Dramatically, as in O’Neill’s great play and a zillion others like it, it’s only fun to watch until someone… you know… coughs it up. Until that moment at the very end (“I… am… George… I am…”) when the obvious truth everyone’s been lying about gets very flatly stated, we sit and watch in delighted suspense, in excited anxious awareness, in a tense condition of enlightenment, astonishment, pity, euphoria, dread, amusement, fear…
When Mitt Romney wrote his beautiful editorial spilling the beans, UD felt a dramatic let-down. When Christianity Today did the same thing, she felt the same onrush of flaccidity. You know how everyone loves to quote Have you no sense of decency? Blah. Play up! Play up! And play the game!
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UPDATE: Trubu Roi’s Run Far From Over!
The long-running American version of Jarry’sUbu the King(UD‘s posts about The Trubu Show go way back: put Trubu in my search engine) runs on. As UD suggests above, the citizen in her desperately wants the show to end, while the aesthete can’t help lovin this seniors gone wild caper, this Hangover franchise for mature audiences. Every time hoary Rudy Giuliani loses his shit and slobbers that “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” every time naughty octogenarian Alan Dershowitz describes the New Yorker’s editor as a neo-Nazi-friendly fraud, the girl can’t help it: She’s giggling in the wings, she’s having a grand time, she doesn’t want it to end. She doesn’t want Trubu psychiatrist Keith Ablow to lose his license; she floods with excitement when she sees the names Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed lined up together in a cast list. She’s watching her very own, her native, La Grande Bouffe, where eventually one of Trubu’s Grand Old Men will sit at a piano, play a few chords, and fart himself to death.
Les UDs finally discovered the precise boundaries of their property; their landscaper had a surveyor do the deed. Turns out we own a good deal more forest than we thought we did, so yesterday UD created a path through the woods, connecting one of our established paths to the new boundary marker. This involved raking up leaves and dirt, plus pulling and tossing dead branches – work UD loves for itself, and also for the way it shapes the land and gives the dog and me more walking space.
It was a clear cold day, full sun, and it took UD very little time to forge a nice wide walkway.
At one point she raked up an old lp.
Why would someone toss/bury a record in the woods? She and Mr UD speculated. An unwanted gift? Did it fall out of a trash bag? But then how would it end up a half acre away, at the very top of the property? What animal would find it worth picking up or nudging?
Something emotional? A favorite track, associated with a love affair gone sour, hurled in rage or sorrow into the void?
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Short of sending it to the FBI forensic lab, there was certainly no way of identifying the record. Right?
Wrong. Take a look at the lp’s center, where I’ve focused a light. All it took was deciphering the printed and written language there, and then checking a discography.
VAN GELDER appears on part of the curve; that would be the recording studio; PRLP is I suppose the record label: Prestige. 2934A (I think that’s the written number) is, according to the Prestige Records Discography for 1961, “To Rigmor,” a piece Joe Newman (the whole album is the Joe Newman Quintet, Good ‘N’ Groovy) wrote for his wife.
The high-profile arrest, in Dubai, of a spectacularly murderous drug lord based in the Netherlands, prompts a BBC article which touches on a disturbing possibility: Liberal drug laws (which UD, as an old hippie, tends to go for) attract the cartels. “… 59% of [the Dutch believe] the Netherlands [is] now a narco-state.”
[A] report commissioned by the mayor or Amsterdam in August described the capital as a “Valhalla for drugs criminals .” … The Netherlands has in a sense created the perfect environment for the drugs trade to flourish. With its extensive transport network, its lenient drug laws and penalties, and its proximity to a number of lucrative markets, it is an obvious hub for the global narcotics flow.
[A]s an image, the blacked-out face of a woman, the alleged obscenity of a woman’s face and hair which must apparently be hidden from view to please God, is not conducive to the post-religious value of democratic equality and democratic engagement.
Writers can only be so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed…
We have lousy memories. Proust had a lousy memory. (There is no “little patch of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft.”). Memory is a liar. It’s a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions. The stories make cumulative lies – or, give us a break, conjecture – of our lives…
Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing.
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The spectacular writer and art critic Peter Schjeldahl thinks about life as he approaches death.
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On meaning and nothing, see also John Cheever:
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.
Lat year, our fraternity system killed a student; this year it onlyalmost killed a student. WE ARE GETTING SOGOOD! This tape is ready for this year’s ad campaign. Watch our ranking soar!!
The Magic Kingdom: Where a violent demented man pursues a fine living as an Islamic preacher who throws shoes at women on the street if they’re only wearing a hijab and abaya.
“If a woman reveals her face and allows men to smell her perfume, she is an adulteress,” he spoke at the top of his lungs.
Ladies of the world! Saudi Arabia is currently making a big tourism push! Remember to pack black gloves, black tights, black flats, a hijab, an abaya, a chador, a burkini, a niqab, a burqa, Moccasin Joe, and a helmet.
