Still More Nordeast Feng Shui

My neighborhood likes giant butterflies. This pair has mistakenly bonded with a satellite dish as their pack leader, and may never learn to migrate properly.

More Nordeast Feng Shui

I salute you, victory gardens of America,

and the trailers of Patriots

who stand watch over thee.

Short Story Review: Lorelei, by Jerome Charyn

This is another story in the Atlantic's annual fiction supplement, that misguided notion of theirs that fiction needs to be sequestered from their supposedly more 'real' content, tucked in the back of one issue a year. As if fiction were like a vitamin to be rationed in quotas. However, I have to say that in general, the stories in this issue are kick-ass prime cuts of literary steakhouse goodness.

Lorelei, by Jerome Charyn, is set in the Bronx, New York. I know only a few things about the Bronx: that it is home to Yankee Stadium, old and new, and that it is the only part of New York City that is not in or on an island. It is mythic to me, a funny name conjuring up visions of urban decay like painted subway cars, weedy vacant lots and tough guys with funny accents. Lorelei changed a few things about that for me.

In Lorelei, the Bronx is hometown to Howell, an engaging middle-aged con man who makes his living traveling the country, marrying widows and divorcees, taking a chunk of money, then skipping town. He's not after big money or out to ruin lives, really - he's a small time chiseler afraid of the big score, and he's getting old, without a retirement fund, and without a purpose to the rest of his life. What to do?

Howell, at a crossroads, returns to the Bronx and the Lorelei, a grand, stately apartment building in a row of grand, stately apartment buildings in the once posh Grand Concourse neighborhood. He'd grown up in the building, where his father had been the super. So, where I had been expecting a story about a con gone wrong, I instead found myself reading memoirs of a Bronx childhood. Howell as a child, befriending the building owner's daughter, a spoiled pretentious brat of a girl, and on the cusp of adulthood they come near falling in love. It was fear of her father that chased Howell on the road and a life of chiseling widows.

When he discovers that the girl and her father both still live in the building, that they've ensconced themselves in the failed neighborhood on the hopeful edge of renewal, Howell can't resist - he rents an apartment and moves in, hoping for, well - he doesn't know what, except perhaps another shot at his lost love. Then he gets invited to a dinner party with the girl and her father, and the story moves into hyperdrive, with characters and motivations mashing into each other, personalities and neuroses leading to revelations and despair, and the con does go horribly wrong after all.

This is a tour de force, really, a story that starts strong and moves quickly, and reaches into amazing scope and depth. It spans generations and crosses the country, all while keeping the point of narration in the Bronx, in a single building. It also manages to tell the history of the Concourse neighborhood, which once had palatial apartments near Yankee Stadium but fell to urban blight in the 60's and is only now starting to recover.

I had probably heard of Jerome Charyn but never read him. He's written 37 books including novels and mysteries. There are also three memoirs of his childhood in the Bronx. On top of that, there's a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and a cultural history of Ping Pong (and, yeah, looks like it's for real), in addition to maintaining his own youTube channel. Busy guy. I apologize, sir, for not knowing of you till now, but it's a big world, and I hope you understand.

The story is on-line. Read it here.

I made this: Ukulele guitar thing!

I've been piecing this guitar together for about a year now and finally assembled the whole thing. I made one a few years earlier from a cigar box, but felt the ambition to actually make a box this time. It's just some thin plywood with little square dowels at the corners; the neck is a stick of 1 inch stock.

Photo: Dandelion invasion

Remi and I walked past this field a few days ago. Strange how the dandelions took over without anyone noticing. By ones and twos, then by tens, they came out to fill the field under the powerlines of 27th avenue.

Short Story Review: The Silence, T.C. Boyle

Tucked away in the back of the current Atlantic, away from where their delicate readers may stumble upon it by accident, is their yearly quota of fiction. I’m not going to spend too much time on the Atlantic’s outrageous stance on fiction, except to say, they claim they love it, but gave no justification as to why hiding it in a little ghetto once a year is the best way to show the love. So let’s just jump to a story.

T.C. Boyle has been kicking around the big leagues of American publishing for quite some time now, so his story “The Silence” could well be considered the centerpiece of this collection. I know Boyle from his novel "The Road to Wellville," a historical novel of the breakfast cereal industry’s roots in health food and spa retreats. (It’s also a movie, almost unwatchable, starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Broderick). Other than that, I know what Wikipedia tells me: he’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he lives in Southern California with his wife and kids, and teaches at USC. He’s written twelve novels and won Major Awards. He also bears an uncanny resemblence to Zonker Harris, from Doonsebury. (Boyle is the one on top.)

All good reasons to be resentful of his success. But let’s take the high road, and assume he got where he is because he’s a good writer. And sure enough, this is a funny, wicked story. “The Silence” is a satire of man’s quest for enlightenment, and his urge to drop out of society (common themes for Boyle). In this case, he follows a group of Tibetan buddhist converts who move out to the desert, under a vow of silence, to live for three years, three months, and three days. The silence is both fitting symbol and comic foil, used to generate humor when the narrator, Ashoka, tries to impart the wonder of a dragonfly to his girlfriend, or when his ex-wife and children drop by for a visit, or the clan leader tries to give instructions for Ashoka to go peel potatoes.

Like the easy humor, there are many other reasons for this story not to work, but Boyle dodges them all. Cartoony cliché, for instance: Ashoka is a former fine arts potter who cashed in on the dot com boom, then dropped out of society to chase enlightenment. That it is precisely all his worldly goods that allow him to drop out is a cleverly understated motif. But I suspect that underneath this cliché you’ll find hundreds of real people with this back-story, especially in Southern California, where flakes and mid-life crises go to flourish. I wrote Boyle to ask whether he based these characters on real people, but his response was that he “makes it all up… That’s the beauty of fiction.”

I suspect he’s being a bit coy about that. But as Boyle plays with the theme of enlightenment through cheerfully self-inflicted suffering and deprivation, and their life turns from a game to a chore, and their minds soften in the desert heat, the story darkens. Then tragedy strikes one of the members, and the results are both comic and horrifying. This is where their suffering turns real, and Akosha gains a form of enlightenment he hadn’t been seeking at all – which, in a way, is what enlightenment is all about.

I also asked Boyle for his thoughts on whether enlightenment was possible or just an illusion, the result of people doing stupid things in the name of enlightenment, and he told me to look at the story. He said you could pretty much figure out whether Ashoka was enlightened from the context of how he ends up, which of course, to me, has all the clarity of a Zen parable.

But I'm okay with his vague answer. To look at the story for answers is exactly what an author should tell a reader, if you think about it. 

Catch the mystery, catch the myth

When we get to the 331 Club there are these four big nerdy guys on stage. Bass, Guitar, drums, and keyboard, the usual combo. The keyboardist is talking, saying he shouldn’t get any of the credit, it was the other three guys who did all the work. Then they launch into a tight rockin’ cover of Rush’s "Tom Sawyer." It’s crazy. There’s a guy in the front row, air-drumming in perfect sync. Head-bobbers everywhere. We check the board and see it’s a band called Exit Stage Right. A tribute band for Rush.


Looking around, you can see we’re in the age of tribute bands. A few weeks ago we went to a show at First Avenue, a benefit for the Humane Society called Rock for Pussy (it’s about cats, mom), that was a series of David Bowie covers. The place rocked, a giant sweaty glam pit of glitter and tremulous operatic bombast. They were backed up mainly by a group best known as EL-No, a tribute band for Electric Light Orchestra. There are at least three Beatles tribute bands covering the metro area, Zed Leppelin (the Led Zepplin band, duh), and all the other cover bands of various stripes I can’t think of right now.

My Feet in front of Nighthawks

This picture was taken at the Art Institute of Chicago, in front of Nighthawks, Edward Hopper's iconic painting. You can see in the clinical composition of Nighthawks that Hopper is fascinated by light and architecture as much if not more than by people; it's partly the love he shows for the empty streets and complex shapes of objects in light and shadow that makes the people in the painting seem so lonely and displaced. It's not hard to imagine that he ended up painting sunlight in empty rooms.

Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1942, as American involvement in World War II was ramping up for three more years of terror and death. Yet Nighthawks is a meditative, calm painting, untouched by war; unless it is the absence of people, especially young men, which haunts the darkness behind the four people in the scene.

State Quarter Limericks

I wrote these a few years ago during the height of "State Quarter Frenzy," when everything was State Quarter this, and State Quarter that - you remember how it was. I figured everyone would love limericks that tell the back story of the images on all the Statehood Quarters. I sent a few out, but I guess the market wasn't as hot as I calculated.

If the public had demanded them, I suppose I'd have done all 50, because I'm nothing if not accommodating.

Anyway, here they are, after the more link. Enjoy.