The Cry of the Pork Vendor

Okay, Gadda keeps hitting me with sandwiches. It hurts. "A sandwich with a slice of pork. Big enough to last two days." Couple of pages later there's "a kind of hamburger swollen with papers more than a generous salami sandwich"... okay, that one... there's a lot to "unpack" as a scholar might say, or scholars used to say, or did they ever say that? The latter is not a real sandwich. It's a wallet as metaphorical sandwich. It is, per the translator William Weaver, a "rotten wallet." And look, I don't want to eat a wallet. I don't even want to eat a hamburger swollen with papers, or anything rotten at all. Now, I wouldn't turn up my nose at a generous salami sandwich, although I am no longer allowed to have generous salami sandwiches under the constant hectoring threats of a well-meaning physician. But Gadda includes the cry of the pork vendor, "Get you [sic] roast pork here! Nice roast pork... golden brown." Golden brown! Dear Lord, how much of this can I take?

Rich in Ideas

Okay, in THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA, Gadda also mentions a "decoy owl on a stick," by which he means, I think, the same object to which both Charles Portis and Sam Shepard referred as a "dummy owl" ("click" here and here for details) and Larry Brown called an "owl decoy" (subtle difference). I don't know exactly what Stephen King called it because I didn't directly quote him regarding that aspect when the occasion arose. Most of all, I feel sure you will want to know that while King, Portis, Shepard, and Brown are talking about literal, physical decoy owls, Gadda's decoy owl is figurative, a way of describing the actions of a certain kind of person. You must take all of these factors into consideration when contemplating owls and plastic owls! When you think about it, Gadda has used owls three different ways. That's what we like to call real old-fashioned owl versatility. But the main thing I am noticing is the sandwiches. As you may recall, Dr. Theresa and I get distracted lately - haunted, really - by the sandwiches presented to us in arts and entertainment. I am going to describe some of Gadda's sandwiches from memory now, because the book is downstairs and I'm extremely lazy. One sandwich has three slabs of prime rib on it as big as terra cotta roof tiles, on a roll of bread "like a carpet slipper" might be a quotation. Well, it's close, if not. Another sandwich has alternating slices of mortadella and roast beef. As I lay in bed reading, I offered the sandwich descriptions aloud to Dr. Theresa. I thought about the sandwiches a lot! I kept picturing a roast beef sandwich I could have sworn we used to get at Alon's Bakery in Atlanta, but I looked it up... that's just how sad I am! And I am not sure it's the same sandwich. Well! I had a doctor's appointment today, so I brought along QUINCAS BORBA, which I have taken out of regular rotation - just temporarily! - because of pressing Million Dollar Book Club business. Let me first say that I was correct! De Assis has attempted no further reflections from a dog's point of view. But! As I sat there in the waiting room, it so happened that the author started a couple of roses talking to each other. Talking roses! But he did it in a way that lets us know he's just pulling our legs... whereas William Maxwell's dog stuff groaned (howled?) with a pathos that would have made Charlie Chaplin himself die of embarrassment. Besides, de Assis once again provides a wonderful justification: "a stretch of wall, a bench, a carpet, an umbrella, are all rich in ideas and feelings, when, that is, we are, too, and this exchange of ideas between men and things is one of the most interesting phenomena on earth."

Knowing Topazes

You know I have to tell you every time I read a book with an owl in it. But did you know I DON'T have to tell you if a book I read has more than one owl in it? Look it up! But sometimes I tell you anyway, because I have really, really great reasons. Like, for example, yes, THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA has a "handsome priest" who looks like an owl, but - and I found this out the other night; I'm ashamed of not mentioning it sooner - it also has a real owl in it, well, a real stuffed owl. The reader will of course be reminded of the embalmed owl in ULYSSES. This owl here we're talking about now, though, the moths have really gotten to this here owl, I'm afraid, but its eyes are intact. In fact, they're "knowing topazes, motionless in the night, in time, surviving the ruins of time." You know how it is! I don't know about you, but the knowing topazes in my stuffed owl's head are always going around surviving the ruins of time every time I turn around. You can't make this stuff up! And surely you recall the "cheap glass eye" of a hypothetical stuffed owl, the color of which (eye color, that is) bestows the title upon a Travis McGee novel. At this point I would like to assure you that neither Elon Musk nor his impish teen pal "Big Balls" can put a stop to the important work of the "blog."

Marshmallow Cigar

We have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Not really. Let's see. Something was on my mind. Yes, I was reading QUINCAS BORBA yesterday and the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Pick up TOM JONES, Book IV, Chapter I." All right. So, later, I got in bed and picked up a different book, one called THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA, and no sooner had I opened it to the passage where I left off the night before than the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Reread the sad and atrocious tale in WAR AND PEACE, book three, part three, chapter twenty-five." Is any of this interesting? I don't think so. I do think it's funny that the author (Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver) assumes I have already read WAR AND PEACE at least once. And before we go on, I would like to make clear that de Assis and Gadda italicize the titles of the other novels they mention. I only use caps here because I've never learned how to italicize on the "blog," or to make paragraph breaks, either, for that matter, and I never will. Meanwhile, back in QUINCAS BORBA, the author pauses the narrative again to relate an anecdote about the distraught owner of a burning house, and a passing drunkard who asks permission to light his cigar with the flames. Now! This struck me for a couple of reasons. But first I will quote de Assis's bleak commentary: "you don't have to be drunk to light a cigar on another person's misery." Anyhow! I did think that if I had read it in time, I would have found a place for it in my book about cigarette lighters, even though, just for starters, I spent God knows how many sentences tediously and pedantically (and probably inaccurately) ennumerating for the uncaring reader the important differences between cigarettes and cigars. The other thing I thought about was the cartoon I've mentioned here before, in which beatniks use a burning house to roast their marshmallows. Beatniks! When will they ever learn? But I would have mentioned none of this here had not a "handsome priest" appeared in the pages of THAT AWFUL MESS "with a pair of owl's eyes very close to his nose: which, metaphorically, between such eyes, could be compared only to a beak." Now, does that sound "handsome," I ask you? Before you answer, don't forget the book I found in the park, the authors of which seemed to consider owls very handsome indeed. All the strands of the "blog" are coming together. Soon, we achieve the singularity. (I don't know what that is.)

New Favorite Fish

Everybody has been wondering what my new favorite fish is, and it's halibut.

Devil Fox Trombone Opera Summary Mayhem

Yesterday, while I was "blogging" about the fox and its relationship, if any, to the devil, I happened to be listening to an opera called DER FREISCHUTZ, forgive the missing umlaut. And I'll tell you why! Why I was listening to an opera, not why to forgive the missing umlaut. So, I had read an obituary in the New York Times about the singer Edith Mathis, and as I often say, without joking, I get all my ideas about what to read and listen to from the obituaries. If you're not dead, don't bother me! Well! This opera really snagged my attention and I started looking into it. I noticed that there was a fox in the summary! And also, the devil! But none of that is what I decided to tell you. So, while I was looking up more stuff about this opera, I found a "web" site called Interlude. I won't "link" to it, because I can just tell from sad experience it will be a wasteland of zombie "links" one day and then when I'm 78, Lord willing, I'll have to go back and replace the "link." So you can look it up for yourself or trust me when I tell you that it mentions "quiet string tremolos and low trombones, an instrument traditionally associated with devilish doings." So! That reminded me of my famous novel SOUR BLUEBERRIES, which used to be on the "internet" - that's just how good it was! "Internet" good! - until I read that the platform I was using had also decided it was okay to host actual, real-life Nazis. So I was like, "No thanks." Later, somebody told me that the platform had entertained sudden misgivings about hosting Nazis, which I hope is true. But who knows in our hilarious modern times? Anyway, I can quote SOUR BLUEBERRIES here because it doesn't exist anywhere else and never will. And here I go! "Anyway, in today’s meeting I kept talking about trombones for some reason. I saw everybody’s eyes glazing over but I couldn’t stop." Of course, SOUR BLUEBERRIES was a work of fiction (wink, wink!) but that detail came from an ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE meeting I had. And one of the myriad boring things I was claiming to know was that trombones had been considered the devil's instrument! But I couldn't find any evidence to back that up at the time. I'm not saying I tried. But it seemed like something I might have "learned" in college, when I was a music major, which I'm not sure is a thing I have ever admitted here.

The Adversary

Well, Dr. Theresa gave me a sculpture of a fox (seen here with the cat who picks lottery numbers) for Valentine's Day! I found it bewitching, as did the cats, who first approached it with extreme caution as if it were a living thing. This is why I say animals can understand metaphors. Ha ha! Do I say that? Or symbols! Which is what Dr. Theresa and I started talking about... symbols, that is. Like, what is a fox, symbolically? So I rushed to Cirlot's handy DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, which had exactly one sentence about foxes in it. ONE SENTENCE! Come on! You're better than that, J.E. Cirlot! And it wasn't a very encouraging sentence: "A common symbol for the devil during the Middle Ages, expressive of base attitudes and of the wiles of the adversary." And honestly, that's a sentence fragment, with an implied subject and verb ("The fox is"), I guess. There's probably a word for that. Anyway, I was like, don't worry, I have a million dictionaries of symbols around here, I'll grab another one! So this other book of symbols, called THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS, had a much more expansive and satisfying view of foxes. But that's not what I want to talk about, and neither is this: as I was putting together this "post," I noticed that Hans Biedermann's dictionary of symbolism, called DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLISM, has been mistitled on my big long list of books with owls in them since the very first day I established it! Anyway, I'm going to fix that. So get off my back! I hate you! Now, what did I really want to say? Well, I'll tell you. When I got out THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS and turned to the animal section, I accidentally opened right to a page about owls. Now, listen. Nothing in this book tells us anything that you and I haven't already discussed about owls. But now that I know it has owls in it, I have to add it to my list. More work for me! What a life. What makes it all worth it is that no one cares.

Cat Money Update

I've already mentioned this to McNeil, Megan, Ace, Jimmy, and Bill, which is approximately four more people than read this "blog," so there is no need for this "post," except for my scrupulous honesty and shameless braggadocio. But anyway, the cat who picks lottery numbers successfully guessed three of them on last night's Match 5, bringing our total cat winnings so far to $34 + four free lottery tickets.

I Take It Back

Well, old Joaquim Maria de Assis really taught me a lesson. He has become one of my favorite writers, through the lens of his translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. So, you remember how I was passive-aggressively griping like a little sniveling coward about William Maxwell writing a jewel-like novella that is 20% (at least!) from a dog's point of view? So what do you think? Last night I'm reading de Assis's QUINCAS BORBA, and I hit page 43, and I say, wait! Is some of this from a dog's point of view? But! In the next paragraph, de Assis addresses his readers' concerns and says he knows what we're thinking, that, to paraphrase, nobody wants to read something from a dog's point of view. Then he makes his beautiful justification! "Yet the truth is that this eye" (the dog's eye, that is), "which from time to time opens and stares so expressively into space, seems to speak of something that shines deep within, hidden behind something else I cannot put a name to, something that, while it is intrinsically canine, is neither tail nor ears. Oh, the poverty of human language!" I love it. It almost made me ashamed. But 20% is a lot! I'll be surprised if de Assis spends over 1% of his efforts on the dog's point of view. Anyway, it reminded me that I was on a podcast a few weeks ago (it hasn't been released yet) and said a lot of indefinsible things that just kept spewing out of my mouth, including (and I think I'm quoting myself correctly) that "writing is one of the least dangerous professions." Now, what I meant, though I didn't express it clearly, is that you're most likely not going to hurt anybody with your writing, bearing in mind what I used to tell students, when I had them, which was, roughly, "Use all the adverbs you want! It's not going to kill anybody!" In other words, be bold, do wrong things on the page, who cares? Nobody! As for professional writers, I habitually listed crossing guards and short order cooks in a diner as people whose excellence at their jobs was of more immediate and pressing concern to the public. I considered this freeing and inspiring... though, as I now recall, when I was giving a guest lecture in a small classroom on that very point at SCAD, I noted that one student live-tweeted he had never been so filled with murderous rage in his life. Of course, I should have seen that my own advice would extend to a jewel-like novella 20% from a dog's point of view. In case you can't tell, jewel-like novellas make me throw up. Anyhow! The host of the podcast, I believe, understood me to be saying that the writer is never in danger, when I meant, conversely, that the victims of the writer (that is, the readers) were in no danger from the pitiful literary gestures of the writer, however dramatic. But to the host's point, we know that writers of various kinds have been endangered by their words throughout history and in current times, too! Most of us, however, stick to harmlessly exquisite novellas about dogs or... I don't know what other people write about. A thirty-year-old in New York City? Or some other godawful thing. And it's all fine! It's all fine!

Frown on It

I finished that book and it is - this is a very conservative estimate! - 20% from a dog's point of view. I reckoned you literary types frowned on such a thing! To be fair, it's close third-person we're talking about, technically, assuming we grant the dog personhood, which I am inclined to do. Example: "When the man and the old man started bringing things out of the house, the dog couldn't imagine what had got into them."

Enviable Birds

Hey! Remember yesterday when I was reading a book with an owl in it? Well! What if I told you that last night I was reading another book and it had an owl in it too? Don't get overexcited! So, after I finished BUDDENBROOKS (which did not have an owl in it) - buckle up! This is going to be quite a tale! - I thought at first I might like to read Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann. I picked it up (off the floor! For real! It's chaos here!) and read a little bit and the tone was uncannily like BUDDENBROOKS, which I am sure Colm Tóibín intended, but, to me, it seemed a little bit like I would be reading BUDDENBROOKS all over again, immediately, and as much as I enjoyed BUDDENBROOKS, I thought maybe something else would be in order as I toddled off to slumberland every night with heavenly angels standing guard over the bed. This story gets better and better! Stay with me! So I dug out what looked to be the opposite of BUDDENBROOKS, one of those slender, elegant volumes I hate so much, ha ha! I kid the slender, elegant volumes. And yet it is true that I would often prefer plunging into a thousand-page saga to opening some jewel-like masterpiece by an exquisite miniaturist sure to make my head hurt with all its simple elegance. But I found a promising volume of that ilk, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell, which was sent to me as a medicinal aid by my good friend Allyson during my recent convalescence. And it's good! And not quite halfway through it takes an audacious narrative turn that one does not expect in a volume of such elegant slimness! But that's not why we're here, is it? We are here to observe that "hoot owls" appear in the text, among a list of enviable birds that our narrator imagines populating the countryside, while, where he lives, in town, there are only some nice but sedate birds that, to continue paraphrasing, don't make such interesting noises as the hoot owls, mourning doves, whippoorwills, bob whites, and so on. Or maybe I've named them all! This slender volume of pristine elegance made an impression on me after all. And one more! Because I actually winced at a typo in it! Winced! Don't get me wrong, people. I don't mind a typo. I like them, even. I no doubt commit them frequently and don't even know it. Just the other day, I happened to find an old "post" in which I spelled Katharine Hepburn's name as, of all arbitrary choices, Kathryn! Did I fix it? Hell no. You know, I read some article that quoted Elon Musk - and I hate to mention his name, sorry! - a while back, and he said something like (I paraphrase quite roughly) "Robots will be writing good novels within three years." And I was like, "What's a good novel to this guy? One with no spelling errors?" Which made me throw up just thinking about the question. And so I was surprised at myself for physically, not just figuratively, wincing as I did at William Maxwell's typo. But look. If your book is a slender elegant volume of refined prose meant to be read through a jeweler's loupe, your typo stands out. In this case, we find a fairly large dog lying down in the grass and "resting her chin on her four paws." Now! Certainly our author meant to write "her forepaws." I am not the most imaginative person in the world, but I find it impossible to picture a dog resting her chin on four paws at once... whereas I have seen for myself with my own eyes a dog resting her chin on her forepaws. Would the dog not have to be a contortionist circus dog to do the former? And could such a position even be called "resting"? So either it's a typo or I am showing my ignorance about dogs, as I have shown it over the years about so much else. PS! Just as I expected, I was wrong. I should have known better than to accuse William Maxwell of incorrectly describing a dog at rest. That's a specialty of such writers! Anyway, McNeil, while unable to find an image of his own dog sleeping on her four paws, assured me that dogs do it all the time, and sent me the above photographic proof from the "internet." I guess I just couldn't picture a dog curling up. The commonplace things I cannot picture are without number.

Mann Crush

Finished BUDDENBROOKS. Didn't find an owl in it, crushing my previously stated hope - which really seemed possible! - that Thomas Mann would have owls in all his books. He was on a roll there! Oh well. Life just serves up one bitter disappointment after another. I did, however, stumble upon an owl in one of my secondary texts, the ratty, tattered paperback I found stuffed in a hole in the park. As you may recall, it's one of those books where Victoria is the queen and yet there are computers everywhere. You know. That kind of book. And two of the characters go to see a panto... you remember what a panto is! Remember when I used to help out with an annual Christmas panto in Chicago? What? You don't? Then why don't you just go to hell. So they go to a didactic panto featuring communist acrobats, you heard me. That kind of book. The name of the panto is "Mazulem the Night Owl." I think I spelled that right. I don't care, though.