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It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon when Drog finally arrived. Needless to say, Clarissa was not pleased. “Sir, I have been positively drowning myself in Jasmine tea. While this is indeed a delightful concoction, a tonic for both body and soul, particularly when taken with lemon, one must acknowledge that after a certain point in the afternoon it tends to lose its charm.”

Drog grunted in a way that she chose to interpret as an apology, and gradually lowered his massive bulk to sit facing her, his deep-set eyes flickering over the afternoon crowd. Clarissa peered curiously at his deshevelled appearance. “You look as though you have been having quite the day of it, my friend. Have you anything new to report?”

Drog swung his heavy head slowly around to return her gaze, and for a long moment he simply looked back at her impassively, his coal black eyes flashing with dark fire. When at last he began to speak, his expression as unmoving as stone, the sepulchral voice that emerged seemed to belong to another place entirely, a place of savage and howling winds. “Yes … I have seen the night flyers,” he began. “Their hunger grows. The dripping flesh of their approaching minions crawls with scarabs and rejoices. The scuttering claws grasp, they tear, they burn. The Dark One’s terrible caravans of war are filled with the long-dead eaters of souls, and the mere things of Earth are broken and destroyed beneath their chain’d wheels of hideous fire. The enemy draws nearer. Ever nearer.”

Clarissa nodded curtly. “All as I had suspected, my friend. Thank you Drog, you are such a dear. I don’t suppose you would care for a scone? I believe that they are freshly baked, with just the merest hint of coconut.”

Her companion barely shook his massive head in response. His hooded eyes were gazing into the distance. A few moments later the waitress approached their table. “Can I get you…” she began. When she laid eyes on Drog she stopped dead in her tracks, and her face went ashen, the words dying in her throat. He glared back at her, his sharply protruding lower incisors gradually stretching out his glistening lips into a shape that distantly resembled a grin.

“Oh, dear me, I am so awfully sorry!” Clarissa exclaimed, “my fault entirely. One does tend to take things for granted.” Delicately she put down her teacup, and made an almost imperceptable gesture with the slender fingers of her left hand. For an instant the room seemed to swim, and a few moments later the waitress approached their table.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked amiably, barely glancing at Clarissa’s new companion. Ugly as sin, she thought absently, but then again, you get all kinds in a place like this. Whatever. As long as they can pay, they can stay.

“My dear lady, thank you ever so much,” Clarissa replied politely, “But I fear we had best be going rather soon. We shall just be needing the bill, at your earliest convenience. I am afraid that my companion is on a somewhat restricted diet, and there is really nothing here for him to eat.”

Clarissa smiled with fond amusement as her large companion’s gaze wandered around the crowded restaurant. “That is to say,” she added cheerfully, “nothing on the menu.”

Back to the beautiful and bewitching Miss White, eighth grade teacher beyond compare, light of my life, fire of my puberty. I knew, from the first moment I saw her, even before she introduced us to the mysteries of Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse, that she was the one for me. I would sit in class each day, gazing raptly at my beloved, all the while doing fervid mental calculations in my head, mostly along the lines of “Let’s see, when I’m old enough to marry, she will still only be…”

Until the day it all changed. Seeing that I was an inquisitive young man, on that fateful day Miss White lent me a book, telling me that it had some exciting ideas, and that I really aught to read it. The book was called Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. Devoted slave as I was to my enchanted teacher, I shyly took the proferred book from her lovely hands and dutifully read it, cover to cover. And that’s when I ran into a snag.

Some of you might recognize this book as the core introductory text of Scientology. Being only twelve, I knew nothing of such matters, but I did know that what I was reading just didn’t add up. It seems, according to the estimable Mr. Hubbard, that the only way to achieve true happiness is to allow experts to remove all your little neurotic tics, or “engrams”, at which point you become an enlightened person – or as he termed it, a “Clear”.

Well, I quickly realized that everything I most cherish about my little brain comes from the very flaws and neurotic tics that this nice book was proposing to surgically remove from it. I mean – to establish some context here – I grew up with Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers!

And that was when the bubble burst, my great love for Miss White dissolving into a sorry puddle, and I became a sadder but wiser adolescent. And yet, who knows? If only I had embraced my inner Scientologist, I might have ended up marrying Nicole Kidman. 🙂

In response to yesterday’s comment, I too memorized Jabberwocky in high school. I remember that it was a weekend afternoon when I was fifteen, and I was hanging around at home with nothing to do except browse through a book of old poems. That day I also memorized The Walrus and the Carpenter and Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kissed Me. And I vowed that I would memorize at least one poem a day.

Well, I can still recite all three of those poems word for word, but I never made good on my vow. To this day, those are the only three poems that I can recite by heart. Rather sad, actually. I assume that anyone reading this knows about The Walrus and the Carpenter, but for those of you who don’t know Jenny Kissed Me, Leigh Hunt was a minor romantic poet – a good friend of Shelley, Byron and Keats who was never quite up to their level. He wrote this poem to the wife of his friend Thomas Carlyle. I’ve read that it captures an actual moment between them. And really, what more could you ask of a poem?

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.

I was thinking back to poems I used to love as a kid, and my mind kept going back to one by John Tobias, a gift from our eighth grade English teacher Miss White (upon whom I had the most intense schoolboy crush, which at the time I was quite convinced was true love). I hadn’t thought about this poem in years, and I was afraid to look at it again, worried that I wouldn’t like it anymore.

I am very happy to report that I like it just fine. In fact, even more. I’m sure some of you know this poem. For the rest of you, happy discovering! Does anyone else happen to have a favorite poem from childhood, one that still resonates for you now?

      Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle
        Received from a Friend Called Felicity

During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
    (Hollowed out
    Fitted with straws
    Crammed with tobacco
    Stolen from butts
    In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
Of civilization;

During that summer--
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was--
Watermelons ruled.

Thick imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chins;
Leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;

And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite:
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.

The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue:
Unicorns become possible again.

One of the striking things about Juno is the way, right from the opening credits, it establishes the magical wise/innocent world inside the head of its main character as the epitome of coolness.

One key moment is at the end of the opening credits, when Juno walks out of her cartoon-rendered inner world, into the real world of other people. There is a second or so where the left side of the screen still shows a little bit of the cartoon world – you actually see both worlds on the screen at once. And that cues in the audience, right from the start, that Juno always carries her alternative world around with her.

Juno is the latest in a long line of magical-innocent heroes. What is striking about her, as opposed to, say, the cartoonist Hoops McCann played by John Cusack in One Crazy Summer, is that she is not marginalized. Rather, the world around her ends up recongnizing that she represents the future, the way to enlightenment.

This same cultural transition can be observed in the 1960’s, as popular culture gradually emerged from a reality centered on Eisenhauer-era post-war materialism. In 1966 the Juno-like character of Murray N. Burns played by Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns was still perceived as being disconnected from the outer world, unable to have power within that world, even though he was a figure of grace. And yet the same year saw The King of Hearts, in which the “real” world is seen to be, ultimately, completely irrelevant – only the people who are innocent to the point of insanity have any importance.

I would argue that the cultural movement of about 40 years ago glorifying the rebellious innocent, also seen in Godspell, Harold and Maude and many other plays and films of that era – and of course going hand-in hand with escalating popular revolt against the Vietnam War – recurs about once every two generations. It is generally a statement that “The approach taken by you grownups has failed, and now it is time for the children to take over.” Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist of that era who was perhaps most self-consciously positioning innocence as a rebellion against the old order, actually subtitled his novel Slaughterhouse Five “The Children’s Crusade”.

This cultural response to “grown-up thinking run amok” is far from new. After the horrors visited upon Europe by World War I, the Dada movement deliberately embraced an aesthetic of pseudo-insane innocence in rejection of the grown up thinking that had led to the devastation of the Great War.

I think we are going through a similar transition now. The power of the rebellious countercultural innocent is on the rise, and I sense that this is fundamentally due to a rejection of the age that we’ve been living through, a neo-Eisenhauer age of rich old white men in suits, a creeping punative fascism in the culture and its public discourse, and a paranoia leading to dimunition of personal freedom and dignity.

In such times, the popular culture responds. In the midst of jingoist war-heroes, the rebelious losers start to appear like small furry mammals between the legs of the mighty thunder lizards. First they show up as antiheroes, and then they start to take over, to emerge ad full-fledged heroes, objects of desire. Just a few years ago Napolean Dynamite had only limited power; he was able to enter a place of grace only through the side door, the one reserved for nerds and outcasts. Similarly, Judd Apatow’s characters in Freaks and Geeks may have been attractive, but they were never allowed to see themselves as heirs to the kingdom.

In retrospect, Linda Carellini’s Lindsay Weir was a kind of proto-Juno. But in 1999 the culture was not prepared to accept her as a figure of power. She was a queen without a realm.

But now we’re going full circle yet again, and anyone who stands up and effectively employs the rhetoric of innocence and rebellion against the old white guys in the suits (I won’t name names) is going to have a good shot at taking over. But nothing is certain. As Bob Dylan once rather perfectly put it: “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

And then Nixon got elected.

On Air Canada last night from Toronto to Edmonton, I saw Juno. Brilliantly written film, knows exactly where it wants to go, and how to get there. All I can say is that Diablo Cody (writer) is a goddess, and Jason Reitman (director) is her high priest.

By the way, there are no real spoilers in what follows, but I will be discussing this film in enough detail that if you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to do so before reading on.

Of course it has the Moment – when the entire essence of the film is revealed in one masterful shot. In this case it’s a reaction shot – the look on the face of Juno, played by the incomparable Ellen Page, after Jennifer Garner’s character has become overwhelmed with surprised delight to feel the baby kicking.

Up until this point we have seen Juno go through an immense variety of emotions and facial expressions: cocky, sad, defiant, quizzical, enraged, vulnerable… The list goes on. But suddenly in that shot we see something new, something Reitman has been holding back from us – an expression comes over Page’s face of utter serenity, combined, for the first time, with a complete, and somewhat startling, lack of vulnerability. It’s there in the combination of her relaxed beautific smile and the kindly yet commanding look in her eyes. This is not the feisty girl-against-the-world we’ve been getting to know for the past hour. This is the Madonna, the all powerful goddess, Shakti incarnate, bringer of fertility to bereft mortal women longing to be with child.

When that moment comes, two crucial things happen at once: First, Juno finally understands, on a conscious level, the extent of her own power. We and everyone around her in the film have been aware from the start that she is by far the most powerful presence on the screen. But she hasn’t, until that moment. Second, the surprising yet perfect ending is foreshadowed – this is the moment that will guide Juno away from the false path of an illusory maturity, unto the true path of adult responsibility and, ultimately, happiness. You can think of it as the “Lester Burnham makes the girl breakfast” moment.

In a way, the husband and wife that wish to adopt her child serve as opposing demon guides along her spiritual path to coming into her own power. Both are disguised, as demons generally are. Each represents a different aspect of adulthood, and of course neither ends up being quite what they had seemed to be.

***
There is another aspect of this film that I found to be quite revelatory. I think this is an important film politically, in a way that might even have ramifications for the upcoming presidential election. Not in what it says, but in the way it says things. More on that tomorrow.

Last night I saw Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. It’s one of those wondrous plays that tosses its audience back and forth between helpless laughter and starkly serious suspense, and then back again, often from one moment to the next. But beyond its enormouse entertainment value, I liked the message I got out of the play. If you see it, you might not get the same message, but that’s one of the great things about the theatre!

To sum up what I learned: In life we are always dealt a much better hand than we think. But the cards are only useful if we can see them. So the problem is not to change your luck, or make the world around you fit your notion of how it should be, but rather to learn to see clearly, since all the good fortune we need is always right there in front of us. If we can just figure out how to see it.

And the first and most important bit of that good fortune is the miracle of getting a chance to be here, to spend yet another day on this planet, and to enjoy relating to all those other people that are here with us, in all their crazy, messy, dysfunctional glory.

I know that all sounds platitudinous and a bit sentimental, but McPherson makes the case most eloquently, and without a hint of sentiment.

Emily sat patiently in the booth. Mr Pimm had said he’d be back in just a few minutes, but it seemed like she’d been waiting forever, sitting there by herself. The waitress was really nice, but by now Emily was tired of nice strangers. They had been on the road for two weeks, and Mr. Pimm still had not told her where they were going, or why.

Today she had on her yellow dress, the good one that Mom had bought her, back before – before everything had happened. This morning Emily had insisted on wearing it, on dressing up, before leaving the hotel room, even though she knew they were just going to a stupid diner to eat. Sometimes things just matter, she told herself. Even if some people don’t get it.

She went back to staring at the salt shaker. She tried to put the sounds of the diner out of her mind, all the stupid loud conversations going on at once. Why did people insist on chattering away like that, even when they didn’t have anything really to talk about? Well, that wasn’t her problem. The salt shaker was.

She kept looking at it steadily, keeping her eyes resolutely on the beveled glass edge around the bottom, trying to ignore the pepper shaker right next to it, not even letting herself think about the ketchup bottle. For a long moment she stared. It wasn’t really like concentrating, more like kind of letting her mind go blank. Finally the salt shaker moved just the tiniest bit, maybe a quarter inch, and then it stopped. But that was enough.

She leaned back in the booth, feeling a little tired, but that was ok. She knew it was going to get easier each time, if she just kept on practicing. Mr. Pimm came back a few moments later, and she noticed he was peering at her, frowning. “Is everything all right Emily?” He sounded concerned, like maybe he thought she was coming down with something.

“Everything’s just fine Mr. Pimm,” she said, and gave him her best smile. Everything really was just fine.

I really love it when an author makes effective use of “the unreliable narrator”. A story’s narrator is not, of course, its author, although the narrator believes himself to be the author. There’s lots of fun, and sometimes beauty, to be had in that distinction.

One of my favorite examples of this is in the song By the Time I Get to Phoenix by the great Jimmy Webb. On the surface the song seems to tell a very simple story: A man is finally leaving his girlfriend – after many times before of saying he would – and he’s thinking that it will take her some time to accept that he’s really gone. Here are the lyrics:

   By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising
   She'll find the note I left hanging on her door
   She'll laugh when she reads the part that says I'm leavin'
   'Cause I've left that girl so many times before

   By the time I make Albuquerque she'll be working
   She'll probably stop at lunch and give a call
   But she'll just hear that phone keep on ringin'
   Off the wall, that's all

   By the time I make Oklahoma she'll be sleeping
   She'll turn softly and call my name out loud
   And she'll cry just to think I'd really leave her
   Though time and time I've tried to tell her so
   She didn't know that I would really go

It all seems pretty clear, right? The narrator is giving us a very unambiguous message. But Webb himself slyly gives us the opposite message. The key is in the opening line:

   By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising

Here we find one of the most potent and compelling of all mythic images: The Phoenix – a great bird that always rises, perpetually reborn, from the ashes of the fire that consumes it.

An author doesn’t just accidentally drop the words “Phoenix” and “rising” into the same sentence. No, the symbol of the Phoenix is only invoked when talking about a cycle of endless rebirth. The narrator himself is unaware of this. He actually believes he’s never returning. But we know better.

And that’s what makes this song so powerfully romantic. A man tells us he’s leaving his woman, and yet something’s not right. He is talking about her in the way we talk about someone we’re in love with – imagining what she is doing each moment of her day, and speaking about her with great tenderness: She’ll cry softly and call my name out loud. The very tone of the language conveys that this man is still very much in love with this woman.

And the kicker is the information that this relationship is a Phoenix: The man who thinks of himself as a loner, a heart-breaking wandering cowboy of American myth, is actually destined to always return to the woman he loves.

Well, the readers have spoken. Two separate comments pointing out that my list of things to do was incomplete. I will take Sally’s sage advice, and update this list in the spirit she suggests:

 

So the right one is out there, and she’s also looking?
In order to find her it’s time to get booking!

There’s no point in searching all over the nation
I likely can walk there from Grand Central Station

She might be on a bus, she might be in a car
Or boarding a train by the old Oyster Bar

Or in Brooklyn, the Bronx, maybe here, maybe there,
In the W Bar – the one off Union Square

The girl that will likely most tickle my fancy
Might now, as I write this, be crossing Delancey

Or maybe she’s taking the last Hampton Jitney
In time for an opening up at the Whitney

She may be at the Vineyard to see some theatrics
Or coming down off of the steps of Saint Patrick’s

Or dancing away at a Russian themed club
After checking out Woody’s gig at Michael’s Pub

She may sing at the Met, she may write for The Times
About style, or film, or state government crimes

I can go for a stroll across town just to seek her
I can start out on A and then walk along Bleecker

To the Blue Note some evening when Gal Costa croons
And then get felafel to go, at Mamoun’s

We might meet before noon, we might meet after dark,
We might meet at a picnic somewhere in the Park

Or we’ll meet on the night of the first snow of winter
At a puppet show version of something by Pinter

No reason to fret, no need to be blue
Somehow, I think she is making lists too