Loose Cans

Um, I'm sorry, but it's way, way too nice to blog all day. Go outside, run around. Get off your ass.

I had a pretty mortifying experience a week or two ago, and I think I forgot to mention it (too lazy to check). It was the night before Duncan's birthday, and since Caitriona and Stephen were out in Belfast seeing Snorah Jones in concert (I appreciate her enough in the background, or when it's bedtime, but I can't imagine having to sit through an interval-less two-hour concert of that stuff. Sorry, Alana), Sadie and I took him out for a nice dinner. He had made us reservations at this place called Il Baccaro, a very nice, acceptably priced Italian place that looks like it's in a wine cellar: a low stone vault, with all the trappings of a good Italian grotto, but somehow avoiding kitsch entirely. I would happily return there. Anyhow, Sadie and I decided beforehand that we were going to treat him. He had no inkling. I was going to slip the waitress my Visa card during the meal, you know, be all slick, and before he knew what was happening, it'd all have been taken care of. So you first understand how I blanched when we elected to have a €20 bottle of wine (it was the house wine, the cheapest, but clever fuckers, they didn't do 70cl regular bottles, just 50cl and litres. So there went €10). But okay, no big deal. The meal was marvelous, and in the middle, I got up and excused myself to go to the jacks. We had situated Duncan next to the wall, facing the back of the restaurant, and aft of the arch you have to pass through to go to the toilet. He'd have to look behind him to see the arch. So on my way back, I snuck up to the front, handed the waitress my Visa (debit) card, and arranged everything. I come back to the table, give Sadie a quick wink, and feel ever so sophisticated. Duncan has noticed nothing. I have always wanted to do this.

Then, after a delightful and satisying meal, we ask for the check. I am looking forward to having my card and bill be conveyed to the table on a little black plastic disc, with a blue pen on top, signing the check with a flourish, S Ashworth, and handing it back with nonchalance. But the check is curiously slow in coming. Then the waitress finally calls me over. Card won't take. They're very apologetic, but not half so much as I. Not enough money in the fucking American checking account (I don't have a payment card from Bank of Ireland yet. I should get one), which I rarely check or replenish. I have to ask Sadie for €20 and pay in cash, of course wrecking the whole plan. It was mortifying and funny and really, really irritating. Also fucking dear, man. I could have flown to London for less. That bottle of wine. Even so, the meal and evening were perfectly lovely, and we all learned a lesson: keep money in thy purse.

I have decided what I want engraved on my tombstone:

"I'M NOT WEARING ANY PANTS."

I think it'd go a long way towards livening up the cemetery.

Okay, aside from the fact that I have a nasty canker sore, everything is, pour le moment (nuts to you, Sam, I'll frenchify whenever and wherever I please, just like John Kerry), absolutely lovely. It's warm and sunny out, real spring weather, and I have ultimate in an hour. But this is not the best part.

I started writing again. Last night I churned out a five-page poem, if we have to call it that. It's very delicately explained: The first part, Everything Below 14th Street, is free verse (something I usually steer clear of, but which was demanded), apostrophic, addressed to New York. It's called Stanzas for a Great City, and it's somewhat interesting. Of some value, perhaps. The prose has been almost entirely de-purpled, and relies on its form for its oomph. There's zero imagery, and the only times I use metaphor I apologize for it immediately afterward. The second part, Bridge, isn't free: the syllable count goes, predictably, 2-4-6-8-10-8-6-4-2-4-6-8-10-8-6-4-2. Looks like a bridge. Reads like suspension cables. The next part, which I want to start tonight, All the Part That's a Grid, is going to be much more regulated, as penance for the earlier liberties taken. It's going to use Fibonacci numbers, for some bizarre reason (Jonah, tell me something about them, I know next to nothing), but not for syllable counts. 1-2-3-5-8 will be the number of lines in successive stanzas: stitchik, couplet, tercet, cinquain, octave. With the conventional rhyme-scheme of each. That should be pleasant enough. Also, I need from a scientist (Jared?) a rigidly scientific, technically worded definition of exactly what a scream is. How the impulse originates in the brain, exactly what sort of motion the larynx engages in, what, exactly, sound IS (frequency and harmonics mumbo-jumbo), and how it's received in the ear. Oh, and keep t to three lines or less. Please? All I'm saying beyond this is that my favorite line so far is, You will be glad to hear that I have put my pants on.

But even that's not the whole reason I'm in such a good mood (though it sure helps). The reason is, I stopped into Tower Records off Grafton st. today, because Sadie had told me they had cheaper New Yorkers. I had actually bought the humor issue yesterday, for the slightly less unreasonable price of €5.90, so I didn't get the issue they had (Easter, with Sy Hersh). But then I saw below it on the shelf, wrapped in plastic: the old familiar font. The condensed typeface of the fifth column. The layout. The motto.

The New York Times.

I nearly had a heart attack. It was the latest sunday paper, national edition. €7.90. I have not seen the Gray Lady once since I got here. I've looked everywhere. I was on the verge of picking it up, trembling like it was my wedding night, when I saw the real reason I'm in this mood.

HEEB.

The New Jew Review.

I had the heart attack.

I'm still in shock. €6.44, you can be damn sure I bought the fucker. Schwartz of the month, Jewish Tattooess, Cornel West, and their own photo-version of the Passion? In goddamn Dublin? Fuckin' A tweety, boychik. Can't nobody piss on my parade today.

And frankly, I was expecting considerably worse. All II.1's, which is honors, despite some more or less unpardonable offenses on two of them.

In Writing Ireland, for which, you will remember, I wrote an essay which turned out to be almost totally off the mark, topic-wise, I somehow made out like a bandit: 66. Perfectly good, all things considered. She repeated the old "extremely articulate" bit, and then went on to ask more or less what the fuck did I think I was doing, not mentioning Ireland once. Stupid of me, I guess. Oh well. That's an A-, anyway.

For CCT, which turned out to be an affable, inoffensive, cream puff argument against the negativity of Shklovsky's idea of defamiliarisation as art (I tried to dyke it up into the happy, magical notion of refamiliarisation), I pulled in a 62. Apparently she's a real hardass when it comes to grading, and a 62 is perfectly adequate, around a B+/A-. I kind of liked the essay, actually. There was a fondness there. I'll post it this week, if I can remember. Her criticism was highly unimaginative, though, and so scrupulously, insistently academic ("sentence fragment." I KNOW IT'S A FUCKING FRAGMENT; IT'S THERE FOR A REASON, YOU TIT. "What does this mean?" You know perfectly well what it means, you prat. "Arrgh!!" Oh, shut up, you sissy, it's only a pun) that if ever there remained in me the slightest inclination towards academia, she has, mercifully, smothered it forever.

Finally, the big bad one: Theatre, Waiting for Godot. Of course, you can't expect much when your essay is 2 000 words over the limit (2 000 words), 11 pages long, wholly unedited and uncut, and titled, "Allegory in Waiting for Godot, or, KILL ME, PLEASE." I did of course expect it to be graded by my former tutor, the guy I was buddies with, Mark Chapman. He said he'd be grading them before he left the country, and so the essay was more or less written for him. It was, you might recall, the most difficult essay I ever put my head to. It was also one of the more scholastically irreverent, which I figured would well suit a good man who had been bent over and fucked by the establishment. So you can imagine my dismay when my new tutor, Andrew Power, a lily-livered wimp of a Ph.D. student who has suffered more mutinies by his class in one term than most teachers usually do in their entire lives, takes me aside and tells me, I'm grading your essay. And I go Say WHAT? He says Yes, and furthermore, you can't do that. It'll come back and bite you in the ass if you're not careful. So you can understand my trepidation. Beyond that, he's known as the harshest grader in the department. It's rather an extreme situation. He considers a 62 "excellent work," which pissed off my friend Kathy something fierce, and no one in the other class, apparently, got above 57. So I was expecting another 42.

60. Shockingly low for any other tutor, shockingly high for this one. I don't know whether I should get it reassessed in hopes of a higher grade (five of seven people in the other class are getting theirs reassessed; he's terrified he's going to be sacked as a result. No jury would convict us) or just leave it as is, trusting that he was, in a strange way, charitable. Here are his comments, brief as his spirit:

"Samuel, your casual approach slips at times into sloppiness [I told you, I wrote it in one night], marring what is essentially an intelligent and worthwhile argument. You have serious arguments to make, you should make them in a serious and scholarly way [leaving aside the glaring comma error in this sentence--should be a semicolon, fool--this man clearly has a "serious" case of scholaroids. Prepare the Preparation S cannon!]. This does not mean that you must hide your personality, just that you should make a clear and serious argument your priority.

"Eliminate the flippency [sic] and you will do very well,
Andrew Power"

Eliminate the misspelling and I might listen to you.

All things considered, though, this is perfectly good, and well ahead of the curve. I've been looking at my friends' essay stylings, and they all look the same. Generic. Direct. Informed and regurgitatory. I seem to be totally abnormal. No one but me swears, and no one dares slip in footnotes that say, "Ba-ZING!" or "Bastards, all of you, bastards." This makes me think: since the first two years don't count at all toward my diploma, I might do well to spend that time getting myself recognized by the department. Not flip them off persistently, of course, nor be an arrogant prat, but simply be anomalous enough to generate a buzz. There aren't so many English students that standing out becomes impossible. We'll just keep this in mind. Keep them entertained, keep myself entertained. I think we all win that way.

Oh, and Mom: obviously the exams will be rigidly conventional. Not self-satirizingly conventional, actually conventional. Don't worry. Because I know you do.

After tomorrow, and its excruciating four tutorials (though fortunately, two of them get me out of two hours of my Old English tutor's insane plot to have a three-hour class, which I imagine might be only slightly more pleasant than being buried alive), I'll be done. With tutorials. Lectures continue--that is, the lecturers keep showing up. No guarantees regarding the students' attendance.

I am, at present, halfway through the gripping, devastating Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is so spectacular a read (one of the best I've ever read without seeing), that I can't imagine what it must be like seeing it onstage. Especially with Vanessa Redgrave and her fluttering hands. Ben Fader, if you're still reading this, I understand everything now, and I hope you've forgiven her.

Also composed a four-page (single-spaced) handout on Derrida the other day. For CCT, we were all supposed to do one on a theorist of our choice, and I, going through my deconstruction phase, naturally chose himself. The thing was, it was supposed to be a one-page list of bullet points. I took this as a polite suggestion and had a party. All the same, I do seem to be acquiring a moderate grasp of the material, to the point where it is of course infecting everything I do, read and see. I don't mind. It's amusing. It's all about playing. I am acquiring an increasing distaste for sententiousness. This is why I included the phrase, Heidegger went about shaking Ontology like a British nanny. Oh, well. I don't really need to graduate, do I?

Received some less-than-encouraging news today. I haven't gotten my essays back because I haven't been to look, but my Writing Ireland teacher, sugarcoating the bad news with positive comments about my style and fluency, informed me that the mythology she was talking about in the essay question (Address the role of myth) was the Irish kind, NOT the Classical kind. You stupid twit.

Oh, fucking NOW she tells me. Because it totally wasn't indicated on the sheet. She said, role of myth. I am supposed to intuit this how? Don't answer. I know it's a Writing Ireland class. Doesn't matter. What the fuck do I know from Irish mythology? Brilliant. The entire essay, about the wrong thing. Down the tubes. Shit. Maybe I can recycle the essay next year. Probably should have used the other half, which was all about power. Shite and onions.

I made Cranberry Brisket in the slow cooker a few days ago. I have eaten it for every dinner since. Tonight I'll run out. It's pretty fine brisket, though. Cost €18 for the 4lbs and €6.40 for the two jars of cranberries. From now on, I'm going to buy whole chickens cheap (you can get them for like €4) and eat them for a week. Then make chicken stock. Fun laffs good time.