Contrails

Among the obvious falsehoods I've taken to be truth--this: when I was in fifth grade or so, around the time I started getting homework assignments that might take more than an hour, and around the time I started working past my bedtime to finish those assignments, I believed that any human problem could be solved by staying up all night.

I distinctly remember pondering this and deciding that the scientists at NASA must, with concentration and caffeine, design all of their rockets at around 3am, a magical time of creativity I'd never consciously known. Failing that, I decided that even if they didn't design their rockets in schematic-strewn somnambulant sessions, they certainly could.




Staying up into the wee hours and beyond was the ultimate dedication, and I think my faith in the all-nighter was akin to my faith in America's inherent problem-solving abilities. There were people staying up all night--I would soon be one--and there were people making world-altering (and correct) decisions--I would be one of those too--who succeeded through acts of will and sleep deprivation. That was all.

Maybe I picked this up from my brother, who, at 17, was embarking on his all-nighter era. A prolific procrastinator, he'd been known to write 25-page term papers during just a few late-night hours, accompanied by Letterman and, later in the evening, by a mustard sandwich. As I fell asleep and he set off to work, my confidence that we would both be awake-and-okay at 7am was unshakable. He'd polish off an A-paper; I'd get my rest; Cheerios for everyone!

Thus, if I stayed up all night, I told myself, I could surely finish the 63 pages of reading I'd put off on the first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. (Before I zonked out at 10pm, 40 pages short, I might have learned that she had a glass eye, and I mightn't've, I can't quite remember).




Glass eye or no, my Blackwell failure only served to reinforce my idea about all-nighters. Sure, I hadn't tried hard enough, but if I ever did try hard, and if I ever worked through the witching hour and all the way to the finish line, dawn, I'd succeed.

This sort of idea is still a tempting fallacy. Someday, when I've expended all of my effort, done my very-stretched-best, then, yes, on that fair day my pumpkins will turn to carriages (I still tell myself that it wouldn't be that hard to write a novel in a month, or even over night, if someone was threatening me with death or aggressive tickling).

Incidentally, I also remember half-days from school (Wednesdays) seeming like periods of time during which the greatest things could be accomplished. One Wednesday, my friend Cheese and I vowed to complete the most difficult task we could think of. We would beat the video game Destiny of an Emperor (was there such a thing as Beating a Game before Nintendo? Did one beat Badminton, or Solitaire? Did the idea of Beating a Game change my generation's conception of fun? I, certainly, seem more drawn to the accomplishment of leisure than the diversion of it).

Though we reached the final battle, it was not our destiny to Beat the Game. I remember feeling disillusioned about half-days after that; they weren't afternoons of invincibility after all, even if I drank four cokes.

I had four cokes the first time I stayed up all night too, at the Sophomore Lock-in, a slumber party of sorts at my high school's gym. I didn't reverse any universal catastrophes that night, but I did watch Beverley Hills Cop and I did hit five straight 3-pointers as morning came on--a first and last for me.

It was quite something, and though the all-night experience lost some of its imagined luster, it did still seem exceptional, a feeling enhanced by out-of-body fatigue and the sense that those four hours between 1:30 and 5:30 were stolen, were never meant to have been a part of my life at all, sneaked.

2. When Mark McGuire hit his 62nd homerun, I switched channels all night to watch high-lights of the low line-drive over the left field wall.

McGwire's 62nd HR from David Levine on Vimeo.

Stupid Cardinals.

3. When the 2000 election got called and recalled and I kept declaring to my college hallmates, "I'm not going to sleep until there's a president." (As an aside, I don't remember much college-fervor for either candidate on campus, and that seems strange to me, as though that year is way, way in the past, back when it might have still been possible to avoid the forceful inanity which now demands a response).

4. Various scattered daybreaks which evade my memory and me, suns-under-the-clouds; but which I also know--from their small, residual warmths--to have existed.

5. Two all-night drives, one with Rob and Riley, one with Kaufmann. Saw the morning in the rearview.

6. And then there was a night rehearsing a play with Megan, after which rehearsal I tried to design the most glorious rocketship by asking her out, thought I'd failed, and learned that, though I couldn't do anything overnight, I could get big projects going full steam.

Meanwhile, I seem now to over-realize the limits of a day. At age 11, I felt infinity + 1 was a reasonable concept to be reasonably attained. I would do everything in life, and maybe I would do all of it in one, charmed, moonlit stretch. Wednesdays were Neverendsdays. 2am was a clock-stopped playground of achievement and productive mischief.

But as small tasks (like taking care of myself) expand to fill most of my time, and squandering fills the rest, I have to remind foot-dragging me to just start, just build the propulsion system. Figure out the insulation. Brainstorm the anti-gravity boots, though they'll eventually fail--those stupid boots, stupid sketches, stupid words I use to describe those stupid boots!--even if that failure takes more than an overnight.

I try to coax myself to keep imagining--even as they fade out--and keep designing--even as they sputter--my contrails.

English Interlude

Yesterday's reading-draw brought me to some more D.H. Lawrence, specifically his essay "Why the Novel Matters." The gist is this:

"To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be a dead man in life."

Lawrence believed, maybe grandiosely, that novels give us a chance to "develop an instinct for life."

But in all this he stressed the fluctuations of the self and of the best characters:

"We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.

Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of to-morrow will have nothing to do with my tears of a year ago. If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself staggered in her inertia by my changing that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I might as well love the pepper pot."

Lawrence painting of a man kissing his non-pepper-pot

"In all this change, I maintain a certain integrity. But woe betide me if I try to put my finger on it. If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!--then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern. Which is no good."

I support that Lawrence points out the dangers of rigidity, but I think there are equal dangers in believing oneself to be totally fluid. We sense ourselves to be consistent, and that means something. I also like his idea that we construct public personalities that then become burdens. This contributes to my aversion to Facebook, since I know I would too-carefully craft myself.

Meanwhile, I read the quoted passage to Megan, always-changing, and she said, "Isn't Robert Downey Jr.'s girlfriend in Iron Man named Pepper Pots?" Yes, indeed.

Additionally, the line "a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post" reminded me of two lyrics: "She sits alone by lamp-post," and "Hello, lamp-post, whatchya knowin', I've come to watch your flowers growin'."

Clearly, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. I constantly try to organize those parts, and I constantly fail--in mostly pleasant ways.

Two Stories

I heard two very different stories this past Saturday, both of which could be fairly termed "grotesque," and I don't quite mean that negatively.

First, The Trans-Siberian Orchestra--a bizarre cultural agglomerate of hair metal, Christmas, and Symphonic Rock--packaged a nice kernel of seasonal joy in some of the more garish wrapping paper I've ever had the luck to observe. The result was a strange piece of Xmas theater, mostly plotless.




TSO, FYI, plays a musical style that no mainstream grandmother likes for 11 months of the year and every mainstream grandmother loves in December. And while the band's Christmas mash-ups are pretty impressive, the rock-opera affectations that accompany those songs--consisting of spoken word narration, soundclips of Martin Luther King, prop-dragons, a gratuitous mention of Darfur, hydraulic lifts, spouting fire (hydraulic lifts spouting fire), an image of Condeleezza Rice, allusions to an angel drinking whiskey, sexy liturgical dancers, a guy dressed as a hobo, more fire, Winston Churchill, subliminal feti, and inexorable lasering--had me scratching my head.

It wasn't the underlying message that befuddled me; I love Christmas, and I even love weirdness. It was the fact that there was a feeling in the arena that this story made sense; that, somehow, the commercialized fever-dream had something to do with the spirit. Again, many of the songs are quite inspired, and I'm not necessarily criticizing the mix of silly and spiritual, Goddy and gaudy. I think what I responded to was that I was being told to feel a certain way--graced--but wasn't really being given the hints as to how or why.

Instead of loving Christmas more, I left thinking that maybe there was something about the audacity of hair metal that I could get behind. Those headbanging, hair-flippers knew they were being ridiculous up there, and they seemed to be having fun. It was only when they nudged me toward feeling something they hadn't earned that I got wary (Martin Luther King? Really?).

But then the Gladys in row 16 banged her head right along with them, her perm awash in pyrotechnic, and I tapped my feet too. On the whole, a fun time with family.

***

The next story has no moral and made no claim to ultimate truth. It was told to me a couple hours after the TSO concert. There was no flashiness. Winston Churchill made no appearance. It was quietly grotesque.

My friend Dave--a somewhat bizarre personal agglomerate of Joaquin Phoenix, Gumby, and an Elk--told Megan and me about a recent morning when he and his girlfriend were hurrying out of the house.



As they backed out of their driveway, they spotted a deer curled out on the side of the road. Instead of lightly gasping and muttering something about the "poor creature," the two of them had an idea. It seems they'd been interested in a hunting license already, interested in harvesting, in true woodsy style, some venison (Dave's girlfriend grew up a hunter/gatherer of sorts in one of the remoter enclaves of Alaska).

The deer had been dragged to the side of the road by the driver who'd hit her, and Dave and his girlfriend weren't sure what the protocol was here. They had no need for damaged doe, and they'd heard something about New York's regulation of roadkill. But they thought that if they cut into the deer and it was still warm, they might be able to make use of it.

As Dave's girlfriend approached with her pocket knife, she hesitated, he hesitated, and the deer, which had been knocked hard by an oncoming truck, lifted its head and looked at them.

"That must have been horrifying," I said, not because of the shock, but because what they'd considered a possible lucky break was now an ethical quandary.

"And I was running late," Dave said.

They decided to euthanize the deer, but just before they did, their neighbor--a local cop it turns out--approached and asked if they needed a tag for it. I found this part of the story darkly--I repeat, darkly--farcical. In a moment of natural beauty and sadness, delays kept arising, the way they tend to in conscience-testing times.

They did want a tag, they said, and, yes, they did want the compassionate arm of the law to handle the poor creature, which they would treat well and value through the winter, and share.

That's how I came to hear a true, grotesque story. And that's how tonight's supper came to my table.

Spring Literary Festival

May 9th through May 11th, 2012, Ohio University welcomes Denise Duhamel, Terrance Hayes, Amy Hempel, Richard Rodriguez, and Susan Orlean to the Spring Literary Festival.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books are Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). A bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me), translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David Gonzalez, came out in 2008 with Bartleby Editores (Madrid.) Her work has been anthologized widely, including several issues of The Best American Poetry. (Bio courtesy of the author).



A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is a professor at Florida International
University in Miami. William D. Waltz, in Rain Taxi, writes "As I read her work...I feel like I'm taking a sneak peek at the future: Duhamel hints at a poetry that transcends irony and alienation. There's plenty of both here, but she's busy working them over...pushing so hard that the next step may be beyond what is known."

***

One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. (Bio courtesy of Blue Flower Arts).

His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.



Lighthead, his most innovative collection, investigates how we construct experience, presenting “the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time.” In Muscular Music, Hayes takes reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In Wind in a Box he explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality with the unifying motif being the struggle for freedom within containment. In Hip Logic, Hayes confronts racism, sexism, religion, family structure, and stereotypes with overwhelming imagery.

Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase, very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. He writes, "There are recurring explorations of identity and culture in my work and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the forms in which I voice them. I aspire to a poetic style that resists style. In my newest work I continue to be guided by my interests in people: in the ways community enriches the nuances of individuality; the ways individuality enriches the nuances of community."

A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.

***

Amy Hempel (more information to follow).

***

Richard Rodriguez, one of America’s most important essayists and a master of the “personal essay,” writes about the intersection of his personal life with some of the great vexing issues of America. (Bio courtesy of Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau).


Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrant parents, grew up in Sacramento, California. He was an undergraduate at Stanford University. He went on to spend two years in a religious studies program at Columbia. He then studied English Renaissance literature at the Warburg Institute in London and was a doctoral candidate at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1982, he published an intellectual autobiography, “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.” Widely celebrated and criticized, this book is today read in many American high schools and colleges. A memoir of a “scholarship boy”, “Hunger” remains controversial for its skepticism regarding bilingual education and affirmative action.

In 1992, Rodriguez published “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father,” a "philosophical travel book," concerned with the moral landscape separating "Protestant America" and "Catholic Mexico." “Days of Obligation” was a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1993.

In 2002, Rodriguez published “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.” In a series of essays concerned with topics as varied as the cleaning of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cubism, and Broadway musicals, Rodriguez undermines America’s black and white notion of race and proposes the color brown for understanding the future (and past) of the Americas.

Rodriguez is currently working on two new books, one that deals with the 'Desert Religions' (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and their role in the 21st century, and the other about beauty.

As a journalist, Richard Rodriguez worked for over two decades for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco; he has also been a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. He currently works for New American Media in San Francisco.

Many Americans probably recognize him from his television appearances on PBS. For more than ten years he has appeared as an essayist on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer”. His televised essays on American life were honored in 1997 with a George Peabody Award.

In 1993, Richard Rodriguez was given the Frankel Medal (now renamed “The National Humanities Medal”), the highest honor the federal government gives to recognize work done in the humanities.

***

As one of the most creative literary journalists of today, Susan Orlean is the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Oscar-winning movie, Adaptation. (bio courtesy of Simon & Schuster)



Her latest work, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend tells the story of Rin Tin Tin's journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. From the moment in 1918 when Corporal Lee Duncan discovers Rin Tin Tin on a World War I battlefield, he recognizes something in the pup that he needs to share with the world. Rin Tin Tin's improbable introduction to Hollywood leads to the dog's first blockbuster film and over time, the many radio programs, movies, and television shows that follow. The canine hero's legacy is cemented by Duncan and a small group of others who devote their lives to keeping him and his descendants alive.

At its heart, Rin Tin Tin is a poignant exploration of the enduring bond between humans and animals. But it is also a richly textured history of 20th century entertainment and entrepreneurship and the changing role of dogs in the American family and society. Almost ten years in the making, Orlean's first original book since The Orchid Thief is a tour de force of history, human interest, and masterful storytelling - something she shares with audiences in her multimedia presentations on the subject.

Orlean became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. Orlean has written dozens of "Talk of the Town," "Profiles” and "Reporter at Large" articles, as well as a series of American popular culture columns, called "Popular Chronicles." The "Chronicles" thus far have included subjects such as an article on taxidermy, umbrella inventors, designer Bill Blass, Harlem high school basketball star Felipe Lopez, the friends and neighbors of Tonya Harding, and D.J. Red Alert, a hip-hop radio star in New York.

Prior to joining The New Yorker, Orlean was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also at Vogue, where she wrote about numerous figures in both the music and fashion industries. She has also contributed to Esquire, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Orlean has written several books, including, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Ordinary People, Red Sox and Blue Fish, Saturday Night, Lazy Little Loafers, and The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida.

Orlean teaches creative writing at NYU and has been a writer-in-residence at several universities. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She lives in upstate New York and Los Angeles with her husband and son.

English Interlude, ctd. (plus)

Since last we spoke--over Welsh rarebit and Darjeeling--I read poems by Thom Gunn that I liked and a play by Harold Pinter--The Dumb Waiter--that I did not.

(Aside: a scene from Pinter's Betrayal was among my first exercises in Basic Acting, in 2000. As a freshman, I had to act with a senior named Joanna as we discussed our various infidelities--we were supposed to kiss during the scene, but I'd only kissed one person at the time, so I resisted--until the final, when I gave her a little peck on the side-lip to earn my A.

The Pit, at Holy Cross. Site of many stirrings.

Oddly-structured, Betrayal moves from 1977 backwards in time and is somewhat groundbreaking, or curtain-breaking, or clock-reordering. Yes, it was a clock-reordering triumph.

Inspired by that achrnological movement, I might have first mentioned the Patrick Marber play, Closer, a scene from which I performed as a junior, in 2002. In Closer, I had to discuss various infidelities and perversities with my friend Sara, after having rehearsed with my girlfriend at the time.

All of this was terribly unpleasant--asking these folks if they'd cheated on me and such--and I remember that in the performance of the scene, I forgot one line: "I love you." Which seems somewhat poetic.

Had I shouted for a hint as I stammered onstage, there might have been an awkward moment with the prompter).

Meanwhile, today I'm back to reading my old friend D.H., Mr. Lawrence if you're nasty. He would have relished the above theatricality, enamored of and enabled by Freud.

What a badass!

But I don't want to quote from his poem, "Snake"; better to include a bit from "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is":

"Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean englishman, outside?
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new

demand on his understanding

and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his

intelligence,

a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own."

***

Lawrence isn't pulling punches, by any means, and it's interesting to compare this poem with a book I'm reading, No More Parades, in which Ford Madox Ford also writes pugilistically, aiming to split the stiff-upper-lip of the English, which he seems to believe disqualified many of them from emotional maturity. (By the way, FMF had real gall--he was born Ford Hermann Huefer and somehow dubbed himself Ford Madox Ford, the former sounding too German; for the remainder of this post, therefore, I shall be known as Dave Walter Dave).

This idea about uprightness hindering emotional flexibility seems to have been very important for the British in the wake of World War I (many war poems from the time lampoon the gentlemanly warrior, sipping his tea while the shrapnel flies). It's also curious to note that Lawrence's poem, written just months before his death, was published the year of the stock market crash, 1929, when the undeserved, well-heeled life described above might have seemed particularly odious and particularly parasitic to a coal miner's son.



Himself suspicious of his own lack of emotional pliability and his own nouveau-upper-class tastes--such as anthologized British Literature and Darjeeling tea--Dave Walter Dave is happy to consider this poem, particularly on Cyber Monday.

May I continue to be suspicious of over-hawked Audi's, continue to eschew being "quite the thing." And may I never turn into a mushroom of conspicuous confumption (Dave Walter Dave has coined this word, for conforming consumption, and hereby trademarks it).

--DWD, Athens, Ohio

English Interlude

For the next 26 days, Wisconsin of the mind. . .

This morning, I looked at "The Metaphysical Poets," an essay from 1921 by T.S. Eliot. Here's a good passage about poets that also works, I think, as a description of the Montaignean essayist (essayer sounds less insider maybe):

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

Dusty

In January, I started a crying journal, not as therapy, and not out of need. I just got curious one day about my own tearing-up because, although I'm pretty steady about most things, I can, in the words of Rob Strong, "get dusty" from time to time. And I thought if I logged those moments, I'd have a calendar of my--what?--lapses.

It'd be a funny-sad kinda journal: Pixar movie, church hymn, Fannie Mae commercial, general depression, general elation, general downbeatedness, guilt, Pixar movie. And at the end of the year, I'd write a funny-sad essay, with dates and stats, about the way I let my emotions get manipulated, about real and periodic sadness, about unexpected, ambivalent joy and overwhelmedness (this is a five syllable word; please read it as such).



The Pixar movie list above is an approximation of the first month's entries--once every four days, a little welling.

Then I forgot about the crying journal, maybe because I suddenly dried up, maybe because I'd gotten too conscious of my own dustiness: since I was paying close attention to the groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness, said groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness wasn't coming out of its hole anymore.

(You know the old adage: a watched groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness never boils. Or is it that the watched pot calls the kettle a racist? I can't remember. Either way, I'd mostly stopped tearing up.)

Anyway, I bring up this journal because I would have had to make three entries in it today, if it still existed. And they would have provided me just the material I would have wanted for that longer essay about emotional manipulation and the like. Because they were weird/typical moments.

First: the new Muppet Movie.
Second: Modern Family.
Third: Reading the sad, reflective words of the sister of a friend of mine.

So, at about 3pm, Kermit The Frog had me dusting all over my shirt collar. Why? Are the emotional machinations of the Muppets so complex, or original, or close-to-home? Maybe. But I think kids' movies slay me because I have a blind spot for simple emotions now, for innocent messages about loneliness or bravery. Thinking I'm beyond that stuff, I get walloped.

Also, cartoons and, in this case, puppets are just enough unreal to do something a little extra to me. If I see a person in a sympathetic situation, I put up all my defenses: don't feel too much, this person could hurt you. Watch out, you're being manipulated.

Plus, I'm still analyzing. Is this a realistic depiction of devastation? I may think. Does Richard Dreyfus deserve the Oscar?




A puppet is abstracted enough to let me wallow. I'm not in the position either to withdraw from a real person or comfort a real person, and so maybe I'm allowed to relate to the cartoon. Somehow, real person + dramatic situation = unreal; while fake frog + dramatic situation = precisely my emotional level.

For the emotionally-calloused (stunted?), The Muppet Movie is a safe place for a little sniffle. And has there been a movie in the last three years that's been sadder than Toy Story 3? I honestly had to stifle an audible sob in the theater. How can that be? My ideas are evolving on this point.

***

Modern Family, meanwhile, has purely conditioned me to tear up. It's done so with structure and with music. At the twenty-eighth minute of every episode, there's a lesson, often having to do with husbands and wives, with taking things for granted, with seeing beyond one's own needs--in other words, Modern Family is cuttin' onions. And when W.G. Snuffy Walden plays his little theme, I remember hearing that theme from last week, and we're off to the water park--I've been eroded by the cruel pattern of a viola.



Coincidentally, Kermit the Frog singing "Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me" was the first perp of the day, and Jay Pritchett talking about "dreamers and realists" was the second. I'm a softy for dreams today, and somehow made to snot all over myself when considering the co-existence of idealism and reality, of puppets and real people, especially when there's a soundtrack behind that co-existence.

D.H. Lawrence, the most famous writer named David, put this experience nicely in his poem, "Piano": "In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song / Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong."

Elsewhere in the poem, he writes, "The glamour / Of childish days is upon me," which also sounds like an explanation for my Kermit-Krying, my Buzz Light Year bawling. The simplified goodness of a kids' movie and my normal jadedness co-mingle in the graduated cylinder of mine heart to produce a chemical bubbling over--an electron of emotion breaking away in the reaction. "My manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance. I weep like a child for the past," writes Lawrence.

(The only other poem of his that I know is about Tortoise coitus, so let's not think he was a sentimental push-over).


And then I have to wonder why those two pop-culture heartstring-pullers--Kermie and Dunphy--can find themselves in the same league as the last journal-able offense, when I had the eye-twinge while reading my friend's sister's holiday letter: in the last few months, she's had just about all the species of grief and is still able to write an affecting Thanksgiving message about gratitude.

We know this pattern. It's derivative, maybe, but it's not at all worn out. How many times have I been trapped into blubbering as I hear about that crusty, old sailor--perseverance? How many more?

You shouldn't be able to feel that way, that brave, I think. I couldn't do that in your situation. You're strong, I'm weak, so strong, and Fozzy's hilarious, and I love my wife, so Damn you W.G. Snuffy Walden--or I hurt her--, but either way I'm glad you're sort of okay, still a dreamer, yet Happy Thanksgiving--in spite of myself.