Sunday, August 20, 2006
Angela's Ashes
I'm ashamed it's taken me till now to read this memoir published ten years ago by Frank McCourt.
His gift for dialogue that leaps off the page and jigs around your ear is unmatched. Without any ability to recreate the accent aloud, I read through the pages and heard conversations in perfect, regionally-varied brogues as the McCourt family travelled from Belfast and Antrim in the North to Dublin and Limerick in the south. And it's not just F.M.'s ability to recreate an Irish dialect on the page, but also to do justice to Brooklyn's manifold tongues:
Awright, awright, you Irish. Jeezoz! Trouble. Trouble.
Bet your ass, said Joe [Cacciamani]. I see them babes comin' at me I jump inna Hudson River.
Mrs. Leibowitz: Wait, chiltren, wait, darlinks. Won't be two seconds...Look at him. Little actor awready. So, chiltren, how's your mother?...So pee, awready. You boys pee and we see you mother. Oh, Mrs. McCourt. Oy vey, darlink. Look at this. Look at these twins. Naked. Mrs. McCourt, what is mazzer, eh? The baby she is sick? So talk to me. Poor woman. Here turn around, missus. Talk to me. Oy, this is one mess. Talk to me, Mrs. McCourt.
Told from the author's perspective, the descriptions and observations mature and develop as the author grows older, as does his language, so that at any point in the narrative you feel as if you are living inside his mind journeying from naivette to anguish to revelation. His ability to recreate the emotions and thoughts according to the awareness of a 3 year old early in the book is incredible.
The saddest stories of death and hunger and poverty are related without pity or piety and are more often than not mixed in with a sense of humor that only the truly miserable and impoverished can maintain. This book had me laughing at things that I'm sure will condemn me to the Eternal Doom with the rest of the Presbyterians ;-)
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhoood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
I can't recommend 'Angela's Ashes' highly enough. It is one of the most powerfully honest and human works of literature I have ever read. Even if my Aunt insists that the author, whom she has met, is a pompous and garrulous self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, that boy can write his ass off and manage to say some profound things of the human heart along the way.
Ah, pick it up, will ye?
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His gift for dialogue that leaps off the page and jigs around your ear is unmatched. Without any ability to recreate the accent aloud, I read through the pages and heard conversations in perfect, regionally-varied brogues as the McCourt family travelled from Belfast and Antrim in the North to Dublin and Limerick in the south. And it's not just F.M.'s ability to recreate an Irish dialect on the page, but also to do justice to Brooklyn's manifold tongues:
Awright, awright, you Irish. Jeezoz! Trouble. Trouble.
Bet your ass, said Joe [Cacciamani]. I see them babes comin' at me I jump inna Hudson River.
Mrs. Leibowitz: Wait, chiltren, wait, darlinks. Won't be two seconds...Look at him. Little actor awready. So, chiltren, how's your mother?...So pee, awready. You boys pee and we see you mother. Oh, Mrs. McCourt. Oy vey, darlink. Look at this. Look at these twins. Naked. Mrs. McCourt, what is mazzer, eh? The baby she is sick? So talk to me. Poor woman. Here turn around, missus. Talk to me. Oy, this is one mess. Talk to me, Mrs. McCourt.
Told from the author's perspective, the descriptions and observations mature and develop as the author grows older, as does his language, so that at any point in the narrative you feel as if you are living inside his mind journeying from naivette to anguish to revelation. His ability to recreate the emotions and thoughts according to the awareness of a 3 year old early in the book is incredible.
The saddest stories of death and hunger and poverty are related without pity or piety and are more often than not mixed in with a sense of humor that only the truly miserable and impoverished can maintain. This book had me laughing at things that I'm sure will condemn me to the Eternal Doom with the rest of the Presbyterians ;-)
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhoood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
I can't recommend 'Angela's Ashes' highly enough. It is one of the most powerfully honest and human works of literature I have ever read. Even if my Aunt insists that the author, whom she has met, is a pompous and garrulous self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, that boy can write his ass off and manage to say some profound things of the human heart along the way.
Ah, pick it up, will ye?
Friday, August 18, 2006
1st World Pretensions
Just read an article on BBC's site about the wealth gap in Brazil that focused on menial jobs in what it considered Brazil's 'informal economy'. Such menial jobs that create employment, but not productivity (according to the argument), include 'ascensoristas', or elevator operators in corporate buildings, people who stand outside passport photo machines feed your money in and cut your picture to size, street vendors and 'catadores de lixo', dumpster divers who rework and resell their finds
The author states early on, "When Brazilian companies want to advertise vacancies for manual or clerical workers, they often rent space on the backs of sandwich-board men... [it] points to a wider tendency in Brazil of employing people in menial jobs that, in more developed countries, do not even exist."
Well, the UK must be an oasis of opportunity that does not exist here in the US. I've never been across the pond, the pound is the premier currency, so that must be the case. Because here in the 'more developed' country of the US, I see hundreds of men employed wearing sandwich boards advertising fitness clubs and gentlemen lounges, thousands of folks passing out flyers for stores selling discount watches and electronics, hundreds of people standing on the side of roads and highways selling water bottles, watermelons, and all types of Chinese-manufactured junk that doesn't represent much more than recylcled trash to my mind.
Maybe the author should visit New York, the financial epicenter of the free world, before he makes such absurd claims that menial and unproductive jobs for poor people serving the rich only exist in 2nd and 3rd world nations of inequality.
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The author states early on, "When Brazilian companies want to advertise vacancies for manual or clerical workers, they often rent space on the backs of sandwich-board men... [it] points to a wider tendency in Brazil of employing people in menial jobs that, in more developed countries, do not even exist."
Well, the UK must be an oasis of opportunity that does not exist here in the US. I've never been across the pond, the pound is the premier currency, so that must be the case. Because here in the 'more developed' country of the US, I see hundreds of men employed wearing sandwich boards advertising fitness clubs and gentlemen lounges, thousands of folks passing out flyers for stores selling discount watches and electronics, hundreds of people standing on the side of roads and highways selling water bottles, watermelons, and all types of Chinese-manufactured junk that doesn't represent much more than recylcled trash to my mind.
Maybe the author should visit New York, the financial epicenter of the free world, before he makes such absurd claims that menial and unproductive jobs for poor people serving the rich only exist in 2nd and 3rd world nations of inequality.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Poem...a week?
Okay, okay. I should be ashamed, I know. After publicly pledging to post one a day, I fell off after two days. Pretty sad. Save your comments and wise-cracks for somebody who isn't a 9th degree black-belt in the deadly martial art of Fuk-Yoo-Fu. How about a poem every Wednesday, the hump in the middle of the workweek's aching back, the hardest to spell and most phonically phunky of days, the day with the most letters that can be rearranged to spell sadWendey...o, sad Wendey, don't cry, today's is a happy poem:
Last Gods - by Galway Kinnell
She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. She opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime--the intimacy
of the visible world. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth.
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke, jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and sucks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human mouth. Now in the lake
two faces float, looking up
at a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.
Remeber skinny-dipping at Harriman, speaking the language of faeries and fungi, watching the slow gaping mouths of fish peck at the organic matter floating up from inbetween the slimy tendrils of green-things at the bottom, the pubis of the lake, and our hair lifting off our bodies and waving in the viscous breeze, bottomless blue skies stretching over hillsides bristling with brocolli, the wise-quacks of tough-guys disguised as slowly sailing ducks, the warm exfoliating whetstone upon which we laid our near-nude bodies until our muscles and skeletons could regain their terrestrial proportions...that's what this poem makes me think of everytime. Hollaback if I'm making any sense!
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Last Gods - by Galway Kinnell
She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. She opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime--the intimacy
of the visible world. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth.
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke, jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and sucks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human mouth. Now in the lake
two faces float, looking up
at a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.
Remeber skinny-dipping at Harriman, speaking the language of faeries and fungi, watching the slow gaping mouths of fish peck at the organic matter floating up from inbetween the slimy tendrils of green-things at the bottom, the pubis of the lake, and our hair lifting off our bodies and waving in the viscous breeze, bottomless blue skies stretching over hillsides bristling with brocolli, the wise-quacks of tough-guys disguised as slowly sailing ducks, the warm exfoliating whetstone upon which we laid our near-nude bodies until our muscles and skeletons could regain their terrestrial proportions...that's what this poem makes me think of everytime. Hollaback if I'm making any sense!
Friday, August 04, 2006
Mark it!
Engagement parties:
1. September 23rd at the Brooklyn house. For the kids. Pot luck style, tell anyone you know - remember the rule: 2nd degree friends. Please bring either an appetizer, a main dish, or a dessert. If you'd like, some kind of drink as well. Party starts at 7pm and runs through the night. Let me know if you'll be staying.
2. October 14th at the Steeves' house in central jersey. This is the family party and all that's required is that you show. Probably an afternoon to evening party with the immediate and secondary families. You'll all be meeting and being re-introduced to lots of peeps here. But that'll make the wedding that much cooler when you've already met them.
Mark the dates!
1. September 23rd at the Brooklyn house. For the kids. Pot luck style, tell anyone you know - remember the rule: 2nd degree friends. Please bring either an appetizer, a main dish, or a dessert. If you'd like, some kind of drink as well. Party starts at 7pm and runs through the night. Let me know if you'll be staying.
2. October 14th at the Steeves' house in central jersey. This is the family party and all that's required is that you show. Probably an afternoon to evening party with the immediate and secondary families. You'll all be meeting and being re-introduced to lots of peeps here. But that'll make the wedding that much cooler when you've already met them.
Mark the dates!
