Pour prendre conge . . .

---

Mes tres chers amis:


J'ecris juste pour dire que Partenaire et moi allons prendre conge pour plusiers jours en Florida, chez Mickey et Donald et Goofy.


Ce blog continuera cette semaine, parce que j'ai ecrit des petits cybercarnets en avance!


On depart pour l'aeroport demain - samedi matin - a quatre heures de matin.


Helas.


Mais c'est sur et certain que je vais recuillir des bonnes histoires la-bas en Florida . . .


A bientot, mes amis.


(Now go to translate.google.com and see how elegant my French is.)


('Bye, kids.  Talk soon.)

---

Loren Williamses of the world, unite!

---

 

About a year ago I wrote about Googling myself and finding all kinds of other people with my name.

 

 

Well, I did it again, just for kicks, and I have to tell you that I appear to be proliferating.

 

 

First of all, I know you're thinking that I didn't just Google myself as a scientific experiment. Well, of course not! I am anxious to see myself come up first, and second, and third, in a Google search. I am hungry to become famous, without doing anything to deserve it. This is called “being a Kardashian.”

 

 

Loren Williams the fly-fisherman and expert on fly-tying is still easily the most popular of us. He dominates the Loren Williams community on Google.

 

 

Next down the line are Loren Williams at Georgia Tech and Loren Williams the Canadian artist. LJW/GA is a handsome Christian scientist who specializes in cellular biology; LJW/CA is a Francophone woman in Montreal who does lovely photography. Go figure!

 

 

A new figure is Loren Williams, the teenaged athlete from Iowa. There are lots of photos of him; he's an all-state wrestling champion, I guess. Go figure! (The football player from last year is gone. He was “Lorenzo,” however, so he wasn't really a full-fledged member of the community.)

 

 

Also still lurking around the edges is Loren Williams of Maryland, convicted of both real estate fraud and sexual offenses. And wouldn't you know that he's the only one with whom I share a middle initial?

 

 

I'm international, of course. In Scotland I am a type of mattress. In New Zealand I'm a competitive rower.

 

 

Every year, something new. Loren Williams the chemistry professor at Western Washington University! Loren Williams the dentist in Pikeville, Kentucky! Another Loren Williams the dentist in San Mateo, California!

 

 

(Also, a few months ago, Loren Williams, originally of Cheyenne, Wyoming died at the age of 69. Actually, according to the obituary, he “went home to be with Christ.” I hope he's at peace.)

 

 

But the best new addition is Loren Williams from Tomball, Texas. I quote:

 

 

“I was born on November 19, 1998! . . . I love animals. I have a puppy and a dog. They are so sweet! I have a sister who is 25 at the time. She is sweet... but you know how siblings can be!!!! I will be going into 5th grade this year and I am so nervous!!

 

 

Bless her heart.

 

 

The whole Loren Williams family is out here rooting for her.

 

 

---

 

Movie review: “Caesar and Cleopatra”

---

The other night I watched a British production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra,” starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The Romans were, I swear, wearing designer bedsheets, and the armor looked like something you’d buy at iParty. The Egyptians were drab for the most part, surprisingly, although some of them had things looking like kitchen utensils sticking out of their heads. It was Shaw, so I expected the dialogue to be brisk and clever; sadly, apart from an occasional epigram, it was pretty limp.

In a word: costume drama at its most languid.

There were, however, two bits of entertainment, buried away like raisins in a dry scone:

There was Flora Robson, who played Cleopatra’s nurse Ftatateeta. Yes, I spelled that correctly. Caesar / Claude Rains can’t pronounce her name, and calls her “Teeter-Totter” and “Titty-Totty” and such. Flora Robson was a very distinguished-looking actress, but they gave her (to use Wallace Beery’s expression) “a hell of a make-up”: they dyed her skin a rich dark mahogany and gave her a hairstyle like a mangled throw pillow. She is ridiculous and superb.

And there was also Stewart Granger, as Apollodorus the rug merchant.  He had a pretty good body, and he gets to flaunt it here. His bedsheet toga is a little more colorful than everyone else’s, and it keeps falling away to show off his big strong arms and chest. He generally enters every scene with one arm held high in the air, like the little man on top of a swimming trophy, shouting “Ha ha!” He is supposed to be a wit, and gets to call Flora Robson a “venerable grotesque,” right to her face.

But the best line in the movie is one of his.

Scene: our protagonists are trapped on top of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Enemy soldiers are coming up the stairs. The Roman galleys are a quarter mile away. What to do? “Ha ha!” Farley trumpets, leaping to the parapet. “I will reach the ships!”

“How?” says Grumpy Roman Soldier #1. “Do you have wings?”

“Ha ha!” laughs Farley triumphantly, yet again. “I have water wings!”

And he raises his bronzed arms above his head and performs a swan dive into the Mediterranean.

Water wings?

And that's why I love old movies.

---

The coffin delivery man

---

(Here's a riddle: What is it, that 1) if you see it, you don't want to buy it; 2) if you buy it, you don't want to use it; 3) if you're using it, you're not aware of it?)

 

 

(Keep reading for the answer.)

 

 

During jury selection this past summer, I was thrown together with five other people: a wiseguy cable installer who kept moaning about how bored he was; an older man (what am I saying? I mean “a man around my own age”) with his nose buried in a 1982 “Quick & Easy Crosswords” magazine; a raven-haired beauty wearing a teensy bit too much makeup; a nineteen-year-old girl, very nervous about missing work (it turned out that she was the Keno-machine operator at a local restaurant); and a short plump cheerful gray-haired man.

 

 

I was sort of fascinated with this last guy; he talked about growing up in Brooklyn, and he knew the whole state of Rhode Island, which is pretty unusual here (most people only know their own communities).  He was smart, and cheerful, and calm, and unaffected.

 

 

And he finally revealed that he worked delivering coffins from the warehouse to regional funeral homes.

 

 

I have always been fascinated by the business of death. Partner and I watched “Six Feet Under” straight through on DVD. And funeral directors are always so courtly and polite and considerate! Partner and I were at a funeral home a year or so ago, planning a “pre-need” funeral for a family member, and I was really charmed by the Italian-American funeral director who worked with us; the room was full of memorabilia of his immigrant father, and he had a big piece of Simon Pearce crystal on the table of which he was very proud, and I looked him up later online to discover that he is a very long-established community benefactor.

 

 

I think living with a constant reminder of mortality must be very bracing. To paraphrase Lady Jane Gray: it teaches you to live and learns you to die.  Monks used to sleep in their own (future) coffins, and drink from cups made from human skulls, just to remind themselves that life is, um, short, and probably you should get about your business, whatever it is, before it's too late.

 

 

I hope Coffin Delivery Man is doing well.

 

 

Someday I'll need his services.

 

 

(By the way: did you guess the riddle yet?)

 

---

 

Cherry blossoms in September

---

It’s happening again this year.

 

 

Walking to work yesterday morning, I could see a filmy white cloud around some of the trees on the far side of the Providence River, as if they were in bloom.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Ridiculous, right?

 

 

I saw them close up later yesterday morning.  Yup.  In bloom, and lovely as an April day.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Waiting for the shuttle yesterday evening, I was examining the shrubbery nearby: some low-growing azalea-like thing.  And oh my dears it was plumb full of flower buds.

 

 

I know I wrote about this last November.  And I am a broken record on this subject anyway.

 

 

But the bloody climate is changing.  Isn’t it obvious? The plants are confused. They’re blooming at inappropriate times.

 

 

Back in the Northwest where I grew up, flowers bloomed deep into November and December; it was a gentler climate.  Those of you who are familiar with New England know that, while September and October can be (and usually are) glorious, they also (usually) grow gradually colder day by day.  I even remember seeing snow on the grass in October once or twice.

 

 

But that was quite a while back.

 

 

What can we do about this? Nothing, probably.  This is one of my “hopeless glance into a dark unfriendly future” blogs, in case you can’t tell.

 

 

The change will continue.  Maybe in a hundred years the Yukon and Nunavut will be garden spots.  (And maybe Copenhagen and New Orleans and poor low-lying Providence will be under water.)  Maybe Canada and Siberia will become the breadbaskets of the world.  (And maybe Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands will be washed away.)

 

 

Not to mention that I don’t do so well in warm weather.

 

 

Probably it’s a good thing that I won’t be around for much longer.  I’d be complaining incessantly.

---

 

Golden years

---

The other day I was coming down the stairs in my office building, and a woman about my own age, who has worked for the University almost as long as I have, was coming down behind me. We didn't converse; we just occupied ourselves with our thoughts.

 

 

We were both walking very methodically. When you're our age, you don't dash down the stairs. You take your time.

 

 

Finally, about halfway down, I said (without turning my head): “I never dreamed this would be how I'd spend my golden years.”

 

 

She laughed aloud. “It could be worse,” she said.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” I said.

 

 

Who knows, in his/her twenties, what he/she will be doing in thirty years? I was telling a story not long ago, and I began with: “When I came to Providence thirty-five years ago . . .”

 

 

OMG!

 

 

Most of the people in my office weren't born yet!

 

(This, if you can't tell, is a blog about getting old. I write these from time to time. They are a pressure release, like the little steam-vent on a pressure cooker.  They keep my head from exploding.  So bear with me.)

 

 

I had a haircut recently. You remember my barber: he's a sweetheart. We talked the whole time, mostly about real estate in downtown Providence. When I got out of the chair, I looked down and saw huge wads of gray hair on the floor. “Oh my god,” I said wanly. “Look how gray I am.”

 

 

“Don't complain,” my barber said, who must hear this kind of comment all the time, and who is mostly bald. “At least you have hair.”

 

 

But – do you know what I mean? I'm inside this rapidly-aging body, here, now. I'm a husk, for heaven's sake! I feel dry and evanescent, as if I'm becoming transparent.

 

 

And here's the bitterest joke of all: my soul, or whatever it is inside me that's looking out through these dull nearsighted rheumy eyes, is still young.

 

 

Ah.

 

 

Try explaining that to someone who's younger than you.

 

---

 

Sunday blog: Devo sings "Space Junk"

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By the time you read this, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will have fallen to earth.

 

 

Just like old times!

 

 

Back in the summer of 1979, we were all breathlessly waiting for Skylab to fall.  Some people even had radar hats, which gave warning signals if they sensed anything falling on them. (Probably these would not have worked very well.)

 

 

Anyway: here's a song from that same period.

 

 

I'm all burned up about / space junk

Walk and talk about / space junk

It hit my baby's head

And now my Sally's dead . . .

 

 

Devo_-_Space_Junk_[Album_Version].mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

 

---

 

 

Life after death, v2.0

---

I write these blogs ahead – sometimes as much as two or three weeks. I move them around, and I revise them, and sometimes I write something vital and current (!), and I shift everything around that.

 

 

But here's the thing: if I were to die this minute, my blogs would still post – automatically – for another two or three weeks!

 

 

What do you think about that? Creepy? Not really. Presumably I'd be in a coffin, and my hair and fingernails would still be growing. So why shouldn't my blog be posting too? It's just a cyberspace expression of who I am.

 

 

Or – I suppose – who I was.

 

 

Who I was, that is, as I'm here, writing this.

 

 

Except that maybe I'm dead right this second, while you're reading this.

 

 

Too complicated!

 

---

 

Providence, Rhode Island: my gritty little city

---

When I first got to Providence in 1978, most of downtown was being ripped up, in preparation for a walking mall on Westminster Street. I took a stroll on my first Sunday here, not knowing that Sundays in New England in the 1970s were pretty much business-free, because of the blue laws still in effect in those days. The city looked like Sarajevo in the 1990s, or Dresden after the firestorm.

 

 

It's 2011, and they've dug up downtown again. For what seems like the seventeenth time in thirty-three years.

 

 

Providence has some lovely neighborhoods. Partner and I live at Wayland Square, a residential district on the East Side of the city, and there are some really charming houses around us, as well as some really pretty grandiose mansions. And the Brown and RISD campuses are fun and interesting. But much of the rest of the city looks perpetually bedraggled, like a dog just come in out of the rain. Downtown (locals call it “Downcity,” just to be unique) always looks that way.

 

 

There are hints and glimpses of terrific architecture: it's great fun to look up when you're downtown, to admire the fanciful decoration on many of the buildings. The O'Gorman Building has a facade decorated with peacocks, their tails running down to street level. The Conrad Building has an gilded onion dome like an Orthodox church. Trinity Rep (which the AIA Guide to Providence Architecture calls “delicious”) is an alabaster jewelry-box, built in the 1920s as a showroom for fancy Packard automobiles. The old Providence Journal building has an exterior like a French chateau.

 

 

But, at street level in Downcity, not much is going on. There are Hello Kitty outlets and handmade-soap stores and hipster cafes and SPACE FOR RENT signs. Businesses come and go.

 

 

But here's one of the reasons that I love Providence:

 

 

There's an old used-bookstore on Mathewson Street called Cellar Stories. You have to climb a steep flight of stairs to get to it. Know why? Its original downtown location, back in the 1980s, was in fact in the downstairs section of another building. The owner / proprietor and I have known each other for decades – not as friends, not on a first-name basis, but as regulars, people you know by sight. A couple of months ago I remarked that this was the – what? - third location for the store?

 

 

“Well,” he said in his deep imperturbable voice, “There was the downstairs place. And then we moved again down on Richmond -”

 

 

His wife – I think she's his wife, I don't know – looked on, laughing. This is a typical Providence conversation: reminiscing about where things used to be.

 

 

But it was important, for him and for me, to remember.

 

 

That's not just the store's past. That's our past, man.

 

 

And, in Providence, the past and the present are the same thing.

 

 

Or something like that.

 

---

 

Toucan Sam and the military-industrial complex

---

I recently read that Kellogg's, the cereal giant, is suing a group called the Maya Archaeology Initiative, because the MAI is using a toucan as part of its logo.

 

 

No lie.

 

 

The MAI is fighting back very shrewdly. They point out that the toucan in their logo (see the image at the head of this column) is modeled on a real toucan, whereas Toucan Sam is, well, a cartoon character.

 

 

Also, there is this charmingly insensitive commercial, using vaguely Mesoamerican tropes like step pyramids and feather-wearing witch doctors with high shrieky voices.

 

 

I point this out to Partner, and he grunts. “Corporations are the new nations,” he said. “Haven't you noticed? They'll probably win their lawsuit. They can get whatever they want.”

 

 

“Like 'Rollerball,'” I said, catching on.

 

 

“Exactly,” he said.

 

 

I have been musing on this ever since. The other evening I was catching up on back issues of the Financial Times when I came across, on one single page, companies called Rotork, Spectris, Petrofac, Essar, and (best of all) Astorg.

 

 

What are they, daleks?

 

 

I am not frightened of corporations in general, any more than I'm frightened of nations in general. They're abstractions, run by groups of rather silly people, no more intelligent than you or me.

 

 

But I think Partner is right. Nations are beginning to seem a little – hm – twentieth-century. Look at Libya! Look at Afghanistan! Borders are really meaningless. All that matters – from a global point of view, anyway – is what can be gotten out of a given geographical area: natural resources, manpower, strategic advantage. And corporations – oil companies, drug companies, mining companies, agricultural companies – can extract these things easily.

 

 

Mitt Romney, you may know, recently told someone at one of his campaign appearances that “corporations are people too, my friend.”

 

 

No, Mitt, they are not. They are legal entities created by people, for the benefit of a few people – owners, shareholders – through the employment of the labor of some other people. All the nice folks at Hewlett-Packard don't get together at the end of the day and roll around in the vault; only a few people at the top get to do that. The rest of us – well, read this little tract by my friends Karl and Friedrich, if you haven't already. Almost 200 years later, I still find it refreshing.

 

 

From Robert Bly's “Those Being Eaten By America”:

 

 

The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

 

 

Soon, I hope. Soon.

 

---

 

Football for beginners

---

I never cared much for football. It was a lot of running and snorting and stamping, and I didn't understand the rules anyway.

 

 

Partner has tried, very patiently, for very many years, to teach me the game. No soap. I used to think I had some kind of mental block that prevented me from learning this stuff; I still think, for example, that a “safety” is when one of the players runs backward.

 

 

Then I hired a member of the university football team to work for me in the office.

 

 

Bingo!

 

 

He was not only huge, but funny and articulate. I asked him what position he played, and he was insightful enough to know that if he'd said “offensive lineman,” I would have been as unenlightened as ever. So he said: “I push people around.”

 

 

Now that I understand.

 

 

He spoke with passion about the phases of his training: strength, speed, agility. I was, naturally, enthralled.

 

 

So now, naturally, I am much more taken by football than I was before.

 

 

Now I see in the New York Times that various teams – mostly college teams, apparently – are redesigning their uniforms to be more colorful, and interesting, and eye-catching.

 

 

So what audience are they aiming this at? The old traditional fans?

 

 

I don't think so!

 

 

They're aiming it at people like me!

 

 

And, just so you know: my former employee's team won their first game of the season, by one point!

 

 

Yay team!

 

 

I hope they win the Stanley Cup!

 

---

 

Happy birthday, blog!

---

I have been chunking out this blog for exactly one year now. My original challenge to myself was to see if I could generate a page a day for an indefinite period of time, and keep it fresh and (preferably) interesting, and maybe even funny once in a while.

 

 

It has given me a chance to set down some personal memories. It has allowed me to think aloud. It has helped me to think about my writing style, which has evolved (for better or worse) over the past year. I'm at least a more fluent writer than I was then. The words just come erupting out of me.

 

 

It has been instructive. The blog entries which have attracted the most notice have been about entertainment, in one form or another: one about Ray Davies of the Kinks, another about this year's Transformers sequel, another about “Jersey Shore.” Lesson: while I may write tremblingly beautiful little essays about my Aunt Petunia, no one really cares about my Aunt Petunia. People care about topics of common interest, like television and movies.

 

 

And politics! I have not gone there very often. I have not been shy of it, exactly; I'm out there, on the Internet, espousing my own (diluted and frightened) version of radical socialism, as well as my loathing for the poisonous conservative factions that are crippling our country and its recovery from recession these days. But I do not think people are reading me for my opinions on these things.

 

 

Sometimes I write about “gay issues.” I'm not exactly a leader in the LGBTQ community, but I have been a card-carrying member since the mid-1970s, so I have a few opinions. I am amazed at how far we've come. I am in agony when I think of how far we have to go.

 

 

And then there's the future. I named this blog “FutureWorld," knowing exactly what I meant, and I've explained it over and over again: here we are! In 2011! The Future! Lasers, and computers, and nuclear reactors, and cars that know how to park themselves! And we're still not happy! We still haven't achieved perfection! Everything is the same as it was a thousand years ago, and if we're not careful, we'll be cutting one another's ears off in a little while, fighting over bread and fish and dirty drinking water!

 

 

Ah me.

 

 

Here's to another dreadful year.

 

 

I hope, somehow, it brings all of us happiness.

 

 

Happy birthday, little blog.

 

---

 

Sunday blog: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers sing "Roadrunner"

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Have I never put a Jonathan Richman song here?

 

 

Well, we need to remedy that.

 

 

I learned to love Jonathan (and his ever-changing backup group, the Modern Lovers) when I was in graduate school in the late 1970s. Two of my friends were heavily into obscure music, and they worshipped at Jonathan's feet. I listened to some of the albums, and soon I was a convert too.

 

 

If you don't know Jonathan: you know that odd-looking guy in the movie “There's Something About Mary,” who keeps showing up in odd places and singing the theme song? That's him.

 

 

Jonathan writes songs mostly about a few things: falling in love with girls, living in New England, cars, childhood, and rock 'n roll. This song combines at least three of those, and you could argue that the others are in here too.

 

 

Oh, and incidentally: Rolling Stone ranked this song #269 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

 

 

One two three four five six -

 

01_Roadrunner.m4a Listen on Posterous

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Actors acting like actors

---

Partner was watching “Stage Door” a while back on TCM. If you haven't seen it, kick yourself seven or eight times, then run out and see it. Not only does it have a dream cast – Katherine Hepburn, Gail Patrick, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball – it's one of those perfect combinations of corny sentiment and real feeling that makes 1930s movies fun, and it's got some good laughs.

 

 

But I had an epiphany while watching it over his shoulder the other night. It was Hepburn's big “calla lily” scene; I won't spoil it for you, but she's supposed to be a Broadway actress, and she's had a big personal shock in real life, and it makes her stage performance very intense. And I suddenly realized why so many of the best movies, and musicals, and plays are about show business. The performers understand what they're doing. If you're an actor, you may have a hard time getting into the mindset of a plumber or a priest or a call-girl, but it's no trouble at all imagining what it's like be an actor - you understand all of the motivations, and all of the situations. Start listing all the good shows about show business in your head: “A Chorus Line.” “All That Jazz.” “42^nd Street.” “The Band Wagon.” “Gold Diggers of 1933.” “All About Eve.” “Sunset Boulevard.”

 

 

Oh, that last one. It's a hall of reflecting mirrors. You see Gloria Swanson screening footage of her unfinished / unreleased silent movie “Queen Kelly,” which had been directed by . . . Erich von Stroheim, who plays the sepulchral Max. Even Cecil B. DeMille has a cameo! But, for me, the creepiest scene is that of Gloria playing bridge with the group of silent-movie survivors that William Holden calls “The Waxworks”: Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. They look like the living dead.

 

 

How aware were they of themselves in that scene? How aware were they that they were playing themselves: washed-up, forgotten has-beens?

 

 

Oh, they were completely aware.

 

 

Too depressing.

 

 

Cue the Gold Diggers!

 

---

 

Student fads: hookahs, porkpie hats, and ukuleles

---

I work on a college campus, so every year is a fascinating adventure into hipness. What will college students be doing / wearing / eating this year? Hoop skirts? Viking helmets? Fright wigs?

 

 

Actually, this year, it seems pretty sedate to me. “It looks,” I said to the shuttle driver the other evening, “like it did when I first came here in 1978. I guess the wheel has finally turned all the way around.”

 

 

He snorted a laugh. “Did they have blue hair back then?” he said, nodding toward a girl on the sidewalk nearby. “I don't think so.”

 

 

Well, he was right about that. There are always changes and aberrations. But if you'd shown me a photo in 1978 of what the average student is wearing in 2011, I would have shrugged. What's so different about that?

 

 

College students are very attentive to trends. I remember Bullwinkle when he went to Wossamotta U.: “I've got my raccoon coat!” he said. “I've got my ukulooloo and my hair stickum!”

 

 

(Yes, he said “ukulooloo.” I can hear it in my head even now.)

 

 

But modern college students look very similar to the way we looked back in the 1970s: simple, black t-shirts, jeans, floppy hair. 

 

 

But Shuttle Driver was right: there are some differences.

 

 

There is, for example, the Ironic Porkpie Hat.

 

 

A few years ago, all the boys (or at least the cool ones) were wearing classic porkpie hats. It was a little odd, but certainly no odder than the lime-green leisure suit I bought in Spokane in 1977.

 

 

Now they've moved beyond the conventional porkpie. They've actually become post-modern about it.

 

 

Today I saw a white porkpie hat. And a straw porkpie hat. And a flannel one, with a little flourish of feathers, like a Tyrolean hat!

 

 

And have I mentioned the proliferation of hookah cafes in the neighborhood? That, at least, was not something we did in the primitive nineteen-seventies.

 

 

Ah, youth! What next?

 

 

(For us, it was disco music!)

 

---

 

Mushrooms

---

The Pacific Northwest breeds life like you wouldn't believe. I've already mentioned slugs. Also coniferous trees (when I took “Washington History” at Battle Ground High in 1971 – a required course, mind you! - it was 10% history and 90% tree recognition).

 

 

The Northwest also breeds mushrooms, toadstools, and puffballs.

 

 

All of them popped up everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. Puffballs were my favorites: smooth stemless white spheres connected to the ground by a stubby little root. When they're growing, they're full of what looks and feels like damp styrofoam; in death, they wither into little brown dry bladders that emit a smoky cloud of spores when you step on them. Fun! (Some people eat them. I had them served to me once. Meh.)

 

 

My mother grew up eating wild mushrooms. She had only one test for poisonous / safe: if it was a white mushroom, and if you could peel the skin off its head, it was okay to eat. These she called “French mushrooms.” I was mistrustful of this, as it seemed just a little too easy. Then there's the silver-dime test: if you cook your mushrooms with a silver dime in the pot, and if the dime turns black, they're poisonous. Two problems here: a) no more silver dimes; b) all it proves is that there's something in the pot with sulfur in it. Lots of people must have died for nothing over this one.

 

 

You know I love Betty MacDonald. As a real Northwesterner, she wrote about mushrooms a lot. In “The Egg and I,” she writes about collecting wild mushrooms and comparing them to pictures in her field guide to determine if they were poisonous. This line, for me, is the best thing anyone ever wrote about mushrooms: “Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't, so I tossed it into the pot.”

 

 

In her lovely last book, “Onions in the Stew,” she writes about gathering yet more wild mushrooms, and trying (unsuccessfully) to get her family to eat them, and eating them herself just to show them how foolish they were being, and going (temporarily) blind as a result.

 

 

Mushrooms must be awfully good, if they make us go to such ridiculous lengths. It's understandable that they would want to protect themselves from us.

 

 

But, for true mycological viciousness and perversity, nothing compares to the things I've seen here in Rhode Island. I suppose it stands to reason: this whole area was pretty much swampland for millennia, and a little rain brings all the old inhabitants back.

 

 

Including some of most peculiar fungi I've ever seen.

 

 

One variety looks like a rotten head of iceberg lettuce, with a gooey interior. It lies on the ground and stares at you like a big rotten pink-purple eyeball.

 

 

Some are airy little spotted toadstools that look adorable and just dare you to touch them.

 

 

And then there are the beauties you can see at the head of my blog today, which I spotted outside my office building the other day. They are red, and beastly, and very – well, suggestive. “Nature is perverse,” my colleague Cathleen said while we were pondering them. “It really makes you wonder what God was thinking about when he made them.”

 

 

I could not have said it better myself.

 

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Student employees

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I posted some student jobs recently, and have been reading the applications. I am bemused, as always.

Some thoughts:

• I would describe myself in a lot of different ways, but not as “ebullient.” God knows I'm not ebullient, but even if I were, I would be shy of applying the word to myself.
• Ditto “gregarious.” There are a lot of ways of saying this: “I'm a people person.” “I work well with others.” For me, “gregarious” connotes a large hearty man in a tweed jacket at a New Year's Eve party, his arms around his friends, singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
• “I have awesome skills.” As do we all. To me, it's awesome that I actually wake up alive and conscious every morning. But the phrase “awesome skills” better describes a ninja than a college sophomore.
• “Affable.” Affable? Are you eighty years old? Do you belong to the Explorers' Club?
• “I have experience with a wide variety of people and computers.” Really! And were the computers nice?
• Best of all: “I make acute observations and have unique thoughts.” Hmm. Dorothy Parker? The Cumaean Sibyl? The Unabomber?

I may actually bring Awesome Skills into the office for an interview. One of the positions is largely customer-service: answering phones, greeting guests. And sometimes, a cheerfully over-the-top student is just the ticket to disarm a grumpy caller.

I hope, when I meet him/her, he/she is affable, and gregarious, and makes acute observations, and has unique thoughts, and is generally awesome.

Because – you know what? Most of my student employees have been all of the above so far.

Here's hoping.

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Hurricane Irene: the aftermath, part two!

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After our recent hurricane, you generally greeted people with something like: “How was your hurricane?” Usually you got a few words: wry, sad, a fallen branch here, no power there.

 

 

There's a big older guy who delivers the campus mail to my building. “How was your hurricane?” I asked him a few days after Irene swept through, expecting the usual light-hearted reply; he's normally very cheerful.

 

 

Thunk! went the bucket of mail. “I lost five hundred dollars worth of meat!” he wailed. “Freezer was out of power for fifty-five hours! I opened it and I was sick to my stomach! Not literally, I mean. It hasn't rotted yet. But the waste! I called Narragansett Electric, and they -”

 

 

Some people, when they tell you a story like this, turn it into a performance piece. He was one of those people. He was leaping into the air and shaking his finger in my face, and for the first time I was beginning to notice how big he was, and I was desperately hoping he wasn't going to turn green and bust out of his clothes. “There's one connection – one! - that runs under Bristol County. And if it goes out, Barrington goes out! And Warren! And Bristol! And National Grid knows it! We've told them time and time again! I told them, I'm gonna bring it up at a town meeting, and we're gonna get signatures together, and we're gonna make them -”

 

 

“You know what I heard?” I said feebly, in an effort to distract him. “It's the restaurants you have to watch out for. They're sorting through their food, and they don't want to throw stuff away – and now there aren't enough food inspectors - “

 

 

“Tell me about it!” he brayed. “My neighbor, he works for [redacted nearby Italian restaurant], and, well you know they've been closed -”

 

 

“What?” I croaked. “We just ate there – we liked it -”

 

 

“It's been closed for seven or eight days now!” he boomed. “Flies! Flies in the walls! They're everywhere! Somebody working there turned them in - “

 

 

I am thinking now of the very nice meal Partner and I had at that restaurant only a few weeks ago, and am trying to remember if I saw any flies, and I have talked myself into believing that I did.

 

 

I used to work for a food distributor; several of the salesmen told me that, once you see the average restaurant kitchen, you will never eat there again.

 

 

On the other hand: a few years ago, Partner and I were in Manhattan and ate at a really lovely Brazilian restaurant called Plataforma. It was Restaurant Week, and we got a special deal: special meal, free gifts, and a personal tour of the kitchen. Kids, you have never seen such a beautiful kitchen. Brazilian restaurants are all about meat, and there was a huge multi-rotisserie with at least ten cuts of meat rotating on it; it looked like something on the space shuttle. The staff looked like they laundered their uniforms every ten minutes. Even the salads they were tossing looked like they were meant to appear in a movie about salads.

 

 

So not all restaurants are filthy.

 

I don't care. I'm gonna eat at that Italian place again. We had a very nice meal there.

 

 

(I'd better not see any flies.)

 

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Two terrible movies in a single day!

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I came home from a walk the other day to find Partner watching a Roman costume epic on Roku. It was fairly modern, obviously, and Malcolm McDowell was prancing and hooting in a toga. “'Caligula'?” I asked, taking off my hat and coat.

“Yep,” he said without taking his eyes from the screen. “You missed it when he killed John Gielgud. And that other British guy.”

I settled down and watched the rest of it with him. Oh my brothers and sisters, this is one for the archives. I didn't see it when it was new, back in 1979; I remember the huge amount of publicity it received – it was X-rated! It was the most sexually-charged and explicit movie ever made for public release!

Now, seen more than thirty years after its first release, it seems tame.

Some of the performances are excellent. McDowell (who has gone from playing fey maniacs like Caligula and Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” to playing Grandpa on “Phineas and Ferb” - not to mention Metallo in the Superman cartoons!) is priceless: staring and bizarre, somewhere between crazy and evil and calculating and desperately bored. Helen Mirren as his stately bloodthirsty wife Caesonia is a revelation; it's no wonder she matured into such an excellent actress.

But the orgy scenes are silly. You can show all the boob and crotch you like, but it really does make a difference what you do with it. Here, it's like Something Dirty a fourth-grader would draw on the wall behind the school. Naturally, it ends with Caligula's death; he's laying there, and you think: so what? He was a murderous lunatic, and somebody finally up and killed him. No lessons to be learned here!

But the costumes! And the banquets! I'd see it again, just for the atmosphere of excess. You can see everyone thinking: “We're being very very wicked.” But I'm glad I've seen it, and I will definitely see it again. It goes in the treasure chest with the other really unfortunately dreadful movies which are – surprise! - fun to watch.

Later that evening, we went to Lincoln Cinemaworld and saw “Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star.”

What can I tell you? I like stupid comedies, and this one (judging by the TV trailers) was stupidissimo. Nick Swardson with gigantic buck teeth! Don Johnson, with his Miami Vice hair twenty-five years later! Christina Ricci, owlish and lovely! It's an Adam Sandler production, so you know what to expect, if you've ever seen “Happy Gilmore” or “The Waterboy” (the latter is a personal favorite). Lots of embarrassing jokes about body functions, and people yelling for no reason, and pathetic characters who are ultimately vindicated. As Bucky says after his first (explosive, and hilarious) orgasm: “My brain is sparkling!”

So: two really terrible movies in one day.

But they were terrible for different reasons, and I very much enjoyed both of them.

Go figure.

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Ten years later

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September and October are really the best months in the Northeast. June is supposed to have “perfect days,” and maybe it does once in a while, but the really lovely weather comes right now.

Ten years ago today, it was a perfectly crystalline day in Providence. Partner and I were watching the Today Show that morning before work, and I remember a video shot over Manhattan, and the weather was just as beautiful there. I think the lead news story that morning was something about Michael Jordan, by the way.

Around nine that morning, I was sitting in my office when I could hear a coworker outside in the hallway: It was awful, was it an accident, how could such a thing happen -

Well, something had happened. I logged onto Yahoo and saw the first story – only a line or two at that point.

My memory of the rest of that day is a garble. The news went on and on, and the story kept changing. First there were four planes, then six, then five. First it was a tragic accident, and then (I don't remember when) the Al-Qaeda element came into it, and then there were images of the towers crumbling.

So many images. So many video cameras and cell phones. I can't help but wonder how different our perception of Pearl Harbor, or of the London Blitz, would be if there had been cameras everywhere, photographing everything.

A few years ago, Partner and I visited Ground Zero. A friend had told me that the best access was through the PATH terminal that still lay under the footprint of the Towers. We went down to the station, and looked up through the grillwork, and it was one of the most ominously sad things I've ever seen. The footprint of the Towers was vast, and completely empty, cleaned out by years of careful excavation. The edges were scarred, with long rusty streaks along the sides.

We didn't take any pictures.

It didn't seem appropriate.

 

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The Holy Bible

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I got my first Bible in 1969, three weeks before the first moon landing, in exchange for two books of S&H Green Stamps. I still have it. It's a big black-bound King James red-letter edition, with large print and lots of maps in the back.

 

 

The Bible fascinated me, and still does. It was the biggest and most convoluted puzzle in the world, and the prize for solving it was eternal bliss. I didn't really know much about the rules – in those days, I went only occasionally to the local church, which espoused a very general kind of God-loves-you Protestantism – but I gathered this much:

 

 

• It is very important to read the Bible. All of it. In seventeenth-century English.

  
  

• Memorizing it is good too.

  
  

• Things that seem contradictory (like the Gospel timelines of Jesus' life), or obviously fictional (like the stories of Jonah and Job), or just plain pointless (like the list of Jesus' ancestors in the Gospel of Matthew, down to Joseph – except that Jesus isn't Joseph's son, right?), are all part of some huge jigsaw puzzle. You can work it out if you try. A few people have managed it. A few people have gone completely crazy trying to work it out. Again, the prize for doing this is eternal bliss.

 

• So get cracking!

 

 

I took all this very seriously, and as a result, I know the Bible pretty well. I know who Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was, and Keren-Happuch, and Shear-Jashub. I know the longest book of the Bible, and the shortest. I have suffered through Paul's interminably pompous epistles, and smiled through Zechariah's wonderful apocalypse, in which the bells of the horses are engraved with the words HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD. I know the book of the Bible that ends with a punchline, and the one that ends with the word “curse.”

 

 

I have flickered in and out of faith, of various kinds. I was an indifferent pseudo-Protestant for a while, and then a Catholic convert, and then a former Catholic. As of this writing, I am a sad unwashed pagan. I have shamed my Catholic baptism.

 

 

I still go back from time to time, however. I keep multiple Bibles at home, and two at work, just for reference.

 

 

The Bible, at its best, is lyrical and terrible and beautiful and very sad:

 

 

“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. . . . O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God! Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.”

 

 

I wish it were true. It would be lovely if it were.

 

 

I'm glad it's not true. I'd be utterly doomed if it were.

 

 

But this much is true (as I can tell you from personal experience): the grass withereth, the flower fadeth.

 

 

Amen, brothers and sisters.

 

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The planet Mercury

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As a kid, I devoured books about astronomy. My brother Leonard actually gave me a telescope for my tenth birthday. But I was handicapped: I was afraid of the dark. Not good for a budding astronomer.

 

 

Over the years, I've gotten out more, and I am no longer afraid to get out under the dark sky and look up at the stars and planets. I only wish I still had that old refracting telescope; it was only 60x, but it wasn't bad. I saw some wonderful sights with it: the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter (dim little stars ranged out along the planet's belt, just as Galileo saw them), and the phases of Venus. The Moon, huge and cratered. The Pleiades, a flower-garden of stars. The Hyades, ditto. The Orion Nebula, a dim mysterious flickering patch of light.

 

 

I tried fitfully to see some of the rarer sights – nebulae, the Andromeda Galaxy, etc. - but I was handicapped in several ways:

 

 

• The Pacific Northwest is not a good place for viewing, as the air's usually pretty thick.

• Remember how I said I was afraid of the dark?

 

 

I've seen a lot, though.

 

 

But I've never yet seen Mercury.

 

 

Mercury is elusive. It never gets far away from the sun; you can only see it in early evening or early morning, just before sunrise or just after sunset. It's just another star that dims with the sunrise, or sets quickly after the sun.

 

 

Every year I buy an almanac and look for the times of year when Mercury will be most visible.

 

 

And to date – after almost fifty years of on-and-off looking – I still have not seen it.

 

 

I'm sure it's lovely. I like thinking about it: that bright hot little orb buzzing like a crazy hornet around the sun, showing itself low on our horizon only once in a while.

 

 

Maybe if I actually got up before dawn one of these days . . .

 

 

And what are the chances of that?

 

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