Puddles of My Mad Men Season Six: "A Quality of Mercy"

On chameleons, the soul, and learning from history.

Puddles of My Mad Men Season Six: "The Crash"

Amphetamines, Finnegan's Wake and knowing what's good.

How James Joyce Invented Twitter

 In honor of Valentine's Day (and because no one else would publish it), Matt Domino takes a look at his two loves: Joyce and Twitter.

Puddles of My Mad Men: The Other Woman

 Mourning, briefly, Memorial Day, Matt Domino brings his weekly Mad Men recap link to the public.

World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011, (1921-1930)

We continue with the second installment of the World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011 list, covering the winners from 1921-1930.

Pace Yourself

With the end of Season 2 of Treme, Matt Domino takes a look at the series and why its pacing means everything.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Today’s post is not going to be a slick or professional post.  This fact discourages me because since I work at a magazine all day, I want to bring a certain level of polish or credibility to the work that appears here.  The other writers and I may not be credible news sources or unbiased commentators, but this was never going to be a place of strict journalism—it was always going to be a place of reportage on the temperament of the soul. And the soul inhabits objects and can be at times maudlin or over-sensitive, which is why the prose must have a level of polish.

Regardless of this preamble, what I want to write about is the changing of seasons and of two different times I went somewhere.

Fine, blue light descended on the city as I left work on Friday. It would have been an unseasonably warm day if there wasn’t such a collective want of spring in the air.  The sun was slowly obscuring itself behind buildings and I draped my black jacket over my arm.  My heart was pulled in a million different directions by love, by ambition and by hunger. I went home and ate a humble dinner while watching basketball and reflecting on the long week I had just had. After dinner, I went up to the top roof of my apartment building to drink beer and smoke a cigar. Though dark, the night was warm and the moon was rising large from the southeast, casting a pale, sunrise glow when it mixed with the light pollution of the city.  I puffed the rich tobacco of the cigar and looked at the lights of the city, which is what a person does from time to time when they live in a large city such as New York. The Empire State building was colored yellow and gold and I wondered what that might have meant—I didn’t want to use my phone to find out.

The night passed by like a Friday night usually does: bars, jokes, walking, beer, remembering to call or text people back.  Along the way I made one, slightly dirty standup joke:

“The thing I hate about New York is when I run into a homeless person. I always feel so bad when they ask for change because I never have actual change on me. So, what am I going to say to them when they ask me for change? Do I tell them the truth?: ‘Sorry, I don’t have any change, I only have this $100 bill that I need to spend on dinner with a hooker.’”

I also made one extremely dirty standup joke that I won’t print here. In the backyard of a bar I ran into some friends that I don’t see too often anymore, because you tend to not see people you like when they are busy and you are busy and you are interested in a lot different things and are growing older. I was sitting with one of these friends on a wood plank drinking beer and talking:

“Did you see those tsunami videos?”

“Terrible, man.”

“Amazing. You see that slow moving water and all of sudden flame bursts out of it and you remember that the water is actually moving insanely fast.”

“It’s just bad.”

“Fucking crazy.”

Then silence.

“I got your text back on the Super Bowl. I heard Fast and the Furious 5 is actually going to be good.”

And the conversation moved from profound, current event to the mundane and stupid talk of people who have known each other for a time. The night ended on a good note with slurred talk of going to Montauk in the morning.

I woke up early on Saturday to meet my mother and sister in order to give them a ticket to an event my magazine was hosting over the weekend. I felt strangely good even though the weather had gotten slightly cooler from the night before.  The day was bright and I was feeling loose and relaxed while crowds and slow walkers moved in front and around me. I couldn’t decide what kind of mood I was in so I listened to Jeff Buckley and then Al Kooper.  While I was riding the subway, I leaned against one of the handrails by the door. The track was at a straightaway so the cars of the train seemed to be all in a line.  I looked through the back window of my car and saw a long stretching row of arched, slanted handrails. The prolonged shape of these rails through the depth of the train’s cars and here and there the bowed head of a weary or anxious rider, gave the appearance of one long church pew.  The image had never occurred to me, so I immediately decided that the main character in my third novel (a journalist who moves to Madrid with his wife and meets a young poet and falls in love with one of his co-workers while missing New York/America) would notice this shape and image before his departure. I felt my heart ache with the desire to write the scene down.

As I emerged from the subway station at Herald Square, horns and excellently recorded drums from an Al Kooper song were pounding in my ears, so I strutted in the sunlight along 32^nd Street until I saw my mother and my sister standing outside of Madison Square Garden. I hugged them and kissed them hello while handing over the tickets to the event. I felt slightly like a scalper. I walked them up to 34^th Street before saying goodbye. I felt a slight pang of sadness at not accompanying them, but that passed as I turned down the broadness of 34^th Street and into the sun. I took the subway back to Brooklyn and when I got out of the subway, my mother had already sent me a text telling me what they were having fun.

In my apartment, while basketball flashed on my TV screen, I remembered the talk of Montauk. I texted my friend to see if the trip was still in the cards. It was. I called another friend, but she was gardening at her friend’s apartment.

“We’ll have to do mine next weekend!” She wrote.

“Lass do it,” I replied, thinking of another sunny Saturday and my knees on cold grass.

I threw a bunch of clothes in a bag, because I figured there may be a chance I’d be camping on the beach in the cold underneath the Super Moon, and headed back up to Penn Station where I got a train to Oyster Bay.

The northern shore of Nassau County is filled with great old names on its rail-line: Glen Head, Sea Cliff, Glen cove, Locust Valley, Oyster Bay. When you pass Oyster Bay by car, you get to Muttontown, which is where the really big homes lay.  Although these towns share the same stretch of land that my youth did, they are foreign worlds to me. Nassau and Suffolk are not one in the same. There is some baroque secrecy to their bluffs that I will never quite understand, coming from the colonial heritage and athleticism of my youth. The train pulled slowly around the bend into Oyster Bay and I looked first at a large home with a nice, blue tennis court out in front and then out to the choppy waves of the bay. I was between my childhood home and my current home and it felt good to take a train-line I’d never taken before.  I got off the train and walked along the track. The air and town were quiet with early spring afternoon. Birds chirped, gulls called and strollers rolled slowly and quietly on an unseen, nearby street. I turned a sand-lined corner and saw my friend waving outside of his brother’s store. He was just getting ready to close up and so we walked into the back and I helped him load some frames onto a new shelf he had just built.  He showed me maps that had been turned into covered trays and also some of his latest photographs of sunsets along different Long Island shores—one had captured some half submerged reeds so vividly it seemed as though I were submerged as well.

We closed the store and loaded into his car, heading further east. We stopped at his home on a farm where I played with his dog while he showered. I lay on the couch and listened to the falling water of the shower in the other room. I started getting thirsty for a beer, but I decided to step outside. The air was getting cooler and I could feel the dampness rising from the earth. It was that evening feeling, as though the whole day had been a fire that was now being put out, and the moistness, the rich almost ashy smell of the air and the slow-fading blue light were the after effects. My friend was soon ready and we left his dog and headed for Montauk.

We drove East through the small, boutique towns of the South Fork, towns like Hampton Bays, Southampton, Water Mill, Bridge Hampton, East Hampton and Amagansett.  Over each of these towns, their fine clothing shops, their streetlights and their movie theatres, the Super Moon shone impossibly big and bright.  Once we reached the last stretch to the outskirts of Montauk and the point, the moon bathed the road and the surrounding dunes. The road rose and you could see the line of light stretch across the dark, milky sea. When we arrived in Montauk, we found our friends on the beach next to a slowly dying bonfire. They greeted us with beers as the wind whipped up from the water. After a few beers, smoke and jokes, we decided to go into town and go to the bars. 

The first bar we stopped at was an Irish bar where I drank Budweiser and looked at the television, which showed images of the U.S. bombing Libya.  I watched the infrared shots of the blasts landing on blurry, desert landscapes and I felt very much removed from the fact that we were exerting our military muscle in another area of the world, but I felt a certain satisfaction because I knew that my dad would finally appreciate something that Barack Obama decided to do.

“What’s going on?” One of my cohorts asked.

“We’re bombing Libya.”

“Damn man. That Ghaddafi.”

“I know. He’s a lunatic.”

“How do you even spell that?”

“I don’t know. He looks like Michael Meyers from Halloween.”

I was torn from the television because we had to move bars.  There was confusion in coordinating the movement from one bar to the next, which will happen when more than four people get drunk at public places.  I ended up walking the quiet streets of Montauk with two of my friends. We smoked outside of the Chamber of Commerce and I walked up to the front door.  The building was a small wooden building that had the interior of some kind of ski lodge.

“This is the coziest Chamber of Commerce in the World,” I said.

We all ended up at a bar called the Memory Motel, which is a motel with a bar and some one-hour occupancy rooms. There’s a Rolling Stones song off Black and Blue named after the motel.  A cover band was playing note for note covers of popular songs from the past ten years. The whole bar had a classic Long Island feel: men with big shoulders and backwards hats, girls with bleach blonde hair who look attractive if you turn your head quickly, loud music and some kind of overriding atmosphere of forced masculinity. I drank my beers and joked with my friends, but in my mind I kept thinking about a sweeping statement I once made to myself about Long Island and the work I wanted to do about it. It was something to the effect that Long Island is just like Faulkner’s South or Joyce’s Ireland, it is a place full of ignorance and self-importance that many of its natives find difficult to escape.  On Long Island, there is a pervading tone of people that obscures the breath-taking beauty of the landscape, where the diversity of the beaches is perhaps the greatest in the world. You may disagree with that fact, but your mystique will never trump the mystique of Long Island. Your ignorance and hard-headedness probably won’t either.

We left the Memory and went to our hotel, The Montauk Manor, which is a large building that overlooks Fort Pond, Fort Pond Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. All of us stumbled around the halls from room to room for a time before going outside to smoke. We looked over the pond where there was an LIRR train idling at the station. The grass underfoot was springy and damp. Something about standing on a hill outside of a large, old, hotel and looking at the bodies of water that surrounded us felt profound to me.  That feeling was followed by tiredness and we all retreated to our rooms to sleep.

The next morning was filled with a large communal breakfast in our room, where everyone gathered for eggs and English Muffins, Entenmanns’s breakfast pastries, coffee and juice. One guy who I’d just meant initiated the beer drinking and the rest of us followed suit. We packed up our rooms and checked out, while slowly gathering in the parking lot.  I sat on someone’s pick-up truck bed and drank beer in the sun.  It reminded me of being 17 again and sitting the parking lot of my town beach drinking beer after school.

“I haven’t done any parking lot drinking in a long time,” someone said.  We all laughed.

Then my friend who organized the trip got us moving to walk back down to the ocean. A girl I had just met explained that there was a hotel with a large back deck that we could sit on. The deck faced the ocean and there were plenty of lounge chairs.  We walked all the way down to the ocean. Along the way we made our way over rolling seaside hills where nice, but humble homes were built.  There is something fundamental maritime about Montauk as a whole that keeps the homes, no matter how luxurious, feeling humble and appropriate. This is what separates it from the Hamptons.  It may have something to do with the spacing of the homes along the hills, but I’m not sure about that, though the vision of those houses as object in relief to one another, the ocean and the sloping, wide grass of the hills is appealing to me.

When we made it to the beach, the girl was right, there was a wide-open deck facing the ocean. The sun glimmered off the sea and it almost seemed like it was fine to go swimming.  We continued to make jokes and drink beer (while another girl passed around Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies) as the sun shone down.  I had to go to the bathroom, so I wandered to the front of the hotel where there was an indoor pool enclosed in another structure. I walked into the little building and found it empty. There was a bathroom, so I relieved myself. When I came out there was still no one there. I looked around for towels but only saw a laundry bin. When I inspected it, I found that it was filled with nicely folded towels. I quickly went back and spread the news and before I knew it, there was a small crowd of us swimming in a heated indoor pool. A Latino woman soon came into the pool area but she didn’t care that we were swimming.  She didn’t speak great English, but she was very diligent about keeping the jets in the hot tub on. So we swam laps. As my friend passed me a beer into the pool, I kicked myself back, did a small backstroke, smiled  and said:

“Swinning!”

We dried off and my friend went out to bum a smoke from the pool attendant.  We watched as my friend, with one of the small pool towels wrapped around his soaking boxer briefs, made small talk with this woman over a cigarette. He came back inside when the cigarette was done.

“Did you make a new friend?”

He nodded his head.

“Did she speak any English.”

“No, so it was mostly her just saying ‘No entiendo.’”

After our pool excursion, we returned to the back deck where everyone was ready to eat. We drank a few more beers and I began to feel the sunburn on my face, which reminded me how close summer actually was.  I looked out at the sea and how bright the light shone off the small waves of low tide. There was a sandbar forming. Children ran and rode bikes along the little inlets of water that appeared. I took a drink of my beer and it was cold.

We all made our way to an old-fashioned fast food place called John’s. There had been a St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the place was packed.  We found a few sun-soaked places to sit and ate our burgers, fries and chicken fingers greedily, while throwing back as much water as possible. Then, after watching two gangs of high school kids almost get into a fight, it was time to go home. I was lucky enough to snag a ride all the way back to Brooklyn in a car, which I was happy about since I was drunk, tired and didn’t feel like switching to the subway at Atlantic Terminal.

As the sun set along the road on the way back and I dozed in the passenger seat, I thought about how the season was actually changing.  There was a once a time when I came back from college and drove around my neighborhood in my car with the window open, smelling flowers and trees and was amazed that the spring was already in full effect.  Ever since then, I have tried to pay attention to the changing of the seasons, to those random Saturdays or Sundays where just walking in the freshness and temperature of the air has the same feel as swimming in a cold pool in the heat of summer. The car I was riding in continued along the long stretch of Montauk Highway, which turns into Sunrise Highway, which turns into the Belt Parkway, which turns into either going to Staten Island or heading into Manhattan. The road passed and the sun set, leaving only lavender and periwinkle traces of evening in the sky, that eventually became the black and orange of night in civilization.  I knew that there would still be a few cold days but that the actual winter was over. The sun burn was tingling on my face and I felt very much the exhaustion of a day in late May.

At one point, I looked out the window and saw a raised trestle of the LIRR with a train passing along it.  The night would be warm, but I remembered riding a bus back from Providence, Rhode Island in February. I’d been visiting my friend and his fiancée. My friend and I had gone to see a basketball game as a means to share our love of basketball and to communicate our long-standing friendship in one of the many ways that one can do that with a friend.  My friend and I drank beer at the game, explained our love of basketball to a woman sitting nearby who asked us who we were rooting for. After the game, we went back to his home where his fiancée and dog were waiting. They took me to a nice sushi restaurant where I splurged on sake and lots of expensive sushi. We talked about their upcoming wedding and the plans for the wedding party. I asked them about their families and the other nice things in life that their union would bring. Then, later, we watched the Oscars and I drank beer. I asked my friend’s fiancée about each pop singer that came up, because I realized that I didn't know many of them. I was pleased with the good humor in which she explained them to me and gave me her opinion. It made me very happy to hear her talk about it all while I threw a toy to their cute, young puppy.  Finally, my friend and his fiancée decided to go to bed. It was about 11:30.  I told my friend that I would go upstairs, drink beer and read Tolstoy before bed.

“How late do you stay up?” he asked me.

“Until about 1:00 every night.”

“Pshht.”

The next day, I woke up, showered, stripped the bed and we went to have breakfast before I caught my bus. We ate breakfast at a place my friend had taken my mom and sister when they were in town visiting.  We ate breakfast. I drank their strong coffee.  We talked about our families and again about the wedding. I found myself getting very excited for his wedding and for all the fun we would have at and around it.  All of my friends would be in one place at the wedding. I would even get to see my friend’s mom again, someone I hadn’t seen in a few years. The coffee set in and I couldn’t stop talking about plans and my thoughts on each of our friends.  That was a warm day in February. I took off my coat as my friend left me at the bus station.  I gave him a big hug and told him that he should call me or e-mail me if he needed any input on the wedding planning.

I watched him take off out of the bus depot and I boarded my bus back to New York, listening to the other passengers.

“I’m taking this all the way down to Jacksonville.”

“That’s some ride.”

“I’ll need a shower when I get there.”

The driver gave us an overly enthusiastic welcome speech and we were soon boring down Route 95, passing through the trees of far eastern Connecticut.  At one point during the ride, I looked at the snow on the ground and hoped that it would melt fast in the strange warmth of the day.  I tried to make out branches and stems of leaves and flowers pointing out of the snow. As the bus moved along I thought of the passing of years between my friend and I. How his life was approaching something extraordinarily different from my own. There was an intimacy to his life, to the space and objects in his realm that he shared with his soon-to-be wife. Its what everything is about, I decided. For some reason I was thinking about Milton. I keep repeating some refrain in my head that went “Winter is the longest season, the changing of the guards, the eras of our life.”  I wasn’t quite sure why, but it kept turning over in my mind. All I saw, though, was passing light, as though years could become something palpable in an instant.  The bus kept rolling toward the city and I felt very happy for my friend and that there would be continuous things to look forward to in life even if they weren’t all as immediate as I wanted them to be.

I woke up yesterday after my long weekend and drank two big mugs of coffee in my apartment. The rain was pouring down, but I felt strangely rested.  I put on my large London Fog trench coat and stepped out in the rain, feeling very much strong, sharp and invincible.  I stepped on the train and stuck my umbrella into the deep side pockets of the coat.  I looked around the train and all of a sudden felt a deep sense of loss for no apparent reason.  There were current events going on all around me that I couldn’t get a firm grasp or stance on. I saw men reading the Times or the Wall Street Journal, which had images of explosions in Libya on the cover. My Twitter feed was a stream of the rising death tolls in Japan. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the tragedy of the world, but rather that I perhaps should have a better hold on how I actually felt. I then had a thought about my friends that had intimate lives that were developing with other people and wondered how I would be able to balance ambition and interest with that need to be intimate with another—how to throw off the crutches of Don Draperisms.  I turned on “John The Baptist” by Al Kooper as I exited the subway back into the rain.  The melody made me feel strong and poised again.  I entered my office and sat down at my desk. People threw questions my way.

“Are you sunburnt?” A girl I work with asked.

“Yes,” I smiled.

She shook her head, laughed and walked away.

Something about that small exchange gave me a sense of validation.  There were things to attend to at work and I already had a sunburn.  There were things coming in the future.  Seasons were changing.

Mark is Worse Than Your Bite

Well, my Puddlers, we made it through another week surviving, snow, hail, rain, mild air, thunder and lightning, which all occurred in one bizarre night.  We also fought off all those ghosts, thieves, poets, lawyers, teachers and gravediggers that we encounter in our daily travels.  If you don't get that, then you should read my list from yesterday and do some research on the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Joyce's Ulysses.

In New York, it looks like it is going to be warmer this weekend than it was than last weekend.  And because of that, Mark Jack is more worked up than he has been in weeks. So, without further ado, I leave you with Mr. Mark Jack. Enjoy the weekend.

Assertions: More Notes on American History

Mark Jack

A pink man, a soft-pink man sat near me today and stage-whispered to his companion some version of American History as only a gray headed, soft pink man can. An ideal, only vaguely concealed, ran skeletally through the narrative and was revealed toward the end of his little lesson. The thesis was unthinking and un-revelatory and its nature as conclusion/thesis was revealed as horrendously as the phalanges on some dog gnawed corpse. What point is there in never departing from one’s point, of using it as initiation, structure and conclusion? How must one approach such thought?

I’m thinking of a small, white dog, blinded by absurd stylization and breeding, with a high growl tugging furiously at the fingers of some never-really-alive soft pink man’s lecture with the intensity available to only such an absurd creature.

Our lust for historical causality in America is that of Europeans unmoored. We feel a deep history in this country as the amputee feels his missing limbs. What I cannot speak of is whether the phantom limb coincides with the prosthetic that was been subsequently inserted.

Americans tend to speak surely of the dates and geographies of historical play, but only assert the lessons, the wisdom of such obliquely. At the moment, America creates the space for concreteness as wisdom’s fount.  Once that space is created, the ideal is then inserted. Thus, we speak of intentions historically located and yet continuously present.  Thus, we place atop our heads the tri-corner hat and speak the slogans of change and stasis simultaneously. Where, though, is the crisis located? The tea party gave its own rebuttal to the President’s speech.

I mean…

We are vain and combative, and the President’s previous assertions of cooperation and global markets for product and compassion were, on Tuesday night, underscored by that great Americanism—competition.

Number One!

I watched the State of the Union via the live feed on whitehouse.gov. I watched the enhanced version. This meant that beside the video of the President, a strange and halting PowerPoint presentation faded in and out, sometimes highlighting—by graph—a claim made by Obama. At other times, they just showed pictures of earlier speeches, as if to say,  “Look! Sometimes the president rolls his sleeves up and speaks to robust men in hardhats as well as speaking with a suit on to similarly suited men with hard hearts.” The graphs were my favorite feature as they operated through a certain wistfulness, showing what was and what should be in the USA Today language of diminutive conception. Here, the bar graph asserts, America’s gray bar is lower than China’s, and here, is where we should set our sites. The second graphic shows a gray bar higher than any other in the world. Is this perhaps, a performative utterance? Obama couches his speech in the grammar of future accomplishment, but the bar graph asserts differently. In positing our gray bar as higher than China’s, do we make it so?

Mark

Going to Market

Well, my Puddlers, we've made it to the end of another long week.  The blog will be back in full (and hopefully better) swing next week with plenty of posts.  However, its cold out there tonight so I am going to skip all of my clever little preamble and leave you with the man who knows how to warm all those hard to reach places. No, I'm not talking about Larry Sanders. I am talking about the one, the only, Mr. Mark (Aurelius) Jack!

Take it away, Mark!


The Debt Collectors

Mark Jack

 

Lately I have been thinking mostly of isolation, but not solipsism. Well, maybe a weak solipsism, one that isn't terribly true but is, still, somewhat inevitable, or inevitably felt. Something that makes the you think, “What's the other thing?” or “How's the other thing felt?” or “How's the other felt thing felt?”

Whatever it is, I think it may remind me of my childhood and what a horrible thing that would be, but then we are all old and sentimental in our own ways no matter our age or health or education or country of origin or sexual orientation or sexual disorientation or gender or not or even memory.

Just the other day I was discussing tire swings with a friend and we both paused for a second to be sentimental—sans twinkle in the eye.  It seems childhood memories necessitate an eye twinkle, but one's eyes never twinkle. The problem with my memory is that the tire swing in question was known to me only when I was 'round two years old. My mother doubts the veracity of my memory in this regard. Most other people don't give a shit. Am I simply remembering a picture or perhaps I am merely doubting my mother's memory? Is it possible to say I remember an other's memory? Am I remembering the telling of it or the memory itself?

Well, I don't know, and maybe these considerations lead absolutely nowhere. In fact, I'm almost certain that the lattter is true—at least as long as I have been formulating the questions. The problem, you see, is I've been reading Samuel Beckett, again. Actually, it's not a problem. This time I’m reading Watt. Honestly, I can't get enough of this guy. Watt is perhaps the funniest book I've read by Beckett; some of his plays are humorous as well, for instance, Endgame. There's some good comedy there. The problem for most people reading Beckett, I think, and it was my problem as well, is that one is told about his absurdity maybe or his mastery/distrust of language, maybe, or all number of things that build Beckett up into some unapproachable and maybe unapproachably weird writer. Well, he is certainly strange. Just look at this photo.

Trust me. Watt is a strange book, but is also funny. The one thing Beckett does not fool around with is sentimentality. He is perhaps the least sentimental writer I know. Actually, that's wrong; let me rethink that. Beckett loves to play with sentimentality. What he is not is sentimental. Watt, rather, is a book featuring a man who is so confused by memory's functioning that there is absolutely no possibility of sentiment being arrived at let alone conveyed. Early in the book, Watt, who is a servant in Mr. Knott's house answers the door and finds the Galls, father and son, who are there to tune the piano. The problem with this scene is that it is as Watt tells it to the author, and Watt is not sure about the workings of memory, but only that this incident, with the Galls resembles all the other incidents of note "in the sense that it was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt's head, beginning to end."

Watt is a strange character "who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his life." So Watt, like many of Beckett's characters find fault in their memories and, more so, find difficulty in considering any symbolic interpretation of the events considered. Often, in Beckett's oeuvre, memory is presented to a character through another medium, such as the tapes in Krapp's Last Tape, and in this respect they are somewhat foreign to the character to whom these memories, these recorded memories belong. They are un-changeable and outside, rather than elastic and internal and meaningful. Although for Watt, memory is elastic in that it is merely a collection of surfaces, and his memory of the Gall's "gradually lost, in the nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal." In this way, the memory is something unincorporated and yet transferable, and prone to editing.

What then, is this process of writing? Memoir and the like seem the most suspicious forms if we think in these Beckettian terms, but all writing is suspect in these terms. We rely so much on the meanings we give to our memories. We learn from them in this way, or we tell ourselves that, when we think back and re-imagine some event that we have progressed in someway beyond it—because of it. Why?

There is a strange and beautiful compulsion to understand our memories as metaphor, and in recording our thoughts and our imaginings we set up an economy of meaning, which pays, sometimes, suspiciously. We  are greedy sometimes, extracting whatever dubious self-knowledge we can from that which passes through our minds as the past. This is a curious communication.

Mark

Seattle SuperCivics

There is a point in the Kate Bush song, “And Dream of Sheep,” where she says with ultimate longing, “I wish I had my radio.”  This line is followed by her singing, with equal melancholy, “I’d turn it to some friendly voices/talking about stupid things.”  This line has felt poignant to me, not only recently with my newfound focus on podcasts and showcasing the stupid/enlightening things the people I know have to say, but for many years, when I think about the concern I have for ideas and notions that may very well be called “stupid things.” Now, do not take this post to be a “woe is me” piece.  Instead, I want to explore some of the meandering thoughts and insecurities I have had over the years about the balance between civic concerns and how, if at all possible, one may balance both.

Last night I attended a round table discussion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was hosted by the PEN/Faulkner organization.  The discussion featured some of the best minds of the world (Jostein Gaarder, James Hansen, Frederic Hauge, Bjørn Lomborg, Bill McKibben, Andrew Revkin, and Cynthia Rosenzweig; moderated by Robert Silvers) discussing the issues of climate control and what measures can be taken to prevent future global warming and to decrease carbon emissions.  I didn’t know who each of the speakers were, but I did some research when I returned home and found out just how prestigious and highly regarded they each are – especially Bjorn Lomborg.  However, at the time of the discussion, it seemed to me, after spending four years working for a humanities quarterly, that they had collected each intellectual character necessary for a round table discussion on any topic: the eccentric foreigner with a thick accent who is impossible to understand but speaks with passion; the brooding foreigner with an easier to understand accent; the young foreigner (not necessary that he be foreign) who is opinionated and who really stirs the pot of the discussion and riles the other participants up; the woman who usually, unfortunately, seems to be too liberal; the old guy (approx. age  65-80) who is not totally involved in the discussion because he is somewhat tired of participating in such events, but towards whom everyone shows deference; the other less older guy (approx. age 50-55) who is sensitive and gets visibly upset by the young upstart and who references his wife and kid in order to make the young upstart see that one day he will have a family too and can’t be so energetic in his pursuits; and finally, my personal favorite, the middle-aged slickster.

Now, I make these stereotypes of course because they are true and I have seen these types of speakers at conferences too many times. But I also make these stereotypes because I, like anyone else who makes a stereotype, feel jealous and insecure by these people?  Why am I jealous? Because they have established their names and work hard for a cause they is certainly outside of themselves and is more concerned with the world at large. Why am I insecure?  Because my soul is not drawn to the same focus and the same concern over these very civic matters.  Civic in my mind means anything concerned outwardly with great causes in the world at large. My soul has always been drawn to matters that concern the immediate emotions and passions of the individual.  I am concerned with the everyday, the miniscule (non-scientific, well some are, say the way light looks, but not in the way that global warming is scientific) phenomena that make people question their ambitions or their identities – those moments of doubt and joy that are able to so completely engross us that at the moment of delirium or fatigue, we must think back to remember what the cause of our fervor was; we must remember who exactly we are.

This inclination may be due to my age.  However, at 24, I believe and have long felt that it is time to move beyond yourself into that greater realm of the world at large – considering that we do live and work in it.  Yet, this blog and the podcasts that I do, which I obviously believe in and devote much of my time to, seem to fall under what you might call “stupid things” rather than the kind of attention and discussion that was paid to a topic like global warming and climate control last night.

The conflict between these two realms and how to properly navigate each, or rather transition from one to the other, has led me to think about some of my favorite artists of all time.  When I say artists, I mean writers, because writing has always been my strong suit and my passion, and because above all it is indisputably the highest form of art that exists, when it is properly executed due to its synthesis of the auditory, the visual and the mental facilities of our senses and imaginations.  The writers that I think of are Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce.  The other day, over GChat, my friend Alex Ramsdell was discussing an Isiah Berlin essay he was reading that referenced Tolstoy and his desire to break the study of history down from a metaphysical procession of time and events – large sweeping motions of nations and movements with ideologies – to the actual interaction between one person and another person.  The quote that Alex gave to me was: “only the sum of the concrete events in time and space - the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual, three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment - this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers might be constructed." This quote was Berlin summing up Tolstoy’s take on history and basically on how to perceive existence.  The great merit to Tolstoy’s writing was not only his ability to control many different characters, perspectives and storylines in an epic breadth of human existence, it was his ability to sit above all of this action without an obvious judgment towards those who were acting and interacting.  But, as the quote says, what was most important about his work and his approach was that the world was made of human interaction at all levels and in varying degrees of meaning and poignancy and that all of these moments must be rendered with a certain equality, because each action occurred within a three dimensional world, made of empirical objects. What often loses people is that our actions and interactions are not merely two dimensional (one person to one person), they are three dimensional, there is an other, whether an individual observer, a group of friends, a community, or a country that is in relation to the interaction between two people.  Our relationships are also objects that must be seen from a distance in order to be seen and fully understood and appreciated.

Joyce too followed this model. Ulysses is celebrated for its focus on the mundane, daily occurrences that people go through in order to leave their home in the morning and return to it at night, hopefully alive, hopefully in one piece, and perhaps maybe happy.  In “The Oxen of the Sun” Episode of Ulysses there is a point where the narrative (for the narrative has taken over at this point, as it shifts styles throughout the ages of the English language) says, “any object when intensely regarded may serve as a passage of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” This quote exemplifies one of the main precepts of modernism, which I have always been drawn to as a “style.” This main precept is the fact that through any one object (an object being an interaction as well, if you have been following this out of the blue rant) a person may have access to that which is eternal, that is to say, elements of life and existence that have existed forever on some universal level.  It is only through keen observation and the consideration of an object in repose that we can truly understand it, its significance and also our own significance. This is the idea or rather the phenomenon that my soul has always been inextricably drawn to.  I can’t help myself from thinking about this concept and what it means to each individual and as you might imagine, that certainly leads one away from actively participating and reaching out to the concerns of a civic life and existence.

However, Joyce and Tolstoy also exceeded in reaching out to that civic world and to the concerns of their respective countries at the times in which they wrote. War and Peace is obviously focused on the Napoleonic Wars and the effect they had on the individual characters within Russia.  Anna Karenina, meanwhile, explores the relations between landowners and the serfs that worked the land.  Levin is equally concerned with his own faith and notions of the divine as well as with the most efficient way to organize the peasants into a work force in order to create a well-organized farming infrastructure within Russia. At other ends of the novel, Oblonsky and Karenin navigate the bureaucratic world of the Russian government and find the different levels of its deceit and disappointment. Ulysses not only follows Mr. Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their respective paths through Dublin on June 16, 1904, but also touches on the hoof and mouth issue sweeping the country, the fallout from Parnell’s death, the fledgling Dublin literary movement, and other news stories that preoccupied Dubliners at the time.  There is a straddling of both the civic world and the intensely personal world of the individual that both Joyce and Tolstoy are able to accomplish, which is not only an important lesson for any artist, but for any person trying to be a human being in this world.

What do we do then? No one likes a singer who only sings about the corruption of the government.  When Pearl Jam put on poses of protest during the G.W. Bush years, it seemed phony and forced – no one truly cared.  One can’t force themselves, whether as an artist or a regular person, to be part of the civic world.  You can only gradually transition yourself.  Because even as I was listening to the lectures yesterday evening, I thought that someone put as much thought into the ergonomic, reclining theatre seat I was sitting in as one might put into solving the problem of global warming.  Underneath our civic duties and world missions, there lie the mundane problems that also must be solved as well.  It is moving past the mundane problems that allows us to embrace those greater problems of the world, for if we live only in the civic world, then we return to a personal world that is left in shambles.  However, in the end, we all want to eventually become bored with our own egos in order to move forward to a world where most of our concerns are located outside of ourselves and our immediate spheres of influence. That is when we all become the President of the United States (follow that joke? No? OK, good.)

**This leads me to a quick note on how one becomes better as an artist. In writing, when you start to achieve a level of competency in your craft, you begin to recognize the ability to form a cogent thought or feeling about an interaction or about any given object and instead of filtering it through your own consciousness, history and opinions, you decide to throw that idea or inclination outward to an other who then thinks the thought through to another conclusion that is completely foreign to you.  That idea, is then given light outside of you, so you can then observe it and try to glean what type of truth lies within it.  When this idea is observed, you are able to record it, to render it as it might appear in life. This how the artist who has begun to understand his or her craft will begin to operate and create.  Your ideas should never come from without you – they are always borne within based upon your experiences, your research and your observations.  However, the art comes in expelling those urges, those kernels of an idea outward where it can then form on its own, through the guise of a character.  You say, “That is an interesting idea, but I don’t care how I feel about it.  How would he or she feel about it? How would they think it through?”  Then, once that has become an object, it is concrete and renderable in your work.  So, again, there is a three dimensionality as Tolstoy had suggested.  There is not just the one dimension of your own thought or the two-dimensions of you and then your experience with an object – there is the third dimension of expulsion, which allows return, which finally allows creation of an art; a successful art**

So, what does a good artist do? A good artist renders the mundane and deeply personal issues in the same light as those pressing civic issues and puts no value judgment on either, like Tolstoy would have done.  It is up to the viewer to create their own idea of what is more important than the other. The best the artist can do is to render the object, the interaction as it would be in life and allow the inner light of that object to show itself.

What does a good person do? A good person learns how to grow up and make more time to read the New York Times and try to volunteer their time to do good in that civic world.  That person hones in on their interests, what they are good at and makes sure they can do that the best, while always making time for something outside themselves.

What does a 24 year old do?  Keeping tuning that radio and talking about stupid things. Get bored with yourself as fast as you can so you can move on to more important matters.  Forget accumlating choices in your life and make a decision.

And that, ladies and gentleman, concludes Matt Domino’s “How to Be a Pompous Ass Without Really Trying” seminar for the month of April.  Admittance Fee: five years from your life, and slight loss of soul.  Profit Gain: $0.39 from advertising revenue in the month of April.

Puddles of Myself couldn’t do it without you!

Don't Know Much About History

When I was in college – during the previously referenced second semester of junior year – I took a course on Joyce’s novel Ulysses. If you have read this blog at all, you will know by now that I am an avid reader of Joyce and have been heavily influenced him him; at times cripplingly so.  While I was living in Ireland, I was shut out of the Ulysses course at the university, so I rented a DVD course on the book and took to walking the streets of the city and the neighboring areas of the city in order to find those precious footsteps left by Stephen Dedalus, who I steadfastly believed was my alter-ego. I spent hours in Ireland – and many since – drinking, making witty comments and absurd comments and barbing my tongue just as that fictional hero of mine did.  However, it was not until I was back at my college taking a classic 6:30 PM-9:30 PM class on the novel that I realized the true importance of Stephen Dedalus’ lesson.  As the weeks of the semester turned by, and the light of twilight remained that subtle shade between periwinkle and grey more and more towards the late end of seven o’clock,  I gained a certain clarity.  Although I was attracted to Stephen Dedalus’ intellect as a character and his intense brooding nature, the most moving part of his story was his attention to and at times crippling focus on the historical moment.  It is Stephen who calls history “a nightmare from which he cannot awake” (Nestor) yet he is doomed to move and grope through it until he can find that “one word known to all men.” (Circe)   What the word is has been debated by many – the originary Word as thou art who in heaven shall not be named once spouteth along the fine ridge of Plymouth Rock and also that word that all men do wish they could know and have access to: Love – but one cannot deny that Stephen is often overcome by waves of history that get in the way of his desire to “hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.”  Now, I went on for forty pages about how Stephen, using the keyword omphalos, and Bloom, using the keyword metempsychosis, use these words in order to meet each other at a single moment in history and by doing so, unlock the stasis of history moving forward at a marked and recorded interval and utilize its imaginative possibilities to mold a history and existense that is open, fluid and open to many variations, which allows each to realize the full potential and desire of their soul.

Heady stuff all of it (pat, pat), but what does it all have to do with sports, like say the moment from Sunday when the Canadian National Team defeated the United States in the final of the Olympic Hockey Tournament?  A very good question.  What I have been getting at more and more on this blog is our ability to take a moment and realize it for what it is, to take in its importance with full effect and mold it into our image, the image of our success or our destiny.  As Ulysses shows us, there are moments that can dictate and change our lives and they may be even the very smallest moment during the course of a day, but if you do not leave yourself open to that ability, if you do not have the sense to seize it for yourself, then you will be left like the rest of the 8th graders cracking their heads against the cool laminated cover of a Houghton Mifflin history textbook – timelessness is different than stasis.  And as sports shows us, a single moment can grip us like no other, can open up our imaginations to the what-ifs and what-ares, can show us what is possible with the right timing and the right preparation and most important of all, the ability to take control of a moment as it threatens to flourish, finish and become grey.

These situations can go as far back as time itself, but let me just take you through a few in my lifetime.  Let’s step back to the early 90’s.  Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had already helped to make basketball a game for all of America throughout the 80’s and Michael Jordan had elevated it to a level of cultural relevance as well as to something more divine.  However, there were five college freshman who entered the University of Michigan in the fall of 1991 by the names of Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson. They were known as the “Fab Five,” possibly the best recruiting class ever in NCAA Basketball history.  Just as Jordan had made his shorts a little baggier, the Fab Five made theirs even baggier – they set the style for the current look of the NBA, with perhaps the help of Allen Iverson – they talked trash and set a mid-90’s basketball style trend with black socks matched up with your sneaks (a tradition carried over and well loved by white kids in the late 90’s through today).

So, you have talent, you are at a big name college program, you are cultural touchstones, how do you cement your legacy?  With a blowout loss to a whitewash Duke team in the 1992 Championship Game, followed by a loss to UNC in 1993 in your best chance for redemption in the “Chris Webber Timeout Game.”  Then, all five of you go pro and have mixed to underachieving careers.  All of that sounds like a missed opportunity to me.  Especially Chris Webber.  If you were a kid and liked basketball in the early 90’s, you liked Chris Webber.  He was cool, those golden Michigan shorts were cool, those navy Michigan shorts were cool, it was the first time you could even vaguely overhear a player being talented all around, that wasn’t Michael Jordan.  He had all the potential in the world: he was well spoken, raised from a middle class family; he was a terrifc passer and a gifted offensive scorer; he seemed to have a knack for the game.  Yet, aside from those few years in Sacramento, he lacked success.  And even those Sacramento years were not successful.  He lacked that ability to seize the moment, to realize all of the gifts he was given and to take that history that was laid out before him and make it his.  Now, I think of Chris Webber and I think of what a great analyst and TV presence he is on TNT – calming, handsome and articulate.  And I do think back to those navy and maize Michigan shorts and how me and my friend Dan both wore our own baggy pairs when we taught ourselves to dribble between our legs.  However, fewer are my memories of his greatness.  All I can say is that I liked to watch him play and I like to see him during halftime now, but he will forever be stuck in 1992.

Sticking with basketball, and of course this will always be an unfair comparison, but we have Michael Jordan.

(Cue the laughter.)

There are endless Michael Jordan moments to pick – which is part of the reason why he is Michael Jordan, because the fact that he rose to a moment, made even referring to him as great or clutch or the fact that he has moments redundant or cliché.  However, let’s stick to a moment that was executed with a perfection that M.J. could pull off, yet was eventually ruined.  1998 Finals.  Game 6 in Salt Lake City. There is under a minute to go, Stockton has just nailed a three to put the Jazz up 86-83. 41.9 seconds remaining. Jordan is fatigued after carrying the team the entire game when Scottie went out with a back injury in the first quarter and wasn’t the same after that.  However, he catched the ball at midcourt, crosses up Byron Russell and sauters in for a vintage Jordan tongue-wagging layup (he looks especially late-90’s Jordan, slightly less air, a little less domineering once airborne, but still as graceful).  The Jazz come down at the other end to counter.  Stockton in bounds to Malone who is met by Rodman.  But here comes Jordan from the backside.  He knocks the ball out of Malone’s hands and picks it up. Rodman looks at him for a second and Jordan is looking down court.  He carries the ball down court and you can feel the moment rising to a head.  There is an opening here for Michael to make history.  So he drives right at Byron Russell and crosses left. He uses a push-off which he had at his disposal to use because he was Michael Jordan.  And when you become legendary, you use the tricks that have made your art.  Then steps back and makes the jumper.  Holding his follow through for good measure.  Game Bulls.  Series Bulls. Ring number 6.

(Looks like a Renaissance painting doesn't it? Raphael?)

Bob Costas: That may have been the last shot Michael Jordan ever made in the NBA...If that's the last image of Michael Jordan...how magnificent is it!?

You almost get goosebumps just reading that.  And if you watch, Michael just looks like the best basketball player ever in this game, he looks like the archetype.  And in that moment, Michael had made the perfect storybook ending to his career.  He had taken every opportunity given to him and seized it by hard work, competitive spirit (insanity?) and working knowledge of a craft.  However, he was not some character in fiction and, like the focused eye Joyce had on the everyday in Ulysses, Michael proved that he was no super-hero.  He had to come back because the game would not die (maybe just his competitive nature) and he spoiled the perfect ending that he had etched into a created out of the static wave of history.  Proving in the end, that history can give us so much, and we can take every advantage from it, but it is up to us in the end to dictate how it will turn out and how we will let things fall into place.

You’ve already heard me talk about one of the more recent examples of this situation.  In this year’s Super Bowl, Peyton Manning had a chance to write the ultimate chapter of football history as being the best quarterback of all time.  Many perhaps would still debate his amount of championships. However, the most championships won by a quarterback is four.  If Peyton won, he would have won two.  Bill Russell won eight championships in the NBA. Michael won six and he is considered the best player of all time because of his execution of the game, his competitive nature, his image as the prototype.  Peyton meets all of those criteria, and with two championships why would he not be better remembered than Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Tom Brady, Troy Aikman and Johnny Unitas?  He damn well would have been.  If he had lost the game in a different manner he would have been remembered differently too.  What if Brees leads a last minute drive and doesn’t allow Peyton on the field? Brees would have earned that moment with his child under the confetti (of course he did earn it, but you know what I mean) and in the hearts of Americans rather than having Peyton give him the moment.  Then, Peyton is a victim to a career year for a quarterback who was a nice guy that was “due.”  Now, Peyton, is a great student of the game who won one Super Bowl and threw away another, just as he used to throw away games to the Pats.  All this happened overnight, because a moment opened up with an opportunity.  A story to be written.

Let’s go to Sunday.  My dad is driving me to the train station so that I can return to my apartment.  He and I are focused on the radio, listening to the play by play intently and asking each other about players on each team, even though we both know that the other has no idea who they are or where they’re from.  But the game is that important, it is that tense and it has that historicality that you just have to ask somone about that U.S. goaltender.  I’ve never been a hockey fan.  My grandfather used to have season tickets to the Islanders during the 90’s, so I had my chance to go to plenty of games in the relic of a once great dynasty.  I grew up a Flyers fan and the Legion of Doom caught my imagination.  However, it was never a sport that I could really get into and I could only shrug when there was a lockout and the league fell into obscurity because most of the friends I had grown up with only shrugged when I asked if we could watch basketball.  However, it was much to my surprise that these Olympics opened my eyes to hockey again.  The Winter Classic tradition that the NHL has started definitely caught my eye because I thought it was a fantastic idea.  Appeal to Americans with a yearly ceremony, something outdoorsy in the cold where you can drink beer – like a late season football game.  Yet, as the Olympics began and the first showdown between the U.S. and Canada loomed, I realized the potential that was lurking. 

Back in June, when the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, I remember thinking that it was perfect for the league.  You have your “best player” (I know, I know, Ovechkin) and also your most marketable player in Sidney Crosby – Sid the Kid (great nickname) – winning the championship on a team that was once a great hockey dynasty (maybe?) that once housed one of the games greatest players.  Obviously, when your best player wins the championship it is terrific for the league.  He becomes the champ, his team gains even more notoriety and he becomes even more hunted than before.  Games take on added levels of physicality and importance because the best player now carries the championship.  Holding no ill will toward hockey, this was all pleasing to me.  After the U.S. shocked Canada in the first game, in what many called a bigger upset than the Miracle Game in 1980, I knew that there was no way these two teams were not meeting again in the Finals.  It was just the way it had to work out.

Sure enough, the tournament continued on, and the U.S. and Canada were destined to meet in the last event of the Olympics, on a Sunday, in Canada. The Canadians had all the talent, while the Americans had the best goaltender and the harder working players.  The U.S. was undefeated while the Canadians were overconfident and had let an inferior team steal a game.  Classic Goliath looking for revenge storyline butting up against the David “the first time wasn’t a fluke” storyline.  Obviously, something had to give.  Although, this set up is murkier territory than simply one party seizing a historical moment.  Each of these sides could claim that the moment was deservedly theirs.  The U.S. wins and shows that hard work trumps talent, which is the American way, although the American way is also that talent can overshadow any fault (hmmm…).  With a U.S. win, hockey picks up popularity in the country that dictates its marketability and the Canadians are humbled and sent home to simmer in revenge for four years and four full hard hitting NHL seasons.  Or, the Canadians win and bring glory to Canada to top off an extremely entertaining Winter Olympics.

Now, you all saw the game.  There couldn’t have been more drama.  Canada jumps to the 2-0 lead despite the U.S. sticking to their winning gameplan.  Then the U.S. crawls back with a scrappy goal.  But that 2-1 score holds until only seconds left when Parise ties it and sends the game into an overtime that had “U.S. win” written all over it.  However, in overtime it is the stealthy play of Crosby that gets him the game winning goal and the accolade of hero added to his Stanley Cup resume at the age of 22.  Sidney Crosby is 22 years old and is a Stanley Cup Champion and a National Hero.

At 22 James Joyce watched his wife take out laundry from the hotel she worked in until he finally had the nerve to ask her out on June 16, 1904.  On June 16, 1904 in , Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus cross paths and teach each other about the timelessness of mankind and his daily existence in the universe.  Stephen Dedalus was 22 as well.  Sports are an unkind venue to discuss these moments of history. Sports brings crowds, they bring the artifice of the “championship game,” they bring the “last minute shot” and the “sudden death goal.”  However, they do grasp our imagination for the great, for coming through when it matters and for sending others into a frenzy of delight.  Bringing pleasure to others is something we should all strive for in our lives.  And our lives are made of small moments like falling in love with a woman from afar who you gain the nerve to ask out on one strange day in June.  Our lives are made of little moments and overlooked occurances, but each moment, every occurance, “any object, when intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”  That is to say, at any moment we can rewrite our own history, and, having long given up my dreams of athletic achievement, that is something that I can not only find solace in, but find contentment in.  Because even if my own ability to change my life at any instant gives me contentment, a feeling of stasis, that means I will forver be hungry, because I’m never in the door – I’m always at the step, watching, but not that closely, for that way in.

And then I’ll take it down like M.J. in 1998 and let Costas give you goosebumps.  But this time, I’ll walk away.  Because I’ve seen it before – its history.

Snow?

I once wrote a story a long time ago called "Snow."  It was a brooding story very much in the influence of James Joyce.  Things really haven't changed so much since I was 17.  Anyway, we are supposed to get this big snow storm tomorrow.  Who knows if it's going to touch down.  I kind of hope it does just to get a little change of pace, though I would like to be up and about when it happens to walk around in it and see the panic in the faces of drivers on the city roads.  There is always something funny about the snow in the city.  Anyway, I'm feeling restless as usual and wanting to get out of the city and out into somewhere with space.  But I am trying to leave my job with grace and in doing that I have to swallow a great deal of hobo pride - as much as it pains me and makes me tired.

In any case, as I said last night, Part I of From Here to The Last Mound of Dirt is finished.  I will begin posting excerpts from Part II now.  Part II is drastically different in its perspective from Part I.  There are no short first person sections that break it up. Part II is made up of three long sections from the respective persepectives of a funeral director, Douglas Bryant, a limo driver, Peter Kosciuzko, and two gravediggers, Jack Simmons and Ed Verlaine.  Each of these characters exists at varying distances from the O'Donnell family, who are the focus of the novel.  This section is really the crux of the novel and the whole concept rides on it.  So, please follow along and let me know what you think.



Bryant and Sons Funeral Home stood white, bright and proud along Old Town Road.  The black lettering of the name was no different than any other funeral home in a ten mile radius of town.  The curves of each character were set with a bolder font, which made the name seem bigger.  The name Bryant – in bold – was regal, classical and, most important of all for the said family in propriety, memorable.

    Douglas Bryant paced the cement front steps impatiently.  In his pocket he thumbed at a piece of loose, callused skin that was on the edge of his middle finger.  He checked the watch on his other wrist.  “Damnit,” he thought. “That bastard O’Donnell is running late.”  He’d heard from Susan, his wife,  that Ben had gone on one of his famous benders again.  Susan had heard this from Ben’s sister-in-law, Erin.  Connor was always the more respectable brother, never carrying on like Ben had.  Funeral Director Bryant wondered if there had been any public displays as there had been years ago, the kind everyone talked about.  The most famous was when that widow who lived on West Meadow found Ben sleeping in a bathtub on the piece of beach behind her house.

    Douglas reminded himself to stop picking at his skin.  His hand rested in his pocket, slowly sweating onto the fabric.  A light breeze pushed his white hair back.  He looked across the street at the brick high school which stood equally as proud.  A small faint smile moved over his lips.  Cars moved in and out of the school parking lot and he felt as though he could hear the uncaring shouts of the students in and outside of the hallways; hear the stick and pull of cleats on the wet September fields.  There was a chance the football team might be good this year.  His son, Frank, was a nose tackle.

    Douglas listened to the traffic pass and continued to think of his son.  Frank was born with the same unfortunate husky build that he had carried his whole life.  However, Frank had used althletics to turn that shape into something positive, something admirable in terms of sacks and tackles.  Mr. Bryant sighed and realized he was picking at the skin on his finger again.  They weren’t getting along – he and his son – and Douglas blamed it on himself.  He was tough on Frank, wanted him to have a standout season and get a chance to go to a big university.  That would give him the possibility to get away.  Douglas looked up at the proud black lettered name on the building.  It would give Frank a chance to avoid entering this business, a business that he – Douglas – was supposed to love and cherish as much as his father Abraham.  God rest his soul.

    The loose skin fell off Funeral Director Bryant’s finger and dropped in a corner of his pocket, lost to him.  From the white noise of traffic two cars veered into the parking lot.  Douglas checked his watch and then peered into the window of one of the cars.  Ben O’Donnell was riding in the passenger seat.  The car stopped and one of Ben’s son’s stood up from the driver’s side.  It was Tom O’Donnell.  He was the strange son, the one with all that potential, who’d been at the head of the class but who’d never gone away.  The one who’d tried to kill himself three years ago.

    “How late are we?” Tom O’Donnell asked, his sharp face squinting in the sunlight.

    Funeral Director Bryant didn’t want to be stern, he didn’t want to seem like a hard ass. “Fairly late I would say,” he began.  Realizing that his tone sounded gruff, he tried to change it, but found his voice cracking. “Your family has been waiting for about twenty minutes.”

    The passenger window rolled down.  Ben O’Donnell, wearing sunglasses – surely not out of grief, thought Funeral Director Bryant – stuck his head out.

    “They can stand to wait.  All of them, Douglas.”

    Douglas Bryant was taken back by this blatant rudeness.  But before he could say anything, Tom O’Donnell spoke up.

    “I’m sorry, Mr. Bryant,” he said. “We’ve been getting calls all morning.  My father’s been having a tough time –"

    “Don’t apologize for me,” Ben O’Donnell said.  He opened the car door and got out.  Douglas Bryant noticed Ben stepping with a certain looseness in his step, almost a wobble, but it was held together. Yes, he still had to be drunk.

     “Dougie can take a little joke. Can’t you, Doug?”

    “It’s up to you how you want to honor your wife, Ben.  I’m not one to make judgments.”

    “Sure you are.”

    The second car honked and Tom O’Donnell gave a small wave. “We’ll meet you inside, dad.”  Then he stooped in, his dark face vanishing, and both cars continued around the corner of the building.

    “Let’s go, Ben,” Funeral Director Bryant said, walking briskly up to the heavy white front doors of the home.

    Ben followed him.  His limbs felt light and alive as he watched Doug Bryant’s round frame move in front of him.  Doug pulled open the door.  Ben stopped.  His head felt remarkably clear, there was no ache or bluriness.  Everything was bright and seemed to sit exactly right,  even Doug in his greenish black suit and his slightly damp parted white hair.  Ben took off his sunglasses.  He looked Doug up and down, then hugged him.

    “You’re a saint, Doug.”

    “Thank you, Ben.  I appreciate that.  But anything we can do, you know –"

     Ben passed by him and stepped onto the red carpet.  It was thick and gave with his shoes.  The carpet could carry him along on its spring, it would be able to carry him through this entire ceremony.  He didn’t need carrying, though.  This was where her wake was.  Connor over there by the door looking in at the crowd as I entered, like I am now.  He’s not here. Can I make out his ghost?

    “This way, Ben,” Doug said from his side.