Stray Reprints

Saturday, September 25, 2021

FIVE POINTS

POINT: There were only fifteen kinds of philosophy. Most of them David did not know. He remained blissfully unaware. He had taken some training in the third kind, though, and told Mary breathlessly about an exercise that was intended to illuminate humanity’s hidebound assumptions about reality and illusion. It went like this: Is that red spot my blood? The trick of course was that the red spot might not be her blood or even anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to be blood at all! The next day he wrote her a letter: “Do you remember when we first met, how happy we were to be together? Or rather, how happy we seemed. You were twenty-nine years old and in the bloom of your beautiful youth. We were on an airplane coming back from Minnesota, where you had recently broken things off with a boyfriend who you began dating when both of you were young professors in New York City. I said, jokingly, seriously, indicating the airplane, ‘I’ll talk you down.’ Later you insisted that we had not met on an airplane, but rather in a gourmet supermarket downtown. You say things you do not mean!” POINT: There were only eight kinds of restaurants. David and Mary went to six of them the first month they were together. The remaining two were Chinese and then some kind of Mexican fusion that used edible flower petals as garnishes. Those held no appeal for Mary. The six, though, pleased her greatly. One kind of restaurant served what they called a “mock chicken,” in which sauce was applied with a broad brush to a concoction of breadcrumbs and filigreed potato. Mary was a big supporter of this dish. She ate it frequently. And yet she never seemed to put on any weight. “I work it off,” she said. David wished he could say that he didn’t get your meaning, because that would be subtle and satisfying, but the truth was that he got her meaning. Right between the eyes! The next day he wrote her a letter: “What about when you told me that you were an enemy of memory? It was such an infelicitous phrase; it had the most insipid music. Enemy of memory. Enemy of memory. You tell me that doesn’t just sound silly. You were trying to explain to me that you don’t like to be reminded that certain things are part of the record, and also that you don’t like to be part of the record yourself. ‘I don’t like to be reminded or remembered,’ you said. ‘What’s my hope for invisibility if you keep looking for me?’ you said. I knew exactly what you meant. I was and remain capable of a powerful scrutiny!” POINT: There were only three kinds of sadness. David felt one the first time Mary went away. “I need time,” she said. He did not take her at her word. He rushed forward. Mary wrote him a letter: “Do you know how trompe l’oeil creates the impression of deep space in flatness? Just so, a woman who flatly says that she wishes to be alone can seem, to a stupid man, like a woman who is not admitting her deep desire for company. Like trompe l’oeil, you have only to move to one side to see things for what they are. You stood in one place like a fool but thought yourself a wise man!” POINT: There were only twelve kinds of birds. One of the kinds of bird was a red-tailed, yellow-crested pine dazzler. In color it resembled a superhero. In physical appearance it resembled a mynah. Mynahs seemed as though they were speaking. Some said they were just repeating. David thought that they were reminding. He had a girlfriend once who had a mynah once who loved to remind him of what had been said earlier. “Time will tell,” the mynah said. “Time will tell.” The mynah was right. Time was always telling him things. It just wouldn’t shut up! POINT: There were only two kinds of letters. David wrote Mary a textbook example of the second one: “Why are birds so delicious? They taste even better when you eat them from the feet up. By ‘birds’ I mean ‘people.’ By ‘delicious’ I mean ‘elusive.’ By ‘taste even better’ I mean ‘seem to be one thing."’ By ‘when you eat them from the feet up’ I mean ‘but in fact turn out to be something else.’ Language can be so imprecise!”

JINGLE-JANGLE MORNING

According to a recent article in Business Digest Daily, which I read religiously — and by that I mean that I read it dressed as a priest — one of the nation’s most influential businessmen “is not Elon Musk of Tesla or Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or even Bill Gates of Microsoft, but a man that few have even heard of: Walter Lomonaco, President of DTR Inc., a privately-held company that specializes in hard-to-find seals and gaskets.” I was pleased to see the name but also displeased. Have you heard of Walter Lomonaco? What I mean is, had you heard of him before his mention in the previous paragraph? If you closed your eyes right now, could you summon up the name “Walter Lomonaco”? You could not. And who can blame you? Your experience is the same as that of most Americans. My experience, on the other hand, is different. As different as an apple from an orange, or a fire hydrant from another fire hydrant uprooted from its station on the curb, turned upside-down, painted a color it had not previously been painted, and thrown into the center of the forest. I have not only heard of Walter Lomonaco, but have spent dozens of hours thinking about him, have in fact been preoccupied with his career ever since I ran across a piece in the Southeast Business Chronicle that disclosed Mr. Lomonaco’s nickname (The Sultan of Seal) and discussed the innovative way in which he had transitioned to the mobile sector. “He,” the piece said, “sells to hospitals for their hydraulically operated beds. He sells to soda companies for their bottles. He sells to dentists for their drills. Everything needs to be sealed, and he’s the man to do it.” Lomonaco also revealed the slogan he had invented when he was twenty-nine years old and a fledgling businessman: “My products have my seal of approval.” Something about the Southeast Business Chronicle opened my eyes to the importance of seals in the world, and from that moment on I thought of little else. My daily behavior, I came to understand, depended in large part upon them. I drank soda from bottle filled by machines that required seals. I ate jelly from jars that had been filled with the aid of seals and then sealed themselves. When I would mention Walter Lomonaco at parties or to colleagues, they would stare at me dumbly. I felt that I was the only man on earth who passed his days consumed with the everpresent utility of seals and gaskets. Then one morning I put on my priest’s outfit to read American Business Weekly and found him there again, Walter Lomonaco, The Sultan of Seal. The article concluded with a plaintive quote in which he lamented that he was not better known in the business community or the population at large. “There must be some way to get into people’s heads,” he said. There is, of course, and I thought I knew what it was. Brands, you see, can be based on simple visuals, such as logos or recognizable corporate representatives—who can forget Olson Fertilizer’s “viny O” or Lawrence Beckel’s bald scalp and sideburns?—but just as often they can be reinforced by memorable jingles. Who would remember Sturdy Dog Food if not for the infectious “Any dog can be a winner / If he eats his Sturdy dinner”? And does anyone really think that they would give a second thought to Microsoft if not for the company’s delightful theme song: “Microsoft / They all scoffed / When we started up in a garage / But look at us now / Milking our giant cash cow / Our billions and billions of dollars are no mirage”? Moreover, some of the best jingles in the history of advertising have been written by people who are not professional jingle-writers. Throughout the years, major companies have used songs penned by drivers, secretaries, electricians, and other somewhat musically talented staffers. The day after I read about Mr. Lomonaco in Business Wire, I decided to try to repair his image problem, and so I sat down with a box of cereal, a book of nursery-rhymes, a bottle of spirit-gum, and a bruised cassette copy of an old Hank Williams album. These were to be my tools: the cereal for visual inspiration, the nursery rhymes for verbal stimulation, and the Hank Williams for melodic inducement. (The spirit-gum I had in case my eyebrows fell off. It has never happened, but you never know.) “If You’ll Be a Baby To Me” was playing on the stereo when suddenly it hit me: a jingle for King Seal and his kingdom. “A-tisket, a-tasket / If you blow a gasket / Don’t give in to your worries or your strife / Just pick up the phone / You’re never alone / We will help you / Seal the deal for life.” I sang it once, and it sounded like a perfect fit. I typed it up and mailed it. Mr. Lomonaco is now in possession of my jingle, with which I intend to make him an internationally known celebrity and generally raise the profile of the gasket and seal industry. I am certain that the campaign will be a hit. I have tested the jingle on several friends and acquaintances. Like my dentist, who is, by pure coincidence, also named Hank Williams, although he goes by Henry. I went to see Dr. Williams yesterday—crown—and told him all about Mr. Lomonaco, and e-commerce, and how the Sultan of Seal and his products were responsible for the proper operation of nearly everything in his office. He nodded and made noises of assent, as dentists tend to do, but when I confronted him afterwards admitted that he had not heard a word. “I just pretend,” he said. “That’s condescending,” I said. “Still not listening,” he said. “Hard habit to break.” But when I sang him the jingle, the habit was not hard to break at all. “That’s fiercely catchy,” he said, tapping his foot. “Really has a nice thing going. Duh dah duh dah duh dah. You might be on to something.” “Could you stop tapping your foot?” I said. “It’s on the pedal for the chair, and I’m getting dizzy.” He rolled his eyes. I went him one better and rolled my nose. Then we sang the jingle together, me and Hank Williams. We sealed the deal for life.

EVOLUTION OF THE MIND

On. Dawn. She was getting dressed, bottomless, vest, remembering Kingsley’s hippopotamus test. “A measure of spirit,” she said. Putnam didn’t hear it. He was in the other room, sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking coffee. He was like that every morning. Similarity was the problem. She kept remembering Kingsley, and how he had observed with both mind and soul the debate over Darwin, Huxley for the defense, Owen for the prosecution. She recalled the battle over men and apes. Did one follow directly from the other? If you cut apart their brains what would you find? Kingsley, a broad church priest, had refused to duck the question, and had over time come to side with Huxley, his friend. Both felt Owen’s objections as a form of angry flailing. Owen claimed that only human brains contained a major hippocampus. This briefly dampened enthusiasm for Darwin but science pushed back. Primates had them too, said science. Putnam coughed loudly, as he often did at this time. “Coming?” he said. She was not coming. She was staying where she was. Where was she? Still at rest. Not yet dressed. Oh, yes, the test. After witnessing the hostility between Huxley and Owen, Kingsley had composed a bit of satire in the style of Lord Dundreary, a character known in the United States only as a result of the play that surrounded him, Our American Cousin, which was onstage at Ford’s Theater the night that Abraham Lincoln took a bullet from the gun of John Wilkes Booth. (The president’s head was opened and, perhaps,a hippocampus briefly glimpsed.) Kingsley then reframed the debate for children in his famous book of fairy-tales, Water Babies. He wondered if a Water Baby were to pass from life, if it was suspended in a solution of sustaining chemicals, aldehydes and such, and then bisected, with half sent to Huxley and half to Owen, what would they conclude? Here Kingsley changed hippocampus to hippopotamus, thinking it would better amuse young readers. He was correct. With this deed, the children’s tale, did Kingsley succeed or fail? Did his jape protect Huxley’s position regarding Darwin’s disquisition about apes and men? And then: did Owen feel the shame of his limits? She did not know the story any further. She thought better of the vest. A white shirt would do. She knew it when she started getting dressed. She only wore the vest as a form of protest. Putnam did not like her in it. “Wait a minute,” he said whenever he saw it. He thought it made her manly. What did that make him, by extension? She ran a finger downward through her breasts, thought once more of the hippocampus test, Kingley’s fanciful embroidery, found a scarf that satisfied Putnam’s fondness for chinoiserie, tied it round her neck, stood looking in the mirror at her body, skin and hair, thin here and fat there, places she had touched, places touched by others, knotted the scarf, discarded it, sat cross-legged atop the covers. She felt along her lip with tongue for fun. Fuzz. She pulled her tongue back but not for lack of wanting to explore more. She’d owe herself for later. Every body is a debtor and a creditor at once. “Breakfast,” Putnam called. She heard that common note of sameness, suffered it. “It’s eight,” he said. “Great,” she said. Putnam didn’t hear her clearly. “Did you hear?” he said. “We leave by nine.” She said, louder, “Fine.” She pulled on underwear. She would eat breakfast like that. Manly? She dared him to come to that conclusion. But what if he still did? “Heaven forbid,” she said. “Heaven forfend.” And then: she pulled them off, fingers twitching. In the kitchen, Putnam coughed. Off.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

The other day I was speaking to two friends, Bill and Paul. We were down at the clubhouse, playing Chinese checkers, smoking cigars, swimming laps in the pool. Then Bill said, “Stockholm,” and Paul got a look in his eyes, and that was it for checkers and cigars. I have known Bill and Paul for longer than I care to admit, and every year around this time, when the autumn air begins to sharpen, the conversation turns to Nobel Prizes. Bill and Paul are in competition to see which of them will be the first to win. Bill thinks that Bill will be. Paul thinks that Paul will be. "You can stay in my hotel room in Stockholm," Bill says. “No,” Paul says. “You can stay in mine." I don't usually participate in the conversation, but that is not because I feel I have nothing to contribute. To the contrary: I have everything to contribute, because I am fairly certain that I will be the first of our group to win. Do not be so quick to dismiss this as a preposterous fantasy. For starters, let me outline the achievements of the other men. Bill is an economist who has, for the last twenty-three years, studied the interdependence of economic sectors, both extending and eroding the work of Wassily Leontief. He has been nominated for the prize several times, and one year narrowly lost out to Edmund Phelps, whose achievement he dismissed as "overexplaining the golden rule savings rate." Paul is an ornithologist who has made great advances in understanding bird movement as a type of language and who has proven, pace von Frisch, that honeybees are not the only animals with hard-wired choreography. Though he has only been nominated once, he is slightly younger than Bill, and so more of his work is still ahead of him. Paul puts Bill's odds at ten to one, while Paul puts Bill's odds at twelve to one. Neither of them wants to suggest that the other is incapable of winning a Nobel Prize, as that would reflect negatively upon the naysayer, as both men are roughly equal in stature. Neither Bill nor Paul will tell me what they believe my chances are, and I detect in their reluctance a mix of condescension and dismissiveness. When they look at me, they see only the slightly younger, slightly stooped man who has worked at the clubhouse for ten years. They see only the husband who sometimes has to leave early to tend to his sick wife, or the father who brings his daughters to work and settles them into a side room with coloring books and crayons. If Bill wants to discuss the labor cost of exports, he may not be satisfied with my response; if Paul attempts to demonstrate sparrow syntax, he may find my concentration lacking. It is true that I cannot engage Bill or Paul on their research. My limits are not the only factor. I am busy with my own work. Over the last decade, I have devised a technology that allows an individual to remain surpassingly ambitious while at the same time not betraying or sacrificing those close to him. I know this seems as farfetched as Cherenkov radiation did in 1951, or as partition chromatography did in 1946. How can a man be both driven forward by his ambition and also remain located confidently amidst his family and friends? How can a man focus entirely on his research and still have energy left over for love, for life itself? It is a problem positively Heisenbergian. The path to solving it was neither easy nor direct—as a young chemist, I earned fame for examining carbon chains in interstellar space, and came very close to finding spectral evidence of longer similar molecules. Then my first marriage foundered on the rock of my research, and it was difficult for me to move forward. Pain clung to every step. I switched fields and, as I have said, eventually discovered how ambition and humanity can co-exist harmoniously. I cannot explain it with any accuracy in this essay—no time, must get home—but suffice it to say that I will give a full account in both my forthcoming paper and the lecture in Stockholm that will almost certainly follow. Bill and Paul are, of course, welcome to come along for the trip. I will even pay for their hotel rooms. It is hard to overestimate the value of friends.

THE ARTIST'S WAY

The other night I fell asleep reading the new thriller, Sliding Scale. The thing hums. There are countless bodies and episodes of brilliant cogitation. I had been meaning to read it all summer but I was moving slowly through Rebecca Smithson, a vast historical novel based on the life of the woman who revolutionized bookbinding. My wife had read Rebecca Smithson first. "It doesn't really hold together," she said. I asked her if I could use that joke in a book. I am a writer. She agreed, stipulating only that I take pains to identify her as a real human being rather than a character that I dreamed up. “Whatever,” I said. My sleep was fitful and contained two dreams. The first was about meeting my wife for the first time. She was in a bar, wearing an olive-green t-shirt that said “Wake Up” on it in thick black letters. It was the same shirt she had been wearing the first time we met in real life. In life, she hadn’t liked me much at first. In the dream, we went away together immediately, to a house on an island one of us owned, and she took down a book from a shelf. It was Diminishing Returns, a novel I had apparently written. “Hmm,” she said, turning it in her hands. I fell then into a second dream. I was walking outside and found, in a bird’s nest, a book that recounted my life from birth. The details were all correct—where I was born, where I grew up, childhood friends, schooling, and so forth—but the book had been published long before I was born. It was a prophecy rather than a history. I started flipping ahead to see how things turned out. The book carried me precisely through the moment of finding the book, but the pages after that were ripped out. I woke with a start. My wife was still sleeping. She had not been disturbed by my start, which sent Sliding Scale crashing to the floor. It is good that it was not Rebecca Smithson, which would certainly have woken her. I reached for my laptop and began work on a new book, Diminishing Returns, in which everything that's important happens in the first twenty pages and what follows is 280 pages of trivia, ephemera, garbled repeats of early sections, and eventually just blank paper. My wife slept soundly, dreaming this paragraph.

Friday, September 24, 2021

ABSTRACT IN YELLOW AND GREEN

Teens scream. They love doing it. They’re in a line, crisscrossing the small meadow off the soccer field, corner to corner, side to side. It’s night, and there’s no danger, only joy. The air is cool and crisp. The park lights are sodium yellow. The one in front knows this because of her father, who works in airport lighting, a very specialized art that involves a great many problems that do not occur in most other fields of electrical illumination. She loves her father, the one in front, loves him more than she has ever loved anyone. She assumes that will always be the case. She shouts at the others to follow her, but then they cross back and she’s the last, which is fine with her too.

MISERABLE AGE

“Bosola was based on Bozolo, about whom little is known…” The student stands. The teacher braces. Will the student (hereafter: she) know that the teacher (hereafter: he) has been reading nearly verbatim from an online encyclopedia, that he has not read The Duchess of Malfi in any of the six years that he has taught it, and maybe in fact has never read it, he is racking his brain now, casting back to grad school, Shakespeare, yes, of course, read that, and not for the first time, read Jonson, too, Middleton, maybe, Marston, definitely not (James? John?), but Webster occupies a gray area, he is near to certain that he owned the book, can see the cover in his mind, a woman with long curls and conspicuous décolletage, a word whose etymology he knows cold, it refers to the removal of the collet or collar, he even remembers the title page because of the way duchess was spelled, D-V-T-C-H-E-S-S-E, and Malfy instead of Malfi, but that might have been as far as he got, oh yes, the student, oh no, she’s just standing there, staring at him. He nods at her. She loads a pause into the room. “I’m just wondering,” she says. “If little is known of Bozolo, how do we know that Bosola was based on him? I mean, wouldn’t we have to know about him to know if someone was based on him?” The room roars. He nearly wets himself with relief. “Good one, Campbell,” he says, entirely unsure if this is her name.