dual personalities

Tag: Literature

May 11, 2021

Look homeward, angel

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of American author Stanley Elkin, who taught at my flyover university for many years. He also lived two houses down from us growing up. I babysat for his children Bernie and Molly from time to time when I was in high school. His wife Joan was nice. I remember they had the cover of every book he wrote blown up to poster size and framed, which I thought was a little over the top, but to each his own.

Here’s a little film about Stanley which shows our street (I think) at about 1:01.

And here he is sitting in front of his house (photo by Esquire).

He rode a motorcycle until he was diagnosed with MS, and then he slowed down quite a bit.

Anyway, the English Department at WashU must have been quite the place back then–what with Stanley and William Gass and Howard Nemerov. The Gasses lived in our neighborhood too and Nemerov famously walked down our street on his way to work. But some of my friends didn’t like driving to my neighborhood–too sketchy.

Different perspectives.

7 Comments
June 3, 2016

“What’s playin’ at The Roxy? I’ll tell you what’s playin’ at the Roxy”*

by chuckofish

Four-day work weeks are the best, n’est-ce pas? It is Friday already. Glory hallelujah!

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I have few plans per usual. However, I am going to hear the author Nathaniel Philbrick speak about his latest book, Valiant Ambition, a “surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution, and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold.” You will recall that he is the author of In the Heart of the Sea and several other books about American History. I especially like his book Why Read Moby-Dick?

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In this short book he says,

He tells us to call him Ishmael, but who is the narrator of Moby-Dick? For one thing, he has known depression, “a damp, drizzly November of the soul.” But he is also a person of genuine enthusiasms. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher int he Rye, he is wonderfully engaging, a vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest to murder the blues by shipping out on a whaleship.

I love this, because it is exactly what I thought when I read Moby-Dick. I mean, don’t you just love it when you read something that is exactly what you thought already? Great minds and all that.

Beyond this intellectual outing to the Ethical Society, I am going to pursue my usual weekend activities of puttering and straightening up my house.

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I may do some further planning for my trip to Kansas City next weekend. Yes, I convinced the OM to take a day off from work and drive out to the western edge of our great state and do some looking around in the Westport area.

Independence and the Opening of the West

Independence and the Opening of the West by Thomas Hart Benton

Good times await. Everything’s up to date in Kansas City, or so they say.

Enjoy your weekend!

*Guys and Dolls

4 Comments
August 26, 2014

Dedication to a mountain

by chuckofish

I was reminded recently that Herman Melville dedicated Pierre: or, The Ambiguities to a particular mountain, which I saw every day when I was a student at Williams College. I climbed Mt. Greylock one Saturday with members of the Mountain Club and enjoyed the view which encompasses five states.

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It was always in the background of all our shenanigans.

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Kite flying in the spring of 1977 with Spud and Emmett

I miss those mountains, and I suppose those big-hearted football players.

Anyway, here is Melville’s most gracious dedication:

To Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty

In old times authors were proud of the privilege of dedicating their works to Majesty. A right noble custom, which we of Berkshire must revive. For whether we will or no, Majesty is all around us here in Berkshire, sitting as in a grand Congress of Vienna of majestical hill-tops, and eternally challenging homage.

But since the majestic mountain, Greylock–my own more immediate sovereign lord and king–hath now, for innumerable ages, been the one grand dedicatee of the earliest rays of all the Berkshire mornings, I know not how his Imperial Purple Majesty (royal born: Porphyrogenitus) will receive the dedication of my own poor solitary ray.

Nevertheless, forasmuch as I, dwelling with my loyal neighbours, the Maples and the Beeches, in the amphitheatre over which his central majesty presides, have received his most bounteous and unstinted fertilisations, it is but meet, that I here devoutly kneel, and render up my gratitude, whether, thereto, The Most Excellent Purple Majesty of Greylock benignantly incline his hoary crown or no.

Don’t you just love old Herman? I mean really.

7 Comments
April 17, 2014

Everything was blazing

by chuckofish

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…Everything was blazing, everything was sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover–because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and–there she was! her! and she was talking to herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions…

–Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Okay, I have finally finished this magnum opus and I have to say I liked it. I think it is overly long and could have used some tightening up. At times I wanted to tell ol’ Boris to shut the hell up, but, you know, he was a talker.  I have heard some blog-grumbling about the end of the novel. Personally–spoiler alert–I was relieved to have it work out the way it did. And I think the last twenty pages were worth waiting for.

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I guess they are making a movie. I’m sure it will be awful. Sigh.

 

3 Comments
March 1, 2012

Taking the shortcut

by chuckofish

“Or you can take the shortcut and paddle to one of the passages in the Huron River, which reflects this world so clearly you can see into the next one. When wild flags blossom along the river’s edge in this world, snow whitens the banks in that one. And when trout and sunfish sleep under a skin of ice here, swamps there hum with bees and cicadas, kingbirds and vireos and warblers. Walk against the current. Follow one of the streams that spill into the river till you find the spring at the bottom. You have found a doorway into the spirit world. Be careful. It is not safe to pass through that doorway without a guide.

“But maybe you don’t travel that far. You say, Ann Arbor is far enough. Stand still in the stream. Listen. Thomas Bearheart’s cousin picks up her hammer. Can you hear it ringing as she forges copper fishhooks in Drowning Bear, Wisconsin? Put your ear to the water as if it were a train track and listen for travelers rushing toward you, invisible as the dead and noisy as a pack of dogs.”

Nancy Willard, Sister Water

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