Turkeys In Pilgrim Clothing

This American Life has been breaking my heart a lot recently, what, with that episode about unconventional love? Don't be fooled by the sweet title, folks, its about a family having to put their son in a home. And the other story is about a woman who adopts a child raised in terrible circumstances in a Romanian orphanage and is unable to feel attachments to anyone...and what they do about it. I mean, really, Ira. Then there were the last two episodes about the economic crisis and then one about the Tea Party, and while they were completely well done and important and thoughtful, they weren't funny and you do funny so very well!

However. Back in the TAL archives, there exists a really fantastic episode about Thanksgiving. The hilarious Sarah Vowell examines "what happens when television takes on a subject it really has no business exploring at all, but seems fairly obsessed with nonetheless: The Pilgrims." It's a mockery of American pop culture and of a holiday that makes us a little uncomfortable when actually considering its roots.

Have you read William Bradford? I have! And I highly recommend it, actually, although its a pain to get through. It's the original text from Plymouth, THE primary source, told in his seventeenth century tongue. It's gory and intelligent and raw, and makes you feel like a slightly better American for understanding what really took place on that first Thanksgiving. Read it. OR listen to Sarah Vowell talk about it.

In the meantime, I'll be brushing up on my pie making skills. Happy holidays, New York.

A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life

"John, we are taking a decorating class."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Well, let's just mix it up a bit! It sounds interesting! I signed us up, you are going."
"Where is it? Brooklyn?"
"Chelsea."
"No."

And thus our night began.

I don't really know what inspired me to sign up for a decorating class to begin with, let alone a class with a woman who claims to value clutter and unmade beds, but it was held at Anthropologie, John is usually up for anything, and I was in the mood for something other than dinner.

I feel like I've been at a party since the middle of October, taking cabs home late and needing bagels in the morning. I was in the mood to do something inspiring, instead of thought-provoking. Not a movie. Not a book reading. Not a show. I didn't want to have to mingle and I didn't want to strain my senses to impress anyone. I basically wanted to hang out with a room full of Me's, and will not apologize for that. No boys allowed, you see.

We were greeted with gingerbread cookies and fancy Missoni San Pellegrino sparkling water by a stunning woman in a one-piece jumpsuit wearing a huge smile and generous spirit. Mary Randolph Carter, or Carter as she prefers, led the course, and for a brief hour and a half let us into her world.

She is a woman who adores living, simply put. Her passion is infectious, and as she danced around a few of her belongings-- yard sale paintings, handmade linens, mix-matched porcelain teacups-- we too started smiling and relaxing and loving it all in unison. She used the word 'love' so often that she began stopping herself, although I wish she wouldn't have. 'I love these curtains!' 'I love these little dogs.' 'I love using painters' palates in place of placemats!!!' 'I hate sofas, I really do, but I love covering them with pillows and wool blankets and beautiful things." Just insane enough to make us feel comfortable. A real nut.

Yet her enthusiasm swirled around the vibrantly set table, fit for a mad-hatter or wild poet, or Monica on Friends, and landed on our tongues. She taught us to fall in love with our surroundings and to create homes for living in, and to leave the housekeeping for the birds. She's the anti-Martha you might say (although Martha and Carter have been 'friends for years!') and thank goodness for that. Our homes should rise up and greet us, she sang. They should be a reflection of the people who live there. They should make us feel happy, alive, and like our own Best Selves.

In the end, it was just what I needed. She's an artist, really, although she doesn't paint, her home is her canvas. (A peek, here!) I asked her about the painting, I assumed she did. I also asked her what music she would be playing during her Thanksgiving dinner and she said 'Coldplay. Or Cole Porter. Or both!' She has a new book out, called 'A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life' with all of this included. Perfect, right? Such a good title.

I took the F train home that night feeling a little more like myself. I live on the Brooklyn side of the East River, just a hop from the Brooklyn Bridge, two lefts off the BQE. I walked in my door as I do every night, after shoving it in with my hip-- it sticks a bit. I was greeted by my varied paintings, my white duvet, my butcher block table, and my favorite poem on the fridge. My over-thought grey walls sat back and smiled; the shelving that I hung all by myself puffed out its chest in approval; and my tissue paper flowers all nodded hello. 'Hello, house,' I said aloud. I'm a nut myself, you see. Life is a little tricky right now, but it will get better. Sometimes all it takes is taking a night off and saying hello to the person that is you.

Thanks, Carter. Loved it.

Bing Crosby Christmas Album

I mentioned that I've been listening to Bing Crosby's Christmas album this morning to Little Sister, who immediately sent this little ditty my way:

"a couple of a teenage tune-smiths around hollywood here. mel torme and bob wells of pendenitum wrote a song that i consider quite appropriate for tonight. skitch i'd like to do it for ya. it's called the christmas song."

Bing Crosby's Christmas album is the best because he encourages you to sing along before EVERY carol. It's as if he's running one of those public radio fund-raising drives, asking for 'just ten dollars a month, to keep our programming strong', but instead of money he's asking us to 'sing along, wherever you are!' 'Just tap your toes!' 'Get into the Christmas cheer!'. It's amazing.

Also, he uses the phrase 'gee-wiz' while doing so three times throughout the recording. Em and I have it memorized, hence the Mel Torme bit above. That's not a lyric found online, people, that is honest-to-goodness memorization on her part. This album is in our BLOOD, yo.

And pulling out Bing's version of The First Noel or Jingle Bells or A Christmas Song, or White Christmas (!!!!) really is the best prescription for a bad mood, even if it's only November. NOT that I've been in a sour mood for the past day, FINE, week. Not that I've been slamming doors and rolling my eyes and pouting around listing off all the the terrible things about my little life that I normally hold dear.

I'm ready, dear reader. Ready for tinsel and lights and angels and shopping and garland and the other Garland. Bring it, Bing.

Jerry Saltz on Art Dealers

"Dealers, please don’t stop talking! Your galleries are special to me: They are wormholes, time machines, matter transporters, gardens of delight, shtetls, hellholes, mediocrities, meritocracies, Dixieland tunes, places to get to the bottom of things, voting booths, fun fairs, tranquilizer bullets, big trees, missing links, states of grace, secular temples, travel bureaus, shallow ends of the pool, deep ends of the ocean, shelters from the storm, nails in your back, stones in your shoe, vicious circles, and burning rings of fire.-Jerry Saltz

A friend sent this bit to me, from Saltz's column on Vulture. I always appreciate Saltz's unashamed nostalgia when writing about art. The world could use a bit more sincerity, don't you think? I know my little corner could.

Photo: Alexis Rockman, our Dec 2010 Basel: Miami cover artist, whom I interesting.

For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen

I spent my Sunday in the usual fashion-- at a high society poetry reading in the year 1920. The event took place at a mansion upstate, where the leaves trailing the Hudson held onto their autumnal glory just long enough to carry us home again that night. I had to pinch myself most of that day, both for unbelieving of the situation I found myself in, and also to stay awake. Lordy, Crane's poem is long and boring. At least the poem's reader didn't understand much of it either.

For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen

by Hart Crane

I

The mind has shown itself at times

Too much the baked and labeled dough

Divided by accepted multitudes.

Across the stacked partitions of the day—

Across the memoranda, baseball scores,

The stenographic smiles and stock quotations

Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;

Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd

The margins of the day, accent the curbs,

Convoying divers dawns on every corner

To druggist, barber and tobacconist,

Until the graduate opacities of evening

Take them away as suddenly to somewhere

Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.

There is the world dimensional for

those untwisted by the love of things

irreconcilable ...

And yet, suppose some evening I forgot

The fare and transfer, yet got by that way

Without recall,—lost yet poised in traffic.

Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,

Still flickering with those prefigurations—

Prodigal, yet uncontested now,

Half-riant before the jerky window frame.

There is some way, I think, to touch

Those hands of yours that count the nights

Stippled with pink and green advertisements.

And now, before its arteries turn dark

I would have you meet this bartered blood.

Imminent in his dream, none better knows

The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words

Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.

Reflective conversion of all things

At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread

The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread

Impinging on the throat and sides ...

Inevitable, the body of the world

Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus

That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.

The earth may glide diaphanous to death;

But if I lift my arms it is to bend

To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing

The press of troubled hands, too alternate

With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.

I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame

You found in final chains, no captive then—

Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;

White, through white cities passed on to assume

That world which comes to each of us alone.

Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,

Bent axle of devotion along companion ways

That beat, continuous, to hourless days—

One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.

II

Brazen hypnotics glitter here;

Glee shifts from foot to foot,

Magnetic to their tremulo.

This crashing opera bouffe,

Blest excursion! this ricochet

From roof to roof—

Know, Olympians, we are breathless

While nigger cupids scour the stars!

A thousand light shrugs balance us

Through snarling hails of melody.

White shadows slip across the floor

Splayed like cards from a loose hand;

Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters

Until somewhere a rooster banters.

Greet naively—yet intrepidly

New soothings, new amazements

That cornets introduce at every turn—

And you may fall downstairs with me

With perfect grace and equanimity.

Or, plaintively scud past shores

Where, by strange harmonic laws

All relatives, serene and cool,

Sit rocked in patent armchairs.

O,I have known metallic paradises

Where cuckoos clucked to finches

Above the deft catastrophes of drums.

While titters hailed the groans of death

Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen

The incunabula of the divine grotesque.

This music has a reassuring way.

The siren of the springs of guilty song—

Let us take her on the incandescent wax

Striated with nuances, nervosities

That we are heir to: she is still so young,

We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,

Dipping here in this cultivated storm

Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.

III

Capped arbiter of beauty in this street

That narrows darkly into motor dawn,—

You, here beside me, delicate ambassador

Of intricate slain numbers that arise

In whispers, naked of steel;

religious gunman!

Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,

And in other ways than as the wind settles

On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:

Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.

We even,

Who drove speediest destruction

In corymbulous formations of mechanics,—

Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice

Plangent over meadows, and looked down

On rifts of torn and empty houses

Like old women with teeth unjubilant

That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:

We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers

The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,

The mounted, yielding cities of the air!

That saddled sky that shook down vertical

Repeated play of fire—no hypogeum

Of wave or rock was good against one hour.

We did not ask for that, but have survived,

And will persist to speak again before

All stubble streets that have not curved

To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm

That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow

To saturate with blessing and dismay.

A goose, tobacco and cologne

Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,

The lavish heart shall always have to leaven

And spread with bells and voices, and atone

The abating shadows of our conscript dust.

Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,—

The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,

Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;

Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,

O brother-thief of time, that we recall.

Laugh out the meager penance of their days

Who dare not share with us the breath released,

The substance drilled and spent beyond repair

For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.

Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile

Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height

The imagination spans beyond despair,

Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.

Source: The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2001)

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Jonathan Safran Foer, deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers that it actually has a body.”
–Olafur Eliasson

I WANT THAT. You can purchase it for me HERE.



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The Corrections

There exists a very specific theme in Jonathan Franzen's novels-- a character flaw that he nails with a specificity so many novels are lacking. The theme is that of 'good' vs 'evil' but with a minutia lens. I'm Not A Good Person, his talking heads silently scream from behind straight A's and strong work ethics and career successes and good parenting. I Am Going To Hurt You, And When I Do, Don't Say I Didn't Warn You.

Both Patty and Denise (Freedom, and The Corrections, respectively) act it out, cowering in the arms of married others, in the shadows hidden from husbands and fathers and their own conscious selves. Sure, you can blame adolescent disruptions but Franzen doesn't seem to be driving home any real messages of the harm of date rape and infidelity. He pushes more radically the idea that even the good girls carry a burden: The burden of feigning morality.

We are used to meeting villains and good faeries and soft monsters. We swell at the idea of 'growing a heart' or 'learning to love', and we expect it (read: Great Expectations, The Museum of Innocence, The Grinch, Beauty and the Beast). Franzen introduces a lesser idea of Evil being confused for Good.

This theme is first carried out by both Patty and Denise as a sort of defense, or reasoning, for doing wrong. 'Well, I slept with that married man because I'm not a good person', they quack darkly behind a sensible veneer. 'It's not wrong if its done by a Bad Person.' The catch is that we will never hate them, as is standard with most Immoral Villains of literature late. Alternately, Franzen shaped us with his tricky potter's wheel to respect both characters as our own sisters, mothers, or selves. Sure, Denise broke up a marriage, lost her job, and feels no remorse-- its her way of proving to herself and the world at large that she wasn't Good to begin with. We know better. It's with this observation of the Human Condition that Franzen so viciously attacks us. Instead of offering platitudes of the masses, he gives us people we know, can imagine, or are.

I loved this novel.

It ate me alive (oh, let our parents never grow old) but I savored the structure and detailing and meat of it all. Franzen knows how to carve a story and when to switch voices just when we've gained interest. (The structure here reminded me so much of those AWESOME Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Super Mysteries. Remember those!? So good.) He's a master at playing hard to get, and we fall for it hook line and sinker.

From Chip, in his heartbreaking and unguided innocence to Gary and his angry neurosis and comical injustices, we follow a family of five during the most tumultuous year in each of their own lives. They are forced together by an overbearing mother as they scramble like flowers from Pepé Le Pew. The mood is dark but the interactions are shockingly kind, as they gather together for one last Christmas with an ailing father who will absolutely break your heart. I loved Chip's observations in that last chapter, when he arrived home from Lithuania. "I'm the least sad person at this table" he thinks, after literally surviving war.

As in Freedom, Franzen offers a view of the Midwest so very familiar to East Coast transplants (such as Franzen and, well, me.) He touches on the uncomfortable and unwarranted guilt that we feel for judging the land that raised us. We wish we could love Christmas the way we understood it from a cul-de-sac but somewhere between the Heartland and Midtown we were robbed of it and feel only a prickly angst for no longer understanding its worth. He isn't degrading it, he's mourning it like the rest of us. It isn't 'less', its just left behind.

I think that The Corrections is my favorite title of a book, ever. The word is echoed throughout the text so carefully that I found myself digging my heels in in hopes of understanding the point of it all early. You see, Franzen doesn't give it up too soon. He makes us work a bit before we realize, 'oh, that book was about Enid all along'. It was first Chip's story, with his final corrections on that sad little screenplay. Then maybe the Corektall tie in, or Denise's treatment of Robin, correcting every flaw. But it's Enid's story in the end, and I loved that. We find her there, on the final page in a hopeful new beginning. Thank you for that, Jonathan. Cheers to ending both of your novels with a completely unsuspecting and all together unwarranted grace.

There is so much more to say here, about this readable novel and its insanely flawed characters. But I've been trying to write it all down for three days and maybe we should just discuss it over dinner, wanna? Let's go to Denise's new restaurant on Smith Street and do just that.

NOW, onto Great House. Get excited.