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.

English Interlude

For the next 27 days or so. . . Milwaukee. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today, I'm reading poems by Louis MacNeice (a contemporary of Auden's). I'd previously convinced myself this person's name was Louise, so I've learned the gender of a major poet before breakfast, at least.




Here're two sections from his poem, "The Sunlight on the Garden," written in a very peculiar form. Sestina-ish, I think.

"The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon

[. . .]

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden."

A cynic's love poem? Or a skeptic's? Or a Bogart's? Whatever way, it works for me this morning as I recover from a cross-northeast, 15-hour drive that was marked by torrential rain and Megan-fancy.

Boss Hog

I began my training with a pot pie.

Last night in Portsmouth, Ohio, a couple hours from home, plus a biscuit and whipped butter. I figured a 9:30 dinner would satisfy, enough of everything to pull me through a morning without Honey Bunches of Oats, a mid-morning without apples, a late morning without granola bars, and a midday without ham sandwich.

I denied myself those daily treats in preparation for The Boss Hog Challenge, a savory pile of meat offered by Kiser's Barbeque in Athens. In order to defeat this challenge, and win election into the Kiser's Hall of Fame, here is what I had to consume:

Two Half Pound Angus Burgers
3 pieces of bacon
4 oz of cheese
1/2 pound of chopped pork
Lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles - 4 oz of sauce--all on a couple buns.

And

One pound of french fries, all within 30 minutes.



For most of the day, I felt mystical. Though I used to intentionally and unintentionally fast--for semi-religious and semi-absentminded reasons, respectively--I'm now on a regimented schedule that has me Pavlovian for cereal at 7:16am. So, missing a meal felt weird. I was equal parts woozy and on edge, growing less and less patient with the remaining work I had to do, and more and more pumped for game-time.

Joe and I pushed it back to two, so that we could get really hungry. This felt foolish, a mockery of real hunger, and we decided we'd donate some money afterwards (we haven't yet, but we'll figure out a way to make up for our gluttony).

I felt the same way today that I remember feeling when I had a play to do at night, when I couldn't really focus on anything else the rest of the day. Boss Hog beckoned. I had to go on stage. It had reordered my day.

Please stand-by for a moment of postmodernism as I compare my eating challenge to the poems of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in a Smörgåsbord-mixing of low and high culture.



She has a poem called "Clochard" which, to me, describes the feeling of a singular day better than just about anything else. Here she's talking about a guy dozing in public, underneath a cathedral:

"He sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams,
his thick beard swarming toward the sun

The grey chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,
hellephants, hippopotoads, croakadilloes, rhinocerberuses,
behemammoths, and demonopods,
that omnibestial Gothic allegro vivace)
unpetrify

and examine him with a curiosity
they never turn on me or you."

The word "unpetrify" is the one I've remembered for awhile and the one that got me out of my chair to scour my Polish poetry section (one book) tonight. She's saying that there are certain people, events, phenomena that reorder the world such that even the stone creatures on a cathedral seem to be altered, to take notice.

This is a ridiculously lofty way to talk about an eating challenge, but it's a good way to describe the misguided feeling of importance the eating challenge gave me, the feeling, as I said, of a singular day--to wit, the strip mall parking lot, the Used Chevy Dealership, the cineplexes and the duplexes and the stoplights seemed to unpetrify and take notice--that's Dave Wanczyk, they said, and he's about to do something stupid.



But before that stupid thing, still waiting in my apartment, I peed my pants a little while zipping up.

In a rush to get out the door to meet Joe, in a rush of excitement, a rush. So there I was, about to demand the attention of the whole inorganic world, and I had to change my jeans, trip over my shoes, misplace my keys--

But off I was at last. We sat--Joe, James, Zach, and I--for 20 minutes, uttering thinly-disguised boldnesses, as men will do. We were scared of the food-pile.

I felt pressure. I've wanted to do an eating challenge since Man Vs. Food came out a couple years ago, and maybe before that. I pride myself on my pigging abilities and on accepting the rules of arbitrary games (Megan and I are trying to get through November without turning the heat on, just cuz). So, I was pacing a little bit, maintaining my stone-face, the main defense I have against the creepy-crawly, bangy-boomy terrors of the world--and the world's voluminous pork.

***

We'd been in Portsmouth, Megan and I, because she was talking to Ohio teachers about good ways to educate minds, and I was talking to myself about taming my stomach. Could I meet my limits and say rudely to my limits, Excuse me, but I have a previous engagement with sauce?

Could I make this eating challenge not so much a measure of manhood as a measure of strength in the face of fry? Megan was on my side. She knew what this meant to me. She had tea at Bob Evans.

***

So flashing forward again to Kiser's. Finally, I saw the sled-ful of food I was set to decimate: 9-inch tall sandwich, acre of potato.

And this is where the story gets hard to tell, because I actually did it, I won, despite the disgusting size of the challenge (and I mean disgusting as it originated--from Latin dis (expressing reversal) + gustus 'taste.') That is, afterward, I was quite concerned that I was about to reverse everything that I'd just tasted, if you take my meaning--and please do. I'm tired and meat-heavy, and I need you to understand without me putting forward too much effort.

My secret to eating: I didn't chew. And, on the first bite, I purposefully got a lot of sauce in my mustache so that I'd feel properly primal. Add to that my aversion to leftover food, my Polish eat-more heritage, and my occasional ability to ignore future pain. . .



17 minutes and the food was all in my upper-gullet, where it still happily(?) resides, churning and churning in the widening gyre.



But I'd done it. I tried to take it in stride, act like I'd been there before. I'm not even impressed with myself, that's how boss I am. I'd made top ten of all time (no one's going to challenge the nine minute record).

I'd gotten a couple claps from some of Southern Ohio's Barbeque fans. I'd accepted kudos from my co-competitors, claimed my free t-shirt, had my picture taken for the wall--I'm sure I'll look my bloaty best.

And when I got home, it was raining, I'd lately urinated on myself, I'd lately eaten an anvil of animal, and I found that I was locked out of my house.

"Boss Hog's Revenge," Zach called it. Yes. And it's the revenge--worth it--that keeps on exacting.

English Interlude, ctd.

For the next 29 days or so. . .Something about Milwaukee. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today I read seven poems by W.H. Auden (that's Wystan Hugh to his parents. . .see earlier note for related joke).

This morning, I thought it was strange that I'd picked Auden twice already, but Megan assured me the odds were not as against it as I'd figured. 30 slips of paper. I get Auden, who's in there twice, twice in the first six days. And twice in the last three. Calculation please?

Here are some of my favorite lines anywhere, from the poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" (I think Time is talking, but whatever):

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

English Interlude

For the next 29 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Yesterday I read two poems and an essay by W.H. Auden (that's Wystan Hugh to his parents, and Wysty Baby to his Karaoke buddies -- 1907-1973).

Auden is maybe my favorite poet. I love "September 1, 1939," and "The Shield of Achilles," which seems to me like a post-war companion piece, is actually terrifying as WHA imagines "An unintelligible multitude, / A million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign.

And then,

"Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place;
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief."

In "In Praise of Limestone," which is extremely dense, he includes this good line: "The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, / Having nothing to hide."

The essay "Poetry as Memorable Speech" encapsulates for me why I like this fellow so much. He writes, "The test of a poet is the frequency and diversity of the occasions on which we remember his poetry." I tend to remember him, often.

He continues,

"A great many people dislike the idea of poetry as they dislike over-earnest people, because they imagine it is always worrying about the eternal verities.
Those [. . .] who try to put poetry on a pedestal only succeed in putting it on the shelf. Poetry is no better and no worse than human nature; it is profound and shallow, sophisticated and naive, dull and witty, bawdy and chaste in turn" (2440).

***

Today, I read some Jean Rhys stories, both of which were better than the novels of her I've read--Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. The most memorable line--thanks Auden--was from the perspective of an immigrant in London who thought to herself, "I think that sleeping is better than no matter what else."

I, too, am tired. And over-earnest. But a little tea should fix both.