Culture Tap

From a Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, the author of Absurdistan, this horrifying excerpt out of our fictional lives follows.

“I noticed that some of the first-class people were staring me down for having an open book. 'Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,' said the young jock next to me, a senior Credit ape at LandO’LakesGMFord. I quickly sealed the Chekhov in my carry-on, stowing it far in the overhead bin. As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my äppärät and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.”

Lies My Father Told Me, Too

As Moishe Keeperman the oldest, at age 6, you helped your widowed mother, Lillian, who spoke only Yiddish, raise her four kids up-and-out of the Great Depression.

As Moishe Keeperman you played the violin until the night your mother broke it over your head for missing a three-cent lesson from Rabbi Schimmelstein, and then tied you up naked in the bathtub and called all the neighbors from the tenements into your railroad flat to witness your punishment.

As Morris Keeperman you were an all-NYC track-star (see here, in this hallowed tin can, all this weighty, jingling brass, can you even lift it?) the pride of the new DeWitt Clinton High School’s first graduating class.

As Monte King you became the night manager, if only they knew you were a Jew—oi—you think you know from tsuris, don’t ask—gevalt—if they would have caught you—of the prestigious downtown New York Athletic Club. Someday you promised, “I will tell you about the stock tips they used to give me, but maybe it’s not such a good idea to tell you. We'll see.”

As Monte King you bootlegged whisky--what else?--for Dutch Schultz, ran a floating crap-game on Harlem rooftops, ran numbers for bookies, and hustled shopping bags downtown with your dutiful, worshipful brothers, for pennies apiece.

As Kewpie Keeperman you lived for 6 years off the ponies, yourself running up and down the East Coast from Narragansett to Hialeah, wiring money home to us weekly.

As Monte Keeperman when Ma resigned from the OSS and applied for a gig at The Treasury Department how you had to go straight, so you bought a newsstand on a busy corner of the Bronx and raked in a fortune reading the Morning Telegraph and getting paid for sure things from an endless stream of winners and losers: 10% of the winnings, 0% of the losings. Piecework, horse sense, whatever.

As Monte  Keeperman you closed the newsstand after 12 years and became the financial officer of a corporation from which you retired at age 62, and bought a house down the street from Monticello Raceway for which you paid at a Sullivan County bank 32,000 silver dollars that you had collected during your years selling newspapers and had tossed quietly into a bucket.

As Monte Keeperman you saw your wife retire and get a nice plaque from Dick Nixon for her nearly 40 years of service to her country, so you bought a condo in Palm Beach for yourselves.

As Monte Keeperman you went bowling for nearly 20 years in air-conditioned Florida bowling alleys three times a week, averaging an ABC-sanctioned 200+ until one day seventeen years ago tomorrow you left Don Carter Lanes, lit a Camel regular in your 100+ degree spanking-brand-new white Mercury Sable and choked on the smoke until your heart stopped. When I got the phone call I was at the Low-Tor Bowling Alley 1,200 miles away getting ready to pick up a spare for my team, "The Mixed Nuts".

As Ronald Keeperman what I know that is not a lie is that you were getting ready to drive that car home with the one-arm you did not lose in 1942, four months before I was born. Given all that I’ve actually seen you do, I have no reason to believe that your proud son would not have picked up that spare—had he stayed another minute at the lanes. We miss you every day, Pop.

Is A Thing of Beauty...

To quote Michael Schmidt from his obituary for the poet Charles Tomlinson in the Guardian a couple of months ago:

"John Betjeman said: “I hold Charles Tomlinson’s poetry in high regard. His is closely wrought work, not a word wasted … ” For the American objectivist poet George Oppen, “it is [Tomlinson] and Basil Bunting who have spoken most vividly to American poets”. Tomlinson bridged the vast gulf between old and new world poetry, and was an heir equally of Dryden and Williams, Coleridge and Pound. His 16 collections of poetry, books of essays, translations and anthologies are a core resource for English writers and readers of the last half-century, yet he has been more honoured abroad than at home."

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I was self-directed to an old edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry after reading, on the inside cover of the October 2015 edition of Poetry magazine, a 9-line offering by Tomlinson which I found at once inspiring, not merely because of its quiet elegance, but also because of its bone-touching, truth-showing, powerful message: We are not alone during our lives, and we will never be alone, not even in death. Certainly, Tomlinson, even in death, communes with the natural world in all of its wonder.

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Below another 9 lines, these from the final stanza of Tomlinson's poem, "On the Hall at Stowey", I offer proof of that assertion.

"Five centuries. And we? What we had not
     Made ugly, we had laid to waste--
Left (I should say) the office to nature
     Whose blind battery, best fitted to perform it
Outdoes us, completes by persistence
     All that our negligence fails in. Saddened,
Yet angered beyond sadness, where the road
     Doubled upon itself I halted, for a moment
Facing the empty house and its laden barns."

Poetic Justice

For the conclusion of John Van Doren's illuminating lecture, "Poetic Justice," as a part of the Law and Literature Series at the Loyola University of Chicago School of Law (April 5, 1995), Van Doren (then President of the Poetry Center of Chicago) remarked:

"I recall hearing that, years ago, the meetings of the English Department at a great university were always held at three o'clock on Friday afternoons. The younger, idealistic faculty members once asked the chairman why he scheduled them at such an hour, when everybody wanted to leave, when there was time only for administrative matters and none left to discuss literature. Should we not be discussing literature, he was asked? Oh, he said, if we did anything like that, we'd never get home in time for dinner.

"I do not know how it will be for you students in days to come, but I should like to think that, at least now and then, when you arrive home late to find that your meat has grown cold and your spouse asks you where on earth you have been, you will be able to present a straight face and say that you could not get away sooner, you were studying justice--that is, you were reading poetry. I wish you good luck."

A Place of Hard Hits, Timely Tackles, and Solid Sacks: You've Entered the 'End Zone'

“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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In Don DeLillo's early novel, End Zone, there is much ado about something untellable, something unthinkable looming, not just for the protagonist, but for the author, his reader, and all of civilization, as well. Peek-a-book below:

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"I graduate," Deering said. "Talk about nothing happening, that's the biggest nothing there is. That's the ultimate nothing. I graduate in the spring."

"No more football," Billy Mast said.

I'm all through school. I graduate. I'm gone for good."

"No more football. No more hitting. No more sweat and pain. No more fear."

"I can't believe it."

"No more being yelled out and cursed by those insane coaches. No more running in the heat. No more two laps around the goal posts. No more getting kicked and elbowed and spat upon."

"It's awful. I can't accept it. It's a bitch."

.  .  .

Howard Lowry, Billy's roommate, came in and sat on the desk, addressing himself to Billy.

"People keep bringing up that course you're taking. The untellable. I keep hearing about that course. Nobody talks about it but I heep hearing."

"So do I," Ted Joost said.

"There's not much I can say about it," Billy said.

"You can tell us what goes on."

"We delve into the untellable."

"How deep?" Bobby Iselin said.

"It's hard to tell. I don't think anybody knows how deep the untellable is. We've done a certain amount of delving. We plan to delve some more. That's about all I can tell you."

"But what do you talk about?" Howard said. "There are ten of you in there and there's some kind of instructor or professor. You must say things to each other."

"We shout in German a lot. There are different language exercises we take turns doing. We may go on a field trip next week. I don't know where to."

"But you don't know German. I know damn well you don't. I'm your damn roommate. I know things about you."

"Unfortunately I've picked up a few words. I guess that's one of the hazards in a course like this. You pick up things you're better off without. The course is pretty experimental. It's given by a man who may or may not have spent three and a half years in one of the camps. He doesn't think there'll be a final exam."

"Why things in German?" Ted Joost said.

"I think the theory is if any words exist beyond speech, they're probably German words, or pretty close."

"What do I say to people who keep bringing up the untellable?" Howard said.

"It's a three-credit course. It's a very hard course, no matter how bright you are. And apparently there are field trips. I don't know what else you can tell them."

Joseph Pulitzer: "Indegoddampendent"

Precious: A précis of  Pulitzer's prizes.

The growth of money power in this country has been very fabulous and its connections with and interest in the Government alarming...Let us never have a Government in Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of the millions.

Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice.

Always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; never belong to any party; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy for the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing the news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

To Hawkeyes With Love and Squalor

"The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests."

--Alexander Hamilton, 1788