These guys are my heroes. Here’s the link to their web site, though it’s been stripped pretty bare for now — not surprising, since it’s apparently what helped get them caught.
Who hasn’t wanted to take out a sharpie and correct egregious errors on signs? Anyone who was forced to stroll by the mangled syntax of the one quoted above can sympathize. A question for you San Marcos folks — is that sign still there?
Here are some images from my visit to San Francisco last week. I was honored to perform the wedding ceremony for my friends Jason and Kerry at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and to read with Mary Burger on the occasion of her new Interbirth book, A Partial Handbook for Navigators, as well as my Ovid in Exile and Translations From Creeley, just out from Roger Snell’s Sardines Press. Audio of the reading is available here.
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Hope to post some photos from the trip to San Francisco soon; in the meantime, here’s a clever ad (and quick turnaround!) in response to McCain’s housing gaffe today.
And set your own World Records.
My World Record is running from my house to Richmond -> Elmwood, cutting around the Park Lake, over the bridge and into Delaware Park. One lap around the park and back home the same way. Last run was 45′09″, shaving almost four minutes off my previous World Record time. I challenge anyone to break it.
In other news:
Micah Robbins has posted a long, in-depth response to the last issue of kadar koli. Thank you, Micah!
Rob Halpern mentions Amy Trachtenberg on his nonsite collective blog.
I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow to perform the wedding of my friends Jason and Kerry, and do a reading with Mary Burger at Moe’s, in celebration of her beautiful new Interbirth book (see right).
Next week it’s straight into school.
God, I hope not.
Background: Since moving to Buffalo last month, Tina and I have been diligently searching for the best deals on everything from gas to pizza to car insurance. One of the little surprises and bright spots in my life has been my nascent love affair with Yuengling, a lager available in the local grocery store for $8-something a twelve pack. Considering that the cheapest (drinkable) brew back in Texas was watery Lone Star, which even so went for $4-something a six, that’s not bad. (Especially decent since local taxes and deposits here push alcohol to quite expensive prices, by and large.)
Yuengling is brewed in Pennsylvania, and while it’s a fairly large brewery, it’s still owned by the original family, which founded it way back in 1829. The beer itself is not as smooth and tasty as Sam Adams or the finer Euro lagers, but I have to say it’s pretty damn good. Add in the fact that you can pick up a 12-pack for the price of most of those finer brews, and, well, you had me at hello.
Salon.com has been running a series of articles on the demise of Budweiser as an “American” beer, and recently speculated on which cheap, regional beer might step forward to take its place as THE American beer. Much to my surprise, Yuengling got the nod.
To me, this is horrible news. It’s not unlike discovering a tiny corner bistro with amazing food and a nice, quiet atmosphere, and then finding that it’s been given five stars by Zagat’s or something. I don’t want what happened to Shiner Bock to happen here.
As Americans, I believe we have a right to cheap, locally brewed swill. If that swill happens to be pretty decent, it’s all the better for the folks lucky enough to live where they can get it. I’m hoping that beer-drinkers, and the companies and conglomerates that market to them, miss reading this article. And that some other brew entirely takes over the mantle from Bud. Leave us our Yuengling!
This can’t be all bad, right?
I hate these Forbes lists, though usually at least they’re positive: greenest cities, best cities to work in, cities with the highest population of under-25 carwash heiresses, etc. — I find myself looking at them even though they’re chock full of random statistics and seem to just be plucked out of a hat for marketing purposes.
Recently here in Buffalo there’s been some ruffled feathers over being included on this list: America’s fastest-dying cities. That’s right: along with Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, and other rust-belt stalwarts, we’re on the list “with a bullet,” so to speak. Question: what does “fastest-dying” even mean? Are we on life support now? Should we plan a funeral?
The irony is that Buffalo also appears in a more positive light in “Great Places in America,” a list of the country’s best neighborhoods compiled by the American Planning Association. Elmwood Village is where we live — sort of — and I can testify, having lived in two of the other cities on this list, that it’s deservedly included here.
Even in the pages of Forbes, Buffalo comes off well on a number of other lists. It’s 15 on the “best cities for couples” (Detroit is 21!), and it’s numero uno on “best cities for commuters” (there’s a good side to population decline, I guess). I’m surprised it doesn’t crack the top fifteen on this list.
The bottom line: Buffalo is a city with lots of problems. High crime rates and poverty still plague many areas. But the people are friendly, and there’s a stubborn sort of pride that’s resulted in the amazing turnaround of this neighborhood (read the whole entry on Elmwood, above, for that story). Also, we have this.
This is the oddly formal, musical phrase that Mr. Hilditch utters towards the end of William Trevor’s novel Felicia’s Journey. It’s the first interesting, original thing he’s said, and perhaps the most honest — his speech up till now has been filled with empty platitudes and shopworn phrases like “beggars and choosers,” “know the score,” and his favorite, “find out the state of play,” an expression he uses to indicate looking into a situation, as he promises to do for Felicia in her search for her boyfriend.
Hilditch’s whole life has been a lie. More than that — or precisely that, but in a way particular to language, his use of language to constantly avoid the truth. His empty expressions mask not only his real intentions but also his genuine mood, which is often dark as opposed to the self-deprecating cheer of his words. A stilted formality creeps in during intense moments, as when he’s trying to convince Felicia to have an abortion. But it’s still borrowed language, official language: “The point I’m making to you is that a situation like you and Johnny are in can all too easily be affected by misfortune.” A touch of this formality is preserved when Hilditch finally cracks, accompanied by the weirdly poetic phrasing, as if he’s a tea kettle that couldn’t help piping his madness at just this pitch.
I remember the concern with language in this book from having read it last summer in Ireland, and a recent visit from a friend brought the novel back to mind as a last-minute summer diversion before school starts up again.
It’s worth expanding on a quote I extracted earlier from Foucault’s preface to History of Madness:
Foucault seems to be referring here to a pre-clinical approach to madness, a time when madness had not yet reached the point of abjection at which it could only be talked about, not with. All of the technical terms around madness as “illness” etc. had not yet been coined, and unreason could carry out a dialogue with reason — as it did in the writings of Erasmus, the paintings of Goya, and so on. That language seems to have been made of simple words, perhaps used in intuitive and surprising ways. Foucault indicates this when he later writes that one of his aims for his book is to find
What does this have to do with Trevor’s novel? Nothing, at least directly. The novel is not so much about an inability to communicate with a madman, as a madman’s inability to communicate at all, and perhaps everyone’s inability to communicate with each other. Not only is Felicia, as an Irish girl, the victim of a “suppression of language, religion and human freedom” according to her father, but she’s doubly so when trying to operate in the backwoods and suburbs of England in search of her beau, unable to understand what people are saying to her and no doubt misunderstood herself.
Miss Calligary, the Jamaican street evangelist to whom Mr. Hilditch makes his strange pronouncement, soon to be followed by a confession, is his linguistic counterpart. When not speaking in religious platitudes almost as meaningless as his empty clichés, she uses a stilted approximation of official, formal speech. When Hilditch cracks and begins telling her about his mistreatment of Felicia, it’s Miss Calligary’s waifish sidekick, a troubled young woman like Felicia, who understands and says to herself “Here is a madman.” Miss Calligary, while recognizing something is off about him, can only conclude that “this man is not as he seems” and offer more empty promises of bringing him peace of mind through prayer and “gathering.”
Foucault dreams of a language in which “reasonable man” can re-enter a dialogue with madness that seems to have been lost in the corridors of confinement and the modern clinic. Mr. Hilditch’s strange poetic phrase is such language, though no one but another lost young woman is there to recognize it for what it is, and aside from her “greater excitement” she is unable to respond. He does not continue along these powerful and emotional lines, and his words don’t seem to do him or anyone else any good. The idea of disconnect and “rupture” certainly fits here, as it does for our cultural and political landscape as a whole. No one understands what anyone else is saying. No one’s listening.
Madness has lost the ability to speak. The language Foucault dreams of is impossible.
Or..?
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