&
credits:
Soundtrack: Pulp Fiction – various/The Good the Bad & Ugly – Ennio Morricone/ Drunkard’s Prayer – Over the Rhine/The Alman Brothers: Live at the Filmore/Blood on the Tracks – Yep./The Fox Confessor Brings the Flood – NC/The Trumpet Child – OtR/Easy Pieces – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
Fossil Fuel: Barley, hops and rye
Favorite Moment: Outside on the porch adorned by wife’s dead winter vegetation, the Great Pyrenees barking, nicotine making its wonderful way through the vessels, I raise a bottle (Schlitz) to the efforvescent vehicle of the local constable washing by in full freak of color and sound in pursuit of one who thought the night was right for holding foot on the accelerator like it was the Holy G-spot, the full moon in stoic poise, flirting with the treeline, close and above it all, sniffing at the strands of clouds running across its diamter, its fans.
Worst Moment: Running out of Dixie beer
Webb Moment: If you’re a liberal, you only put a cigarette behind your ear because the government is about to force you to smoke dope; if you’re a conservative, it’s because you got a bottle in the one hand and economic leverage in the other.
Potter Moment: Finding and summarily forgetting the perfect rhyme for orange.
Ex Pat Moment: Ars gratia disgustibus.
Lickona Moment: Having the throat make that lame click after the wine runs out.
Quinn Moment: Giggling silly at the thought of Dylan riffing on “Ille, mi par esse, deo videtur…”.
Walker Percy Moment: “Loose bark from the pine is beginning to work through my shirt. My scalp is still quilted, my throat is whistling with hives — albumen molecules from the gin fizzes hum like bees in the ventricles of my brain — yet I feel quite well.”
Joseph Mitchell Moment: “If you smirk enough you can get away with practically anything in a New York newspaper, and once it is understood that Sex is to be treated coyly or as a melodrama, one of the most amusing classes of people to interview are naked people — nudists, strip tease girls, models, dancers who believe to be artistic you just start unbuttoning.”
Best Line of the Night: “How can people not know what beauty this is…”.
Worst Line of the Night: “Beer makes me sleepy.”.
Last Word: JOB was here…
Kabbalah with a capital K
You need a new category: INSIDE BASEBALL
This one is practically inside the inside baseball. From my recent chapter on Dinner with the Devil in New Orleans: “For starters, going to see a movie in New Orleans while attending a conference in New Orleans about a novel starring a fellow who goes to see movies in New Orleans? Poor Binx Bolling would have had to invent a whole new category of experience – neither rotation nor repetition, this, but something more. Perhaps a rectality, in which a experience becomes so self-referential that the experiencee disappears right up his own backside.” Which is to say, this was amazing, JOB.
Should be “an experience,” of course. Shouldn’t write while drinking.
‘Rectality’ does seem like a Percian concept. It calls to mind the dog in The Moviegoer that Binx nicknamed Rosebud for its ‘convoluted anus’.
That’s an unsavory image, and I’m not happy to have it lodged in my memory. Just as vividly memorable, and much, much more appealing, was your description here in the comments a few months back of this so-called ‘Devil’. I look forward to learning more….
You may have survived dinner with her, but remember (and this applies to everyone, not just Lickona): He who breaks fast with the Devil should have a long duffy.
JOB: This is over my head, but in whatever way it connects to the Walker Percy conference, you’ve already got more words published on it than those of us who were there. Speaking of which, weren’t they going to do something with those essays the rest of us wrote FOR THE ACTUAL FRIGGIN’ CONFERENCE? Or are they being recycled somewhere as anonymous content? I mean, if they’re to be considered filler, should we use them here? Anyway, very kind of you to recall the Dylan/Latin thing.
CM: You should consider it a mark of honor that you write what I think is the opposite of Inside Baseball … your little parables seem to be accessible to anyone, anywhere. Or at least anyone who values, say, Kincades’s Christmas Cottage and trench warfare with complementary esteem.
ML: Spot on target, as usual, and but can you help shed a little light here?
AN: Thanks for recalling Rosebud’s convoluted anus. That’s up there with other memorable Percy references to the tail end of the GI track, like the proctologist Dusty Rhodes in Love In The Ruins and the Secret Asshole of the Universe in LITC.
I really wasn’t trying to go over anyone’s head – just wanted to report on my lil’ ol’ conference of one. I read Percy; commented on the reading; listend to music and drank Nawlins beer. What else could a man with a house to himself for a night want?
JOB
Quin: shed a little light? Surely not on the rectality? You read the footnotes on Dinner with the Devil, didn’t you? I was just saying that JOB was referencing the Korrektiv into the Korrektiv…
‘You read the footnotes […] didn’t you?’
LOL
Tagged with: the Influence of Anxiety
Thank you Quin.
No, no, I get the whole rectal thing … and I suppose that Dusty Rhodes reference above is my own contribution to it. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the original post. I couldn’t figure out if JOB was visiting San Diego and you guys had a mini-conference, or if he was at home in Wisconsin, or whether he was cabin-bound because of the snow, and he was doing a kind of round up of the last year (the Dylan thing he mentioned re:me had nothing to do with the conference) so maybe these were old pictures from New Year’s Eve (no, because that’s a recent poem on the screen), or maybe… I just had no clue; I know I can be pretty boneheaded, especially when I’ve been pounding a few myself. The rectality was actually the one thing I got.
JOB: No offense intended. After all, it’s possible to like something without completely understanding something. Or understanding it at all. For example; I had no clue as to who Joseph Mitchell was, but I loved the quote. After reading the wiki article on him … I’m ordering a copy of Joe Gould’s Secret.
Quin,
Absolutely no offense taken, my friend.
I just didn’t want you to herniate your brain looking for something deep when in fact the entire thing was a record of my goofing off. The soundtrack was merely what music I played REALLY LOUD that evening, what with the wife and kids away visiting relatives. The rest, too, are the various things that came to mind and senses over the course of the evening.
I second Matthew’s recommendation on Up in the Old Hotel – he turned me on to Mitchell a number of years ago, and it reamins a touchstone of writing for me. The quote is actually from his collected earlier works – for varous NY newspapers before he hit it big at the NYer. “My Ears Are Bent.”
JOB
You can do the PowerPoint for us on Ot13.
JOB, What did you make of this? I’ll wait until after I read the book, but I like Tucci and want to believe it isn’t completely awful …
I love Tucci, but I won’t watch this, because I love him and because I love Mitchell. Get a copy of Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of his New Yorker profiles. He’s a master. But Tucci mishandled his Winchell biopic – read the Gabler bio! – and I fear he mishandled this as well.