Intro Excerpt

[Williams] complains about the change away from pure study within the universities, the results of which cannot be predicted, towards a purely utilitarian, problem-solving way of doing things more efficiently, both in arts and sciences, all of which can be predicated and measured. Then, more specifically, Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text"as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced."
Wooley [the interviewer] then suggests playfully, "It's to be exegeted, in other words." "Yes. As if it were a kind of puzzle." "And literature is written to be entertaining?" Wooley suggests again, "Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid."

~ from John McGahern's annoyingly cursory introduction to Stoner

Coriform

Latest favorites around the neighborhood

Dropping f-bombs

To All The Bakers Out There

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The Things She Carried

I visited my grandparents this last weekend. Whenever I get ready to leave for home again Grandma gears up to shower me with 'necessities'. Here is the list of what I took home this time:

1. Vintage milkglass salt and pepper shakers
2. Vintage cake tin
3. Cookies
4. Cookies for friends
5. An empty Andes Mints Christmas tin to put the cookies in
6. An apple
7. A washcloth (to pack between the glass objects and then I can use it later)
8. Four mini bread pans
9. Two jars of home-canned grape jelly
10. Aprons to give to my two nieces made for my mom and aunt when they were little
11. Vintage Christmas apron for myself because Grandma doesn't throw parties anymore
12. Bubble wrap and tissue paper

There is another list of all the items I turned down, but it is lengthier and will simply switch to the take-home list on my next visit. I staunched the flow somewhat by adamantly announcing that any more tins she gave me were going straight to the recycling when I got home.

We were in her basement looking through things she hadn't used in ages. She said she ought to have a yardsale but it takes so much work. I suggested giving it all to Goodwill.
Nope, no Goodwill in La Grande.
Salvation Army?

Nope, it closed. There is a store out in Elgin but they don't seem to care at all about what you bring, just tell you to set it on a table and they don't seem to care what happens to it!

A glance at the faded plastic flowers, broken ornaments and dusty mementos, and I couldn't blame them.

Well, Grandma, I ventured, what about just throwing it all away?

Gasp! Shudder! Heavens, no! I couldn't do that!

Back-handed Censure

Owen makes a suggestion:

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANY THING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE--TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS.

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Evolution of Loungewear

Sometimes I wonder at what point our action verbs change to reflect current technology. For example, when will we stop saying 'pick up the phone' or 'I'm going to hang up ' since now we flip our cells on and off? No more handset and cradle, yet our collective conscious still faintly hears a click and a thunk, rather than a blip and another blip. I sometimes still hear a rotary dial, but only in far off dreams.

A tangent on that got me thinking about that seductive phrase used in so many old movies, "I'm just going to slip into something more comfortable." The siren utters this and then re-emerges clad is some amazing, Star Trek-inspired lounging apparatus, usually with the same amount of fabric and ornateness, or more, than the gown she discarded.

I got to wondering what was more comfortable about them. Then I considered the undergarments she must have taken off:


One ad announced the amazing bonus, "...and you can bend!"

The other fact about this foundational equipment is that it looks rather impenetrable for any poor gentleman trying to 'get to know her better' and all that.

What with modern fashions being so much less confining than what the girdled eras demanded--if we accurately represented what would be more comfortable than our jeans and t-shirts--when a woman utters that phrase now it should strike terror in any man's heart, because this is probably what she'd come back wearing:

Side note: Kind of a bummer we are now only left with exercise programs and celery sticks to get the firm, sleek look that women through the ages have used whalebone, rubber and elastic to achieve.

Some Times Are Good Times

I stopped in at a neighborhood bakery on my way to work this morning. It was drizzly and dark and cold and the shop glowed with light, warmth and butter, which are several key things necessary to survival besides water and pizza. And martinis. Wait no, I mean whiskey sours. Or, no, I mean beer. Anyway.

.

When I asked for a croissant the cashier told me to hold on and she'd get me a warm one right out of the oven. "That's awesome!" says I.

"Not as awesome as last night's election!" she responds.

"No, that was amazing." The hours of cheering, cars honking, fireworks, starry-eyed enthusiasm. Curiouser and curiouser.

.

"Did you see the paper this morning?"

When I said I hadn't she calls to the waitress to get it for me.

"We had it in the window earlier," she adds proudly.

.

They unfurl the full front page photo of Obama waving to the crowds in Grant Park. My throat goes all twitchy and I find myself blurting out, "That makes me want to cry!"

They are both grinning and nodding and the man that just walked in is smiling fondly at me like we are soul mates from the beginning of time.

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All these feelings of hope, warmth, camaraderie, good cheer...it's not even Christmas, yet. Godspeed, Mr. President Obama, sir!

.

No Time To Think

...beginning in the fourteeth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as [Lewis] Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

[Mumford] is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment to moment." He attends to the philosphy of clocks, to clocks as a metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clockmakers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measureable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death,
referencing Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization

Observing the End of Gentility

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, and hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc—instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.
“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.
“Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.
“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.



Note from Sutter’s casebook:
The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

from The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy