Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now
By Roy Blount Jr.
Episode I: Don't Get Me Started
The best thing I ever wrote was a blurb. The book, by John Norris, was about a great newspaper columnist, who managed to have great sources and yet (in Washington!) great values. And according to this biography she had a great capacity (in Washington!) for merriment. Her heyday in journalism came before mine, so I never met her. (Just as so many young hotshots today are not -- do not even realize they are not -- meeting me.) I missed out on her parties, where, according to Norris's book, liquor flowed and there was dancing far into the night. Here is my blurb:
"Any person of spirit, who loves good writing, will almost feel, after reading this book, that he or she did have a chance to dance the rumba before dawn with Mary McGrory."
Do you see the movement of it? Hitch-hitch-hitch-hitch (leading with the hearty "person of spirit" but fading into "good writing," blah-blah (maybe "almost" is a bit surprising) -- but then, when your patience is almost exhausted: rumba!
And the rhyme and the d's, but you don't need to be told that. You are a reader. For reading's sake.
Your opinion: would you want the singular they, there in that beautiful blurb, instead of he or she? Answer: No. He and she is not always appropriate, or at least ideal, but the singular they is often confusing! Consider this limerick (one of a series portraying Reprehensible Men):
Who is pansexual? Morris.
He comes between Horace and Boris,
And then, nothing loth,
He dumps them both,
And breaks up Dolores and Doris.
Now consider that limerick with the singular they:
Who is pansexual? Morris.
They come between Horace and Boris,
And then, nothing loth,
They dump them both,
And break up Dolores and Doris.
Futhermore, consider a remark, which I came upon online somewhere, by the daughter of the late great creepy actor, Vincent Price. She had just been to a horror-picture convention. There, she had felt privileged to hear how fondly her father was remembered. She told a reporter:
"Most of us don't get to have other people come up to us and tell us they love the person we love as much as we love them."
Love him. Love him. He's your father.
Ah well love is confusing. I kept company with a woman once who had been friendly with Price and his third wife Coral Browne, and cited their marriage as a model one. He and she, Price and Browne (or if you prefer, they and they), who had met while making a movie called Theatre of Blood, were great company, I gather. Both sustainably bisexual. (Something I have never been, unless you count loving both Pittsburgh and New Orleans.) On Browne's Wikipedia page, here's a quote from Alan Bennett: "When I said to Coral that I'd thought [Cecil] Beaton was gay she remarked, 'Not when he was with me, darling. Like a rat up a drainpipe.'"
I can't say I ever loved Price, though, until I rented, back in the Seventies, from an excellent VHS tape-rental parlor on the upper West Side of Manhattan (those were the days), the 1951 black-and-white comical noir, His Kind of Woman. The romance angle is Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, but the joy is that they are surrounded, on an island, by Tim Holt, Jim Backus, Raymond Burr, Mamie Van Doren (very briefly), Marjorie Reynolds (The Life of Riley, anybody?) and especially Price. He plays a ham actor, with the inspired name of Mark Cardigan, who has always suspected himself, understandably, of being a phony. Cardigan turns out to be not just a mensch but the hero of the piece -- delighted to have sustained a flesh wound while victoriously exchanging fire with the bad guys, quoting Shakespeare tellingly, and rescuing Mitchum!
Mitchum's character: "I'm too young to die. How about you?"
Price's: "Too well-known."
The Life of Riley! My demographic is not long for this world.
Can You Imagine what it's like now to be Donald Trump? You know you are President. The vast, teeming majority of the world's people know you are President. And yet . . . You google yourself, or have a computer-savvy aide do it, and . . .
It doesn't say you are President!
"Go back and do it again," you snap (forgivably) at your minion, she of the world-class gazongas and refreshingly vacant eyes . . .
And again . . .
And . . . again . . .
Google is gaslighting the leader of the Free World!
What do you say to yourself? Here's what we say to you, Big Fella:
Stop banging your big head (size eleven cap, right?) up against Invincible Ignorance. Roll with it! Hasn't it always been your friend? What does invincible mean?
You're young yet, and human. And quite possibly, what with one thing and another, you are involuntarily celibate. You may have bills that actually have to be paid. A few unstiffable lawyers. A whole fresh bunch of accountants.
You're a story-teller, right? There's money in novels! Hire somebody to do the, like, wordsmithing, while you provide the magical realism. Start with something like this, from a campaign rally in South Carolina in 2015 -- your prescient observations on the Iran nuclear deal:
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Or maybe you're counting on the right move from your friend Vladimir Putin. Maybe he will clear the air by declaring, "I will talk peace! But only with President Trump!"
Remember when George W. Bush announced, "I am a wartime president!"? And we, the American people, were expected to respond, "Cool!"?
Let's hope Zelensky of Ukraine lives to exchange notes with old W:
"So you became a wartime president, eh?" says Zelensky.
"Yeah!"
"On purpose?"
The Lingo Corner:
Speaking of the rumba (is there a number called "Remember the Rumba"?), did you ever wonder what caramba means? Sure it's an exclamation of surprise or dismay, but what is its literal meaning, in the original, pre-Bart-Simpson Spanish?
Bet you didn't see this coming: caramba is a euphemism for carajo, penis. Which derives from the Latin caraculum, which means (or did mean, back in Classical Days) small arrow. So if you're exclaiming, "Aye, caramba!" you're really shouting "Aye, small arrow!" Be advised.
How to take the sexism out of caramba? I don't know. No person of spirit will be likely, in the moment, to shout "Carambx!"
Another in our series of Regrettable Men:
At 80, a fellow named Mitch
No longer knows which way is which.
Though not deaf or blind,
He's lost a kind
Of orientational itch.
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I'd been scouring my brain for the name of that movie in which Vincent Price turns out to a courageous hero, surprising everyone. So, many thanks for that. and this. or this and that.