Archives for May 2005

What does it help, you ask? What doesn’t it, ask I. For the moment what it is helping is proofreading, which is sucking up all my attention tonight and keeping me, for now, from posting the little Randall Jarrell birthday celebration I had planned. So here’s what has passed my notably low threshold of amusement so far in the journal issue I’m proofreading tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present:

Mr. “Merlin Heidegger” and the illustrious “Wa Ho Auden.”

There are typos, and then there are typos. It’s almost a shame to have to fix such gorgeously goofy ones. But we must make the world safe for those who are not so easily amused.

“But I would think there are actually fewer intelligent people watching TV now because the intelligent people are all, you know, writing on their weblog or something.”

Steven Johnson, CBC interview

I just thought you’d like to know that I did indeed work all night, and that I finished writing the second of the first two chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong a few minutes ago, a couple of hours’ worth of line editing excepted. Once that’s done, all I have to do is print both chapters out and take them downtown to Andr

“I’ve had some great ovations in my time. When people do that, they must feel something within themselves. I mean you don’t just go around waking people up to the effect of saying, ‘You know, this music is art.’ But it’s got to be art because the world has recognized our music from New Orleans, else it would have been dead today. But I always let the other fellow talk about art. ‘Cause when we was doing it, we was just glad to be working up on that stage. So for me to be still on earth to hear that word, sounds pretty good. I’m just grateful for every little iota.”

Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong–A Self-Portrait

…delivering the first hundred pages of your next book to a waiting editor. Thus, one must imagine me happy (and yes, the reference is intentional). I dropped it off, I came home, I don’t have anywhere to go tonight, and what am I doing? Blogging, of course. But briefly, briefly! I’m really sitting in front of my iBook, listening to Donald Fagen’s “Century’s End” and running my fingers idly over the keyboard, somewhat in the manner of a roomful of monkeys, because I’m soooo burned out. Too much. I think I wrote 20,000 words in the past week and a half. Maybe more. Yikes. Ouch.

Anyway, these are the last words that will ever cross my lips, at least until tonight, when I post tomorrow’s almanac entry and drama-column teaser, and then I am going to bed. No alarm. No phone. No nothing.

I’m trying to figure out what this posting is about. I guess it’s about being so tightly wired that the process of becoming unwired takes a few hours. At least.

Oh, now I remember what I was going to tell you: I’m not reading my blogmail this week. Forgive me. I’ll read it next week.

Enough. See you tonight.

Went to Washington, ate my dinner, saw my show, marveled yet again at the maximal coolness of my friend (who, among many other things, makes incredibly funny faces). Returned to New York this morning to find 99 e-mails (not counting blogmail) and two brush fires (one at a magazine, the other at a newspaper). Put them out, went to lunch, and found myself standing on an Upper West Side street corner next to two casually dressed young women who were walking their dogs.

WOMAN NO. 1 So, how’s the Prozac working?

WOMAN NO. 2 (beaming down at her dog) Oh, it’s just amazing–he doesn’t bark nearly as much since we put him on it!

I bet they don’t have conversations like that where you come from. Wherever you come from.

Radio silence resumes as of now. Something tells me I’ll be up late tonight flogging away at the last item on my itinerary….

“The most infuriating thing about men was that they were both predictable and impossible. Their buttons were ridiculously easy to push, but unfortunately, every button came with its own self-destruct program.”

Donald E. Westlake, Watch Your Back!

Old Dominion

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors

of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.

Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking

across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.

It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell

I stared at on the backs of books in college.

He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.

He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.

It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov’s,

everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized

because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of

or because someone somewhere had set the old words

to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn’t hurt.

Now the thwack…thwack of tennis balls being hit

reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax

in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns

where the young terrorists are exploding

among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.

I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay

in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,

never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,

the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis

whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Robert Hass