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Everything happens for a Raisin. Focus on this eternal truth and one day you might achieve Sultana.
Vikings consulted their prunestones; Gypsies have their mysterious currant cards; the ancient Chinese believed the prophecies of the I Fig and the ancient Greeks threw themselves on the mercy of the three white-robed Dates.
But following the Raisin is the only true path to Sultana, all others lead to a state of crystallised banana. And you don't want that.
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I usually enjoy the convoluted, labyrinthine sentences readers are forced to navigate when they, for want of a better word, 'peruse' literary works from previous centuries. Sentences in such books often continue for nine or ten lines, even the length of a modern paragraph.
Harrison Ainsworth, writer of, for want of a better phrase, historical derring-do, published a novel of long sentences about the Tower of London in 1840. It's the sort of highfalutin nonsense I thought I might like, but I can't get beyond the first few gilt-edged pages.
I don't know what, for want of a better sentence, you'd call the book reading equivalent of having eyes bigger than your stomach, but I certainly have potboiler indigestion after my Harrison Ainsworth experience.
Nevertheless, for want of a better paragraph, I hope the short, boring sentences of modern novels suffer a similar fate. Humanity is truly doomed if people are still reading the withered and eroded prose of contemporary fiction in one hundred years time.
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God is in the details, they preach to me. But I'm an atheist.
And being an atheist, I simply ignore any important information vouchsafed to me from Heaven: these details can't be right, I conclude, a holy light seems to be shining from within them.
Such willful disbelief rarely ever works out for me. I guess it's a variety of hubris and consequently punished by whichever God made the effort. I think it's usually Ganesha, the elephant in the room, so to speak.
For instance, I'm not really sure whether I should've added the an before atheist in the first line of this post, or whether I should've just written atheist without the addition of an.
Considering the subject, you would think that's the kind of grammatical detail wherein you'd find a God; or a least some sort of deity might appear to me in a sentence about Damascus.
But I only ever find a cold, implacable void in the details.
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I recently purchased an extra-sturdy, reinforced umbrella to replace those flimsy umbrellas of mine demolished by last month's high winds and heavy rains.
When fully open, the umbrella's mechanism reminds me of a robotic armature from some dystopian sci-fi film. I would not be surprised to learn that the canopy is not only rain resistant but also bulletproof. Perhaps the ferrule is even poison tipped?
Alas, this extra-sturdy, reinforced umbrella is so heavy that my arm aches whenever I hold it over my head. The umbrella's form might follow function but its weight most definitely does not. Frankly, I'd rather be windswept and soaked to the skin than incapacitated by muscle spasms. Mary Poppins would be permanently grounded.
The answer is one of those full-body rain suits modeled after the latest in toxic waste clean-up fashion. I'm just afraid a sudden gust would inflate such an outfit, lifting me skywards and away over the houses like an untethered balloon.
That would be okay as long as I was buffeted in the general direction I was traveling. I might even get there sooner. Something to think about in these wet and windy times.
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I've lived in Boston for a long time now. Walking out into the city feels like getting dressed in the same old everyday clothes I always wear; its neighborhoods fit me just right in all the important places and the color of the sidewalk complements my complexion. The buildings aren't too boxy in the shoulders and most of the streets are a fun paisley pattern rather than that tedious windowpane check you find in Manhattan. Sure, parts of the city might be more ring-around-the-collar than Emerald Necklace, but that's what you'd expect after so much daily wear and tear.
As for Boston's shoes, the apotheosis of any outfit, this was a penny loafer town back in the day. Some pennies were even shinier than the shoes they adorned. I used to think most of the wealth of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was strolling around Beacon Hill stuck on people's feet. Of course, it's all bedraggled chukka boots and filthy flip-flops now, just like everywhere else. Disposable footwear for disposable times.
These idle thoughts were inspired by my fruitless quest to find a Back Bay cobbler. There are tailors and seamstresses in every corner of the city but no cobblers I could find. You can get a pair of old-fashioned pleated, baggy pants cut and sewn into pencil thin, slim-fit trousers anywhere, but it's impossible to get a pair of Oxblood Oxfords resoled downtown. You might just as throw yourself upon the charity of fairy-tale cobbling elves.
I searched in all the places you would normally look: in the empty mezzanine lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel; down the sunless side street where the watch repair guy used to be; along all the subterranean walkways beneath Park Street; opposite the men's bathrooms behind the Panda Express at the food court; on the second floor above the dry cleaners in the alley adjacent to the parking garage; in the weird alcove beside the elevator and under the escalators at Copley Place. You name the nook or cranny and I looked there but found no cobbler.
The crossing-sweeper, the lamplighter, and now the cobbler: all traders that have disappeared from the high street. I suppose I could run into Marshalls or DSW and buy a brand new pair of similar shoes, but how long before these stores also relinquish their brick and mortar identities for the more profitable guise of online retailing? And my profession also seems to be following them into extinction, arm in arm with the man in the sandwich shop whose business relies on my custom every lunchtime.
We will be replaced by Capital One 360 "banking cafes," no doubt, and whatever other unholy hybrids the financial sector breeds. Then walking out into the city will no longer feel like getting dressed in the same old everyday clothes I always wear; it will be like being forced into spandex pants and a hairshirt with a dayglo dunce's cap completing the outfit. God knows what shoes will be on my feet. Some sort of inflatable plastic sneakers I should imagine. Whatever, I hope to be living full time in Hawaii long before that happens.
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As Winter coughs up its last spiteful gobbets of unpleasant weather, daffodils are already extending their bulbous yellow heads above the flowerbed parapets.
William Wordsworth would call them "a host," but they're more like an unruly mob. If plants could carry flaming torches, then I'm sure they'd chase the monster Jack Frost out of the garden, rather than let him leave peacefully at his appointed time.
I'm not one to talk to flowers like experts say you should. I imagine they'd be brazenly conceited and pompous conversationalists, talking about themselves the whole time, never letting their interlocutor get a word in edgewise.
Evergreens in the garden must view the blooming of daffodils in Spring much as a black sheep views the visit of an especially obsequious gamboling lamb.
So come back frozen gray earth and brown sticks, all is forgiven? Not a chance. I'd much rather spend time with Spring's vainglorious popinjay than that unfriendly, miserable old curmudgeon called Winter.
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Listening to a 78RPM recording of some pre-war thespian — I use the word advisedly — reading passages from The Aeneid, I was struck, and not for the first time, by the appalling quality of early twentieth-century acting.
Those formidable yet tremulous tones, somewhat sing-songy, full of foreboding and dark portents even when reciting the most sentimental of love lyrics or pronouncing Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard to be bare. One can easily imagine that "bare" being rendered as three syllables, each with its own vocal curlicue.
More of an incantation than a speaking voice, this style of acting renders all dialogue as a series of rhetorical questions rather than conversation. It's as if they were perpetually auditioning for the role of the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, even the actresses.
After five minutes of such declamatory melodrama, the weary ear longs for the aggrieved mumble of Sylvester Stallone or the clipped monotony of contemporary British performance.
"I sing of arms and of a man ..." Fine, but don't sing about them like you're in Sarah Bernhardt's shower rhapsodising upon the perfection of your own navel to the last loofah sponge in the world. The muse doesn't tolerate that sort of theatrical hubris anymore.
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In the guise of 'Dr Homer,' antiquity's greatest authority on weight-loss, I am creating my own specialised diet.
It's a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the Paleo diet, so I'm calling it the 'Trojan Diet' as the menu consists of only those foodstuffs eaten by Achilles in his tent outside the gates of Troy.
I'm not entirely sure what these would have been, so I'm going with olive oil (obviously), fish (no-brainer), ritually slaughtered meats (naturally), and a variety of salad and cheeses. Dieters will also be allowed one slice of chocolate cake per week (Trojan horse).
I also recommend that thirty figs be consumed with each meal, which will be known as "The Fare That Launched A Thousand Shits."
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I cannot read a book while walking along the street. Admittedly, I've never tried, but this lack of application is not the sole reason why the perambulatory consumption of literature is not listed as a skill on my curriculum vitae.
I tend to prefer to look where I'm going, for one thing. Finishing that last paragraph I was reading on the bus is not as important to me as avoiding striding headlong into a lamppost. No pulp thriller or sci-fi novel, no matter how plot driven it may be, is "unputdownable" when there is the possibility of tripping over a fire hydrant while devouring the cliffhanger ending to chapter twelve.
Yet, working near a college campus, I constantly observe students lost in a book while walking along the street. I see them reading while crossing a busy road and I even see them reading while navigating their bicycles through heavy traffic -- look, professor, no hands!
The pedestrians are usually young women with Emily Dickinson hair, thrift store skirts, and Celtic Twilight jewelry. The fixed-gear cyclists are disheveled males re-reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the umpteenth time.
I admire Neil Gaiman's abundant talent, energy, and enthusiasm, but I've never read any of his novels. Perhaps that's why I don't read while walking along the street: I lack the disheveled, speculative fiction strand of DNA that's apparently so essential to reading in motion?
Never mind. This weekend, while stationary on my sofa, I shall be consulting a collection of George Orwell's essays called Facing Unpleasant Facts. It's about time.
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Today is known as Super Tuesday on the political calendar.
Which means tomorrow will be Incredulous Wednesday, followed by Coming-To-Terms-With-It Thursday, Apathetic Friday, and so on.
Day by day, month by month, the invasive, man-eating species we call Presidential candidates are cultivated with incalculable amounts of financial manure.
Instead of the sun, their greasy tendrils reach for the spotlight and the camera flash.
It is like a phallus-shaped hothouse where only self-perpetuating Triffids grow.
Or a boundless field commandeered for dubious agricultural experiments. Typical crop rotation: lies, fraud, military spending, kickbacks, etc.
If only there was weed-killer strong enough to destroy them all.
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