What--Me Worry?

I loved Mad magazine when I was a kid--and even beyond. Early in my teaching career, I sometimes took copies to class to help illustrate irony and satire. (Would you be surprised to learn my parents were not fans of the magazine?)

And, of course, Alfred E Neuman (pictured above) and his famous question: "What--me worry?"

Lots of us are worrying now about COVID-19--I know I am. Trying not to. But worrying nevertheless.

Joyce and I are being cautious--we wash hands, have sanitizers around, we're avoiding the movies, and the Great Lakes Theater Festival just notified us that they're canceling their March-April production, Much Ado About Nothing (which I was really looking forward to: I taught the play for the last four or five years of my public-school teaching career).

We're careful about when we go to the store. We are not hoarding--although we've always been a bit ... fussy? ... about having extras around: soap, paper towels, toilet paper (!), etc. So we're in pretty good shape, I guess. Now we go to the store just to get perishables (fruit, veggies, yogurt, milk, etc.) And I know we are lucky to have the lives we do--very lucky.

Joyce has stopped going to the gym--something I have had to do anyway in recent weeks because of the ******* dizziness that my physicians are trying to figure out. She used to go six mornings a week. But now ...? Being safe. Prudent. And prudence, recall, is one of the four classical virtues, the others being justice, temperance, and courage. I think we probably need all of those these gloomy days.

I still go to the coffee shop each day--but am careful about proximity to people. Yesterday, a friend I regularly see there (he comes in, talks with me a bit, gets coffee, leaves) came over to my table to chat--but stayed about six feet away from me. Prudent. I was grateful.

I always wash/sterilize my hands when I get home.

Of course, Joyce and I are in the "danger" demographic--i.e., in the upper decades of our lives. I've gotten annoyed a couple of times when I've read/watched younger newspaper and TV commentators say things like, "Don't worry too much--it's mostly the elderly who are going to die from it."

That's a comfort. And so empathetic.

Joyce is trying to use her bank card instead of cash whenever she can. I'm doing that, too. But even at the grocery store at the self-checkout, we have to touch the screen. I try to use a knuckle--doesn't always work. Wash and sanitize when we get home.

For entertainment? We've got many unread books around; we stream things; Joyce is at the copy-editing stage of her forthcoming book about John Brown; I am writing doggerel and this blog and trying to work my way through the first very rough draft of vol. 3 of The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, YA novels about a middle school girl who is a direct descendant of Victor F. (The 1st two volumes are available on Kindle Direct--and appear, in early forms, in previous years on this blog.)

Best of all--we have each other. And there's no one on earth with whom I'd rather be quarantined!

And so it goes for who-knows-how-long. There are very few cases in Ohio right now, so if/when the wider spread comes, it will be down the road a bit, and we will have to make additional adjustments. Perhaps not even leave the house at all.

Which, as I said, is no real punishment at all—not for me.

But our hearts go out to those whose incomes and livelihoods depend upon their leaving home. We are doing some small things to help some who are in our lives, but modesty keeps me from saying more. But I urge everyone who is able to do everything they can for those less fortunate.

Stoned

I got stoned the other day.

No, not in the drug-abuse way. More like the Old Testament way.

I was reading the New York Times, and I came across a review of a new biography of writer Robert Stone (1937-2015), Child of Light, by Madison Smartt Bell. Link to review.

Stone had been a celebrated novelist—a finalist several times for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

I read a lot of Stone—Back in the Day. Dog Soldiers (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and a few others. And in our massive set of files about writers, I was pretty sure we had a Stone file. So I clipped the article, found the file in a packed drawer, opened it, and found a surprise.

I’d actually seen Stone back in 1992!

Back then, the Cleveland Plain Dealer sponsored a series of events each year—the Book and Author Luncheons. I’d gone down there several times—sometimes taking with me some of my middle school students—to hear presentations—and meet—well-known writers. (Okay, and I got them to sign books.)

At one of them I remember an encounter with Elmore Leonard (if you haven’t read him, do so; if you haven’t read him, you may have watched the Fx series Justified, based on Leonard novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, and starring Timothy Olyphant).

After I stood in line for about eleven years and reached the little table where Leonard was signing (I’d brought a bunch of books—some of my students were carrying some in line so that I wouldn’t look that the Pig I was), I asked him if he was going to write any more Westerns (he had written a half-dozen or so—good ones).

“Why?” he asked. “No one will read them.”

Okay.

Anyway, Robert Stone.

After I’d pulled the little program from the file, I saw that joining Stone that day were journalist Robert MacNeil and novelist Sara Paretsky (she writes mysteries featuring V. I. Warshawski).

And I saw, to my surprise, that I’d jotted down some things Paretsky and Stone had said:

PARETSKY: She’d raged about an abusive father: “Those early lessons die very hard.”

STONE: “It’s ironic that we want our lives to mean something. We want to link ourselves to a story. Only through stories can we have the beginnings of coherence.”

I remember very little about that day—even with this material. It says in the bulletin that Paretsky grew up in Kansas, and I remember I told her I was from Oklahoma. She smiled. Asked me some questions about my life in the Sooner State—and I can not remember a single thing I said.

So ...

Also in that Stone folder: the long Times obituary from January 12, 2015. Pulmonary disease (he’d been a heavy cigarette smoker).  Stone was 77. Link to that obituary.

I’m 75.

That’s not comforting.

What is comforting is that I’ve learned all those files are—as I should have suspected—a source of wonder.

"Tell My Story"

Hamlet features a lot of dead bodies on the stage by the time All Is Done: Hamlet's girlfriend, her father, her brother, the usurping king (Claudius), Hamlet's mother, and--of course--Hamlet himself. (We also hear about the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)

Of course, there's also that skull ...

And don't forget: Hamlet's father (King Hamlet) died (murdered) shortly before the play begins and appears as The Ghost.

Not the happiest play from the pen of the Bard.

Anyway. as Hamlet himself is dying, his good friend Horatio, who is with Hamlet at the time, decides to take his own life, too. But Hamlet stops him, tells him why. Basically, he wants Horatio to hold off death's happiness ("felicity") so that he can tell Hamlet's story.

Here are the actual words he uses as he talks to Horatio:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story. (5.2)

He wants Horatio to tell everyone what happened there--explain the deaths--explain young Hamlet's actions, etc.

Which, by the way, Horatio begins to do in a few moments when Fortinbras and his army arrive. (I will not explain any more of this!)

I don't know why this all popped into my head the last couple of days--the whole draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story thing. But it did (obviously).

I guess I realized how relevant that passage is to me--and, surely, to all of us.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I have written several memoirs (available on Kindle Direct) and have very often published pieces here that deal with my life--from cradle to ... you know. And there's little doubt that a principal motive for all of that? To tell my story (since I haven't as yet detected a Horatio around to do it for me).

I enjoy the writing, of course (or I wouldn't do it), but I guess I also want our son and our grandsons, later, to hear the stories--from someone who was in them. Stories about my grandparents, our travels, my parents, my siblings, my career, my reading, my ...--so much of that is here. And, in many cases, nowhere else.

And it's this impulse--to tell our stories--that surely propels our pervasive social media today. Facebook is chockablock with the stories of my friends--success, failure, happiness, heartache, grief. All is there. (I'm not really on any other site--but I'm guessing they're similar?)

We all just have this urge--this compelling desire--to get our stories out there--in the hope that people will understand us--and that all will not be lost when we are gone. Our words are our little scratches in the sand, our hope for a kind of immortality.

I have some wonderful family documents, among them the diary kept by my great-grandfather Addison Clark Dyer in 1898 when he traveled by horseback to the Yukon to get in on the Klondike Gold Rush. And some letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was off in Europe during WW II.

But so much of my family history--so many of the stories--are just gone. And all those people who made ME possible? I know not a breath of their own stories--nothing in their own words, nothing from their own hearts.

It's much easier now, of course. Writing things. Saving them in the cloud. Posting them. Even publishing them.

And so I hope that one day my grandsons--and their grandchildren--and their grandchildren will be able to look back at what I've written and from my words get some idea of what I was like--what my world was like, what the love of my life was like.

Nothing is forever, of course.

But I'll settle for several generations. In some odd way that thought gives me hope.

Roaring Boy

I’m now a compulsive looker-upper. If I come across a word or phrase I don’t know (and I’ve discovered there are far too many to please me!), I look it up—or ask Joyce—or ask a friend sitting near me in the coffee shop.

I was not always this way. In boyhood this is what I figured: If I don’t know it—or can’t figure it out from context—it must not be important, so I’ll skip it! Not practical or wise, I know. But (in self-defense) it was much harder then to look things up. It meant a visit to a set of encyclopedias or an unabridged dictionary. (The latter had one great virtue: It contained many of the dirty words I wanted to know about.)

But by the time I got to college, I was realizing there were some pretty cool words out there—words like lycanthropy (a delusion that one has become a wolf—or the assumption of the form and characteristics of a wolf held to be possible by witchcraft or magic). That one I learned from Dr. Ravitz when he was telling us about Frank Norris’ novel Vandover and the Brute, 1914, published a dozen years after the author’s death.

Later, I was inspired by the young Jack London, who looked up all the words he didn’t know when he encountered them, wrote them on little slips of paper, and carried them around with him. Reviewed them. Stuck them around his room. The words helped him write his fifty books, I guess.

Mustn’t get side-tracked any longer. Here we go ... and you’ll quickly see the relevance of what has gone before.

I’ve been memorizing W. H. Auden’s wonderful poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening.” Link to the poem.  If you read it, you’ll notice, a ways down, the line: “And the Lily-white boy is a Roarer.”

I wasn’t positive what roarer meant, but I had a pretty good idea, for the expression roaring boy was more common in earlier centuries (see definition below from The Oxford English Dictionary). Quickly: it means a drunken roisterer. A loud and wild party boy.

I’d also come across the term in the 1990s when I was reading my way through the Elizabethan thrillers by Edward Marston. He has a series about Nicholas Bracewell, who’s the book holder (stage manager) in a London theater that produces plays by Lord Westfield’s Men.

Number Seven in the Bracewell series is ... The Roaring Boy (1995). It’s about a play of that name that the Westfield Men present—and chaos ensues. Murder. Threats. Etc.

I raced through all those books back then—had a good time doing so. Like munching Frito’s—which, in pre-girth-worry days, I ate with the abandon of a starving jackal.

So ... in Auden’s poem, the innocent-looking kid is, in fact, not. And that line, as you can see, appears in a stanza that deals with unexpected things. (We’ll not get into the Jill-on-her-back line, agreed?)

And, today, checking out roarer in the OED, I discovered that the term is now rare—and the latest example the dictionary gives is from ... Auden! Our very poem! In 1940!

Oh, the world is not random, is it!

DEFINITION  FROM THE OED

 b. A noisy, riotous reveller; a person who indulges in wild drunken behaviour. Cf. roaring boy n. at roaring adj. and adv. Compounds. Now rare.

In later use chiefly archaic, after Elizabethan and Jacobean examples.

1622   F. Beaumont & J. Fletcher Phylaster (new ed.) v. 72   We are thy Mirmidons, thy Guard, thy Rorers.

1639   T. Walkley tr. J. de Luna Pursuit Hist. Lazarillo xi, in D. Rowland tr. H. de Mendoza Pleasant Hist. Lazarillo (new ed.) sig. R5   Canil was dressed like a Roarer.

1640   ‘Ben-Arod Gad’ Wandering-Jew 49   I am a man of the Sword; a Battoon Gallant,..in rugged English, a Roarer.

a1704   T. Brown tr. Beroaldus Declam. in Def. Gaming in 3rd Vol. Wks. (1708) i. 149   Is there any so besotted to the Bottle, which this Discourse of Pliny's..cannot reclaim..from the Suppers of Roarers to the Dinners of the Cinicks?

1709   R. Steele Tatler No. 40. ⁋3   All your Top-Wits were Scowrers, Rakes, Roarers, and Demolishers of Windows.

1780   T. Holcroft Alwyn I. 21   This fear, however, presently evaporated, and I joined the roarers above.

a1872   E. Atherstone Love, Poetry, Philos., & Gout i. i, in Dramatic Wks. (1888) 198   Hast thou not..been..a roarer among the mirthful over the wine-cups?—and a companion to midnight debauchees?

1873   Judy 16 July 124/2   Not being of the Roaring Lambs, a roarer and reveller, their enjoyment chafes my ruffled spirit somewhat.

1940   W. H. Auden Another Time 43   Where..the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white boy is a roarer And Jill goes down on her back.

Would I Have Liked You Then?

Joyce and I have kidded around a lot in our half-century of marriage. And among the recurring "issues" we kid about can be expressed in a single question: Would I have liked you then?

This came up yesterday when she was telling me about the covers she used to put on her little reports she did in elementary school. (She still has some of them.)

And I joked: "I would have hated you then."

Which I wouldn't have. But I was not exactly the most assiduous of students Back in the Day, and kids who put covers on their assignments? Not my favorite.

Though I do remember one that makes me smile. When I was in junior high, the 7th and 8th graders in Hiram shared a homeroom--with Mrs. Rood. I was in the last row of 7th graders, and right behind me sat an 8th grade kid I was afraid of. But one day he showed me the cover of his term paper (it was about metal alloys--probably, like most reports in those days, copied directly from The World Book ... well, mine were). He had used an orange crayon (to suggest copper? brass?), and his main title was TURN PAPER.

I didn't dare laugh. He would have beaten the hell out of me--with ease--at lunch.

Sometimes Joyce and I consider our school pictures. Below is Joyce in fourth grade.

Below is Yours Truly in fourth grade.

Let's not discuss my shirt.

Or my face.

Or my hair.

Or ears.

Cute smile, though, eh?

I just noticed, too, that I have my head cocked a little bit. My grandmother used to do that in pictures; I still do it. It's a sign, I've read, of superior intelligence.

(Actually, I've never read a thing about it.)

PAUSE while I check Google ...

I typed "cocked head in photographs" and got more than 9 million hits. That's right--NINE MILLION!

One online wag suggests it's a thing girls do--a sign of submission.

Idiot.

Another site says it makes men who do it look more feminine.

Stupid Internet.

It makes boys and men look more like superheroes or Hall-of-Fame athletes--that's my take on it.

Anyway, Joyce and I generally agree that if we'd met in elementary school, things might not have ... worked out. She was a devoted, careful, respectful, industrious student.

And I ...

Never mind.

Good thing we met in grad school--that's all I can say.

The In Crowd

You know how it is: You're in a place with music coming through the ceiling, and you don't really notice it--until the music rings one of your bells. And then ...

Happened to me this morning.

At the coffee shop I was working away--reading, taking notes on an Ian McEwan novel (The Black Dogs, 1992). And then I noticed the music. So familiar. The kind of music that is transporting--a vessel that carries you back. And in this case, it was a long way back.

It was jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis playing "The In Crowd," 1965, a live recording at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D. C. Eldee Young on bass, Redd Holt on drums. Part of a live album--The In Crowd. I once owned that album. Played it to death. Had a cassette tape, too, which is probably still lying around in my mess of a study.

In 1965 I was about to start my senior year at Hiram College, and Ramsey Lewis would be a big part of that year for me.

I should back up a moment ...

I knew virtually nothing about jazz in my boyhood. I knew about Louis Armstrong (a little)--and had actually seen him perform at Hiram College when I was in junior high. With the aid of a friend, Johnny Kelker, I got to sit in the front row.

But when I got to college, I became friends with Claude Steele, who'd grown up on Chicago's South Side and was a huge jazz fan. In the evenings I would lie on a bed in his room and listen to all the wonders I'd never even known existed, courtesy of his extensive record collection. I paged through his copies of Down Beat, a magazine devoted to the art form--and to which I would later subscribe myself.

I just checked: Down Beat first appeared in 1934 and is still publishing.

Ramsey Lewis was one of Claude's favorites, and so I heard a lot of and about him--and would later buy his records when they came out. I still listen each year to his Christmas album (his trio on one side, full orchestration on the other).

In December 1969 Claude was an usher at our wedding.

Claude is 2nd from the right

Claude and I have remained friends for many decades--despite the huge geographical distance between us. For a while he taught in Seattle, and my 14-year-old son and I stayed with him one night in the summer of 1986 when we were on our way to Skagway, Alaska, to do some Jack London research--and some Dyer family research.

Later, Claude was teaching at Stanford (psych department), and I stayed with him several times when I was out in the Bay Area researching my various Jack London projects.

I would also see his wonderful wife, Dorothy (a Hiram College classmate), now and then when she would come back to Hiram College (she was a trustee). She, too, had a Ph.D. and was one of the most remarkable human beings I've ever known.

I hated typing the word was in that previous sentence. Dorothy has passed away, and such a loss--to Claude, to her son and daughter, to her friends, to the world--is inexpressible.

It seems far more than appropriate that Benny Steele, their son, is now a jazz drummer and producer of recordings in his own studio. (Link to his website.) And their daughter, Jory, is the Associate Dean of Student Affairs at Stanford Law School.

So Claude & Dorothy have conferred upon the world a stunning legacy. Whenever I was with them, I felt as if I, too, were a member of the In Crowd.

And all of this came swirling back to me this morning at Open Door Coffee Co. Thank you, Ramsey Lewis. Thank you, Claude and Dorothy.

Link to Ramsey Lewis performing "The In Crowd."

NOTE: The song was first sung by Dobie Gray and released in Nov. 1964. Link to video of his version.

Sunday Sundries, 267

1. AOTW: This was a wild one out on the highway. The AOTW passed me on the right, then veered across in front of me into the left-turn lane. (No signals involved, natch.) I'm starting to rethink my position on capital punishment.

2. I finished one book this week, the 2020 novel by Arthur Phillips, The King at the Edge of the World.

I'd read only one Phillips novel before this one--The Tragedy of Arthur (2011); it deals with a "lost" Shakespeare play. (Real or not?) Phillips wrote a "Shakespeare" play to include in his text, and the whole thing is amazing. (How nervy is that--writing a play by the Bard!)

This new one deals with the imminent death of England's Queen Elizabeth I and the worries in England that the logical heir, James VI of Scotland, was a crypto-Roman Catholic. In a sort of complicated maneuver English spies send to Scotland a Turkish doctor who was in England as part of a diplomatic mission--and was forced to stay because of his medical skills.

The doctor's mission? Find out if James is a Protestant or not. The English fear a religious war if he is not. Henry VIII had switched the country to Protestant; then his daughter, Queen Mary (aka Bloody Mary), reversed it; Elizabeth reversed it again. Each reversal cost countless lives as the unwilling-to-convert were horribly tortured and executed.

Phillips does a wonderful job of narrating the story over time, shifting the focus, surprising us at the end. I mean, we know the ending (James VI of Scotland became James I of England), but what happens to the other principal players?

I liked this novel so much--and remembered Arthur so fondly--that I've decided to read Phillips' other novels--not a lot (he has only about a half-dozen--and he's only 50).

3. We started streaming the new Netflix film: Spenser Confidential, a film based on the Spenser novels of the late Robert B. Parker (1932-2010). He wrote forty of them--and the series is now being continued by others. I read his 40 but cannot bring myself to read the new ones--seems weird.

There was also a TV series in the 1980s: Spenser: For Hire (1985-88)--with Robert Urich as the P.I. and Avery Brooks as his buddy, the dangerous Hawk.

In this new iteration, Mark Wahlberg plays Spenser; Bokeem Woodbine is Hawk. Alan Arkin is along for the ride--as is comedian Iliza Shlesinger, who plays Spenser's wacko girlfriend (a character not in the books).

We've watched about half of it--pretty dull so far (despite some graphic violence). I just don't see Wahlberg, who's not a big man, playing Spenser, who is a very big man in the books. (Reminds me of Jack Reacher being played by Tom Cruise.) And the mammoth Hawk has to take boxing lessons from Wahlberg?! And Spenser as an ex-con? All is just WRONG!

The similarities to the books are slight. But maybe this is just the inauguration for what might become a series? Who knows? Netflix does this. Longmire is not much like the books--nor is the series about Jack Ryan. Or the one about Bosch.

BTW: Back in the 90s I took a few middle-school students up to Booksellers (a shop now long gone), where Parker was doing a signing. No one else was there when we arrived, so we got to talk to him a bit--and he signed a bunch of books for me!

Link to some video.

4. Sadly, a couple of nights ago we finished streaming the latest season of Vera, one of our favorites. In the final moments of this season's final episode, Vera (Brenda Blethyn) has some of her best moments as an actress in the series--and she's had some great ones.

5. When we went to the grocery store this morning, we were wondering if we'd see evidence of hoarding, etc. Empty shelves? Nope. Hudson seemed the same--although there were fewer people in the stores (Acme & Heinen's). Coincidence?

6. Last Word: a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from dictionary.com

cacoethes [ kak-oh-ee-theez ]

noun: an irresistible urge; mania.

The rare noun cacoethes, “irresistible urge, mania,” comes from the Latin neuter noun cacoēthes “malignant tumor at an early stage, incurable disease (of character),” from Greek kakóēthes “malice, wickedness,” neuter singular noun use of the adjective kakóēthes, “ill-disposed, malicious, malignant,” a compound of kakós “bad, wretched” and the noun êthos “custom, habit, character, usage.” Cacoethes in the sense “irresistible urge, mania” comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal’s phrase insānābile scrībendī cacoēthes “incurable urge to write.” Cacoethes entered English in the 16th century.

We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, and write up to it too, if that cacoethes be upon us, or we are nought. ANTHONY TROLLOPE, BARCHESTER TOWERS, 1857

“Malachi has caught cacoethes scribendi, the scribbling craze, and is writing more sermons,” Turlow reported.