Elderism #62

“Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that. And if that’s true, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.”

From Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist

Elderism # 61

“I’m going to get in bed, and I don’t have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that’s kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it’s very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine twenty nights of sleeping, you’ve taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.”

From The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s new novel about a poet who’s trying to write an introduction to a poetry anthology

Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)

In his new memoir, True Compass, we learn that Ted Kennedy, when trying to decide whether to run for Senate in 1962, remembered what his father had told him as a child: “You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whatever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.”

Car Rides That Might Get a Little Abstract

According to the BBC, Bob Dylan is talking to a number of car companies about being the voice of their satellite navigation systems.

No One To Talk To

There’s a fairly heartbreaking story by Patricia Leigh Brown in today’s New York Times about how the ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. They’re America’s fastest-growing immigrant group (in California one in nearly three seniors is foreign born), yet 70% of older immigrants speak little or no English, and most don’t drive. “They come anticipating a great deal of family togetherness,” says a professor of sociology at UC Irvine, “but American society isn’t organized in a way that responds to their cultural expectations.” The story ends with the example  of an 84 year-old Indian grandmother who shares a room with her 12 year-old grandson in Fremont, Ca. (“improbably surrounded by Iron Man and Incredible Hulk posters”), who’s spending a lot of time with her eyes cast downwards at her folded hands. Interestingly, the one social group that gets written about is all-male–as we’ve discussed before, older men typically don’t form the social networks women do, which makes aging harder for them–and takes the form of Indian men getting together five days a week at the mall for something called the 100 Years Living Club. Sounds like the basis of the next  Mira Nair movie, no?

Elderism #60

Ray Charles, then blind for 67 years, in 2003:

“It would be a real bitch if I ever lost my hearing. I know I couldn’t be no Helen Keller. That would be worse than death.”

The Larry Stage

James Wolcott writes amusingly in Vanity Fair that Larry King Live, through its bizarro coverage of the deaths of David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, has become “the funeral parlor of the gods.” Wolcott writes of King, “Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he’s strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.” While Charlie Rose tends to assemble panels of august Times and New Yorker writers to weigh in on the deceased, King books “just about any showboat with a slim connection to the departed.”  In closing: “Elisabeth Kubler-Ross may have given us the five stages of grief, but she left out the sixth: the Larry stage.”

I Was Tim Gunn

The folks at Bravo who brought us Project Runway are working on a new reality series–this one about visual artists–to air in 2010. Although the show isn’t called So You Want to Be an Artist (the producers haven’t decided on a name yet), it might just as well be–it’ll be painters and sculptors making slightly uncharitable comments about one another as they vie for cash and glory under pressure-cooker deadlines. The public radio show Studio 360 sent me to the New York auditions, where I walked  up and down the line of hopefuls, giving them unsolicited advice. The piece airs this weekend, and is here.

Sadly, no one was excited by my idea that the show should have a catch phrase like Project Runway‘s “Make it work!,” or that this catchphrase should be art historical and take the form, “Don’t cut your ear off over a disagreement about a prostitute!” These things take time.

Strawberry Fields Forever

I have a story in the New York Times today (it is here) about VeggieTrader.com, a site that is essentially Craigslist for homegrown produce (you can swap or sell homegrown produce or plants on it). My apartment is now brimming over with the 25 strawberry plants that one VeggieTrader swapped me for a pepper plant and a woman melon plant. Though scraggly, these little ladies fill me with joy. They are all my children.

UPDATE: Oh, no–have I turned into what United States of Arugula author David Kamp calls a smugavore?

Hair Is Architecture

81 year-old coiffure legend Vidal Sassoon–who helped define the”mod” look, and who created both Mia Farrow’s pixie look for Rosemary’s Baby and fashion designer Mary Quant’s asymmetrical bob–tells public radio’s Studio 360 this weekend about what inspired him: architecture. Raised an orphan in London, he joined the Israeli army when Israel was formed. Later, after working as a shampoo boy in a salon, he started cutting hair.  “As I got into hair,” Sassoon  says, “I started to love it so much that I thought, Why not use architectural shapes?” He concludes, piercingly, “It was all inspired by Bauhaus.”