead of argued over at the termination, at which point they can either recommit or leave it be.

Marriage isn't what it used to be when it was invented. People live longer now. You say "I do" and you're going to keep “doing” for like 50 years or so. And how much of that really works out? (If we had to go to high school indefinitely we’d never graduate.) Whereas, if a couple can commit to five years, just five years, they might make it longer than they think. A time-limited marriage would force them to learn to commit, instead of taking the relationship for granted, and then wandering off from each other.

Mum

I have a Scottish friend who wrote a story about a boy and his mum. What’s a “mum”? my kids ask, then, Why does he say “mom” that way?

“Mum” is not American English. It does not mean “mom” and it has nothing to do with keeping silent. (In America, very little has to do with keeping silent.) However, most grown Americans do recognize “keeping mum” as an idiom of the British Isles. We just have no idea how to practice it.

Director Niall Johnson has made a film of that title, KEEPING MUM, to demonstrate the expression to those on the West Atlantic. Despite the cast of Her Majesty’s Royal Regulars, this is not a stiff British flick. Any hint at Jane Austen is annihilated by the role of Patrick Swayze as the sleazy golf professional. “I see your wife,” he tells the vicar and adds a glance loaded with double meaning.

Yes, this movie’s primary concern is the vicar’s wife, who is nearly about to have an affair with Patrick Sleazy. In-between her nearly about-to’s, Mrs. Vicar hires a housekeeper, whom she subsequently learns offed people, before multiple decades in an institution for the criminally insane. Question is, is Mrs. Housekeeper at it again?

There is another twist, but I’m not going to spoil it. That’s what the movie’s all about, after all: keeping mum. My public library was forethoughted enough to have this film on the shelf. Perhaps your local institution has been so forethoughted as well in its collection. Check it out.

Jellicle Cast

In 1962, Lillian Hellman said Broadway was a bore. In the last five years, ballet has been in a slump—infused too much with choreographers that come from modern dance. And yet from 1982 to 2000, CATS was the longest running Broadway show.

Hellman’s complaint was the modern playwrights, more concerned with commercial viability than art, too afraid to produce a flop. Of course CATS dropped back to an established writer, T. S. Eliot, and his poetry of the 1930’s, conjoined with the contemporary popularity of composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I saw CATS in Chicago, then later from a catwalk in a smaller town. We weren’t very well dressed when I saw it in Chicago—we had on everything we owned, but I’m from the south in the January wind off Lake Michigan. We’d been walking around Chicago, beautiful Chicago, crisp, blue sky, shrieking wind that must have blown the trash elsewhere, clean streets with snow parked on the curbs, and us skating the sidewalks slick with ice. My ears were still ringing with frostbite.

Second time I saw CATS I dressed all in black, showed up at a stage door at a designated time. The door slid open and I crept in, climbed a ladder, and stealthfully walked out on a lighting rail over the audience. If you moved too much, the lights shook, and you could see that on stage. I had to be very still. Those catwalks are sturdy, built to hold the heavy ellipsoidals and freshnels, but they’re not designed for people to walk around on them during a show. I didn’t pay five hundred dollars for my seat, and I wasn’t wearing formal attire, but the sound swelled up into the ceiling, and I swear I had the best seat in the house.

I have two cats, or rather, they have me. One is every color God could think of, splotched in a Picasso pattern. The other believes she is the queen of Siam, but has the ring-tail of a tabby.

I’ve always thought of CATS as a celebration of non-menstruation. There is absolutely no bloating or cramping evident in this fine display of skinniness backed by exquisite muscle tone. The splendors of exercise and diet must render those dancers not about to have kittens. “They had to get real stretchy people,” my kid says. Yes, real stretchy people. And the costumes are amazing. Precision tailoring to accentuate the human form while wearing a cat suit—brilliant. I mean cats do have that sensuality, well, mine don’t, but the flirting, the stretching, the flexibility—even my dear little cats have that in common with their rogue cousins, and with the tremendous performers of CATS, who make cat life look so easy, while they make human dance so beautiful.

Poof

The machinery isn't working well today--I heard that line in a movie called PROOF and thought it was useful. I can remember what I wanted to write about, but I can't remember how I wanted to say it. It's not good if I can't remember how to say it.

I watched a movie version of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It was dull as the book. Stephen Dedalus reminds me of Henry David Thoreau, who over-intellectualizes something as organic as growing beans.

There was a time in our human history, maybe at the very start of human history, when life and art were one. We began to separate them, though, as we began to examine things out of context, much as visual art in a modern sense is sterilized into pale galleries instead of being integral to the architecture where its individual meaning can be lost and/or it informs on the larger structure. There is merit to examining text and context individually, depending on whether the interpretation provides greater meaning.

Thoreau takes beans out of context. "I want to know beans!" he says. But the way he did it, it was like putting navel lint in a Petri dish and expecting it to give you a dissertation on the last digit of pi. Poor Thoreau, he had no idea what Emerson was talking about (who does? but E says it all so beautifully) so Henry David had to fabricate his own intellectualism by doing something freaking farmers had done for centuries, but academically reinvent it by writing about it. Just because you write something down doesn't mean that you've given it meaning, and Thoreau did no more than duplicate a farmers' almanac.

In my next life I'm going to be a nuclear physicist. I would have been one in this life, but I was scared off by the math. Math is a language. It is a way of talking about concepts. Numbers have personalities, else why would they have different values or characteristics. The movie, PROOF (Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins), is about a genius mathematician whose equations dissolve into poetry. He begins to go over his proof, line by line, those algebraic letters reform into English words. The other characters call him crazy because he does this--it isn't MATH anymore! Nobody recognizes him as poet.

It doesn't matter if a writer writes about writing. Nor does it matter if a writer uses a thin metaphor to write about writing. All elements as they approach their limit change form. Matter turns into energy. Solid into liquid into gas. Life into death. It is elemental and beautiful, it is aesthetic and utilitarian. You can't make life or art more than they are through academics or any other means because that will send you on a tangent and you'll never reach infinity--art, life, meaning, beauty will disappear in your hand.

Smoke Screen

My father taught me how to drink, gamble, cheat, and tell a lie. There’s not many dads out there who realize the value of good vice.

Dad’s drinks are so strong, I learned not to like liquor. I found I was safe to stick with beer and wine, alcohol that isn’t made stronger than it already comes.

Dad dealt me hands of black jack and lectured me not to take a hit on seventeen. He taught me that the house always wins, and to scream “PAY THE TABLE” when I caught him dealing off the bottom of the deck.

He also taught me how to hide food, how you could flick a morsel of something off a toothpick into a shrubbery, and how much unwanted cuisine you could slip inside a potato skin, then to smile at the host, and say it was all delicious.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a great Father's Day movie, about a dad who doesn't necessarily lie, but he reweights the truth, with his son as a constant witness. The spin cycle runs strongly through the issues he's washing, from ice cream to cigarettes. He is a completely honest character, despite his skills in debate and logic. In the end, he stabs through the whirl of upheaval with pure honesty in a solitary moment that affects himself, his son, and his career. And he becomes more powerful than ever.

This movie is so cleanly put together, you have to believe its makers are deceiving you, but the only deception is the lack of deception, right clean down to the fact that you never see the protagonist smoke. He is reputed to be such a great smoker, that his enormous nicotine tolerance is what saves him when he is captured and overdosed with nicotine patches. The lobbyist for alcohol takes a drink for every second of screen time when she isn't speaking, and the firearms advocate is packing, most definitely packing, but true to tobacco advertising restrictions, we never actually see the protagonist take a puff. Most certainly this film takes heavy swings at political correctness at all levels of social and private habits, but despite its title, it's actually a promotion to do the right thing.

My dad never taught me how to smoke. He quit when I was little, so little, I don’t even remember him ever smoking. He hasn’t smoked in nearly forty years. Me neither.

Elect Shun

I’m running for office. Any office. Any office that’ll pay me to sit in it and do work. In other words, I need a job. More than that, I need money.

Barack Obama has sent me two of the exact same letters. Two of them, twins, about a month apart. Form letters. They’re in response to my letter to him extolling reform for the American publishing industry. I propose we pave the way to peace via an American literature worthy of the United States military. In order to do that, we need to crack open the printing houses entrenched in genre books. Let a new era of words begin!

I’m still not published.

I sent the same letter to Barbara Bush. I figure Obama’s got Oprah, and Mrs. Bush Senior’s got a whole foundation for literacy and education. Besides, anybody who can teach George W. to read has got some merit. So I pit the parties against each other. I’ll see which one can do something for me.

Haven’t heard from Mrs. Bush.

When women got the vote in 1920, my grandmother went down to the precinct to cast her ballot. Turns out she voted exactly opposite what my grandfather had voted for, effectively cancelling out his vote or any part of the democratic sway of their household. That was the first and last time my grandmother voted.

I addressed two hundred envelopes by hand. Call it my contribution to the election process. It’s for a local politician, invitations to his fish fry. My husband had volunteered to do it, but I did it. It’s not even the party I favor. Apparently I’m also going to be issued a tee shirt and serve fried fish at his campaign rally. Maybe I should follow the example of my grandmother and exercise my right NOT to vote.

Funny thing, of those two hundred envelopes addressed to the ’80 section of my zip code, I knew not one single person. Not one. You’d think, out of two hundred people, in my own small town, I’d know somebody. Not nobody. It occurred to me, though, they’re the rich people, that’s why I don’t know them. They’re rich; I’m not. I need money; they’ve got it. The only thing we have in common is that we’re all going to this fish fry. Hey maybe there is something this candidate can do for me after all!

Ading

Ading is better than subtracting, especially when it comes to income. So www.rev2rev.blogspot.com has gone commercial.

I haven’t told Bill Dovany. He doesn’t read this blog, which is why I don’t have to split the profits with him. Truth be known, Bill Dovany is just some guy I met on the Internet. He says he’s incredibly handsome, but when he says “surfer,” I bet he means keyboard rather than surfboard. He tried to visit my house once, but he got lost on MapQuest, so we’ve never actually met.

A prostitute on National Public Radio said that if you didn’t have your own website, you were nobody. So I’ve crawled out from under my rock to participate in this folly of humankind. This is my first website. It’s over a year old now and since August of 2007, it has had a fresh post every Friday for our readers’ weekly delight, or at least something to pass the time until the weekend. The addition of ads is another stage of progression into upright posture presence on the Internet. I’m curious to see what Google will run on this site. Who do they think our demographic is?

Google, of course, is very generous. Despite what their motives may be, right now you are accessing this site free of charge, and with a free Google membership, you can post comments on the posts. Google also hosts the site with no charge to its contributors. And Google gives me a chance to make some money from the site.

There’s an awful lot I’m not allowed to say or I get kicked off Google, which is the modern equivalent to having your white blood cells excommunicated. Besides, the company title says it all: “Go-ogle.”

The Earnest of Being Important

Actor, Colin Renfrew, has a face created to carry mutton chops of a Dickinsonian era. He is to the manner born, in his aspect, and fits nicely with the cast of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. No one, in fact, is earnest. That is the comic point of the movie, based on the play by Oscar Wilde—there is no one named “Ernest” and all the characters are just play-acting.

I walked out on a live production at the local college. It was so boring, the way it was staged with an exaggerated lack of blocking, that there was more head-nodding than applause. I walked across the street to a fashionable coffee shop and had a piece of chocolate cake to put the second act to shame!

I did better with the Colin Renfrew version. I actually stayed awake a lot longer, with only a big nap in the middle, but I was conscious at either end. I came to understand that “Ernest” or “earnest” was a label to aspire to for a couple of young cads toying with the hand of love. As the story progresses, they become earnest, but does Ernest become himself?

Ernest Hemingway has a very true and masculine name. Much like his career. Poor Ernest became a literary superstar before his works were allowed to become great. He was untouchable before he learned the fine art of craft or submitted to the careful skill of editing. He loved his stories the way he loved himself. He imbued his tales with emotion beyond the words on the page. If only the editors had not been so afraid of his aura.

Despite how much I agree with Stephen King's sentiment that the first draft should be viable, my favorite Hemingway books are the ones published posthumously. Ouch. Would that no one says that about my works. True at First Light and Garden of Eden have the necessary craft to solidify the structure, and make the structure bear meaning beyond the flimsy members of the pages. Hem got lucky with Sun Also Rises. Islands in the Stream (of consciousness) could have been a great book. As it is, it's a classic because it's by Ernest Hemingway. Ernest’s novels lack craft, though I’m sure he meant well.

Speed Bracer

Saw SPEED RACER. Best reunion of the Osmond Family look-alikes I’ve ever seen. Including Chim Chim. Didn’t Susan Sarandon once play Jane Goodall? No, that was Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey. The bad guy looks like Tim Curry, but isn’t. Still, you know he’s the bad guy by virtue of the resemblance. I tell you what, though, if my car breaks down, I’m taking it to John Goodman Tire. He can build a car in 32 hours! From scrap!

For a fast-paced car, it sure is a slow movie. The slipstream editing leaves you wondering if someone forgot to press “compile”. I’m not sure it was meant for human consumption; though I’m positive a computer could understand it. The first third of the movie is presented as if time does not exist. Director Wachowski pushes lack of chronology past the margin of artistic, and into confusing. The movie is incorrectly rated PG, when it should have been PhD for cognitive ability required.

Go go see SPEED RACER! Nice Mormon family like that with five kids, including a chimpanzee and spittle in the trunk. And Susan Sarandon doesn’t look a day older than her plastic surgery.

Lift

I've been thinking of having a mental breakdown. Seems like a nice time of year for it. My great grandfather had one, of course he was in Micanopy at the time. Preaching. Leading a prayer meeting when his young son burst in, announcing he'd found a nest of baby rattlesnakes. It just wasn't that kind of church.

Tina Fey's got nothing on me. She makes 30 ROCK look like 3RD ROCK. And really, Alec Baldwin and John Lithgow could be interchangeable. With Denny Crane. "I was once a spaceship captain!" William Shatner exclaimed in realistic clarity on an episode of BOSTON LEGAL.

All elevators in the state of Florida are inspected in August. Signed by the Governor, the updated certificate has to be displayed in public view for its users, same as a Certificate of Occupancy—something the fire marshal can easily find when he doesn't want to fill out paperwork.

I worked for a boss who managed to disconnect the emergency telephone in the service elevator. He did it inadvertently. Nearly. In an effort to make gains toward greater economic efficiency, he was reviewing the phone bill, trying to cut unused lines. To be honest, I didn't know what that number was for either. My boss picked up his phone and dialed the number. One of the employees answered.

"Where are you?" my boss said.

"I'm in the elevator, sir."

My boss looked at me.

"You can't cut that line," I told him.

"Couldn't we group it as one of the roll-over lines?"

No.

The slowest elevator is in Sanford, Florida. It is laughably slow. I had to visit a trophy shop on the second floor. The building only has two floors. When I called the trophy shop to ask for directions, they warned me that a ride on the elevator was well worth the wait. It was comically inconceivable that any piece of modern equipment could move so recklessly lacking in speed. I thought I was in a dumb waiter, the emphasis here being on DUMB. I could have walked up and down the stairs twice and still beat this elevator to top. Yes, I was smiling when the door opened. "See, didn't we tell you?" said the man behind the counter.

You endure by enduring, but in an elevator, you have a choice of going up or down. Taking the elevator is the very process of elevating, or alleviating, if you double the “l” and change the vowels. I figure I'm in the subbasement now, so there's really no other way but up.

Universal Noise

Fifty-seven octaves below Middle C, a black hole resonates on B Flat. And it is the only note on the tuba that agitates alligators. B Flat is the key to the universe. The world may be round, but the universe B Flat.

British women speak English at a higher pitch than American women. American automobile horns are tuned to the key of F. “Air ball!” begins on F and drops to D, chanted in total and rhythmic mass unison. What sounds are universal and what are national? What are the implications? What are the explications? Clearly I need more fiber in my diet.

Universal tones and intervals exist. People overuse an expression because something in it appeals as cosmic dialogue, like “woo hoo”. The expression “uh oh” is the only glottal stop in our language. Is it a vestigial expression left over like an appendix from Middle English? Where did it come from? Why do we keep it? Will it be added to the Oxford English Dictionary? Certainly fads shape what we use, as well as our own physical evolution. There is evidence that cavemen did NOT say “ugh”. That deep back sound was a physical impossibility by the way the jaw was mounted. We are social animals. The need for dialogue at the broadest level may be why we seek God. It could explain the need to write blogs, and the hope for personal response from complete and total strangers.

Perhaps these sounds and expressions imply the limitation of language. Some emotions may be beyond what we can utter in recognized words, or do we create hyperbole of emotion by speaking outside of language? Is this a radical breakthrough in cosmic theory? Or is it cosmetic noise?

Provincial Knowledge

I'm going to call it St. Ives device; whereby, I begin talking about one thing, then I'm going to feed you a whole bunch of information which is factual and interesting and will make you forget where I started, until I return to my original topic, at which point I’ll pull it all together as a clever drawstring bundle. I'm sure there's a name for that already, but it is very like the riddle of traveling to St. Ives, where on my way I met a man with seven wives, seven cats, seven kittens, etcetera, but in the end, only I traveled to St. Ives. I myself for real have never been to St. Ives, but it is a provincial seaside town, and just north Penzance.

In my own provincial seaside town, we have a light house, a three hundred year old fort, dolphins in the bay, a breeding colony of artists, twenty-one miles of beach and the rest is history! No, my town does not have the volumes I was accustomed access to at the University. And yet, even in our tiny provincial collection, especially tiny and especially provincial at the branch library, I was trolling around one day and found a copy of the Popol Vuh, which is the exact book of Mayan mythology I needed for my language and culture class at college to draw similarities between the ancient story of crossing into the afterlife and the current situation of Mayan immigrants into the US. My Professor talked about the Popol Vuh, but its very existence at the University library seemed mythological, yet here it is, in my own little town. (Could be the original copy.)

Bangladesh has had digital TV for over 20 years. They didn't have any TV before then, but when they did get it, they got it with the best current available technology infrastructure. Which was digital.

I don't know what I'm going to do in 2009. I've pioneered the non-digital age of electronics to its end so it seems. I think my TV's out of focus now, but I can't really tell. I don't watch very much, and when I do, I'm usually drinking something, especially if I have to endure the Disney Channel. I could have picked up satellite years ago, but I didn’t. Mostly I just watch movies.

My VCR is stuck on French. When you press "play" it says "lecture", and "rewind" is "rebobinage." I'm passively learning a second language while I enjoy movies. It is the French revolution against the English channels.

Pirates of Penzance opened in 1879, five years before the Prime Meridian was set at Greenwich. France and England were both vying for the zero longitude line, each for their own national observatory, but England won out, with the proviso that everyone would adopt France's unit of measure as the world's standard--the meter, which was actually accurately based on the Earth's circumference given in calculations by Eratosthenes in Alexandria back around 100 B.C. (Significantly NOT the measurement of Earth's size used by Columbus, who judged the Earth to be a great deal smaller and thus bumped into the Americas unexpectedly on his way to India.) So England got the Prime Meridian and immediately reneged on using the French metre--England absolutely put her foot down...until recently. And recently we have overcome the Y2K problem (which Alan Greenspan admits to having contributed to by entering computer code in the Sixties in double zeros to indicate 1900). Starting in Greenwich and circling the globe we managed to keep airplanes in the air and financial markets on the ground (which now has reversed itself but not through the cause of computer miscalculation). Yet Unix code today may still create a Y-2K38 problem because of its inability to handle leap seconds, which is the exact same problem young Frederic has in Pirates of Penzance. His contract with said pirates holds him indentured until such time as his twenty-first BIRTHDAY, and NOT his twenty-first YEAR. As Frederic was born on the day of leap year, he will not celebrate his twenty-first birthday until 1940. Obviously this creates a most ingenious paradox, as 1940 was over sixty-eight years ago, and yet that is how the play is still scripted. The funny thing is, is that it's still funny, it's maybe even more funny with this built in vintage humor that no one's likely to remove. Perhaps you have a greater chance at success if you write something not for all time, but for your time, and then see how it endures.

For the time being what it is, we have Google. Thank God for Google. Even in the provinces we have Google, and Google can take you to a nice little ditty ripped off from Gilbert and Sullivan and retitled “Modern Major Googler.” If all goes right, simply paste this link into your browser and enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9KHc6qLXQ

If the link doesn’t work, ask Bill Dovany what he’s getting paid for.

Truck Nuts

I am all in favor of testicles. They are a gender issue, not a neutered subject. Just because your dogs and cats may go around without any balls doesn’t mean you have to have your truck fixed. Though they may look like man’s attempt to accessorize, to put a ban on truck nuts is to castrate the whole democratic system. By nabbit, you should have the right to keep and bear truck nuts. They are an inalienable expression of: “I have the horse power of a stallion (and I’m leaving you geldings in the carpool)!”

I’m going to put a set of truck nuts on my Jetta. If they’re prohibited, then I’ll get a bumper sticker that says “GO NADS!”

Cape-Abilities

Back in the seventeen hundreds somewhere, guy named Capability Brown, landscape architect, used to walk onto English country estates and declare: “Place has capabilities!” Transformed the formal French garden into what we now revere as the English countryside, vast lawns and trees and lakes, the beauty of the natural England, aesthetic of a golf course. He didn’t wear a cape, but he revived the pretty of what was already there.

Stretch of road between Grandin and Florahome, short stretch between two small places, is where I came upon a dead man. He wasn’t really dead, turns out he was just a drunken epileptic whose wife had thrown him out of a car while they were having a fight. I try to look for the place in the road where it happened, how I came around the bend on a new moon night, no street lights. There was a rise just beyond where the man lay, one arm in the lane, place where I stopped my car. I can pick out three places where it happened. One of them has got to be right. I’m unaccustomed to rescues. I fail the details.

An auto accident makes very little noise. Perhaps it makes no noise at all if I hadn’t been there to witness it. Saw it coming a quarter of a mile before it happened: a delivery van accelerating, weaving. The guy smashed his job right into a guardrail, ran the engine block square into the blunt end of the rail as if he were aiming for a clenched fist. The van bounced back and slowly rolled off on its rims toward the opposite shoulder. The driver wasn’t hurt, but he’d sure lost his job. And he knew it. Big man. Wept. Nothing I could do about it.

After, I drove to the end of the earth, but the beach was crowded with spring breakers. I imagined I was some spectacle to them, fully clothed and surrounded by families of bathing suits. Still, it felt good to put my toes in the cold ocean, to know there’s something bigger out there than I am.

Superman dated Lois Lane, “Low Us Lain.” I watched his movie again recently. It’s back from when Gene Hackman had hair, before Marlon Brando became a Godfather, and when a white man could still get away with a name “Jor-El”. It’s when Christopher Reeve was still alive and could fly.

The movie was filmed on grand stages before sets were digitized into virtuity, filmed when the term “green room” meant “area of refreshment.” Director Richard Donner takes his time to show us the grandeur of the ice palace and the wonder of Superman’s abilities. We go through minutes of flying dreams, when flying was new, and those were the best dreams anyone could ever have. My gosh the movie is slow, slow motion super powers, slow, seductive Hollywood, won’t you sleep in my crypt-tonight? The only thing Superman does quickly is change clothes, and even then he’s got his briefs on the outside.

Solving the Y2K problem was supposed to keep airplanes in the air and businesses grounded. Yet the exact opposite has happened. The word “sublime” became confused with “subprime” in the same way you could reverse “focus” and “fuck us”. This place, this economy, this market needs something out there bigger than I am, bigger than my mortgage, bigger than a thousand other mortgages, someone with cape-abilities…Ben Bernanke in tights!

In the meantime, here are emoticons to express what you can’t bring words to.

EMOTICONS for today’s economy by C. J. Godwin

:-) No new subprime lenders went bust today

:-( Another mortgage lender filed for bankruptcy

=I:-)= The Fed is going to adjust the rate

*:o) Bernanke is a bozo

:(=) Jimmy Carter led a better oil crisis

+<:-) The Pope to make an appeal for economic stability

}:- Bullshit market

~~ 8 Bearshit market

:-o Uh-oh, what was that?

:-@ I hear screaming

B) Now donning protective goggles

.-) Tell me when it’s safe to open both eyes

:- # Kiss your ass good-bye

Conservation Peace

Stand just in the right place in my yard and all the trees align. They’re not trained to do that. They were planted that way. Row by row, column by column, past my yard, beyond the neighbors’ to the very edges of the development they form a grid like soldiers at attention, watchful over the houses in their ranks. I live in a recycled neighborhood, an old pulpwood farm, where land had already been cleared by humans for one use, and now has a residential zoning. Despite the carbon Sasquatch that I drive, I’m proud of where I dwell.

Furthermore, I am a garbage snob. I play a little game with myself every week. I try to get my recycle bin to hold more items than my garbage can. Everything is disposable when you come down to it, and perhaps the ability to waste is what has made this country truly great. I don’t care. I like the challenge to see how many things I can recycle. This little contest often starts with the grocery story about avoiding telltale signs of the big bad non-biodegradable containers.

I’m not greenwashing here. I’ll give you my disclosures so I don’t get caught in some biohazardous scandal. Yes, I made the conscious decision to use disposable diapers, and I swore I’d teach my babies to recycle. Triangle formed with arrows was the first shape that they learned. Thank the Lord for disposable diapers and may we find a more environmentally acceptable way to deal with them.

I throw away glass. One of the most recyclable substances there is and I pitch it in the garbage, yes, I do that. Glass is not picked up curbside in my neighborhood. If you try to sneak it in the recycle bin, the crew will throw beer bottles all over your yard. I shun the extra effort to store the glass and haul it for appropriate disposal. My bottles are providing necessary air pockets in the overcrowded landfill to allow aerobic decay.

I do not, however, put grease down the sink. Anybody with a septic system knows not to do that. And I am not running a prostitution ring nor have I ever propositioned sex in a public bathroom. Not that these things are inherently bad for the environment, but they do create a lot of wood sacrifice for the sake of newsprint.

God bless those of you who read this off your computer screens without making a hard copy. Your carbon emission credit will surely be used by some less worthy country.

The apostle, Paul, was the first Christian to champion paper-reduction practices. He wrote e-pistles, no?

Unlike Paul, I am the most unpublished writer on the planet. My ratio of production to publication is very out of balance, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t try. Oh I try all right, and computer technology has enabled me to try at a faster pace.

The absolute fasted way to get rejected is to send an e-query. I did a multiple electronic query over Christmas. I got e-jected within the hour, some within two minutes. It was outside the business day. It was a holiday. It was depressing.

Yet I hadn’t spent a stamp to get rejected and I hadn’t butchered a tree for someone to write bad news on it. (No one’s ever stood up for the free rights of electrons and I burden them without consciousness.)

E-submission gives me a larger scale on which to multiple query and I can readily manipulate my package to the individual preferences of the recipients, for instance whether they accept writing samples attached or only in the body of the e-mail. Printed cover letters, postage stamps, mailboxes, SASE’s become obsolete. I have increased e-missions for a better environment!

So far, the results are still the same.

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST April 2008 - Review

I know when the placement of a piece of furniture works because it is invariably adopted by the cat, who has excruciatingly picky taste. However, when I’m not consulting the cat on matters of interior design, I do look to such sources as professional design books available in the public library and that ever faithful subscription to ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST.

Now ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST, or “AD” as its intimates know it, is the most pompous, bombastic-perpetrator-of-style magazine you’re likely to run into on a casual graze of the magazine rack. It is the glossy tabloid of the rich and the infamous, or those affluent enough to afford a complete lack of taste.

I truly do love AD, you must understand this, its thick pages, the heavy weight like money in my hand. It is the best over-priced subject of my pot shots, and I have annotated the April 2008 issue for pure pleasure. Feel free to follow along in your own copy, as I will reference page numbers.

Photo front cover – light, airy, tropical. You can’t really “swing” on those couches because they’re suspended by FOUR ropes to the ceiling, instead of two, but they must be easy to clean under. Furthermore, look at the view out the window—it’s a freaking bridge! This real estate is half way built under a causeway!

The Connecticut house design by Susan Green (pp. 84-90) – she is hideous and has done nothing new or remarkable. It’s a study in conservatism.

Mongolian yurts in the Serengeti (pp. 114-120) with bed coverings from India? Everything is foldable, everything is moveable, okay, this is innovative and practical. Thank goodness they didn’t try to picture the army of servants it takes to actually fold up one of these yurts and pack it in an umbrella case. Still, here is creation spawned from amino acids. Here is world-wide cross pollination of style and practicality informing at a new level. It works. As long as you have that army of servants, it works.

Meat Loaf house – Nice tones. Same as everywhere. Who cares? It is unremarkable, except to know that it’s Meat Loaf’s, who has specifically non-decorated the interior as rock and roll. Come on! This is Bat out of Hell, how interesting is it to rebel against that? Sports memorabilia? His house is a study in squandered opportunity; it looks like the reflection of unwasted youth. Furthermore, look at page 140, then flip back to page 138—it’s the same damn table! Well, not the exact piece of furniture, but it’s two candle sticks, a plant and a bowl, same arrangement, even same angle of the photograph!

Scandinavian heights over Central Park (pp. 164-235) is warm and delicate. I like. You could complain that because the wall and ceiling surfaces are painted white on white that the interest of the architecture is hidden; however, for the context that the designers create, the effect is like layers of a snow drift.

D. C. house renewal (pp. 172-179) is summed up by the motto pictured in the library above the fireplace: “Remember the Dead.”

I’d love to write a story about a person who lives in that glass house in California (pp. 182-191), a fish tank overlooking the Pacific. Of course the story would end when an earthquake brings all pretension smashing down in shards of lethal edges.

Thai died at Bangkok House (pp. 192-197) in Bangkok, Thailand. This was probably a really gorgeous dark wood interior, which now looks like an over-sized bird cage for humans. Is that like a giant stadium looking over the trees onto the grounds? See the turret on the left, page 192? Maybe they rent out the yard for game day parking.

New York glamour (pp. 198-203) looks like it was highlighted in lipstick. I love New York. X. That couch with the heavy teal curtaining…what do they DO on that couch?

Found modern and unlikely art in San Francisco (pp. 206-213) – I wasn’t going to make any comments at all about this magazine, about this issue…I was going to keep quiet, keep my thoughts to myself, be polite until I came upon this article, at which point I must, I really must express some opinions. First, it is illegal to possess any remains of a marine mammal without special permitting. Exhibit A, mounted on pedestal page 207 is a bleached whale vertebra, as identified by the magazine’s captioner. If it isn’t bad enough that AD condones use fur fabrics and leather upholstery! All of Greenpeace and whale watchers should descend upon this dwelling and demand the proper curation of this ecofact. Furthermore, and next to a leather chair I might add, is a cobbler’s bench, probably the symbol of oppression for some poor generations of shoe menders, which here becomes a side table to the effluent (yes, that’s the word I meant). Monet’s self portrait? Good gracious I’d like to have a portion of these people’s credit line, though I must say, even Monet looks bored with them. And the culinary studio—aren’t we over the checkerboard kitchen? This is the pinnacle of pretension.

Bora Bora looks just like Disney Disney (pp. 214-219), still I wouldn’t mind a few nights booked there, charged to that resident in San Francisco.

I like the wild craziness of the style in Manhattitude (pp. 222-227), except I could do without the trunks, especially the bashed damaged one that keeps appearing—it’s pictured in the sitting room and the living room, watch closely.

Interesting reflections in Belgravia (pp. 228-233). Did they move that mirror from the entrance hall into the library, or did the house come with identical images? The couches of the library are vibrant rather than relaxing. Those must be some pretty boring books on the shelves. And why is there a lamp on the floor by the window? Okay, I’m really not sure what a lot of the art is in here, but the big black bug thing framed on the wall in the study looks like the portrait of a black widow spider, just the subject for a husband’s office, no?

So here are harmony and irony replete within the pages of this April issue of AD. Ah, and here is May’s.

Cutting Edge

I told my husband if he didn’t sharpen the knives I’d cut his heart out with them. This is a gruesome threat considering how dull those knives are. I was mutilating healthy fresh vegetables with dull blades, juicing more than I was dicing. He gave me a chopper chopper thing instead.

It’s not a Cuisinart that you plug in (I’m not allowed with power tools) and it’s not the nice little housewifely thing with the alligator jaws that give you the ease of leverage against the hardest of carrots. No. I didn’t get that one. This is a man’s invention, a big, strong, mean, angry man, one who likes to pound his fists against frustration, the kind of guy who’d kill for a vegetable stew. You press down hard with quick, deliberate jabs. It’s like jack-hammering by hand, and just that loud. You have to strike with such force as would bring Annie back to life.

It’s a simple, ingenious mechanical design. A zigzag of blades comes down each time you strike the top, and the zigzag changes direction when you let up, ready to come down at a new angle. Not easy to clean, probably meant for a mechanized dishwasher rather than our Amish technique. But this device does achieve the critical increase of surface area exposed; thereby, maximizing flavor output for any given material you’re working with. If I ever do off my husband, I’ll use it to disseminate the body.

White Matters

Now I'm going to use something very familiar to you. You've seen these things before, in fact, you use them yourself all the time, but I'm going to make you forget about them. They're as common as clouds on a sky, chill in a wind, warmth in the sun. You're already forgetting that you’re seeing them. They are familiar, everyday objects. They are words.

I like to keep my pens handy, caps off, ready to jot down any immediate thought without fumbling for ink. That’s the way Gomez Addams did it. On the old TV series, Gomez would pull a cigar from the Indian, from a box, from his own chest pocket already lit. Always already lit. No idea is worth saving for later—smoke it now!

The challenge is that every reader already knows every word you're going to say, or they can look them up readily. Writers have to work with something as stupid and known as a common language, then do tricks with it. Anyone can learn the methods, the art is pulling off the tricks, especially when the reader is aware he’s being tricked. Ah the sleight of hand putting ink on paper, chapters in a book, paragraphs in chapters, sentences in paragraphs, and words into sentences. It is the combination and dexterity by which you use words which makes writing magical, lifts ideas off paper fibers, beyond the ink into the liquidity of the reader’s imagination. Any technique has to be invisible as a card trick.

Writing is about creating dialogue. It is not a flat static pose. You require input from the reader's experience in order for it to work. Writing is an excursion in empathy, with the reader and writer walking together. You must leave space for the reader’s response, a break between chapters, a pause behind each period.

Liars tend to have more white matter in their brains. It pushes out of the way some of the gray material that honest people have. Sonny, in I ROBOT, seems to have a thoroughly white brain. Now I ROBOT is a movie about a robot so intelligent it begins to think for itself, a prototype for what all robots could become. Or they could become V.I.K.I., the evil HAL-syndrome motherboard doomed to charm electronic Eden into the Dark Ages. It’s up to actor Will Smith to sort it out; after all, he is our go-to-guy for all funky futuristic problems. In the case of I ROBOT, it takes a black guy to figure out a white lie.

Fiction writers too, have thoroughly white brains. Fiction is a wonderful misappropriation of facts. In the beginning was the word, but by the end, it’d become a novel.

Fast Times--Experimental Starvation

Lent must be easier to follow if you live in a place frozen solid during those forty days. I live in thermal winter, temperate at all times holy and un-Godly.

I worked for a guy who told me he hated his job, which he clearly didn't. It was towards the end of Lent, so I brought him a box of chocolates. He ate three of them before he realized they were alcoholic. He had to go to confession over that. He always made such a big deal of not drinking for 90 days. Try nine months I said to him when I was pregnant. I figure he deserved whatever Hail Marys he had to say.

This year I gave up lunch for Lent. I decided I could eat before sunrise and after sunset, like Ramadan, plus help me to understand another culture as well as the general idea of sacrifice. It was really tough the day I slow-cooked a pot roast, but I’d already given up gasoline and disposable income, so one out of three meals was all I had left.

I could definitely go vegetarian; that would be too easy for me. It wouldn’t be giving up much that I can already not afford. But I couldn't go without milk and cheese. I could give up yogurt for Lent, but God would laugh at me. He knows I'm not real keen on yogurt.

How long is Ramadan? When is sunset? Giving up lunch is by far the hardest thing I've ever done for Lent. It is way more than an aggravating inconvenience. I might even learn something.

I need a slow religion, you know, one where you don't go to fast. Do you count sunset earlier with cloud cover? I accidentally ate a strawberry before 6:11, but I was doing it to inspire my son to finish his math homework and have his strawberry treat reward. I don't think that really counts. I was hungry later that afternoon and I thought, well, it's just another hunger pang, and then I realized oh glory it was time to fix dinner!

This really would be a lot less sacrifice if I ate breakfast. Despite my best efforts, whether I eat a lot or nothing at all, I’m always hungry at ten o’clock even with the fasting. Whatever I eat first thing in the morning doesn’t seem to count. Regardless of well-meaning studies, I am not a breakfast person—I’m a brunch person!

It is finished. I didn't make it to the end of Lent. I got sick. My right eye tried to glue itself shut. So I took medicine, and not on an empty stomach. If it were me, in the desert, alone...I wouldn't be taking the medicine. And I also probably couldn't find enough locusts to eat. However, me being sick has a major detrimental effect on my family, so I have quit fasting. I am not going to save the world through my starvation, but I do have a greater appreciation of sacrifice and satisfaction, and greater thankfulness for what I do have. I admire God more. I can’t do all the things God can do, but I can learn how better to rely on Him.

Dubliners

The only Dubliner I knew was named Ennis, just like “penis” without the P and except the E was pronounced as short I, so really it was more like “Guinness” without the “guh.” That was her last name anyway. Brown haired, green-eyed, dark brown freckles to match the hair—she was the portrait of Dublin. She was tall, long in every direction, and the worst tennis player I’ve ever seen, like she had grown faster than her flexibility could account for. Still, she lacked discouragement, and she played like she could see over the top of adolescence, knew she’d outgrow it. There was a grace to her ungainliness, like a joke played against her good nature to make others comfortable around her. I used to tease her about Leprechauns. “I assure you there are no Leprechauns in Ireland,” she’d say. I loved to hear her call her parents to come “collect” her.

Domestication breeds for large eyes and diminutive chin, the better to take a bit. Throw a group of people together for a thousand years and they’ll come out Irish. They’ll look like me. Put me in a pair of John Lennon glasses, and I could be James Joyce. Minus the moustache.

John Lennon stole those spectacles from James Joyce, don’t you think?

Nuclear physics gained the term “quark” from Joyce’s book, ULYSSES. I always meant to read it, especially after Hemingway writes about how dirty it is. But I have looked at PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It’s on my shelf of half read books, along with EAST OF EDEN, which I found south of good; and O LOST—I understand why the editor cut sixty-six thousand words (book length) from that manuscript to make LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. PORTRAIT is high-falutin’, high style, Catholic guilt set against sins of the flesh. PORTRAIT isn’t even a long book, I just got tired of the nail bitingly pretty language all the way down to the spine.

James Joyce was a famous Dubliner, you may have heard of him. Wrote a stack of tales about people of that city, put them into a collection called DUBLINERS.

Most of the DUBLINERS’ tales are well rounded, so much so that it’s hard to get a footing on what is interesting beyond reality. They have a beginning, middle, and end, just most of them aren’t very interesting. They play out as pale allegory to something, but what? Their artistic nuance is far too great for me.

“After the Race” is worth its weight in spit more than any of them. A dumb little guy who makes bad bets, but enjoys himself doing it. Cars careering is something any NASCAR fan would like.

“Counterparts” is a chilling tale of a father who comes home to beat his son.

“A Painful Case” has a ring tone of ROMEO AND JUIETTE.

“A Little Cloud” has the most potential of all of the stories in DUBLINERS. Someone could do something with it, expand the storyline, stretch out the metaphor into a novel-sized portion. Now that could be really good. “A Little Cloud” could be interesting, especially with the right writer behind it.

I remember reading “Araby” in high school. I remember because I was expecting something very different from what it is. I thought it was going to be related to ARABIAN NIGHTS, not about boyhood crush. As it is, it isn’t bad. I don’t see the significance of the geography, though. It doesn’t matter where it happened; boyhood crush is common human experience. It could have happened anywhere, even in Arabia.

And the other tales are also common human experiences—death, love, expectation, unrequitement, longing, loneliness, politics, scrutiny, corruption, wickedness, betrayal, crookedness, shame, honor, pride, drinking, murder, redemption, suicide—a paddy wagon full of things that happen to these people, these Irish people who are living in Dublin. One tale doesn’t relate to another tale, only the streets sometimes cross paths story to story. It is a grouping of collected experience of a population of one time and place, an anthropological drawing, but not terribly provocative fiction.

My grandmother’s family emigrated from Ireland in the Sixteen Hundreds. Before that, they had been Catholic. They dropped the “O” off their name into the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in the United States as Protestants. So I think I have a genetic predisposition to reject Joyce’s characters. They’re the branch of family we moved away from. If it ain’t brogue, don’t fix it.

Thank goodness for the Ennis of tennis. Without her, I’d have no good opinion whatsoever of Dubliners.

Ed Harris Campaign

Family entertainment versus violence is the meat and potatoes of domestic conflict. It’s worth having cable just for the wrestling match over the remote. What’s appropriate, versus who’s going into therapy.

In NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris pair up once again to demonstrate good against bad, just like they do in THE ROCK. Cage plays a PG-mouthed good guy, exactly as he does in THE ROCK, versus Ed Harris, except Ed’s swallowed a bar of soap and presents menace minus profanity. He’s the thinly disguised heir of Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Both men are trying to make honor for their ancestors’ names.

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie I kept crying out, “Why are these actors doing such a poor job of acting?!” I do recognize that a star-spangled cast is often a recipe for disaster (from Nicolas Coppola Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Chris Plummer…), but I was really more complaining about the lines they had to say. The plot was unbelievable and stupid.

Unbelievable I could handle. I am an American. I have lived under the reign of George Bush W. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out for me, but I am well practiced at suspension and disbelief. Comes naturally as shock and awe.

Stupid, I could also manage (the President goes without mentioning). RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER was stupid, but I laughed anyway.

However, unbelievable AND stupid was like going cold weather camping in the rain. Cold you can take; and wet is messy but survivable, yet the two conditions combined make a misery of marshmallow roasting. ALIEN does not try on elements of ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE. DUNE and UNCLE BUCK are not related. HAPPY FEET and RAMBO have little neutral ground. As the first NATIONAL TREASURE movie progressed and I kept choking down facts, I realized this is a children’s movie, not just an historian’s wet dream of antiquities.

The second NATIONAL TREASURE movie is no different. NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS puts Harry Potter’s singular CHAMBER OF SECRETS to shame. NT has MANY chambers, all secret; the scenes are chain-linked, one secret chamber to the next. The book, the all-important documentation—is simply a prop along this chain, a gateway from one set of chambers to the next.

Both NT movies are primarily educational in nature, to pique the interest of young minds, to inspire kids to look beyond the facts they get in school. Big-name actors have bent their talents toward a charitable cause in value of this nation’s youth. Otherwise no one would go to see these movies. Very similar to EMPIRE FALLS.

I tried to read EMPIRE FALLS years ago. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. I picked it up again recently. By page 63, I knew why I’d put it down at page 59.

They’ve made a movie of it, an HBO special, so I’ll watch that. Believe me, I would have never gotten through the story without cinematic form. Paul Newman, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright Penn, Aidan Quinn, Joanne Woodward, Dennis Farina, all the way down to the Disney darling, Danielle Panabaker—without them, the story would not have made it. It has some interesting scenes of dialogue, where tension is sustained without resolution, but over such subtle qualities. Most people would have given up on similar circumstances and stormed out long ago, but not these characters.

I kept watching. I kept drinking caffeinated beverages and watching one useless flashback into another, each revealing something I didn’t care about for a character with whom I didn’t identify, until at the end—finally at the end!—the Boo Radley-type wakes up and shoots a bunch of people in the school.

Light bulb.

That’s why it’s Pulitzer Prize-winning. A work boring enough to be literary, yet dealing with a modern problem. Literary breaks into mainstream by means of a cheap device of tacked on trauma. Anybody could have written that. The plot, however, does not suggest this ending. The story fails to write itself. Boo hiss. Boo hoo.

The main character, Miles Roby, is unbelievably depicted by…Ed Harris. He’s supposed to be overweight. Harris is not. He’s supposed to be out of shape. A-hem. When Dennis Farino whips off his jacket to challenge Harris to an arm wrestling match, it’s a good thing Harris doesn’t accept or there would be a shattering loss of disbelief. Harris’ hair is another non sequitur. What baldish guy in that good of shape would grow hair like a fur stole for his pate? Harris looks more like an actor trapped in a movie that’s supposed to be good, rather than a man stuck in a small town with big problems.

Harris is probably the worst actor among the cast. He always plays himself, though convincingly so. He’s good with his short-cropped military roles, like APOLLO, RIGHT STUFF, THE ROCK. His unforgettable blue hand emerges with a wedding ring in THE ABYSS, as he blatantly defies the proverb: That which you have thrown into the toilet, probably you should not retrieve. (This applies in TRAINSPOTTING as well, and is equally disregarded to large comic effect.) There is a certain luxury, though, of watching an actor who is behaving as an actor, whom you know is acting and he knows he’s acting, and he’s not being false.

Madam Bovary lied even when she didn’t need to lie.

Holly Golightly was so good at being a fake, she didn’t know she was a fake.

I’d elect Ed Harris for president, certainly over Nicolas Cage.