Life is moving on

John Ashbery

   I was sorry to hear that John Ashbery died today. Though not terribly sorry: 90 is an age we can all hope for and, anyway, a poet of worth never really dies, not in the way that you or I will.

   Sara Bader and I included excerpts of three of Ashbery's distinctive, enigmatic poems in Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery—"The Skaters," "The Ecclesiast," and, my favorite, "The Bunaglows," whose lines bear repeating on this day:

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way.
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planted and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterward, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back.
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on toward death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

     
   

How I got that bowling ball

    This is the column that explains how I got the bowling ball I gave away—or, rather, tried to give away—in the Saturday Fun Activity. What stands out for me upon re-reading is how different the media landscape is today compared to 20 years ago.  I can't imagine a publicist calling up and trying to get me to go to a party with a Hollywood actress—it sounds like something out of "The Sweet Smell of Success." The Goat is more of a tourist trap than journalist hang-out, or so I'm told. 

     Men are idiots. I almost said "Women make men idiots." But why blame them? They're merely being women, doing womanly things: lounging on red velvet chaises, brushing their long, golden hair, striding smartly about their business in those sharp suits. It's not their fault.
     It is men, weak in the presence of beauty, who do it to themselves. Who, in their infinite capacity to believe in their own imagined splendor, stride into light posts while straightening their ties in store windows.
     Particularly married men. I almost said "Even married men," but that also understates the case. To be married is, among other things, to be out of practice. Out-of-circulation, pickled in the brine of domestic bliss. The rare moments you are dragged out into the light of unfamiliar feminine society, well, you make mistakes. You head down into the basement to get your old bowling ball. . . .
     But I am getting ahead of the tale. It begins like this: I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when the phone rang. A publicist calling with—surprise, surprise—an opportunity. Usually I dispose of such calls in about five seconds. But this opportunity was a little different: a pretty young actress, Jennifer McShane, is in town, shooting a movie with Keanu Reeves. Would I like to meet her? They were having a party for her at a swell downtown spot Saturday night.
     "That sounds like fun . . ." I said, Jiminy Cricket pulling on my sleeve. "But I had better not." I had never heard of Jennifer McShane. I had no burning desire to write about the difficulties of filming a big-budget Hollywood movie. And yet . . .
     "Maybe we could set up something else up, then," the publicist suggested, and I felt myself weakening. I tried to think of some ridiculous, unromantic, neutered activity to invite the budding thespian to and came up with a doozy: "How about bowling?" I blurted out.
     The publicist said yes—publicists invariably say yes—and hanging up the phone I heard the reverberating gong of doom sounding in the distance. This was a bad idea. Embarrassment was afoot. I hadn't gone bowling in about 15 years. My last game, if I recall, I managed an 80. True, this young woman, judging from the 8-by-10 the publicist sent over, was a slight thing, willowy and undernourished. But there was a certain athleticism about her. Maybe she could bowl.
     I considered rolling a few practice games to sharpen my form. I swung by the AMF lanes at Marina Towers to get the lay of the land. I knew the lanes were there, in theory, but wanted to visually confirm it beforehand. It was like we were going on a date or something (you might want to take this moment to reread the first sentence of this column).
     I had forgotten that one of the many advantages of being married is you never have to meet unknown women at bowling alleys. I had forgotten how nerve-racking that could be and now was being reminded.
     Of course I told my wife about the rendezvous. God bless her, she was jealous. While the tabloids are not filled with tales of young actresses falling head over heels for the bowling flair displayed by endomorphic newspaper reporters who bear a passing resemblance to the Bob's Big Boy character at the age of 40, my wife—perhaps infected by my delusional view of the world—was worried about me being plucked away and ending up poolside in Hollywood, some actress's plaything.
     I planned to use my own bowling ball, purchased when I was a teenager. That'll impress her! I was heading down to the basement to retrieve my "Golden Knight" ball, a relic of my misspent teenhood, when my wife offered up a vital bit of helpful advice.
     "Why not just rent a ball?" she said. "Why lug it?" I paused, thinking, perhaps for the first time, and took her advice.
     Later that day, the publicist called. Bowling might be a problem, she said, schedulewise for Jenny. I leapt at the opportunity to reverse my folly: "Fine, fine," I said. "Bowling is a mistake. Let's meet at the Billy Goat instead. We can have a beer and talk about acting."
     At 5:15 I got up from my desk, announced that I was going to the Goat to meet a starlet and left the office. I don't write about the Billy Goat much—a very good columnist who is no longer with us already staked out that territory—but it is a nice place to sit and have a beverage. Like the basement of a crazy Greek uncle with a lot of friends.
     I took a table by myself, facing the door. The clock ticked. Every time someone came in, I looked up, expectantly. A few friends happened by, and we got to talking. I told them I was being stood up by the star of "Cyborg Cops 3." Finally, about 6:30, I abandoned hope.
     "OK, guys," I said. "I'm leaving. If any starlets come by, tell them they missed me." I walked out, thankful to be going home, and even more thankful not to be dragging around that bowling ball.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 1999

Saturday fun activity: What is it?

     Why didn't I think of this before?
     For years, I've posted enigmatic places, and only once stumped the Great Hive Intelligence.
     Because people get around. And anyplace I've been to and snapped a photograph of, odds are, one of the thousands reading has been to as well.
     But this ... this, thing, I have a good feeling about.
     A musical instrument, obviously. But what sort of musical instrument? 
     I'll give you two hints.
     First, it is a common term, not something exotic and unknown. It is something whose name people will have heard, at least people—second hint alert—of a certain age, of an age nearing my own. Younger people might not have heard of it, for reasons that will become obvious when I tell you what it is.

Obscure starlet Jennifer McShane

     So what is this thing? The winner will receive ... an undrilled, unused though not new bowling ball with an interesting back story. That is, you'll receive it provided you come to the paper and pick it up. I'm not shipping the thing. A bowling ball signed by the obscure starlet Jennifer McShane. And if you're wondering why I'm giving away an unused, though not new, bowling ball signed by obscure starlet Jennifer McShane, it is because I'll be moving to the new building in a few months, and it won't do to have all this stuff I've accumulated. 
    And if you're wondering why I own a bowling ball signed by obscure starlet Jennifer McShane, well, I tell the story in a column, on that I can't believe I haven't shared with you yet. But I will. Tomorrow. Do consider stopping by. 

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Plato's 'Republic,' ripped from the headlines

     Computers prevailed, remember, because they are far better than what came before.
     When writing, you can edit easily. No Wite-Out necessary.
     When reading, the endless resources of the internet are a few keystrokes away.
     But books are not entirely mooted. They retain advantages, which is why, unlike typewriters, they’re still here. Books do one thing technology is still terrible at: they stick around for a long, long time. Any given technology has a way of blooming dramatically then wilting fast. Everything I wrote on my Kaypro is lost unless I printed it out. The Zip drive I bought with my Dells? Useless. With the Cloud, thumb drives are as convenient as thumbscrews.
     But the copy of Plato’s “Republic,” translated by G.M.A. Grube, that I bought in 1981 for a college class is still here, booted up, ready to go when, on a whim, I plucked it off the shelf to pass an idle hour.

     Wow.

     The “Republic” vibrates with relevance, from the very first page, when Socrates and his pal Glaucon head down to check out a festival and, wobbling homeward, are overtaken by friends, who deliver an ominous invitation to stick around in town.
     “Do you see how many we are?” Polemarchus asks.

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World hounds queen like Diana was hunted

Shrine to Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Harrod's, 2009

     When the subject turns to the death of Princess Diana, 20 years ago today, Aug. 31, 1997, two memories stand out.

     The first is the manner I learned of the accident: from the Sunday New York Times, which was delivered in our breezeway on Pine Grove Avenue. Old school, even back then. We had a newborn, two months old, our younger son, and didn't watch TV or listen to the radio that evening. We weren't as plugged in, could go hours if not days without dipping a toe in the sloshing oceans of news. 
     Nowadays, you can't have a moment downtime, waiting for the elevator doors to open, without whipping out your phone and dipping into the constantly running river of information.

     Back then, I clomped out the back door, scooped up the fat paper log of a newspaper, stripped off the plastic, and saw a short, early bulletin, squeezed into a column on the front page, that told only of the auto accident in Paris. I  went inside, clicked on the TV; the grim music and somber tones immediately told me she was dead, even before I heard words confirming it.

    The second was a few weeks later, during the paroxysm of scorn for the media that follows. A photographer pal of mine, Bob Davis, and I were returning from a story when we happened upon a bad car accident in the Loop, on Wabash Avenue. A woman pulling out of a parking lot had run down a group of pedestrians. As Bob raised his camera to record the carnage, one of the on-lookers, rubbernecking for a view, some businessman, held up his yellow legal pad, blocking the lens, snarling something critical of the jackal pack media. 

    The irony of that moment stung and lingered. Here was a guy trying to do what? See what had happened. And while in the very act of trying to do that, he instinctively lunged to stop everyone else from seeing what happened. 
     Donald Trump might skate along on hypocrisy but he sure didn't invent it. 

    My column was still weekly, so naturally, writing a week after the event, I sidestepped the death itself and focused on what was most recent, the queen's speech. I was genuinely revolted by the public reaction to Diana's death: the  wallowing in sentiment, the hyperventilating exaggeration, the overwhelming bathos, the bottomless hunger to pry into the inner lives of those we feel we own.

     With all the sympathy and tears—much of it, no doubt, genuine—expended over the tragic death of Princess Diana, I hope you'll forgive me if I whisper a kind word about the villains du jour, Prince Charles and his mother.
     Perhaps I am stone-hearted. But I was far more interested in what Queen Elizabeth, pushed by public pressure in front of the TV cameras months before her usual day, had to say Friday than I was in witnessing Diana's funeral, the four-hankie culmination of this week's extraordinary worldwide keening.
     Would the queen, bending to the public craving for self-exposure, stoked to a white hot flame by the cheerleading British media ("SHOW US YOU CARE!" a headline demanded) drop 50 years of carefully manicured public decorum and break down, cry, give us a show, sing the old Bill Clinton standard, "I-feel-your-pain; you-feel-my-pain; we-all-feel-each-other's pain"?
     That was what the mob seemed to be howling for.
     Or would she—as I so fervently prayed—be true to herself, maintain the reserve that was once the very definition of royalty, perhaps slipping in a bit of pique? Stare boldly into the camera and say, in a properly icy tone: "How can you bloody pack of bloody jackals condemn the paparazzi out of one corner of your mouths while yapping for my son to go on the BBC and read a love poem to his dead ex-wife out of the other? How dare you?"
     Well, one could hope.
     Or would she, unaccustomed except at Christmastide to talking to an audience larger than a brace of corgi dogs, sleepwalk through a pained yet Buckingham-Palace-polished chin-up attempt at damage control ("I believe there are lessons to be drawn . . ." she said), lobbing a few shovelfuls of beach against the rising tide of ever-cheapened sentiment?
      That was easy. Door No. 3. And of course CNN immediately cut to the throng outside the palace, to pull a few average citizens aside to give the thumbs down on the performance.
     "Not enough," one said.
     "Not enough?" Isn't Rule No. 1 of etiquette that the parties most affected get to act however they like? That it's cruel to judge Mr. Widower for not crying at his wife's funeral and rude to express that judgment?
     And the really galling thing is that we're using the same cudgel that killed Diana to pummel her survivors. The public has no more right to know how Queen Elizabeth felt about the death of her former daughter-in-law than it did to see how Diana looked working out in her leotards. Those two interests spring from the same desire. The same demand that public figures—movie stars, political leaders, royalty—not only perform their jobs, but act as a sort of surrogate pal and fetish object to the body politic.
     Why should Charles—a reticent, solemn man who can't state an opinion without being mocked as a twit— suddenly be expected to spout his deepest pains on command, like a trained seal? Why should the queen suddenly be requested to emote like a diva? It's bad enough that people started lining up along the funeral route three days early, as if they were camping out in front of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before the Academy Awards.
     "Not enough"? It's already too much. Diana, in declining to act royal, in refusing to adopt the remoteness that the queen and Charles are unable to shed, might have built up a cult for herself, but she succeeded in pulling the royalty down to a state of low regard unequaled since the Roundheads were chasing the first Charles across the countryside.
     Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe royalty is bad, and the sooner it is retired, the sooner we can march off to whatever brave new world awaits us.
     We lie to ourselves that we loved Diana because she was so good, for her causes. But people didn't love Diana for her causes—we ignore causes. We scorn charity. Bor-ing. Except in the case of people like her, when causes are an excuse. How else to have parties? Unless it benefits AIDS or cancer or something, a masked ball is just decadence.
     People follow royalty for the same reason they play the lottery: wish fulfillment. Aren't we so interested in the royals for the very reason that the closest most of us will ever come to wearing a $ 200,000 ring or having tea and crumpets with the queen is to read about it, or to gape at it on TV?
     To suggest that people follow royalty for the good works they do is like saying that people play the lottery, not to spin dreams of wealth, but as a convenient way to contribute to the state's educational fund on an anonymous, weekly basis.
     So pity poor Charles and pity the queen. The reserve and decorum that seemed merely stiff before Diana will now appear inhuman.
     The only thing worse than remaining how they've always been would be to change—for Charles to start hanging out in nightclubs, joining conga lines with supermodels. For the queen to be photographed painting her toenails. Maybe that's next. God save the queen; God save us all.

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 7, 1997

   

Can't we pretend Hurricane Harvey didn't happen?

  
    What storm? You mean Hurricane Harvey? Or rather, so-called Hurricane Harvey?
     Never happened. An obvious fraud cooked up by Democrats trying to push their “climate change” agenda. The images on TV of waterlogged Houston residents being led to safety through flooded streets? Actors on Hollywood sound stages. More fake news by CNN trying to goose ratings with inspiring tales of rescue and . . ..
     Nah, it’s no good. Can’t do it. See, that’s why we liberals are at such a disadvantage. We have one hand tied behind our backs in the street brawl for America’s soul, denied the full range of fabrication easily employed by the Right, from simple bald lies (Ted Cruz first claiming he supported relief for Hurricane Sandy, then, fibbing again, insisting the bill was laden with pork. Which it wasn’t.) to the most elaborate fantasies (Alex Jones suggesting that Nazi protesters at Charlottesville were Jewish actors).
     Meanwhile, we’re mired in the troublesome realm of the real. Democrats just can’t contort our minds the way they can. We’re like rheumatic middle-aged men trying to compete on the pommel horse against Olympic gymnasts.
     I can’t even in good conscience hold up Hurricane Harvey — the worst rainstorm in United States history — as an example of climate change. While it is certainly the sort of meteorological disaster we are going to see more and more of as the Earth heats up, you can’t point to any one particular storm and lay it at the feet of our warming world. That’s why even though the evidence of climate change is as clear and undeniable as evidence that something wet and windy hit Houston this past week, that doesn’t stop Republicans from denying the former as they shed crocodile tears over the latter.
     Honestly, I’m not even comfortable using Hurricane Harvey as column fodder, because there are people involved. People suffering. Their homes destroyed, their lives upended. You don’t turn that into a joke.
    Either you sympathize with people or you do not. That is the essential gulf we see in America today.

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Fight night

     How big was the Mayweather-McGregor fight Saturday night?
     Even I watched it, and I had never seen a professional boxing match before in my entire life. The closest I came previously was a smoker at the Union League Club, and then we didn't pay as much attention to whatever was going on in the ring as much as we did our scotches and cigars.
     It was an accident of course. Friday was, well, one of those days, and when I saw my younger kid in his work-out gear heading for the Y, I said, "Wait five minutes and I'll go with you," and he graciously paused while I got dressed, grabbed a bottle of water and we went to work out.
    Exercise helps.
    While I was in the weight room, doing sit-ups, I heard an insistent, leathery, flapping noise, and realized it was the boy hitting the speed bag. I drifted over to watch, a blur of hands, the bag snapping back and forth faster than I thought possible. He invited me to try, and I did, getting up what I thought was a respectable rhythm.
    "You're doing it wrong," he said, and showed me his technique: hit with the knuckles of the fist then the heel of the hand, a double-tap with each hand that worked the bag much faster, so that even I could manage halfway respectable results.
    "How did you learn that?" I asked.
    "YouTube," he replied.
    Of course.
    I thanked him and, as we departed, we talked about how much fun the speed bag was—I usually end my work-outs with it, as a kind of reward. I mentioned the fight the next day, perhaps we could head somewhere and see it. He'd said he'd like that. A bit of online sleuthing told us: go to Buffalo Wild Wings.
    But they wanted $20 a head cover charge. And my other son wanted to join in. And my wife, who wouldn't actually watch a fight, but would go along with her men. Suddenly we were looking at $80 just to get in the door, never mind what we'd spend on wings, wild or otherwise. A hundred bucks to stream the thing at home suddenly seemed a bargain.
     It seemed a wasted opportunity, almost selfish, to just watch it by ourselves. Texts were sent, doors down the street knocked on, pizza ordered, and a party sprang up around the slugfest.
     The event started at 6 p.m. Having never watched a fight before, I ignorantly assumed that meant there would be an hour or two or preliminaries, then the Main Event. I stupidly began watching at 6 p.m., what turned out to be an hour lionizing the UFC fighter Conor McGregor, an Irish martial arts expert who despairing of worlds to conquer, like Alexander the Great, had challenged undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather to come out of retirement to face him. Then we got an hour of hosannas to Mayweather, including visits to his boxing center and strip club.
     Two hours of proof that, black or white, American or Irish, flaunted wealth ends up ridiculous and puerile.
     It wasn't boring exactly, with plenty of shots of exotic cars and a kind of pumped up self-assigned significance—not only would boxing be changed forever, but all sport, if not the universe nudged off its axis by this match. I smiling, remembering that a few days earlier I had never heard of either man. Their general tone of unashamed, counter-factual exaggeration made me think, more than once, of the current occupant of the Oval Office. The fact that he too isn't trailed by goons holding enormous championship belts above their heads seems almost a kind of restraint. Maybe that's coming.
     The truly boring part happened in the three undercards, as non-entity boxers poked at each other. The sport is condemned as violent, but these matches weren't violent. The contestants poked at each other in near-stupor. I knew I was in trouble about 8 p.m. when the talking heads introducing the matches did so from a largely empty arena in Las Vegas. The crowd wasn't even there yet.
     Fortunately I had the good sense to light the Tiki torches—will we ever look at them and not think of Nazis?—and build a fire out back in the fire pit, so we could repair there and take a break from the action, or lack of which.
     The main event began at about 11 p.m. Common wisdom was that McGregor, who had never fought a professional boxing match before, would have to overcome Mayweather, 49 and 0, early on in order to win. Mayweather, for his part, was content to keep his hands in front of his face, elbows close together and ward off blows for about the first eight rounds. As fit as McGregor is, he couldn't do that forever, and when he tired, in round 9, Mayweather began to pummel him and by the 10th round he was hitting him at will and the referee stopped the right to keep McGregor from being maimed.
    It was more complicated than that, but that was the essence.
    We all agreed that McGregor had not embarrassed himself, marveled at the sums taken in by the fighters—Mayweather earned a reported $300 million, McGregor a third or so—and declared the whole thing a success.
     Final thoughts? McGregor was undone by his personality, not his skill—as the bold newcomer, he couldn't have adopted the conservative strategy that won for Mayweather, even though that would have been his only hope, though not that doing so would have worked; then they'd both be hanging back, neither would win, and the audience would feel robbed. So everyone was forced to behave the way he did; McGregor's loss was almost foreordained by Fate. Hubris.
    What else? I was surprised at how poorly produced the opening segments were.  At one point they spent several minutes showing a poster of the fight, certainly a lost opportunity, considering that millions were watching. They were advising something we had all already bought.
    Given that the evening was bringing in the take of a Hollywood blockbuster, and that many people new to the sport were viewing, I would have imagined they'd have explained the terrain a bit more than reprise a few of McGregor's fights and show Mayweather getting on and off jets and talking about how much money he makes in a tone that, again, struck me as sadly presidential.
     On Facebook, friends wrung their hands over the violence of boxing. They should save it for the victims of actual violence. These guys are laughing all the way to the bank, and while I'm sorry it had to be done on this pretext, the fight led to a house full of my kids, their pals and our friends, so I can't complain either.