Man on a Cell-phone, Overheard…

My head’s on the chopping block… Other shoe dropped… and I have to defend my job… My own doctor won’t write me a note… whether I’m a danger driving… He can’t prove it one way or another… I don’t know, they don’t say… She doesn’t know, she can’t help me anymore… No good to anybody… That’s all in the past… Doesn’t matter anymore…

The Importance of Being Earnest

Virginia Woolf wrote of Charlotte Bronte “That is an awkward break… the woman who wrote those pages… will write in a rage where she should write calmly… She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.” As Virginia spake, thus spake I…  about Hemingway. I finished To Have and Have Not yesterday… I tried to be openminded, I swear! It starts off exactly the way I feared it would, with Harry Morgan (some protagonist, all right) fishing and smuggling and double-crossing… ho hum. Halfway through he’s lost an arm, his fishing tackle and his boat (he’s plenty unlucky, all right) and he becomes more interesting, but then we have a few subplots (some subplot) involving two writers and their wives that are so spiteful and pointed and pointless that I can only imagine he was satirizing someone he knew and disliked. Chapter Nineteen has Richard Gordon, a novelist, passing Harry’s wife in the street and coming up with a nasty, presumptious (and completely erroneous) backstory for her to be used in his novel, the implication being that Richard Gordon is not so good a novelist as Ernest Hemingway. The breakup of Richard Gordon’s marriage (some non-sequitorial stuff, all right) leads to a night spent with drunken brawlers and then some a couple of overviews of the guys in the boat next door or something and then back to Harry. The segments needed more or not at all (I’d have preferred not at all).

I have BYWYR tonight, so maybe I’ll feel a little differently, but for the moment I see no reason to review my opinion of Hemingway, which was based on a 15 year loathing of The Old Man and the Sea and a skim of The Sun Also Rises, which was not so good as the movie (a phrase I’ve only uttered twice before… I think… in case you’re curious, Jaws and Forrest Gump, both of which were godawful books, although Jaws was enjoyably godawful… we seem to have wandered off the topic somewhat). Maybe I’ll be back later tonight.

These days I seem to think a lot…

These days I’ve been thinking. Mainly about family and myth and old age and responsibility and how different versions of events layer up until they bury the event they describe, like sheets of gauze that pile up till they’re as heavy as stones. Every conversation comes back to my grandmother and how and where she should live. There are so many details, many of which aren’t explicable, that going into living with your family; all the history and personality and daily living and interpretations and misinterpretations that are possible among people who are closest to each other.

I want to learn how to play guitar just so I can do the multi-tracks of The Smiths’ Ask. It’s on YouTube; check it out.

At some point I want to expand on the idea that the Philly skyline make very good use of the sky. Unlike New York, whose buildings seem to stand in opposition to the sky, while Philadelphia’s buildings are both reflective of and complementary to the sky around them and consequently seem on very good terms with each other (how many skies can I fit into two lines?). On the other hand, there are several buildings that will be torn down come the revolution, most of which look like they were built as the result of a revolution!

I have no ear.

Have I told you about my new boyfriend? Michael knows, my mother knows, but I think everyone should know about me and Charles Lamb. I’m going to be talking about him a lot in the future, but to introduce you I’m going to give you a glimpse. Here’s the opening of his essay A Chapter On Ears;

I have no ear.

Mistake me not, reader – nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets – those indispensable side-intelligencers.

I’m trying to find out who said something about Hazlitt being the essayist you respect and Lamb being the one you love (although I do love Lamb even more in his letters than in his essays).

While we’re here, I’m about to start a Hemingway novel. I haven’t had good luck with him in the past and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just missing something. Can you explain to me why he’s sooooo loved? I’ll let you know how it goes with To Have Or Have Not.

Scraps

I just found the post below saved from a few weeks ago and I’m going to post it because I am having trouble posting. I have to do it everyday or I won’t at all, but even my most polished thoughts see less interesting to me than they used to. I assume that it’s my writing that has gotten worse, but it may just be that my taste has gotten better!

Nothing in the world so irritating as the fact that Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are not stashed in Fiction, but in African-American Studies or Interest. Unless it’s the fact that the aforementioned African American interest is usually placed next to the cash register or security guard.

If you have a moment, check out The Atlantic’s article on Katrina’s Architectural Revolution.

The Boss has been playing at the Spectrum for the last few days and everyone at work has been in a twitter. Occasionally Matty the bartender sneaks up on Joel the manager and rasps out “We’re in Philadelphia, where they’ve got cheesesteaks as big as airplanes!” Today, on the way home from Ikea, they played Side B of the vinyl Born to Run (Born to Run, She’s the One, Meeting Across the River, Jungleland). It vividly recalled just how Bruce etched America into my mind. While other music of my childhood was about Love, vague and capital-lettered (early Beatles, Hall and Oates) or about England in one form or another (George Michael, Simply Red, Everything But The Girl), only Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen tossed off details that brought a place alive, with honorable mention to Joe Jackson. Paul Simon’s world (“Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints” was a magic world, humid, poor, dazzling, changeable, where Bruce’s world was…well… Jersey. And what could be more American to an Englishwoman than Jersey, except maybe Texas?  We learned “Working on the Highway” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad (Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah)” at the same time, so I assumed that most Americans did in fact work on highways and railroads… those who weren’t rock and roll musicians.