Iowa vocabulary

This part of the Midwest has a fairly nondescript accent/dialect. New Yorkers make fun of us for saying Mary, marry, and merry the same way, but that’s a debatable point anyway.

But just from listening to people, I’ve been reminded of the following in Iowa:

*it’s always “pop” and never “soda”

*it’s always “sack” and never “bag”

*it’s always “supper” and never “dinner”

I de-Iowized my vocabulary in Maryland in the late 1980’s.

read this morning

Greenberg on Monet. Brilliant stuff. He was highly critical of Monet in the 1940’s and highly positive by the late 1950’s. What’s interesting is that both the critical and the positive pieces are insightful and largely convincing.

The main critique in the 1940’s was that Monet was confusing the aims of art and science with his paintings of isolated lily pads and so forth. By the 1950’s Greenberg had decided that the pendulum of appreciation had swung too far towards Cézanne and van Gogh, and that Monet once again deserved his due.

But wow, Greenberg can really write. No one writes better short things of three or so pages, I don’t think. I said a few weeks ago that Freud might be a slightly better 20th century prose writer, but Freud was at his best with medium-sized essays. Greenberg is very hard to beat in the 3-4 page range, just as Nietzsche is impossible to beat at 1.5 pages.

As for Monet, I also started out disliking him very much before later changing my mind. It was the “Haystacks” series that finally won me over.

the arts in the Arab world

A brief article in the Financial Times. HERE.

Mouctar Diallo update

Mouctar’s mother has arrived in The Gambia to help him get out. It sounds to me like he’ll be out very soon. Not sure if he’s planning to go home to Guinea to recuperate or straight back to Egypt.

hotel disorientation

If you travel enough, you’ll eventually have the experience of receiving the wakeup call and not having any idea where in the world you are.

Among NBA players this is almost an epidemic, due to their endless series of lookalike hotel rooms, and a few have been known to put homemade signs on their desk displaying the city name, before retiring for the night.

It can last up to 30 seconds as you try to reason out the chain of places where you’ve been and are going. It happened to me this morning.

It’s perfectly normal, but it’s really funny that it would ever happen to me in this place– the one location on the planet where I have spent even more time than Cairo.

bridge damage

Amtrak contacted me to say there was bridge damage on their line between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and we would have to be bussed between the two cities and board a new train in Cincinnati.

No way. That would be brutal in the middle of the night. I cancelled it and booked a one-way flight back to Providence.

The train ride coming out here was fun, but the itinerary in the other direction (two nights on the train!) looked bad enough even without the bus part. This country is just too big, that’s the problem.

But this is a good example of the difference between being young and being not-quite-young. If told I would have to take a weird midnight bus between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, my young self would have viewed it as a lucky and cool adventure opportunity, and a good story to tell. My current self just thinks: “How many days will it take to recover from that stupid itinerary?”

Indiana dumps cursive

It’s fine with me. I always had sloppy handwriting, and hated the 3rd grade boot camp in cursive writing that was pretty much a national staple. Those who enjoy calligraphy-like activities may have enjoyed that phase of school life, but I did not.

I’ve probably told this story before, but here goes…

In the early 1990’s I was killing time at a Barnes & Noble in Chicago, and happened to pick up a book on handwriting analysis. The analysis for my own handwriting was something like: “This is a conformist with no creativity, since he still makes all of his letters exactly as he was taught them in third grade.”

I was so annoyed by this insulting verdict that I resolved then and there to change my signature into something a bit strange. I immediately did so, and have kept the “strange” signature ever since (beaten to the punch in this respect by my youngest brother Raven, who simply prints his first name and then draws a raven flying into an abstract rendering of the sun– that’s his legal bank signature, seriously).

If my new signature were analyzed now, the analysis would probably flip from “uncreative conformist” to “untrustworthy sociopath who refuses to follow instructions.”

walking

The fun starts tomorrow, when very long-ago friends begin to converge here. It’s not just the reunion for a number of high school classes this weekend, but also the multi-day town festival. I’m surprised I was even able to find an empty room.

It’s a very small town, but the walks are long if you follow a snaking route up and down the side streets, which is exactly what I intended to do, and did.

Mt. Vernon is quaint, and known for being so. The college campus is hilly and pretty. There are a number of brick streets, and whole sections of the town are on the national historic registry. It generally feels more like New England than like Iowa, geographically speaking.

This may sound strange, but in the back of my mind tonight I was deeply worried about being hit by any vehicles while crossing streets. My fondest wish while growing up here was to get as far away as possible. Having incontestably succeeded in achieving that particular aspiration, I was thinking how cruel it would be if I were plowed down by a big truck right in front of my childhood home. So, I was almost inordinately careful.

The childhood home has been gone since ’97 or ’98, used by the town for firefighting practice, and replaced by a baseball complex. The baseball authorities were wise enough to preserve all of the best trees from our yard– ancient, gnarled things climbed dozens of times by me and my brothers. It sends a chill down the spine to see that there isn’t the least trace of the house anymore, but the trees still look precisely the same– their strange shapes are unmistakable.

Then on side streets to Davis Park (baseball/swimming pool), past another house, still standing, where we lived even earlier. I left it at age 4, and it’s the earliest residence I clearly remember. My brother and I foolishly played on fiberglass in the backyard once and had to go to the doctor to be bathed in whatever sort of fluid they use to remedy that. I was given a raccoon-shaped pillow in this house labelled with the words: “I’m Randy the Raccoon. I live in the woods.” My brother’s was turtle-shaped and turtle-hued and said: “I’m Tippy the Turtle. I live in the pond.” The third son was still a few years from being born.

En route to that house I passed the former short-term dwelling of Mt. Vernon’s most infamous all-time resident: Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. THE UNABOMBER. His brother was a high school teacher in neighboring Lisbon, Iowa in the late 1970’s, and Ted (not yet working as the Unabomber) lived with him for awhile. The town is so small that there can be no question that I passed the Unabomber on the sidewalk any number of times when I was, say, 11 years old. (No one realized he had ever been there until the national press began phoning in droves shortly after his arrest.)

I passed another important edifice of age 11 a few blocks later: the home of Anne-Marie R., my first “girlfriend” (in the 11-year-old sense). She chased me first, but then it reversed over time and I was more interested. I didn’t like hanging out at the swimming pool, her favorite place, so she had her friend Brenda send me to the guillotine by phone. It was horribly timed– I’d just endured a very bad week or two of the chicken pox. Anne-Marie was a very friendly redhead, but certainly took cold revenge in this case, “dating” (in the 11-year-old sense) three of my best friends over the next six months. She transferred to a different school a couple of years later and I never heard what became of her.

At a certain point tonight I noticed that my gait had become a bit unnatural. Suddenly, I realized that Mt. Vernon had reawakened in me that dark childhood rhyme: “step on the crack, you break your mother’s back.” Ritualistic chants of that sort have a magical power over children even when not literally believed, and I clearly remember going all the way to age 18 making sure not to let my shoe fall on any sidewalk cracks. I’d long since lost that useless habit, of course, but this town instantly reawakened it.

Then up “Pres Hill” (so-called because the Presbyterian Church sits on it), where my brother had a serious sledding accident. His chin slammed into the rear bumper of a car, at age 9 or 10, as my parents and I watched in horror. It cost him nothing but stitches, but could have been so much worse. Whoever parked the car on that celebrated sledding hill didn’t have his thinking cap on that day (I clearly remember who it was, but he was generally a nice guy– the father of a girl a year ahead of me).

Also the place behind a small cement factory where a strange rail car had been left abandoned long ago, like a prop from a Tarkovsky film. It was filled with tins of crackers and biscuits intended either for the army or for post-nuclear war civil defense scenarios, I can’t remember which. Some of the “bad boys” broke into it one day at age 10 or so. I walked up and watched them looting it. Luckily I wasn’t involved, and luckily I left quickly, because the police showed up and there was some more-than-parental discipline meted out in that case.

Finally back to Gary’s Supermarket for some fresh fruit. But the high school ritual (for absolutely everyone) was to go to Gary’s before school and buy a couple of doughnuts and a soda (or “pop,” as we Iowans call it). Tonight I took the doughnuts, for old time’s sake– one German chocolate, and one with blue sprinkles. In my crowd the pop of choice was Dr. Pepper. For the more rednecky types it was Mountain Dew, of course. They were known as “the chew and dew boys,” and they were not my friends.

In any case, I toyed with the idea of picking up a can of Mountain Dew tonight, but couldn’t keep a straight face. I’ll leave that mild comic gesture to any of my classmates who may care to re-enact it over the next few days.

On the whole, nothing could be more fun than exploring this place for the next few days.

also here

The Prince and the Wolf. Excellent service from Amazon.UK.

Many people deserve credit for that event having occurred, but Peter Erdélyi (one of the main credit-earners for the event) is the overwhelming credit-earner for the existence of the book. He’s the one who wrestled with the first-draft transcript and the recordings, and also the one who wrote such a helpful forward.

One thing you may not know about Zero Books if you’ve ordered them all from one location is that their books have glossy covers when printed in the U.S. and matte covers when printed in the U.K. (A difference in market tastes, I suppose?)

My two copies of The Prince and the Wolf, having come from the U.K., are very matte. Same with Towards Speculative Realism and Circus Philosophicus, since I ordered those both from Amazon.Uk as well.

But I’m a typical American, and prefer the sugary gloss on the cover.

back in my hometown

Mt. Vernon, Iowa, for my 25th high school reunion. I’ve never attended any of the previous ones, but am looking forward to this one and seeing many of these people for, literally, the first time in 25 years. It’s a very small town, so I knew the majority of these people from ages 5-18 quite well. Then I left and didn’t really stay in contact, especially since my parents moved to another town. But one of my uncles still lives here, and I’ll be seeing him tomorrow as well, I believe.

Before that, I stopped off at Tama Casino to meet up with my sports-and-gambling-aficionada friend E., who practically put the slot machines out of business. One victory after another for her. I could only watch in open-mouthed awe.