gwayland

A TOKYO MEMORY

Last day of March, 2020. Middle of a pandemic. Trying to comprehend such an enormous thing — and such an enormity — as watching the only planet we know, and all of us who inhabit it, be menaced, from West Bengal to Time Square and everywhere in between, by a potentially deadly pathogen, something bascially as UNhuman as a coiling, twisting vine multiplying and creeping up a wall.

It is giving us all time to think, and remember — especially if you’ve been on this planet for nearly three quarters of a century, like me.

And what do I do? I stay confined — though tending to a sick companion; sick not with the dreaded virus but with an inexplicably debilitating leg pain that has put her on a borrowed set of crutches following a painful trip to a clinic for an ultrasound and MRI.

And, with no “hook” to make it relevant, I suddenly scour the archives of my memory during this enforced leisure — and my letter file — and discover that I wrote a very accomplished composer some months back after chancing to see his credit at the end of the television series Biography. He wrote the music for that and, apparently, much, much more — and is a well-known composer of experimental and symphonic music as well. Continue reading “A TOKYO MEMORY”

CONFINED AND BRIEFLY CONFOUNDED

Hello, all. If you’re visiting here, welcome. But for the next 24 hours (it’s March 30 at 10:33 p.m.) I need to work in some new material here, especially about these anxious, seemingly endless days of self-quarantine and confinement. A pandemic demands daily engagement. I’ve been stalled. Not alone, I suspect. But the point of a blog, at least in part, is to banish our aloneness, right? I’ll be back.

COVID 19 ADDENDUM

My former colleague Chris Luke, who is Chinese-American, has taken me to task for that part of a Facebook post in which I seem to link China and, by extension, all Asian peoples to the Covid-19 pandemic, presumably finding most offensive the reference to ” a filthy street market in Wuhan” and bats being butchered for food. She says Asian people, including apparently her relatives, are being “racially profiled” as a consequence of the pervasive linking of the outbreak specifically to China, either to a marketplace, or a lab, or wherever in that country. Continue reading “COVID 19 ADDENDUM”

THE INFECTED MOMENT

No one writing anywhere on the web can fail to say a dozen or so words about where we find ourselves, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. This is to note it — and note that, when I can get my small head around it, I’ll want to say more, if only to myself — and to whatever lonely soul chances upon this lonely blog. Continue reading “THE INFECTED MOMENT”

ANCIENT GUM, ANCIENT FACE

I have recently read in the Health & Science section of the journal This Week that scientists have recreated the face of an ancient hunter-gatherer using DNA extracted from a piece of “chewing gum” that was spat out some 5600 years ago. The lump of chewed birch tar was found at a site in southern Denmark, alongside pieces of wood and wild animal bones.

Before I convey what further information was relayed regarding this bizarre but fascinating bit of anthropological news, I must, at long last, let myself be instructed (again) how to includes images and photographs in this site — probably not hard, but I can be a stubbornly slow learner. You have to see the lump of “gum” — and the reconstructed face of the beautiful hunter-gatherer to appreciate this.

Later…. ( like there’s anybody reading this blog. It’s becoming disheartening talking to myself on the web.)

NO JOY ON JERSEY STREET

That — Jersey Street – is what became of Yawkey Way after the posthumous mugging of the late, once-beloved Tom Yawkey over questions of his racial attitudes. I won’t open that big can of snakes again — but, yes, as winter grips Beantown and that short, shadowy byway astride Fenway Park awaits the crowds of opening day and the Sox begin their ritual preps in Fort Myers – I’d have to say, as a Boston native and unalterable fan of all Boston teams, that the loss of Mookie Betts is, well, too, too bad. Who can deny it? But that’s pro sports now. We root for laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld so aptly said. Continue reading “NO JOY ON JERSEY STREET”

THE LIFE WE SAVE MAY BE THE U.S.A.

Something reasonable to think about — albeit also a little emotion-charged — on the subject of tolerance and bipartisanship in this fraught election season – a post by Princeton Professor and scholar Robert P. George, always a voice of reason and principle: He’s aiming it at conservative Democrats. Continue reading “THE LIFE WE SAVE MAY BE THE U.S.A.”

AN AGEE MOMENT

We lay on our backs about two feet apart in silence, our eyes open, listening. The land that was under us lay down all around us and its continuance was enormous as if we were chips or matches floated, holding their own by their very minuteness, at a great distance out upon the surface of a tenderly laboring sea. The sky was even larger.

–James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

If you ever want to attempt to read a beautiful but prolonged and exasperatingly complex, minutely detailed, verbally rococo work of human sociology — poetically rendered — pick up the above-cited volume by a man who during his brief life was, indeed, a poet, novelist, screenwriter, movie critic and, briefly, a very unusual journalist. This particular book grew out of a Depression-era Fortune magazine assignment to write about poverty-stricken families of Alabama tenant farmers. Agee never really finished the assignment — or, perhaps finished it, but had it rejected by his editors though it would be preserved and enormously expanded by the author. The story of how it came to exist is doubtless told in two Agee biographies that I’ve been totting around and aspiring to read. Continue reading “AN AGEE MOMENT”

NECESSARY KOBE B. ADDENDUM:

I just wrote of the tragedy — wrote at length — and made passing referenced to the circa 2003-2005 rape accusation. I needed to remind myself that Kobe read a statement in court essentially acknowledging that the sex with the 19-year old who accused him of rape “may not have been consensual.” As Tara Sullivan in the Globe is saying, finally, the star who could have been a great advocate against the rape culture missed that chance. Mindful, he was never convicted in a court of law and there was a civil settlement, which does not amount to a guilty conviction — and these sexual encounters, with the famous or non-famous can be complex he-said-she-said matters….nonetheless, it shouldn’t take a #MeToo movement to remind us that no means no. And that victim is still out there, a 34-year-old woman. What must be her thoughts?

And so, there. We are all sinners. The tragedy abides, as does all the good KB did, this father of four daughters, one of whom entered eternity with him.

A FLASH IN THE FOG

I believe I was somewhere in Florida’s interior when it happened — when Kobe Bryant, his daughter and several other souls were suddenly lost in a violent flash in the fog three thousand miles away on a north-of-LA hillside. I had probably just recently exited I-275, then exited I-10 and found my way to state road 301 west on my way back to what is currently home: Largo in the Tampa Bay area. And I know that for much of the drive I’d been thinking about my son and his new wife. I was just coming from their wedding in Mount Pleasant, SC, a seaside suburb of Charleston. And I was thinking about life’s frailty, its shooting star evanescence. ( Driving on any American highway at any hour of the day will induce such thoughts.) I’d been praying for God to keep the newlyweds safe — to keep us all safe, every soul. But life is both fragile and — though we should not dwell on it — full of dangers. And the truth is that I had not, in the years prior to his wedding, bonded with my son as any father should — and should not now fail to do. The swell of emotion I was feeling during that wedding ceremony, tinged in equal measure with joy and remorse, was great. Every moment without love is a tragedy. Life is short. Love — well, it’s eternal. Cliche? Yeah. Sorry. Continue reading “A FLASH IN THE FOG”