The Umbrella Monster

umbrella1
Originally uploaded by DeaSuperba.

Emily has seen fit to retract her comments of my last post in her blog. I'm sure we are all thankful to learn that she does not, in fact, hate intellectuals. Perhaps she merely has an inferiority complex about serious thinkers. Indeed, someone who wears umbrellas may be presumed to have many inferiority complexes. One can only conjecture...perhaps she got frustrated with her business casual wardrobe...perhaps she's been watching too much MTV...perhaps she has fantasies of being a male bullfrog.

Emily: Prolific Writers Are Boring

I: "Calvin wrote the first draft of Institutes when he was twenty-six!"
Emily: "What a boring man."
I: "You think creating a system of theology and studying under the two greatest legal humanists in Paris is boring?"
Emily: "He must have done nothing but write."
I: "So you would have preferred that he go out and impregnate his lover and get himself castrated like Peter Abelard?"
Emily (unconvincedly): "Oh, fine - Calvin wasn't boring."
Moral of the Story: Don't write too much if you want Emily to think you're interesting.

Killing the Gypsies

Sometimes I get tired of the same faces on coins, the same name on Sharpies, the same publishers of books. Even going to Canada or England is a small relief because the chocolate bars are different. But there is nowhere to go on this earth that can really satisfy someone with wanderlust anymore. Everywhere there will be Jeeps, Adidas, and someone will speak English. Every mile of desert, jungle, or tundra has been photographed by some supercilious satellite.

Dona Anna and the Goats

I had owned four goats before. The first one was the runt of a set of twins that belonged to my neighbor. I bottle-fed him KLIM until he grew up into a friendly but sharp-horned billy goat that hung himself while grazing on the hillside. I wrote my first tragic poem and thought I had a broken heart. I still remember my dad desparately pushing the goat's chest, trying to get him to breathe again while I stood behind him and sobbed.

My next goat was a big, brown, bossy nanny. I used to lie against her warm belly as she chewed her cud. Then she got sick and died. Our brown, shriveled, jibaro neighbor, Don Julio, said she had eaten a praying mantis.

Next came Chocolate Milk and Butter Milk. Butter Milk was a tiny white kid. I gave her a bath every day until she caught a cold and died. Our neighbor lady Dalia said goats weren't supposed to have baths. Chocolate Milk was a bigger goat that belonged to my brother. He gave her to me as consolation for Butter Milk. She probably lasted the longest, but then she got into the sweet feed pellets, gorging herself until her stomach burst.

So by the time Goodness and Mercy came along, I was experienced with goats, both living and dead. I knew, when we got back from Christmas in Michigan, that Dona Anna, the 80-year-old woman in the tiny house with the large pen of goats, was trying to give me a different Goodness than the one I left in her yard a month ago. This Goodness raised her triangular head into the air and rolled her rectangular yellow eyes in an odd fashion. But Dona Anna was adamant and we took the same Mercy and different Goodness home.

In a short while they were pregnant by the next-door long-haired billy. Being very good goats who didn't climb on any of the cars except the rusty old Nova and rarely charged mom's flower bed, they were allowed to have the run of the neighborhood. One day they didn't come back. Dona Maria said that goats often disappear when they are ready to give birth, but I always thought the new Goodness was a foundling who had led Mercy astray and Dona Anna was a twinkle-eyed, mischeivous gremlin.

The Sole, True and Entirely Accurate Account of our Trip to VA Beach

Friday: 8:00 am: *drowsily* "my mom said there was a hurricane headed this way." "oh well, let's go anyway - it'll be fun." "hope they have a roll-away bed."
Friday: 4:30 pm: "You mean you don't know how to check your oil? Do you know how to pump gas yet?"
Friday: 5:30 pm: *after politely being asked whether she was ready to go* "MICHAELA!!!! Will you STOP nagging. You sound like my MOTHER"
Friday: 6:23 pm: "Do you have any nail clippers?"
Friday: 6:35 pm: *three cell phones ring simultaneously* "Yes, mom, Michaela is driving - I'm sure it'll be fine...I think." "Maria did WHAT????" "That's fine, Brooks, just don't make out on campus."
Friday: 7:00 pm: *blabbering in the back seat* "Is that my exit?...um, is that my exit? IS THAT MY EXXIIIITTT?"
Friday: 10:35 pm: *quiet, small, extremely deserted intersection in the middle of nowhere* "There were too gas signs back there." *four voices* "MICCCHHHHAAEEEELAAA." "OH SH***" "D*** IT." "WHAT ARE YOU DOIINNGG?"
Friday: 11:00 pm: "did you say there was a continental breakfast?" "it's a Days Inn?" "Yuck"
Saturday: 12:00 am "there's no roll away?" "look - my knees hang of the edge of the bed." "maybe we should let the two little people sleep in one bed so we don't crush them." Friday: Saturday: 12:03 am: "MICCHHHAEEELAAA - you can't go out there - you're in your pajamas!!!!"
Saturday: 7:30 am: "oh look - they have donuts!" "MICHHAEEELAA - what did you do to the coffee maker?" "can we stop at Starbucks?"
Saturday: 9:30 am: "gosh, there sure is a lot of SAND everywhere."
Saturday: 10:00 am: "MICHHAEELLA - don't you dare take a picture back there!!!!!"
Saturday: 1:00 pm: "Are those kids feeding sea gulls? I HATE sea gulls."
Saturday: 5:00 pm: "I KNOW there's a Haggen Daz around here somewhere....." "Can we just stop at the Dairy Queen." "NOOOO."
Saturday: 5:20 pm: "Can we stop at Starbucks?"
Saturday: 6:00 pm: "Ouch - my AASSSSS is burnt!!!"

Thanks again, Uncle Sam

OK, Emily, I'm going to link to a Fox News story. You can make all the nasty comments you want. But they broke the story...http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,128198,00.html

The US Department of Agriculture, which very logically controls these sorts of things, is considering non-renewal of the waivers that allow foreign doctors to work in the USA.

Why would we send back doctors that are providing health care in a time when there is a shortage of health professionals?????

Because they might be terrorists. Let's keep ourselves safe by getting rid of all the doctors. After all, we've just received breaking new intelligence that people who hate America might try to attack our financial and political centers (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/roost.html)

Hollow Men?

Do you agree with T.S. Eliot (http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html) that the world ends "not with a bang but with a whimper?" Is our civilization coming to an end, has it reached stasis (a la Fukuyama), or is it basically the same as past ages? The other day I heard an interesting proposition that the extreme sarcasm and irony among the young is a sign of a declining civilization. That seems rather tenuous - Alexander Pope was the most civilized of men and was extremely sarcastic.

Are You Feeling Better Now?

My favorite Decembrist song has always been Grace Cathedral Hill. It is poetry about real life. The songwriter is trying to find some sort of cheer in an atmosphere that stinks of fish and beer, in a world that will never belong to him. Small things, a candle, a hotdog, a paper halo, can make the people in the song feel better for awhile, but the foul smells and decaying buildings still assault their senses, making the world tedious. We can never always feel good. We can only feel better for a little while.

Sometimes I think I am a bad Christian because my life seems to go in circles. The older I get, the more everything that I see and hear and smell seems the same. Sometimes I find a new world in a book or a song to distract me, but usually there is a sense of suffication. Wanderers used to be able to escape the sense of sameness by perilous dangers into unknown forests and oceans, but now there is no unknown besides the void of space. Sure, there're drugs and booze and sex, but how long does it take for those things to get old or kill you? Why bother becoming callous to yet another world?

You can say that I'm to introverted, that I don't think about God enough, but God and Love and Transcendent Ideals aren't constantly invading your eyes, your ears, your mouth, your nose. If I put out my eyes so I don't see the big plastic M at yet another intersection, I won't be able to see the lightening flashes either. I've never liked television adaptations of the classics because when I read there are pictures in my head that are better than the ones on the screen. It's kind of hard to see God in my head except as a stereotype. I have a hard time not seeing Jesus in flannelgraph, with a blue robe and a white arian face. My earthly senses make me miserable because they keep me from focusing on the transcendent but they also provide such large compensation with beauty in music, in faces, in trees.

Book Review - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

My favorite character is most definitely the goat, Jolie. Of course, I have successively owned and killed 7 goats, all of whom I loved very much. Despite my bias, however, I find her the most amicable character.

I am not a huge fan of the Romantic school, particularly when it descends into the mawkish and fantastic, as this book occasionally does. Hugo, like his Romantic counterparts, uses gypsies, monsters, and lecherous priests for his main characters instead of the two-bit scholars and common folk who are much more compelling.

In the beginning Hugo painstakingly describes Paris and Notre Dame. This would be very useful but he does not paint particularly good word pictures, in my opinion. His description of the 14th century mob is much more interesting but, again, he ignores this in order to write about crazy women immuring themselves because their baby daughter got stolen by gpysies.

Again in line with his genre, Hugo nurtures his plot with large doses of unrealistic sentiments between men and women, hinting at sex but never being so bold as to discuss it realistically. Esmerelda goes about dancing, thereby raising the priest's lust, but she is never described in erotic terms. Quasimodo, a young man despite his deformity, possesses an unreal platonic affection for the gypsy girl. The only normal loves in the story, those of the soldier and the philosopher, are disparaged because they are not "strong" enough.

In nuce, Hugo's mixture of the fantastic and the tragic ends up being merely maudlin.

New Feature - Book Reviews!!

Mere titles are probably not very interesting for those who did not grow up wanting to be a librarian....

I think I'll begin with the books I presume are less read.

Madame Bovary

I found the style of this book a bit stuffy - that could, of course, be the fault of the translator and not the author. There were similarities to George Eliot, particularly in the minor characters. Although it begins like a typical Victorian novel, it becomes much darker, taking on tones of Virginia Woolf and the others who reveal the inner minds of unhappy women.

Only women and sensitive men should read this book. If you are an ordinary man, you will probably think Dr. Bovary is a perfectly decent chap and his wife is a weak strumpet. If you are a woman, you will sympathize with Emma, as I think Flaubert intends. Although she cheats on her husband, throws money away indiscriminately and kills herself, it is her atmosphere that is to blame. Her life has no windows: she tires of novels, her husband's crude attentions are unwelcome and her neighbors bore her. Perhaps her most unlikable traits are her pretentions of sophistication and inability to resign herself to her fate. The moral of the story: unless they have a strong bit of stoicism, moody women should refrain from marrying well-intentioned churls.

Random Survey for YOU

I have three questions I want answered about you (i.e. the people who read my blog, i.e. the people that may have worn berets once upon a time).

1. Do you consider yourself a stoic, a cynic, or an epicure?

2. Did you grow up in a suburban box or other form of plastic house?

3. Do you ever find yourself compelled to laugh at other people's injuries and misfortunes?

The Grandiloquent Dictionary

Ah, my fellow didine nulliparas  and wuntees,  you're going to drintle like a rixatrix over this website.  I was divigating from looking for GRE vocab lists when I found it.  It is a list of words that are in danger of being expunged from the common dictionary.  I think you will agree they are too daedalian to be lost.  I promise, they will so preoccupy you you will be as doytin a droud as I.  Brianna, I think you ought to take up dactyliology and teach Emily not be such as diepnophobiac.  Despite my height, I seem to be a bit of a nanophiliac.  Forgive my witzelsucht - here is the link: http://www.islandnet.com/~egbird/dict/dict.htm

Only Two More Weeks...

And I quit my job - my comfortable, well-paid, excrutiatingly boring job - which is only tolerable because I can lose myself in audiobooks.  But the job is so very necessary.  The older I get, the more money it takes to keep me in comfort and style.  Our society makes it very difficult to step off the treadmill of consumerism.  I suppose I could do it, but not if it meant reverting to denim jumpers and birkenstocks.  I think I would have to move back to the tropics and build myself a palm frond hut on the beach and eat mangos, which I don't even like.  No thank you, I think I'll continue running on the treadmill until I fall off.  Besides, I am rather good at subtle acts of rebellion.

I want to live in Paris and Hong Kong and Africa and Montana and finally die on a fishing boat like Thomas Hudson....

Call Me Irresponsible

I am trying temporarily to escape (look Emily, no split infinitive) from the Greek verb eimi. It calls louder and louder and distracts me.

Do you ever begin to think youself very brave? Very grown-up? Be careful! Suddenly you will be walking down your own tree-lined, safe, sidewalked street and a truck will pass by, a flag pole cable will clink and a dog will bark all at once. Your instincts, which your mature consciousness had thought mastered, will nearly send you scurring under a bush. Primal fear is never very far away. Do sights or sounds frighten you more?

Do you think anyone has ever come up with a good explanation of what creates quality in art? Doestoevsky and Hemingway are so different in style and content, but they are both "good." Is it originality? Is it a distinctive style and mastery of language? Is it the metaphors and philosophical undertones? Is it realism and compelling characters? Is it all of these?