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Donald's Blog
September 28, 2014 Go west, old man (I'm packing, already.) Seventeen days since I last wrote here. Well, I guess I've been busy. Meanwhile, in five days, on Friday October 3rd, I will be 74 years old, and the movers will be here to start packing. If they don't finish packing in one day they'll come back Monday; on Tuesday they'll load the van, and we'll be out of here; on Wednesday the house will belong to the new owners. There won't be a lot of packing because for the first time in all our moves we are doing a lot of it ourselves, to save money, and I hope and expect that this will be my last move. But it has been a hell of an experience. I think I mentioned that we had a garage sale, which was a lot of fun, with the unsold stuff going to Goodwill, and that an auction house came and took away a lot of stuff. We gave hundreds of books to a charity that raises money for college scholarships for underpriveleged girls. And on top of all that we are just throwing away a lot of stuff. Ethne had boxes of manuscript paper from her last two books, printouts of proofs and whatnot; don't need those. I had several photo albums from my parents and grandparents, and most of that got thrown away. It occurred to me with a start that back when we had to pay for film and processing, every snapshot went in the photo album, no matter how boring or banal; I have pictures of all my loved ones, and all I need are the nicest ones. I don't a need a small blurry photo of somebody standing next to his car in the 1970s; I don't need 90-year-old photos of people that I don't even know who they are. And someday my son will throw away my photos and I won't care 'cos I'll be dead. The only fly in the beer here is that the house we are buying in Colorado Springs is a short sale, and banks take a notoriously long time to do what they are supposed to do, so we don't know when we are going to be able to take possession. A friend of ours recently moved from Chicago to Minneapolis, having purchased a place on a short sale, and it took six months. That is unconscienceable, but is typical of the way banks jerk around their customers, and dovetails neatly with some of my dad's memorabilia I've been going through. He's been gone for over 20 years, after many years of working for the good old Bell Telephone Company, the best and the cheapest telephone service in the world, and he left a dozen or so letters full of high praise for his work. First he was a salesman, and he hated it, but he was good at it, and his clients, who were buying telephone lines, switchboards and whatnot, were pleased. There's a letter from somebody at Eaton Manufacturing gently chiding a phone company manager (they were on a first-name basis) because he was getting better service from my dad than he was used to. Then Dad became a right-of-way engineer. This meant that he had to deal with property owners, sometimes ordinary folks, sometimes corporations, for permission to lay a telephone line or whatever. On one occasion the phone company needed access to a triangular piece of land between a farm, a country lane and a railroad; the farmer had farmed it for decades, but my dad found out that the farmer didn't own the land: the railroad owned it. But the railroad didn't need or want the land, and somehow my dad finagled it so that the farmer got title to the land, the phone company got access to it, everybody was happy and it didn't cost anybody a dime. And sure enough, among his papers is a letter from somebody in the phone company's legal department to some other manager saying that "If we could get Don Clarke to come to work in our department" the whole company would benefit. My dad always said he could do more work in one afternoon than a roomful of lawyers could do in a week, and he didn't even go to college. Too bad he's not working for the bank that's sitting on our short sale. Yet the way things are coming together is quite extraordinary. I haven't even set foot in Colorado yet, and we have more friends there than we have made in five years in Pennsylvania, including one of Ethne's high school buddies who has a place where we can stay while we wait for the bank's lawyers and accountants to pull their fingers out. On top of everything else, someone from Pershing Boulevard in Kenosha who I have known since I was eight years old -- we double-dated in high school, and all that -- has reappeared in my life after 50 years. As a subscriber to the website of my high school class of 1958, I was notified when he registered there, and then we were looking each other up. Among the many things we have to talk about is that we both had younger brothers who took their own lives. He lives on the east coast, so before I move away we are meeting tomorrow for lunch. With all this I feel like I am squeezing through a wormhole in time/space. September 28, 2014 The idiot advertisers There was an item in the Wall Street Journal ("Sorry We Canceled Your Favorite TV Show; You're Too Old", Sept. 12) about the TV series about a sheriff called Longmire, a Western set in modern times, based on a series of novels. Ethne and I enjoyed it, but it's been canceled, although it was the no. 2 show on A&E, because it doesn't draw enough younger people to suit the advertisers. It's hard to beat that kind of stupidity. A few days later the paper printed three letters from fans of the show. One woman observed that she and her husband, while not rich, have a retirement account and a house that's paid for, and certainly have some disposable income, and A&E have canceled one of their favorite shows. Meanwhile, she wrote,
Just so. But then A&E are the ones who broadcast in the USA the BBC program about Billie Holiday in which I took part. They took out a couple of the most amusing bits and scrunched the rest, squeezing the breath out of it in order to make room for commercials, and replaced the British narrator with an American who sounded like he was bored. I despair of American television. September 28, 2014 Joseph Epstein
I have become a fan of Joseph Epstein, the retired academic who has published 23 books, many of them collections of his short pieces. He is described as the greatest American essayist, and I can believe it. Every time I see a piece of his I enjoy it just because it is well written, and then I also enjoy what he has to say. This makes me wish that when they wanted us to write essays in grade school 65 years ago they had been able to tell us what an essay is and then show us an amusing example. The Wall Street Journal is not the only place Epstein writes, but in the current weekend edition I was delighted by a piece called "Precision Engineering", which is a review of two books about grammar and style, where he says that in the public schools of Chicago he had managed to escape the subject of grammar. The feature-length piece is full of chuckles, along with the observation that, with or without correct grammar, "Nobody seems to know why intelligent people write inscrutable prose." But on September 12 there was a commentary on the coverage of football players beating up their wives and children ("Blitzing the NFL With Moral Preening"), pointing out that these men make their living at violence. One player described being a running back in the NFL to getting into 30 car accidents in the same afternoon, "without, I assume, wearing a seat belt." Furthermore, ever since these men began to show talent as athletes no one has said "no" to them; is it so shocking that when someone does say "no", they respond with violence? "I do not say it is right; of course it isn't. I only say it's not shocking. What is shocking is that there isn't a lot more of it."
Meanwhile the media are provided with "a chance to exhibit their own high and irreproachable virtue." The piece is so well written that it's difficult to choose chunks of it to quote; I wish I could link to the whole thing. And it sticks in the mind. It makes me think: how many times, as a child, was I kicked in the groin or punched in the stomach by moronic male children in my home town? I am reading about religious fascists beheading hostages; I am also reading reviews of Martin Amis's new novel, The Zone Of Interest, which is set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, about more or less ordinary people going about their lives while they are helping to murder millions of other ordinary people. It's apparently considered perhaps controversial, setting a work of fiction in the murder factory; we cannot comprehend, we cannot understand the Holocaust. Or can we? Maybe it is as ordinary as a thuggish athlete knocking out his girlfriend in an elevator, a question of scale rather than difference.
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