Bathtub Families

Last night I met--live and in person--an imaginary friend, ReadersGuide, who was in town to visit the local college with her younger daughter. And aside from the initial nervousness about meeting someone I knew only virtually (all of our kids said "mom, you're not supposed to meet people you know from the internet!"), it was delightful. Because we did already know each other. And unlike real-life friends, where there's usually some element of catching up, we could take the conversation up where we'd left off, only in a little more depth and with me racing around saying "see? here's this thing I talk about, right here!"

Meeting someone I knew previously only through the written word made me think of this poem by Billy Collins:

Bathtub Families

is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.

No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.

I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

Now I can add a mental image of ReadersGuide when I think about her, but meeting her didn't change my picture of her otherwise. Especially for those of us who love language, it can be "better than reality" because you don't have to bother with airline tickets and driving down deer-strewn highways on windy nights and children who get sick when someone is visiting (as Walker did last night). Eating pizza and drinking wine with someone in real life beats the heck out of doing it virtually. But I enjoy all of you imaginary readers who float in the air around my head and into the comments here!

No Nest for the Wicket

A friend loaned me Donna Andrews' mystery novel No Nest for the Wicket because she knows I like playing croquet. I like backyard croquet best, preferably with partners so we can play off each others' balls and go for the final post together, rather than suffer the inevitable ignominious defeat when one person hits the post and goes out, leaving his partner at the mercy of all the other players on the field. I have played competition croquet, with the billiard-smooth lawns and tall, narrow wickets. But I have never played X-treme croquet as it is described in this mystery...nor am I ever likely to, because the rules are not explained in enough detail to recreate the game. It would have to be created from hints like that cow legs can serve as wickets and radios can be used to inform far-flung players when it's their turn.

I did enjoy one character's explanation of why croquet was banned in Boston in the 1890s:
"Several prominent clergymen denounced it for encouraging drinking, gambling, and philandering. Men and women playing on the same field. The occasional bare ankle explosed to the leering eyes of the spectators. Young couples disappearing into the shrubbery in search of lost balls."
Come to think of it, my version of extreme croquet should probably include some drinking; makes the game more challenging!

And I very much enjoyed the culminating decision on house rules for the game being played during a murder investigation: "Spectators are fair game, but if you try to murder one of the other players, your team's out."
Croquet, of course, is infamous for having wildly varying house rules. Personally, I don't much care for playing with people whose major fascination with the game is rocqueting balls into the next county and chortling that there's no out of bounds.

The mystery itself, in this novel, was uninteresting. Possibly this is because the croquet one is the seventh in a series (my friend did tell me this), and it's more interesting if you know some background on the characters and their unfriendly dog. I spent three hundred pages with these characters and never got to like them, so I'm not feeling inclined to start at the beginning of the series to see if we could get off on the right foot.

I have started some mystery series novels with one of the middle ones and been interested enough to read backwards after the first one, and then forwards. I did that with Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael tales, and Dorothy Gilman's series about Mrs. Pollifax. Have you ever tried dipping into a mystery series in the middle?

Marriage

We had a whirlwind weekend at Non-Necromancy headquarters. There were houseguests I would have liked to have seen more of. There were parties I didn't have the energy to attend. Walker and I spent all day Saturday and then all day Sunday at his end-of-the-season soccer tournament an hour and fifteen minutes away. Today we're exhausted and all the fun is over, the houseguests already gone, nothing left but candy wrappers and dirty dishes.

I've been planning tomorrow's classes and not feeling inspired to my usual level of hilarity for talking about Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer. So I decided we'd talk about courtship rituals and I'd read Gregory Corso's poem on the subject, Marriage, out loud. (If I ever decide to vlog, reading you a poem like this will be the reason):

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap-
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son-
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food-
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on-
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd almost be inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce-

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust-

Yes if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup-
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
Not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking-
No! I should not get married! I should never get married!
But-imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream-

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes-
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and-
But there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible-
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait-bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

I do a very good performance of this poem, if I do say so myself, with the climactic line "I deny honeymoon!" delivered at the top of my very considerable voice. And I love the poem, love the idea of all these different possible lives, even though I got married relatively young and never worried too much about courtship roles or possible young married scenarios. Still, having visited Niagara Falls, I can imagine being a young person going into one of those hotel rooms and feeling the way the speaker does, here. And for years I have not felt my shopping lists to be complete if someone hasn't written in "penguin dust."

The House With a Clock in its Walls

This is my Halloween book review, The House With a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs. I don't read many books I think might be scary because they usually give me nightmares. This one is a children's book, so I thought I could handle it. And although I did dream about it, the dream was interestingly woven around this bit of description:
"And now Uncle Jonathan's back yard came to life. It was full of strange sights and sounds. The grass glowed a phosphorescent green, and red worms wriggled through the tall blades with a hushing sound. Strange insects dropped down out of the overhanging boughs of the willow tree and started to dance on the picnic table. They waltzed and wiggled in a shaking blue light...."

I read it because Nymeth's review mentioned that it features illustrations by Edward Gorey and that reading it reminded her a bit of reading Roald Dahl. And I read it because Amanda's review listed five thing she learned from it, and one of them is that necromancy never pays.

There are two people who live in the house with a clock in its walls, and they are ten-year-old Lewis, whose parents died in a car crash, and his Uncle Jonathan, who turns out to be one of those lovable and slightly ineffectual good wizards. The clock in the walls is eventually revealed to be a doomsday device left there by the former owner of the house, a bad wizard. When Lewis starts looking through magic books in the house for a spell to impress a friend with, he finds one on necromancy and all it takes is to read the book, memorize "some of the charms," and then he "copied one of the pentagrams and the spell that went with it onto a piece of notepaper and put it in his pocket" so he can raise the dead, specifically the dead wife of the house's former owner, who almost immediately begins scheming to activate the doomsday device in the house where Lewis and his uncle are living. There's a visit from Lewis' dead aunt, but I was mildly surprised that his parents don't make an appearance. That would be a far scarier and more adult story.

Lewis makes up for his act of thoughtless necromancy by coming up with a spell that he, his uncle, and their neighbor (a good witch) hope will counteract the effects of the dead woman's schemes. His uncle asks him to think up a silly spell, and it turns out to be a magical version of something like calvinball. First they put lighted candles in all the windows. Then they set the player piano to play chopsticks. Then they play a game of poker until the "Ace of Nitwits" comes up, at which point Lewis directs his uncle to "wear it stuck to your forehead with a piece of bubble gum" and they get Lewis' magic 8 ball, which tells them where the clock is. At a crucial moment, Lewis remembers what he's read in the magic books and is able to destroy the person he brought back from the dead, along with her doomsday device.

My favorites of the Gorey illustrations are the ones featuring the dead woman; mostly what you see of her is the reflection off of her spectacles, floating at adult height above the 10-year-old protagonist.

If you like interesting and mildly scary stories, this is a good one with a happy ending. And I like a happy ending. It helps me sleep at night.

Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris

My friends' cat died of old age yesterday, and it happened so fast that attending a 2-hour symphony rehearsal Monday night and teaching class from 8:50 am to 12:50 pm on Tuesday made me unavailable to talk to them every time they called.

The leaves from my neighbor's enormous tree that overhangs my driveway and yard have all fallen on the ground and turned from gold to brown. I have a sick parakeet and am keeping the house very warm. The garbage disposal is broken, and it's been a week since I paid for a new one, but since it hasn't come in yet we can't schedule the installation. We're expecting houseguests this weekend.

My youngest child, who is getting almost too old to go out trick-or-treating (at 13) decided what he wanted to "be" for Halloween, and then found out that some adult scheduled the second game of his soccer tournament for the evening of Halloween night.

Up and down all the streets of my small town are campaign signs for a man running for the school board with the express purpose of reinstating the former middle school teacher who burned crosses on his students' arms and taught them young earth creationism as science.

I was initially irritated by the snobbish attitude of this poem--Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris--up until the part where she spends three hours getting her own hair cut and then admits that she adores time travel movies with action heroes in them:

For an hour on the train from Beauvais to Paris
Nord I'm entertained by the conversation of three
American girls about their appointment the next
day with a hairdresser and if there is a subtext
to this talk, I'm missing it, though little else. Will bangs
make them look too dykey? And layers, sometimes they hang
like the fur of a shaggy dog. Streaks, what about blonde
streaks? "Whore," they scream, laughing like a coven of wild
monkeys, and after they have exhausted the present
tense, they go on to the remembrance of hairdos past--
high school proms, botched perms, late-night drunken cuts, the Loch Ness
Monster would be lost in their brains as in a vast, starless
sea, but they're happy, will marry, overpopulate
the Earth, which you can't say about many poets,
I think a few weeks later taking the eighty-four
bus to the hairdresser, where I'll spend three long hours
and leave with one of the best cuts of my life from Guy,
who has a scar on his right cheek and is Israeli,
but before that I pass a hotel with a plaque--
Attila Jozsef, great Hungarian poet, black
moods and penniless, lived there ten years before he threw
himself under a train in Budapest. If we knew
what the years held, would we alter our choices, take the train
at three-twenty instead of noon, walk in the rain
instead of taking the metro? The time travel films
I adore speak to this very question: overwhelmed
by disease and war, the future sends Bruce Willis back
to stop a madman. I could be waiting by the track
as Jozsef arrives in Paris, not with love but money,
which seemed to be the missing ingredient, the honey
he needed to sweeten his tea. Most days I take the B
line of the RER, and one of the stops is Drancy,
the way station for Jews rounded up by the Nazis
before being sent in trains to the camps, but we can't see
those black-and-white figures in the Technicolor
present like ghosts reminding us with their pallor
how dearly our circus of reds and golds has been purchased
and how in an instant all those colors could be erased.

I like the train metaphor going on here, the idea that sometimes it's enough just to stay on track and keep going. And, of course, I like the sense of adventure that the memory of navigating through train stations in and around Paris gives me. I was there! I figured out the RER maps enough to ride over some of the storied ground she rides over in the poem!

And what else is there to do? Kill the bird in the process of trying to transport it an hour away in the cold to an avian veterinarian? Be less brave than my child about the disappointments grownups inflict? Find the source for those campaign signs and impersonate a wacko long enough to get one I can write on and put in my yard? ("Vote Steve Thompson for school board... if you want state-sponsored religion")

Manhood for Amateurs

Because I was going to my second weekend chess tournament requiring an overnight stay and at the first one I had read Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, I decided to read Michael Chabon's new collection of essays entitled Manhood for Amateurs this weekend. I find that parenthood memoirs are always good reading over a weekend you're dedicating to your child's enjoyment, and since I've already read Fred Waitzken's memoir of being a chess parent, it was on to more general topics.

The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).

And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.

His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.

The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.

I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."

Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."

So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.

Anathem

We have met the aliens, and they are us. That's what struck me about Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which it's taken me a whole year to read. I had gotten almost halfway through (396 pages in) when I stopped for a while, simply because this is a novel that requires you to read it in large sections, great contemplative swathes of time. Since I'm measuring out my life in coffee spoons, loads of laundry, miles driven, and papers graded, it was hard for me to make the time to read, an extremely frustrating state of affairs. So what was the answer to the question of how to finish it? The excellently performed audiobook, read by Dufris, Wyman, Gilbert, and Stephenson himself. That gave me at least two hours twice a week to re-immerse myself in the twists and turns of the continent-spanning adventure story, underlaid with seeming digressions like an 80-page conversation about the nature of the universe, and culminating in a trip to outer space.

Anathem is one of the novels held up to ridicule by this xkcd comic, but I was as much interested in the words as in anything. They're from alien tongues, mostly from one called Orth, that developed along lines similar to English. Discussion of merely the title word, Anathem, involving both "anthem" and "anathema," takes up an inordinate amount of time in some reviews. My favorite word is the one the main character, Fraa Erasmus (or "Raz") uses to describe the phone/blackberry devices carried by everyone outside his "concent" (similar to a convent but for academic contemplation rather than religious): "geegaws." The degree of onomatopoeia tickles me every time I hear it, to the extent that I now think of cell phones, at least in the back of my mind, by that name.

The main characters of Anathem, the ones you sympathize with and root for, are aliens, living on the planet Arbre and investigating an orbiting alien spacecraft which turns out to be a joint effort originally from four different planets, one of them identified as "Laterra," or--as it turns out--Earth. But that fact is less central than you might expect, providing only one of many opportunities to examine Arbre and its inhabitants from one perspective and then another. One of my favorite parts is the public questioning of Erasmus by a skilled Rhetor, Fraa Lodoghir, whom Erasmus and many of his fraas and suurs suspect of having "the power to alter the past" with words.

More complete reviews of Anathem attempt to summarize the plot or discuss the relationship between science and religion that Stephenson says was based on observation. More interesting to the movement of this immense (935 pages) story are the recurring theoretical conversations about multiple universes, summed up most cogently by Erasmus' teacher and father-figure, Orolo:
"We developed a theory that our minds were capable of envisioning possible futures as tracks through configuration space and then rejecting ones that didn't follow a realistic action principle."
It is this seemingly theoretical conversation that underlies the action of the novel, culminating at first in what looks like the death of the main characters on p. 826 (the end of one of the audiobook cds) and then alluded to by the rest of the main characters for the last hundred pages.

The novel ends with a kiss, and the promise of a new generation in a world made more perfect by the recent actions of the characters. I couldn't have been more satisfied by the ending unless it had been a little longer. Sigh.

Have you ever read something so immense and absorbing that you were disappointed to come to the end?