Last Friday a headline and a black & white photograph caught my eye--something in the Times about the return of "Lennie." Without further inspection, I folded the section into my bag and carried it around all day, carried it home later that night, went to bed, and in the morning, when I had a few minutes and a steaming hot cup of coffee, I remembered with pleasure what I had waiting for me. Lennie. Lennie Bruce. An article in the times would give me just enough (but not too much) to ponder.
But the article was about Leonard Bernstein. I had it all wrong, the wrong Lennie. There must be a word for this condition--when all your Lennies are wrong, when all your Thursdays are Tuesdays.
Since then, things have seemed mostly out of whack. Playing football with H., I feigned a tackle and he flipped the ball right into my tooth and then dove on the ground. My jokes, too, have landed on the ground. Explaining the intention behind them leads to headlocks, toothaches, mud. It gets as ugly as four fish in an olfactory. So, too, the Jets lost . . . and Lehman Brothers.
Finally, today, a correspondence.
You use the word suicide in a poem and all morning I'm thinking about it. The word, a theory. Peculiar. Then I pick up that same Times, the one that betrayed me, and see David Foster Wallace's mug. A suicide.
And this is supposed to make me feel better?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I wrote that poem, actually, after having read an article about D.F.W.. The details have retracted into fuzziness, but I read somewhere that after the completion of his first novel he had checked into a facility and had himself put on a suicide watch.
I was thinking, I guess, about the corrosive effects of that kind of intense self-consciousness D.F.W. criticized and made use of.
So it's no mistake, that word.
"it gets as ugly as four fish in an olfactory"--nice one...
Ah shit... another correspondence!!!
Post a Comment