A DEMOCRACY OF GHOSTS
Every bit as powerful as Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and, as Bob Shacochis says, “evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair,” and closely informed by historical records of an actual series of events, John Griswold’s first novel, A Democracy of Ghosts, tells the story of both sides – rather, all sides – in an early 1920s coal mine strike in southern Illinois. It is a gripping tale – rippling with horror, humor, passion, and irony.
William H. Gass tells us there are no people in fiction, only words, but the words here are clear windows on the complex souls of human beings – no heroes, just men and women in all of their weakness and some of their strength. Though less than 200 pages, the novel has a large presence, giving a sense of a whole community and its many and varied inhabitants. Here we see the quotidian treacheries, small and large, of human beings at home and on the job, the terrible organism of a mob run amok (one of the scariest chapters I’ve seen in a novel in some time), the sad fragility and egotism of human dreams but also the determination to help keep things going, albeit usurped by a shocker of a surprise in the penultimate chapter.
I don’t want to be a spoiler, cheating potential readers by revealing details of this novel’s secrets and surprises. I would only like to recommend it strongly – and to quote a passage toward the end of this powerful story that sums up the fate of the strongest character in it, and perhaps the ironic fate that most of us who wish to be a part of something larger than ourselves are powerless against:
“He’d trapped himself in a system… He was no longer free to omit one part he hated; it would be like omitting nails from a house. A man might choose which system he wanted to help build, but once built, it became his fate.”
Master novelist Duff Brenna sums it all up beautifully – so let me second his words about the book: “At times disturbing and tragically violent, always insightful, poignant and uncompromising, Griswold’s riveting narrative is filled with complex men and women bursting with life. Fast-paced and powerful, A Democracy of Ghosts is an original ride told by a masterful writer.” Hear, hear!
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
torsdag den 3. september 2009
tirsdag den 18. august 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: Dead Man Falling
Sudden inspiration strikes midway over the Atlantic in an SAS jumbo jet bound for Copenhagen, and I am hunched over the fold-down table in my aisle seat, scribbling away at a love story – I have just had the good fortune to spend some time with a lovely woman and such are my proclivities that I have to make a story out of it. At just the moment in the story when boy is about to get girl, something slams into my face and knocks off my glasses, stunning me. I think something must have fallen out of the overhead bin, but realize then it was another passenger, a man who had been walking along the aisle, got just abreast of me and collapsed like a ton of bricks.
After finding my glasses, not broken fortunately, and noting that a goose egg is growing out of my forehead, I look around and see a body lying in the aisle, looking quite dead. A man, in his forties perhaps.
Three men converge on the body from three different directions. I learn that they are Danish doctors who happened to be on the plane, and they set to work on him at once, lifting his legs to get the blood flow back in his head, taking his blood pressure, reviving him. Soon he is up on his elbows, telling that he had felt nauseated and was on his way to the toilet when suddenly he blacked out, next thing he knew he was on his back in the aisle. His blood pressure is 100 over 70, too low for comfort, and when he tries to rise he grows dizzy. The doctor nearest me – a man of forty perhaps, an oncologist I heard him say, tells the man to remain lying down. It is good to see how attentive the doctors are, how concerned to do what they can for the man. I know from experience in an earlier professional life that doctors who intervene in such aircraft incidents are not only rarely rewarded, but even risk legal suits. But the sue-your-ass-off mania has not yet hit Scandinavia.
A stewardess appears and tells the one doctor that the captain has made available his sleeping quarters, but because the patient is still not able to rise without dizziness, he must scuttle crablike on his bottom, propelling himself with the palms of his hands and bottoms of his feet to the front of the plane. I am given an ice pack for my goose egg and lean back in my seat, thinking about how suddenly and unexpectedly things sometimes happen, how vulnerable we are, how half the time we don’t even see it coming.
I recall an incident some forty-five years ago when I was working as a runner in the Wall Street area. In the crowded morning rush hour just as I got off the train at Bowling Green, a middle-aged couple walking beside me, the husband suddenly dropped like a stone. His wife looked with bewilderment at him. A transit cop materialized and for some reason blew his whistle – perhaps to summon colleagues.
He crouched beside the body, felt for a pulse, and said, “It’s all right, lady – he’s dead.”
“Dead?” she asked. “He can’t be. He just ate breakfast.”
And then, because the platform was crowded and people were pushing me from behind, I moved on. Yet that moment is etched in memory: It’s all right lady – he’s dead. He can’t be – he just ate breakfast.
But of course we all can be, from moment to moment, at any moment, even in the middle of a love story, even when boy is just about to get girl.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Sudden inspiration strikes midway over the Atlantic in an SAS jumbo jet bound for Copenhagen, and I am hunched over the fold-down table in my aisle seat, scribbling away at a love story – I have just had the good fortune to spend some time with a lovely woman and such are my proclivities that I have to make a story out of it. At just the moment in the story when boy is about to get girl, something slams into my face and knocks off my glasses, stunning me. I think something must have fallen out of the overhead bin, but realize then it was another passenger, a man who had been walking along the aisle, got just abreast of me and collapsed like a ton of bricks.
After finding my glasses, not broken fortunately, and noting that a goose egg is growing out of my forehead, I look around and see a body lying in the aisle, looking quite dead. A man, in his forties perhaps.
Three men converge on the body from three different directions. I learn that they are Danish doctors who happened to be on the plane, and they set to work on him at once, lifting his legs to get the blood flow back in his head, taking his blood pressure, reviving him. Soon he is up on his elbows, telling that he had felt nauseated and was on his way to the toilet when suddenly he blacked out, next thing he knew he was on his back in the aisle. His blood pressure is 100 over 70, too low for comfort, and when he tries to rise he grows dizzy. The doctor nearest me – a man of forty perhaps, an oncologist I heard him say, tells the man to remain lying down. It is good to see how attentive the doctors are, how concerned to do what they can for the man. I know from experience in an earlier professional life that doctors who intervene in such aircraft incidents are not only rarely rewarded, but even risk legal suits. But the sue-your-ass-off mania has not yet hit Scandinavia.
A stewardess appears and tells the one doctor that the captain has made available his sleeping quarters, but because the patient is still not able to rise without dizziness, he must scuttle crablike on his bottom, propelling himself with the palms of his hands and bottoms of his feet to the front of the plane. I am given an ice pack for my goose egg and lean back in my seat, thinking about how suddenly and unexpectedly things sometimes happen, how vulnerable we are, how half the time we don’t even see it coming.
I recall an incident some forty-five years ago when I was working as a runner in the Wall Street area. In the crowded morning rush hour just as I got off the train at Bowling Green, a middle-aged couple walking beside me, the husband suddenly dropped like a stone. His wife looked with bewilderment at him. A transit cop materialized and for some reason blew his whistle – perhaps to summon colleagues.
He crouched beside the body, felt for a pulse, and said, “It’s all right, lady – he’s dead.”
“Dead?” she asked. “He can’t be. He just ate breakfast.”
And then, because the platform was crowded and people were pushing me from behind, I moved on. Yet that moment is etched in memory: It’s all right lady – he’s dead. He can’t be – he just ate breakfast.
But of course we all can be, from moment to moment, at any moment, even in the middle of a love story, even when boy is just about to get girl.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
søndag den 19. juli 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
VON TRIER'S ANTICHRIST
So, after all the hype, the prizes and anti-prizes, and my own squeamish fear of the already infamous auto-clitoridectomy scene, I decide this rainy July Saturday in Copenhagen to go in to the Dagmar to see Lars von Trier’s new film, Antichrist. (The final ‘T’ in the title incorporates the feminist symbol – something I cannot duplicate on my computer.)
The movie opens with a beautifully filmed scene of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg coupling with great passion to an elegantly impassioned musical background of Handel’s Rinaldo sung by a castrato voice. While man and woman mount toward orgasm, we also see a side story in which their very young son crawls out of his crib, catches a smiling peek of his parents in flagrante delecto, shoves a chair over to a table by an open window. On the table stand three tiny sculptures on whose bases are engraved the words “pain,” “grief,” and “despair.” As the woman is climaxing the little boy is spilling the sculptures onto the floor and standing up on the sill of an open window to watch the gently falling snow while he clutches his teddy bear. The boy falls, or perhaps dives, out the window to crash several floors below in the virgin snow, followed by his teddy bear (in defiance of the laws governing the acceleration of gravity).
The remainder of the film is the story, in four chapters and an epilogue, of the woman’s “atypical grief” and the husband’s insistence on undertaking her therapy (he is a therapist) in their isolated cabin far out in the mountainous countryside which they call “Eden.” He seeks to help her understand that the nature she has become so afraid of is not really dangerous.
Antichrist has been attacked by feminists as anti-feminist and defended by others as being a representation of male rationalism versus female emotivism, of the woman as a “therapy victim” and the man as a rationalistically manipulating therapist, as a representation of Antichrist nature versus the Christian world which at its best is ruled by love and mutual consideration.
Kim Skotte, a film reviewer for Denmark’s Politiken who right from its premiere in Cannes gave the film six out of six stars, describes the woman character as “a heroic figure in a tragic world and perhaps anyway a mirror image of a hero.” He writes, “…it is not films with sweet Christian miracles that rouse debate on Christian values. That is done by tales describing how terrible the world would be without love and trust. Films like Antichrist.”
Skotte asserts that the film takes all of its horror and makes of it “a life-affirming film.”
As strong as the film is, I must confess to find little life-affirming in it other perhaps (and this might be a self-indictment of myself as a rationalist male) than the male character’s attempt, even if ill-advised, to help his wife out of her pain and despair – which is described by Professor Joanna Burke of Birbeck College as “the violence of…rationalism’s heartlessness.” Professor Burke goes on to describe the violence in the film as “rebellious, transgressive and beautiful.” Perhaps in addition to being a heartless male rationalist, I am a wimp, but I saw nothing “beautiful” in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s snipping off “her” clitoris (a rubber facsimile, painstakingly accurate) with a kitchen scissors or thumping her husband/therapist in the groin with a hunk of firewood (ever been kicked in the balls, Ms Burke? It’s not beautiful) or graphically boring a hole in his leg and performing other violence-porn acts upon him. Powerful perhaps, but not beautiful.
Perhaps the point is that the violence of nature depicted in the film – heart-rending and “natural” as it is – is just that, natural, heartless as nature. The dozen or so ticks or chiggers that affix themselves to the Willem Dafoe character’s hand as he sleeps with his arm dangling out the window say it all. They are tiny vampires sucking his blood in a” crime” of opportunity – but no, they are as natural as we are. No, in fact, we are more despicable than those little bloodsuckers – we heartlessly, rationally organize nature for our pleasure and convenience. Our crimes of opportunity are truly crimes and they are enormous. Compared to us, birds of prey are innocents, even when they swoop down on a baby bird fallen from the nest.
That the film opens and closes with a castrato aria from Handel’s Rinaldo seems a tip-off about the theme intended: Rinaldo is an opera about the First Crusade in which Rinaldo, the crusade leader, is taken prisoner by Armida, Queen of Damascus and a powerful enchantress who tries repeatedly to stab his beloved but in the end is defeated and converted to Christianity. It seems hard to deny that this is a film about Christian love and engagement versus evil (as has been said, Christianity is a magnificent philosophy – if only someone would give it a try), a man who seeks to render care to a woman who has become infected with evil via the study of human wickedness (she has been writing a thesis on the torture of “witches”.)
A moment of passion leads a couple to be unmindful of their responsibility toward their baby, resulting in his death. The woman (perhaps because she might actually have seen and ignored the danger to the boy in favor of her pleasure) responds with a debilitating grief. The man believes that he can through reason save her from the anxiety that has developed within her by making her understand that what she fears – nature – is not really dangerous (presumably is not really dangerous to human beings who, arguably, prevail over nature and whose emotional life can lift them beyond the heartless indifference and opportunism of nature).
However, perhaps there is a deeper secret in the woman. Perhaps she understands more deeply that what she fears is dangerous, that human nature – she has become convinced – like all nature is evil. Perhaps her mind has been tipped by its immersion in her study of the evil done to women, and she is now in the grip of her own evil. It later appears that she had been systematically deforming her son’s feet, and she does nothing to save him as he climbs up to the window. Perhaps she has been driven mad by her witness of evil.
She now believes that nature is the church of Satan. The constant sound of the acorns falling on the roof becomes a symbol of nature’s reproduction of itself. She has lost the balance between reason and natural force and chaos reigns in that imbalance; she sees evil in nature and the evil within her is encouraged and increasingly breaks through into violent actions. When her husband discovers what she had done to the boy, she attacks him, brutalizes him, smashes his groin and in a symbolic sense turns his leg into a woman’s womb, “impregnates” it with a grinding wheel that is perhaps a symbol of the millstone nature has forced women to carry, bolts it in place so that it cannot be removed. It is a mockery of reproduction. She is the Antichrist – nature out of balance with itself, unalloyed by reason.
Her madness rages further, and she cuts off the source of pleasure that drives humans to propagate. She has become nature against herself and thus another form of Antichrist, filling the world with wickedness.
Finally, after his resurrection from the fox hole where he hides while she is on her murderous rampage, she tells him that she will kill him when the three beggars arrive. Three animals do arrive (fox, doe and bird) but he manages to remove the millstone from his leg and he kills her.
He wanders the countryside. The three animals watch him tamely as he eats wild berries. Are nature and humanity back in balance? At the end, crowds of faceless women appear from the woods and mass around him. Why? Is this the second coming of Christ who has destroyed the Antichrist? Are they surrounding him to follow him or to destroy him? Why are their faces blurred? Are they coming to him to be given an identity? (Hardly seems possible.) And what an irony is echoed in the castrato aria in view of the fact that it was the Catholic Church that originated this beastly practice of cutting off the testicles of pre-pubic boys to preserve the “purity” of their voices: Is von Trier contradicting his Christian message or just tempering it?
Perhaps someone can answer these questions, but when art prickles with symbols that need interpretation and puzzles that need solving, I feel that I am more closely involved in the realm of the intellect than that of the soul, and I lose interest.
Nevertheless, the movie is a strong experience filmed with startling beauty and acted memorably. It is definitely worth seeing even if you, like I, have to look through your fingers at a bloody scene or two.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
So, after all the hype, the prizes and anti-prizes, and my own squeamish fear of the already infamous auto-clitoridectomy scene, I decide this rainy July Saturday in Copenhagen to go in to the Dagmar to see Lars von Trier’s new film, Antichrist. (The final ‘T’ in the title incorporates the feminist symbol – something I cannot duplicate on my computer.)
The movie opens with a beautifully filmed scene of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg coupling with great passion to an elegantly impassioned musical background of Handel’s Rinaldo sung by a castrato voice. While man and woman mount toward orgasm, we also see a side story in which their very young son crawls out of his crib, catches a smiling peek of his parents in flagrante delecto, shoves a chair over to a table by an open window. On the table stand three tiny sculptures on whose bases are engraved the words “pain,” “grief,” and “despair.” As the woman is climaxing the little boy is spilling the sculptures onto the floor and standing up on the sill of an open window to watch the gently falling snow while he clutches his teddy bear. The boy falls, or perhaps dives, out the window to crash several floors below in the virgin snow, followed by his teddy bear (in defiance of the laws governing the acceleration of gravity).
The remainder of the film is the story, in four chapters and an epilogue, of the woman’s “atypical grief” and the husband’s insistence on undertaking her therapy (he is a therapist) in their isolated cabin far out in the mountainous countryside which they call “Eden.” He seeks to help her understand that the nature she has become so afraid of is not really dangerous.
Antichrist has been attacked by feminists as anti-feminist and defended by others as being a representation of male rationalism versus female emotivism, of the woman as a “therapy victim” and the man as a rationalistically manipulating therapist, as a representation of Antichrist nature versus the Christian world which at its best is ruled by love and mutual consideration.
Kim Skotte, a film reviewer for Denmark’s Politiken who right from its premiere in Cannes gave the film six out of six stars, describes the woman character as “a heroic figure in a tragic world and perhaps anyway a mirror image of a hero.” He writes, “…it is not films with sweet Christian miracles that rouse debate on Christian values. That is done by tales describing how terrible the world would be without love and trust. Films like Antichrist.”
Skotte asserts that the film takes all of its horror and makes of it “a life-affirming film.”
As strong as the film is, I must confess to find little life-affirming in it other perhaps (and this might be a self-indictment of myself as a rationalist male) than the male character’s attempt, even if ill-advised, to help his wife out of her pain and despair – which is described by Professor Joanna Burke of Birbeck College as “the violence of…rationalism’s heartlessness.” Professor Burke goes on to describe the violence in the film as “rebellious, transgressive and beautiful.” Perhaps in addition to being a heartless male rationalist, I am a wimp, but I saw nothing “beautiful” in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s snipping off “her” clitoris (a rubber facsimile, painstakingly accurate) with a kitchen scissors or thumping her husband/therapist in the groin with a hunk of firewood (ever been kicked in the balls, Ms Burke? It’s not beautiful) or graphically boring a hole in his leg and performing other violence-porn acts upon him. Powerful perhaps, but not beautiful.
Perhaps the point is that the violence of nature depicted in the film – heart-rending and “natural” as it is – is just that, natural, heartless as nature. The dozen or so ticks or chiggers that affix themselves to the Willem Dafoe character’s hand as he sleeps with his arm dangling out the window say it all. They are tiny vampires sucking his blood in a” crime” of opportunity – but no, they are as natural as we are. No, in fact, we are more despicable than those little bloodsuckers – we heartlessly, rationally organize nature for our pleasure and convenience. Our crimes of opportunity are truly crimes and they are enormous. Compared to us, birds of prey are innocents, even when they swoop down on a baby bird fallen from the nest.
That the film opens and closes with a castrato aria from Handel’s Rinaldo seems a tip-off about the theme intended: Rinaldo is an opera about the First Crusade in which Rinaldo, the crusade leader, is taken prisoner by Armida, Queen of Damascus and a powerful enchantress who tries repeatedly to stab his beloved but in the end is defeated and converted to Christianity. It seems hard to deny that this is a film about Christian love and engagement versus evil (as has been said, Christianity is a magnificent philosophy – if only someone would give it a try), a man who seeks to render care to a woman who has become infected with evil via the study of human wickedness (she has been writing a thesis on the torture of “witches”.)
A moment of passion leads a couple to be unmindful of their responsibility toward their baby, resulting in his death. The woman (perhaps because she might actually have seen and ignored the danger to the boy in favor of her pleasure) responds with a debilitating grief. The man believes that he can through reason save her from the anxiety that has developed within her by making her understand that what she fears – nature – is not really dangerous (presumably is not really dangerous to human beings who, arguably, prevail over nature and whose emotional life can lift them beyond the heartless indifference and opportunism of nature).
However, perhaps there is a deeper secret in the woman. Perhaps she understands more deeply that what she fears is dangerous, that human nature – she has become convinced – like all nature is evil. Perhaps her mind has been tipped by its immersion in her study of the evil done to women, and she is now in the grip of her own evil. It later appears that she had been systematically deforming her son’s feet, and she does nothing to save him as he climbs up to the window. Perhaps she has been driven mad by her witness of evil.
She now believes that nature is the church of Satan. The constant sound of the acorns falling on the roof becomes a symbol of nature’s reproduction of itself. She has lost the balance between reason and natural force and chaos reigns in that imbalance; she sees evil in nature and the evil within her is encouraged and increasingly breaks through into violent actions. When her husband discovers what she had done to the boy, she attacks him, brutalizes him, smashes his groin and in a symbolic sense turns his leg into a woman’s womb, “impregnates” it with a grinding wheel that is perhaps a symbol of the millstone nature has forced women to carry, bolts it in place so that it cannot be removed. It is a mockery of reproduction. She is the Antichrist – nature out of balance with itself, unalloyed by reason.
Her madness rages further, and she cuts off the source of pleasure that drives humans to propagate. She has become nature against herself and thus another form of Antichrist, filling the world with wickedness.
Finally, after his resurrection from the fox hole where he hides while she is on her murderous rampage, she tells him that she will kill him when the three beggars arrive. Three animals do arrive (fox, doe and bird) but he manages to remove the millstone from his leg and he kills her.
He wanders the countryside. The three animals watch him tamely as he eats wild berries. Are nature and humanity back in balance? At the end, crowds of faceless women appear from the woods and mass around him. Why? Is this the second coming of Christ who has destroyed the Antichrist? Are they surrounding him to follow him or to destroy him? Why are their faces blurred? Are they coming to him to be given an identity? (Hardly seems possible.) And what an irony is echoed in the castrato aria in view of the fact that it was the Catholic Church that originated this beastly practice of cutting off the testicles of pre-pubic boys to preserve the “purity” of their voices: Is von Trier contradicting his Christian message or just tempering it?
Perhaps someone can answer these questions, but when art prickles with symbols that need interpretation and puzzles that need solving, I feel that I am more closely involved in the realm of the intellect than that of the soul, and I lose interest.
Nevertheless, the movie is a strong experience filmed with startling beauty and acted memorably. It is definitely worth seeing even if you, like I, have to look through your fingers at a bloody scene or two.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
tirsdag den 21. april 2009
EASTER SUNDAY ON THE COAL SQUARE, Thomas E. Kennedy
Today a rare sun of spring, and I set off at noon to hike cross town to the Coal Square. Here I will pass my Easter Sunday in the sunlight, in the company of the new New Yorker, a couple of cigarillos, a pint or two of golden brew, notepad close to hand.
Here I can gaze across to a first floor apartment occupied more than 150 years ago by the father of existentialism Søren Kierkegaard, across from that The White Lamb serving house, shelled by the British in 1807, under orders of the Duke of Wellington, the year it opened. Now, 202 years later, Wellington is dust in his grave and The White Lamb continues to serve golden pints. Sometimes you hear a Duke Ellington CD playing in there – the only Duke now welcome.
There are seven trees and eight outdoor cafés on The Coal Square. I once conducted an exercise which I dubbed “Pint of View” on this very square, its objective being to drink a pint in each of the eight cafés and observe the Square from the eight points of view, the eight pints of view. The point of view is variegated, particularly through the intensifying focus of the increasing tally of pints.
Today, however, I alternate between tipping my face up to the ancient, holy sun, sipping my golden pint, reading a James Wood article in the New Yorker about George Orwell, and observing the human traffic on the Square.
This being Easter Sunday, the café tables are sparsely populated by their usually affluent clientele, and the public benches and pavemwent are largely taken over by the homeless. At my table in the sunlight, I am drinking a seven-dollar pint and smoking a fifty-cent cigarillo. Off center on the square, a few meters from an educational tobacco-preventive sculpture of a huge, twisted-out, filter-tipped cigarette butt, sprawl an encampment of the homeless, drinking fifty-cent cans of strong Easter brew and smoking various substances.
There are five of them, laying or sitting on the cobblestone-bordered cement slabs. The seven trees ranged round the perimeter radiate with a glorious halo of spring green so young it glows yellow in the midday light.
The five are talking loudly in foghorn voices about the hash they would be smoking if only they had a pipe. Two women, three men, and two large mongrel dogs. The dogs sleep on their flanks on the sun-warmed concrete. The spirits of the people seem high. Soon they are joined by two young men whose hair is an unnatural shade of red. They kiss one of the women, greeting her as “Mom.”
Ranks swelled to seven, the conversation grows louder. Scraps of phrase reach me:
“Allo, allo, master! Who you think you are?!”
“Gimme that fuckin’ lighter!”
“Hey, Mom, I got to go into jail soon.”
“Just relax!”
“I’m fallin’ asleep here – who could be more relaxed than that?”
These seven and another group clustered on a public bench nearby never mix with the patrons of the cafés. Only two Inuits I have occasionally seen do that, sneaking up to try to snatch pints of beer from the tables at unguarded moments to steal a slug and giggle mischievously.
Clusters of words fly across the sunny square:
“The dog’s okay. He’s lyin’ on my jacket.”
“There where I used to live…”
“You never lived there!”
In the background, the cathedral bells are tolling, no doubt in honor of the resurrection of the savior of man.
A short, mustached Inuit man in a porkpie hat, obviously well into his cups but spry on his feet, dances happily across the square, trying to sell an unauthorized copy of the homeless newspaper to the occasional passerby. He is indefatigable and relentlessly cheerful and before long has sold the paper for three and a half dollars to a black woman with an enormous Afro, rolling her bike across the square. He bows in formal thanks to her as he pockets the money, then spins and dances lightly across to his bench mates, giggling at his success.
Among the Inuits is a tall muscular young man in a sleeveless T-shirt who hunches around, growling loudly, occasionally attacking the giant cigarette butt which he seems to want to lift over his head and heave away from him, but every time he gets it off the ground he loses interest and drops it, rolling his head, face up to the sun, growling, roaring.
Two of the Inuits are in standard hospital-issue wheelchairs which they sit in and walk with their feet. A woman stands in front of one of them, bowed forward at the waist. They kiss passionately, mouths rotating together, arms around one another’s neck. The kiss continues long enough to make me wish I was kissing somebody. Another Inuit woman sits on her jacket and strums a guitar, singing a happy Greenlandic song.
The conversation in the other group grows increasingly animated:
“Mogens, bring me that bag of beer – no! don’t look into it! Just bring it to me!”
A skinny, wrinkle-faced fellow in a peaked cap announces, “The supreme court has asked me to convey greetings to teach and every one of you on this Easter day!”
“Same to you, buster!”
“Whoa, master! Who telephoned you and invited you to say hello?!”
Off to one side, a large round man rises from a bench. He looks like a prophet in a dirty grey jogging suit, big belly, big face, big head, big bald pate with long grey hair streaming down, a long grey beard. He garbles some words in an impressive booming voice, and a small slender woman in a sleeveless blouse stands up to block him from joining the group on the cement.
“You do not belong here,” she says. “Go. Away!”
He tries to circle around her but she steps to the side to keep her face in his. He stumbles away from the homeless circle, shaking his head, over to my table. He is wearing garden gloves, one of which he drops a foot in front of me, leans on the edge of my table and says, “Gagagaga…” which I interpret to mean he is only leaning there for a moment until he retrieves his glove.
I say, “That’s quite okay,” and he answers, “Très bon!”
Glove in hand, he peers into my face. “I gi’ them half an hour,” he says. “Then they’re blown away.”
I say, “Très bon.”
He says, “Magnifique!” with a satisfied grin and limps away, but glances back and adds, “You got the right to sit there and write if you want!”
I say, “Merci. Très bon. Magnifique!”
He looks happily at me and stumbles over to collapse on a bench, falling immediately asleep.
The thin woman with the dog, whose name I surmise is Mette, shouts out, “Is my dog dead?!”
A café customer at one of the tables yells, “Give it mouth to mouth!” and Mette yells back at him, “Ey, buster! Who called you on the phone?!” Her dog lifts its head where it lays in the sunlight to look at her, and she says, “King! Don’t scare me like that!”
In addition to taking notes, I am reading an article in the New Yorker about George Orwell, which asserts that Orwell could not really tolerate the thought of social mobility.
A woman with henna hair sitting amongst the homeless on the cement calls out in a foghorn voice: “Allo! May I speak?! Allo!”
The homeless people are breaking into factions that shout or call to each other from bench to pavement. One of the young men who called the henna-haired woman mother says something to which a skinny, scraggly-bearded man wearing a peaked cap says, “Pseudo necrophile!”
The henna-haired woman says, “Slow down there, buster! What’re you sayin’?! That means a person who fucks the dead! Look me in the eye and say that about my son!”
“I come from the provinces,” says the scraggly-bearded man. “I don’t look in people’s eyes. Anyway, I said pseudo-necrophile.”
“You do not call my son a necrophile!”
“I didn’t say that. It’s a joke. And he’s an adult. He should stand up for himself. A man doesn’t need his mother to do that.”
The tall young muscular Inuit looks at them and rolls his thick shoulders. He growls. Then he turns away but looks back again and roars and struts away, nodding with satisfaction.
It occurs to me that this being Easter Sunday, I really ought to work in a metaphor of resurrection and redemption, of sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind, about the spotless virgin mother of Jesus. But what I am actually thinking about is the incredible amount of energy that these people exhibit.
I ask myself how it can be in this enlightened social-democratic Christian kingdom that there can be so many of our fellow citizens who have no home to live in. How can it be that I sit here drinking seven-dollar pints of beer while they sit and fade away on the pavement? Though they look older, they are young most of them – not more than a couple over fifty, most of them under forty, forty-five tops. Apparently life expectancy among this segment of the population doesn’t extend much beyond that.
Then I remember a black-and-white poster I used to have hanging on the wall of my studio apartment on East Third Street in Manhattan, Alphabet City, back in 1966: the photograph showed a scraggly derelict staggering along the Bowery above the words: WE HAVE ALL COME FROM LOVERS.
All except Jesus, it occurs to me.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
Here I can gaze across to a first floor apartment occupied more than 150 years ago by the father of existentialism Søren Kierkegaard, across from that The White Lamb serving house, shelled by the British in 1807, under orders of the Duke of Wellington, the year it opened. Now, 202 years later, Wellington is dust in his grave and The White Lamb continues to serve golden pints. Sometimes you hear a Duke Ellington CD playing in there – the only Duke now welcome.
There are seven trees and eight outdoor cafés on The Coal Square. I once conducted an exercise which I dubbed “Pint of View” on this very square, its objective being to drink a pint in each of the eight cafés and observe the Square from the eight points of view, the eight pints of view. The point of view is variegated, particularly through the intensifying focus of the increasing tally of pints.
Today, however, I alternate between tipping my face up to the ancient, holy sun, sipping my golden pint, reading a James Wood article in the New Yorker about George Orwell, and observing the human traffic on the Square.
This being Easter Sunday, the café tables are sparsely populated by their usually affluent clientele, and the public benches and pavemwent are largely taken over by the homeless. At my table in the sunlight, I am drinking a seven-dollar pint and smoking a fifty-cent cigarillo. Off center on the square, a few meters from an educational tobacco-preventive sculpture of a huge, twisted-out, filter-tipped cigarette butt, sprawl an encampment of the homeless, drinking fifty-cent cans of strong Easter brew and smoking various substances.
There are five of them, laying or sitting on the cobblestone-bordered cement slabs. The seven trees ranged round the perimeter radiate with a glorious halo of spring green so young it glows yellow in the midday light.
The five are talking loudly in foghorn voices about the hash they would be smoking if only they had a pipe. Two women, three men, and two large mongrel dogs. The dogs sleep on their flanks on the sun-warmed concrete. The spirits of the people seem high. Soon they are joined by two young men whose hair is an unnatural shade of red. They kiss one of the women, greeting her as “Mom.”
Ranks swelled to seven, the conversation grows louder. Scraps of phrase reach me:
“Allo, allo, master! Who you think you are?!”
“Gimme that fuckin’ lighter!”
“Hey, Mom, I got to go into jail soon.”
“Just relax!”
“I’m fallin’ asleep here – who could be more relaxed than that?”
These seven and another group clustered on a public bench nearby never mix with the patrons of the cafés. Only two Inuits I have occasionally seen do that, sneaking up to try to snatch pints of beer from the tables at unguarded moments to steal a slug and giggle mischievously.
Clusters of words fly across the sunny square:
“The dog’s okay. He’s lyin’ on my jacket.”
“There where I used to live…”
“You never lived there!”
In the background, the cathedral bells are tolling, no doubt in honor of the resurrection of the savior of man.
A short, mustached Inuit man in a porkpie hat, obviously well into his cups but spry on his feet, dances happily across the square, trying to sell an unauthorized copy of the homeless newspaper to the occasional passerby. He is indefatigable and relentlessly cheerful and before long has sold the paper for three and a half dollars to a black woman with an enormous Afro, rolling her bike across the square. He bows in formal thanks to her as he pockets the money, then spins and dances lightly across to his bench mates, giggling at his success.
Among the Inuits is a tall muscular young man in a sleeveless T-shirt who hunches around, growling loudly, occasionally attacking the giant cigarette butt which he seems to want to lift over his head and heave away from him, but every time he gets it off the ground he loses interest and drops it, rolling his head, face up to the sun, growling, roaring.
Two of the Inuits are in standard hospital-issue wheelchairs which they sit in and walk with their feet. A woman stands in front of one of them, bowed forward at the waist. They kiss passionately, mouths rotating together, arms around one another’s neck. The kiss continues long enough to make me wish I was kissing somebody. Another Inuit woman sits on her jacket and strums a guitar, singing a happy Greenlandic song.
The conversation in the other group grows increasingly animated:
“Mogens, bring me that bag of beer – no! don’t look into it! Just bring it to me!”
A skinny, wrinkle-faced fellow in a peaked cap announces, “The supreme court has asked me to convey greetings to teach and every one of you on this Easter day!”
“Same to you, buster!”
“Whoa, master! Who telephoned you and invited you to say hello?!”
Off to one side, a large round man rises from a bench. He looks like a prophet in a dirty grey jogging suit, big belly, big face, big head, big bald pate with long grey hair streaming down, a long grey beard. He garbles some words in an impressive booming voice, and a small slender woman in a sleeveless blouse stands up to block him from joining the group on the cement.
“You do not belong here,” she says. “Go. Away!”
He tries to circle around her but she steps to the side to keep her face in his. He stumbles away from the homeless circle, shaking his head, over to my table. He is wearing garden gloves, one of which he drops a foot in front of me, leans on the edge of my table and says, “Gagagaga…” which I interpret to mean he is only leaning there for a moment until he retrieves his glove.
I say, “That’s quite okay,” and he answers, “Très bon!”
Glove in hand, he peers into my face. “I gi’ them half an hour,” he says. “Then they’re blown away.”
I say, “Très bon.”
He says, “Magnifique!” with a satisfied grin and limps away, but glances back and adds, “You got the right to sit there and write if you want!”
I say, “Merci. Très bon. Magnifique!”
He looks happily at me and stumbles over to collapse on a bench, falling immediately asleep.
The thin woman with the dog, whose name I surmise is Mette, shouts out, “Is my dog dead?!”
A café customer at one of the tables yells, “Give it mouth to mouth!” and Mette yells back at him, “Ey, buster! Who called you on the phone?!” Her dog lifts its head where it lays in the sunlight to look at her, and she says, “King! Don’t scare me like that!”
In addition to taking notes, I am reading an article in the New Yorker about George Orwell, which asserts that Orwell could not really tolerate the thought of social mobility.
A woman with henna hair sitting amongst the homeless on the cement calls out in a foghorn voice: “Allo! May I speak?! Allo!”
The homeless people are breaking into factions that shout or call to each other from bench to pavement. One of the young men who called the henna-haired woman mother says something to which a skinny, scraggly-bearded man wearing a peaked cap says, “Pseudo necrophile!”
The henna-haired woman says, “Slow down there, buster! What’re you sayin’?! That means a person who fucks the dead! Look me in the eye and say that about my son!”
“I come from the provinces,” says the scraggly-bearded man. “I don’t look in people’s eyes. Anyway, I said pseudo-necrophile.”
“You do not call my son a necrophile!”
“I didn’t say that. It’s a joke. And he’s an adult. He should stand up for himself. A man doesn’t need his mother to do that.”
The tall young muscular Inuit looks at them and rolls his thick shoulders. He growls. Then he turns away but looks back again and roars and struts away, nodding with satisfaction.
It occurs to me that this being Easter Sunday, I really ought to work in a metaphor of resurrection and redemption, of sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind, about the spotless virgin mother of Jesus. But what I am actually thinking about is the incredible amount of energy that these people exhibit.
I ask myself how it can be in this enlightened social-democratic Christian kingdom that there can be so many of our fellow citizens who have no home to live in. How can it be that I sit here drinking seven-dollar pints of beer while they sit and fade away on the pavement? Though they look older, they are young most of them – not more than a couple over fifty, most of them under forty, forty-five tops. Apparently life expectancy among this segment of the population doesn’t extend much beyond that.
Then I remember a black-and-white poster I used to have hanging on the wall of my studio apartment on East Third Street in Manhattan, Alphabet City, back in 1966: the photograph showed a scraggly derelict staggering along the Bowery above the words: WE HAVE ALL COME FROM LOVERS.
All except Jesus, it occurs to me.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
mandag den 16. marts 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
UNCHANGE MY HEART
Aarhus, three train-hours northwest of Copenhagen, the Ides of March: Duties fulfilled at the WildWithWords Literary Festival, you wander the city, find yourself on Telephone Square where the Ha’penny Pub bartender sent you at closing time with the promise there would be a blues jam at the Antiquarian Bar. Staggering a few steps ahead of you on the walk along the Aarhus River is a tall man with a bushy black beard, carrying a baritone sax. He also has just left the Ha’penny where he had been blowing New Orleans jazz before asking the young raven-haired barmaid if he could have a Black Bush. She reached for the Irish whiskey but the sax-man said, “No I want a big black hairy bush. You got one?”
He reaches the Antiquarian before you, and to avoid guilt by association, you hang back, let him get well ahead. You puff a cigarillo outside the door, then step in. A quick look down the long bar and the cluster of tables convinces you that you have stepped into a 500-word story you once read by Richard Brautigan, entitled “The Old Bus,” in which the narrator climbs onto a city bus somewhere to discover that all the passengers are very old and very near extinction. From face to face, his eyes flicker but each new face is old and dazed and dusty, each and every one. Realizing that he has inadvertently climbed aboard the Old Bus, he jerks the stop signal and clambers off again, watches with relief as it pulls away toward its unknown destination.
However, the story you have just stepped into is “The Old Bar,” and the faces here blaze with life.
A short bulky man, long white hair dangling from beneath his grey cowboy hat, wearing a fringed, turquoise-studded buckskin jacket, holds a pint in each hand and shakes his hips to the music. Beside him, a tall bent dude in black leather, black cowboy hat cocked across his spotted bald pate, silver-steerhead string tie swinging, claps his hands, scrawny turkey neck bent forward, bopping, as he laughs with wide open mouth.
You order a pint of Royal Pilsner for a pittance and take a chair, spy a life-sized barrel of sealskin two chairs over and do a double take: a pair of ancient blue female eyes peers invitingly out of the sealskin barrel at you. The bushy-black-bearded baritone player is out on the floor now, doing the lindy hop with a lumpy old gal in a flowered dress, twirling her slowly with intoxicated gallantry. It occurs to you that he dies his beard.
On the stage the vocalist, sporting a shiny lilac-striped shirt and helmet of grey hair, is singing:
Lookin’ for some pussy on a Saturday night.
You know the kind a gal who really treats you right.
I got the hard-on blues…
People at adjacent tables – old men, old women – focus welcoming smiles upon you, raise their pints, call out, “Skaal, friend!”
The band starts a new number with a jivy, three-electric guitar opening, and the vocalist bursts out with, “Unchange my heart/Baby set me free…!”
You are about to correct him, shout, “No, no, it’s unchain my heart,” but suddenly you realize that his words are better. Your heart has been changed, and now you want it to be unchanged – unchanged back to whatever it was before.
An ancient duffer beside you goes into a wet, phlegmy coughing fit, just as you spot a babe with stringy long grey hair and no neck checking you out from the bar. A jowly face wearing your own beret is glaring at you from behind her – then you understand that is your own face in the back-bar mirror, and you down the rest of your pint and start backing toward the door. The old babe at the bar has turned full-face in your direction, doing a shimmy, smiling for you and you alone.
You salute her and clamber for the street, stepping smartly across Telephone Square in the direction of your CabInn budget hotel room. You do not look back. You know the destination.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
Aarhus, three train-hours northwest of Copenhagen, the Ides of March: Duties fulfilled at the WildWithWords Literary Festival, you wander the city, find yourself on Telephone Square where the Ha’penny Pub bartender sent you at closing time with the promise there would be a blues jam at the Antiquarian Bar. Staggering a few steps ahead of you on the walk along the Aarhus River is a tall man with a bushy black beard, carrying a baritone sax. He also has just left the Ha’penny where he had been blowing New Orleans jazz before asking the young raven-haired barmaid if he could have a Black Bush. She reached for the Irish whiskey but the sax-man said, “No I want a big black hairy bush. You got one?”
He reaches the Antiquarian before you, and to avoid guilt by association, you hang back, let him get well ahead. You puff a cigarillo outside the door, then step in. A quick look down the long bar and the cluster of tables convinces you that you have stepped into a 500-word story you once read by Richard Brautigan, entitled “The Old Bus,” in which the narrator climbs onto a city bus somewhere to discover that all the passengers are very old and very near extinction. From face to face, his eyes flicker but each new face is old and dazed and dusty, each and every one. Realizing that he has inadvertently climbed aboard the Old Bus, he jerks the stop signal and clambers off again, watches with relief as it pulls away toward its unknown destination.
However, the story you have just stepped into is “The Old Bar,” and the faces here blaze with life.
A short bulky man, long white hair dangling from beneath his grey cowboy hat, wearing a fringed, turquoise-studded buckskin jacket, holds a pint in each hand and shakes his hips to the music. Beside him, a tall bent dude in black leather, black cowboy hat cocked across his spotted bald pate, silver-steerhead string tie swinging, claps his hands, scrawny turkey neck bent forward, bopping, as he laughs with wide open mouth.
You order a pint of Royal Pilsner for a pittance and take a chair, spy a life-sized barrel of sealskin two chairs over and do a double take: a pair of ancient blue female eyes peers invitingly out of the sealskin barrel at you. The bushy-black-bearded baritone player is out on the floor now, doing the lindy hop with a lumpy old gal in a flowered dress, twirling her slowly with intoxicated gallantry. It occurs to you that he dies his beard.
On the stage the vocalist, sporting a shiny lilac-striped shirt and helmet of grey hair, is singing:
Lookin’ for some pussy on a Saturday night.
You know the kind a gal who really treats you right.
I got the hard-on blues…
People at adjacent tables – old men, old women – focus welcoming smiles upon you, raise their pints, call out, “Skaal, friend!”
The band starts a new number with a jivy, three-electric guitar opening, and the vocalist bursts out with, “Unchange my heart/Baby set me free…!”
You are about to correct him, shout, “No, no, it’s unchain my heart,” but suddenly you realize that his words are better. Your heart has been changed, and now you want it to be unchanged – unchanged back to whatever it was before.
An ancient duffer beside you goes into a wet, phlegmy coughing fit, just as you spot a babe with stringy long grey hair and no neck checking you out from the bar. A jowly face wearing your own beret is glaring at you from behind her – then you understand that is your own face in the back-bar mirror, and you down the rest of your pint and start backing toward the door. The old babe at the bar has turned full-face in your direction, doing a shimmy, smiling for you and you alone.
You salute her and clamber for the street, stepping smartly across Telephone Square in the direction of your CabInn budget hotel room. You do not look back. You know the destination.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
mandag den 2. marts 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
REAGAN AS RHINOCEROS
This shout from Copenhagen is one that has been lingering, unvoiced, in my throat since Ronald Reagan was laid to rest, accompanied by glowing newspaper reports of the accomplishments of his presidency. Baffled, I asked myself whether I had slept through the years of his administration. I hadn’t known that we loved the man and his scary astrology lady, hadn’t realized how great his accomplishments were. I still haven’t.
Anyone still baffled by the lavish newspaper accolades and ornate ceremony which accompanied that gaudy laying to rest of a B-actor turned American president might be relieved to know the case has been reopened by Michael Neff in his debut novel, Year of the Rhinoceros (Red Hen Press, 2009). Described as “a surrealist and tragicomic tale of courage, love, betrayal, and murder, based on a true story pieced together from (Capitol) Hill hearings, reports and interviews with OSC (Office of the Special Counsel) staff who remain anonymous,” the novel is about – in Neff’s own words – “The agency distorted by the Reagan White House into a force employed to discover and betray whistleblowers…” An agency which Neff notes “still operates today” (quotation from the mid-W years.)
In an interview (http://www.eclectice.org/v12n1/janus_neff.html) conducted by Cicily Janus at Eclectica, Neff says, “Like many in this country, I am tired of the purposeful revisionism on the part of some Republicans regarding the presidency of Ronald Reagan. They want to make him over into their version of Kennedy, mythologize him into something he wasn’t. Reagan’s regime was one of the most corrupt in American history, especially when one takes into account the number of public officials caught exercising their right to criminal behavior. The Nixon era was more publicized because of Watergate, but the Reagan era was a free-for-all of rampant fraud, waste, and abuse of power at all levels. Also, there is the ridiculous myth that Reagan was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is a little like giving Nixon credit for the first U.S. landing on the moon. Reagan just happened to be making rehearsed speeches at the time of the collapse.”
Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler says, “Year of the Rhinoceros is a compelling, utterly original novel that savagely and hilariously explores what went wrong in this country a couple of decades ago, and that keeps going wrong even now.”
Neff’s novel is about an idealistic Reagan supporter, taught from childhood to love “The Gipper,” who is employed by a small congressional agency to protect brave individuals who seek to blow the whistle on government corruption. Dominated by the White House, however, the agency lures and betrays potential enemies of the administration to clear the field for their corporate clients and protect them from public scrutiny. The year is 1984 – a year that evokes Orwellian terror in post World War II hearts.
Michael Neff himself worked in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s and ‘90s as a government staffer during the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton years.
So is the book fiction? “The setting is real,” says Neff. “The circumstances are real. The struggles of the whistle blowers are real and their prosecutors are real – just the names changed to protect the guilty. The plot is fictional but based on a true story… One particular way I incorporate facts into the story involves the pseudo-legalistic manner in which whistle blowers were forced by Reagan’s agency to run a gauntlet of tests to determine authenticity. Of course, no one ever made it through the tests… It was all a game, one designed to prevent Reagan and his corporate pals from suffering the loss of any important contracts.”
But does what happened under Reagan even begin to compare with the excesses of the Bush administration?
“I recently had a long talk with Tom Devine, director of the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., one of the top three watchdog organizations,” says Neff. “And he told me the Reagan group was more energetically evil than the Bushies – who are mostly morons and evaders. It was during the Reagan era that corporate America began taking over Washington.”
So let us think twice before we begin to shout out praises of famous dead men like Reagan – and maybe take a look first at The Year of the Rhinoceros, a tale of another kind of 1984, the real year.
P.S.: In 1994, Michael Neff created and began to direct WebDelSol.com, a popular internet publisher and community portal for scores of literary journals, independent presses, filmmakers, poets and writers, serving content to millions of readers worldwide and links from over 40,000 other websites. Readers are urged to visit www.WebDelSol.com – it’s a virtual literary mall.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
This shout from Copenhagen is one that has been lingering, unvoiced, in my throat since Ronald Reagan was laid to rest, accompanied by glowing newspaper reports of the accomplishments of his presidency. Baffled, I asked myself whether I had slept through the years of his administration. I hadn’t known that we loved the man and his scary astrology lady, hadn’t realized how great his accomplishments were. I still haven’t.
Anyone still baffled by the lavish newspaper accolades and ornate ceremony which accompanied that gaudy laying to rest of a B-actor turned American president might be relieved to know the case has been reopened by Michael Neff in his debut novel, Year of the Rhinoceros (Red Hen Press, 2009). Described as “a surrealist and tragicomic tale of courage, love, betrayal, and murder, based on a true story pieced together from (Capitol) Hill hearings, reports and interviews with OSC (Office of the Special Counsel) staff who remain anonymous,” the novel is about – in Neff’s own words – “The agency distorted by the Reagan White House into a force employed to discover and betray whistleblowers…” An agency which Neff notes “still operates today” (quotation from the mid-W years.)
In an interview (http://www.eclectice.org/v12n1/janus_neff.html) conducted by Cicily Janus at Eclectica, Neff says, “Like many in this country, I am tired of the purposeful revisionism on the part of some Republicans regarding the presidency of Ronald Reagan. They want to make him over into their version of Kennedy, mythologize him into something he wasn’t. Reagan’s regime was one of the most corrupt in American history, especially when one takes into account the number of public officials caught exercising their right to criminal behavior. The Nixon era was more publicized because of Watergate, but the Reagan era was a free-for-all of rampant fraud, waste, and abuse of power at all levels. Also, there is the ridiculous myth that Reagan was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is a little like giving Nixon credit for the first U.S. landing on the moon. Reagan just happened to be making rehearsed speeches at the time of the collapse.”
Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler says, “Year of the Rhinoceros is a compelling, utterly original novel that savagely and hilariously explores what went wrong in this country a couple of decades ago, and that keeps going wrong even now.”
Neff’s novel is about an idealistic Reagan supporter, taught from childhood to love “The Gipper,” who is employed by a small congressional agency to protect brave individuals who seek to blow the whistle on government corruption. Dominated by the White House, however, the agency lures and betrays potential enemies of the administration to clear the field for their corporate clients and protect them from public scrutiny. The year is 1984 – a year that evokes Orwellian terror in post World War II hearts.
Michael Neff himself worked in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s and ‘90s as a government staffer during the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton years.
So is the book fiction? “The setting is real,” says Neff. “The circumstances are real. The struggles of the whistle blowers are real and their prosecutors are real – just the names changed to protect the guilty. The plot is fictional but based on a true story… One particular way I incorporate facts into the story involves the pseudo-legalistic manner in which whistle blowers were forced by Reagan’s agency to run a gauntlet of tests to determine authenticity. Of course, no one ever made it through the tests… It was all a game, one designed to prevent Reagan and his corporate pals from suffering the loss of any important contracts.”
But does what happened under Reagan even begin to compare with the excesses of the Bush administration?
“I recently had a long talk with Tom Devine, director of the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., one of the top three watchdog organizations,” says Neff. “And he told me the Reagan group was more energetically evil than the Bushies – who are mostly morons and evaders. It was during the Reagan era that corporate America began taking over Washington.”
So let us think twice before we begin to shout out praises of famous dead men like Reagan – and maybe take a look first at The Year of the Rhinoceros, a tale of another kind of 1984, the real year.
P.S.: In 1994, Michael Neff created and began to direct WebDelSol.com, a popular internet publisher and community portal for scores of literary journals, independent presses, filmmakers, poets and writers, serving content to millions of readers worldwide and links from over 40,000 other websites. Readers are urged to visit www.WebDelSol.com – it’s a virtual literary mall.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
torsdag den 12. februar 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
A WALK ON THE WILD NORTH SIDE
Last night I took an icy February walk on Copenhagen’s wild north side, had a pint or three at the Blue Yard Drugstore on Blue Yard Square. Then I dined on lamb curry at Kate’s Joint on Blue Yard Street, amidst the primitive faces of the paintings, where the waitress – a striking young woman with skin the color of pale chocolate – did wonders for my self-esteem by saying she had enjoyed hearing me read my Dan Turèll translations at the Poetic Bureau the week before.That went straight to the refurbishment of my feel-good shield which protected me in the freezing dark night as my Giglio leather running shoes led me through dark side streets. Wandering boys in hooded jackets chucked empty bottles like hand grenades which exploded against brick walls in a rain of glass. Past Eve and Adam’s by a commodious vicus of recirculation etc., I entered through the banged-up face of a serving house whose name I did not note on a street whose name I do not recall.
Here I could smoke my little cigars and enjoy bottled beer at a modest tariff – straight from the bottle since the glass provided was not something I would want near my lips.
From my table against the wall, I could see around the elbow of the bar a slender woman in a blue beret, eyes closed beatifically above her smiling mouth, dancing ethereally with her hands and arms to Eva Cassidy’s “Autumn Leaves” which seeped moodily from the juke box. Normally, I would attack a student sentence that included as many adverbs as that, but must admit at times, after all, that adverbs do assist the lonely hunter of the heart in its quest.
The juke box was just beside me, and the dancing woman in the blue beret drifted across the floor to select more tunes, speaking softly to the machine in Norwegian-accented Danish: “I am old,” she told the juke. “I must find old music.”
“You’re by no means old!” I said. And she was not.
She beamed at me. “Is my music okay?”“
Your music is perfect.”Which earned my hand a warm clasp from hers.
“I am Norwegian,” she said.
“I thought you might be.”
“You thought I might be,” she repeated, eyes sparkling, as though I had said something truly witty.
She selected Santana and Leonard Cohen and stood a little away from my table, dancing in a trance-like state which did not preclude sly glances toward where I sat, presumably (I fancied) to see if I was watching. How could I not?
“Do you mind that I dance here all alone?” she asked.
“You are a pleasure to watch.” Which she was. She had a kind of scarf wrapped alluringly about her hips, tied at the waist to fall away at the front, and she moved with grace, turning to allow me (I fancied) a view from all alluring angles, throwing in the occasional discreet bump or grind, and my mind, in analytical mode, produced the thought, She is really quite pickled.
Whereupon a tall, broad-shouldered man with large hands and a young face approached my table and plopped down in an empty chair, saying, "Mind if I..?" Tattoos showed on every exposed area of his skin. On the fingers of either hand were tattooed letters spelling out, on the right, R O C K, and on the left, R O L L. Elaborate tattoos crawled out of his shirt collar to wrap about his neck, and from the thin skin of his inner wrist smiled the cocked lip of Elvis Presley.
He lit a nonfiltered Cecil and said to me, “I'm a young rock and roller, and you're an old rock and roller.” Enough of a speech to display a hefty slur. “I got these words tattooed on my fingers when my father died. I was fifteen. He was an old rock and roller, too. So I'm second generation. I'm 25 now."
Moved, I thought to share with him one of my most cherished stories about the day in 1959 when I was taking the GG subway home to Queens from my high school in Brooklyn, and the door between the subway cars slid open; in stepped a tall black man of perhaps forty years. His white shirt was unbuttoned, shirt tails untucked, revealing the black skin of his chest, and he was carrying a white handkerchief, flapped out and dangling from one hand.
In a melodious growl, he announced to the subway car - which was full of boys and girls on their way home from two adjacent Catholic high schools, one for each sex -- "Ever' body on this train: Do rock an' roll!"
And he began to dance along the aisle to the rhythm of the train’s shuttling, screeching wheels against the tracks, the rhythms of the cars racketing against one another, dancing to the music his body made from all those sounds, and pointing to each boy or girl as he passed, directing, "You there, boy: Do rock an' roll! And you there, girl: Do rock and roll!"
Dancing, twisting, hopping, landing lightly on the toes of his black leather wingtips until he had traversed the length of the car and disappeared out the door at the far end, leaving all of us Catholic boys and girls smiling at one another and wishing, just wishing, we could rock and roll like that man, just one little piece of his infectious, hypnotic set of moves.
One of the most beautiful, unexpected interludes of my life, a gift from a stranger, a glimpse of wild beauty.
That was in 1959 -- 50 years ago. And I thought to impart this tale to this young Danish rock and roller in this wild north side Copenhagen bar where the barmaid looked like she might have done some time in the ring and the lovely pickled Norwegian woman swayed ethereally to Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," treating me to shy, sly glances from her shining eyes, and the drunken young Danish rock and roller’s response to my story was, "How long you been living in Denmark? You got a fucking terrible accent! How come you won't learn to speak Danish right?!"
I shrugged, smiled, folded shut the petals of my story and shoved it deep back into my pocket, feeling sad for this young fatherless guy.
While telling my story, I was vaguely aware of last call being called, of the Norwegian woman leaning close beside me to murmur at my ear, “Last call, last music, last dance,” of people filing out, her blue beret disappearing with one last glance back through the door.
Young man, take a look at your life. You’re a lot like I was.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy http://www.thomasekennedy.com/)
Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
Last night I took an icy February walk on Copenhagen’s wild north side, had a pint or three at the Blue Yard Drugstore on Blue Yard Square. Then I dined on lamb curry at Kate’s Joint on Blue Yard Street, amidst the primitive faces of the paintings, where the waitress – a striking young woman with skin the color of pale chocolate – did wonders for my self-esteem by saying she had enjoyed hearing me read my Dan Turèll translations at the Poetic Bureau the week before.That went straight to the refurbishment of my feel-good shield which protected me in the freezing dark night as my Giglio leather running shoes led me through dark side streets. Wandering boys in hooded jackets chucked empty bottles like hand grenades which exploded against brick walls in a rain of glass. Past Eve and Adam’s by a commodious vicus of recirculation etc., I entered through the banged-up face of a serving house whose name I did not note on a street whose name I do not recall.
Here I could smoke my little cigars and enjoy bottled beer at a modest tariff – straight from the bottle since the glass provided was not something I would want near my lips.
From my table against the wall, I could see around the elbow of the bar a slender woman in a blue beret, eyes closed beatifically above her smiling mouth, dancing ethereally with her hands and arms to Eva Cassidy’s “Autumn Leaves” which seeped moodily from the juke box. Normally, I would attack a student sentence that included as many adverbs as that, but must admit at times, after all, that adverbs do assist the lonely hunter of the heart in its quest.
The juke box was just beside me, and the dancing woman in the blue beret drifted across the floor to select more tunes, speaking softly to the machine in Norwegian-accented Danish: “I am old,” she told the juke. “I must find old music.”
“You’re by no means old!” I said. And she was not.
She beamed at me. “Is my music okay?”“
Your music is perfect.”Which earned my hand a warm clasp from hers.
“I am Norwegian,” she said.
“I thought you might be.”
“You thought I might be,” she repeated, eyes sparkling, as though I had said something truly witty.
She selected Santana and Leonard Cohen and stood a little away from my table, dancing in a trance-like state which did not preclude sly glances toward where I sat, presumably (I fancied) to see if I was watching. How could I not?
“Do you mind that I dance here all alone?” she asked.
“You are a pleasure to watch.” Which she was. She had a kind of scarf wrapped alluringly about her hips, tied at the waist to fall away at the front, and she moved with grace, turning to allow me (I fancied) a view from all alluring angles, throwing in the occasional discreet bump or grind, and my mind, in analytical mode, produced the thought, She is really quite pickled.
Whereupon a tall, broad-shouldered man with large hands and a young face approached my table and plopped down in an empty chair, saying, "Mind if I..?" Tattoos showed on every exposed area of his skin. On the fingers of either hand were tattooed letters spelling out, on the right, R O C K, and on the left, R O L L. Elaborate tattoos crawled out of his shirt collar to wrap about his neck, and from the thin skin of his inner wrist smiled the cocked lip of Elvis Presley.
He lit a nonfiltered Cecil and said to me, “I'm a young rock and roller, and you're an old rock and roller.” Enough of a speech to display a hefty slur. “I got these words tattooed on my fingers when my father died. I was fifteen. He was an old rock and roller, too. So I'm second generation. I'm 25 now."
Moved, I thought to share with him one of my most cherished stories about the day in 1959 when I was taking the GG subway home to Queens from my high school in Brooklyn, and the door between the subway cars slid open; in stepped a tall black man of perhaps forty years. His white shirt was unbuttoned, shirt tails untucked, revealing the black skin of his chest, and he was carrying a white handkerchief, flapped out and dangling from one hand.
In a melodious growl, he announced to the subway car - which was full of boys and girls on their way home from two adjacent Catholic high schools, one for each sex -- "Ever' body on this train: Do rock an' roll!"
And he began to dance along the aisle to the rhythm of the train’s shuttling, screeching wheels against the tracks, the rhythms of the cars racketing against one another, dancing to the music his body made from all those sounds, and pointing to each boy or girl as he passed, directing, "You there, boy: Do rock an' roll! And you there, girl: Do rock and roll!"
Dancing, twisting, hopping, landing lightly on the toes of his black leather wingtips until he had traversed the length of the car and disappeared out the door at the far end, leaving all of us Catholic boys and girls smiling at one another and wishing, just wishing, we could rock and roll like that man, just one little piece of his infectious, hypnotic set of moves.
One of the most beautiful, unexpected interludes of my life, a gift from a stranger, a glimpse of wild beauty.
That was in 1959 -- 50 years ago. And I thought to impart this tale to this young Danish rock and roller in this wild north side Copenhagen bar where the barmaid looked like she might have done some time in the ring and the lovely pickled Norwegian woman swayed ethereally to Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," treating me to shy, sly glances from her shining eyes, and the drunken young Danish rock and roller’s response to my story was, "How long you been living in Denmark? You got a fucking terrible accent! How come you won't learn to speak Danish right?!"
I shrugged, smiled, folded shut the petals of my story and shoved it deep back into my pocket, feeling sad for this young fatherless guy.
While telling my story, I was vaguely aware of last call being called, of the Norwegian woman leaning close beside me to murmur at my ear, “Last call, last music, last dance,” of people filing out, her blue beret disappearing with one last glance back through the door.
Young man, take a look at your life. You’re a lot like I was.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy http://www.thomasekennedy.com/)
Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
lørdag den 7. februar 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
Although the MySpace profile shows me as 100 years old, I am only 64. Only! In 1961, when I was 17 and learned that Ernest Hemingway had killed himself, I remember thinking, Well, he was 61; he lived a good, long life. 61 is not a good, long life. And 64 is what I would call the start of advanced late youth. Of course, we’re all going to die, but I say later, much later – in fact, as the old saying goes, never.
Trying to keep myself fit to fiddle, most mornings I rise at six and drag my butt over to the local fitness center to swim a kilometer. When I say “most mornings,” that is hyperbole. Let’s say two to four times a week. This week I only managed to crawl out of the sack twice – on Monday and on Friday, leaving three days in between where, due to a surfeit of social events which included a good deal of food and drink, emphasis on the latter, I slept in. When, in disgust, I finally threw off the covers and limped out to brew coffee, I felt every single year carrying me toward mortality, and later started to seem not so very much later after all.
So today, Friday, with some sense of urgency – the eternal footman’s chill breath down my neck – I sprang out of bed and hoofed it over to the pool by quarter to eight. I was the only swimmer there. I love it when I am the only swimmer. I get the lane I like, far side of the pool by the high windows and can let my mind roam free without the intrusion of splashers or erratic lane shifters or heedless back strokers who whack you on the snout, can sense the Danish winter gloam opening slowly to light the morning toward spring.
Stretch and scoop water, stretch and scoop and paddle the legs with my self-styled slow-motion crawl, I did my 50 lengths in as many minutes, then breached out of the pool, did some stretching on the wet tiles to keep my leg muscles and back from cramping and, feeling virtuous and good, jogged down the stairs to the men’s locker where I stripped for the shower.
In the shower room were two naked men with whom I have a nodding acquaintance. They were not swimmers – they used the gym, treadmill, stationery cycles, weights, machines, stuff I can’t use because it gets to my back. As I attempted to allocate the customary nod and mumbled greeting, I noticed that both of them were looking strangely at me, eyes large, mouths open, as though they might be seeing a ghost. Odd, to stand there, naked, being stared at by two naked men as though your face was hanging out.
Finally, the younger of the two said, “Good thing it wasn’t you who drowned.”
I asked, “Did someone drown?” flashing weirdly on the fact that the book I am reading at the moment is titled Drown by Junot Diàz.
“Sank like a stone,” the man said. “Bottom of the pool. There was another man swimming with him and he yelled and waved through the windows. Two other men came running from the gym, and one of them – an Egyptian guy, a writer, strong swimmer – dove right in and got him up out of the water. He was dead.”
“He was dead?”
“Yeah,” said the other guy. “But the other man from the gym knew first aid and resuscitated him. Weird. To be dead. And then alive again. We didn’t know who it was, didn’t see him. They carried him out on a stretcher. We figured it must have been you. You usually swim at that time. Good thing he wasn’t alone in the pool. He’d really be dead.”
The other man said, “Figure he must have had a stroke or something when he was swimming. He was an old guy. Seventy.”
“I’m 64,” I said.
“Still. Thought it was you. Good thing it wasn’t.”
I swallowed. I looked from the one naked man to the other, and my voice was hushed as I murmured, “Thanks.” Then I went in to shower, feeling an odd mixture of fear and elation.
Ten minutes later, dressed, headed for the door, I nodded more elaborately than usual to my two locker mates, said, “Have a good weekend.”
“Good weekend,” the one said, knotting his tie. And the other, buckling his belt, echoed, “Good weekend.”
Outside on the street I stopped to gaze in at the big pool, its surface still and glassy, no one in the water. Behind the tall broad window, beneath the high spotlight-speckled ceiling, the tiled floor empty under the dim light, water reflecting the color of the aquamarine pool bottom, the big empty space looked like something from a David Lynch film – menacing in its stillness, lifeless matter that somehow might have absorbed and smothered whatever vitality had been in its proximity, ready to absorb more – like if you looked too long, it might suck you in.
The day was cold and clear. I flung my long grey-striped woolen scarf over my shoulder and strolled off briskly, legs easy, stomach tight, still alive, wondering how I would use the day.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
Although the MySpace profile shows me as 100 years old, I am only 64. Only! In 1961, when I was 17 and learned that Ernest Hemingway had killed himself, I remember thinking, Well, he was 61; he lived a good, long life. 61 is not a good, long life. And 64 is what I would call the start of advanced late youth. Of course, we’re all going to die, but I say later, much later – in fact, as the old saying goes, never.
Trying to keep myself fit to fiddle, most mornings I rise at six and drag my butt over to the local fitness center to swim a kilometer. When I say “most mornings,” that is hyperbole. Let’s say two to four times a week. This week I only managed to crawl out of the sack twice – on Monday and on Friday, leaving three days in between where, due to a surfeit of social events which included a good deal of food and drink, emphasis on the latter, I slept in. When, in disgust, I finally threw off the covers and limped out to brew coffee, I felt every single year carrying me toward mortality, and later started to seem not so very much later after all.
So today, Friday, with some sense of urgency – the eternal footman’s chill breath down my neck – I sprang out of bed and hoofed it over to the pool by quarter to eight. I was the only swimmer there. I love it when I am the only swimmer. I get the lane I like, far side of the pool by the high windows and can let my mind roam free without the intrusion of splashers or erratic lane shifters or heedless back strokers who whack you on the snout, can sense the Danish winter gloam opening slowly to light the morning toward spring.
Stretch and scoop water, stretch and scoop and paddle the legs with my self-styled slow-motion crawl, I did my 50 lengths in as many minutes, then breached out of the pool, did some stretching on the wet tiles to keep my leg muscles and back from cramping and, feeling virtuous and good, jogged down the stairs to the men’s locker where I stripped for the shower.
In the shower room were two naked men with whom I have a nodding acquaintance. They were not swimmers – they used the gym, treadmill, stationery cycles, weights, machines, stuff I can’t use because it gets to my back. As I attempted to allocate the customary nod and mumbled greeting, I noticed that both of them were looking strangely at me, eyes large, mouths open, as though they might be seeing a ghost. Odd, to stand there, naked, being stared at by two naked men as though your face was hanging out.
Finally, the younger of the two said, “Good thing it wasn’t you who drowned.”
I asked, “Did someone drown?” flashing weirdly on the fact that the book I am reading at the moment is titled Drown by Junot Diàz.
“Sank like a stone,” the man said. “Bottom of the pool. There was another man swimming with him and he yelled and waved through the windows. Two other men came running from the gym, and one of them – an Egyptian guy, a writer, strong swimmer – dove right in and got him up out of the water. He was dead.”
“He was dead?”
“Yeah,” said the other guy. “But the other man from the gym knew first aid and resuscitated him. Weird. To be dead. And then alive again. We didn’t know who it was, didn’t see him. They carried him out on a stretcher. We figured it must have been you. You usually swim at that time. Good thing he wasn’t alone in the pool. He’d really be dead.”
The other man said, “Figure he must have had a stroke or something when he was swimming. He was an old guy. Seventy.”
“I’m 64,” I said.
“Still. Thought it was you. Good thing it wasn’t.”
I swallowed. I looked from the one naked man to the other, and my voice was hushed as I murmured, “Thanks.” Then I went in to shower, feeling an odd mixture of fear and elation.
Ten minutes later, dressed, headed for the door, I nodded more elaborately than usual to my two locker mates, said, “Have a good weekend.”
“Good weekend,” the one said, knotting his tie. And the other, buckling his belt, echoed, “Good weekend.”
Outside on the street I stopped to gaze in at the big pool, its surface still and glassy, no one in the water. Behind the tall broad window, beneath the high spotlight-speckled ceiling, the tiled floor empty under the dim light, water reflecting the color of the aquamarine pool bottom, the big empty space looked like something from a David Lynch film – menacing in its stillness, lifeless matter that somehow might have absorbed and smothered whatever vitality had been in its proximity, ready to absorb more – like if you looked too long, it might suck you in.
The day was cold and clear. I flung my long grey-striped woolen scarf over my shoulder and strolled off briskly, legs easy, stomach tight, still alive, wondering how I would use the day.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Copyright Thomas E. Kennedy
onsdag den 28. januar 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
UPDIKE & ME
Last night I learned that John Updike had died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-six – too soon to lose such a fine writer. It occurred to me that this most likely explained why I had never received a response to the last note I had sent him a few months ago. We had exchanged occasional notes over the past decade and met a couple of times, though we had never progressed beyond the Mr. Updike/Mr. Kennedy phase.
Teaching at a writers conference in New Jersey in 2000, I was delighted to learn that John Updike was the headliner. Not only that, but the organizer promised to invite me home for drinks and cigars along with Updike after the reading that evening. I had a mission; I was in the process of completing preparations for an anthology issue of The Literary Review entitled “Poems & Sources” for which I had selected a couple of dozen poems and invited the poets to provide an essay on how that poem had come to be written. I had some outstanding poets, including two or three Pulitzer Prize winners, but to include something from Updike would be a coup. I also had the miserable job of telling him that I had no budget to offer anything but copies in payment. Previously I had used a long excerpt from a review he had published in a book I wrote about Andre Dubus and got a bill from his agency which equaled about eighty percent of my advance on the whole book; I appealed to Mr. Updike and was granted permission for a double sawbuck. Now I would have to ask to use something for free and considered digging into
my own pocket.
Prior to Updike’s reading at the New Jersey conference, there was a reception in his honor at the home of the president of the host college. When I arrived the guest of honor was understandably already surrounded by a double ring of academic admirers. I had met him once before, at a conference in the Netherlands, but doubted that he would remember me. I sidled up, cradling my glass of red wine close to my chest to avoid mishaps, in the hope of getting close enough to make my face visible to this great writer whose work had been a model of style for me since I was a teenager. As I penetrated the second tier of the ring of people around him, I became dazzled by the man’s aura – his stature, his bearing, his powerful smile, his great mane of silver hair.
I heard him say, in response to some comment, with a nonchalance that belied the profundity of his words, “Of course the easiest thing in the world is not to read a book.”
Instantly I recognized the truth of the statement; further I recognized that I knew this to be true but would not have had the awareness to have known that I knew it without Updike’s having said it. In the grip of this complex of truth and submerged awareness and his dazzling aura, the hand that clutched my glass of red wine spasmed, and I jostled the wine all over my tie and jacket lapels.
Clearly, the college president had hired only the most alert and alacritous servers for I was instantly taken by the elbow and spirited toward the kitchen by a woman who performed magic with a dishcloth and club soda, eradicating all trace of red wine from my best silk tie and pale grey jacket. When she was done, she gazed kindly into my horror-frozen face and asked, “Would you like another glass of wine? You’re welcome to drink it with me here in the kitchen. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?”
An hour later, Updike was on a stage reading to a theater full of some 500 persons. He read a story titled “The After Life” which I had read on the plane from Copenhagen to Newark, and its beautiful language combined with the mix of clarity and subtly and frank and honest revelation which characterizes the best of Updike fiction took my breath away.
The apres-reading autograph line wound up and down the aisles of the theater, at least 200 people, each holding several books. I waited in back with the organizers, Jean and Bob Hollander, who had recently published the first volume of their new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (a segment of which was to be included in my sources anthology), to drive back to the Hollanders’ for a nightcap and conversation and cigars. This would be my big chance. By the time he had signed the last of the books, however, Mr. Updike was understandably tired and asked to be driven back to his motel, where I watched him disappear inside.
The spirit had gone out of the party, and although Jean and Bob invited me back anyway, I thought it would be an imposition and begged off. From his breast pocket Bob produced a Cohiba Robusto. “Well here’s your cigar anyway,” he said. And I stood in the motel parking lot, smoking my Cohiba beneath the moon, feeling like Ferlinghetti seeing the moment of his greatness flicker while hearing the eternal footman snicker.
In the morning I entered the motel dining room for early breakfast and was startled to see Updike eating breakfast all by himself, reading a newspaper. I considered asking if I might join him, but decided to sin boldly: I swept across the room and plopped into the vacant chair opposite him, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Updike, wonderful reading last night, how did you sleep,” preparing to work into my anthology request.
He looked up from his paper and said, “Oh, you’re the guy who lives in Denmark. Why in the world would you want to live there? What’s it like?” and proceeded to ask me a hundred questions about Denmark before he took his leave without my having got my anthology request in edgewise.
His questions were not idle. I learned later that he was working on his novel about Gertrude and Claudius at the time. In fact, when I got back to Copenhagen there was a note from him, asking what sort of birds one might encounter in the Danish countryside in autumn. Which finally gave me an opportunity to request a poem for my anthology and a short essay about how it had been written, and regretting that I could only pay in copies.
He replied graciously with an original handwritten sonnet he had jotted down on an airplane, along with several further hand-corrected drafts as well as the letter from Alice Quinn commenting on it as she accepted it for The New Yorker and finally a cut-out of the poem as it had appeared in that magazine. There was no comment about the lack of fee. Incredibly, he had sent me the original hand-written copy of the sonnet! At the end of the week I spent trying to decide what type of wood to frame it in, I received another note from him, mentioning that when I was done with the handwritten copy, he would appreciate having it back.
My last letter to him was only a few months ago. I had got it into my head how wonderful it would be if Mr. Updike would read one of my books – specifically the book that I thought was the best of the twenty-five I’ve done. I had nothing specific in mind. I would not presume to request a blurb. I just thought that it would be wonderful if what I considered my best work would occupy the thoughts of John Updike for at least as long as it took him to read it. I recall years before talking to Diane Benedict about the fact that Updike, who was guest-editing Best American Short Stories that year, had selected one of her stories for the volume. I congratulated her, and she said, “What excites me most about it is that my words occupied his mind while he was reading it and that he was not displeased.” That was what I hoped for, too – to have one of our greatest living writers read something of mine before, well before it was too
late.
I argued with myself whether or not it would be outrageous to do so, but finally sent him a note requesting permission to send him the book, recalling that I had once heard him say the easiest thing in the world was not to read a book, but nonetheless enquiring whether he would consider reading one of mine. He had always responded to my notes within a couple of weeks so when two or three months had passed without a reply, I cursed myself for having asked, began to feel as though I had violated the discreet perimeters of our peripheral association.
Then last night I learned that he had died, and abruptly it was clear to me how irrelevant it was whether or not John Updike had ever read anything of mine. What was relevant was that I had been privileged to read the breathtaking prose of John Updike, that I had been privy to the originality and often startling honesty and insights of his fiction, that I have been privy to sentences and stories that have taken residence in my sensibility, touchstones that remind me what fine writing can be. After all, reading an author’s book is the closest one can ever come to that human being.
Not infrequently I find myself quoting Updike, referring to specific works, stories like “Guilt Gems” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” and “Your Lover Just Called” and “Pigeon Feathers” and Rabbit, Run and Couples and so many others. The story about the couple who are divorcing and have to tell each of their children, and finally the husband gets to the oldest son who incredulously demands, “Why?!” And the father cannot remember why. Or the story about the man in New York City who has to urinate and cannot find a men’s room, the description of the radiant urinal when, in agony, he finally finds one, more beautiful than even Marcel Duchamp could ever have presented it.
And I remember that cocktail reception – one of my own cherished guilt gems – and hearing him say, “The easiest thing in the world is not to read a book,” as I spilt red wine down my tie.
Perhaps that is the easiest thing in the world. And how grateful I am that I bothered to read so many of his!
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
Last night I learned that John Updike had died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-six – too soon to lose such a fine writer. It occurred to me that this most likely explained why I had never received a response to the last note I had sent him a few months ago. We had exchanged occasional notes over the past decade and met a couple of times, though we had never progressed beyond the Mr. Updike/Mr. Kennedy phase.
Teaching at a writers conference in New Jersey in 2000, I was delighted to learn that John Updike was the headliner. Not only that, but the organizer promised to invite me home for drinks and cigars along with Updike after the reading that evening. I had a mission; I was in the process of completing preparations for an anthology issue of The Literary Review entitled “Poems & Sources” for which I had selected a couple of dozen poems and invited the poets to provide an essay on how that poem had come to be written. I had some outstanding poets, including two or three Pulitzer Prize winners, but to include something from Updike would be a coup. I also had the miserable job of telling him that I had no budget to offer anything but copies in payment. Previously I had used a long excerpt from a review he had published in a book I wrote about Andre Dubus and got a bill from his agency which equaled about eighty percent of my advance on the whole book; I appealed to Mr. Updike and was granted permission for a double sawbuck. Now I would have to ask to use something for free and considered digging into
my own pocket.
Prior to Updike’s reading at the New Jersey conference, there was a reception in his honor at the home of the president of the host college. When I arrived the guest of honor was understandably already surrounded by a double ring of academic admirers. I had met him once before, at a conference in the Netherlands, but doubted that he would remember me. I sidled up, cradling my glass of red wine close to my chest to avoid mishaps, in the hope of getting close enough to make my face visible to this great writer whose work had been a model of style for me since I was a teenager. As I penetrated the second tier of the ring of people around him, I became dazzled by the man’s aura – his stature, his bearing, his powerful smile, his great mane of silver hair.
I heard him say, in response to some comment, with a nonchalance that belied the profundity of his words, “Of course the easiest thing in the world is not to read a book.”
Instantly I recognized the truth of the statement; further I recognized that I knew this to be true but would not have had the awareness to have known that I knew it without Updike’s having said it. In the grip of this complex of truth and submerged awareness and his dazzling aura, the hand that clutched my glass of red wine spasmed, and I jostled the wine all over my tie and jacket lapels.
Clearly, the college president had hired only the most alert and alacritous servers for I was instantly taken by the elbow and spirited toward the kitchen by a woman who performed magic with a dishcloth and club soda, eradicating all trace of red wine from my best silk tie and pale grey jacket. When she was done, she gazed kindly into my horror-frozen face and asked, “Would you like another glass of wine? You’re welcome to drink it with me here in the kitchen. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?”
An hour later, Updike was on a stage reading to a theater full of some 500 persons. He read a story titled “The After Life” which I had read on the plane from Copenhagen to Newark, and its beautiful language combined with the mix of clarity and subtly and frank and honest revelation which characterizes the best of Updike fiction took my breath away.
The apres-reading autograph line wound up and down the aisles of the theater, at least 200 people, each holding several books. I waited in back with the organizers, Jean and Bob Hollander, who had recently published the first volume of their new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (a segment of which was to be included in my sources anthology), to drive back to the Hollanders’ for a nightcap and conversation and cigars. This would be my big chance. By the time he had signed the last of the books, however, Mr. Updike was understandably tired and asked to be driven back to his motel, where I watched him disappear inside.
The spirit had gone out of the party, and although Jean and Bob invited me back anyway, I thought it would be an imposition and begged off. From his breast pocket Bob produced a Cohiba Robusto. “Well here’s your cigar anyway,” he said. And I stood in the motel parking lot, smoking my Cohiba beneath the moon, feeling like Ferlinghetti seeing the moment of his greatness flicker while hearing the eternal footman snicker.
In the morning I entered the motel dining room for early breakfast and was startled to see Updike eating breakfast all by himself, reading a newspaper. I considered asking if I might join him, but decided to sin boldly: I swept across the room and plopped into the vacant chair opposite him, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Updike, wonderful reading last night, how did you sleep,” preparing to work into my anthology request.
He looked up from his paper and said, “Oh, you’re the guy who lives in Denmark. Why in the world would you want to live there? What’s it like?” and proceeded to ask me a hundred questions about Denmark before he took his leave without my having got my anthology request in edgewise.
His questions were not idle. I learned later that he was working on his novel about Gertrude and Claudius at the time. In fact, when I got back to Copenhagen there was a note from him, asking what sort of birds one might encounter in the Danish countryside in autumn. Which finally gave me an opportunity to request a poem for my anthology and a short essay about how it had been written, and regretting that I could only pay in copies.
He replied graciously with an original handwritten sonnet he had jotted down on an airplane, along with several further hand-corrected drafts as well as the letter from Alice Quinn commenting on it as she accepted it for The New Yorker and finally a cut-out of the poem as it had appeared in that magazine. There was no comment about the lack of fee. Incredibly, he had sent me the original hand-written copy of the sonnet! At the end of the week I spent trying to decide what type of wood to frame it in, I received another note from him, mentioning that when I was done with the handwritten copy, he would appreciate having it back.
My last letter to him was only a few months ago. I had got it into my head how wonderful it would be if Mr. Updike would read one of my books – specifically the book that I thought was the best of the twenty-five I’ve done. I had nothing specific in mind. I would not presume to request a blurb. I just thought that it would be wonderful if what I considered my best work would occupy the thoughts of John Updike for at least as long as it took him to read it. I recall years before talking to Diane Benedict about the fact that Updike, who was guest-editing Best American Short Stories that year, had selected one of her stories for the volume. I congratulated her, and she said, “What excites me most about it is that my words occupied his mind while he was reading it and that he was not displeased.” That was what I hoped for, too – to have one of our greatest living writers read something of mine before, well before it was too
late.
I argued with myself whether or not it would be outrageous to do so, but finally sent him a note requesting permission to send him the book, recalling that I had once heard him say the easiest thing in the world was not to read a book, but nonetheless enquiring whether he would consider reading one of mine. He had always responded to my notes within a couple of weeks so when two or three months had passed without a reply, I cursed myself for having asked, began to feel as though I had violated the discreet perimeters of our peripheral association.
Then last night I learned that he had died, and abruptly it was clear to me how irrelevant it was whether or not John Updike had ever read anything of mine. What was relevant was that I had been privileged to read the breathtaking prose of John Updike, that I had been privy to the originality and often startling honesty and insights of his fiction, that I have been privy to sentences and stories that have taken residence in my sensibility, touchstones that remind me what fine writing can be. After all, reading an author’s book is the closest one can ever come to that human being.
Not infrequently I find myself quoting Updike, referring to specific works, stories like “Guilt Gems” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” and “Your Lover Just Called” and “Pigeon Feathers” and Rabbit, Run and Couples and so many others. The story about the couple who are divorcing and have to tell each of their children, and finally the husband gets to the oldest son who incredulously demands, “Why?!” And the father cannot remember why. Or the story about the man in New York City who has to urinate and cannot find a men’s room, the description of the radiant urinal when, in agony, he finally finds one, more beautiful than even Marcel Duchamp could ever have presented it.
And I remember that cocktail reception – one of my own cherished guilt gems – and hearing him say, “The easiest thing in the world is not to read a book,” as I spilt red wine down my tie.
Perhaps that is the easiest thing in the world. And how grateful I am that I bothered to read so many of his!
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
søndag den 18. januar 2009
A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY
BLUNTLY IN WROXTON
The first couple of weeks of 2009 I had the good fortune to spend with 30 or 40 other writers in an ancient English abbey in a tiny village called Wroxton. The abbey was once owned by Lord North, who was prime minister under King George III at the time of the American Revolutionary War. Lord North’s abbey is now owned by the American university Fairleigh Dickinson, a development Lord North could scarcely have anticipated, although it is long since he has been in any condition to anticipate anything at all.
Wroxton is a two-pub village, three if you count the bar and restaurant at the local hotel – which I definitely do. Closest to the abbey is the North Arms, small and cozy with a fireplace and a great fat cat, run by a congenial young couple. Up the hill past the duck pond is the White Horse, under new management once a year or two, a bit larger than the North Arms with facilities for darts, billiards and good company.
Needless to say, 30 or 40 writers holed up in an abbey for creative reasons would make good use of such establishments. We were also fed at the abbey, though institutional food tends to grow predictable. Thus, before too very many days had passed, five of us jumped the abbey wall in gloam of midday to mount the hill and cross the winding road to the Wroxton Hotel inn – a warm and welcoming place in freezing January whose lobby bar is furnished with cozily battered overstuffed armchairs and sofas and a crackling fire.
No doubt resembling a group of chilled and disheveled escaped monks, with one monkess, our gang of five – two Davids, one Andrew, a Sheridan, and myself – were received by a young waiter who looked a bit like David Hemmings in Blow Up, though composed of that perfect balance of dignity and deference at which the very best of British servers so excel. His name, I was informed by a button on his black vest, was Tom.
“Tom,” I said, my great coat smoking in the welcome heat of the room, “My name is Tom as well.”
“Excellent, sir,” Tom replied. “An excellent choice of name.”
“Tom, we are seeking meat and drink. Have you a table for five?”
“Certainly, sir. Wonderful.”
Soon seated at an excellent table, we began to order and be served – a three-course lunch preceded by aperitifs of various liquid measure, accompanied by various-colored wines, followed by ruby port with the fru-it and a cognac digestif with espresso. The food and drink soon warmed and relaxed us, indeed induced in the entire company an excellent humor, and I realized that as much as the food, which was very good, our humor was being discreetly created for us by Tom the waiter – not more, I’d guess, than two and twenty years but a man with a gift for instilling a sense of security and good cheer, and the way he did that was ingeniously minimalistic.
As he took our orders, he made each of us feel, with an encouraging word, that the choice we had made – be it drink, appetizer, main course, cheese, desert, wine, liqueur – was, as he put it, simply “Excellent, sir.” Or, “Marvelous, madam.” Or even, “Wonderful.” He managed to do this without being in the least intrusive, but neither was he self-abnegating. His was a presence that almost imperceptibly affirmed good spirit. And he seemed to have a perfect sense of when he might be needed, and when not.
Soon our spirits were so nourished by the sustenance of food and drink and comfort that we five broke out into an impromptu chorus of Händel’s Messiah:
Wonderful, Counselor! The mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace!
In this warmth and well-being, our conversation grew animated. We began to discuss various matters with passionate feeling, including – though I don’t know how – at one point the lyrics of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy. In a paroxysm of opinion, I pronounced loudly, “Those lyrics suck!” Whereupon my four table companions fell still. They were all looking over my shoulder. I turned in my chair to see Tom standing behind me, waiting patiently to take our orders for coffee and liqueur. I looked into his eyes, and he said quietly, devoid of any judgment, “Very blunt, sir.”
And at that moment, I understood what I needed to shore up my sense of self and well-being for this new year that was facing me, my sixty-fifth, 2009. I needed a few days, perhaps a week, a fortnight of being shadowed by Tom. Of his observing and pronouncing upon my every act, choice and decision:
“Excellent, sir.”
“Marvelous choice.”
“Very well done, sir.”
“Wonderful decision.”
“Now that statement, sir, was a bit blunt. Did you wish to reconsider it?”
Ah, Tom: I hope that Wroxton knows how blessed it is by your presence. I hope you know how great your value is: Wonderful, counselor! Excellent, Tom. Marvelous.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
The first couple of weeks of 2009 I had the good fortune to spend with 30 or 40 other writers in an ancient English abbey in a tiny village called Wroxton. The abbey was once owned by Lord North, who was prime minister under King George III at the time of the American Revolutionary War. Lord North’s abbey is now owned by the American university Fairleigh Dickinson, a development Lord North could scarcely have anticipated, although it is long since he has been in any condition to anticipate anything at all.
Wroxton is a two-pub village, three if you count the bar and restaurant at the local hotel – which I definitely do. Closest to the abbey is the North Arms, small and cozy with a fireplace and a great fat cat, run by a congenial young couple. Up the hill past the duck pond is the White Horse, under new management once a year or two, a bit larger than the North Arms with facilities for darts, billiards and good company.
Needless to say, 30 or 40 writers holed up in an abbey for creative reasons would make good use of such establishments. We were also fed at the abbey, though institutional food tends to grow predictable. Thus, before too very many days had passed, five of us jumped the abbey wall in gloam of midday to mount the hill and cross the winding road to the Wroxton Hotel inn – a warm and welcoming place in freezing January whose lobby bar is furnished with cozily battered overstuffed armchairs and sofas and a crackling fire.
No doubt resembling a group of chilled and disheveled escaped monks, with one monkess, our gang of five – two Davids, one Andrew, a Sheridan, and myself – were received by a young waiter who looked a bit like David Hemmings in Blow Up, though composed of that perfect balance of dignity and deference at which the very best of British servers so excel. His name, I was informed by a button on his black vest, was Tom.
“Tom,” I said, my great coat smoking in the welcome heat of the room, “My name is Tom as well.”
“Excellent, sir,” Tom replied. “An excellent choice of name.”
“Tom, we are seeking meat and drink. Have you a table for five?”
“Certainly, sir. Wonderful.”
Soon seated at an excellent table, we began to order and be served – a three-course lunch preceded by aperitifs of various liquid measure, accompanied by various-colored wines, followed by ruby port with the fru-it and a cognac digestif with espresso. The food and drink soon warmed and relaxed us, indeed induced in the entire company an excellent humor, and I realized that as much as the food, which was very good, our humor was being discreetly created for us by Tom the waiter – not more, I’d guess, than two and twenty years but a man with a gift for instilling a sense of security and good cheer, and the way he did that was ingeniously minimalistic.
As he took our orders, he made each of us feel, with an encouraging word, that the choice we had made – be it drink, appetizer, main course, cheese, desert, wine, liqueur – was, as he put it, simply “Excellent, sir.” Or, “Marvelous, madam.” Or even, “Wonderful.” He managed to do this without being in the least intrusive, but neither was he self-abnegating. His was a presence that almost imperceptibly affirmed good spirit. And he seemed to have a perfect sense of when he might be needed, and when not.
Soon our spirits were so nourished by the sustenance of food and drink and comfort that we five broke out into an impromptu chorus of Händel’s Messiah:
Wonderful, Counselor! The mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace!
In this warmth and well-being, our conversation grew animated. We began to discuss various matters with passionate feeling, including – though I don’t know how – at one point the lyrics of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy. In a paroxysm of opinion, I pronounced loudly, “Those lyrics suck!” Whereupon my four table companions fell still. They were all looking over my shoulder. I turned in my chair to see Tom standing behind me, waiting patiently to take our orders for coffee and liqueur. I looked into his eyes, and he said quietly, devoid of any judgment, “Very blunt, sir.”
And at that moment, I understood what I needed to shore up my sense of self and well-being for this new year that was facing me, my sixty-fifth, 2009. I needed a few days, perhaps a week, a fortnight of being shadowed by Tom. Of his observing and pronouncing upon my every act, choice and decision:
“Excellent, sir.”
“Marvelous choice.”
“Very well done, sir.”
“Wonderful decision.”
“Now that statement, sir, was a bit blunt. Did you wish to reconsider it?”
Ah, Tom: I hope that Wroxton knows how blessed it is by your presence. I hope you know how great your value is: Wonderful, counselor! Excellent, Tom. Marvelous.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
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