Thoughts on Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985)

I kept waiting, waiting for the altercation to happen… for ACTION. This is both the blessing and the curse of the book…the waiting… “it’s gotta be on the next page…” So you keep reading with anticipation, with hope and one ultimately ends up with no closure.  

 And maybe this is like Vietnam, never closed. Lives ruined without definition, without reason, families uprooted in spirit, young men with open wounds for the rest of their lives, young men who can’t close the box on a Pandora like guilt from actions they didn’t think they could commit… 

And while our hero stays in country in her own swamp to show her toughness, it is her uncle who captures the essence when explaining his lack of a job, lack of a meaningful relationship says that looking at birds and watching MASH reruns is “all he can handle.” 

Can post-Vietnam war people understand this? Sure, the hero wants people to tell her but isn’t it the case that while she can spend the night in her swamp, she can never stand in the shoes…never truly empathize.

So are we left with this question after reading In Country: can one understand if one can’t empathize?

Thoughts on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)

I couldn’t help but find myself comparing the end of White Noise to Camus’ The Stranger.  The terseness of the shooting scene, the insensitive harming of another with the inhumane, animalistic self-reflection…it was just very Camusian for lack of a better word. 

But the ending wasn’t the best part, not by a long shot. The weirdness of the novel, the only intimations as to deeper meaning, the fact that it made you think, made you define… “What is nature?”… These were the best parts of the book. 

A toddler that won’t speak, a maybe genius teenager who runs with an asking-for-it Guinness record attempter, a wife named “Babs,” Hitler Studies, photographic-memory-having colleagues,  a pervert colleague who hits on the aforementioned “Babs,” and of course, the airborne toxic event. 

And all of it “caged” in death (just like the snakes). Or should we say the fear of death? Just as death gives life context and delineation, death gives White Noise life and delineation. What is the airborne toxic event if not nearness to THE ownmost possibility? What is Dylar if not to push away THE ownmost possibility?  Why run the stadium stairs if not to meet THE ownmost possibility? Yes, death my friends, does it make life rare? Does it turn your years of life from a ubiquitous carbon to a rarefied diamond? 

I don’t think DeLillo knows…and that’s a good thing. That he asks in the first place is more important. Does he believe? The nuns believed, if only in a perfunctory way so that we couldn’t believe…capisce?

Is Delillo saying we need both sides of the belief coin? Maybe, just like we need both sides of life and death.

As I read the book I also couldn’t help but reflect on my undergraduate years, those years shaped by the coins with sides like Martin Heidegger and Leo Buscaglia. Heidegger taught me we are beings-unto-death facing an ownmost possibility that ends all others and Buscaglia taught me that “I don’t brood over death, I’m too busy living.”

So it’s like Delmar in O’Brother Where Art Thou?

Pete: Wait a minute. Who elected you leader of this outfit?

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well Pete, I figured it should be the one with the capacity for abstract thought. But if that ain't the consensus view, then hell, let's put it to a vote.

Pete: Suits me. I'm voting for yours truly.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well I'm voting for yours truly too.

[Everett and Pete look at Delmar for the deciding vote]

Delmar O'Donnell: Okay... I'm with you fellas.

Life or Death?

You bet.

Red Carpet

This red carpet that we may lie upon

Little fiery waves to delineate our beyond

Top to bottom and side to side

If we could get depth we could confide

Our love! our hate! our apathy! our awe!

But we’re bound to the surface, fettered by law

No abyss no crevice no hidden nook

no submerged heart within which we might look

for this and that and other lovely things

for the key that is why, a caged bird sings

dig for love divers, part the waves

in the wake we’ll say goodbye to ruts posing as days

together we’ll jump and know not where we’ll land

but together we’ll be, hand in hand

a different place, different people, different day

on this red carpet we lovers lay

Good or Bad

[Context: listening to Smiley and West Podcast]

Isn’t it interesting how we bloat our own positive characteristics? I heard Nelson Mandela described as graceful and thought to myself that no one and I mean no one, would describe me as graceful. And that fits. But then the inner monologue immediately begins to defend not being graceful; “but what I lack in gracefulness I make up for with x, y, and z.”

[Extrapolation]

Well if we want to be all Leo Buscaglia about it, we can say that every person has some positive characteristics. (What would it mean to have just 1 positive characteristic?) But who is going to step up and laud the positive characteristics of Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer, or Kirstie Alley. Kid, I kid. Kirstie was great in Woody Allen’s ‘Deconstructing Harry.’ The question remains: does every person have positive characteristics?

Or do we want to be all atomistic about it and say that some people, you know who you are, are pure evil? Not one ounce of good in these folks. Mayhem, murder, genocide, and 80’s music are left in their wake.

Is this really a grey area? Are we going to say it’s nuanced, ooooh it’s nuanced, it needs to be fleshed out as they say. It depends, you say, it’s contingent upon many, many relevant factors you say.

Oh c’mon! There are two kinds of people aren’t there? Good and bad? What is this nuance crap? Are you going to tell me people are good and sometimes do bad things? Are you going to tell me “to err is human?” Erring is one thing but making hats out of skin is another.  Again I ask, aren’t some people pure evil?

How else can you account for clogs, golf, and fox news? Kid, I kid. I love golfing in clogs.

The Emergency Strap Beats Wearing A Helmet

He was at a pretty good clip. He was at a 7 minute mile with a lot left in his lungs and figured he had at least two more quarters at a six. At about 3/4's of mile number 2, feeling good and strong, he decided to go for a half mile at a 6. Maybe he got cocky, maybe it was the Billy Preston song Outta Space blaring in the earphones, or maybe it was the shapely coed that caught his eye passing down the hallway but his right foot got ever so slightly off track and caught the stationary part of the treadmill. With his fore strike hitting off the belt and with his heel hitting the fast moving belt meant he had to force his left foot to turnover quickly to hit the belt if he wanted to remain running and not be thrown from the treadmill in a heaping pile of embarrassment. It didn't work. His left foot came down on the track all right but with his right foot on both moving and nonmoving parts of the machine, it bent him into a pretzel on the belt and when his knee hit that 10 miles per hour belt, it threw him off the back like a BB from a slingshot. Embarrassment would have been one thing but being thrown from the back of the treadmill was only the beginning of his problems. Due to a shortage of space in the facility, the treadmills were all pushed to the back wall and only about two feet from the wall. Not nearly enough for code and not nearly enough to keep him from hitting said wall like a crash test dummy. Embarrassment is one thing, being bent like a pretzel and thrown against a wall at ten miles per hour is another, but here's the coup de grâce: after bouncing off the wall he headed back toward the moving, no wait, still fast moving track of the treadmill: as a veteran treadmiller he never attached the emergency strap. His cranium was the closest body part to said moving track. What happened next doesn't defy physics but it does defile physics. His head slammed the 10 mile per hour track and because the track was moving so fast and because there wasn't enough space between the treadmill and the wall, his head followed the path of the track and like a fridge magnet, pulled his head under the treadmill like a lifespan great white shark. Now because he was bent up like a Christmas morning Stretch Armstrong , his head did not hit the blistering track exactly centered, he was a little, pardon the technological jargon, caddy wampus. Yes, his noggin banged off the too-close-wall and went to the right. Plungered right under the treadmill and his freshly jostled mane caught the spinning wheel under the treadmill, and well, it scalped him. Tore his hair and skin right off the top of his head. Now here is where it gets nasty though. He was stuffed under that still moving treadmill like a marshmallow in a shot glass and his freshly scalped head was still rubbing against the 10 mile per hour wheel which, as you can guess, caused quite a stink. The good news is that before the smoke alarm went off some other patrons rushed over to shut off the treadmill. The bad news is that toupees are passé and the aroma of burning flesh isn’t good for the ole lunchtime workout.

Embarrassment is one thing, thrown from the catapult into the castle wall is one thing, having your head sucked under a moving treadmill fast enough for  Dyson to litigate patent rights is one thing, but, and I'm paraphrasing coach Lombardi here: being scalped isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

Wear the emergency strap!