... from whose bourn

"I asked if I might go out for a breath of fresh air. The doctors answered 'Yes, just close by, for half an hour.' "

So Queen Victoria, at the bedside of her adored husband, in December 1861. He was dying. She needed a respite from it all.

Why is it, given the collective human experience of death, that the individual human brain is not yet "hard wired" to understand it? "None of this makes sense to me," the grieving say when it is all over, or shortly before it's all over. "Everyone else is enjoying their lives, and he is dying."

And yet, on all our own happy days when we were enjoying our lives too, someone was dying.

At best I suppose it's human societies which have managed to hard-wire themselves into understanding it, which is why religions and civilizations have rituals to ease the dead into the ground and the mourning through the necessary time. But the human being, alone, is still at a loss. We suffer physically, from a wound like an amputation. Even if we weren't constantly and effusively friendly with the person who died, even if it was someone we saw twice a year, still this was a fellow traveler, perhaps born before me and therefore a part of life since before time began. After the amputation you can only look at the stump in shock, bind it up or do what you can to help people suffering worse bind theirs, and wait to get used to it. While thinking, this was someone who lived before me -- before time. How can time die?

Perhaps the worst of it is just fear. We can't help but think ahead. Here death has happened to someone else in the herd, but surely it can't happen to me. Not to me, the very special Ivan Ilych who, in Tolstoy's story, "had a striped leather ball as a child." Think of all the people I was born before, all the people to whom I am prehistory, I am time. How can I die?

And it can't happen to me like this -- physical pain, helplessness, anger, drugs, muddle-headedness, starvation, ravaged body, near-ravaged personality. The disbelieving struggle for last breaths, the terrified begging of family for help when there is none to give and even panic is immaterial. This body got diseased, randomly. I wonder if, on the first day, the diagnosis makes everything look different, even to the angle of the sun in the sky on a beautiful summer morning, even to the surreal look of other, healthy people out walking their dogs and conversing easily ... this body is finished. You must learn, now, what we witnesses will follow you into learning. But not yet.

It's our witnessing and surviving of it which seems an added cruelty to the dying, and which gives an added sickly prick of fear and guilt to the survivors. Every single mourner still eats and drinks afterward. Maybe not as much, but the food still goes in and digestion still works. Every mourner, if he was a caregiver at the end, needs "breaks," Queen Victoria style, from the watching and the waiting. If I were the dying one, I think I would resent my loved ones going off and needing breaks. Really? But you're going to live, tomorrow. How's that for a nice break? I wonder if, when it's our turn and everything is reduced to one hospital bed in one room and a last few minutes, we'll see them gathered as though at the end of a tunnel, a hollow place far away where everyone is still in the pink of health and frankly looking forward to being able to consult their own needs soon And when it is all over they still laugh and tells stories, in between bouts of crying and silence.

Scar tissue forms. Society or church ease us through the rituals that human beings in the aggregate have learned bring comfort, even though human beings as individuals don't understand this death. (Although, really, modern funeral rituals are getting very pathetic. So many people are basically non-religious that even "services" run under the auspices of a big, popular, catch-all evangelical denomination are little more than ad hoc family reunions in which it so happens everybody is wearing black and crying. There is no liturgy. A family spokesman gives a speech about the deceased, and humor is required. The deceased's favorite music is piped in. It's downright tacky, and there is no hint of awe at this person's "entering into eternity." That one phrase from Reform Jewish funeral services has always appealed to me. It may sound overly grand, but it focuses the mind. It seems to reassure us: this, very minor, person has gone where you all, very minor people, are going, and where all other people -- and aren't they all very minor, in the end? -- have gone and will go. So be still.)

Then one day when we scarcely notice the scar tissue anymore, when we feel pretty good and are at peace with the universe, maybe after we have been through this a number of times and think we know death, -- barring accidents, I suppose we do suddenly find our old striped leather ball.

*Queen Victoria, A Personal History, by Christopher Hibbert (2000), p. 280.

Field trip -- the beach

A rather lowering day at Indiana Dunes State Park, all high hazy clouds and cool, damp winds. The soft sunlight on the pebbles made them gleam as if they were in moonlight -- I suppose. I've never seen the beach at night.

Below, a native plant up on the dunes. Milkweed, I think. I have the same in my garden.

And below, the dunes. The lake's waters reached this far -- and much farther -- in previous aeons.

The beach was not as empty of people as these photos suggest. We chose to picnic in an area where there were no lifeguards and therefore no swimming allowed, and therefore fewer would-be swimmers. Besides, one can always grab the camera, get up from the beach towel, and keep on walking toward still more isolated spots. 

Come to think of it, why do masses of people obey two teen lifeguards who drive around the beach in a dune buggy, mournfully telling their fellow citizens that they mustn't swim here, but may swim over there where lifeguards are posted -- and where it's correspondingly crowded? One angry lady raised a sensible point. "Why on earth," she yelled, "is it any safer to cram hundreds of people into one area of the beach, so you can watch them there? We've got this whole beautiful beach -- you are not going to be able to save anybody in trouble. You won't be able to see them." And the teen had to explain, in age-old fashion, that he was just following orders.

There was nothing for the erstwhile swimmers to do except either leave the water -- which they did -- or leave and go swim where the rules allowed it. Or rise up, French Revolution style, and hurry the teen lifeguards à la lanterne, or (and this would be better) simply ignore them. But people don't ignore authority. It's a pity, but it seems the bureaucratic, Leviathan nanny state has ground all of us down in this way. When we are faced with a silly command from people who deserve to be ignored and who are embarrassed at giving orders anyway, still our minds work forward and anticipate the sanctions. If we don't obey, eventually the kid will fetch a higher authority, not because the issue is so important, but because it's as much as his job is worth not to enforce rules he's been told to enforce. The higher authority will then be able to impose real sanctions -- at minimum a "scene," at maximum physical removal from the park plus probably a fine. Meanwhile, the day of fun would be ruined, when all we need do to go on having fun is obey the orders of the nanny state which can claim it is only looking out for our safety anyway. Doctor Johnson would never have tolerated this. The Duke of Wellington would never have tolerated this. Our ancestors of a hundred years ago would not have tolerated it. Maybe the liberals are right. Maybe human nature can be changed.    

Although, to be fair, nothing prevented anyone from wandering off and swimming far away from other people, teen guards, the nanny state, and all. And there were plenty of dogs on the beach, despite the signs warning "no pets." Maybe the teen guards had long since decided to pick their battles.

And finally, I am puzzled to know why anyone should have decided that a stock image of a bewigged eighteenth-century French couple in a bosky glade adequately represents the experience of going to Indiana Dunes State Park. I found this plate at a local thrift shop a long time ago, and bought it as a curiosity. We didn't bother stopping in any gift shops this day, so I have no idea what sort of souvenirs are sold on behalf of the park now. Perhaps, years ago when this plate was made, some foreman at a Chinese factory simply glanced at the wrong order form and gave the nod to the wrong assembly line. And there we are.

God

Look closely, and you'll spot him waving from the distant clouds. From a psalter belonging to King Henry VIII; scanned from the book Henry VIII and his Court, by Neville Williams (1971).

We know we mustn't think of Almighty God as an old man in heaven, crowned and robed, yet how often the image crops up -- in Western art, of course. There is a precedent for it. In the Bible, Daniel says:

I beheld till thrones were placed,
And one that was ancient of days did sit;
His raiment was as white snow,
And the hair of his head like pure wool;
His throne was fiery flames, and the wheels thereof burning fire ... (Dan. 7:9)

Have readers noticed the large number of posts lately that are a bit long on pictures and a bit short on text? I hope no one minds. Working retail during the holidays, having the flu, and tending to the wine blog have all taken quite a bit of time. Will attempt to become as verbose as ever, soon. 

"Half the charm"

"Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold in the rough stable ...."

Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan, 1912

It's happened

It's happened. I've looked and looked again, checked and double-checked. I've waited a day, a week, and checked again.

Remember the "Woo-hoo demographic"? Remember my unscientific monitoring of the mommy-bloggers who all loved and voted for Barack Obama, and kept his blue and red Hope badge on their sidebars forever? Do you remember my worry at the way they utterly ignored him after the twin joys of election day and inauguration day, my fear that they constituted a huge demographic able to put him back in office in 2012 no matter what, precisely because they loved the hope and the excitement and novelty, loved the idea of a better future, loved Michelle and the girls and didn't care about anything he actually did? ("Thank God it's over. I'm BORED. I need a new toaster.") I said that I waited and watched, looking for some sign that even they might at least be paying attention to his behavior, his words. Something. This was back when his returning of the Churchill bust was still a bit of a shocker, at least for those of us outside the woo-hoo demographic. What kind of ill-bred infant needs to make a gesture like that? And so much more to come.

I waited for one mom blogger in particular to take his badge down from her site. Of all of them, I followed her most, and saw her as probably among the truest-to-type of that happy, energetic, good-souled troop of people. I thought, when the day comes that she takes the Hope badge down, it may indicate that the Great God has lost someone significant, or lost people like her in significant numbers. Perhaps both. 

She's taken it down. Perhaps she just got bored with her sidebar after roughly two years, and it's silly and meaningless of me to plumb depths there. But it's happened. It was the change I was waiting for. Boo-yah.

Hello, mom bloggers! Someone? Anyone? (March 2009)

Hey, Jude! Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby and Lucy left home on Penny Lane, and went to Strawberry Fields with the fool on the hill while fixing a hole on the long and winding road with a little help from their friends

Or, what gets engraved in your brain while listening to the Muzak piped into a grocery store every day. Lord have mercy, how I do loathe the Beatles. And who decided that only their most depressing songs are slow enough to please the morning shoppers, who tend to be elderly and (I suppose) in need of nice slow music to keep them maundering along the aisles and absently filling their carts with more stuff? Who, I ask?

Someday I want to own a grocery store where we pipe in Saint-Saens' Bacchanale the moment the doors open at 7:00 a.m. I don't know what other music, but certainly that.   

The single greatest movie scene, ever

All right, perhaps it's not the absolute greatest. Professional movie connoisseurs will gasp in derision and point to the Odessa steps scene in Battleship Potemkin, or the chariot race in Ben Hur, or anything from Citizen Kane, or the burning of Atlanta or who knows what else.

But I pick this one, so we'll just call it my favorite movie scene, ever. It's from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Tippi Hedren, as the impossibly blond and rather too smirky Melanie Daniels, climbs into a little rowboat fitted with an outboard motor and chugs across Bodega Bay to drop off, all in secret, a cage of lovebirds at Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor)'s house. She is dressed in her best traveling-to-the-boondocks-from-San-Francisco clothes: pencil skirt suit, hose, high heeled pumps, scarf, fur coat -- three quarter length, mind you -- bag, and gloves. And of course she must carry the ultimate whimsical accessory, the birdcage.

The scene begins when she writes, left-handedly, "To Cathy" on the envelope that she will drop off along with the birdcage. (The birds are a putative gift for his little sister.) She pops the envelope into her handbag, jumps into her adorable roadster, and roars down from Bodega Bay proper to the pier where her hired skiff is waiting. She climbs down the rickety ladder tacked to the dock, heels, skirt, fur, bag, scarf, gloves, and all, and steps in. It rocks alarmingly. The man in charge of the thing helps with the cage, gets in too, starts the motor for her, then climbs out. She is on her own.

Off she putts across the bay, a well dressed little figure who would drown in a moment if the slightest mishap should occur on the water. ("Can you -- handle an outboard motor?" the nice man asks at the general store before he reserves this conveyance for her. "Of course," she says.)

When she gets close to "the Brenner dock" she cuts the motor and paddles her way in. What I like about the rest of the scene is the way Tippi Hedren has been trained to look proficient at handling the boat. Who knows, maybe she knew how anyway. She does things in all the right order, things that I certainly wouldn't know how to do. You see, you pull up to the dock, lay the paddle on the floor of the boat, and loop a rope from the boat around a post on the pier first; then you step out to the pier. In heels, skirt, hose, gloves, bag, scarf, and three-quarter length fur. Plus birdcage.

She trips along smilingly up the pier, across the muddy yard, and into the empty house. Mitch is in the barn, and so as she delivers her surprise and the explanatory envelope and then leaves the way she came, all is suspense and tiptoeing and a dozen looks over the shoulder, as the camera's eye -- her own -- pans farther and farther away from the terrifying but exciting open barn doors. Then, it's back to the skiff, and all the correct actions in reverse. You step in, pick up the paddle, steady yourself on nothing but your own strong legs and those stiletto heels, and use the paddle to push and turn the boat's nose out toward open water. The actress is willing herself to stay upright and yet look natural and excited about her practical joke -- which helps make the scene natural, in its way. Lastly she sits down, pulls the securing rope off the big wooden post, and heads out. I'd be the landlubber type who would frantically try to push off with the rope still stupidly looped to the pier, or before that, the type to try to emerge from the boat without tying it up first.

And all in that skirt, hose, heels, bag, gloves, scarf, and gorgeous but not too ostentatious and wintry fur. The greatest movie scene, ever. It was 1963. Don't tell me feminism came after this, and made things better. This woman could outclass just about anybody, thank you so much. 

Image from moviediva.com

For ye be villeins (another California decision)

It's the illogic of it that ought to stand out, even for those of us who have been cajoled into supporting the right of homosexuals to "marry," mostly because we want to be good-natured, and because for fifty years our civilization has accepted that no discourse can possibly be more exalted than civil rights. The illogic of the judge's decision consists in this, that at some point, gay marriage activists will have to slam the door behind them, on all the other people who will want this right too. If marriage can be expanded to include same-sex partners, a thing no human society has ever dreamed of any more than it has ever dreamed of legislating that cats shall be dogs or day shall be night, then there is no logic in closing off "marriage" to anyone. Brother and sister, adult and child, more than two partners -- who shall say any joining is incorrect? Today's activists will have to either return to the notion of human taboo in order to shut the gates, hardly a sophisticated argument (albeit enough to have trumped them), or follow through in their moral posturing, open the gates fully, and announce that all sexual behavior is good and laudable.

The first alternative would prove them self-serving hypocrites and the second, collective sociopaths. They won't want to accept either alternative. They like the here and now, and their celebration here and now proves that the point of the gay marriage drive has always been to assault common people's beliefs, and morality itself, for the sake of assault.

I don't know what the upshot will be. If I were a fiction writer I would notice the current trend of young men and women living together without marriage, and put into my books something about youth no longer sullying itself with a polluted institution. Or I'd think about a futuristic tax revolt -- about some enterprising software engineer starting work, this very moment, on a computer program that would enable retail stores to bypass the automatic collecting of state sales taxes, for example. Cheaper goods would mean a satisfied and surging customer base, that is, until the authorities noticed and came with their handcuffs and their jail sentences. Then there might be the plot line of the mass of ordinary citizens simply choosing not to file. Why willingly pay the salaries of our oppressors?

Would a fiction writer think also of sketching in some details about violence -- revolutionary violence? Is there any logical precedent, would it feel emotionally right and in keeping with characters, motivations, etc.? What if army units abroad should begin to decide that events at home, at the highest levels of leadership, are totally unacceptable?

I suppose for the maker of fiction it all depends on fictional characters and fictional motivations. The Jacquerie rose, you know, and lots of other peasants at other times and places. And who was it who made an agreement with them and then broke it, sneering, "for ye be villeins, and villeins ye shall remain"? "Whether you like it or not" is the modern translation. It was some king, I think. 

Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin


The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell

Foursquare

For quite a while, and beginning fairly early I remember, I had it in mind to invent a new type of literature. Well, naturally, who wouldn't? I think it was a childhood dinner table conversation that set me off, although it sounds obnoxious to claim so. One night, someone at the table said there are only three basic plots in either books or movies: man against nature, man against man, and man against himself. (Make no mistake, our dinner conversations were rarely so exalted; possibly on this afternoon we had company, and somebody made a real effort to be bright.) I was startled and outraged by this pronouncement. Do you mean there is no new story to be told? But alas, probably, yes. Try thinking of any story that does not fit those three parameters. Man against space alien doesn't count -- that's just man against man, again.

But if there are only three basic plots, surely they have all been done to death, I reasoned. Of course my ten- or eleven-year-old self did not quite reason it out immediately that night. Later I did. And I stored up resentment, as I thought hard. It might help to know that my absolute favorite pleasure reading during these middle school years was Louise Fitzhugh's great diptych Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. In one of the books, when Harriet and her preteen friends are confronted with an adult question about how they plan to solve the world's problems, Harriet, the writer, barks: " 'Well, we'll FIX it.' " I loved Harriet.

Eventually I fixed upon the mental image of literature as a sort of box drawn on paper, divided into four squares. Three of the squares are labeled. One is Prose, one is Poetry, one is Drama. (The dinner table conversation seems to have convinced me to dismiss all idea of coping with the established-plot problem. I went straight on to what seemed the real fundamentals now, the much huger genres of composition.) In that drawing, the fourth square gapes tantalizingly empty. Can it be filled with something new?

I thought perhaps a new language would do. Well, certainly, why not? Time was passing, I was reading other things besides Harriet the Spy -- though not much with as much pleasure -- I had met teachers and professors who remarked in passing how difficult it is to rhyme in English, but how lilting and fine old Chaucerian English used to be. "Whanne Aprille with his shour-ese swe-te," and so on. A new idea. Not a Romance language, modern English lacks the abundance of soft vowel endings gracing Italian or Spanish words, so I thought, why not tack some back on, Chaucer-like? Fill in the fourth square with a new and lovely sound, that will transform all the styles of composition and even the exhausted plot lines.

But "rhoses-e are red-e, violets-e are blue-e" is laughable. Besides, the point of language is to be understood.

I tried writing poetry, never a strength anyway, while actually listening to classical music, to see if I could at the least write in a rhythm that people would recognize as "why of course, that's the Fifth Symphony," or "it sounds just like she was listening to the Nutcracker Suite." The exercise failed.

Then a community college English literature class laid an anthology of experimental fiction in my lap. I pored over it, loved it and hated it, above all resented the evidence that other people besides me had thought recently of trying something new. And had already gotten published. None of the pieces in the book were enjoyable, and all have fled my memory now, except for one superlong paragraph by a 1960s icon (Joan Didion?) in which a girl chronicles a stay in a mental hospital, and a "story" that was only a list of the billboards the author had seen on a drive across America. The professor who assigned the book said he felt sure a new type of fiction was on the point of being invented, and that it likely would involve computers. He wanted to try writing stories in which the reader, with the push of a button on a computer console, chose plot twists and helped determine endings. I snorted inwardly: that couldn't be it.

My little project stayed alive enough in my thoughts for little things to keep sticking to it, just as you might add to an odd little snowman on a dull winter day, not by getting down on your knees and packing up and rolling snow in the usual way, but by throwing snow randomly at a sort of lumpy white goal in the middle of your yard. And letting other people do so, too. I collected helpful quotes. Some famed writer said, that if he could have mastered an economy of words as he wanted to, he would have become a poet; if he could at least have mastered brevity enough to become a short story writer, he would have done that; but since his talents were poor, he became a novelist. It may have been Faulkner.

Ah-hah, I thought. There's something in that. Stuff is too long. The original synopsis of Gone With the Wind, printed on the inside jacket flaps of the 1936 edition, is a superb condensation of the whole thing. The anonymous copywriter at MacMillan who wrote it had a talent as extraordinary, in its way, as Margaret Mitchell's, bless her. Why not let novels follow that genuinely new pattern? Later I thumbed through an obscure literary catalogue and saw a book for sale -- if memory serves -- titled something like On the Making of Books that are Too Long. The novel is finished, this author believed. Ah-hah, I thought. To be sure, this subset of the square labeled Prose in my diagram doesn't look like it's finished, not if you walk into a library or book store and see the fantastic wealth of product on the shelves, and all of it being of the proper, uniform, "serious" thickness. But is it possible that, when any product is so abundant, it is also inwardly empty of meaning? Can there be much too much of a good thing, long since?

Prose, poetry, drama. If you are confined by three basic human plots, if you can't create a new poetic language and novels are too long, what's the fourth square? I never did, incidentally, wrestle with drama, though I actually wrote one play and had fun doing it. (God knows if it would ever be considered produceable.) There seems not much to do to that Drama section of the foursquare. What the ancient Greeks established and Shakespeare perfected, is impervious to further fuss.

I still kept thinking. Once in a while, other things stuck to my little project, my interior literary snowman. The Harry Potter phenomenon descended on the world, and a local newspaper article quoted a local boy standing in line at a bookstore to buy his copy of The Sorcerer's Stone. "It's different from other books," he said. "In every other book, the kid has a problem, he solves the problem. But Harry is a wizard ...."

That's true. With the three basic plots inescapable for all mankind, the gatekeepers of literature, children's or adults, today seem to have given up, recognized this, and lowered their sights considerably. For them literature has whoomfed down in a corner like a dog who ignores three big identical roasts sitting on the kitchen table, and busies himself instead with a little random beef bone, the little insistence that the Protagonist shall Solve a Problem. Not that problem solving isn't a part of great literature and of the Plots, but as a mathematical formula it is now so overtaught in schools and so overdemanded in submission guidelines that it really has become dull and stifling. A starvation bone-diet for the little dog. The guidelines for a prestigious children's magazine used to insist not only that the kid solve a problem, but that it be a unisex problem -- one that either a boy or a girl could likely face -- not involving war, death, or illness. Even lacking such details, the simple rigidity of the Problem guideline insures that third-rate talents, whether editors or writers, clog the fountains of creativity with correctly assembled papers that seem to imitate art imitating life, but are instead just a correctly long traipse up and down what middle school teachers call Fiction Hill. Passionless; idea-less; and a lot of it.

I'm sure it wasn't always so. Try reading a few short stories from a different era and see how curiously older and fine writers, subservient as they were to mankind's plots, nevertheless did not just give their protagonists a problem. Somerset Maugham wrote a story about a woman at a dinner party shocked at the arrival of another woman wearing a fatally important pearl necklace. That's all. Rudyard Kipling, in Plain Tales from the Hills, wrote about the tragic, unseen life of a beautiful Indian girl whom an English sahib did not marry. She waited for him, he never returned, she married someone else, became a village crone, and died. That was all. I suppose in a way both protagonists -- let's call them heroines, that might help -- had problems, but they were not put through earnest paces as problem-solving professionals. They were observed as heroines. I wrote a little story, which I haven't looked at for a long time but which was a favorite, in which a male character -- a hero -- was also simply observed being what he was. An editor wrote on it, "Style in the piece needs development." I smiled, in not too superior a fashion I hope, and muttered at the rejection slip, "Very good! That was the point."

I submitted the thing because after some years puzzling over my foursquare pattern, I had what seemed a revelation, something to fill the empty space. I think it must have come after one last little fling of snow got added to my inner literary snowman. This one was the best: it's the scene in the old movie The Women, in which a very garrulous salon manicurist discusses good books with the patient and regal Mrs. Stephen Haines (Norma Shearer). Mrs. Haines is trying to read, as she soaks her fingertips in the bowl and then submits to the file. "Don't you just love to read?" the little manicurist gushes. "How do they ever think up those plots? Of course, I guess everyone's life would be a plot if it had an exciting finish."

Yes. God, yes, brilliant. Everyone's life would be a plot if it had an exciting finish. But there often aren't any. I'll be brilliant now -- I shall invent the Half-story. Life is full of half-stories -- people you know for a time and then never see again, titillating rumors you never hear confirmed or denied, strange or even quite ordinary scenes which could mean nothing, but could be ripe with hidden secrets. The man answers the department store P.A. system at a certain woman's checkout station ... it is an isolated part of the store and he leans in closely to her after his phone call, hunching his shoulders and lowering his head to whisper something private near her bright blond curls. They both grin down at the countertop littered with wrapping paper and pens and scissors, friendly, at ease, a little excited but totally intimate. Both deep into middle age, he rough and pock marked, she drawn and thin and grey at the roots, but bright eyed. The young woman striding by glances and sees a world, a past, -- but not a plot. Write what you know, the literary rules say. But what can she know? She wonders, have they slept together? An employee Christmas party -- years ago -- too much to drink -- a mistake, yes, spouses told and not told, guilt, regrets maybe. Maybe not. No real harm done. And ever afterward, this little lightning leaping between them, this little fizz of excitement and pride and affection. The End.

For who on earth is really an omniscient narrator? and anyway, after every denouement, life goes on. Especially for us. We live in this big country where people, family, friends move away for good, or for forty years, which amounts to the same thing. In a light-hearted book called Entre Nous, all about the differences between American and French culture (especially for women), writer Debra Ollivier tossed off a seemingly offhand, even lazily phrased comment about American families. And yet it's also the most bitterly profound imagery in her book, which I'll bet is why her editors kept it despite the literal vagueness. She says: touch an American family, "and you touch the edge of a continent and faded memories."

That's all. We're also reputed to be not good at intense friendships. Perhaps we treasure our privacy; perhaps we hide because we know we'll all move, and we like to forestall the pain of everlasting goodbyes. We walk past the couple hunched over no connection stronger than a long past secret -- we know only illusions, half understood denouements, half stories. Our main entertainment lies in watching shifting pictures on a screen, shifting, literally flashing fast enough to create the illusion of movement and reality, purporting to tell stories and to show life. Watch an old movie, and see the sunlight of seventy years ago, individual pictures of it flashing, angling on the face of a starlet long dead. She acts out a story about something else; illusion upon illusion upon illusion. Shouldn't whatever is put in the foursquare of a new literature, shouldn't literature in general, reflect all this? Why the continuing mania for tight plotting and satisfying endings? That was all very well for our ancestors, who lived life fast and straight ahead and dealt every day with master and slave, work and rest, priest and saint, farm and famine, winter and summer, beginnings and endings. Death at thirty. Perhaps we're different, and need different stories. The strictures of the old ones seem so tired, and so false.

Oh, and by the way. I excuse historical fiction from my questions and my rigorous non-rules. I was only reminded of historical fiction because I see by Debra Ollivier's website that she is working on a historical novel. That's different. With history, you know what happened. A life there tends to have an exciting finish.

And so I have never yet been able to fill in that fourth square. I admit to being partly stymied, long since, by the discouraging information that the best people consider the search for newness in the arts to be the sign of an immature mind. My early master Louise Fitzhugh expressed that judgment herself, in a way. In The Long Secret, Harriet, the writer, nags her moony and artistic friend Beth Ellen into confessing the details of her first day with her long-lost and wildly glamorous mother, newly arrived from Biarritz. Beth Ellen shyly and resentfully answers questions but then clams up at what Harriet considers the high point of the day -- the top of Fiction Hill, as it were. " 'There's nothing more to tell,' " she says. Harriet gapes at her, inwardly fuming that "it's a good thing she doesn't want to be a writer. Her books would all get thrown across the room."

Indeed they would. Beth Ellen had all her facts and wasn't even paralyzed by the useless desire to create something new. She just couldn't bother finishing up a well-told tale. And everybody wants a well-told tale. Never mind complaining about mankind's basic plots and his inescapable genres -- never mind, perhaps, singling out those examples, like Maugham and Kipling, whose excursions into gentle plotlessness probably are the exceptions proving the rule that tighter stories will always naturally enter mankind's beloved canon, as Plain Tales from the Hills has not. We may as well quibble over there being only two sexes, or over the conventions of walking upright.

But I still like to think my foursquare gapes open, for a better mind to fill. Beth Ellen's halting answers, her trying to gauge information and relationships she half understands, and chronicle a day with people she hardly knows, accurately reflect what life is like even for the writer who then delves into the inventive joy of omniscient narration. Her books would be real, even if they were thrown across the room. Or vice versa.

I begin to understand

I begin to understand why a landed aristocracy should have arisen over the course of centuries in Europe and particularly in England. It makes sense, if nothing else, as a way to stop the galloping growth of government. There is nothing for political candidates to do in the modern world except perpetually run for office, perpetually promising us what they'll do for us (with our money) and perpetually legislating, legislating, legislating. The time will come when there is little left to legislate except, as our next Supreme Court justice seems to think is fair, what we must eat and drink every day.

I think I would prefer living in a system where a landed aristocracy controls the reins of power, but at least goes home to its estates and does nothing but wallow in idle privilege for a large part of the year. Squire Allworthy, hunting, shooting, fishing, and wenching, and occasionally rearing foundlings, would at least be in a position to leave us all alone when Parliament was not sitting. He could ride the circuit as a justice of the peace, too, I suppose, and hear cases and ladle out right and good, and get a little more fishing and wenching done that way.

Who wants to vote for a return to dukes and earls? Do you think an American earl would understand the premise? I'll bet his countess would.

The most beautiful movie costume ever

Of course I haven't seen every movie, though I have seen quite a few. And I haven't seen or been properly struck by the glories of every costume ever designed, but in all those movies I have noted my share.

This one made my jaw drop.



It may look ho-hum Tudor, but you must imagine it in color: pink and silver brocade over vivid cranberry-colored underskirt, the cranberry bands on the sleeves all individually hemmed in small, perfect rows of seed pearls. White ruff and lace fan collar. Jewels, of course, though they hardly matter beside the color.

Bette Davis inhabits a gown by the legendary Orry-Kelly, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Oh yes, there's Errol Flynn too, but somehow one forgets him.

A new experience

What I saw and heard at a political candidate's "meet and greet" at a crowded local sports-bar restaurant, amid the thundering din of twenty televisions blasting out the Chicago Black Hawk's Stanley Cup playoff game (#6 in the series):

I saw a barely-known candidate and his staff circulate among tables full of strangers, introducing the concept of a challenge to a Chicago Democratic machine incumbent whom most political observers would consider unbeatable, no matter the dirt clinging to him.

I saw a handful of people, among them young marrieds and another political candidate too, approach him, introduce themselves, and talk to him about their concerns.

I saw a young woman approach her potential future U.S. Congressman and ask him "just one question" -- namely, whom he held finally responsible for the oil spill in the gulf. His answer satisfied her, and then she explained her background. Her husband, she said, worked for BP, and most people's views on the subject infuriated her because most people did not have the facts. (I didn't. Who has ever heard of TransOcean, and the argument on the rig the morning of the explosion?)

I heard the candidate's campaign manager describe her own experience running for office in the state. She was ahead in all the polls, she said, until the Wednesday before the primary election this past February. She attended meet-and-greet events, she traveled, she spoke with mayors in her district, she tried to be the best candidate possible and to get the word out about herself and her views. The weekend before the election, her opponent, unknown, inactive, and invisible, received a cash dump of $35,000 into his war chest, the bulk of it from a local union and the rest from two big local construction industry firms. "So what did this do?" I asked -- "it bought exposure for him?" She agreed. "It bought exposure," she said. He won. Memo to the common man: you may only contribute $2400 to the candidate of your choice, in a primary and in a general election.

I saw the candidate's wife, young and pretty, cheerfully greet total strangers in a loud, strange, and tiring venue for what probably seems, and indeed may be, the umpteenth time that day, that week, that month. It was also their wedding anniversary.

I saw the candidate, and the staff and the small handful of people who had come out to meet him, at length relax and eat potato wedges and chicken wings, and crane their necks to watch a bit of the hockey game along with the rest of the patrons, because really there was no getting away from it.

I heard the candidate admit "it is tough" drawing a decent sized group to these meet-and-greet events. It's only June, the November elections seem a long way away, and the very people who might be most inclined to vote for a conservative Republican representative in Illinois are also the type to not put politics at the center of their lives. They are the type to want to live and let live.

And at the end of the night I saw the candidate take the bill for the potato wedges and the chicken wings, look at it, and reach into his back pocket for his wallet and his credit card.

We all shook hands and left, and the hockey fans stayed.

By the way, the Hawks won.

For more information: Isaac Hayes 2010

Alphonse, the evil neighborhood cat

Alphonse is not really evil, it's just that our own cat, Martha, thinks he is. In truth he may be misnamed as well. He may be Alphonsa. Or Alphonsina?

This cat, black with a white chest and white paws, has prowled the neighborhood for upwards of five years. He survives all weathers. I have seen him loping down ice-crusted backyard snowdrifts in the howling winds of February, and trotting along the alley in the sunny blazing heat of August. What he eats or drinks in any season is beyond me. He must know how to hunt, for I've seen him eagerly tearing at and gulping down things in the neighbor's lily of the valley bed. And yet he is also glad to consume a plate of roasted chicken by porchlight on a darkening winter afternoon, when nature's pickings must be slim.

Last spring, a full year ago, he emerged with a friend who looked exactly like him, accompanied by three gambolling gray kittens. Unhappily, the three gambolling kittens were picked off, I fear, rather quickly by an impersonal and pitiless fate following the glorious day in May when they leaped about the soft green grass, learning the difference between sun and shade, and practicing climbing trees. In a few weeks there was one kitten, and then there were none, and Alphonse's friend also disappeared. But the two adults looked so alike -- perhaps it was Alphonse (or Alphonsa?) who disappeared. Perhaps this seeming long-term survivor is actually the Friend.

At any rate one of them is back, and taunting Martha as usual. Martha used to be a stray herself. She is an enormous and beautiful calico, picked up on the streets of Whiting, Indiana, three years back and shipped off to the local Humane Society shelter in nearby Munster, which is where I found her. When I first brought her home she was thrilled to be with people and to have a whole domain to herself. She sat in laps, and purred. Then after two weeks she came to her senses, remembered she was a cat, and became cat-like again: aloof and imperial, willing to tolerate being fed and let down into the basement to prowl her daily rounds, willing perhaps to sleep on the humans' ankles at night provided they didn't thrash about too much. To this day she hovers about doors and windows, always anxious, it seems, to get outside again and give the local squirrels what for. I don't allow her out, for fear that she would be taken, at best, or at worst meet another impersonal fate under the wheels of a car or in the talons of a local hawk. (As the Lolcats site might put it, "hawwks -- we haz tehm.") We scold her that she "doesn't really" want to go back to Whiting and all her reprobate friends.

Now that the good weather is here and the windows are open again, and only flimsy screens stand between her and freedom, the main and terrible excitement of her life has become Alphonse. She does enjoy some mild excitement year-round in the form of our other cat, Nicholas, whom I adopted (much to her shock and disgust) a few months after Herself. But he is so fat, and deaf, and friendly, and oblivious, and he slouches so in doorways, that he hardly counts as a proper enemy. One may sneak up behind him and box his ears -- she seems obsessed with his ears -- and be done with it; and as for the times he chases her under a bookcase and keeps her penned there hissing, his white tail puffed up like a bottle brush, well, the less said the better.

But Alphonse. Alphonse is a challenge. He saunters along the sidewalk of a morning, under the mulberry tree. He has the effrontery to actually mount the steps to the back porch, and once even to jump on the purple table there and peer into the office window. Her office window. Sometimes on deep quiet nights in summer he patrols the front of the house, skulking along close to the wall in the soft dirt beneath the evergreen bushes, directly below another of Martha's very special observatory windows. And she can't get at him, because of the d----d screen. She sits there, fat and tense, watching Alphonse's lithe virileness, and she makes horrible high-pitched noises in the back of her throat.

We named the virile one Alphonse in a moment one evening this week. My daughter had been saying that if ever "we" get another cat, a good name for it would be Alphonse. I thought this an excellent idea, and then as we pulled into the driveway, returning from a family party, there he was -- the black neighborhood stray with the white chest and the white paws. "Ooh, look!" I said. "There's that evil cat Martha hates. Let's call him Alphonse." And while I was babbling about Taking Him In, my son got out of the car and bounded up the porch steps three at a time to go in the house. It was a late and chilly evening, past eight o'clock. The summer darkness was at last falling, and the robins were chirping, not only their evening carols in the distance, but their slow, rhythmic bip--bip--bip that means "danger" closeby.

Then there was a sudden, startled movement, a confusion, a blur, and a rattling among the furniture and empty clay pots at the corner of the porch. My son reared back and gasped, "Nick got out." This is bad news. Nicholas really is deaf, and commensurately panicky at any moment. (The staff at the Humane Society warned me that he is a sweet cat of course and just like other cats, only um -- moreso, because of the deafness.) When he decides a certain situation has become uncomfortable, he bolts for safety where another cat might merely begrudgingly shake itself and saunter off. We call it freakout mode, and there's no knowing when it will come. Since he has never been declawed and since a characteristic of freakout mode is that all twenty little nails flash out as he gropes for traction, we just stand back. Indoors, he need only fly under a bed or a couch until he feels better; the danger of his ever escaping the house is that there would be no way to call him back, and increasing panic would send him shearing ever off into the beyond like a great, fat, white fur golf ball. Like Martha, he would be a beautifully colored target for any predator.

Indeed "Nick" had gotten out, but how could he possibly? We were away at the party and had safely locked the house. Then we noticed. The screen on the office window, giving out on to the porch -- one of Martha's special observatory screens, looking over Alphone's porch, you might say -- had been burst through, and dangled crazily off the window frame. There inside the office, perched on her computer printer but with full free access to the outside world, sat Martha, looking somehow determined, guilty, and perplexed all at once. Nicholas cowered in corner of the porch, amid last year's clay pots. Alphonse had long since vanished.

I grabbed Nicholas from behind, after first trying in vain to get his attention with hand-wavings near his head and with thumps on the porch floor beside him. (I should explain that it's a high porch planted with tall bushes here and there, and built in such a way that I could approach it, and him, directly from the driveway, with him at my eye level but unable to notice me.) I didn't know but what one unexpected touch of a human hand might go through him like an electric jolt and send him soaring into the darkness, claws scrabbling for a hold. But there was nothing to do but grab him before he bolted anyway.

He held steady, my husband cleared away the protective furniture, picked him up, and brought him inside, and we all followed in and made sure of ourselves and him and Martha being inside the house. Then we looked about, secured the hanging screen, stepped on a few large flying bugs that had taken the opportunity to explore the world of humans, and generally talked and exclaimed and worked off the adrenaline that had gone coursing through five people at once, at this unprecedented crisis. A stenographer taking it all down would have found us talking in enough soulignes to satisfy Queen Victoria herself. How did it happen? We thought someone had broken in. And Martha -- what a brave cat, protecting her home! And I petted her as perfervidly as if she had brought home one of those offerings -- a bird, a mouse -- that we are always supposed to praise our pets for. Honestly, the things that pass for crises among pampered people really don't bear thinking about. Our hearty ancestors used to tie cats up in bags, with only their heads exposed, and hang the bags from a tree to use for archery practice. Not that I agree with doing that.



After that stimulating evening, the next morning Alphonse returned. I was calmly eating my breakfast when I heard Martha, once again in the office and at the vital window, making that horrible high-pitched noise in her throat which either sounds as though she is sick unto death, or as though she is seeing pure evil in action. And there he was. Alphonse, the neighborhood cat.

He is frightened of people and of doors opening, but I moved quietly. After spying out how things lay, petting Martha and reassuring her on her wonderful good sense and keen powers of observation, I went into the pantry. I fetched a handful of kibble from the plastic jug where we keep it -- she knows the delicious sound of that rattle, of course -- closed up the jug again, and then softly opened the back door and stepped down the porch stairs. She was still on station at the office window, but made no move to burst through the screen again. (We've wondered whether, for all her imperiousness and growlings, it may have been Nicholas who did that anyway. He was the one actually outdoors. This morning, however, he was asleep and oblivious.) I laid out the little handful of kibble on the sidewalk, and in a few moments Alphonse came along and ate it. Then some people walked past, and he scampered off. Until next time, I presumed.

I have thought that really I ought to make an effort to collar Alphonse, as someone once collared Martha, and bring him to the Humane Society where he too may be cleaned up, fed regularly, and have a chance to go to a "forever home." But then I think, after all, Alphonse so far has been doing all right for himself. He is free, he shows no signs of being in any major cat fights, he seems not to be ill or even overly skinny. And anyway he has all the amusement he wants in Martha -- and sometimes Nicholas -- and their observatory windows. The occasional plate of chicken or handful of kibble may or may not be welcome. When he returned for a third morning, I thought, O God -- now I've done it. He expects to be fed, poor thing. So I stealthily put out another handful. But at the end of the day it was still there, food for ants. Apparently he had better things to do, or to eat.

Only do not tell Martha that. Souligne.

Who are the 29?

Once again, a tiny minority submit to sharia, Islamic law and its inherent triumphalism, on our behalf. Who are the 29 members of New York's "community board 1" who voted to approve plans for a 15- storey mosque practically at the site of the World Trade Center? In an interview with Rush Limbaugh yesterday, Andrew McCarthy says the mosque builders intend to have it built by the tenth anniversary of the attacks.



Image from Standbesideher.com

Do you think this man, rather nattily dressed for a nice late summer day, would approve?

It's hate

So, now "we," the U.S.A., have decided to support a United Nations resolution demanding that there be a nuclear-weapons free Middle East -- how sweet -- and that Israel specifically should open up whatever facilities it has for inspection. No mention of Iran, which is thiscloseandgettingcloser to a nuclear bomb which it has in turn promised to use against Israel. All this, by the by, just before a meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. I guess maybe this time Netanyahu will get something to eat, and not be left alone to cool his heels in the White House while his host goes off and has dinner with his family.

All the smart people who write politics are working, right this minute, on proper, cool, yet properly anguished and deeply intellectual responses to this up-ending of a decades-old friendly American policy toward Israel. They'll have their articles up by tomorrow morning. I can save them a lot of trouble, and assure them the day is coming when they will have to simply admit: Barack Obama may not be a good old fashioned anti-Semite. After all, it seems he can put up with Rahm Emmanuel without throwing up in his mouth. But he is a good old left-wing American academic who loathes Israel and could very calmly see ... well. Let's just say the day is coming when an event will occur that will force the commentators to say: he's not naive. He's not inexperienced. He's not puzzlingly or foolishly fixated on a post-modern world where ideologies, like those of the mullahs eager to bring the Mahdi back via bombs on Tel Aviv, don't or shouldn't matter. I would venture to say, he's not even really "young."

He's a hater. Yes, maybe U.N. resolutions are toothless in themselves, and maybe there is some kind of pathetic comfort in that. But Obama has opted to change this one piece of American foreign policy specifically because he hates. I daresay in this case there is something personal in it. Benjamin Netanyahu has what Barack Obama doesn't have -- a biography. Good luck persuading him, in deeply intellectual and anguished tones, back from where he is and delights to be. Then again, maybe they won't bother trying. Maybe this is the event.

Where is "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"?

I only learned about yesterday's being "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" on Facebook, just in time for Facebook to shut down the page. Once again, as with South Park, as with Yale University, as with the Metropolitan Museum of Art canceling an exhibit, as with all the newspapers in America that refused to publish "the Danish cartoons" -- once again, our elites capitulate to sharia on our behalf.

Facebook's "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page was put up in a burst of enthusiasm by an artist named Molly Norris on April 20 of this year, partly in reaction to Comedy Central's censoring of the South Park episode in which, no, it seems Mohammed was not depicted in a bear suit. A character in a bear suit was referred to as Mohammed. Norris suggested May 20 -- yesterday -- should be the day that everybody draw something similarly idiotically random, like a teacup or a spool of thread, and call it "Mohammed." It was all about the fight for free speech. Her own cartoon, below, is excellent.



Image from wikipedia.

Her idea took off, the Facebook page grew, prominent bloggers and news sources approved of it, anti-"Draw Mohammed" Facebook pages started up and of course gained followers, and she got scared and backed off. Understandable, but very regrettable. Her original thought, a mere month ago, was that if millions of free people do this, Muslim terrorists won't be able to kill every one. Noble and rational -- until you get famous and it occurs to you that they may nevertheless be able to kill you. Also, her intention, which on second thoughts all good Westerners repeat endlessly, was "NEVER" to disrespect religion. The extensive Wikipedia article about her quotes her own website in late April:

"This was always a drawing about rights, never MEANT to disrespect religion. Alas -- if we don't have rights, we will not be able to practice the religion of our choice. [...] None of these little characters ARE the likeness of Mohammed, they are just CLAIMING to be!

"I, the cartoonist, NEVER launched a draw Mohammed day. It is, in this FICTIONAL poster sponsored by this FICTIONAL GROUP," [referring to the 'Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor' wording in the cartoon]. "SATIRE about a CURRENT EVENT, people!!!"

Well, maybe. If she never launched "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," if it was only a one-time phrase in a single cartoon's fantasy world, then why go to Facebook with it?

If the breath of Muslim supremacist terror, the breath of thirteen hundred years of sharia -- which lays down among other things that no, we can't choose our religion, and it is forbidden to criticize Islam -- can reach a lone Seattle cartoonist who was trying to do the right thing by free speech given the fate of people like Theo van Gogh, then we can begin to understand what courage it takes for artists, writers, and politicians to do the right thing who are far more in harm's way. Who are living in Muslim-dominated Europe, for example, and need security guards around them in order to give a classroom lecture on free speech. A Muslim killed Theo van Gogh. Nobody to my knowledge so much as threatened Molly Norris. It was just the idea -- and a very vivid one it is.

Not being a cartoonist, I have no drawing to offer as representing Mohammed. Although, given the point of the joke, any one would do. I'm more interested in literary images. Consider this, from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXVIII, on the Sowers of Discord in the eighth circle of hell:

A wine tun when a stave or cant bar starts
does not split open as wide as one I saw
split from his chin to the mouth with which man farts.

Between his legs all of his red guts hung
with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder,
and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung.

I stood and stared at him from the stone shelf;
he noticed me and opening his own breast
with both hands cried, "See how I rip myself!

See how Mahomet's mangled and split open!
Ahead of me walks Ali in his tears,
his head cleft from the top-knot to the chin.

And all the other souls that bleed and mourn
along this ditch were sowers of scandal and schism;
as they tore others apart, so are they torn ...."

Translation by John Ciardi, 1954. The poem itself was written in the early 1300s. Seven hundred years before the Danish cartoons, why on earth would Dante have done this? Just a bigot? Or did he know something?

Art exhibits

In the richly red and beautiful Sidney R. Yates gallery of the Chicago Cultural Center, two modern art exhibits are just coming to the end of their run.



One is called "Expect the Unexpected," and is a collection of paintings -- plus one delightful set piece that the viewer walks into as if he were entering a painting -- by Hollis Sigler (1948-2001). These paintings first caught my eye from outside the gallery's glass doors because they looked so pretty and colorful, so unlike modern art. I walked in.

The paintings are pretty and colorful, and they have interesting and poetic titles. Some Days You Feel So Alive. One of the best is It keeps her going, a beautiful imaginary scene of a table set for two on what seems a tropic beach, under an incongruously huge splashing fountain, all seen through a curtained window. Before the window lies assembled all the accoutrements of daily life: stove, washing machine, a little electric mixer here, an ironing board there. It's all done in a childlike, firm, skewed-perspective style called "faux naive" I gather, and this one especially is witty, light, and if not profound, at least pleasing.

It didn't take too long, however, to figure out that all the paintings in Expect the Unexpected, scores of them in total, are about breast cancer. Hollis Sigler suffered it and died of it while just in her early fifties. Her mother and great-grandmother had also had it, and knowing this from the accompanying brochure helped lay the foundations of a foreboding which otherwise the gallery patron might not have looked for in any Sigler works before 1985 (the year of diagnosis).

As I walked about looking at all the paintings, and reading the descriptions beside them -- she wrote long explanations of cancer research, or of her own treatment at the time of a particular work, on the frames, explanations which are hard to read and whose prose has therefore had to be posted neatly under plexiglass alongside -- it struck me that this isn't so much an art exhibit as it is a voyeuristic plunge into Everywoman's nightmare. After a while, the motifs of little birds, chairs, skewed-perspective rooms, dead trees, cracked mirrors, and bloodstained women's clothing become emptied. As art, it's not much beyond the level of greeting cards. The heavy reliance on text seems almost a cheat, or for a painter a crutch at any rate.

But as chilling, vicarious descent into illness and death, woman's death, the exhibit is fascinating, the moreso to women. Brochure in hand and plexiglass addenda well digested, I found myself looking for signs that the sufferer's, the patient's, painting changed in 1985. I found them. Her paintings turned red. Just before the fateful year, she could still paint a bright picture of a woman in the shower, her bathroom filled little hairdryers and stockings and lots of other stuff pertaining to beauty and grooming. There is still foreboding here, because we know that many women inadvertently find the lump in their breast while showering. But the picture itself is still a picture filled with normalcy and a future, and all the colors of a spring garden.

Then, 1985. Lump. Family fate. Diagnosis. Change Doesn't Come Easy for Her shows a volcano spewing rocks, snakes, birds, and lizards into a room; a television set is cracked and a chair and coffee cup bounce and spill. Yes, that is illness: what was normal yesterday, and what you felt you were entitled to because of course everybody lives normally and you are normal just like everybody, is no longer yours. (A later work in fact is titled something like "This is no longer yours," and copes with another effect of illness. No, you can't walk, run, or garden now. My lord Sickness has shaken His royal Head, and said you are unable.) Another red 1985 painting, another grappling with "it's happened it's happened," shows a Greek statue (the famed bronze Poseidon Soter, I think) with broken arms in a little shrine on a hill, and a river of lava flowing down from it to busy, bright, modern Everywoman's world. There are chairs and wine bottles and clothes and green trees and shoes. It's More Than the Loss of My Breast shows another skewed-perspective room, full of womanly things, a pretty dress, high heeled shoes, a broken pearl necklace, a chair and a vanity with a broken mirror. All the things that don't matter anymore when you've had your mastectomy.

Or maybe they can still matter. Some women survive breast cancer. Maybe a lot of women do, which is why we hear so much about it. I recall reading this once -- it was the opinion of a doctor I think -- who also pointed out that there's a painful reason why society bothers to designate a color "for" breast cancer ribbons, but not, say, for pancreatic cancer ribbons. (Gray? Black?) Not too many survivors to hold fundraisers for there.

But is Hollis Sigler's breast cancer journal art? We read the frames: "now the cancer is in my bones, my pelvis, and my spine." We shudder vicariously. In small later paintings, she raised up, in thick applications of paint the same color as the scene, single words that physically loom: Heredity, or Organochlorides. We shudder again: imagine having to come to terms with sheer stupid bad luck. Why did it have to be me, and my great grandmothers? But at last, that raising up of paint, a physical sensuous thing -- not prose, not explanations -- struck me as art. Art: communicate something to me in some other way than explanatory prose and illustrations. Make me "see" in some other way (which is a gift that explanatory art gallery brochures are always claiming artists have), a way I also can't necessarily put into explanatory prose.

Seeing so little of that in Expect the Unexpected is why I could turn to the neighboring, much smaller exhibit and learn with surprise that even though it didn't look nearly as colorful or pretty, it showed the work of a far better artist. Angel Ortero (Touch with Your Eyes) lays on to canvas or wood little squares of gold paint, silicone, and what looks like mesh and foil, and creates an elegant, monochrome mosaic picture of a vase of flowers on a tabletop covered by a carelessly flowing cloth -- or is it a woman holding the flowers in her lap, and is that perfectly molded gold mosaic shape her breast in profile? He puts up a piece of gorgeous stuffed, ripped purple floral upholstery, and a mess of more thick paint, mesh, and silicone, calls it My Grandmother's Couch -- and makes you laugh. One of my favorites was a piece called Untitled -- dear me, when will artists stop indulging themselves? -- in which a beautiful lump of blue and white porcelain drips off a table and lands and rolls to a stop on the floor. The table is spattered with another mess of colorful paint, mesh, and twists of foil and silicone. It was simply lovely, refreshing, and interesting to look at. Words and explanations would be beside the point. The artist has communicated something pleasurable in some other way.

Downstairs, in the Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue galleries, was another exhibit, this one of photographs of the interiors of some mausoleums in the Midwest. The photographer is John Allan Faier, the collection Queen of Heaven. The photographs were beautiful, they could almost have been "interior design porn" except of course that they had a posed, spotlit stillness that no art editor for Southern Living or Real Simple wants to see. Looking at them, I was struck by the effort that mausoleum designers must put into making these places as sumptuous and vibrantly colored as possible. Clearly, the object here is comfort, not mourning. Hospitals, where there is still hope of life, are dismal prisons of white and olive in comparison. Here in these photos, chairs, carpets, walls, and stained glass all shone in jewel tones of red, fuschia, purple, raspberry, green, and blue; lamps and lampshades were tasteful old gold. Everything was spotless; there were simple, sleek wooden statues of obscure saints (Elizabeth of Hungary) standing in quiet corners amid the walls of names on black-gray marble.

Alas, I seem to have taken all the wrong lessons from this exhibit. Would you like to bet a nickel that the explanatory brochure accompanying Queen of Heaven included the words "loneliness," "alienation" and "kitsch"? How about "suburban entrapment" and "rage at society's treatment of"? Oh wait -- that was the breast cancer collection.

Have you laid your nickel down? Good show. You win.

Learning to love winter?

Writing project ideas sometimes come from the most ridiculous sources. Years ago while reading aloud to my children in the Madeline series of books by Ludwig Bemelmans, I encountered the phrase "she loved winter, snow, and ice...."

There's an arresting thought. You don't often find, in life or books, people who love winter. By late February, say, people are sick of it, especially in a year like this when the snow has fallen thick and fast -- what a cliche -- and the days have been gray and gray and more gray, and the trees have looked dead for four months and the cold and the ice underfoot and the tiresome dangerous driving conditions just go on and on. The season does occupy, or seems to, such an inordinately large part of the year. To which brilliant observation the clever reader replies "Well, duh!" But wait, I have a point: what a pity to hate half the year, if only there were some way we could train ourselves not to.

I suppose the most straightforward way to do it would be to develop, or be born with, a love for winter sports. Imagine speaking on Madeline's behalf: "She loved skiing, and ice fishing, and coming in to the fireside for hot chocolate and sandwiches afterward...." But even people who love winter sports can't do them all the time, and anyway, does the love for the sport translate into a love for the weather and the season, all the time? And what about the rest of us, who aren't interested in athletics but don't want to hate half the year?

When I settled into some research on this topic -- researching winter, no kidding -- I see by my old notes that I found myself starting out by exploring ancient writers to learn what they thought winter was. Why did it occur, -- did they wonder? And I wanted to know what farm work people did during the season, how they survived, what they ate, what holidays they enjoyed. It seems Herodotus thought winter came because the cold north winds blew the sun far down south in the sky. "During winter," he wrote, "the sun is driven out of his course by storms toward the upper parts of Libya" (The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, 1954). And, centuries later, Tacitus claimed that the barbarian German tribes "had only winter, spring and summer" because they produced only one crop. They did not "know" autumn because they did no particular autumn work in orchard or garden (the Agricola and the Germania, translated by Harold Mattingly, 1948). Isn't it funny to think of the seasons as abstractions that people haven't always known alike.

I envisioned carrying on with this, arranging chapters and topics and someday holding a delightful little work of belles lettres in my hand, Learning to Love Winter. It would make no pretensions to scholarly depth or world importance but would still be unique, entertaining, and who knows? possibly even help a few quirky readers to not hate half the year.



Ah, but how, how does one go about such a project as efficiently as possible? Although writing shop talk is dull, let me indulge myself just for a moment. Every writer faces the three-pronged problem, a sort of vicious triangle of opportunity costs: what shall I do today? Shall I research more, write more, or query editors more? Good research gives you a good case to present to an editor. Stopping research to turn to writing gets the actual job done. Querying editors lets you know whether or not there may be the slightest chance whatsoever for your project to be remotely worth all those opportunity costs. If they all say no, or if you can be almost certain that they will, do you pursue your project anyway, because you are such an artiste?

And how do you answer the question that undergraduates are told to grapple with in their writing classes? -- "So what?" Of course that's a good and challenging question. But I've always liked information for its own sake, too -- show me to the Trivial Pursuit board, and stand back -- an attitude which seems to be frowned upon now. Now academics and everybody want information that is actionable, that tells the reader why he needs to know this. I doff my cap to those who can always write actionable things, but I should think, often times, that is merely the icing on the writing-cake. Why do you need to learn to love winter? Well, really, I -- . And can I make you do it?

I don't know. But if neither is possible, is the whole thing therefore better left undone?

ee-sah-teest

Spelled Ysatis. Pronounced ee-sah-teest. The magazine ad looked like this, in 1984:



The scent was so divine I pulled the sniffy-card, or whatever they call them, out of the magazine and kept it in a drawer for, I do believe, years. In those days I was a firm virtuous person who would never dream of spending money on the actual perfume. Besides, I was a product of the Seventies. Everybody was natural then, or scoffed at engineered feminine capitalist self-definition, or both.

Then a couple of years ago I began subscribing to Bazaar, and then to Vogue. Once again I met the perfume industry's sniffy-cards. I try them all. Last year, for my birthday, I gave myself a treat, and bought a bottle of Miss Dior. It's heavy on the orange, but delicious.

And then what with one thing and another, today I decided to buy myself an early birthday present. Why not try -- could it be possible they still make -- Ysatis?



In fact, Givenchy (jzhee-vahn-shee) still makes it. In a delightful blog maintained for three years, from October 2005 to October 2008, Scentzilla says of it:

Nothing better exemplifies the balls out, over the top glamor of the 80s than Ysatis. Ysatis was introduced by Givenchy in 1984. Ystais [sic] was created by Dominique Ropion, who went on to make a number of other perfumes for Givenchy, as well as some other rather infamously bold fragrances like Carnal Flower (F. Malle) and Angel (T. Mugler.)

This fragrance heaves thick floral notes of mandarine, orange blossom, iris, carnation, and narcissus over a fantastically fecund base. And for me, that base is the key to its charm. The combination of vetiver, oakmoss, patchouli, civet and (likely) castoreum in Ysatis is both terrible and wonderful to behold. The whole thing is smoothed over by a heady rush of vanilla and amber, creating a smokey sultry perfume overall.

"Very strong and not for everyone," she concludes. Heaven knows I can't detect all those wonderful things on my wrist, but I do find clove, possibly, and something like a memory of church incense there.

The universe of perfume is absolutely extraordinary, and that alone is a trite thing to say. Better, perhaps, to note that it's absolutely extraordinary there should even be a universe of perfume. It seems so un-Seventies, so un-earnest, when the world has such problems. But there it is. Scentzilla was not, and is not, the only one recording her passions and her knowledge. "Why would anyone collect perfumes?" she asks in her FAQs. And she answers, "Why would anyone collect CDs, movies, or those suspiciously adorable Hummel figurines? We all have different interests, and what catches the fancy of one person may not appeal to someone else." So true. When you finish learning all you can from her archives, you may go on to 1001 Fragrances, written by Paris based fragrance historian yes-there-is-such-a-thing Octavian Coifan. And then to Anya's Garden, Perfume Critic, to a makeup site brilliantly named Eyeshadow Government (complete with blunt motto, "Everyone needs makeup, especially you"), and then don't forget to stop off at Basenotes, where you'll learn -- alas, too late! -- about the Sniffapalooza fragrance, wine, and chocolate event held in New York City this past Saturday, February 6th.

These people, as a man in my house often comments when something is happening, are having way too much fun. May I, too, be a "balls out" perfume critic, just for tonight? Because you see, I have never much liked that most famous fragrance, Chanel No. 5. It strikes me as resembling Johnson's Baby Powder. Could a century of brilliant marketing account for its reputation? The current ad for it is divinely beautiful.