Citizen of Which World?

Thorby the Slave Boy, kidnapped by Space Pirates!

Last week Barack Obama went to Germany. He saw a bunch of German kids hanging around, jostling for lebensraum and he called out to them, “Hey, do you know what I am?”

“Wir wissen nicht,” replied the Deutschkinder. “Was sind Sie?”

“I am a citizen of the United States,” said Obama cheerfully.

The Deutschkinder shrugged and muttered, “Das ist nicht so speziell.”

“Oh, but that’s not all,” said Obama. “I am also a Citizen of the World!”

“Ach! Das ist wundervoll!” cried the German kids, now stirred to their very Blut und Boden. “Wir lieben das! Ja! Ja! Bürger der Welt! Bürger der Welt!”

Me, I was less impressed. “Citizen of the World?” How parochial. The Senator from Illinois should appropriate the title of Robert Heinlein’s 1957 science fiction classic, Citizen of the Galaxy. Now that’s audacity!

Not to nitpick, though. I’m grateful to the Junior Senator for reminding me of Citizen of the Galaxy. During a Heinlein kick many circuits of the sun ago, I devoured the entire vast output of the old hack. Enjoyed it all, too — the good, the bad and the cranky.

But the best of his novels, I always thought, were the “juveniles” he churned out in the fifties; satisfying space dramas like Podkayne of Mars, Red Planet, Space Cadet and Tunnel in the Sky. The corniness of the titles had put me off when I was a kid, so, unfortunately I missed reading them at the ideal age for Sci-Fi: twelve or so. I read them as an adult; a stupid adult, true, but adult nonetheless.

Fortunately, once past my snooty pre-teen years, I’ve always retained my ability to appreciate kid’s literature — from board books to “YA” novels, from Dr. Seuss to Zindel and Konigsburg, I enjoy them all; and not in spite of their being in the juvenile ghetto, but with admiration for the special discipline required for writing to a particular age group.

Science Fiction, especially — as evidenced by Heinlein’s best yarns — benefits from being consciously aimed at undeveloped minds. Sci-Fi is for kids. True, SF has achieved an almost universal acceptance as suitable adult fare, partly because of its perversion by the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises; by the endless Terminator and Alien retreads; but neither pretense to epic scope nor infusions of sex and violence will ever make it other than what it is fundamentally: a wide-eyed vision of Wonderful Other Worlds for people who haven’t yet seen much beyond their own living rooms. Which brings us back to Obama.

Lou Grant

At iTunes the hits just keep on coming. I couldn’t resist their offering of the thirty-year-old TV series, Lou Grant, a show you can’t even get on NetFlix.

A spin-off of the old Mary Tyler Moore sitcom, Lou Grant featured the title character, once the head of Mary Richard’s Minneapolis television newsroom, but now, having been fired, moving west to become City Editor of the Los Angeles Tribune.

Can anyone identify that machine? Kaypro? Osborne? Merganthaler?

At first he is daunted by the spanking new technology; call waiting, Pong, things like that.

Woodstein or Burnward?

But in mere minutes he’s his old crabby self. Dishing opinion and criticism and wagging a forceful pencil. No one but no one can arch an eyebrow like Ed Asner, the actor who plays Lou Grant. I love how he can look assertive and browbeaten all at the same time. James Gandolfini owes him bigtime.

Aaaw, poor you!

Speaking of Gandolfini, one of the counter-forces comes in the shape of Tony Soprano’s Mom, Nancy Marchand! She plays Mrs. Pynchon, the stodgy old filthy-rich dog-coddling owner of the paper who needs to be taught a lesson or two about muck-raking journalism. Don’t worry, Lou saves her crusty old soul from conservatism.

What muck? What rake?

Another obstacle is doddering old (50!!) friends-with-police reporter who won’t rake the muck like the young Turks. You can tell that he’s a fuddy-duddy conservative because he wears a bow tie. The Young Turks are identified by their open collars and 70s style permanents.

After lots of soul-searching, the Stodgy Old Reporter yields to the taunts of the Young Turks and the pleading of Lou Grant (also 50 but hip) and turns in a great story that crucifies a whole division of cops for getting frisky on the beach with a girl’s volley ball team. I am not making this up.

Ruined lives! I still got it!

In the final scene, everybody is practicing being sardonic in the local watering hole. At first, they think they’ve been canned, but no: Mrs Pynchon, bless her heart, has come around to Lou’s views, the Young Turk has learned to respect the long experience of Fuddy-duddy Reporter, and Fuddy-duddy Reporter has ditched the bow-tie. They all start to yuk it up like madmen. Jimmy Carter is in the Oval Office, All’s Right With the World.

Et in Arcadia Ego

California Dreaming

That’s the last I’ll bore you with our L.A. journey, but I couldn’t resist sharing this glimpse of the Good Life. The photo has NOT been monkeyed around with. The pool is really that ghastly. At least William Holden wasn’t floating around in it.

We’re back in the old digs for the moment, but not resting. We’re running around more here in our own home than we did in the Valley eyeballing houses. The circles are tighter is all, and the work of constant cleaning more strenuous than snapping photos. Our usual comfy-cozy hideaway has become so clean that I’m considering taking up a sideline of microchip production. Not that we were dirty before, mind you, just informal; informal in the sense that Cro Magnon Man was informal. I mean, even before the Great Purge you could see people outside through the windows, but they looked like trees walking. Now the windows are HD.

I’ve always envied people who had the will and strength to keep their homes this tidy. It seemed like an expression of good character. Now, after all these weeks of dusting, polishing, vaccing, waxing, stowing, dirty-clothes-hiding, scouring, grouting, mowing (of lawn), trimming (of hedges) and watering (of flowers) — after all this I have changed my attitude: people who keep their places this clean either have help or are deranged.

Broken Window

No, really, officer, we’re house-hunting. Honest.

Most of the properties we looked at in LA were unoccupied — bank or corporation owned. They seem to have been forclosures from which, in some cases, the last rowdy occupants needed to be removed forcibly. Or maybe the violent damage and graffiti evident in more than one place only meant the defaulters had vented their spleen against Adjustable Rate Mortgages that — O, the Injustice! — adjusted. Who knows? Not I.

So we figured it would be okay to traipse into yards and take photos through windows. The only privacy we violated was that of the uneasy spirits who howled piteously in the debris strewn halls. The picture that accompanies this post shows one of the few contented spirits: your web log poster who is glad to know this house is the last he will be looking at that day.

Soon he will flying on a jet plane, returning to the comfort of Jeffery Deaver’s latest potboiler: The Broken Window. Mr. Deaver, you will be happy to know, sticks to the job we pay him for in this, his new Lincoln Rhyme mystery. His quadraplegic detective and the the Usual Gang of Forensic Analysts sift the dust, match the DNA, and even taste a knife handle in their relentless pursuit of a new kind of villain: an identity thief, but not just your humdrum, run-of-the-mill identity thief. This one uses the vast amounts of personal data out there on you, me and everyone else, to create the perfect set of planted evidence he needs to set up fall guys to take the rap for his own wicked deeds.

Is The Broken Window good? Well, what does goodness have to do with it? I wanted some competent, lurid escapism, those trademark Deaver plot twists, an Interesting Factoid or two, and a smattering of Sherlock Holmes-type deduction, and that’s exactly what I got. No PC pulpiteering. The Broken Window did nothing to improve me; it may have made me a tad worse. Heh.

The Broken Window
by Jeffery Deaver
(Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, 432pp.)

Thar She Blows

We will soon drag ourselves and most of our accumulated tchotchkes from the Mid West to the Unqualified West: specifically, the San Fernando Valley. My last three days were consumed by House Hunting in Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Encino, West Hills, Canoga Park and Winnetka. I enjoyed a brief respite Friday morning when the House Hunt changed into a Whale Hunt: the sight of a glittering waterspout in the distance made an Ahab out of me. A car, I soon discovered, had smacked into a fire hydrant at Fallbrook and Vanowen in (I think) West Hills, providing much merriment for the gawkers whom I quickly joined.

Apart from the winning of $22.30 during a layover in Vegas, this was the highlight of the trip. As a bonus for you, dear Reader, it helps me resist the temptation to bore you with pictures of all the properties on which I trespassed, our Realtor being unavailable to make my visits entirely okey-doke. Here, instead of my travails, is a refreshing moment of cooling spray for the (literally) hot Californians who had forded over-the-ankle water to admire the L.A. Fire Deparment’s struggle to stem the tide.

I only hope the hapless driver of the offending vehicle had as much fun when he abruptly woke from his mobile nap to find himself enveloped in a magical, sparkling fountain.

Matter Marches On

So much to do today — and over the next coupla — I just don’t have the time to write a post. Coming up with the right word is [five minutes pass] tuff, and so I will [thirty minutes pass] eschew [another ten minutes] skip the verbal stuff and communicate in mime. I mime Welcome.

I point now to the picture on the left. There we see the gears of a clock from a time long ago and place far away. Switzerland maybe. Or perhaps the Duchy of Thuringia. I don’t remember. The clock represents the time I don’t have today (or tomorrow) to play with you. Soon the little clockman will swing his, um, pumpkin, I guess; the bell will toink and we will all disappear. I mime Boo Hoo.

Now I will ask all of you to look to your right.

There we see at least one plaster statue by George Segal. Segal was the pop artist who made casts of people with the plaster infused cloth doctors use to set broken bones. He would display these rough, unpainted casts in rough, bleak settings to show us all how rough, unpainted and bleak our lousy lives are. I present this photo to tell you how rough, bleak, unpainted and lousy will be my next few days as I submit to stern duty. I mime Unpainted Bleakness.

Finally, to send you out with a song on your lips, I give you this photo of a statue by Barbara Hepworth. She did oodles of these things ‘way back when in the fabled land of England. I empathize with the poor rock on the bottom. The title of the piece is not “This Is How I Feel Today,” but it should be. I mime Rock-on-Head, and wave bye-bye until The Commemoration of the Great Upheaval Day.

What Do You Think?

One of the cutest qualities of the Web in general and Web Logs in particular is how they affirm everyone’s unshakeable belief that their opinions are important. The sweet, innocent confidence with which all of us offer up those opinions, ideas, observations, beliefs, arguments, convictions, memories, inspirations, worries, insights and every little stray thought is a beautiful, heartwarming example of the triumph of fantasy over reality. Or maybe it’s just a form of solipsism. Either way, it’s darling.

The truth is, no one cares what you think. (Well, not you personally, of course. We all care what you think. I mean everyone else.) In fact, people divide into two unequal groups: those who still believe their thoughts matter, and those who know they don’t. Happily, it doesn’t matter which division you belong to, because the two populations are indistinguishable. Everyone talks as if anyone were interested. We all go on nattering in exactly the same way whether we are aware of the futility or not. See? I’m doing it now.

Exiles

So many of my favorite trash novelists — e.g., Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Lawrence Block — have let me down this past year by forgetting their main job; instead of dashing off their usual unredeemed lurid entertainments, they each decided to mount the politically correct pulpit. I’m holding out hope that Jeffrey Deaver is still in the gutter, but I’m almost afraid to read his latest — The Broken Window — lest I find the quadraplegic detective, Lincoln Rhymes, being cured of his paralysis by a touch from St. Obama.

In the meantime, darn it, I’m forced to read real literature. I hate to have to work that hard, and hate also running the risk of actually being moved by a serious novel, but what’s a bookworm to do?

Fortunately, Ron Hansen’s newest book has just arrived: Exiles.

Last October I saw the film version of his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s a great movie — watched it twice on the big screen during its too-short theatrical release, and it will be the first disc I buy when I get Blu-Ray — but what I like best about it is that it made me aware of this great novelist.

Immediately I snapped up Jesse James and others of Hansen’s works: Atticus, Hitler’s Niece, and Mariette in Ecstasy. All brilliant. Exiles tops them.

Each of Hansen’s novels (excepting Atticus) are fictionalized versions of actual lives and events. The life, in Exiles, is that of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the event is the wreck, in 1875, of the steamship The Deutschland. The newspaper accounts of the tragedy — 157 passengers and crew froze to death or drowned after the ship became stranded on a sandbar during a winter storm — deeply affected Hopkins, a Jesuit seminarian, who at the urging of a Superior, commemorated the catastrophe in his great ode The Wreck of the Deutschland.

The exiles of the title are five German nuns — none of whom survived the wreck — who were booted out of their country during Otto von Bismark’s kulturkampf against Catholics. Hopkins, too, is an exile of a sort, never achieving distinction in his vocation, nor recognition as a poet, and who ends up isolated and fatally ill in Dublin, Ireland which may as well have been Dublin, Ohio for the alienation he felt there. He even lives at a distance, as it were, from himself, supressing his most obvious talent, poetry, as an egocentric indulgence. By the time he figures out that his gift and vocation are one, typhoid occupies his full attention.

Now, because most of the main characters are in orders of one sort or another, the story necessarily involves religion — and the poem itself, included in an appendix, is a Christian version of a classical evocation of the gods — but it is never about religion. Beliefs inhere in the various protagonists, informing their actions. They aren’t shoehorned in by an author eager to improve his hapless readers. Hansen never preaches. I wish our contemporary potboiler writers would learn that trick.

A Man of Property

I will admit I was skeptical, but those Real Estate agents really know their stuff. We followed all the sprucing-up advice — commands, really — given by our Realtor and… well, see for yourself the stunning transformation of our humble little shack into a veritable Dream Palace:

Amazing what a slap of paint here and there will do. The only way it could be improved is if it were made out of Legos™.

It’s too rainy this weekend to hold our “moving sale,” and so we will postpone reducing our tonnage until the next clement Saturday. I wonder if anyone has actually sold their house to a moving sale customer? It’s not impossible, you know. We’ll stick a price label on the siding just in case.

Say, Friend, if you’d like to gawk at the interior of our “stately colonial,” please help yourself to a hearty click on the words I PEER WITH UNBLINKING EYES THROUGH YOUR WINDOW.

The Bats in the Band

I can hardly believe how many seemingly intelligent writers on the Web are hopping up and down with excitement at the opening of yet another Batman movie. Maybe it evokes for them happy childhood memories of reading superhero comic books; memories I don’t share, preferring, as I did, Scrooge McDuck to [Fill in the Blank]man. Funny Animals for me, not loving exploration of men in tights.

One of the great disappointments of the whole Gay Pride movement is the failure of pop culture to respond by moving the Q subtext of so many comics and TV shows (Starsky and Hutch, anyone?) from out of the shadows and placing it — pardon me — front and center. All the gay references and humor tucked away in the Conan permutations, in gladiator and cowboy movies, in countless sitcoms like Frasier and Friends, and the endless posters of male disciplinary figures (cops, spies) wagging their guns like deputized Village People — all that would be so much less tacky if it were out in the open instead of sniggering in the closet. But the Heath Ledger and Christian Bale pas de deux suggests there are still vast underground reservoirs of suppressed homoeroticism ready to be tapped.

Wives, if your husband is champing at the bit to see this new Bat thing, there’s no need to worry. But you might want to invest in a cute little sailor suit.