Archives for April 29, 2008

• Maud points the way to a Theodora Keogh story, published in 1957, called “The Man Who Loved Old Ladies .” It’s a short-short story, easily readable online, and it’s interesting to place it in tandem with another short-short story, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Young Girl“, especially in the way both stories close.
Keogh is a new author to me — I hadn’t heard of her before reading an obituary that ran in the Telegraph this January — but Maud, who along with others is agitating that Keogh’s books be brought back into print, can tell you more.
Mansfield’s story, by the by, is included in the Angela Carter-edited anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, put out by Virago in the ’80s. The collection’s out of print but you can still pick up a used copy dirt cheap.
• Lately, I’ve been re-reading David Copperfield as my before-bed, literary-cup-of-Ovaltine book. Last night I hit the chapter called “My First Dissipation.” It’s such a funny set piece and can be read as a stand-alone excerpt if you start here, where David first decides to have a few friends over to his new apartment for dinner (Mrs. Crupp is his landlady).
A taste of the dissipation:
I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind, and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner. I laughed heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else’s; called Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford; announced that I meant to have a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until further notice; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger’s box, that I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.
I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long before any was needed. I proposed Steerforth’s health. I said he was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood, and the companion of my prime. I said I was delighted to propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could ever express. I finished by saying, ‘I’ll give you Steerforth! God bless him! Hurrah!’ We gave him three times three, and another, and a good one to finish with. I broke my glass in going round the table to shake hands with him, and I said (in two words) ‘Steerforth -you’retheguidingstarofmyexistence.’

Personal aside: Whenever my book club meets, there’s inevitably some point in the evening where we all start making plans to go on a trip to Cuba together, or Budapest, or else, you know, start a bowling team. So the “made several engagements to go to Oxford” bit hits home.

Consider yourselves warned: this is not a post about the arts, but one of those occasional yet inevitable posts about the life of the blogger that are delightful to some and obnoxious to others. Proceed or click away accordingly.
My absence from this space recently, excepting the occasional fortune cookie, can be explained in two short words: work and hockey. Behind these words lie a very boring story and a semi-interesting one. The first goes like this: work is busy. I know you know all about it. The second? I think it’s pretty cool, actually. I haven’t trotted out this particular obsession for a matter of years, maybe, but longtime readers will remember that alongside the interests that brought me here, interests in books, movies, criticism, and to a more limited extent the performing arts, stands a less elevated but equally passionate love for ice hockey–for the professional variety, from a strictly spectatorial perspective. Until recently.
The more hockey I watched over the years, the more a question or possibility gnawed at me: what does it feel like–to fly across the ice like that, to deliver a pass or receive one, to shoot and, in my very wildest dreams, score? Until a couple of years ago, the question seemed purely theoretical and made me increasingly melancholy. I was on the far side of 35 and I didn’t know how to ice-skate, let alone do things with pucks. Even if I learned some of this, somehow acquiring skates and the bulky, mysterious-to-me carapace of a hockey player, and finding ice to play on and other people to play with who would not laugh me off said ice–even if I overcame all of these obstacles, I would certainly never be capable of performing any of the highly-skilled on-ice feats that most piqued this niggling desire to capture a feeling. There was perhaps a remote possibility that I could pursue this, but no question that anything transcendently gorgeous would always be beyond my grasp. So why bother? It would have to be more frustrating than gratifying, right?
(Speaking of ungraspable beauty in hockey, the nonpareil hockey blogger E, who runs A Theory of Ice, once posted a great little paragraph by William Faulkner on first witnessing this strange northern game. Read the whole thing here, but a bit of it goes like this: “it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful….”)
Something had to happen to change my mind. And, as with many consequential and fortunate turning points in my life, the difference was made by my dad. At the age of 64, just after Christmas, he went out and bought new skates, suited up, and took to the ice for the first time in about four decades. True, he had years of real, competitive experience as a teenager and young man. But he also was almost thirty years older than me. Part of me was envious, part inspired. By March I had new skates too and was enrolled in beginning figure-skating lessons in a fairly distant suburb. I made the 45-minute drive every Monday evening, right after work, spent half an hour on the ice, and turned around to head back. Behind-wheel to on-ice ratio: 3 to 1, but worth it. I learned some basic skating that would help later, and some kid-level figure-skating stuff that wouldn’t. I earned a turquoise ribbon with a penguin on it certifying my mastery of 1/2 level of skating expertise.
This was all extremely exciting, but it didn’t feel like it was getting me much closer to playing hockey.
I kept skating wistfully, trying to work diligently on my stride and my backwards with dim hope of someday, somehow, getting a stick and a game. And this winter, wouldn’t you know, the stars aligned and I found myself becoming friends with someone whose friend was about to begin teaching a beginner’s hockey class. By now I’ve had maybe ten lessons. I am entirely incompetent and thoroughly addicted.
Some amateur observations:
• Many things in ice-skating are easier with a stick in your hands and an urgent purpose.
• Stopping is not one of those things. Did you ever see a lot of beginning skaters play a hockey scrimmage? Everyone goes into big loops or dire spin-o-ramas to get to the puck facing in the right direction. I can’t imagine it’s not very funny to observe. “Frantic darting of the weightless bugs” indeed.
• No matter how wretchedly you play, the hunger to get the puck is all-consuming. In my case, the need to get rid of it once I have it is equally urgent. One-half of this attitude needs changing.
• Playing hockey means developing a deeper relationship with velcro.
• A one-minute shift in scrimmage is almost enough to kill me.
But most of all: I love this game and already can’t imagine life without it, even though I clearly will never be any good at any part of it and what I’m doing is to the real thing what fingerpainting is to Frankenthaler. I remind myself, in fact, a bit of Terry when he finally put paint to canvas a few years ago, after years of wondering what it felt like: “It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.”

“I looked at her and knew she was sincere, and I remembered what else Catherine had said about her, and my world rocked, for this was the first time–I had always been slow on the uptake–when I realized that under certain circumstances sincerity is the most dangerous thing in the world.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night