Culture

Daily Prompt: Four Minutes and 24 Years

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The benches in front of 1 Penn Plaza, along West 34th Street, are lively at lunchtime and look like they remain so long after lunch, as deliverymen pick up and drop off all day long and limo drivers waiting for their VIPs kibitz with one another and with passersby who want to know how famous the person about to become their next brush with fame is and whether he or she is worth pausing for on their way to their next New York City attraction.

There was no reason for me to be in front of the famous skyscraper to make this observation last Thursday afternoon. Five minutes before passing the limo drivers and their VIPs and the lunchtime crowd, I was finishing up being lost in Penn Station, the renowned train- and bus- and everything else station (flying saucers will someday land there because it is shaped like one). Ten minutes before that, frustrated that I could not find a sign directing me to exactly where I was going, many many blocks away, I reasoned that any door with sunlight coming through it and people’s shadows walking past must lead to the outside and a street, any street, and the possibility that, once there, I would be able to figure out where I am. In New York City, on the streets, I am (usually) okay, since it is one of the easiest cities to negotiate on foot. It’s a grid. (Mostly.)

That hunch led me up one staircase to plate glass doors that entered into Madison Square Garden. I headed back down that staircase.

Out on the street, I made my way back around MSG to the front of Penn Station and then onward, north along 8th Ave. to have coffee with a college classmate and then meet up with other friends to attend a taping of “The Colbert Report.”

The college classmate and I had not seen each other in almost 24 years, when I had thrown a post-graduation party he attended; thoughts and memories of this party were on my mind while I strolled up 8th. Cars were blocking the crosswalk, so instead of waiting to cross, I turned right and started over to 7th, where I would continue my northward stroll.

This is how small a moment any moment can truly be. Had the crossing been available, I would have continued on 8th. But sitting on a bench on 34th Street at that moment was another college classmate, in fact the co-host of that post-graduation party, someone I have not seen or spoken with in three years and who did not know I was in New York City. He has an office in 1 Penn Plaza and was on his lunch break, people-watching.

Had I walked past ten minutes earlier, I would have missed him, but I had just spent those ten minutes escaping from Penn Station.

“Is that … Kevin? Really?” I thought to myself. Can’t be. I was not going to say anything; I was going to walk past the person who I assumed was a merely a stranger with a familiar face, since how could it be that I would bump into a long-ago friend in this giant city; a hunch had just now almost gotten me lost in Madison Square Garden. I had better leave the hunching business to others, I thought.

“Mark?” That settled it; it was my old friend. With one friend waiting for me in a restaurant in midtown and about 20 more blocks to walk, I had about four minutes to bring my graduate school housemate up to date. He had the same four minutes to bring me up to date. What was I doing in the city. What was he doing on that bench. Our relationship statusi, our work situations, my physical condition. How long it had been since. How utterly baffling the fact of what we were experiencing right then was. Why I was not taking the subway instead of walking 20-plus blocks. We finally, after all these years, exchanged phone numbers.

“How long has it been?” That was my other friend’s first question as I walked in the restaurant, a few minutes later. I reminded him: 24 years. And an extra 10 minutes because I had run into someone. He, too, was on his lunch break, so we had limited time in which to reacquaint each other with each other. Relationships, work, life.

How much time does it really take to tell someone what you’ve done and seen? Maybe it only takes about four minutes to (re)establish who you are and the rest is elaboration with anecdotes.

Who am I? Someone who takes 10 minutes to get out of a wide-open train station but is happy at the social accident that was thus made possible.

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colbert ticket2

My thumb.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 22 asks, “You’re about to enter a room full of strangers, where you will have exactly four minutes to tell a story that would convey who you really are. What’s your story?”

To Be Brief … No Such Thing in Some Books

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most copies of “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne are about 600 pages long. The book is a fictional autobiography in which Tristram, the not-quite hero of a story that is not quite his own, attempts to tell us about his life from birth onward. However, he does not even begin to begin telling us about his birth and his first day on earth until the fourth volume because, like his own conception on page 1, his story is much interrupted.

(On page one, at the very moment Tristram is to be conceived, his mother asks his father if he remembered to wind the clock, an ill-timed interruption that, according to Tristram, produced an author who is incapable of telling a story straight to its end without breaks, questions, and digressions.)

The full title of Sterne’s masterpiece is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” and it was published over almost eight years from 1759 to 1767. It made the Irish writer world-famous and wealthy.

At the end, one more character brings in one more story and Tristram’s mother asks, “L–d, what is all this story about?” It is the second-to-last sentence in the book and it is also the question most readers ask as they conclude reading Sterne’s great comic novel. “Tristram Shandy” is one of the most entertaining novels in English because it never gets to its point.

Christopher Ricks once described Sterne’s novel as “the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language.” By the end of all these pages Tristram has only brought us all the way into his own toddlerhood, leaving with us the thought that, should he continue the attempt to tell his life-story, he will never catch up to himself.

Thus, not much of Tristram Shandy’s life nor many of his opinions appear in the book, but many other characters—and their opinions—do. The title is the novel’s first joke. Tristram Shandy is not a character in his own story. He often criticizes himself for his many digressions and his way of not getting to the meat of his story very quickly, but he always steps away from criticizing himself, and he even sets out in one chapter to finally tell his own story in a “tolerable straight line,” but not before drawing his narrative schemes for the volumes we have just read in a series of diagrams:

tristram

He opens a chapter in which he promises a straight story with an interruption about how hard it is to do that. He identifies for us which interrupting anecdote corresponds to which bend away from the “tolerable straight line” and defends the sections that he labeled with “ c c c c c ” as “nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs” of life. Several paragraphs later, Tristram lays out an estimate for us: If he writes two volumes a year for the next 40 years, he will be all caught up … to where he is now, 40 years before that imagined future, at which time he would have written thousands of pages yet have decades of life yet to tell us about.

Tristram recognizes that his own storytelling method has created a paradox for himself: If it took him one year to bring himself in his own story to one full day old, yet he lived 364 additional days in that writing process, that means that 364 days have been added to his job, 364 days that he did not write about because he had not yet gotten to them in the process of getting to be one day old in the narrative. “… [A]t this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write”—just?! that implies he might slow down!—”It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.”

Sterne’s Shandy is self-entrapped in an ever-present present which interferes in real time with his recounting of the past. And Sterne loved finding every conceivable method to interrupt his character’s storytelling. Shandy wants desperately to be brief, but how brief should he be? How brief can he be? If an experience takes X amount of time to live through, and if a story about that experience takes more than X amount of time to tell—because listeners need the context and background—then every story in a life takes longer to tell than however much time it took to live it. Every writer will live forever by that logic.

Tristram’s mother asks at the end, “What is all this story about?” At the moment, Obadiah has been complaining about a cow that will not give birth, perhaps because the Shandy bull was not successful in impregnating it. He thinks he is owed a calf. Tristram’s mother asks her question and the answer is about both Obadiah’s story and the book we are have been reading: “‘L–d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—’ ‘A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.'”

Cue the rimshot. A “cock and bull story” is a derogatory term for a fanciful tale; Obadiah’s complaint was literally an accusation having to do with that phrase. It also describes the book in the reader’s hands. Sterne’s punchlines are brief, as they always should be, but there are many of them in Tristram Shandy, as he builds joke after joke, scene after scene, chapter upon chapter.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 20 asks, “‘I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.’—Blaise Pascal. Where do you fall on the brevity/verbosity spectrum?”
There is an expression, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And another: “The more the merrier.” As in “Tristram Shandy,” the punchlines and wit should be quick and brief, but plentiful.

Daily Prompt: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(Some thought-fragments about art with a small a and Beauty with a capital B.) (Or vice versa.)

The title is from the final lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which the poet ends by telling us that the centuries-old vase he has been describing serves as a reminder that, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'” Earlier the poet also says, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter … .”

The ones I can not hear, because I am a mere mortal and what I hear on Earth is all I need to know, those are the sweeter ones. O, vile mortality!

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Some experiences are almost universal: without sharing a common language, audiences will laugh at many of the same things. A person slipping on a banana peel. The fish-slapping dance. Analysis of comedy kills comedy (unless one is making fun of analyzing comedy) because laughter is more than a feeling, it is a reaction; when honestly expressed, it comes in an instant. Conversely, some experiences are unique to each one of us: all of us experience physical and/or emotional pain, but the best any of us can do is talk around it in an attempt to almost come close to describing it. Pain management specialists present their patients with a chart of a series of faces and ask the patients to circle the grimacing face that “matches” how they feel. It is simplistic, but it does something important in that it asks us to leave language, which can be misinterpreted, aside.

Language. The most vile and hateful sentiments can be expressed in sentences that might sound pretty when they are spoken. There is probably a language in which the sentence “I am going to kill you” would make me swoon just before I got shot.

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What makes me laugh might make you cry (if you were the person who slipped and fell) and what makes me cry might make you laugh. There is much ugliness in this world and someone somewhere finds harsh and violent things funny.

I find the sentence on that poster at the top, “We all have within us our own …,” which is a piece of typical Facebook inspiration-stuff, a poster that is designed to elicit a hopeful gaze or something, to be clunky and, worse, empty. Sunsets are nice and all, but why put words all over one? (I would rather the Kadampa Center had just put a picture of their temple on there.)

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To the best we can tell, birds are singing shopping lists to each other. “Seeds over here, seeds over here; nice sturdy branch I’m standing on.” The most boring and necessary stuff, but pretty to our ears, a sweet unheard melody to Keats.

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alainWe teach each other what we find beautiful. The cartoon at right captures, without words, something of this. Artists in a class learn to depict reality, but what about the world made Egyptians in the era of the pyramids and pharaohs depict things and humans as they did? We look the same now as we did then, but the art seen in the ancient (and beautiful) monuments does not look like our twenty-first century reality. Did life in the ancient world look all that different to eyes that are biologically identical to ours?

Certainly not. The same cartoon could be drawn about art classes from other eras: the flat crowds with identical faces in Giotto’s scenes, the extraordinary gowns and suits that probably rendered most people who wore them immobile for longer than the time it took to to sit for just the start of a portrait.

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Someone might bring up the Cubists, Picasso specifically. At different points in the cultural history of art, the visual and the performing arts diverge from mass notions of “pretty.” They always seem to reconvene, usually when the mass notions of pretty start to include the works of art the masses once rejected. Rocks were thrown at the orchestra during the debut performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” because it sounded so odd. You might hear snippets of it in television ads during NFL games now.

I can tell you that for me, Picasso’s drawing line is voluptuous and his color scheme, well, beautiful. And the intellectual challenge the Cubists presented themselves and attempted to conquer: to include time and time’s passage in a static form, painting (which is why two eyes will appear on the same side of a human head—think of any photo you have taken in which someone turned away just as the camera snapped); I find the intellectual challenge and game and the attempt to meet and match it exciting and, well, here is that word again: beautiful.

Here is one of David Hockney’s “joiners,” a type of photo-collage that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. It is made of 77 Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make 77 Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one. hockney-sun-on-the-pool

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 16 asks, “We’ve all heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you agree? is all beauty contingent on a subjective point of view?” The answer is a definite and thus easily questioned simultaneous yes and no.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode that I am sure someone else has referenced in their response, titled “The Eye of the Beholder,” in which a world that culturally dictates notions of physical beauty sends away people that we Americans of a certain era might find beautiful. We live in neither a world of only sunsets and platitudes and easy listening music nor in one in which we force one precise, single idea of beauty on one another, and that, that in itself, is beautiful. (Sadly, this is not true in every country, not right now; in some countries, Rod Serling’s script might seem to present a pretty good idea.)