Showing posts with label Walmart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walmart. Show all posts

Thursday, May 15, 2014

No matter how hopeless




"This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain."


I didn't write that, troops. It was that Steinbeck feller, you know, the clever one. And I don't know for sure why it leapt into my mind at this late hour, or how dissonances are going to relate in this-hyarr particular post.






It all goes round and round. You put a book out, it has taken you years and years to get to this point, it's suddenly "out", and you're sitting there waiting for something to happen. It doesn't transport your life or change the fact you need to lose weight or even lift your intermittent depression interspersed by Walmartian visitations of euphoria.


No kidding. Right in the middle of Walmart, the retiree's home away from home, looking for an economy-size sack of birdseed for my bird, I am hit with blinding euphoria: MY BOOK IS OUT. Harold, we made it! After six years of wandering around the desert, of having him roaming around in my head, he is "out", he is the word made flesh. And for that sublime, dazzling moment, I crest the top of the rollercoaster.


By the time I get home my pants are too tight and it's starting all over again. The divine/obscene comedy.





I've been obsessed with Don Quixote. Everybody is obsessed with Don Quixote because he makes them feel better about their own lives. At least we aren't some nut case crashing around with a lance. But we love him at the same time, for he takes the fall. He dies for our sins. There is something Christly about him, and Cervantes knew it. The holy fool. A sort of gaunt, underfed anti-clown. I started listening to the mind-lurching, emotionally-intoxicating Richard Strauss tone poem recently, with Yo Yo Ma on cello as the voice of Quixote. Oh God oh God oh.


And yes, you don't even need words to see and hear him. Then of course I had to go on YouTube to look up that documentary, that Terry Gilliam thing I watched when it first came out. Years ago. How he tried to make a film, an update of Quixote, and everything fell into the shit to a monumental, even Biblical degree. Everything was literally swept away until there was nothing left but rubble. This film made EVERYONE feel better, but everyone, even heroin addicts on death's door! But seriously, schadenfreude aside, what people were really reacting to and feeling deeply was the courage it takes to let your dream fall apart in full view, though thank God WE don't possess that kind of courage and never will.





We say failure is good, but it isn't. Failure is just failure. I guess it's inevitable, but who likes it, who really embraces it? Those motivational speakers are so full of shit their eyes are brown. In spite of Walmart birdseed raptures, my book likely won't go very far. It won't do a Quixote swandive either, but them's the breaks. I don't think Terry Gilliam lost out in the end, for somebody made soup out of the whole thing, and it was fascinating soup.


Most of us have had times when things have seriously fallen apart, when there's nothing we can do to hold it together. Might be serious illness, or a whole lot of people suddenly die in a row, like fucking dominoes. Or a job just falls out from under and there's nothing to dive into, no safety net at all. Or the safety net throws you up in the air so violently you wish you'd landed on cement.






So I hear this burningly idealistic, almost indecently gorgeous Quixote music by Richard Strauss,and then of course I must look up that song, you know, the one that was so popular in the '60s that everybody recorded it, even Liberace. Or Liberace's horse, I forget which. But I found, on an old kinescope of The Ed Sullivan Show, an 11-minute segment, a live, un-lip-synched slice of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, when it was brand new and still wet. And I found Richard Kiley singing it with heartbreaking devotion, just beautifully. I found a studio recording of him singing it with much more polish, but I never want to hear that one again. In this one he's standing in front of an audience, garish stage makeup all over his face, and every phrase is shaped as if with his own hands and ends with a little sigh. There's a catch in his voice here and there, as if it's almost too much for him, and the timbre of his voice is like a trumpet or trombone, the burnish and generosity and flash of the vibrato, the chest tones. This is coming from a human being. And I'm thinking.





The song is very short and compact, two minutes, and the lyric simple. The tune is something that sounds like it has always been there.


Dissonances relate. This is all about impossible quests, longing and questing, and holy idiots falling down into the mud. I feel like a goddamn fool sometimes, as if I'm on my fourth marriage and it's coming apart, as if I fell for it again. Haven't learned a thing. I remember when the idea for The Glass Character first leapt into my head. Now he is a book, he's outside myself. He lives, and he's in other people's hands, even if they aren't reading it! He's probably in Rich Correll's hands and Kevin Brownlow's hands, even if THEY aren't reading it. Today in Walmart, with the bag of birdseed in my hand, that was a glorious thing. Though at this moment, sitting here, I am not sure why.





A lot of people identify with Quixote because he is seemingly crazy, but everybody loves him anyway and he never has to go for shock treatments or be in the hospital. It's a freedom not granted to many. A lot of people like Quixote because humanity is very dark indeed, and we all want someone to take the fall for us. That's what drama is all about. Fiction is about trouble, poorly resolved or not resolved at all, and no matter how shitty our lives may be, they're a damn sight less shitty than Ahab's over there, he can be counted on to act it all out for us, to bear the brunt, to be humiliated or even killed in our place.




Sort of Christly, wouldn't you think?


Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Monday, January 9, 2012

Written by the Hemingway of the hen house: Matt Paust's close encounter


I stifled a curse when I heard the beep beep

beep.

Another traffic jamming electric cart. 

 I'd soon be upon the damned thing

 in my usual hurry

 to get the shopping done

 and get the hell out.




Someone less able than me,

self-destructive I guessed

in my least charitable way.

Someone stuffing greasy chips

into his or her face,

stuffing his or her beeping conveyance

with ever more bags of cheap deadly calories,

or shooting the shit

with another witless old fart,

both oblivious to me

as they block the aisle

in their GOD DAMNED ENTITLEMENT!




I round the corner and there he is.

Yes, a he,

a gaunt, tall ancient he.

Enormous bearded head,

white hair on top

and under chin,

milky eyes rolled inward,

parchment lips agape.

The head is erect,

but dead.




The old man is dead,

body propped in its cart

like the dead El Cid

strapped on his horse by Jimena

to save Valencia,

and yet...




Somehow the cart moves,

small, herky jerky moves,

forward and back,

and around,

this way and that,

beep beep beep,

as if its dead commander

still tries to drive.




I walk carefully around

this curious grotesque

to find the spices

and then the beans.

A couple more aisles

I must traverse

before I can leave

this crowded, cursed place.




Several more times

I meet the dead shopper.

Is he following me

or what the hell?

Each time we pass

I study him harder,

with quick glances

to catch a vital sign.




I wonder why he's alone.

If he's dead, how are the purchases

filling his cart?

A respect for him sprouts in my head.

There's no fear in his face,

nor defeat in his frame.

He's not dead but he's close

and it frightens him not.




He's an old sea captain I begin to think,

a mariner once,

an adventurous man,

who thrived on the challenge,

the danger of imminent

untimely death.

 eric the red


He's Eric the Red

returned from the dead.

He's Ahab and Blackbeard,

Morgan and Kidd,

the spirits of skippers

who handled the helm,

whose lives became legend

inspiring us still.


And that's when I saw her,

as I pieced it together,

this towering figure

nearing death in his cart,

refusing surrender

despite all the odds

overwhelming his body,

every breath that he took.



She stood there behind him,

far enough back so I couldn't be sure

she was with him at all.

She looked lost,

nearly helpless,
bent and frail thin.                                         

I studied her face,

but like his it was closed

to strangers it seemed.

She was looking at something

only she seemed to see.



I walked on past her,

wondering anew,

and that's when I heard it:

a murmuring sound.

It was her or him or both in tune.

I turned to look and sure enough,

she'd moved closer to him and was leaning in,

and I wondered if I could tell by the voice

or the voices if two,

what clue I could take from the tones I might hear.

Does she know this old warrior,

does he know her, too?

Would I hear impatience or grumble or scorn?

Would they speak at all, would their faces reveal?



I saw the cart move.

It turned toward the woman

and the old captain's spirit

I could see had joined hers.

There was movement, animation

in that bearded large face.

Her body was bobbing a little with life,

and I heard it then, the sound unexpected.



It was thin, it was fragile, but it held its own.

It chased away dread, frustration and worse.

Their doom imminent, the bodies for sure,

but their spirits were stronger than ever, I knew

when I heard it from her,

her giggle.


                                                            Matt Paust







http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

                                                                  

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Wake up, it's Christmas!



I do try to get into the season. Not always easy, for there's something in me that resists. It's not just the Charlie Brown feeling that Christmas has become too "commercial" (and this was a sentiment first expressed in 1964!). I feel swept up in something I don't want to be swept up in, at least not all the time.

But I do try. I made shortbread yesterday, and if I must say it myself, it was melt-in-the-mouth heavenly. But full of butter, and not much good for my resolve to lose weight (for I need to lose a lot of weight, again).

I don't know why exactly this ad grabs me, but it does, and I was glad to see it on YouTube. I remember that rambunctious "wake up, it's Christmas" feeling when I was a kid. And yes, a lot of it was about "things".

All these gifts are supposed to be, what? A remnant of the Magi and their gold, frankincense (sp.??) and myrrh? We're getting farther and farther away from such symbolism, unless we happen to be churchgoers (talk about remnants!). Or is it Santa, his insistence on flying over us and landing on each rooftop to give just the right gift to the right child, but ONLY IF THEY'VE BEEN GOOD ALL YEAR??

Talk about a tool for parental manipulation.

So if it isn't about the Christ Child, isn't even about Santa and his explosions of toys in particular, then what IS it about?'

I'm tired of it, kind of. No, not kind of, definitely. We're scaling down gifts now, in fact attempting to do away with gifts for the adults altogether. It's hard, because there's this entrenched custom for them to give to us, and if you don't reciprocate you somehow feel chintzy.

You know the feeling.

I'm trying to start a new tradition, and I've done it twice so far, of making charitable donations in the person's or family's name. Myself, I'd love receiving this, the feeling that the money that might have gone into yet another blender or Body Shop gift set will actually do some good. The Body Shop stuff doesn't even get used, and the blender is likely to be shoved in the very back of the cupboard along with the waffle iron that you used maybe twice.

The kids, well, we're still giving them stuff, but the emphasis is changing, we hope. We're giving them tickets to activities they might enjoy, science lab kits (for Caitlin), things they can DO rather than "play with" (i.e. ignore). I've knitted things, made things for them. I'm giving a ream of paper to Erica so she can build more stately mansions with it (and I wish we had photographed the Parthenon she built with rolled-up paper and tape). They don't need more Barbies or Matchbox cars or train tracks. They've got all that stuff, too much of it.

For all that, I don't feel well today, and it occurs to me I have the same acid stomach I always have in December. I just have to get through it. Not that January will be a sweet time, necessarily, but at least all this pressure will be over.

Pressure? Yes. To go along with it, so you won't look Scrooge-y or Grinch-y. Spend, spend, spend: and not just money, but time, decorating, baking, doing all those things that I guess we should be enjoying more than we actually do.

So I don't know exactly why I like this ad so much. I think it's the bouncy energy of it, the song and the swift half-second montage of shots. Some ad people are genuises at putting it all together. I loathe almost all TV ads, but once in a while one comes along (like the Glade one with the animated cookie reindeer) that delights me.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm