"... in a room decorated with porcelain elephant statues and photographs of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. John McCain, and listen to a well-built man with a five o’clock shadow and an Australian accent tell them that '"nasty women" are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!' In some ways, Adams’s shtick is conventionally conservative: He’s Christian, he’s very concerned about there being only two genders, he rails against 'woke.' In other ways, his version of MAGA manhood is so over-the-top, so uncanny that it almost seems like performance art.... He writes about how if your wife is 'high-maintenance' then you’re a 'loser' no matter how hot she is. And about his love of steak. 'Alpha males don’t care about time changes, we wake up at 4AM every single morning regardless of the circumstances,' he wrote on X last month, a few days after the clocks sprang forward for daylight saving time. '64oz tomahawk ribeyes aren’t going to eat themselves!' Is Nick Adams serious?... 'You remember Andy Kaufman?; Adams’s hired security guard told me, referring to the late comedian who was famous for never breaking character.... 'This is not a character,' Adams told me. 'This is not a bit. It’s not trolling. Anyone who thinks this is not me, that I don’t eat steak, that I don’t drink ice-cold domestics, that I don’t repel woke beer, they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong.”
I hadn't heard of Nick Adams until this article. The issue of when a comedian is "serious" is kind of intriguing. I don't think the point of reference should be Andy Kaufman. It should be Andrew Dice Clay. I already lived through that. Another thing I lived through was the TV show "The Rebel." Don't reuse a name that already means something to some people who still roam through the west.
ADDED: As pointed out by William in the comments, there's also Nick Adams, the Hemingway fictional character. I don't have a problem with this new Nick Adams adopting the name in a reference to those stories from a century ago, just as I'd accept a comedian who called himself Hamlet or Captain Ahab. "Nick Adams" was taken as a showbiz name back in the 1950s, and I don't like seeing it reused.
"Even though I lived in one of Georgia's best places (Athens, I was in the geology faculty at UGA), I never found any redeeming qualities in the Southeast. And I tried, oh I tried. I found the climate and the vegetation oppressive, the landscape depressing, and the culture alien. I finally found two good things about Georgia: Atlanta's airport (the departure lounge only, never liked baggage claim) and Delta. I retired on January 1 of this year and moved to Santa Fe three days later. This place is, for me, as close to perfect as possible (at least among places that I can afford). Everything that I hated about Georgia I love about New Mexico. Yet according to this article New Mexico ranks near the bottom in terms of quality of living."
The study in question ranked Georgia first for "living." Factors that counted: The size of houses and housing lots and the presence of swimming pools!
Another comment: "I have lived in several states, and visited virtually all of them. Ranking 'living environment' in New Hampshire as only the 44th best, and Colorado's as 47th, is something of a joke, although I suppose if the most important attribute that the pollster can think of is a private swimming pool, as opposed to, say, a wondrous outdoor environment, that might account for this bizarre finding."
It's a good idea for an article, as many people these days are in a position to relocate and work remotely, but the specific advice is ludicrous. Even if your favorite thing is having a swimming pool taking up your backyard, it doesn't matter who else in the same state has a swimming pool, only that it's warm enough to justify having a swimming pool. You can install a swimming pool! And why would a young person — working remotely — want the largest house and yard? How about a well-designed, easy-to-maintain smaller house?
FROM THE EMAIL: Georgia has its proponents. Joseph says:
1. Actual sunrise time was 7:10, which did not look that different. It was another one of those days when nature seemed to present me with the "subtle nuance" challenge.
2. The light of the state capitol dome predominated, and I thought about the balance between the government and nature — order and chaos. But which one is order and which one is chaos? You could take either side of that debate.
3. In the comments to yesterday's dawn-run post, Susan in Seattle said: "I visit here every day but am mostly under the radar ('lurking' sounds a little creepy). This post in particular, I really enjoyed; it's been rolling around in my head since I read it in the early morning hours today." I said: "Thanks, Susan in Seattle. It’s my favorite kind of post to write." So I'm doing it again.
4. I love repetition. The run to see the sunrise is a daily repetition, and the 9-point (will it be 9?) list could be a repetition as well. But this is only day 2 of that repetition, and 2 times is no kind of pattern. Got to have at least 3.
5. In yesterday's comment thread, Mr. Forward said: "I was training for the Birkenbeiner and I had a playlist where 'Cannonball' by the Breeders would kick in at the top of the hill and with the right snow would synchronize with the topography of the downhill plunge. Transcendent or close enough." Today, I asked Siri to play a running playlist that I've used a lot over the past 3 months and — just by chance — I got hit with "Cannonball."
6. I had my AirPods in so I thought Meade was howling because he heard a coyote. I ask him now, and it turns out he wasn't howling, he was hooting. He heard an owl.
7. Was he trying to convey the message to me that the sounds of nature are superior to the podded-in music? I ask him, and he says, "No, no, it's not all about you. Get over yourself." You have to imagine the tone, which is humorous and a denial of what would be ever so slightly oppressive: hooting as a way to disparage listening to music.
9. Why write lists that go to 9? William said yesterday, "A list that stops at nine leaves a vague sense of not being quite complete." I said, "I stopped at 9 because I was writing within John Lennon’s universe." Point #4 had something to do with the song "Across the Universe," and "Revolution Number 9" is another John Lennon song: "Revolution 9 was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. One thing was an engineer's testing voice saying, 'This is EMI test series number nine.' I just cut up whatever he said and I'd number nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn't realise it: it was just so funny the voice saying, 'number nine'; it was like a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time, that's all it was." Order and chaos! Owls and coyotes!
It's in his self-interest at this point though, isn't it? And he's not committing suicide or — say — resigning from a Senate seat like Al Franken. He has the power to come back when it suits his interests. This is his best hope to get people to buy his book, better at this point than going around telling people buy my book (with some whining about how he's apologized). It's better for him to lie low. Yes, there's something horribly beta about it. Moby is mopey. But I'm guessing that fits his overall self-presentation, so it just might work.
The book is called "Then It Fell Apart." It's all so poetic.
IN THE COMMENTS: William said:
I myself am a beta male, and I'd just like to express my thanks to Moby for showing the way. Truly inspiring leadership. He didn't back down. He backed out...... It's not often a guy who looks like Moby ends up on a bed with a girl who looks like Portman. When such things happen, it's important for all of us to know that such a rare and welcome event has come to pass. Now, you Gods, stand up for betas.....I think Moby could put even a little more spin on the passive aggressive fists of fury by explicitly denying that he and Natalie ever had any kind of physical relationship.
I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.
ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").
Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.
This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....
This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works....
IN THE COMMENTS: William said:
I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....
That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.
"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."
Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.
The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:
The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.
"President Trump makes the job of a feminist security analyst almost too easy. No subtle teasing out of subtexts required with this guy."
Writes Carol Cohn, the director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in an op-ed in the NYT.
Too easy? If this were a movie, and someone was making it "too easy," you'd know that something really complicated was going on. I'm thinking of the meme (satirized in "Airplane") "It's quiet... too quiet."
Cohn is looking at a Trump tweet that looks too simple — it seems to shout its own Freudian/feminist analysis: "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
He's conflating nuclear bombs and male sexual ego right there in the open, so if you tell him he's doing what he's clearly doing, you're just repeating what he said. His statement and the critique of the statement are both already out there, in as few words as possible. What's left to say? There's nothing for you to feast upon. It's all pre-digested by Trump. Disarming!
He made it too easy. What can you do? Un-pre-digest it?
Citing her work "among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists and arms controllers," Cohn says:
Overt impugning of masculinity is still only the most surface level at which ideas about gender play out in strategic thinking. They work in deeper, more subtle ways too. The culturally pervasive associations of masculinity with dispassion, distance, abstraction, toughness and risk-taking, and of femininity with emotion, empathy, bodily vulnerability, fear and caution, are embedded within the professional discourse.
And there they function to make some kinds of ideas seem self-evidently “realist,” hard-nosed and rational, and others patently inadmissible, self-evidently inappropriate. (One white male physicist told me that he and colleagues were once modeling a limited nuclear attack when he suddenly voiced dismay that they were talking so casually about “only 30 million” immediate deaths. “It was awful — I felt like a woman,” he said.)
(Why are we told he was white? He didn't say "It was awful — I felt like a black person.")
Mainstream national security analysts have been reluctant to think seriously — or at all — about the ways that ideas about gender shape national security. So if Mr. Trump’s disparagement of Mr. Kim’s manhood somehow does not wind up bringing us yet closer to war with North Korea, then perhaps he has in one sense done us a favor. He has made it glaringly evident that while the literal button or penis size of Mr. Trump or Mr. Kim matters not at all, their need for the world to believe that they are manly men does.
I would not exclude the possibility that Trump has much more dispassion, distance, abstraction, and toughness than Cohn acknowledges. I think he's trying to have an effect on Kim's mind and thinks Kim is vulnerable to this kind of belittling. It's also quite possible that both men know it's a game played for the horror and delight of the general public. These are showmen. They know that we need to see a really big penis show.
And I have one more point I want to make. Hang on. I've got to do a Google search. Oh!
Ha ha. Ridiculous. I guess no one has made that point, because I did not make it in that post, which is from last September, before the "button" tweet. It's a good post, about the "Rocket Man" nickname and phallic symbols. But I don't use the word "button" — it's in the sidebar, referring to PayPal contributions — or "clitoris" — that word is in a comment ("The clitoris simply doesn't have the clear, simple lines of a penis, and who even knows what g-spot looks like...").
Quite a few people are asking this question, e.g., Vox:
Swift does have grounds to appear on the cover: She was at the center of a sexual assault trial this summer that in retrospect seems like a precursor to our current post-Weinstein moment.... In 2013, Taylor Swift was groped by radio DJ David Mueller, who grabbed her butt during a meet-and-greet photo session. Swift told Mueller’s boss, who fired him following an investigation. Mueller then filed a defamation suit against Swift, saying that he never touched her and that she ruined his reputation and cost him his job. So Swift filed a countersuit, claiming assault. She sought — and won — an award of just $1, saying through her lawyer that she wanted to “serve as an example to other women who may resist publicly reliving similar outrageous and humiliating acts."...
Swift’s appearance also raises the specter of those not included on the Time cover who were arguably more central to the #MeToo moment. Rose McGowan, who led the charge against Harvey Weinstein and his associates, is relegated to the interior....
It might have something to do with who was willing to sit for the portrait Time wanted for the cover. Maybe McGowan didn't want to be in that group or didn't like the words Time wanted to use or the strange aesthetics of the cover — with the women all draped in black and looking grim.
Notice that the names of the women do not appear on the cover, and I'm sure that caused many people (including me) to say I know that one's Taylor Swift but who are these other women?
I can see why Time was eager to include the very famous Taylor Swift on the cover. Swift was in the running for Person of the Year in her own right as an individual, and she did very well on Time's poll to find out who readers wanted to see.
I can think of all kinds of things that may have caused McGowan to decline to participate. Maybe she's just angry that the silence-breaking has taken so long. Why didn't Time Magazine apply its journalistic resources to breaking the silence itself long ago? Now that others have done the work, Time wants to reap rewards from doing its traditional end-of-the-year cover. I can see resisting that.
But let's see what Rose McGowan herself may be saying. Ah!
Ronan Farrow. Investigator of the Year. Writer of the Year. #MyTime
"If, on the other hand, more than one hundred people feel impelled to comment on Lena's unworthiness as a human being, then another season of Girls is in the bag."
Only 32. (But that's more than 25.) And that's with an excellent short short story by Laslo Spatula, in the persona of The Girl at Starbucks That Hates You. I'll put it here so you won't have to click back:
This had a multiplier effect. Debbie was sucked into the vacuum. I liked them both, and I'm genuinely sorrowful to hear of their deaths. Carrie was very open about her family life and her relations with her mother.. If HBO brings back Wishful Drinking, take a look. It's a performance piece, but you really get the sense that you know them in a way you don't with other celebrities. The piece supposed to be a comedy about life in Hollywood, but I bet it would play like Sophocles upon re-viewing.......Well, they were both performers and I can't imagine a more dramatic exit.
We were watching "Wishful Drinking" last night when I got a text from my son Chris: "debbie reynolds died!"
There's a new HBO documentary, made to air in 2017, with Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Here's a little clip, showing that the 2 women lived in houses next door to each other:
Says William, in the comments in the previous post, apparently forgetting that whole notion of leading from behind.
The underlying issues are clear as a bell. By kicking the case back to the lower court for another look, the court simply deferred its ultimate responsibility.
But affirmative action is all in the timing. The Court manufactured delay the first time the issue came around. Then it did Bakke, giving schools a clue on how to move forward. (Say "diversity," and be like Harvard.) Then it let things ferment for 25 years, at which point, it said:
It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased... We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
Even if 25 years had already passed — it's only been 10 — the argument would be for an extension.
Like a schoolmarm, William insists "The underlying issues are clear as a bell."
That paper was due 40 years ago.
I'd say the answer is crushingly clear: We need more time.
Said William, in the comments to my post about closing the White House to tourists.
My response: "Yes, but sometimes it happens that you decide to do something for the wrong reason and it happens to be a good decision for other reasons."
Can you think of some good examples?
I was going to say that my observation is related to but different from the idea of unintended consequences. But it seems to be the first of the 3 types of unintended consequences:
A positive, unexpected benefit (usually referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
A negative, unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse)
"... and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality," says William (the commenter), tapping his own memory as "I'm an old man and a living link with the past."
Keep oiling and loading that pisstool, big boy. We know what you're really doing....
Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia? They don't want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.
Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain."...
The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades....
The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” in the song is the United States....
“In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S.,” says Yang Jingduan, a Chinese psychiatrist now living in Philadelphia who had in China been a doctor in the Chinese military. “It’s like insulting you in your face and you don’t know it, it’s humiliating...
[One] Chinese commenting on a forum responded to the Lang Lang performance by writing, “Defeat America, defeat Obama” (writing Obama’s name with the wrong first character, one meaning “sunken” or “dented.”)
IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says:
The media in general will make less of this than they did of Michaele and Tareq Salahi.
This is "fuck you, ignorant barbarians" crashing.
William says:
Didn't the Red Chinese lose tens of thousands of men in the Korean War in order to insure the prolonged rule of one of the most fucked up regimes in that region's long history of fucked up regimes? I would think that playing that tune is more likely to remind the world of the stupidity of Communist rulers than humiliate the United States. I think Obama should get Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen to write a commemorative song about Carter's failed rescue mission to Iran. He should play that song at all state functions. Same deal as this.
I can sympathize with Edwards. My wife is lying in a coma, and the doctors do not expect a full recovery. The whole experience has been very traumatic, but I have learned a valuable lesson. When I get my license back there will be no more DWI on my part. And that's a promise.... But that's not the immediate problem. My wife has all sorts of hot friends visiting her, and you should see the nurse on the night shift. My problem is how do I approach the touchy question of post mortem dating with these attractive women. I don't want to appear insensitive, but life is for the living... I would welcome the advice of any Edwards' voters on this difficult subject.
"... to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world."
Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it:
["Angel at the Fence"] was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him....
Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show....
Here's the New Republic article by Gabriel Sherman that exposed the hoax:
"It's a lie. It's one big lie," says Henry Golde, 79, who was liberated with Herman from Theresienstadt, in 1945. Rosenblat "was normal," Golde adds. "I don't know what happened. Something went haywire, to tell a lie like that on national TV. It's terrible." Golde, a former New York City cab driver who now lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, says he was angry when he first read about Herman's story in the 1990s. "What the hell? I said. What the hell is he writing about?" Golde remembers....
"A love story set in a concentration camp as a way of teaching about the Holocaust actually inverts the reality of the Holocaust, denies it in its own way," [Michigan State University professor Kenneth] Waltzer wrote me in an e-mail. "The reality of being in a concentration camp was that ... [n]ormal impulses like those of young lovers were disrupted, collapsed. The idea that two people in the circumstances described--a prisoner in a camp, in a group of brothers, the primary source of loyalty, and a girl in hiding under false identity with a family group, her primary source of loyalty--would put all up for grabs by meeting daily in the open at a guarded electrified fence means that the writer didn't really understand, and the publishers and moviemaker didn't really understand either. And this is why all this is so important. There is denial of the Holocaust, this isn't that, but there is also denial of the substance or reality of the Holocaust--and this is definitely that."
IN THE COMMENTS: A little pity, from Bissage:
Mr. Rosenblat is a world-class bullshit artist?
Gee . . . I don’t know . . . that sounds kind of harsh. Anyway, he’s certainly not the only guilty party in this false-memoir scheme.
Go to the link and look at the cover of the bound proof. Was the fence really a single strand of barbed wire? Is a white dove the same thing as an angel? Was there ever a white dove at all? Is that an illustration of an apple tree that actually existed near Buchenwald?
These are stupid questions, of course.
But so too is it stupid to ask whether Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and has a reindeer with a red nose that lights his way. Stupid for anyone except children, that is.
There are those who make it their purpose in life to jealously guard the memory of the Holocaust and that’s a good thing, for the most part.
Still, a little poetic license can be a good thing too.
Does it really change the horribleness of the Holocaust to say a little girl tossed an apple over a fence?
In early drafts of "Angel at the Fence" the little girl tossed over a hot pastrami on rye and an egg cream.
The editors thought that was going too far and they were right!
And William:
Let us come together in the sunlit, upland pastures and gather cow patties. Let us pile these patties one upon another and build such a towering edifice that God in his heaven looks down upon us and says "What a pile of bullshit"...The idea that the Holocaust is the one atrocity of the past century that should be immune from evasions and myths and denial is itself a cow patty that can be used as the keystone for the arch of a lofty cathedral of bullshit.....Some addled old man packed his wounds with a poultice of bullshit. I can relate to that. We all try to invent a usable past. He tried and failed, but the attempt was not evil.
HEH: “Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it.” She’s a sucker for a good life story, true or not.
The Obama angle. You know, Oprah's gullibility is no joke. She's hugely influential. Skeptoid put her first on his list of "Ten Most Wanted: Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience."
To her estimated total audience of 100 million, many of whom uncritically accept every word the world's wealthiest woman says, she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life. Although much of what she promotes is not directly harmful, she offers no distinction between the two, leaving the gullible public increasingly and incrementally injured with virtually every episode.
When you have a giant audience, you have a giant responsibility. Maybe you don't want such a responsibility, in which case, fine, keep your mouth shut; or limit your performance to jokes or acting or whatever it is you do.
The suddenly warm temperature on top of deep snow raised a lush fog. Last night, driving on a narrow road next to the lake, I said, "This is what death looks like in the movies. Driving into nothing." All the familiar landmarks had become invisible, and I felt lost even when I knew exactly where I was.
The fog remained, but it was easier to see things in the morning. I remembered the photographs I'd taken in the graveyards last December -- here and here -- so I went back to that place to see what the fog was doing to it this year -- and to do some things to it myself with the fisheye lens.
As I drove into the cemetery, just by chance, on the radio's "Sinatra" channel, Van Morrison was singing "That's Life." I can't find the Van Morrison version, but here's Frank Sinatra. Lyrics (by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon):
I said that's life, and as funny as it may seem Some people get their kicks, Stompin' on a dream But I don't let it, let it get me down, 'Cause this fine ol' world it keeps spinning around...
That's life and I can't deny it Many times I thought of cutting out But my heart won't buy it But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die
What a crazy song! It's all life affirming and then, impetuously, suicidal.
I like the Jewish custom of leaving a pebble by the tombstone -- a pittance of memory by the eternity of death. Even if you could find them, a few bright flowers on a day like today would be overwhelmed by the bleakness of nature. Sad that the Irish custom of taking a whizz on the most elaborate tombstone has fallen into disuse. A few yellow streaks against the mausoleum of some forgotten notable reminds us of the transience of life and the abiding value of malice and envy in human affairs.
Sir Archy -- our favorite ghost! -- says:
I know, Madam, that Entertainments of the Nature of a Turn through a Graveyard, such as you have taken, are apt to raise dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations; but, for my own Part, because of my Sanguine Nature, I do not know what 'tis to be Melancholy; and can, therefore, take a View of Nature in her deep and solemn Scenes, with the same Pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones, especially when contemplating such Pictures as you have made upon this Occasion.
Dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations... I have these sometimes. But I must say that this morning, I wasn't the slightest bit spooked by the thought of all the dead bodies as I stalked about looking for the oldest headstones and the most gnarled trees. The winter cemetery is more evocative of death than the green one, which I have alsophotographed, but in winter, I work more efficiently. I'm not here for meditation. I'm here for art. I concentrate on that and on not stepping in snowbanks higher than my boots.
George says:
You can get van morrison's version at amazon as an mp3 or on the album 'The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3', on rhapsody, and on itunes...
Ah, yes. Good point. Done, with iTunes. Now, I'm listening to it on infinite repeat as I write this.
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