Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist are two of the most popular books in history, each selling over 150 million copies. Both are simple yet convoluted tales set in fantastical places. However only one of these books is worth the read, multiple reads in fact, while the other comes across like an inspirational poster on a middle school teacher’s wall.
The first half of Coelho’s book isn’t awful, following a boy in search of treasure, but the writing, attempting some kind of mythic, becomes tedious and facile. “Well, why did you say that I don’t know about love?” the sun asked the boy. More than anything though, it is the repetition of the two phrases Personal Legend and Soul of the World that tips the experience into something barely worth skimming.
Saint-Exupéry’s tale, on the other hand, straddles the wonder of a child’s imagination and philosophical reflection.
It offers a fairly simple rundown of the problems of mankind but with wonderful phrasings such as If you tame me, then we’ll need each other. Most of all, it is the structure of the work, the little prince an apparition to a man lost in the desert, and the painful finale where nothing is resolved. We just want the little prince to come back.
The deli counter was in the back corner of Gristedes, a New York supermarket I had mistakenly pronounced as Gris-TEA-dees to my sister — and not Gris-TAY-dees. She had mocked me for that. “Ham and cheese sandwich please.”
The woman didn’t look up from her phone.” American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Swiss, Colby, Pepper Jack?”
“Cheddar, Medium, thanks.”
“Roll or hero?” She continued to scroll.
“Rye please.”
“Rye.” She turned off her phone and placed a block of cheese on the slicer.
“Thank you.” I looked around the great empty space, lit in the horrible bald light and thought about my childhood fears and trauma, being abandoned, alone, all of that amorphous stuff, fanged blobs out from between the walls, bursting out, and then saw the woman wrap the thick sandwich in wax paper. “Oh, I forgot to ask for lettuce and tomato.”
“Anything else? Pickles? Pepper, salt? Mayo?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
She opened the sandwich to reveal a teetering stack of cheese, ten slices, more than that, atop the ham, and added watery slices of tomato and a tough ribbed section of lettuce.
“Maybe not the pickle.”
“No pickle?”
“No pickle,” I reiterated.
“What about the salt, pepper and mayo?”
“Yes.”
She wedged the sandwich back together and gave it to me.
“Thank you.” I opened the sandwich outside and counted the slices, 17 ion all along with three slices of ham. It had to be pulled apart to be eaten. I thought that was just how it was in the city, massive sandwiches that you couldn’t get in your mouth.
Even though I was wrong and came to learn that 2-4 slices of cheese was the standard, I still think of that woman as the gatekeeper of sandwiches. And that Gristedes as the gatekeeper of delis. Gris-TAY-des.
“I’m going to kiss others.” And then her lips were on mine, and I was closing the blinds, people trying to peek in, her naked body there, all of it over too quickly.
I didn’t remember much, but she was pregnant and we were married. And then the accident, she paralyzed from the waist down. We didn’t make it.
I was back in her neighborhood years later, at a fundraiser. I stayed at the periphery, thinking I might glimpse her but only saw her friends, and went back down the hallway, and she was there, her hair lighter now, elegant as ever. I whispered her name. She began to cry. “You came.”
I wanted to hold her but knew that would make it worse and kept a respectful distance, leaving later, talking with her assistant about what arrangements might be made for later.
Eight years ago, when Trump first was elected, there was the remarkable Women’s March in New York City, a joyous event attended by 400,000 people.
On Saturday, January 18, a mere 3,000 meandered through Lower Manhattan, now the People’s March, sad calls made to never surrender when they already had.
There is a lack of purpose in confronting Trump 2.0 , the vast majority preferring to doom scroll over engagement. “Is it even safe to protest? What about the counter-demonstrators?” Trump’s Culture of Fear is here, jokes about Canada and Greenland not jokes at all, freedom and individuality at stake, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding to come.
With the oligarchy setting up shop in DC, it isn’t time for identity politics nor inclusion, but for the furies and fates to rise, the sirens and witches to assemble and tear this thing apart.
Like Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is one of those books I had never read and thought everybody else had. Like Moby Dick, I found the book exhausting and dense and eventually learned that few have actually read it.
The problem with the book is three-fold, the biggest challenge being the archaic language, with words like slockens (moisten), gliff (look), clour (hit), kittle (difficult) and argle-bargled (argue) permeating the text. On top of the language is the convoluted politics of the 1700’s where you were either a Whig, a Jacobite or a repressed Highlander, Stevenson assuming the reader understood the background to all of this. (Which I didn’t.)
View of the highlands from Ben Nevis
At the heart of the problem however is the narrative, which is a story of a young man who is knocked on the head and put on a ship for the slavery in the Carolinas only to escape and find his way tediously back through the highlands. It’s a never-ending journey that plugs on and on, like Ahab and his whale, until it doesn’t.
Beached Pilot Whales on Sanday Island, Orkney
I eventually made it to the end but with little satisfaction. And I would not recommend the journey to anyone else, unless you know bauchle and kittle and can tholefashious things.
I’m coming back from two weeks in New Orleans where I was tired and uninspired and did very little writing. Instead, I read and drank and walked around. “It’s good for you,” I was told time and time again. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like life was pointless. I felt desperate.
My father always said that if you don’t like work, you’re not going to like life. Jim Henson concurred: “I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of – and probably what I do best. I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It’s one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying that finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”
The idea of being idle, either enjoying the company of family and friends or, worse, in retirement, are presented as goals in our society, a tendency toward inertness that has been furthered by our self-destructive attraction to our screens and just be generally stupid.
My dream is to be like Henson and my father, to be working until the end, projects on the go, one close to completion, others in production, another one or two in development, and then getting up from a table, moving onto another thing, I just don’t make and am no more.
The subjugation of women started long ago, Gunter Grass postulating in The Flounder that it was the moment men figured out childbirth was not a secret of women but the result of fornication.
Whatever the moment, the persecution has continued unabated throughout history, well documented through the portrayal of women as The Fates, Furies and Witches, all tortuously guiding men to their downfall.
Macbeth’s Witches ThreeOrestes Hounded by the Furies
The portrayal of witches has evolved somewhat today, some still hideous and evil, others sexy and fun, but all remaining an essential threat to men.
Cher in EastwickSam in BewitchedThe Witch of WitchesWitchie Poo in HR PufnStuff
The fear of women remains rampant throughout the world, especially so in the United States, because they really do have a greater power than men. It isn’t because of their vaunted role as mothers – preserve us from that pronouncement – nor their intuition or dreaded scorn. Rather it’s due to the fact that they aren’t as petty, childish and stupid.
Given that young women have been trained to sexualize themselves for approval and financial security, they now need role models to find their way.
PJ Harvey on stageDee in My bad SideDee in Anori
Intelligent, talented and, yes, beautiful, Ms. Harvey mines the essential ooze with acuity and supreme confidence, enough to terrify any man. As does Dee in my novels My Bad Side and Em, hopefully soon to be in print.
Men just need to accept that they are babies and let these witches take over the world.
What I mean to say is “I appreciate you”. Each and every one of you.
The ruling is a simple one. Stop being a fucking baby. There’s no paradise thing. We made every step, always our own, never for another, pretending maybe, but that’s a child’s game.
Life has to be lived, the same as it’s always been. It doesn’t matter how long or short the game, black-outs and cash-outs included, it’s played to the end. Grow the fuck up and keep posting your dog and cat pics. They’re fucking hilarious.
If you were to ask me how I’m doing, I would say I’m pretty good. A bit tired but getting some reading done, recharging my battery, all that. And then I’d ask how you are, and we would go on like that, like usual. But I’m not. Doing well that is. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give myself a one or two. I’m low. I’m losing the point of this. Fight on. I can’t go on. I must go on. All that. But we’re in the shitter. I am anyway. I’ve lost the faith, if I ever had it. It’s not just Trump & Putin, although they’re sure part of it. It’s the hubris, the lies and hate, mine too.
I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies, Mark Twain, Robert Kennedy, Orville & Wilbur Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Mahatma Ghandi, Leo Tolstoy, Judy Garland, Agnes Varda, Zenobia. The story is clear: You’re born, you do stuff and you die. They all struggled, found success in something, struggled again, maybe found success again, and then died. I just finished When Breathe Becomes Air, the autobiography of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is a rumination on mortality, littered with literary references, including Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” He dies before he finishes the book.
I also read Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights. As facile as it sounds to consider an actor best known for “Alright, alright, alright”, it still has all the same moments, struggling and succeeding, trying to make sense. Alright, it is a trite read, and a little tiresome in the end, but he’s earnest and banged a whole beautiful women. And he’s not dead. Yet. Yeah, and he’s hot.
It’s better to live a life doing things, finding some sort of meaning and ‘indulging’ as McConaughey confesses. Then what? The key seems to be remembering, reflecting and sharing. But what if you don’t? What if you lose all that? You forget it all? My mother succumbed to dreaded Alzheimer’s and remembered nothing in her last years. Once a very insightful and intellectually demanding woman, she forgot everything including her beloved Mozart and The New Yorker. It was the one way she wanted to go. I’ve forgotten moments too, entire nights, years gone by and indulging too much, and all of the enjoyment I assume I had, is gone too. Like everything.
Whether we lay this planet to waste or not, this will all be forgotten. Not just my little old blog but everything else, Barbie, Mozart, Krakatoa, This space we fill will be empty and dark. There will be nothing at all. And so maybe I’m being generous with myself. I’m definitely not a two. I’m more like a one or zero.
I have neglected the blog over the past two months (sorry!) as I am immersed in teaching and spend many weekends out hiking. My regular destination is in the Hudson Highlands, from Bear Mountain Toll House to Anthony’s Nose, which I documented with a monthly picture from multiple spots over a year.
The above pictures look up the Hudson River toward the Bear Mountain Bridge.
The steady decline in water levels at Broccy Creek is just another sign of things gone awry.
It was an exercise in patience and focus, framing and remembering the right spot. And getting out every month. Sadly I missed the snow and peak fall colors.
