It’s been ten years since this Nobel laureate last published a work of fiction, so the arrival of the English translation of Memories of My Melancholy Whores qualifies as a major event—even though, at just more than one hundred pages, it’s more novella than novel. Still, after a bit of journalism and the obligatory stab at a memoir, it’s nice to see the Colombian master of magical realism returning to his bread and butter. Memories is unquestionably the work of a man with mortality on his mind, but it should come as no surprise that Garcia Marquez’s elderly protagonist (he is approaching his ninetieth birthday) retains a lust for life. Lust, period, in fact. The lifelong bachelor, a bit incredibly, decides to observe this milestone in his senescence by procuring the services of a young virgin. That’s something of an unseemly proposition, but yet there’s something oddly moving about this story of a randy and philosophical codger determined to be done in not by old age, but by love.
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Screaming "STUPID" in a crowded museum
As dangerous as an allegory on the banks of the NileYesterday this from the NY Times about the Biblical literalists’ invasion of natural history museums and how they are accosting and interrupting guides while they are explaining the scientific view of how we got here.
The article explains how members of B.C. groups (B.C. stands for Biblically Correct, which has to be one of the greatest oxymorons of all times,) have started showing up at museums to challenge Darwin, Newton, or anyone else who ever had a coherent thought.
But, they have their backers. According to recent polls, 54 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution. I suggested earlier that those who don’t believe in evolution shouldn’t get to partake in the benefits science has provided us. If you don’t believe in survival of the fittest, you shouldn’t get the benefits our evolved brains’ study of viral and bacterial evolution have provided us, e.g. vaccines.
Now some thought that was too harsh, so I’m going to suggest another tactic. Let’s form groups called FART (Fundamentalists Are Really Thick) and start going to churches and challenging their ministers to debates on whether their beliefs aren’t prima facie evidence that they are closely related to chimpanzees who can be trained to do tricks on command–such as pulling the Republican voting lever and getting a banana.
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Night Stand: Reading In The Dark
A pair of epigraphs and some random gleanings from the archives of the Wangensteen Medical Library at the University of Minnesota:
When I lie down, I say, when shall I arise,
and the night be gone? And I am full of tossing
to and fro unto the dawning of the day.
–The Book of Job, 7-4
This relentless repetition of the same illegible text….
–Yannis Ritsos, “Insomnia”
Melancholics are not so sleepless as maniacs, yet the want of sleep is often an early and prominent symptom. They do not readily sleep, and if they do, they awake soon to be tormented by the vilest misery that it is possible for human creatures to endure.
–A.W, MacFarlane, M.D., Insomnia and its Therapeutics, 1891
Want of refreshing sleep we believe to be the frequent origin of insanity, dependent upon moral causes.
–John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke, Psychological Medicine. 1858
Those who pursue a desultory method of thinking are very often the victims of an obstinate and peculiarly distressing form of insomnia. During the day such persons are observed to apply themselves with apparent zeal to the regular vocations of life; but, if closely observed, there is often visible a certain absence of concentration and devotion to the particular matter in hand. When questioned upon this point, they admit that they are ‘absent-minded’; and, while only too willing to apply themselves, are frequently tormented by the intrusion of ideas totally foreign to the particular subject at hand….they carry their responsibilities to bed with them; and, while other minds are at rest, their own intellection is morbidly active. Midnight, and even the small hours of the morning, find such individuals speculating upon the pros and cons of the past and future with an intensity which often drives them to a state of positive desperation. The small ills of life assume alpine proportions, and even the most trivial circumstances are distorted and magnified a thousand-fold. When at last sleep actually does supervene, it is no longer psychological, but, on the contrary, perverted by dreams and unconscious cerebration to such a degree that these unhappy individuals can hardly be said to have slept in the ordinary sense of the word.
–J. Leonard Corning, Brain Rest. 1885
Under [insomnia’s] influence injurious changes are permitted by the patient to be made in his daily habits; pursuits which formerly engaged his attention no longer interest him; even important business concerns are sacrificed; and against such tendencies no pre-existing vigour of intellect will afford any defence; the strongest minds (intellectually considered) may sink into apathy and feebleness.
–James Russell, M.D., “On Sleeplessness.” British Medical Journal, November 16, 1861
After dinner, my friend drove me, in a carriage, some five miles back into the country –the greater part of the way, along the margin of Migunticook Lake, and under a terrific precipice, whose boulders every moment threaten destruction. In fact, the whole of a bright sunny day, cooled with healthful zephyrs, was spent in pleasurable excitement. Interesting conversation beguiled the evening; and, after family worship, I sunk to rest in a luxurious curtained bed. Ere long, I slept; and, about five o’clock next morning, was awakened by the crowing of the cock. This was the only night’s sleep I have had these last six years and seven months; so help me God. Since then, my nights have been tedious, as usual, without sleep, and some of them distressing.
–“An Example of Protracted Wakefulness,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. July 31, 1845
Experience in private practice, and extended observation in the wards of general and lunatic hospitals, have taught me that the ordinary hypnotics are frequently unreliable, and that in some instances their use is attended by results as bad as, if not of more serious consequence than, the conditions they were intended to remove. I do not wish by this somewhat sweeping assertion to be understood to condemn the ordinary hypnotics, or to doubt their efficacy in suitable cases; but it seems to me that we run great danger of becoming routinists in the matter of sleeping-draughts….Like most of my fellow practitioners, I constantly meet patients who have run through the whole gamut of sleep-producing drugs, and find their last condition, in many instances, worse than their first.
–Edward N. Brush, M.D., “Some Clinical Experiences With Insomnia,” The Practitioner, January 1889
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Ugly Duckling
Joe brought to my attention this morning that the term “mud duck” has emerged as a derisive name for Minnesotans. It’s trend enough to have made the pages of the Star Tribune, although to be fair, the Strib appears to have perched its considerable reporting credibility in this very important matter on the back of a newspaper produced by high school students in Maple, Wisconsin. Apparently, the word is used by Wisconsinites who live near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, and who are in a position to interact involuntarily with a lot of Minnesotans.
It’s probably about time we had an aspersing nickname. We all know that modesty and graciousness are well-dressed stand-ins for misanthropy and insecurity; and if you want to see Minnesotans at their worst, truly losing their cool, spend a weekend trying to find a quiet campsite on the south shore, an organic sandwich in Bayfield, at the gas pump in Bismarck, or saying good-bye to their valedictorian down in Iowa City. If the truth be known, probably the worst “mud ducks” belong to the City and Regional Magazines Association. These kinds of magazines are forever urging their readerships to trample the greenswards of bucolic little villages in search of morel mushrooms, fall color, and antique trivets. They are designed to reach a certain local subspecies of the Ugly American.
“Mud duck,” of course, is a term that is potentially cute and nonthreatening, even if it’s a little dismissive. Thus, it’s a lot like “cheese head,” but a little less obvious. Which raises the disturbing possibility that the Wisconsin coiners of “mud duck” are more subtle than the Minnesota coiners of “cheese head.” But whoever was the first to create the mold for those cheddar-wedge styrofoam hats, he was most definitely not a native Minnesotan.
But let’s not forget the original mud duck, otherwise known as the spoonbill or the shoveller duck. James Audobon himself was very fond of the bird. He wrote:
“We have no Ducks in the United States whose plumage is more changeable than that of the male of this beautiful species…. The Shoveller walks prettily, and I have often admired its movements in the puddles formed by heavy dashes of rain in our southern corn-fields, where I have found it in company with the Wood Duck, the Mallard, and the Pin-tail. Its flight resembles that of the Blue-winged Teal; and in tenderness as well as in flavour, it rivals, as an article of food, that beautiful bird. No sportsman who is a judge will ever pass a Shoveller to shoot a Canvass-back. It is rarely however found on salt water, and that only when compelled to resort thither.”
That, I think, is a namesake we can all live with.
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Jump the Snark
A moment away from a very busy week of production:
It’s too early to see whether the roll-out of Times Select is going to bung up the daily “most e-mailed” list–and whether articles behind the firewall, that is, primarily the celebrities of the Op-Ed pages, will even be emailable and thus eligible for the honors they have previously monopolized. Whatever. I’ve been meaning to go back to reading the daily paper edition anyway– the Times is one of the few newspapers that has actually done a good job of reproducing the paper on the web, by which I mean that when I look at the paper edition after having looked at the website, it feels very familiar–the web didn’t miss the high points, the way it often does at lesser operations.
I did want to comment on an article in the Times magazine from last week, and I went looking for it, and of course it is now archived and thus inacccessible without a financial transaction. From the Times, anyway. As I’ve said a few times before, a savvy googler will always find premium content squirrelled away somewhere, and so it is.
I have to admit, too, that I haven’t really finished reading this nice story for a couple of reasons. First, I guess, is the usual: I like Dave Eggers about as much as I like any really talented young popular writer I’ve never met. (Actually, I have met him, and he’s pretty cool.) I like him. I like what he writes. I like nearly everything he sets to paper, which is great, because there are a lot of popular professional writers who don’t fit into my general mathematical tables plotting quality against popularity.
Still, I am probably more weary of the hagiographies of Dave Eggers than even Dave Eggers is, and it strains my patience when the New York Times finds yet another reason to cobble together another exalting story badly concealed as a summary-trend piece. (It’s not JUST about Eggers! Lookit, he wasn’t even in the lead–it was about Benjamin Kunkel!
I imagine the pitch went a little something like this:
Writer: “It’s Dave Eggers, everybody loves Dave Eggers!”
Editor: “Yes, but everyone knows about Dave Eggers already.”
Writer: “But he’s just the peg! There is a whole new generation of literary critics.”
Editor: “Such as?”
Writer: “Uhm. The Believer women.”
Editor: “Great! Who started that magazine, love it!”
Writer: “Well, it’s edited by Vendela Vida”
Editor: “Great name! Who she?”
Writer: “Uhm. Dave Eggers’ wife.”
Editor: “Is there an echo in here?”
Writer: “I’ll find some other Gen-X literary types, promise.”
Time passes.
Editor: “Find anybody else? Two’s an accident, three’s a trend.”
Writer: “Yes, I think so. There are these kids at something called n+1. They’re in Brooklyn!”
Editor: “Yeah but Eggers is in Brooklyn.”
Writer: “No! He moved back to Frisco years ago!”
Editor: “Okay, good. But Eggers is in the lead, right?”
Writer: “Well, let’s say the first 500 words.”
Editor: “Awesome. Due yesterday.”)
Anyway, what I really wanted to say, before I indulged in that long patch of badly concealed schadenfreude–or was it weltschmerz? Whatever, I’m German, I’ve got it all in spades–was that a single pull-quote really caught my eye. It was from the lovely and brilliant Heidi Julavits, Egger’s executor at The Believer. Now, our little magazine has been compared favorably with The Believer, for the right reasons, I think. You can call it “post-ironic” or a vehicle of the “new earnestness,” but basically it comes down to trying to stand out in the publishing marketplace by actually being enthusiastic without being cynical–celebrate the written word, be funny, take care, try not to hurt anyone that doesn’t REALLY deserve it, and so on. According to the author of the article,
For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.”I thought, Geeze what an unfortunate pullquote. The way I normally operate, I don’t “endow” things with importance through a willful act of emotional positing. I do that simply by caring. I had no idea my generation was so far gone that it is almost an unnatural, philosophical act to openly sympathize.
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Gloria Was The Little Girl's Name, And An Accordion Was Her One Fierce Desire
For many months, on her way to and from school each day, Gloria had paused at the pet shop window to gaze with a combination of adoration and desire at the pretty little accordion nestled there in its kennel.
Each night at the dinner table she would beg her parents to let her have an accordion –and not just any accordion, but the one, lonely accordion in the pet shop window. How she longed to have that accordion in her arms, to have it for her very own!
Her father, however, was insistent that they would never have an accordion in their home; Gloria, he said, was much too young, and an accordion was a serious and expensive thing. The world, he proclaimed, was already full of abandoned and unloved accordions.
Perhaps, her mother said, when she was a bit older, Gloria might get an accordion. But her father looked sternly at his daughter across the table and said, Not as long as I am in charge of this house. I don’t have a moment of peace and quiet and can barely make ends meet as it is.
At this, Gloria’s mother winked at her and said, Someday you will be older and you can work hard and save your money for an accordion of your own.
Finally, one day when she had all but given up hope, Gloria came home from school to find the pet shop accordion wrapped in a red bow and resting on her bed. She took it lovingly in her arms and was startled to discover how much larger it had grown since the first day she had laid eyes on it in the store window.
And then, as she cradled the accordion in her arms, Gloria found herself seized with a sort of panic that cast a dark shadow over her joy. An accordion, she suddenly realized, was a tremendous and perhaps terrible responsibility.
What, she wondered, shall be my accordion’s name? And what will I feed it?
As Gloria studied her accordion intently and ran her fingers over its beautiful details she also thought, How will I ever sleep again?
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Limbo, Limbo, Limbo
Question: How low can you go?
Additional question: When was the last time a Major League baseball team played so many games that so closely resembled World Cup soccer matches?
Another question: Who wants to weigh in on this team’s chances of finishing above .500?
One final question: What the hell?
And, further food for thought: Has anyone else noticed how oddly taboo David Ortiz’s name has become in any analysis of the strengths and failures of this organization? I mean, I know people have whined plenty about missing him, but that goes without saying. What really needs to be explored is how the hell this team let one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball –exactly the kind of hitter the Twins so desperately need– simply walk away just when he was entering the prime years of his career (and money, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with it)? How could they not have recognized his potential?
Just who the hell was the Twins’ hitting coach when David Ortiz was here in Minnesota? Help me out here, because I’m having a hard time remembering the guy’s name.
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Scenes From A Marriage
I apologize for the mess, Reverend, but I wasn’t expecting company. Things have gone to hell around here since Delmar moved into that old pop-up camper out back –says he got tired of captivity, as if that filthy camper he bought on eBay is anything but an even smaller cage.
That’s the thing about Delmar, of course; he never gets tired of captivity. The man can’t get enough of it. If you threw him out in the middle of the wilderness he’d curl up in a ball and starve to death before he even needed a shave.
I remember one time when we were still dating we went driving in the country just outside of town –I’ll never forget this, Reverend, not for as long as I live. There wasn’t nothing out there but gravel roads and fields and silos, and Delmar turns and says to me, “I get the creeps if I can see too far.”
Seeing too far was never gonna be a problem for poor Delmar, of course.
I always did know there was something just slightly off about that man, but I guess I took some small comfort in that ‘just slightly’ part. By now, though, it’s pretty clear there’s not a damn thing just slightly about it.
Everything’s gotta be whole hog with Delmar. He couldn’t just live with the crazy notion that he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body; no, sir, he’s bound and determined he’s going to go right ahead and become a woman.
Yet even that’s apparently not enough to make Delmar happy; you’d think it would be, but no, of course it’s not. Now Delmar is insisting he’s got to be a woman with big tits.
Good heavens. In a town like this? I can only imagine what people must be saying, and I don’t think I even need to tell you, Reverend, that the man sitting out there in that camper in one of my old house dresses is not the man I thought I was marrying.
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Time for a little levity
Brownback–isn’t that a species of great ape?Today, I take back everything I’ve said about David Brooks of the NY Times.
This is a howler. If you’ve spent any time at all listening to the confirmation hearings for John Roberts, you’ll like this. The only thing funnier is listening to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback’s performance in the original and imagining yourself as being represented by that moron.
Or is that tragic?
n.b. If you like reading the NY Times editorial columnists, as of Monday on it’s gonna cost you. They are going to start charging for access on the web. I think it’s a bad idea, but, what can you do? At least it’s better to pay for the NY Times than get that sorriest of op-ed pages that the Strib offers up for free.
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The Detonation Of A Mediocre Man
I’ll tell you exactly what I saw: they had the mediocre man trussed in a wheelbarrow and they rolled him out into the middle of the street and blew him up. He was round, agitated, and full of guts, and he babbled nervously right up until the moment when they set off the detonator.
I suppose to be fair I should point out that there were feeble bursts of indignation in the midst of the nervous babbling. I’m sure the mediocre man had some points he wanted to make, but by that time it was too late. Nobody had any interest in hearing what he had to say; we were all just there to see the explosion.
One of the –I’m not sure, really, what they called themselves. Rebels? Insurgents? I know there was some kind of acronym involved. At any rate, one of the leaders of this group read a prepared statement, but it was difficult to understand him, speaking as he was through a ski mask and without a microphone. I’m pretty sure I heard him say something about the ideals on which this great nation was founded, and I’ve no doubt he railed a bit about the corruption and abuse of power and the only justice unchecked power understands.
That, at any rate, was the sort of thing these characters were always carrying on about.
There was a decent crowd on hand (and it was growing by the minute), and the few government soldiers who were present merely observed from a safe distance. The guy who was doing the talking finally got around to pronouncing a formal sentence on the mediocre man. I didn’t catch all the wording, because the crowd was getting pretty riled up at this point –some people were throwing things– and there was a television news helicopter hovering directly overhead. What I did make out, though, seemed to follow standard bureaucratic boilerplate –“We hereby declare…,” that sort of thing. The usual nonsense, I suppose, but it struck me as kind of odd, given that these characters fancied themselves rebels.
I also thought it was odd that in pronouncing the sentence the guy actually spoke the mediocre man’s full name –Karl Christian Rove. The speaker, I think, clearly did a little improvisation at this juncture, declaring that the prisoner’s middle name alone represented a grave enough blasphemy as to provide all the necessary justification for the detonation.
It was quite an explosion, I can tell you that. I can also tell you that the mediocre man made a spectacular mess.