Emblems of Perfect Happiness

Well, here it is the last day of June, and the kids and I are feeling that summer has just begun. Eleanor is finished with her summer school class. Walker and I are finished with Peter Pan, which played to sellout crowds every night and got Walker a mention in the local paper for being a "memorably chipper" Tootles. I just turned in my annual report for the Writing Center, due every year by the end of June. So we're ready for days without deadlines. Summer days. For me, emblems of perfect happiness.

Trouble is, the newspaper confirmed this morning that this has been a record-breaking June for rainfall, and today it's raining again. So we can't really do happy summer things, despite our new feeling of freedom. It makes me think of a poem I have a love/hate relationship with. I memorized the first stanza of this poem long ago, because I love it so much. But I hate the second stanza. I'd like to do like Emily Dickinson's sister, who blacked out an entire stanza of the poem "wedded" that talked about how Emily didn't want to be wedded.

It may seem premature to think of August thunderstorms right now, but we feel thunderstorm-scarred already this summer, having just replaced all of the electronics that fell prey to our own personal lightning strike. Anyway, this is Philip Larkin's Mother, Summer, I:

My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, let swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost.

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone;
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can't confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.

Maybe it's because Larkin was a Brit that he felt he couldn't confront those emblems of perfect happiness. The British have a peculiar attitude about things being too much--it's like the line in Peter Pan about the cake being "much too damp and rich for you." I always feel quite ready to enjoy the perfect happiness of summer days. July 4-8 is my absolute favorite time of the year, between parades and fireworks and picnics and my birthday (the 8th), when I almost always persuade someone to spend the day swimming with me. And the weather almost always cooperates.

Funny words

Walker and I are morning people. We're having a hard time adjusting to the theater life this week, with rehearsals for Peter Pan going until midnight. But the end is near--tonight is opening night. If the costumers can get Walker's Lost Boy pants to stay on (they're loose around the waist, and the decorative rope belt doesn't help) and if the pit orchestra I'm playing in can keep straight which parts we're playing and which we've x-ed out or put in vamps and repeats because the music the cast was given is SO DIFFERENT from the score and the individual instrumental parts (thank you, Samuel French Company), the show will be great.

All I've had time to read this week is the new Stephanie Plum novel, Janet Evanovich's Fearless Fourteen. It's just the thing for summer--fun, but no surprises. I don't think the writing was as good as in any of the previous 13. The tension between Stephanie picking Ranger or Joe Morelli was ratcheted down a level, and details like where the severed toes that are sent to Joe's house in the mail actually came from are missing (or else I missed them in my state of sleep deprivation). But it does have Lula making wedding plans, and incomprehensible video-game terms tossed around as if they're everyday conversation, which I find quite amusing:

"I'm going online as soon as I'm done with breakfast," she said. "I'm gonna lay waste to the griefer."
I looked over at my mother and she made a gesture like she was going to hang herself.
"What's a griefer?" I asked. I'd heard Zook use the term, but I didn't actually know what it meant. I also knew Moondog was a griefer, but I didn't know what a Moondog was, either.
"A griefer's a snert," Grandma said. "A cheese player. A twink."
I nodded. "That makes it all clear."

About as clear as Walker's comment that "King DeeDeeDee threw wattle-dees, and wattle-dees have the most chance of coming up, and wattle-doos have less chance of coming up. And Gordos are really, really rare." What this means, I don't know. But it SOUNDS hilarious.

The way I participate in conversations about video games is about the way someone who has misheard the lyrics to a song can talk about music. You know, that song by Glen Campbell "country boy, you've got your feet in the lake, but your mind is on the sea..." or "I believe in Delco....all the time...you sexy thing" ("I Believe in Miracles"). Haven't you ever done this? Despite the fact that my kids' generation is learning the music of my generation by playing Guitar Hero (I made the avatar throw down his guitar when I tried to play "Barracuda," but my kids can get through most of the songs), there's still lots of room for misunderstanding on the lyrics, at least until we get the sing-along version of Guitar Hero! Walker still hears "Give me the strength to face the laundry in the dark" when he hears the song "The Truth Beneath the Rose" by Within Temptation. And isn't that just more fun than the original line ("give me the strength to face the wrong that I have done")?

If you like misheard song lyrics, you've got to go to http://www.kissthisguy.com/funny.php

How Modern These Faeries Be

Ironside, by Holly Black, is subtitled "A Modern Faery's Tale," like the two volumes that precede it (Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale and Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie). The modernization is interesting and amusing; it only occasionally fails to be true to the tradition of fairy stories.

Ironside is well plotted and a fast read. Although I can imagine someone enjoying it without reading the first two, a big part of its pleasure is how well it weaves threads from the previous stories. In Tithe, Holly Black introduces her characters and brings their first adventure to a full and satisfying close. In Valiant, she introduces different characters and tells what seems to be a separate story, but it is not as compelling and doesn't come to a satisfactory end. The third book demonstrates that these stories are meant to work as a trilogy.

The faeries are as heartless and beautiful and compelling as traditional fairies should be, with an additional layer of appealing-to-teenagers coolness, a la Jane Yolen's updated fairy tales (Pay the Piper is the latest one I've read). They're clever, too, although this is the main area in which the updating falls short. It's amusing when Corny the mortal boy says, in Tithe, "I woke up outside the hill this morning. I figured that you'd ditched me and I was going to do a Rip Van Winkle and find out that it was the year 2112 and no one had even heard of me," but why didn't it happen? How can he also eat the fairy food and be able to return to the moral world with no problems (other than an isolated vomiting episode in Ironside). Black attempts to explain a little of how her modern magic works in Valiant, with the plotline about "never," an addictive-to-humans faery glamour tonic, but it all seems a little easier than usual for the mortals to overcome the magic of the fairy realm.

There's a lovely bit of traditional fairy trickery in Tithe, when Roiben is ordered to seize Kaye and "he grabbed her hair in a clump, jerking her head back, then just as suddenly let her go" because he hasn't been ordered to hold on, but this isn't developed any further in Ironside. In fact, the final play on words is so funny and infuriating that it made me scream with laughter and kick the book across the floor in annoyance. Luckily, that bit of trickery is not integral to the plot; it's just a revelation after the action has already taken place.

What is clever about the ending of Ironside is the way the heroine saves herself. She needs the hero's help and he needs hers, but the actual saving of her own skin is up to her. There's no cheap ending where anything is resolved by magic. There's no easy happily ever after. The ending isn't as tidy as it could have been. Early on, my daughter and I were both amused by this dialogue:
"You can't date the Lord of the Night Court."
"Well, I'm not. He dumped me."
"You can't get dumped by the Lord of the Night Court."
"Oh yes you can. You so completely can."
And despite various annoying (to me, anyway) descriptions of this Lord's black leather outfits for going out into the mortal world, the ending of the book is letter-perfect in its blend of traditional and modern:
Kaye groaned. "You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?"
He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance."
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons."
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad."

An additional pleasure of reading these books is the epigraph for each chapter, drawn eclectically from the writings of people like Pablo Neruda, Andrew Wyeth, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Czeslaw Milosz. Some of them might even interest young readers in casting their net wider, as Cornelia Funke's epigraphs drawn from the writing of Michael de Larrabeiti for her chapters in Inkheart caused my family to seek out and enjoy The Borrible trilogy.

The American Way

I am a little bit reassured by today's report that the outside consultants who investigated whether the science teacher in the local public school system was teaching his peculiar brand of religion in the public schools have reported to the school board that "there is a significant amount of evidence that Mr. Freshwater's teachings regarding subjects related to evolution were not consistent with the curriculum of the Mount Vernon City Schools and state standards." Now the school board has to decide what to do about the man who would be a martyr. They're under intense pressure from Freshwater and Daubenmire's supporters, many of whom must have been educated in Freshwater's classroom.

What still disturbs me is that any child in our school system who claims to be "disturbed" by the teaching of evolution can go sit in the hall while it's being taught. (The same is true for kids who claim to be nauseated by dissecting a worm or a frog--they can go sit in the hall.) What's wrong with this picture?

This morning I was rereading Gregory Corso's poem "The American Way." Like most of his poems, it's very long and is best read out loud. Here's the section that caused me to look up the poem, after reading the newspaper:

2
They are frankensteining Christ in America
in their Sunday campaigns
They are putting the fear of Christ in America
under their tents in their Sunday campaigns
They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America
They are televising the gift of healing and the fear of hell
in America under their tents in their Sunday
campaigns
They are leaving their tents and are bringing their Christ
to the stadiums of America in their Sunday
campaigns
They are asking for a full house an all get out
for their Christ in the stadiums of America
They are getting them in their Sunday and Saturday
campaigns
They are asking them to come forward and fall on their
knees
because they are all guilty and they are coming
forward
in guilt and are falling on their knees weeping their
guilt
begging to be saved O Lord O Lord in their Monday
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
and Sunday campaigns

Why is this poem reassuring? Because it was written in 1960, the year of my birth, and published the year after Nemerov's Boom! appeared. This stuff has been going on all my life.

My family just watched Inherit the Wind, with the recurring singing of "Gimme that old-time religion" on the soundtrack. We found it ironic how much the current situation in our small town resembles the situation of the small town during the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's discouraging to see how little some things have changed. We need to be singing some better songs. I dislike the one "patriotic" song that says something about being an American "where at least I know I'm free." At LEAST? I'd like to be able to say that my community is at least trying to educate middle-schoolers who can't tell the difference between a philosophic and a scientific theory, rather than allowing them to sit in the hallway and perpetuate that old-time ignorance. It isn't good enough for anyone.

Thunderstruck

You probably thought we were just goofing off around here. Well, we have been reading books. As my faithful readers will recall, I'm not in favor of listing every book I read, but I'll mention in passing that I read M.J. Rose's The Reincarnationist, Stephen Evans' The Marriage of True Minds, and Catherine Ryan Hyde's Love In the Present Tense, all of which I enjoyed, and Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon, which I loathed. Like almost everyone in the world, I enjoyed The Lovely Bones, gruesome as it was, but The Almost Moon is just unpleasant, and the ending doesn't redeem it at all. The Marriage of True Minds was my favorite of all these books--it was a kind of romp, and it was about something I think about--how, especially with humane society and environmental issues, half measures are often not enough. Well, here's a book about someone who went all the way for what he believed. And his logic was so much fun to try to follow! Also he has fun with lobsters.

Why have we not been just goofing off? Because on Friday night a thunderstorm came through, and we weren't home to see or hear it completely destroy our modem, quite probably our router, one of two identical garage door openers, and our new television. The cable people have been out three times, and we've reached the limits of my knowledge about how our computers are connected to the modem and router and each other. Today the cable guy kindly connected one of the wires from the modem directly into my laptop so I could stop feeling so um, disconnected this week while Ron is at an IT conference and I'm here coordinating the home base for a lonely guinea pig (yes, Sandy succumbed on Father's Day), a sick cat, and an all-day smorgasbord for kids with hungry friends .

What to do? We went to the library and checked out a bunch of unimportant books that look fun. If any of them turn out to be memorable, I'll let you know. When I can.

Paradise

I just read Alan Brennert's Moloka'i, about the 19th-century leper colony. It was a better book than I expected, focusing less on the horrors of the disease and the isolation policies, and more on how Hawaiian people, some of them based on historical characters, might have lived and died in Kaluapapa. His protagonist, Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa, lives long enough to receive the sulfa drugs that keep Hanson's disease from progressing or being contagious, so at the end of her life she is able to leave Kaluapapa and go home to Honolulu.

The description of Honolulu particularly interested me. Rachel lived there as a 7-year-old in 1891 and finally came back in 1948: "The difference between Old Honolulu and New, she would come to decide, was the difference between a beautiful woman who was simply being herself and a beautiful woman calling attention to herself: a little vain perhaps, but you couldn't say she wasn't attractive." I lived in Honolulu for one summer, in 1971, and finally came back during the summer of 2007. The beautiful woman calling attention to herself is still beautiful, and calling more attention to herself than ever, but some of the attention does detract from the beauty now. While I wouldn't want to say that there should be fewer hotels ringing Waikiki beach, I would say that fewer of them should be high-rises. The shadow of the high rise hotels blots out the morning sun on the beach and the trade winds that should be blowing around all the beach-side businesses. I also wouldn't say that there should be fewer restaurants opening onto the beach, but it would be nice if fewer of them were chains, turning some of the rarest real estate in the world into the same sort of homogenized mall offerings you can find anywhere. Next door to the hotel we stayed in last summer was a thriving Cheesecake Factory restaurant. I looked in every time we passed, to see if it was a novelty for Japanese tourists, or something, but the clientele looked overwhelmingly European-American.

Each Hawaiian island is a little bit of paradise, and even Brennert's characters, exiled and imprisoned on Molokai, appreciated that, despite their hardships. It's hard to find a face on any Hawaiian island that doesn't reflect some consciousness of how lucky that person is to be right where they are at that moment. Today's tourists are more conscious of the impact their stay has on the fragile environment, and today's tourist industry has more safeguards in place to ensure that paradise will not be lost through overuse and carelessness. But someone who goes to Hawaii for a brief vacation, a getaway, might not venture outside the resort areas to hear any of the Hawaiian folktales about Maui the trickster or the Menehune, or realize what it means that there was once Hawaiian royalty. Folks like that are haoles, as guilty as the early missionaries of discounting what the people who live there know about enjoying and preserving the islands. They'll drive around Oahu listening to "...paved paradise, put up a parking lot...." on the radio and won't realize how old the song is, or that they could be contributing.

Like anything of value, paradise requires you to take some time to appreciate it. Anyone who writes about the charms of Hawaii, me included, uses Hawaiian words to convey this--that Aloha "means both hello and goodbye." Almost anyone who has ever been there yearns to return. Before I read Molokai, I didn't realize that the Hawaiian burial service concludes with this farewell to the departed "go, but if you have a mind to return, come back." But that seems of a piece with the rest of the Hawaiian attitude. What haole wouldn't want to return to paradise, knowing its pleasures, and knowing that you'll still be graciously welcomed?

Everything that Rises Must Converge...

...at least you'd think so, eventually. I thought I had moved away from regions where people are still fighting the War between the States by shouting things like "the South will rise again" out of their confederate-flag-draped pickups. Imagine my surprise when I read the following letter to the editor in the local big-city newspaper this morning:

Confederate soldiers fought against U.S.
I respond to the June 2 Dispatch article "But not forgotten." I strongly disagree with Richard Hoffman, a board member of the Hilltop Historical Society, who said "These are fallen Americans who fought for this country," in his description of the Confederate graves along Sullivant Avenue.
They didn't fight for this country, and it is offensive to anyone who lost a relative who died defending this country. These are the people who took arms against this country; that's a fact.
To ignore that fact is as ridiculous as anyone who would defend Germany on D-day and then tell you they were good people whom we should also honor.
Michael Yopko, Westerville

The letter sure woke me up, and made me start laughing. I pushed it across the table to Eleanor, who skimmed it and said "Dang, guys, that was about 150 years ago!"

Are people getting wackier and more entrenched in their strange beliefs, or is it just my imagination? A teacher at the local middle school just told me that her three children were harassed for the family's religious beliefs throughout their school careers, including an incident with a teacher who thought one of them needed to be "saved." "What is your family's religious belief?" I asked. I thought maybe her kids were going around telling people they were atheists, which would be a bit confrontational in this intensely religious community. But no. "We're Roman Catholic," she told me. I looked it up briefly (on google) and found that there are strange "Christians" out there preaching that Catholics are not saved and will go to hell. Huh. It's like the bible belt is encompassing more area than it used to. How American.

Maybe the whole country is getting as grotesque and gothic as the South, and we just haven't fully realized it yet. Maybe I'm thinking that partly because I just breezed through Stephanie Gayle's My Summer of Southern Discomfort, a strawberry daiquiri of a novel, easily consumed and with little effect. The main character is a northerner (Boston and NYC) who moves to the south (Macon, GA) and does predictable things, saying, at one point "in Georgia it's all about 'your people.' I draw out the phrase in my best mock Southern accent, which isn't very good. My throat clips the long vowels short." Isn't that just always the way when a northerner tries to mock a southern accent? As she gets to know her neighbors and allow her colleagues to know her, she begins to feel at home in the south. Her northern friends and relatives finally begin to accept that her new home is a place she enjoys, not simply a place where she is missing the pleasures of the north.

Well, geez. Or, in Eleanor's words, "Dang, guys!"