Light My Fire, A Contemptible Cremation

       The self-justifying confessional is alive and well.  And on occasion, you encounter an anguished tale face to face.  I have a service provider who I’ve been with for a few years now.  I have noticed that appointments with him take longer than required to accomplish their purpose.  That’s because Dave has a need to talk.

       I use that alias for him because of this personal story he related.  His father was living in Florida.  His brother also resided there, and Dave lived and worked in Illinois where the family originated.  Word came to Dave that his elderly father was close to death so Dave boarded a plane to Florida and met up with his brother.  They had a bedside visit with their Dad before he expired.  Their Dad made clear his last wish—that he be buried beside his dear wife in Illinois.  They assured him they would do as he asked.  The father passed away, at peace that his sons would see to his final resting place.  The Florida brother began inquiries into modes of transportation of the paternal remains back to Illinois.  Dave stepped in and wised his brother up.  “No way we’re going to send him back to Illinois.  It’ll cost an arm and a leg. We’ll cremate him and then have a brief service here.  That will save a lot of dough.  No transport costs.  No plot.”

     The brother resisted but he was no match for Dave’s resolve.  He assured his brother there was no harm.  Dad wouldn’t know.  After all, he was dead.  The fire was lit and the flames reduced the paterfamilias to ashes and dust.  Dave returned to Illinois, to his family and his job and all seemed well.  But there are those voices that whisper in the night, the shadows that speak from the corners of the room, and they seemed to say, “Shame, liar, heartless son.” 

     Dave is not easily shaken.  What they did was logical, sensible.  It would have been a terrible waste of money to ship Pop back just so he could be buried beside his wife.  They had to make a decision.   “And we did the right thing, the sensible thing.  At least I believe we did.  What do you think?  Did I betray my Dad?”  I looked at Dave.  I let a minute pass.  My impulse was to rise from my chair, plant both hands on his desk, lean into his face and exclaim, “Of course you betrayed him, you cheap-ass son of a bitch!  You lied to him. You dishonored his last wish.  You fried your father!”  But I didn’t say what I thought.  I just repeated “Betrayed?  Betrayed?  Well, some would say you did.  But what matters is how you feel about it.  What’s your verdict?”  He replied, “I think we did the right thing.  The best thing.”

     Since that narrative was disclosed, rationalizations about other matters have crawled from Dave’s craw.  But in my view he’s never topped the story of breaking his word to his dying parent.  Short of parricide, there is no filial transgression more repugnant than breaking the bond of a last wish.  I hope Dave is always haunted by his selfish monetary motives.  I think of him as “Dad-Fryer-Dave,” the contemptible cremator. 

Mind in the Gutter

     Apparently I have reached the age at which I am no longer allowed to speak about matters of the flesh.  It’s unfair but there are ways to redress the injustice .  If you catch me emitting a concupiscent-sounding chortle, you’ll know that my mind has revisited the gutter.  Here are a couple of examples of what I found there.
    
    Those of my generation who grew up Catholic experienced interrogation and peculiar theology in the experience of going to confession.  When I was a young fellow in my late teens, there was a priest who heard confessions at my all boys high school.  As we waited in line, we knew he was done with the current penitent when his voice boomed through the drawn curtain, "Get your mind out of the gutter!"  That was the only part of the confession that was audible.  But he said it to everyone. Apparently we were all voicing the same sins.

    A year or two after high school, in my home parish, I encountered a confessor who listened to my recitation of transgression, and then said:  "You must never see her again."  "What, Father?"  I asked him to repeat.  He did so.  "Well, Father that's really not possible.  We have a date tonight."  He then explained that he could not give me absolution, and justified his decision by quoting canon law--in Latin.  (I actually understood a  number of the words because I had a good Latin teacher in high school.)  I refused to abide by the edict.  He did not absolve me.  I was dumbfounded.  Outside, I sat in my car for a few minutes.  Then the Holy Spirit sent me a fine idea.  I pulled out from the curb, and drove five miles to the next parish.  I walked in, picked the nearest confessional, knelt down and spoke the same sins.  The priest asked me no questions.  I was sure I heard him yawn.  He gave me a modest penance.  And I said an act of contrition while he said the words of absolution.  

     The experience taught me an important application of  theological decision-making.  Ya gotta shop around.  Oh, and the date that night . . . how hot was it?  Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.

      This other incident did not involve confusion over ritual, but I tell it with a residuum of rue.  Many years ago, I was traveling, training staff in the field. A female trainee came to my room on the pretext of clarifying a manual. Later, when she left the employ, she angrily told me that visit was intended to result in sex with the boss. I had no clue and there was no sex. I was so focused on the football game on TV, I barely noticed when she left the room. Apparently, I missed a booty call before there was such a thing. 

      The lesson I'm trying to pass on here is--pay attention!  You really can't afford to make mistakes like that when you're young.  Some opportunities are unlikely to repeat. 

    

A Brief Reflection on Decay and Delight

     Our decay is their delight.  But not only decay.  Accident, illness, disease, debilitation are conditions that the medical profession thrives on.  And that's not a condemnation.  Deficit or deficiency is the sine que non of many professions.  Teachers strive to transform ignorance.  Lawyers seek to attain justice in a situation of transgression or conflict.  Science seeks to change the unknown into the known.  Ministers foster the restless search for meaning in spiritual life.  What binds these practitioners is their address of the presence of absence.  We are aware of persistent longings in ourselves for stasis, equipoise, integration, a center and a sense of balance.
     It's not surprising that we turn to seers, savants, prophets, medicine mavens, wizards, wunderkinds, and gurus to anchor our waywardness.  Enlighted experts have knowledge sets we lack, but they need our lack as much as we need their lead.  It's a kind of social symbiosis more than parasitic feeding.  We all benefit from the supply and demand. 

Reading Gatsby with a Lawyer by your Side

                         

          Materialism runs rampant in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes and language etch images of acquisitiveness.  Daisy’s voice is “full of money”; and her tears are evoked by Gatsby’s expensive garments: “They’re such beautiful shirts, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”  Gatsby himself keeps his huge house “always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things.  Celebrated people.”  Tom of course supplements his racism with a crass concentration on status and financial worth.  And narrator Nick’s opening statement is his recollection of his father reminding him of his own advantaged position in life.

         So if you have not been born into privilege and abundance, or had much contact with those conditions (“The rich are different from us”) there is a lot in the ambience and the attitude of The Great Gatsby that would befuddle you.  Reading the text with an Ivy League lawyer by your side might seem guaranteed to strengthen that strangeness.  But not if the lawyer is the right one.  And the right one in the case I will describe here is my daughter who serves weekly as a volunteer tutor for high school girls whose potential for accomplishment is high but whose confidence is not. 

       She had occasion recently to work with a student who was, at first, overwhelmed by The Great Gatsby.  The signal that the young woman was adrift was the significant omission of any mention of her English class as her work load was reviewed.

“So, what’s going in in English?”

“We’re reading The Great Gatsby.  And . . . “I think it’s really hard.”

“So what have you tried to do to help yourself.”

“Well, I got one of those study guides, you know the ones that summarize the story.  But then the teacher asks questions that I haven’t thought of. . .”

“You know, those ‘study guides’ are not a good idea, especially if you’re reading it instead of the novel.   Here’s what I suggest.  Let’s read the book together.  OK?”

“Well, other people have tried that with me.  I don’t know. . .”

“Let’s give it a go.”

      The next week the lawyer walked in, sat down with the young woman, and pulled out a fresh new copy of the text.  The student was stunned.

“That’s not a library book? You bought the book yourself?  It’s the same as mine, the cover’s the same!”

“Sure I bought it. If I used a library copy, I wouldn’t be able to mark it up.”  And the lawyer showed her the annotated pages and marginalia.  The student was amazed that any tutor would have taken her homework that seriously and prepared so fully. 

They set to work on the novel. The lawyer tutor had, in her rereading, underlined and written in the margins of the page.  She noted some words with a “c” (for comprehension) if she thought the student might not have the words in her active vocabulary.  The lawyer was alert to images that were evocative and echoic and attentive to phrases rich in meaning.  The young woman picked up on this.  The feeling that The Great Gatsby is too deep a pool for us to immerse ourselves in is counteracted when we receive the invitation to come in, the water’s fine.  And when that invitation takes the form of an exemplum, i.e., thorough preparation and a working strategy to unpack the density of “a world elsewhere” that is the literary environment of The Great Gatsby, then what transpires and inspires is a propaedeutic, an ontological poetics that encourages the imagination to function as a way of knowing.   That such a level of response can begin to form in new readers is evident in the passage that the student found on her own and spoke to in her class: “it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”  She said she did not fully understand these lines, but she felt the sense of loss in the words.  She had begun to interpret and was learning respect for the text and for her own mind.

 So keep this in mind the next time you start to laugh at another tired lawyer joke.  Yeah, all lawyers are terrible people.  Except when they’re not.  Except when your back is against the wall and you need help.  Except when one sits down with you and helps you to learn.

            By the way, did I mention that the lawyer is my daughter?  Oh, right. I did.  Of course I’m proud and beaming.  Why wouldn’t I be?

           

                             

           

The Music of Words in The Great Gatsby

     It's too hard.  You'll never understand this.  And you shouldn't try.  That's what the new dumbed-down edition of The Great Gatsby conveys to students.  It's a re-write of Fitzgerald's masterwork that removes exquisite expressions and reflective observations that impart richness and density to the prose.  Here's a cogent and incisive account of this travesty by Roger Ebert. 
    I concur with almost everything Ebert says in his piece, with one exception.   "When I read it the first time, I certainly missed some of the nuances, but I didn't stumble over any of the words."  I doubt that Ebert's memory serves him well here.  His first reading of Gatsby was a long time ago as it was for many of us.  There are challenging words in the novel.  Words that are not part of common parlance and unlikely to be grasped from context.  Here are some examples.

meretricious (term one character in the novel uses to describe another); pasquinade (used by Nick in a description of the aftermath of Gatsby’s murder); ulster (used as part of a description of Gatsby's father's attire when he arrives for the funeral); pandered and commensurate (not so much for their denotation but for what they mean on the last pages where they appear) 

   When I taught Gatsby, we would pause on unfamilar words and take the time to look them up (what a concept!).   Expanding one's vocabulary is a to-be-expected benefit from reading notable novels.  The Great Gatsby is also an auditory book, one that directs our attention to sound as well as sense.  Thus the famous concluding coda proved to be apt material for a section of a test that I entitled THE WRITER'S EAR: THE RIGHT WORD IN THE RIGHT PLACE.  Here's a sample of the layout I used.

Reproduced below are some extracts from the exquisite conclusion to The Great Gatsby with three variant phrases at key points.  Underline the phrase that is Fitzgerald’s.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.  And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for

                                   native settlers’
                                   Dutch sailors’            eyes--a
                                   alert clear

fresh, green breast of the new world. 

   And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.  He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the

     dark fields of the republic

     faint hope of promise                rolled on under the night.
     deep sounds of discord                  

     Gatsby believed in the green light,. . .  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will  

               try harder to overcome our limits

               run faster, stretch out our arms farther
               find the missing needed dream
 

. . .  And one fine morning---

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly

into the past

to our first hope
by the green light

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

       So an important dimension of learning how to read The Great Gatsby is learning how to hear it.  Knowing the dictionary rendering of literary vocabulary moves you only partway down the road of understanding.  Sense is served by sound, tone, pace, rhythm, sonority and what is tellingly not stated as well as what is voiced. A complex gestalt of all of these elements is what makes interpretation possible and necessary.  And interpreting a work of art is a continuing process that changes as we encounter it in new contexts.  Without interpretation, without readers who engage with the paradoxes, ambiguities and tensions in a text there is no way for the book to bloom in the world.  That end will not be attained by stealing from The Great Gatsby the substance of its content or the music of its form.

  

Grunts from the Wordgrump (5)---! Marks and The Sentence

>The maladies of cliched expression in online writing are manifold.  This article in the N.Y. Times is unfortunately balanced and calm, when what is called for is a cauldron of boiling oil for those who use multiple exclamation marks.  The conclusion, with its "analogy" to conversation in an Irish pub is an inexcusable profanation. 

>Stanley Fish is well enough along in years to be in his dotage but his recent work demonstrates more dexterity than doddering.  Check out How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One.

The Expandable Leash and Other Poor Choices

      Expandable leashes mark you as a lazy dog owner.  They impede training.  They are unsafe.  You have ceded control to the animal you have an obligation to protect.  Your dog can be twenty feet or more away from you and in the street before you are able to react or retract.

      Sidewalk your dog on the parkway or street side not the property side.  Do not allow roaming on residential front lawns.  People (even dog people) don’t want your pooches’s poop plopped on their flower beds.  And no fake pick-ups.  The phony bend over is execrable.  Your dog's waste is your responsibility.  Bag it.  Stow it.  Throw it in a suitable receptacle.

     You should be walking your dog not only for the exercise that benefits you both but to increase your bond with and knowledgeable appreciation of a species superior in character and intelligence to many humans.  So pay attention.  Get your phone out of your ear, your downcast eyes off your text screen and walk your dog with a fixed four foot lead.

    Once you get these basics in line, I’ll address the other numerous mistakes you make when you encounter my giant breed and me in the neighborhood and at the dog park. 

        Have a nice day.

Panning for Poems: netting some nuggets

                                                          
     I recently checked out four volumes of poetry from my local library.  They are: Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey (2006, a Pulitzer Prize awardee); Breakwater, Catherine Savage Brosman (2009); American Rendering, Andrew Hudgins (2010); and Inseminating the Elephant, Lucia Perillo (2009).  Right off the bat I think we can agree that the winner (I keep typing sinner) for best title is Inseminating the Elephant if we use vividness of imagery as the criterion.

     Why did I emerge with these four books of poetry (and three other books of different genres) when I had nothing in mind when I entered the library.  I emerged with seven volumes in tow because I had nothing in mind when I entered what is still holy ground, e-books and the internet notwithstanding.  The old word for this is serendipity. A phrase I would offer is a simple one, “informed browsing.”  I let my eye be caught by author’s names I do not immediately recognize or recall. But they have to have some credentials—testimonials from other writers or reviewers, a publisher of note, previous publications, even the way the book is set up, epigraph-ed and dedicated can yield a sense of substance—that increase the chance of finding something fresh.  And I did with these four.  They’re all good poets with distinctive voices.

      Brosman is a formalist who unexpectedly appends an odd Postface in Prose at the close of her volume; it’s a personal essay, “Lightning in the Heart.”  It’s about a rekindled love affair late in life and she connects it to her poem, “To Former Students, Who Would Be Skeptical” of their teacher’s passion. I think she doth presume too much about students’ active response to “this comment by a sage:/To fall in love is good at any age.” I prefer her work in its more buttoned mode, her paeans to Mina Loy, Madeleine Gide, and D.H. Lawrence.

     Trethewey is a young Southern poet.  Black soldiers in the Civil War (Native Guard)  
capture her attention and she shapes their stories through their voices in Parts II and III of this slim volme. In “Pastoral” Trethewey dreams she is in blackface and declares “My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.  They answer in the last line: “You don’t hate the south? they ask. You don’t hate it?”  Thus she deftly alludes to Faulkner’s Quentin Compson who makes a similar statement at the end of the novel, Absalom, Absalom. Part I is stand alone and has an autobiographical feel to it especially in “Genus Narcissus,” “Graveyard Blues” and “After Your Death.”  Her mother constitutes the presence of absence in these poems.

     Perillo, our “winner of best title” is a poet in a wheelchair, something neither she nor her poems draw much attention to.  She has a sassy style.  She will mix the colloquial and the ruminative as in this example from “Transcendentalism.”  The setting is a class on Emerson. “I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, / a quiet little interlude from everyone outside/ rooting up the corpse of literature / for being too Caucasian.”

    Hudgins is better than good.  American Rendering is a full and accomplished volume of “New and Selected Poems.”  Many of his poems have a narrative center and so they unfold in a way that folds you into the story.  He is unafraid of the profane and the erotic, and he’s interested in Saints and Strangers, to borrow the name of a section of this collection taken from his previous book with that title.
      “Lorraine’s Song” will startle.  It involves sex through the knothole of a fence with a boy on one side and a mocking girl on the other.  Yes, it describes exactly what you think it does.  However, ardor is dashed by the choice of “mouth or knife.”  Feeling lucky fella?  The amalgam of lust and loathing moves into an equally surprising combination of opposites depicting singing and violence in a church.  A young girl watches in horror as intruders attack and beat her father, the minister.  She, though unable to move, leads the congregation to lift their voices in “Amazing Grace” until the beating ends and the attackers leave.  There is more in this section about the girl and her preacher-father as she grows up and those poems will attach themselves to the ear in your mind.

     So this panning for poetic pleasures yielded some nuggets, and put me in mind of William Carlos Williams’ famous lines from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":  “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." 

     Find the necessary news from the muse.