Elderism #67

“I think of the days we were gods and goddesses, playing ball with planets. We were larger than dinosaurs. But now we sit like good girls and boys and watch the tennis ball going left and right, forgetting the days when we used to play with bigger balls. What happens when we shrink even further, and become the size of cockroaches? Will we still be playing with something that echoes the time when we were larger?”

-Yoko Ono, on her website. Most of us are shrinking but 76 year-old Ono keeps getting bigger—in recent years, she’s had five #1 dance singles; her new album is weird and wonderful.

McSweeney’s

I have a fairly nutty humor piece on the website of Dave Eggers’s journal, McSweeney’s, today (it is here.) It’s called, “Fall Fashion Report from a Local Correctional Facility.” It could not be gayer.

Elderism #66

Wheelchair-bound after a 1990 car accident that cost him the use of both his legs, Bard professor Chinua Achebe, the author of the brutal and awesome Things Fall Apart, is releasing his first book in more than 20 years. An essay collection about the 78 year-old Nigerian’s literary upbringing, the book barely mentions the car accident; as a Reuters story put it,

“‘It is better to talk about the things that belong to all of us. One is more comfortable doing that,’ Achebe said, running his hands down his still legs.”

Rewriting the Classics

Writers and artists, take note: the publishing house Scribner recently published a “restored version” of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, “restored” by Hemingway’s grandson in such a way as to make the grandson’s grandmother–Mrs. Hemingway #2–more sympathetic in the book. (Grandson also added chapters in which Hemingway describes Ford Madox Ford’s body odor and the size of  Scott Fitzgerald’s wang.)

Irritated, or fascinated, or concerned about future depictions of my own bodily disappointments, I asked three of my favorite funny writers–Sandra Tsing Loh, Ben Schott, and Patricia Marx–to goof on what classics of literature they’d like to revamp. The results air this weekend on public radio’s Studio 360 (the episode is here.) Added bonus: because of the aforementioned Fitzgerald fact, Studio 360’s buttoned-down, Omaha-bred host Kurt Andersen says “penis” on air.

Elderism #65

Gore Vidal, in a recent interview in the Times of London:

“My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody.”

Incoming: New Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte’s scaldingly dark comic novel, Home Land, caused me to vomit with laughter (laughter, as the saying goes, is the best emetic.) So it was with grabby, snortling glee that I recently received a galley of his new slab of scabrousness, The Ask. It’s  coming out in March from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and it concerns a recently-fired development officer at a mediocre university who, re-hired, must reel in a potential donor–a major “ask.”

A taste:

“Autodidactic vigor is darling in a little boy. Give him forty years, though, a beer gut, leather vest, bandana, granny glasses, and picture him the poor slob known as the Professor in a biker bar off the thruway, the arrogant but harmless turd humored for his historical factoids about extinct warrior societies and mots justes about the bankruptcy of liberal democracy, humored, that is, until some severe, silence-craving patron, maybe a thug who made his living garroting  wives and business partners for high three-figure fees, suddenly didn’t find the Professor’s disquisitions edifying, kicked his neck in, then it wasn’t so charming.”

Elderism #64

“Beautifully done.”

-The last words of English poet A.E. Housman in 1936, to his doctor, who was giving him a final injection of morphine.

Man on Fire

O, James Ellroy! Such a loveable nutjob are you! In his interview on public radio’s Studio 360 last week, the author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia managed to 1) chastise his interviewer for interrupting him at one point, 2) claim that he’s learned more about writing from listening to Beethoven than from reading any author, and 3) utter the chest-beating call to arms,

“I floss with barbed wire and gargle with the AIDS virus.”

I’m thinking it might behoove Mr. Ellroy to have a licensed professional sit him down and tell him all about lithium.

Ring Nuts

Was it the gentleman seated next to me at the symposium who told me that he had six subscriptions to New York’s Metropolitan Opera? Was it the gentleman who told me about how his seatmate at the Ring Cycle in Bayreuth, Germany had passed out from the heat (and lack of air conditioning), and, once revived, had decided to watch the rest of the four hour-long opera from the floor? Was it the choreographer Mark Morris, who, minutes before curtain at Seattle Opera’s Gotterdammerung this August, told me, “This is the only theater in the world with enough womens bathrooms”? Was it the guy who packs Ring Cycle-themed doggie bags of food to eat at intermission? I’m not sure which ardent fan of Wagner’s Ring Cycle was my favorite, but I’ve written about them in tomorrow’s New York Times (the story is here).

Elderism #63

“[Y]ou can’t expect bras necessarily on a clothesline. You have to go to Target to see bras hanging nobly out for the public gaze.”

From Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist