For the Record

There is a little game that is going semi-viral on social media as I write this.  It is simply a list of the nine (not ten!) books or films that have made the biggest impact on you, which is not the same, of course, as a list of those that you consider to be the best.

So here goes, in no particular order, but starting with books:

• A Maggot (Fowles)
• Karamazov
• The Aubrey/Maturin Series (O'Brian)
• Passport to Magonia (Vallee)
• American Pastoral (Roth)
• A Stillness at Appomattox
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
• Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Kotkin)
• Cultural Amnesia (James)

• Wings of Desire
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Taxi Driver
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Moment of Contact
• The Dead
• Fargo
• The Seventh Seal
• No Country for Old Men

 

Beggars Can't Be Choosers

As many of you know, aggravated vagrancy has long been a capital crime here in our little principality.  Alejandro, my late cell mate, three times convicted of it, asked in my presence for a sumptuous meal for his last, as is the custom.  He wanted ground lamb with Mediterranean spices, potatoes au gratin, creamed corn, and chocolate pudding with whipped cream.  As it turned out, many of the required ingredients were not to be found in the prison pantry, so he was offered instead a bowl of Grape-Nuts soaked in Fanta.

As they were taking him away the following morning, Alejandro pleaded with me to file a formal protest on his behalf.  I told him that I would do it, but do it I did not.  

Cuius intersit hoc?  And besides, why should I stick my neck out in a land that since 1880 has had the guillotine on its 500 flingan note?

It's a harsh world.

 

Boomerdammerung Under the Lights

When I was young, the carnival would come to my town once a year, usually right around the Fourth of July.  It would camp out for roughly a week in our biggest public park, which was very near to the center of town.

During the day, not much was happening in the encampment, but I would wander through once or twice, hoping to get a glimpse of authentic carny life.  This almost never happened.  What little I did see though was, let's say, a little rough.  I wasn't tempted thereafter to run off and join Ringling Brothers.

After dark, the place came alive with crowds and bright lights, mainly around the amusement rides.  There was a Merry-go-Round with an old-fashioned calliope in the center.  There was a Tilt-a-Whirl for the strong of stomach, little cars and rockets for the small kids, and a good-sized Ferris Wheel that would become a landmark for the week, visible from some distance away.  Also a rather dubious Haunted House.

At colorfully-lit carts you could buy cotton candy or fried dough dusted with powdered sugar.  And around the periphery there were various games of skill/chance.  With luck, you might score a teddy bear for your girlfriend (if you had a girlfriend as I did not).  

Of the games, my favorite was the shooting gallery.  Your weapon there was a relatively powerful BB long rifle.  Your targets were little two-dimensional tin men whose feet were attached to a long rubber conveyor belt that ran from deep in the back in the direction of the shooter.  Your object was to plink the little men down on their backs.  But the points you scored depended on how far away the targets were.  If you hit one that was way in the back, you might score 50 points.  If you could only hit the ones right in front of you, you might score ten.

When I first played this game, I was probably in single digits, age wise.  It was only ten or twelve years later that the grand metaphor hit me.  The journey on the belt from back to foreground was the Journey of Life, and it was the Lord our God who held the gun.  While He was said to be Almighty, in fact He wasn't a perfect shot, and for Him as for us it was easier to plink down the targets when they were near at hand.

And so, when we were young, the chances were excellent that the Lord our God would spare us from catastrophe, but past 50, 60, and especially the allotted three score and ten, God had us in His sights and we had to prepare for the rapid-fire annihilation of both ourselves and our loved ones who were in the same cohort.

The grand metaphor was abstract back in the day.  Alas it is no longer.

 

400 Years of Distaff Deception, Depicted in Film

Don't blame me ladies; I am just the messenger.

As I write this, there are two feature-length films scheduled for imminent release.  While they seem entirely unrelated on the surface, a common theme emerges naturally that is plain just from the stories that they tell.

One is Ken Russell's adaptation of the true story recounted in Aldous Huxley's "The Devils of Loudun," the adaptation first released in 1971 but now to be re-released in a restored version that includes scenes that were left out of the original as too provocative and controversial for a general audience.

In 17th century Loudun, France, a handsome and charismatic young priest, Father Grandier, is posted to the town.  His sermons are much loved, but he is in fact a licentious scoundrel.

There is an Ursuline convent in the town, and its abbess, Sister Jeanne, becomes sexually obsessed with the young priest.  She asks him to be her personal confessor with hopes that that relationship will blossom into something more.  When Father Grandier declines, pleading other responsibilities, her romantic attraction quickly turns to bitter resentment and hatred.  Her schemes against him culminate in what we would now probably characterize at the abbey as displays of mass hysteria.  The nuns in her care fall into wild abandon.  They lie on the floor, hike up their skirts and shout out the vilest of obscenities.  These displays become a form of mass entertainment for the townspeople and for others who come to Loudun just to bear witness.

When various Church authorities investigate what is going on, Sister Jeanne convinces them that Father Grandier, in league with Satan, has facilitated demonic possession of the nuns.  The ensuing attempts to exorcise them lead to further blasphemous displays, to the mixed horror and delight of the locals.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of political intrigue that is orchestrated from Paris by none other than the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, who at the time perhaps wielded the most power in France after his patron, King Louis XIII.

The Grandier affair fit nicely into Richelieu's larger scheming, and when the priest was convicted of conspiring with the Devil to ruin the souls of the Ursulines, Richelieu personally authorized and blessed the burning of Grandier at the stake.

Huxley's telling of this tale is remarkably detailed and doubtless historically accurate; because the entire affair was centered on the Church, meticulous records were kept and they have remained intact for four centuries.

In a postscript, Huxley details for us as well the horrifying final days of the Cardinal himself.  Fittingly, perhaps, his last illness and hare-brained attempts to cure it turned him into an object from which everyone involuntarily recoiled in disgust.

The second film is "You Can See Everything," a documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, once America's youngest self-made female billionaire, now serving time in a federal prison for fraud associated with her late company Theranos, which purported to have invented a revolutionary way to do blood tests with mere pin pricks rather than needles.  At her peak she had George Schultz and Henry Kissinger on her board of directors; Barack Obama made her a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, or "PAGE."  Now all of that lies in dust.

The film begins with its co-director, comedian Nathan Fielder, shadowing Elizabeth for a month in her husband's home as she prepares to enter prison, but the film's investigation of her psyche goes on for three years.  The trailer, which is all that we have at the moment, is oddly riveting; something in the unblinking gaze of Elizabeth communicates a deep and dangerous level of mental disturbance.

I don't have the stomach to witness the depravity of "the devils" as portrayed by Russell and, besides, I have already absorbed the whole story from the infinitely more subtle pen of Aldous.  But I will succumb, I think, to Fielder's portrayal of the Holmes saga, even though I suspect that what lies at the core of her particular 21st century epic deception will forever remain opaque.

 

A Match Made in Heaven?

If Marian Anderson had married Luis Aparicio, she would have been Marian Aparicio, the living embodiment of Fatima and Lourdes.  And their kids could have marketed themselves as "The Singing Shortstops."  But it was not to be.

 

On the Theme of Oneness

The swell was light to moderate as we steamed from Boston to Ipswich late last summer.  A straight shot from the North Channel, President Roads, to Thatcher Island, then around Halibut Point and west to the big buoy a few miles off Crane Beach.

In retrospect, the rise and fall of the boat mimicked the rise and fall of the human chest in deep sleep, or indeed in deep meditation.  

As in the beginning there was the Word, the secret is said to lie in the confluence of three things -- sound, light and frequency.

 

Dreadful Dwelling

I was living on the 79th floor of one of the so-called "pencil" buildings in Manhattan.  In fact, I shared the entire floor with my two older siblings, Mary and Charles.

I hated it.  I hated everything about it.  What I hated most was opening one eye in the middle of the night and seeing the dimly lit roof of a building that I knew from the ground to be a formidable structure in its own right, an Art Deco knock-off from the late 1930s.  There was a rusty water tank on the roof, probably no longer in use.

I also hated the incessant swaying we experienced whenever the winds aloft exceeded 25 knots or so.  Likewise a faint, peculiar smell that came in the late fall and stayed for the winter, a telltale sign, I thought, of some fundamental glitch in the heating system that might turn towards catastrophe at a most inopportune time.

And the awkward elevator rides, filled either with silence or meaningless chit chat.  In the chit chat, the building itself substituted for the weather as the safe default topic of choice.

And the reaction I got from casual acquaintances, friends of friends and such, when they learned where I lived.  There was an assumption that I was filthy rich, but also a conviction that I must have had more money than taste.

In fact, my father bought the unit for us.  He paid for everything thereafter, including Christmas gratuities for the people at ground level.  He did it, of course, to exercise control; you won't be surprised to learn that he still exercises control from beyond the grave, via a complex series of trusts.

I thought of the arrangement at first as a kind of dystopian experiment that I could share with two of my very best friends, two people who understood me on a deep level and who were, and are, inherently interesting and companionable.  The artist and the bond trader (and no, you have them backwards as to which is which).

The COVID years were particularly difficult.  The common American isolation was made locally worse by a little handbook of rules that the building association must have copied from Xi Jinping.  I ignored it when I could get away with it.

I finally left in the late summer of 2023, for a teaching job in Missoula.  I live there now in a small house with a ground floor and only a ground floor.  From my back porch I can see the Clark Fork River, but just barely, wending its way through a waterfront park.  There is a very friendly tavern within walking distance of my house and, at the other end of the street, a modest church, of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that I have seen only from the outside.

I sleep soundly for the most part, but from time to time a dream recurs in which I am floating motionless above the city, like the Goodyear Blimp hovering against a gentle breeze.  It's bad because it's vertiginous, but to make matters worse, in due course a peregrine falcon decides to practice his bombing runs against my head.  At that point I wake up in a sweat.

My daily driver is a vintage International Scout in British Racing Green with a transfer case and a heater that still is able to fend off the winter cold.  My students think that it's cool.

There, you asked me how it was, and I told you.  Straight up and God's honest to the extent that I am able.