La Kid, Rufus Wainwright,
and La Kid’s friend Molly.

Kennedy Center Honors,
December 2013.

(Click on photo
for a bigger view.)

… to Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Academy Award nominated documentary, The Act of Killing. (You know how your friends say My kid makes films. and you nod vaguely and move on to something else? UD isn’t going to do that anymore.)

Les UDs will probably not watch the awards show tonight, even though they’d maybe get glimpses of their friends the Oppenheimers in the audience. Both UDs are too distracted to watch (UD‘s under a deadline: A press approached her about publishing something UD‘s got cooking – The Electronic Burqa: Women, the Internet, and the Public Realm – and she promised a sample chapter by tomorrow morning; Mr UD is riveted to the news out of Ukraine), but UD will follow events online.

The jolting – perhaps ultimately morally awakening – surreality of Josh’s film (in which mass murderers gleefully, meticulously, theatrically, re-enact their killings) was the perfect backdrop for UD‘s discussion, in her Modernism class last week, of Dada and surreality. The blithe amusing infantile conscienceless bestiality on view in Josh’s film has its aesthetic origins, for UD at least, in Alfred Jarry’s surrealistic farce Ubu Roi (1896).

“We are all Ubu,” writes Roger Shattuck, “still blissfully ignorant of our destructiveness and systematically practicing the soul-devouring ‘reversal’ of flushing our conscience down the john. Ubu, unruffled king of tyrants and cuckolds, is more terrifying than tragedy.”

The shock, hilarity, and unsettledness that violent surrealistic art can sometimes provoke does seem to have its political purposes (Josh’s film has apparently provoked a national conversation in Indonesia.)

Ubu Roi was the basis for Jan Lenica’s animated film Ubu et la grande gidouille (1976) and was later adapted into Jane Taylor’s “Ubu and the Truth Commission” (1998), a play critical of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed in response to the atrocities committed during Apartheid. Ubu Roi was also adapted for the film Ubu Król 2003 by Piotr Szulkin, highlighting the grotesque nature of political life in Poland immediately after the fall of communism.

Inspired by the black comedy of corruption within Ubu Roi, the Puerto Rican absurdist narrative “United States of Banana” by Giannina Braschi, dramatizes, with over-the-top grotesque flourishes … the fall of the American Empire and the liberation of Puerto Rico.

… I watched two barred owls fly from one bare tree in my backyard to another. They lit for awhile on each limb, scanning the ground, and then lifted their big wings and flew off to the trees across the railroad tracks. I can still hear their call.

… office upgrade.

She’s all aflutter about it at the moment, and is not ready to decide whether she wants one of the front window offices overlooking the White House or one of the side windows overlooking the National Mall.

And no. As to wall art, she doesn’t want the Warhol Mao, even though it matches the cover of her beloved DeLillo’s Mao II.

This one makes more sense. Something to study while waiting for students to visit me during my office hours.

LOL. Only the best writers manage to make their point in this elegant off-hand final phrase of the sentence way. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: BRAVO.

**********************
Perkins, by the way, has the floor (post-Kristallnacht) and clearly intends to use it. Here is his latest proposal.

In order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

“And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes,” he continued, “should have a million votes.”

He said later he was just kidding, but the comment has hit the airwaves hard (sample headline: TOM PERKINS CALLS FOR END TO UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE).

This idea of his – a million points of votes – for some reason reminds me of a proposal UD herself has put forward for years, but no one will listen to her. It came to her one summer morning as Les UDs were crossing the long, long Chesapeake Bay Bridge on their way to Rehoboth Beach.

Instead of each car paying whatever it is – ten, fifteen dollars – to cross the Bay, UD proposes that each car pay fifty thousand dollars. During the time the car is on the bridge, this money will be invested. (High-speed computers.) When the car gets to the end of the bridge, if the investment has paid off or broken even, all the money will be returned to the driver. Any profit will go toward maintenance of the bridge.

Before we look at a very good
snow poem, by G.E. Murray,
here’s a picture La Kid
just took of UD‘s morning
handiwork: A path through the snow
from our house to the street.

(She took it through a window,
etc., etc., so it’s a bit vague.)

****************

The poem is from his Sequels to an Uncollected Winter.

4. The Certainties

Coon Rapids, Minnesota. January 1976

*******************

Point One, pretty much all poets say the same thing about snow. Wind they’re divided about; rain can be new life or dreadful dullness, sunlight happiness or oppression… But snow for most is clearly death, the world whited out to reveal whether we like it or not “what’s really always there / Unresting death,” as Philip Larkin writes (not about snow, but same idea).

“All poems are elegies at their core, [Maxine Kumin] often said.”

So Murray’s poem, with its long lines drifting like the cattle, drifting like us into dangerous thoughts while we look at the snow, does that same death thing, follows the snow as it snakes toward a truth about the certainty of our oblivion. We’re kept animals, set adrift by the weather in the direction of morbid thoughts. The real animals, sad things, are indeed adrift, doomed to starve or freeze as they wander; we are figuratively driven from warm complacent ordinary thoughts by what’s happening outside. We get to stay in – truly kept animals – and from our windows watch the merest “residue of soul” that shows itself in expelled breath. And this tells us how at any moment we are, whatever the weather, barely existent, hanging on by a thread.

the hung
Bellies of cows lunge through drifts forming whale tracks, inching
Ahead, the beasts hopeful as drifters at the hiring gate.

Hung and lunge: This is an unrhymed but lightly metered poem with plenty of internal rhyme or near rhyme. Its mood is the ominous feel of being unmoored, so tight exact rhyme wouldn’t do; but on the other hand the poem’s not ultimately about random drift. It has both a nuanced parallel between animals and human beings to express, and a familiar trajectory to trace toward a familiar conclusion. So despite its snow drifts, the poem exhibits a certain solidity of form – all those long lines, more or less the same length.

The famous final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” is the prose cousin of “The Certainties.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Murray writes:

Night-hammered,
Blizzard-ripe, we wait by the window with house plants, our fears
Nearly realized, a salt lick of faith turning to stone in our bowels.

Wonderful final lines, pulling forward the parallel with the beasts. We wake up having been hammered all night with snow, and we wait by the window with house plants and I ask myself why is house plants so brilliant? Why is that little phrase the genius, the elegiac core of this poem? Why in the world does it make me think of that song from Hair that starts

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats

I guess it’s one of those existential status lines – We, we, we. Let us look starkly, in the clarifying snow, at us, the human race, in a corporate, spiritual, sense. Our fragility, isolation, transience, efforts to continue to exist. Our cattle-like hopefulness despite our doom… On we walk, proudly, in our winter coats, despite gasping, starving…

The house plants are the perfect pathos-example. The poignant pathetic way we bring small doses of nature in, keep these teeny therapeutic helpings warm so they thrive. Kept things for kept us. They keep our delusions of safety alive. Except that now, with so much snow, our fears are very close to realized.

Et in terra Pax homes in on us.

Mr UD‘s out panic shopping with the rest of ‘thesda; UD is au Metro on her way back from a meeting in Foggy Bottom; La Kid is at work. We’ve all got that vague hunched feeling that goes along with anticipating lost power and falling trees.

Of course for UD this is all ultimately about racing over to the nearest hotel, pulling multiple sheets blankets and throws from a kingsize bed, jumping in, ordering room service, and firing up the MacBook.

Mr UD will be all disapproval: Life is for meeting strenuous character tests like staying in dark cold houses with falling trees.

A few more comments, if I may, on the Tom Perkins business.

One of UD’s father-in-law’s friends was the architect and painter Serge Chermayeff (Les UDs have one of his paintings). UD recalls being told that, at the very end of his life, Chermayeff told Soltan he felt sure the world was, as it were, going with him – that the end of the world was close. I don’t know if he meant via nuclear warfare or what, but he clearly meant that in dying he was taking the rest of the world down with him.

UD‘s theory about old men who were very big personalities for much of their lives – people like Perkins – is that their resentment over having to die can take the form of insisting that everything else die with them. They missed nothing during their lives; they’re damned if they’re going to miss anything after their deaths.

This would explain, in part, the otherwise bizarre theory Perkin’s peddling, the belief he’s excited about, which involves a kind of armageddon in which the violent majority will French revolutionize the rich minority. In this scenario, Perkins guarantees that none of his fellow super-rich, with whom he’s been competing all of his life, will beat him in the ultimate competition. Everyone gets slaughtered.

As Michael Kinsley writes in “Mine is Longer than Yours”:

This is the game that really counts. Perhaps you imagine that, as eternity approaches, the petty ambitions and rivalries of this life melt away. Perhaps they do. That doesn’t mean that the competition is over. It means that the biggest competition of all is about to start.

At 82, Perkins – one of life’s enormous winners – is in the very thick of the biggest competition of all. He is looking for a way – any way – not to lose it.

… over the great plains has the word “bountiful” buzzing in UD‘s brain. This obviously bountiful land, even under patches of snow.

Bountiful Chicago, where a glowing plaid-clad Burberry store appeared in UD‘s hotel window – and behind the Burberry was the lake, ice-blue, iced-in, beautifully silent behind the city noise. How can it be said that UD still knows this city, so generous to her with adventure and love many years ago? This is America, bountiful and changeable, and you can walk down Michigan Avenue and gaze at the ice chunks in the Chicago River, and, except for the Trib Tower, you can find the streetscape entirely strange.

The strangeness is fine with me – it does me good to feel the nervy vitality Saul Bellow described… And didn’t I once find myself driving next to him (I still drove then), north from Hyde Park on Lake Shore Drive? He was in a derelict little BMW – green, as I recall – and I kept glancing over at his thin white hair, his hard-set lips. A Chicago moment – chronicling my life in that city while racing next to perhaps its greatest chronicler. That was sweet.

… is a great blog written by someone rather like UD – a Washington-area English professor. Marilee Lindemann was in the audience last night at UD‘s MLA panel and afterwards we got to talking. She lives in Garrett Park’s sister city, Takoma Park (both are Nuclear Free Zones) and teaches at the University of Maryland, where Mr UD (himself just back from a conference in New Orleans, where he talked about civic studies) teaches. So they had a lot to talk about, and it was a pleasure.

Altogether, the small tight nuclear Les UDs unit has been out and about lately – La Kid is here in Chicago with UD (she spent time yesterday with friends in Ukrainian Village), and Mr UD is just back in Garrett Park from the “almost uncomfortably hot” streets of New Orleans.

She’s at National Airport (she’s too ancient a Washingtonian to use its new name) on a drippy dreary morning. Her flight to Chicago leaves soon.

La Kid slumps in a chair next to her (UD‘s taking part in an MLA panel; La Kid‘s visiting a friend at the University of Chicago).

Airports make UD morbid. They make her spiritual in a tedious and neurotic way.

For the last half hour, with deep melancholy sighs, she’s been humming Panis Angelicus to herself.

She will blog from Chicago, of course.

… singing with Rufus Wainwright, honoring Billy Joel, at the Kennedy Center Honors.

… at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.

Honoring Billy Joel.

(Click on the image
for a better view.)

… at 10:44. Across from UD at a long wooden table sit a father and son on their way to Plymouth. “Going there to take pictures,” says the father. He wears a pilgrim hat; his son wears a three-quarter.

While we wait for our train to DC, Mr UD walks around the busy station. At its center, next to the holiday train display, people gaze at the big schedule and gate sign as if in a saint’s presence. Their awed uptilted faces are lit by the streaming sun.

*********************

Here we go. Business Class, Acela, Washington DC. Pulling away from rickety old Boston – Mr UD and our cabbie went back and forth about all the construction zones and how you have to sit in traffic around them for hours – UD ponders the failure of this city, over many years, to appeal to her. To her it feels wintry, rickety, past it.

*********************

A dream UD had last night:

She is sitting beside Luciano Pavarotti on a comfortable couch. He is in despair. UD puts a consoling arm around him and says:

The line between dignity and farce in opera is a thin one and not all productions manage to cross over into dignity.

The Amtrak Quiet Car is the best invention since central heating. Washington to Boston’s a long haul, but you’re sitting in a laptop library with a cafe one car down, and the hours pass calmly, happily.

I’m not saying the lav on a train is a thing of beauty after six hours, and I’m not denying the jostle as passengers leave and arrive. I’m saying who would have thought transport by rail over many hours would evolve into a semi-trance with long water views and private screenings of the international news?

Yet precisely because of the peculiar utopianism of the place, its deliciously infantile and also somehow self-righteous shushing, the Quiet Car makes people bizarre. Here are two cautionary tales – of silence loved not wisely but too well – from UD‘s ride yesterday.

The one outstanding exception to the universal hush of the Quiet Car is of course the conductor. He gets to blast through barking small talk as he takes our tickets. Lady, always print the bar code. Where’s your bar code? Don’t just print the first page lady. Why don’t people know to print the second page? I need to see your bar code was the recurrent theme as our guy blasted through.

On one of his blasts, a woman a few seats in front of UD made the mistake of telling the conductor to shut up. This is the quiet car she told him. She told the conductor.

Are telling me or asking me? You think I don’t know this is the Quiet Car? You keep your mouth shut lady and mind your own business.

UD will admit to being shocked by the conductor’s aggression (his face flushed, his eyes flashed), but the Quiet Car seemed to bring out equal intensities of silence love and noise defense in these people, and the results were ugly.

******************

Then there was, a little north of Connecticut, UD‘s own series of unfortunate events. She was sitting comfortably, one foot resting on her backpack, when she heard faint but unmistakeable Christmas music. Sound of any kind was bad enough in the Quiet Car; but Christmas music? Was Amtrak asinine enough to pipe carols into the Quiet Car??

Or was it one of her neighbors? She stood up and looked around for the source of the offense but though it felt nearby and weirdly insinuating she couldn’t locate it.

Finally she made a general announcement to the car. Would the person playing Christmas music please turn it off, she said.

Yes, said a disapproving voice. There’s music in this car.

But the music did not stop, and UD once again began beating up beastly Amtrak in her mind…

Until she remembered that Mr UD had, just before they left DC, bought a new little radio – a thin black number – and that UD had packed it in the backpack under her feet.

Frantically, guiltily, humiliatedly, she pulled up the backpack and extracted the radio which it seemed her feet had pressed against and turned on.

It was somehow like that scene in Pnin where Pnin irritatedly returns to the campus library a book he still wants to read. Someone has recalled it. (‘Mrs Fire, permit me to ask something or other. This card which I received yesterday – could you maybe tell me who is the other reader?’

’18, 19,’ muttered Pnin. ‘There is not great difference! I put the year correctly, that is important! Yes, I still need 18 – and send to me a more effishant card when 19 available.’)