Watching the sun disappear in gradual increments today, what amazed me most was how little you would notice if you weren’t looking at it with glasses. The light did change towards the end, but not so much. Of course, we didn’t go to total eclipeseville to see it, just to east county where the sun wasn’t obscured by fog.
What Larry said: “I don’t know what amazes me more, the sense of the bodies moving in space or the ability of the scientists to predict their movement to the minute.”
Oh, and if you want to see the poetry reading last Thursday, here it is: https://www.facebook.com/beltiblibrary/
When he was a boy, Larry lived near a vacant lot with an the chassis of an old P40 airplane that he and the other boys played on, pretending to be pilots, fighting enemies. He grew up near Camp Pendleton in southern California, and war myths were part of his boyhood. Continue reading “Larry and the P40”→
I read Larry a line from this review of The Art of Rivalry, a study of influences a group of modernist painters had on each other: “Lucien Freud declining a wedding invitation because he found himself ‘in the unusual position of having been involved sexually not only with the bride but also the groom and the groom’s mother.'” Larry’s response:
According to Larry, reading from the paper this morning, Jan Böhmerman, a German comedian, is being prosecuted for reciting a lewd poem on late night TV lampooning Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. Why? You can read about it.
The event inspired British free-speech advocate Douglas Murray to host a contest with a Ł1,000 prize: “The President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Contest, the ruder the poem (limericks preferred) the better.”
I’ve never been very engaged in the political process–probably because my introduction was going with my mother to rallies for Adlai Stevenson. But I’ve never been quite as depressed by the process as this year. Really? This is who people are voting for?
Larry summed it up perfectly, “The biggest problem the next president will face is presiding over a nation of idiots.”
Looking at my post yesterday about Robert Lowell’s book, Imitations, I commented that the first edition of that book was for sale for $35. Larry looked at the picture and said, “That must be the British first edition.” I checked the source, and it was. “How did you know that?” I wanted to know. Continue reading “The British first”→
Gabe Souza/Staff Photographer: Photographed on Friday, July 8, 2011 for Eat & Run…No Chinese buffet would be complete with the standby, Vegetable Lo Mein, seen here at Asia Restaurant in South Portland.
This morning over breakfast Larry told me he had been reading Five Thirty Eight, Nate Silver’s blog, and that the whole “MSG is bad for you” story is a myth, based on flawed science. Apparently, the negative effects only occurred when subjects were told they were eating MSG, and weren’t reproducible in blind tests.
Meanwhile, I was reading the latest issue of Poetry, a mostly depressing start to the morning, and picked up the pepper shaker absently, meaning to put some on my egg, but distracted.
“Are you planning to use that as a chess piece?” Larry asked.
Apparently, Larry hated yesterday’s poem. So I thought I’d post this little anecdote he told me to balance the scales. It’s about Steve Wynn, a big investor in casinos in the US, Macao and Hong Kong–a casino magnate in fact. He was asked in an interview how he got into the casino business. His answer was something like this:
“The first time I went to Las Vegas, I saw this gigantic room. At one end was a door. People came through that door with their money, and hours later they went back out without it. I thought, ‘What a wonderful business!’.”
My friend Tung and I ofter call ourselves “colander heads,” as in “my brain is a sieve.” Here’s a woman who has taken colander headism one step further. You can read the article here (of course Larry found it), or in case it’s gone, see below:
“Massachusetts woman wins fight to wear colander in drivers license by citing ‘pastafarian’ religion
Some states ban smiling in driver’s license photos, but wearing a colander on one’s head is apparently allowed.
A Massachusetts woman this week won the right to wear a colander on her head in her driver’s license photo after citing religious reasons. Lindsay Miller identifies as a “Pastafarian” and member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which some critics call a parody religion.
She tried to wear the kitchen utensil in her driver’s license photo this year but the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles denied her request. However, after intervention by the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center the RMV recently reversed its stance.
Ms. Miller said she was delighted that the agency allowed her to don a colander for her driver’s license, which was issued Thursday.
“While I don’t think the government can involve itself in matters of religion, I do hope this decision encourages my fellow Pastafarian Atheists to come out and express themselves as I have,”Ms. Millar said.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster spawned out of a letter that Oregon State University graduate Bobby Henderson penned to the Kansas State Board of Education in 2005. He wrote to protest the board’s decision to permit the teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes, suggesting that students should “hear multiple viewpoints” of how the universe came to be, including the idea that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created it.”
You can’t make this stuff up! Anyone up for joining the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? First religion I’ve been interested in since I received my ministry with the Universal Life Church.
Last night Larry said he had forgotten Creeley’s rain poem, and how much he loved it. I was surprised, because Larry has often said he thought Creeley was mostly a faker.
“Well,” he explained, “The early work was great. But then he just kept writing. And the cult of Creeley was obnoxious. One of his devotees once told me in all seriousness that ‘One day he will write the perfect poem, and it will be one word.’ A direct quote.”
I heard Creeley read in the late 60s at Harvard. He wore an eye patch and a beret and was a true showman–maybe a bit of a faker, but the poems were powerful. Perhaps he suffered from his fame, trying to imitate himself in his later work. I’m not well-read enough to say.
She was famous for her wit, and her boss at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, was famous for his penury. Larry read me a quip Parker made when Ross was berating her because one of her assignments was late:
“I’m sorry,” Parker said, “But someone else was using the pencil.”
It seems to me I first heard of Phil Woods while in college. Now he’s gone, and Larry read me portions of his obituary over breakfast yesterday. According to Larry, who has seen him in person, he was a great story teller.
A story Larry told me was that Phil was playing his first paid gig at a burlesque show and at the break he felt there was something wrong with his saxophone, he wasn’t getting the sound he wanted–the mouthpiece wasn’t right, or the reed was too hard, or the action of keys wasn’t quite right. Continue reading “Phil Woods”→
