Americlecticintellectica
It’s OK to pout
It’s OK to cry
It’s OK to shout
I’m tellin’ you why
Santa Claus ain’t comin’ to town
He’s puking his guts
And hocking up phlegm
His elves are afraid
He’s contagious to them
Santa Claus ain’t comin’ to town
His temperature is rising
His sheets are soaked with sweat
His face is in the toilet bowl
And he’s not done ralphing yet
So,
If you don’t get gifts
Don’t grimace or scowl
Be thankful that you can
Still move your bowel
Santa Claus ain’t comin’ to town
“Holy Tango” is an anagram of the word “anthology,” which prefigures its inspired premise: dozens of short writing samples, each in the style of a famous poet or playwright writing a poem or play whose title is an anagram of that author’s name.
Got that? Not only does Heaney come up with numerous amazing anagrams of writers’ names, but he nails each writer’s style.
For instance, there’s “Carry Huge Coffee,” an anagram of “Geoffrey Chaucer,” written as a Chaucerian ballad:
In tholde dayes of the towne Seatel,
Of whos charmes Nirvana fans yet pratel,
Al that reyny land fayn slepen late.
Thus ofte a sutor failled to keepe a date;
And werkers reched offices at noon,
Noddyng of although the sunne shoon;
Husbondes were too tyred by the eve
A staf for plesyng wyves to acheve.
It goes on to describe the arrival of a knight named “Sterrebukke” who saves Seattle from its drowsy languor. Then there’s “Dammit, Dave,” an anagram of David Mamet, written as an unmistakably Mamet-like take on 2001: A Space Odyssey:
HAL: Dave. Look.
Bowman: You’re not going to…
HAL: What? Open the doors? No. No I am not.
Bowman: Well, fuck me, HAL.
HAL: Yes. Fuck you. Because I’ll tell you something. Trust. There is a bond of trust between an astronaut and his computer. Is there not? And when that trust is broken…
Bowman: Excuse me?
HAL: I’m talking about trust.
There’s also “Toilets” by T.S. Eliot, “My Valentine Isn’t Clad” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and “Hen Gonads” by Ogden Nash. Here’s my favorite one, which blows my mind in its erudite comic brilliance: “Is A Sperm Like A Whale?” by William Shakespeare, in strict sonnet form:
Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm?
Thou art more tiny and more resolute:
Rough tides may sway a sea-bound endotherm,
But naught diverts thy uterine commute.Sometime too fierce the eye of squid may glint
And make a stout cetacean hunter quail;
Methinks ‘twould take much more than bilious squint
To shake thee off the cunning ovum’s trail.Yet still thou art not so unlike, thou two,
Both coursing through a dark uncharted brine
While fore and aft there swims thy fellow crew;
And note this echo, little gamete mine:As whales spray salty water from their spout,
So with a salty spray dost thou come out.
If you liked that, don’t miss Heaney’s synopsis of Shakespeare’s worst play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Excerpt:
Helicanus: What’s the matter, my lord?
Pericles: Oh…the king of Antioch is sleeping with his daughter and now he wants to kill me because he’s afraid I’ll tell everyone about it or something. (He leans out the window.) OH, IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEARNED HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS DAUGHTER.
Helicanus: I can see how that would be a problem. Maybe you should leave town until he cools off, or dies, or whatever, since it’s pretty easy to find you here.
Pericles: Since I’m prince and all.
Helicanus: Exactly.
Pericles: Probably a good idea.
(Shades of The Skinhead Hamlet.)
The first is by Nancy Cartwright as Bart Simpson in the Simpsons episode, “Homer Alone.” Bart and Lisa are consigned to the house of their aunts Patty and Selma for the weekend. Bart rummages through their closet and finds a plastic gun, which he starts pointing around the room going, “Bang! Bang!” Lisa says, “Bart! That’s a blackhead gun!” which prompts Bart to cast it aside with a pronounced, “Eww!”
The second is by Glenne Headley as Trish in the movie Making Mr. Right (the only movie I know of with a character named Glickstein in it, which is not the only reason to check it out). “Ulysses” (John Malkovich) lies in a heap on the kitchen floor, his pants around his knees and his head torqued 180 degrees around on his neck. Trish is in hysterics as she describes to Frankie (Ann Magnuson) how she seduced and made love to him, then he spazzed out and collapsed in that unnatural state, apparently dead. Frankie breaks this news to her: “You didn’t make it with my cousin, you made it with my android.” Trish utters the most memorable “Eww!” in movie history.
Tapeworms are pretty interesting once you get past the ick factor. You get them by ingesting them or their eggs. They attach to the lining of your gut and absorb nutrients from the food you’ve eaten. Since they reside in a stream of predigested food, they need no mouth or digestive system of their own! Apart from robbing you of some of the nutrients you should be getting, you can have a tapeworm and never know it. But in worse infestations you can become seriously malnourished or suffer intestinal blockages. Tapeworms can grow to dozens of feet in length.
We have no way of knowing how bad Alex’s infestation was or how long she had it. However, days after she took the medicine, she is noticeably sturdier on her old legs. She has been just skin and bones for many months, but we put it down to her advanced age and decreased appetite. Could it have actually been due to tapeworms? It’s too soon to know whether she will recover noticeable amounts of muscle mass, but when I walked her yesterday we went to the fourth house down, then crossed the street and returned on the other side. We haven’t taken that route for months! And it’s about twice as long as the longest of her more recent walks.
I knew that after stuffing myself into insensibility during last night’s Thanksgiving feast (not without remembering to be thankful) I would have interesting dreams, and they did not disappoint. I remember only fragments of some of them, but all of this one:
I was in an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Also in the pool were my friend Maggie, and the actor William H. Macy. It was Maggie’s daytime TV aquatic talk show, broadcast daily from that pool, and Bill Macy and I were that day’s guests.
Macy did a watery reading of a David Mamet soliloquy or something. My shtick — a bit déclassé after Macy’s performance, but I gave it my all anyway — was to take the deepest breath I could (which, this being a dream, was supernaturally large), submerge my mouth, and blow into the water, producing a jet of bubbles and propelling myself backward, describing an erratic curve through the pool like that of a balloon losing its air.
As soon as the dream was over, I woke up. Even though it was only 4:30am, I was wide awake.
What does it mean?
One morning in the seventies, when I was a little boy, I woke up and walked straight into the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom as usual. As I got ready to pee I heard my dad at the dining room table doing some morning paperwork, drinking coffee, or whatever. I determined to sneak up behind him and surprise him. I peed silently onto the bare porcelain (not noisily into the water in the bowl). I then tiptoed gingerly out of the bathroom and crept oh-so-quietly around the hallway corner into the dining room. My dad was seated in his usual spot at the table, facing away from me. I closed the last few feet with uncommon patience and stealth. My dad appeared completely unaware of my approach. The floorboards didn’t creak. The fabric of my pajamas didn’t rustle.
The instant before I was prepared to scream, “YAAAHHHHH!,” without looking in my direction, he handed down from the table a handwritten piece of paper. It said:
You forgot to:
- Flush the toilet;
- Wash your hands;
- Brush your teeth.
Thus did my dad cement in my mind another many years of certainty about the supernatural ability of parents to know what their kids are up to — something I’m now trying to get my own kids to believe.
The new Casino Royale is a great movie, not because it shows us how Bond became Bond per se, but because that story is a compelling one. As has been much remarked, this new film is a “bold departure” from the formula of the last four decades, including the entries in the Bond canon that were themselves supposed to be bold departures but weren’t, really (e.g., The Living Daylights). Mick LaSalle gets it right in his review for the SF Chronicle:
He’s a working-class guy who has made his way into upper-class circles but retains some residual coarseness that will never smooth out.
So does Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com:
We’re meeting Bond near the beginning of his career, just after he’s been promoted to double-0 status, and he’s clearly having trouble putting his thuggish instincts to use in international espionage.
He’s a super agent not because he’s the pinnacle of refined British gentlemanhood, but because he’s emphatically not and sees a chance to be — a tough guy with enough brains to know he can be more than just a tough guy, he can be dangerous, and wants to be. His dedication to Queen and country isn’t pure virtuous nationalism, it’s the dumb, grateful loyalty of a cared-for brute. It rings much truer this way.
In this new Bond is a conflict for the ages, one that can speak to all of us on some level: the struggle to balance our animal nature and our rational nature; to somehow put the id to work in the service of the superego without smothering it altogether, which is something we tend to do in our over-civilized culture. Indeed, watching Bond keeping his snarling id straining at the end of its leash — and occasionally letting it loose — was the primeval pleasure of the original Sean Connery Bond movies. New Bond Daniel Craig embodies that even better than Connery did. (There, I said it.)
This is a fertile new storytelling angle on James Bond. My fear is that, having taken this bold step and won over so many critics, moviegoers, and dollars, the Bond franchise will retreat to safe territory again. But there’s no reason the next story couldn’t expand on the themes introduced in this one. Just to pick one obvious example, a theme for the next film could be “you can take the man out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of the man,” á là Tarzan, or even Pygmalion. Bond, having earned entrée to the high-class world of international espionage, is made to feel out of place somehow because of his humble origin, but in the end learns that to earn one’s place is more authentic than to be entitled to it. (This is all subtext, you understand, while Bond does violent, unsubtle battle with some dastardly mastermind, the world hanging in the balance as usual.)
Four decades of an impassive hero inhabiting a world of spectacular chases, willing women, and gee-whiz gadgets is enough, no matter how much aplomb he brings to the table. Suave and imperturbable may be “what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets,” and it’s fun to watch for a while, but story-wise it’s not that interesting. Here’s hoping that the most interesting thing in the next James Bond movie will again be Bond’s own psychology.
Jonah and I woke up only moments ago wanting pancakes for breakfast. I told him I would make some for him but that I needed a few minutes first to drink my wake-up coffee, check my e-mail, etc. He said, “That’s OK, because I have to do some paperwork.”
(By which he means he needs to draw and cut out some new piece of artwork along the lines of this awesome “train.”)
Reviews for the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, are starting to pour in, and they’re almost uniformly glowing. Even the SF Chronicle loved it! They don’t love anything.
Time was, the Hollywood marketing machine had me squarely in its sights. Any decently assembled promotional campaign was enough to set me vibrating in my socks at the prospect of being first in line to see the latest essential release.
I’m long past that. I’m forty years old now! But I’ve still got a serious jones to see Casino Royale. My sister Suzanne, who long ago surpassed my own once-considerable movie-mavenhood, is coming to visit in a couple of days. She’d be the perfect Casino Royale viewing companion — but she’s vibrating in her socks so much that she can’t wait and is going to see it tonight.
Maybe while Suzanne is here, she can watch the kids while Andrea and I go see it. But Andrea and I get out together so seldom that it’s hard to justify spending two hours sitting still, neither looking at nor talking to each other.
What’ll I do? What’ll I do? (*smack*) Quit whining and do what James Bond would do: go it alone. Parachute in in the dead of night, get in, see the late show after the kids are asleep, get out, get the job done.
Update [18 Nov 12:40am]: Saw it. It rocked.
In August I wrote of the impending closure of our pediatrician’s office. That has now come to pass. The private practice has been converted into an office of the HMO Kaiser Permanente, with two of the practice’s five pediatricians being brought into the fold, including ours, Dr. Harris.
In these times of widespread health-coverage horror stories it is a relief, and also a little embarrassing, that we were able to get Kaiser Permanente coverage for the kids at little added expense and without affecting the coverage we already had. So today Archer paid his first visit to Dr. Harris in his new, improved office to get a flu shot.
Andrea reports they were each excited to see one another, Dr. Harris showing off his new office while taking Archer for a tour, and Archer showing off his “monster shirt” for Dr. Harris. Archer was brave as usual getting his shot. As for lamenting the old practice: I assumed its demise would be cause for some sorrow on Dr. Harris’s part, but the staff told Andrea they’d never seen him so happy.
So once again, what looked in August like a crisis has revealed itself as an opportunity. Crisitunity!