1193
Digging through the bargain bookshelves, now and then a treasure is found. Such is Caleb Carr's splendid The Alienist. I have a fondness for "Victorian mysteries" (usually with little-old-lady Miss Marple types solving the dilemma), but I'm sure the writers of those would all agree that Carr sets a new standard with his fascinating novel set in the late 1800's in New York City.I've neglected to mention a couple of unusual recent events. Kory K made one of his very rare visits to the secluded grove. He's so "wholesome" compared to most young men I talk with. (Take that as a compliment, Kory, not an insult.) And Mme de Crécy is being forced to vacate her long-time residence, so I made a brief visit there to reduce the stuff she has kindly been storing for me. There's hardly any reason to continue keeping an "office-suitable" wardrobe, so it all went into the trash. Not much was kept. The Willie K tee-shirt which Harold gave me (off his back) and a small wooden box with the India Notebooks and other little treasures. (I didn't open that at all, didn't want to have to decide if the contents were worth saving or not.)
$2.07 in December, $2.18 in January, now $3.12!! The supermarket at the mall has lost a beer-buying customer. (Those bottles can still be found for $2.07 in Chinatown and at my favorite cheap tobacco store.) On the other side of the economic scale, the baby strollers now only reward one quarter if they are returned, not two as they formerly did. Not surprisingly, there are many more of them seen abandoned. Unless they are very close to a return corral, I don't bother.
Another letter came from Felix, pushing the "recorder debate" over the edge when he wrote about enjoying some tapes he's made from past Met broadcasts (including a Mozart with Fleming). That one is available in a commercial recording, too, although I haven't yet found it. Well, I am sure I'd kick myself on Sunday, March 7th, if I hadn't recorded "La Traviata" the day before, and then Sears pushed it further over the edge by getting a Panasonic FM stereo/cassette recorder for about sixty dollars.
The Collector returns.
1194
She belonged to the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound, in which the secret of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept.Henry James: The Spoils of Poynton
Homeless men, especially those plus-forty, seem to generally fall into two categories. The absolute loners who never speak to anyone, except perhaps to say 'thank you' to a salesclerk, and those who just won't stop talking. If there is no one for them to talk to, they invent an invisible companion, or just talk to themselves.
We have a new absolute loner in the Rainy Day Bench area. I think he probably sleeps in the park because he heads off in that direction not long after sunset. Why he sits there the rest of the time doing nothing (like the old man whose exclusive area that was before I discovered it), I don't know. Like I've said, maybe they are more spiritually advanced than I. Not a chance I could sit for hours doing nothing, no book, no radio.
The ones who talk all the time have nothing interesting to say. It's either nostalgia for their (dubiously glorious) past, complaints about how the world is treating them, or schemes to "succeed". See Kevin for a really typical homeless man, plus-forty.
We have far too many of them at the Black Hole, and they never stop talking. All with an "unaided emission of sound."
The Henry James enthusiast who has been unloading books on the Hamilton cart has dumped some more. The three volume collection of letters to his family don't interest me because they are in French. Okay, okay, one of the (few) regrets in my life is that I didn't learn that elegant language, so much finer than this thing we call "English".
Curious, because this James book is something of a complete indictment against "collecting". Sorry, Henry, I'm going to ignore that aspect of your elegant novel, never mind synchronicity.
I had settled on my mat at the Black Hole on Friday night, was drifting toward sleep, when someone kicked my mat several times. I was ready, of course, to say "what the hell!", sat up and saw the Sleeptalker walking away. I waved to him.
1195
I wonder who's kissing her now.Wonder who's teaching her how.
Wonder who's looking into her eyes
Breathing sighs, telling lies;
I wonder who's buying the wine,
For lips that I used to call mine.
Wonder if she ever tells him of me,
I wonder who's kissing her now.
HA! Michael Lasser played it in his wonderful hour of American songs on the weekend. I'm sure I know the song from the 50's, although I don't remember the specific recording, but evidently it dates from 1902 so maybe I know it from a previous life. It is without any contest the most popular selection of the Internal Jukebox. I've mentioned before in the Tales how I told that wretched earworm one morning, "shut up! no one is kissing him, he's having breakfast at the Black Hole."
If the Sleeptalker had arrived at the mall while it was playing I might have gone hysterical.
I bought the radio/cassette recorder on Saturday. The tape seems to be decent enough but the tuner isn't nearly as good as the little Sony I have. This may be a blessing since it puts the damper on casual recording. One thing I told myself when agreeing to the purchase was that I would not record the Lasser shows. Good thing it was tucked away in my locker because I couldn't have resisted on Sunday. I'll get a connecting cord, see if I can get better results using the Sony tuner linked to the Panasonic recorder but I have an idea I am in for lo-fi results either way. Never mind, it will do until her stupid record company records Fleming in a complete Traviata, not just the excerpt on her newest CD.
Strange book, The Spoils of Poynton. I'm not sure if I read it a long time ago, but I did anticipate the ending long before it arrived. Then I was most happy to find Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness on the bargain shelves, more tales of NYC in the late 1800's with the same cast of characters. I think Carr is definitely destined to join my list of "favorite living writers".
No Bad Boys all weekend, although I did see Mondo sprawled on a bus stop bench at the mall early on Monday morning. He has been missing from the Black Hole for awhile. No game all weekend, either. Maybe that bizarre Englishwoman is having another temper tantrum. Recently some foolishly undiplomatic player accused her of "doing nothing". She flew into a fit, explained that the automatic re-boot facility isn't working so the game shuts down at midnight its time and doesn't, as it should, re-start. So she has to do it. To prove her point she said she wouldn't bother the next day. And didn't. I don't really care that much except for its being a main point of contact with the Sleeptalker.
I wonder who's kissing him now ...
1196
A reader, with a unique reason to ask, wrote: "did you need glasses at 16?"Yes. In my younger years I was "near-sighted", which is to say, anything at a distance was blurred and indistinct. My parents didn't realize that until I was seven or eight years old when they took me to see a Ringling Brothers & Barnum Bailey circus and noticed I was squinting through the whole thing (trying to see).
So I got tested and was one of those unfortunate children who had to wear pieces of glass over my eyes in order to see the blackboard in the classroom. (Little wonder I'd had a problem with the first year or two of school.)
By my thirties it steadily ceased to be a problem, I only wore the glasses when I was going to the theatre or to see a film (and I remember sometimes going to the cinema and forgetting to take them.)
Now it has completely reversed itself. I only need those pieces of glass before my eyes for "close-up" things, like reading a book or a computer screen.
Caleb Carr is quite shameless. In his (obviously wonderfully researched) tales of late-1800's NYC, he now and then introduces historical characters into his fiction. Theodore Roosevelt in The Alienist, now Clarence Darrow in The Angel of Darkness.
Knowing at the time nothing of the infamous "Monkey trial", my first encounter with Darrow was that film, "Compulsion", which touched me deeply. Leopold and Loeb. [Hideous photograph on that web page, not much like the film, although obviously the photo must be closer to historical reality.]
Oh well, I did have a HUGE crush on Dean Stockwell.
With or without my glasses.
1197
As I've noted before, I get off the bus one stop before the Black Hole so I can have a little walk and the last cigarette of the day. Sometimes the bus driver, obviously knowing what my final destination is, just ignores that stop. Very annoying. But on Tuesday evening, the driver did stop there and on my walk to the Black Hole, who should come strolling along but the Sleeptalker.He was high on something, could tell it from his eyes. Probably the glass pipe. But he was lively and talkative, most of it about the game. Did I know he had suicided all his characters? Yes, I said, "yawn". "I don't have a character called Yawn," he said. Of course, I meant that it was nothing new, no one is anymore much excited by him suiciding his characters. I did tell him about the young (supposedly female) player who had said she was in love with him. (I just replied to her in the game saying, "good luck to you.")
And I told him the game hasn't been available since Friday of last week, explained the problem with the automatic re-boot. He thought he should send an email to the Mad Englishwoman, persuade her to keep it going. Well, she does like him, so maybe it might work, but he didn't show up on campus next day to try it.
Amongst the email which did show up was a photograph I haven't seen in many years. Oh yes, once we were young.
I chuckled at the news report that Bush2 stood in front of a painting of Theodore Roosevelt to announce his backing of a Constitutional Amendment to restrict "marriage" to a man and a woman. Cute of him to pick one of the, if not the, most macho presidents. Every weekday evening I put away my book and listen to NPR's "Marketplace", a half hour of news which is primarily based on economics, but of course these days, just about any news story is related to economics, so I get more or less a summary of what has happened during the day. Then I listen to the half-hour which follows, different each day. My favorite of those is definitely "Left Right and Center", a discussion group (made much more lively by Arianna Huffington) and one of their topics was this "gay marriage" nonsense.
I agreed with the speaker who said it was a "civil rights" issue and we'd just have to learn to live with it, like folks have been forced to live with black people sitting on the bus next to them, etc. I also agreed with the speaker who said government should get out of the "marriage" business. Let two people, of any sex, go to a government official and register a formal "civil union" with all the protections and benefits of the current "heterosexual marriage". But if they want "marriage", then they should seek some religious authority to grant them that "sacrament". Such an attitude would be far too sensible for Bush2.
But then, what isn't? I think I really must stir myself this time and register to vote.
1198
The headline on Thursday morning's newspaper telling us a severe storm was "marching" toward the islands wasn't really necessary. There was a most ominous feeling in the atmosphere. I made my usual early visit to the secluded grove, fed the furry ones, went online for awhile and then returned to the grove. But by then that ominous feeling was getting more and more obvious so I decided I'd best get myself to the mall, much earlier than is my habit. Good timing, since I got there just before rain started to fall. And then I had a front-row seat for the most impressive display of thunder and lightning I have seen in years. Streak lightning is rare here but I did see one dazzling example amidst the more usual flashes, and the thunder was awesome.By late afternoon the storm had passed, and the Sleeptalker arrived, to my surprise. He had his post-pipe cough but was in a good mood and I much enjoyed the time with him. I told him I'd seen Angelo (on his own) in the mall earlier. The Sleeptalker showed me his new notebook and let me read what he's recently written.
And he kissed me. That's only the second time he has done that in these six years I've known him. He's keenly aware how it shocks me, the rascal.
We went off to the Black Hole where he stayed downstairs. The next morning he arrived in the secluded grove very early. The sky was gray but rain hadn't yet started to fall. I had a breakfast beer, a decadent indulgence I usually restrict to Sunday mornings, so he shared that and then we went on to Hamilton Library. Seventh Circle was still down. He emailed the crazy Englishwoman and got what I assume was an automatic response saying she was not answering her email. So we both created new characters in the grand-daddy of SMAUG MUDs, Realms of Despair and played for hours. We took a break to have breakfast at Paradise Palms and had just finished when the rain began.
And it rained ... and rained ... and rained.
Finally, at about three in the afternoon I said we might as well head to the mall since the rain obviously wasn't going to even slow down enough to allow a visit to Manoa Garden. He grabbed a garbage bag from a Hamilton toilet, I had an "emergency poncho" I'd bought after that last massive downpour (really just a thin plastic bag with a hood). At least this time I managed to cross the raging river in the street across from the bus stop without losing a slipper.
I sat in the front of the bus, he sat in the back. A few stops later, Rocky got on the bus, ignored me and walked to the back. Despite the fact that the Sleeptalker had vowed earlier he was not going to smoke the pipe again ("I wish I had ten dollars for every time you've said that"), I assume Rocky made the offer and they didn't leave the bus when we got to the mall. Oh well. It had been a delightful day with him, in one of his best moods, often chuckling over whatever had come into his mind, despite having a toothache from a troublesome wisdom tooth.
The storm absolutely raged for the rest of the day. There was one moment when it was as close to frightening as I have ever seen. Ferocious wind and rain so heavy it was like being in some gray fog, couldn't even see the apartment building across from the mall. I had to put my poncho back on, even on that sheltered bench. The birds all flew up to the top of the wall and cowered right under the overhang.
No getting off the bus one stop early, opted for the one closest to the Black Hole and was much relieved to get in there without being drenched. As I was getting my mat, Rocky was there. Good sign of just how bad the weather was when even he sought shelter, the first time I've seen him at the Black Hole.
I'd wondered why recently some of the newer security people had asked me what my first name is. There is another Vanderburg on the list! Good grief, what has this family come to.
1199
The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing.
from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
Illustrations for Tender Buttons. New York City: Teuscher Editions . Ten original xerographs by Edward Meneeley; Folio designed by Wayne Adams. Copy signed by Meneeley.
Says the Yale catalogue from their Virgil Thomson Collection..
For the larger version of that photo see: Once We Were Young.
1965. Meneeley did a limited edition of prints. "Xerographs" in art-talk, Xerox copies in ordinary language, although on better quality paper than is the norm. He arranged objects (including, of course, buttons) on the glass plate of a Xerox machine. It surely must be one of the most successful things he ever did, has gotten him into many museum collections.
Wayne Adams, at his Teuscher Gallery in New York City, staged an exhibition for the work and in the smaller room of his gallery placed other works, including the one of mine you see in the background of that photo. It was a very large black-white-and-gray painting (probably the largest canvas I did, except for the Tolkien room), and included my variation on Picasso's portrait of Stein.
And we had, as you can tell from the photograph, a black-tie opening.
On the left in the photograph is Edward Meneeley, in the middle is Addison Metcalfe who bought the painting and eventually gave it, with the rest of his large Stein collection, to some college in Southern California. And I, of course, am on the right with my wine glass and cigarette.
Meneeley has kept the photo all these years and sent it to my French reader who kindly scanned it for me. I was quite touched by it and it certainly has gotten reaction from my readers. I printed it for the Sleeptalker on Friday, later told him he didn't have to keep it. "I want it," he said.
the tales