Literature | dual personalities

This is the day

by chuckofish

Good morning! There’s nothing like some Mandisa to start your day off right! And it is important to start your day off right.

This is the day which the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

(Psalm 118:24)

My mother, who was not one to scold or correct, did tell me once, when I was grousing about something as an adolescent, that this is the day which the Lord has made, and you ought not to complain about it, but, indeed, rejoice about it. And for Pete’s sake, don’t waste it! That advice struck a cord in me and I never forgot it.

IT IS A MOMENT of light surrounded on all sides by darkness and oblivion. In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another just like it and there will never be another just like it again. It is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

“This is the day which the Lord has made,” says the 118th Psalm. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you’re wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you’ve been waiting for always that you’re missing.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from them. Today is the only day there is.

– Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

I may have said all this before, but it bears repeating. Write it on your heart.

And here’s a little Stephen Stills on the subject:

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice…

6 Comments

March 8, 2019

Call it sad, call it funny But it’s better than even money…*

by chuckofish

So what’s on the docket for this weekend?

I don’t have much on the docket and that is okay with me. It’s going to warm up around here (which is good) but it will probably rain (bummer). Estate sale-ing in the rain = no fun.

Last weekend when daughter #1 was home we watched Oklahoma! (1955) on a whim and I really enjoyed it. Gordon MacRae was super cute…

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…and there was a lot of good singing and dancing in it. Maybe I was just in the mood…

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…but it was a pleasant surprise. Perhaps I will continue down that musical trail…

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I also have plenty to keep me busy reading.

And maybe I’ll get some hair-styling advice from little Lottiebelle.

Have fun this weekend! Make good choices.

*Frank Loesser, “Guys and Dolls”

5 Comments

February 28, 2019

The Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World

by chuckofish

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I was thinking about this ‘anecdote’ the other night and looked it up to read. It always reminded me so much of the boy when he was…a boy…and also, what I imagined my grandfather Bunker to be like.

It’s an Anecdote, sink me, but I’ll let it rip: At about nine, I had the very pleasant notion that I was the Fastest Boy Runner in the World. It’s the kind of queer, basically extracurricular conceit, I’m inclined to add, that dies hard, and even today, at a supersedentary forty, I can picture myself, in street clothes, whisking past a series of distinguished but hard-breathing Olympic milers and waving to them, amiably, without a trace of condescension. Anyway, one beautiful spring evening when we were still living over on Riverside Drive, Bessie sent me to the drugstore for a couple of quarts of ice cream. I came out of the building at that very same magical quarter hour described just a few paragraphs back. Equally fatal to the construction of this anecdote, I had sneakers on–sneakers surely being to anyone who happens to be the Fastest Boy Runner in the World almost exactly what red shoes were to Hans Christian Andersen’s little girl. Once I was clear of the building, I was Mercury himself, and broke into a “terrific” sprint up the long block to Broadway. I took the corner at Broadway on one wheel and kept going, doing the impossible: increasing speed. The drugstore that sold Louis Sherry ice cream, which was Bessie’s adamant choice, was three blocks north, at 113th. About halfway there, I tore past the stationery store where we usually bought our newspapers and magazines, but blindly, without noticing any acquaintances or relatives in the vicinity. Then, about a block farther on, I picked up the sound of pursuit at my rear, plainly conducted on foot. My first, perhaps typically New Yorkese thought was that the cops were after me–the charge, conceivably, Breaking Speed Records on a Non-School-Zone Street. I strained to get a little more speed out of my body, but it was no use. I felt a hand clutch out at me and grab hold of my sweater just where the winning-team numerals should have been, and, good and scared, I broke my speed with the awkwardness of a gooney bird coming to a stop. My pursuer was, of course, Seymour, and he was looking pretty damned scared himself. “What’s the matter? What happened?” he asked me frantically. He was still holding on to my sweater. I yanked myself loose from his hand and informed him, in the rather scatological idiom of the neighborhood, which I won’t record here verbatim, that nothing happened, nothing was the matter, that I was just running, for cryin’ out loud. His relief was prodigious. “Boy, did you scare me!” he said. “Wow, were you moving! I could hardly catch up with you!” We then went along, at a walk, to the drugstore together. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely at all, the morale of the Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World had not been perceptibly lowered. For one thing, I had been outrun by him. Besides, I was extremely busy noticing that he was panting a lot. It was oddly diverting to see him pant.

–J.D. Salinger, Seymour an Introduction

Classic Salinger. I love it. So. Much.

4 Comments

February 27, 2019

“When glorie swells the heart”*

by chuckofish

Can you believe that a week from today is Ash Wednesday? Where did February go? I mean really.

Well, today George Herbert (1593 – 1633) is commemorated on the calendar of saints throughout the Anglican Communion.

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“The Herbert Niche” at Salisbury Cathedral

Herbert wrote poetry in English, Latin and Greek. Shortly before his death, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of a semi-monastic Anglican religious community at Little Gidding, reportedly telling him to publish the poems if he thought they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul”, otherwise to burn them. Thanks to Ferrar, all of Herbert’s English poems were published in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, with a preface by Ferrar, shortly after his death in 1633. The book went through eight editions by 1690.

Here’s one of his most famous poems, “The Flower”.

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;

         To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                      Grief melts away

                      Like snow in May,

         As if there were no such cold thing.

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

         Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown,

                      Where they together

                      All the hard weather,

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

         And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

                      We say amiss

                      This or that is:

         Thy word is all, if we could spell.

         Oh that I once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!

         Many a spring I shoot up fair,

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;

                      Nor doth my flower

                      Want a spring shower,

         My sins and I joining together.

         But while I grow in a straight line,

Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,

         Thy anger comes, and I decline:

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone

                      Where all things burn,

                      When thou dost turn,

         And the least frown of thine is shown?

         And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

         I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing. Oh, my only light,

                      It cannot be

                      That I am he

         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide;

         Which when we once can find and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;

                      Who would be more,

                      Swelling through store,

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

He’s pretty great, don’t you think?

*Herbert, from “The Pearl”

2 Comments

January 14, 2019

“See, what you have to ask yourself is: what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?”

by chuckofish

Well, we did, indeed, have a little snow on Friday night.

I did a little shoveling, but the boy brought his snow blower over and did most of our driveway…

He made short work of what would have been a major effort/pain for me to do. I did some more shoveling on Sunday…by then the snow was heavy and icey. But it felt good to get out in the cold and do some physical work.

I spent the weekend reading M Train by Patti Smith, “an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as ‘a roadmap to my life.’”

Like me, she is a person who sees signs and miracles in the world. She rescues objects and keeps talismans that are full of meaning for her.

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She wears vintage clothes and watches detective shows and visits cemeteries to pay homage to specific graves, usually of literary figures or artists. If I ever go to Tokyo I will, like Patti, want to have dinner at the restaurant Mifune. In other words, we are on the same page.

–Reading Ibsen?

–Yes, The Master Builder.

–Hmmmm, lovely play but fraught with symbolism.

–I hadn’t noticed, I said.

He stood before the fire for a moment then shook his head and left. Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down “Desolation Row.” I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top because I wished it. (M Train)

I also delved into Sam Anderson’s Boom Town, “The fantastical saga of Oklahoma City, its chaotic founding, its apocalyptic weather, its purloined basketball team, and the dream of becoming a world-class metropolis,” which DN gave me for Christmas, because he knows that OC is on my top-five list of places I want to visit. Isn’t it great to have a son-in-law who picks out books for me? I mean really.

The wee babes frolicked in the snow…

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…and they came over for Episcopal souffle on Sunday night. Can you believe how grown up they look?

Can you say, “chip and dip”?

And now it’s back to the rat race…have a good week!

Here is Patti Smith’s lovely elegy for her friend Sam Shepard.

*Graham Hess in Signs (2002)

7 Comments

November 14, 2018

“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.”*

by chuckofish

The Christmas cactus is on the verge of blooming–right on schedule.

I am pretty impressed, considering the abuse it has taken from the wee babes, who are fascinated by it.

We had a little snow, which came before most people had an opportunity to rake/vacuum up the leaves that have fallen. So there is kind of a mess out there. As you can see, there are still a lot of leaves on the trees. C’est la vie.

Every year is different, and that’s what makes living in flyover country interesting.

Yesterday, after a busy day at work, I raced over to Umrath Lounge at my flyover university to find a seat to hear Marilynne Robinson speak. I found a single seat in the second row and sat right behind her. I could have reached out and touched her, but I restrained myself. A member of the English department made an incoherent and self-serving introduction and then Marilynne read her essay on “Holy Moses: An appreciation of Genesis and Exodus as literature and theology” in dim light which frequently caused her to stumble over her words. It was an academic talk and I am no scholar and she is way over my head anyway, but I enjoyed listening to her. In the Q&A section at the end we got a chance to see Marilynne the person and not the scholar and that was good.

Well, I am thankful that I have a job where I am in a position to come in contact with one of my heroes from time to time. To be in the same room with Marilynne Robinson was really something–a Christian in that den of academia, quoting 17th century puritans unironically!

“The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

5 Comments

June 27, 2018

Wednesday round-up

by chuckofish

So did you read about the brouhaha over Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic Little House on the Prairie series?

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A division of the American Library Association voted unanimously last week to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks. Funnily enough, I bought a hardback copy of Little House on the Prairie at an estate sale last Saturday. I started reading it on Sunday and I have to say I was impressed with the beauty and simplicity of the writing.

“In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.”

Haven’t these PC-obsessed librarians ever heard of context?

I say, “Phooey!” to the American Library Association.

It may be time to road trip down to Mansfield, Missouri to see the “House on Rocky Ridge Farm”–where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo lived and where she wrote her books.

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There is a museum there as well. Mansfield is located in the Ozarks on the south edge of the Salem Plateau. It is a 3.5 hour drive from St. Louis. Branson–which is not on my bucket list–is a little over an hour from there.

On the movie front the OM and I watched Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) last week when it was on TCM and I thoroughly enjoyed it. That dance sequence at the barn-raising is superb, as is the subsequent fight-dance. It is so appropriately athletic. All that stomping!

Wow. Sure looks like fun.

Anyway, you might want to check it out.

And speaking of drama, thunder storms here lately have been quite theatrical. This was how the sky looked as I drove home yesterday.

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I was reminded of the night of June 28, 1969 when a severe storm with winds of near tornadic force struck the St. Louis riverfront. The riverboat restaurant Becky Thatcher,

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with her barge and a replica of the Santa Maria (not kidding) alongside, broke loose and drifted several miles downstream, safely clearing two bridges, before crashing into the Monsanto dock on the Illinois side. One hundred restaurant patrons were aboard at the time and all were rescued by the towboat Larrayne Andress and taken back to St. Louis, where they were safely landed at the Streckfus wharfboat. The Santa Maria, we are told, sunk like a tub.

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Quelle flyover weather drama.

Well, try to take time to smell the flowers and enjoy the week. Read something controversial–like Little House on the Prairie!

8 Comments

June 14, 2018

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”

by chuckofish

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

Today is the anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator.

He is buried in the Cimetière de Plainpalais, in Geneva, Switzerland, along with John Calvin.

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Many people thought that he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This makes me think of Philip Roth, who died a few weeks ago, who also felt robbed of the same award.

Well, as Calvin said, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”

If you are looking for something to read, you might look up old Jorge Luis Borges. I am not well read in his canon, but what I have read, I liked.

I’m talking to an American: there’s a book I must speak about — nothing unexpected about it — that book is Huckleberry Finn. I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer. I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. All those silly jokes. They are all pointless as jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn’t in the mood. The jokes had to be worked in somehow. According to what George Moore said, the English always thought, “better a bad joke than no joke.”

I think that Mark Twain was one of the really great writers, but I think he was rather unaware of that fact. But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.

I remember Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and not more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. In this country, though, there is a tendency to regard any kind of writing — especially the writing of poetry — as a game of style. I have known many poets here who have written well — very fine stuff — with delicate moods and so on — but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be a kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets and writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them — except four or five, I should say — seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it.

(Interview with Borges in The Paris Review)

3 Comments

April 25, 2018

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

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“Part of the forces that sent Sam trudging across the white prairies was love of life, a gladness for health and youth that filled him as Mozart’s gayest music filled him; and part of it was his belief that the earth on which he walked had been designed by the greatest of artists, and that if a man had the courage and fortitude not to fail it, it would not fail him. In Sam’s rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator. If it was a part of the inscrutable plan that he was to live through this ordeal, and again cover the bones of wife and child with mountain lilies, the strength was lying in him, waiting, and he had only to call on it- all of it- and use it, without flinching or whimpering. If he showed himself to be a worthy piece in the Great Architect’s edifice he would live; in Sam’s philosophy that was about all there was to it.”

–Vardis Fisher, Mountain Man

While reading through my pile of 1940s New Yorker magazines, I read a review of a novel by Vardis Fisher. This reminded me of the movie Jeremiah Johnson (1972) which is based on another Vardis Fisher novel, Mountain Man, which I had always meant to read. So I checked out Mountain Man (published in 1965) from my flyover university and have been reading it.

The story follows the life of Sam Minard (and various other fur-trappers) and his relations with the Crow and Blackfoot tribes in and around 1846. Two of the three central characters were suggested by actual people: Kate Bowden (i.e. Jane Morgan) who went crazy after killing with an ax the four Indians who had slaughtered her family on the Musselshell: secondly, Samson Minard (i.e. John Johnston- the “Crow-killer”). It is an action-packed tale, full of detail and interesting facts about the Wyoming-Montana-Idaho territory. Our mountain man hero is apt to wax eloquent on many subjects, such as which animal mothers will fight to the death to protect their children (wolf, wolverine, bobcat, badger, bear, grouse, avocet, horned lark) and which will not (buffalo, elk). Sam is also quite a spiritual being:

Reading nature, for Sam, was like reading the Bible; in both, the will of the Creator was plain.

He is educated, well read and likes to sing. What’s not to like?

It should be noted that the book has very little in common with the movie, however, and they must be enjoyed separately. I have no idea why the screenwriter strayed so far from the book, but he did. I guess they felt the need to lighten up on the Indians and make them more palatable to the movie-going audience. Whatever.

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Our great-great grandfather, John Simpson Hough, was a good friend of “Uncle Dick” Wooten

Richens Lacey Wooten

and Kit Carson,

who are both referred to in the book. Although no mountain man himself, John Hough was a great admirer of the breed. Family legend says that Kit Carson died in the Hough’s house in Boggsville (and not in Fort Lyon per Wikipedia). At least one of his daughters (Terasina) lived with and was raised by the Houghs for several years. When he knew Dick and Kit, they were both old men, and I’m sure John Hough enjoyed listening to their tales of the early days. In that, I am like him.

What are you reading?

5 Comments

March 23, 2018

“Sit down, you’re rocking the boat”*

by chuckofish

Funny story: when I was returning from my trip east on Tuesday, my carryon bag was detained when it went through security at BWI. I had to wait while another TSA agent came over to check things out. He said, “It looks like you have a book in there.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking, is a book a problem?

He opened up my suitcase and rooted around until he found the 640-page Henry David Thoreau: A Life, which daughter #2 had given me in my welcome goodie bag of treats. He whiffled through the pages, but didn’t come up with anything, so he put it back inside and we closed up the bag.

Then he said, “Do you mind if I ask you what that book is about?”

“It’s the new biography of Thoreau,” I said. “What do you think he’d make of all this?” I chuckled.

He chuckled too, but he had no idea what I was talking about.

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” (Civil Disobedience)

That’s what I thought.

Well, this weekend will be a busy one. Carla and I are hosting a bridal shower at my house for our friend Becky’s future daughter-in-law. Daughter #1 is coming into town to make the champagne punch!

Can’t wait to see the wee babes–it’s been two weeks!

And can you believe it, Sunday is Palm Sunday! Time for the Passion story and the Grace Church showcase of lay reader stars. It is also time to catch up with some Lenten movie fare. Indeed, it may be time to dust off Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and get down to business. Holy Week is upon us.

*Nicely-Nicely in Guys and Dolls

3 Comments

dual personalities

Category: Literature

March 13, 2019

This is the day

by chuckofish

March 8, 2019

Call it sad, call it funny But it’s better than even money…*

by chuckofish

February 28, 2019

The Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World

by chuckofish

February 27, 2019

“When glorie swells the heart”*

by chuckofish

January 14, 2019

“See, what you have to ask yourself is: what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?”

by chuckofish

November 14, 2018

“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.”*

by chuckofish

June 27, 2018

Wednesday round-up

by chuckofish

June 14, 2018

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”

by chuckofish

April 25, 2018

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

March 23, 2018

“Sit down, you’re rocking the boat”*

by chuckofish