TV is King!

Posted on 25 March 2006 by Hillery

You know that’s not a statement, right? At least not one of mine. It’s the cover headline of this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, which, by the way, I have not yet read. Except for the back page. Because, say what you want, I love Stephen King. If you’ve read the stuff I used to write for The Simon, you know that I’m not a very likely or remotely typical fan. But I seriously dig the guy!

I’ve been working on something for you about getting back on the bus and then I read his essay this week. You know when you’re piecing something together in your head and then you see the fully formed realization of that idea, rendered more artfully by someone else, how morbidly fascinating that can be? I don’t know how to put it exactly. It’s like you’re in Renaissance Italy and you’re thinking, ‘To Hell with doing the bidding of the Medici clan, I think I’ll try working with my hands…maybe I’ll tinker with some marble.’ Then you run into Michelangelo. It’s a punch in the gut and the realization of true beauty all at once.

King2 It doesn’t stay like that. The feeling is momentary. I mean, don’t worry, I’m not going to cry or anything. The second time I read it, I was just plain giddy. And I’m still going to finish my version, which for all its inferiority isn’t really the same in anything but spirit.

I just really think you should read it: Confessions of a TV Slut by Stephen King. In your mailbox or on newsstands as we virtually confer.

You Don’t Get to Bake Your Own Slice of Cake

Posted on 20 March 2006 by Hillery

I was talking to my brother on the phone the other night, in a cab, on the way to a party. Since I live in the middle of Brooklyn and the party was in Manhattan, this gave us some time to catch up. And, I admit, the call prevented me learning the names of all of the family members of my driver or the story of how he met his wife. In my neighborhood, most of the gypsy cab drivers are from South America and, well, you wouldn’t believe how much I know about snake hunting in Ecuador.

Jon doesn’t usually have that much time to talk. He and my sister-in-law are working parents with two kids and he’s got a teenage son from his first marriage who causes him no little concern. The boy lives with his mother in another state and while he’s a super good kid, you know, he’s sixteen. Lately, he’s been acting out a little. So, Jon and I usually speak in abbreviated bursts.

Things were a tad more calm this time because he was alone in a hotel room in Texas. He just got a new job outside Austin and he’s there working and looking for a house while Dorothy stays with the kids to sell their place in the Pacific Northwest. I got all the details on this. They are not considering any property without a pool. Despite being hard on the kids, it sounds like it’ll be a great move for them. They’ll be closer to family, including me and my older nephew, and Dorothy may not have to work.

Then we’re on to me. Because I live on another planet, namely New York City, the questions and answers differ. Of course I don’t own property and I’ve never been married or had a child. So he wants to know about my business, when that reality show is going to air, and boys. So far so good, I hope it gets canceled, and listen to this one!

I tell him how I’ve been making an effort to go out more and meet people, but I’m largely uncomfortable with the kind of attention I’ve been getting from men. Then there was someone potentially…I don’t know, someone with potential. We had a great first date and then this weird, flailing follow up on his part where he confirmed and then canceled our second date. “And then I never heard from him again,” I said.

“He got a better offer.” This was Jon’s assessment. And this is one of the many things I love about him. He speaks to me like an equal and he always has. He’s not going to sugarcoat it. He’s telling me how it is. And still I say, “No such thing!”

“He probably asked out several ladies for that night and went with the one who seemed like the least complicated sure thing.”

I am still clinging to my girl mindset when I say, “But this guy was into me. He was trying to impress me and…”

“Sometimes, that’s just what we do.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “he didn’t seem like a player. The things he said to me, they’re not in The Game. And at this point, I have a pretty good bullshit detector.”

“Maybe,” he says, “but you don’t have a cock.”

And those were the magic words. I awoke from my stupor to see that I had been stupid, again. Some guy picked me up in a bar because I looked cool and aloof—out of reach—and then, when I wasn’t, he wasn’t interested. Sometimes I feel like if I had known Jon my whole life, my whole life would be a lot easier.

HB-little I grew up an only child. Without getting too far off track, I will say that I was not a very happy child. I was shoplifting by the time I was ten. At eleven, I was spiking my Kool Aid. I started driving when I was twelve. I ran away at thirteen, only to be delivered right back home. I had sex for the first time when I was fourteen. By the time I was fifteen, I saw that these stunts were not getting me the kind of attention I wanted. In short, I understood that my home life was never going to be satisfying.

The best thing I could hope for was to get away for good. The running away thing hadn’t worked out too well, so I decided to bide my time until college. I got a job. I sat in my room and read books. I listened for car doors and mood swings and I pretended I wasn’t there. When I got my actual driver’s license, I barely ever was.

This was the tenuous nature of my household when I was a teenager. After having overlooked me for years—we had our better moments, but mostly before I was ten and after I was twenty—my father was absolutely puzzled as to why I was never around. He was on wife number three when he told me I had a half brother, so I wasn’t all that surprised to hear that he’d gotten his high school girlfriend in trouble and that they’d given up the baby for adoption.

J-Rbaby I met my brother on my seventeenth birthday, right around Thanksgiving, 1991. He was 23 and he didn’t talk to me like I was a kid or a girl or, for that matter, like he needed me to like him. He told me plainly that he had a little boy, he was divorced, he was in the Army reserves, and he owned a gun rack. Bookish, sheltered, and not very trusting, I put him through my social litmus test of the moment. I made him listen to Dennis Miller’s 1987 comedy record, The Off-White Album. We bonded over verbose and incredibly articulate dick jokes.

From what he’s told me, Jon had a fairly stable young life. His parents also adopted a girl, so he grew up with a sibling. He was in a band in high school. He scored a perfect 100 on his driver’s test (to my 97). He also beat me on the ACT test (and, I feel compelled to tell you, my score was very high). It must be something in the genes because he took three dates to his prom and not one of them knew about the others. There is something legendary, and familiar, in that story.

No matter how hard an act he would have been to follow, I can’t help but wish he had been my brother then. I dwell on how cool it would’ve been to have had him around during all that adolescent crap. I daydream about him being there to break it down for me when my best friend turned on me in the eighth grade. “Hill,” he’d have said, “You got boobs before anyone else. He wanted to touch them and you wouldn’t let him.” On my own, seriously, it took me about ten years to puzzle that one out.

The reality check is there’s just no way our shit could’ve gone down like that. The thing I dig the most about Jon is that he grew up. He put in his time as the bad boy, but somewhere along the way he decided to become an adult. It’s the reason we can have the kind of conversations we’ve been enjoying for the last fifteen years. It’s also something our dad never did. So, if Jon had shared my childhood, would he ever have made that choice? In such an environment, I’m not confident he would have been equipped to do it.

The other, more obvious problem is that I wouldn’t have been born. If dad and Jon’s biological mom had gotten married, dad probably wouldn’t have gone out with my mom. If so, probably not until way later. And even if my parents would’ve had a kid, it probably wouldn’t have been me. Even if it was me, Jon would still be about six years older, so by the time I had to deal with boys he’d have gone away to college. I still would’ve had to go through all that adolescent crap alone.

If you’ve read this far, you know me a little. I ruminate. I imagine. I analyze. I over think everything. And I work at home, so no responsibilities are so pressing as to halt these pursuits. Lately, as the cogs crunch and roll in my brain, it kind of makes sense that I spent most of my teenage nights sitting alone in my room, save for the company of fiction. It has something to do with ending up readerly, writerly, and in New York. And as little as I know about where I’m headed, I’m sure this is where I’m supposed to be.

My thought for the day—my point in all this—is that you get what you get. Work with it! Try to be patient. Every once in a while, you end up with something or someone totally, unexpectedly great. Often enough, it’s a come true you never thought to dream.

Family

Life over 50!

Posted on 14 March 2006 by Hillery

I was sorting the mail for my building last week when I noticed that our postman had mistakenly delivered a copy of AARP Magazine. We only have four apartments and the subscription was not in the name of any of my neighbors, so I stole it. I’m not into thieving and I don’t read that many magazines, but Goldie Hawn was on the cover. She’s sort of a hero of mine and she looked so amazing, I had to have it!

Aarpletterhalf Interestingly enough, the American Association of Retired Persons and I enjoy mutual inappropriate desire. Just the other day I received this letter from them encouraging me to get the most out of “life over 50” as I am fully eligible to register for their benefits. This came as a surprise to me, since, as far as I know, I am not yet 40. Not by a long shot. In fact, if I were 50, my mother would have given birth to me when she was not quite two years old. I wish I got mail this good every day!

Today I began to wonder about my AARP karma. I stole from them and then they offered more. In most mythology, this makes me the guy that bad things are going to happen to down the road. On the other hand, that magazine could have been sent to me on purpose, as a sign. Perhaps this letter is portentous. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Only time will tell.

Honestly, I’ve always looked forward to aging, partly because I had such a baby face. I remember heading toward the big 30 with baited breath because that’s how old Madonna was when her cheeks thinned out and I hoped mine would too. They did!

Mother50300 The other part is my mother. I know, everybody thinks their mother is the most beautiful woman in the world, in one way or another. My mother is flat out gorgeous. And while I feel blessed by my genes, I’m also burdened by comparison. By the time I got to high school it became obvious to me that I was never going to be, well, stopping traffic beautiful…like she so is. We’ll get into my mommy issues another time. Suffice it to say, I can look forward to aging because I can look forward to aging well. Just look at her now.

Do it again! (Part Three)

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Posted on 11 March 2006 by Hillery

Another one of my brilliant professors at NYU, Perry Meisel, once said to me, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can ride the bus. And the good thing about the bus is you can get off whenever you want.” That made a huge impression on me as well. I see that statement as a metaphor for individual contributions to our communal culture. Every creative person stands on the shoulders of a whole lot of people who came before.

Berry-Lennon I love it when people get this. When John Lennon met Chuck Berry, he dropped to the ground, kissed the man’s feet, and said, “Thanks for lettin’ me and the lads be rock stars!” When they don’t get it, I am so annoyed. You love Jazz? You like Soul? Then don’t dismiss Hip Hop. You were riding the same bus. They just took it to a further stop. Maybe you should get back on.

The desire to experiment and the freedom to make mistakes, these are the elements that drive the bus. Because things that are great aren’t always perfect, at least not from the get go. Frankly, the first season of Buffy was only pretty good. The second season rocked my world. It’s my dessert island pick. That’s the kind of leap one can make with a little patience and perseverance on the other end of the line. And that’s where it gets complicated, on the other end of the line.

The ability to recognize brilliance before it’s fully formed, and to foster it, that’s kind of what working in the entertainment industry used to be about. These days, not so much. These days, the odds of getting something potentially brilliant to float down the mainstream, they’re infinitesimal. Particularly with television, where there is no per screen average or paperback market to fall back on. With television, the fit—because they are few—are not a ratings market.

Firefly This is how it happened that Firefly, Joss Whedon’s third gift to television viewers, got canceled in its first season. As with Buffy and Angel, I never watched the show while it was airing—no reception, remember—but I rented it as soon as it came out on DVD. I had just finished season five of Angel, far and away the best of the bunch, and I was a little let down by the new show. There was a lot more lore to digest and there were nine main characters to get to know, which made the development of the larger drama lag a little. It was good stuff, but by Joss standards you could argue it wasn’t up to full speed.

Still and all, canceling the show was a supremely stupid move. Only very rarely are you blessed with a phenomenon like The X-Files or Twin Peaks. It’s a magical event when a one in a million show goes from flash in the pan to cult sensation. And the fans never say die. It’s been years since the show was on and I still have my Scully and Mulder Barbie & Ken dolls, in the original packaging, prominently displayed in my living room. You will have to pry those toys from my cold, dead hands. And I consider seasons seven through nine on par with The Godfather: Part Three—they simply don’t exist. Think, for a minute, about that level of devotion.

That’s what being a cult sensation means—your creation isn’t popular, it’s important to people. What working in the entertainment industry has largely become is getting people to show up, solidifying your brand, and separating your audience from their money (or in this instance, viewing time) on a regular basis. So, in my opinion, somebody didn’t do the math on this one.

Yeah, the Firefly DVD sold like Kool-Aid in Jonestown. Joss refused to take no for an answer and, so it goes, neither did his fans. Oh, and, newsflash: everyone with a phone line, a keyboard, and an opinion now has a forum. It’s called the internet. This time, the fit though few got loud…and something changed. A major motion picture was made to fill the gap left by a space-western television show that didn’t even get to finish its first season. If this is something you see everyday, leave the key under the mat—I’m moving in.

Yes, I said space-western. A huge governmental bureaucracy, the Alliance, is taking over space and our guys, the brown coats, were fighting the battle of independence…until they lost. Now they’re skirting the fringe of civilization, keeping it together by smuggling and sundry other slightly immoral activities. Sound a little familiar? Sure, there are parallels. If you want to go all Millennium Falcon, you’ll see that Mal, the captain, resembles a certain character portrayed by Harrison Ford. And Zoe, played by Gina Torres, could be described handily as the hottest Wookie ever! But he’s in love with a prostitute and she’s married to the pilot, so that’s pretty much where it ends.

The beauty of this story, if part of its sluggishness out of the gate, was always the ensemble. Serenity_2 Joss put together the necessary members of any frontier society. There is the aforementioned rebel yeller and his sidekick gunman, plus the pilot and the prostitute. Add to that a preacher, a mercenary, a mechanical engineer to patch up the ship, a doctor to patch up the people, and a loose cannon. Because it’s Joss, the last is a seventeen year old girl who everyone thinks is crazy. And get this; she has unknown powers of force and psychic awareness.

With all that inducement, can you believe I didn’t make it to the theatres for this one? You know I meant to, right? I am full on about voting with my dollar. But somewhere in between being evicted from my apartment right after I quit my job and stress-eating my way through millions of bags of peanut butter cups right out of my freezer while trying to figure out where I was going to live, and then moving and all, it passed me by. But it was on the tippy top of my Netflix list!

I should have known better. In retrospect, Firefly being canceled might have been the best thing that’s ever happened to Joss Whedon fans. It forced him to make a movie. I mean another movie. I mean a real movie. I mean the best movie I saw from 2005. When Serenity finally arrived, I watched it five times…in a row. Believe it or not, I’ve never done that before. I should have bought the damn thing straight away.

You know I’m not going to break it down for you all the way; I’m a pusher. I’m all about the tease. But the structure, the character development, the foreshadowing, the brilliant combination of genres—sci-fi allowing you to invent your own civilization and westerns providing the metaphor with which to define the ethics of the inhabitants of that world…it’s all beyond deft. The dialogue is so fast and tight, that was viewing number two right there, not to mention the unspoken interplay. The symbolism is itself a commentary on the ultimate result of our current conglomeration fixation. The villain is fucking amazing!

Serenity_1 Ooh, ooh, and the fighting! I’ve always seen martial arts styled fighting sequences, when done well, as highly technical, quickly paced dance numbers. That’s exactly what I got here, except somehow more. In the commentary, which accompanied the final two viewings, we learn that former ballerina Summer Glau (playing River, the loose cannon) can kick someone standing behind her around a pole! So they built a pole! When we get to the hero shot, Joss says, “Some people say I have a bad problem not making shows with adolescent girls with super powers. I. Don’t. Care. This is the sweetest thing I’ve ever shot.” And I concur. Seriously, I want to watch it again right now.

I know, you’re thinking you’ve read a long way for an overlooked Oscar shoulda-never-coulda rant. But that’s not even what this is. This is my way of telling you how important stories are. It’s why I’ve always loved popular culture and why I chose to work in its development. Creative expression is how we share our version of the human experience. And without that, there are no shoulders to stand on. That’s what I want to communicate to people who tell me I get too caught up in make believe. I want to tell them to really think about those two words.

When you look at a story like this, and the larger chain of events that made its expression possible, hopefully you feel like you count. I’m always too overwhelmed by our socio-political environment and its constant changes to know where to begin in making an impact. But I’ve begun to understand the empowerment in being able to comment on it. I’ve started to think of Blanford Parker’s envy as what it obviously was: not so much disappointment as disgust. It’s simple to say, but I’ve realized that doing nothing and having nothing to say, not participating in the process, it sucks. Because, culturally or politically, it doesn’t have to go down like that.

For my part, I’m going to the Frick, probably by myself. I’m going to finish Catch 22, but first I’m reading Don Quixote. Because if I get wiped out tomorrow, that’s the book I would have most wanted to have read. I’m going to listen to people who have proven time and again that they are smarter than me. Like Kendra, who suffered much sass to ensure that I saw Freaks & Geeks, Gilmore Girls, The Office, and Cracker. In short, I’m getting back on the bus. If I can swing TiVo, I might even get television again. I so need to see Joss’ cameo on Veronica Mars, which is, by the way, as he says, the “Best. Show. Ever.” But only because long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a vampire slayer named Buffy.

Obviously, apart from my requisite over thinking rhetoric, this is a tribute. drucilla Give some people enough rope and they’re bound to hang themselves. This guy, he’s going to swing through the jungle tree to tree howling and beating his chest. And now that there are no holds barred on my cultural consumption, I’m going to need as much of that as I can get. Yes, Joss Whedon, this is a valentine. It’s a little piece of sugar shaped like a heart. It doesn’t read ‘Be Mine’ or ‘I’m Yours’. Like any kid seeing warp speed for the first time or, better yet, like Drusilla, after she sees the Judge in action, it says: Do it again! Do it again!

Do it again! (Part Two)

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Posted on 6 March 2006 by Hillery

A couple of years ago, my friend Kendra’s Buffy addiction reached a level that distressed me. “Excuse me?” I said. “I saw that Luke Perry movie and it was crap. Why would I want to watch it on TV?” I was contemplating an intervention and instead she intervened on me. She sat me down in front of the television, season seven was on at the time, and what I saw and heard shut me up. After two and a half episodes I had to stop watching. I was hooked and I needed to go home immediately and start at the beginning.

I achieved a spoiler-free zone for the year or so it took me to catch up to the series finale. And if you remember that time in magazine media, you have to agree that this was a coup. With a dearth of Buffy on the box Kendra was on to Season Five of Angel, but I refused to watch. I had to see the spin-off’s seasons simultaneous to its Buffy counterpart time-frame. Continuity was key, but there would be no pacing myself here.

I rented, and then I just started buying each season as it came out on DVD. When one arrived in the mail, my lifestyle became as that of a free baser. No light penetrated the windows of my apartment. The telephone cord was pulled from the wall. I would not sleep for however many hours it took to watch the entire season straight through, including special features and commentaries. Oh yeah. Then rinse and repeat.

What’s silly about me even writing this down is that I can’t explain the show to you. I can tell you that it takes place in a world similar to ours—good people die for no reason, love rarely lasts, family relationships are hard, money is often tight, and friendship is what gets you through the rough spots. As in any good fable, the hero is unlikely and often reluctant. The good guys win every time, but there are casualties of love and war and consequences to be faced as a result of everyone’s actions.

And yet, it’s so much more than that. The vampires, demons, and otherworldly arch nemeses effectively polarize good and evil. The microcosm of high school raises the emotional stakes for everyone. You remember that time you’ve worked so hard to forget; you were more vulnerable, less jaded, and every day was its own universe. The superhero life lesson—brilliantly illustrated here, but best coined by Stan Lee—about power, responsibility, and sacrifice is ultimately all we need to know about growing up. Not just the adolescent kind, but the maturation through tough choices that continually forms and reforms every thinking adult. For my money, it’s the perfect moral fantasy.

And then there’s the whimsy. Along with the ubiquitous slaying comes the slayer punning, “Hi, I’m Buffy…and you are history.” Annoyed with her boyfriend Angel, a 241 year old vamp cursed with a soul, Buffy retorts, “You’re a vampire. Or is that an offensive term? Should I say undead American?” Buffy Grave Disappointed at the prospect of having to bury a great big slimy demon that inconveniently doesn’t turn to dust when it dies, she muses, “Is anyone else waiting for it to go poof? Maybe we can cover it with flowers.” In just the first few years, the slayer and her friends face down so many apocalypses that when anyone observes the world is going to end, everyone’s immediate reaction is, “Again?” The second time Buffy dies, her epitaph reads: She saved the world. A lot.

I can tell you all those things, but what you really need to understand the beauty of the show is to sit down and watch it. Intervene upon yourself. Try a couple of episodes. It’s either going to speak to you or it’s not. If it does, you will quickly understand that Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon is a total genius…if a bit of a mad one.

And (I know, you thought the thread was lost.) I’m back with the Milton! You see, Joss has also invented his own lexicon. While he creates words—shirty, single entendre, and nowned (as a potential basis for becoming renowned) come to mind—he really shines in the arena of hybrid phraseology. Like, “Raise your hand if eww.” Or behold the golden, “Wake up and smell the hottie!” And then there is the definitive achievement, the radical popularization of obscure cultural allusion that is “five by five.” No one knew exactly what it meant, but as soon as we heard it we all had to say it. When I heard Marshall do so in season four of Alias, I did the little dance men do when their sporting team wins something. Geek Nation had just swept the Super Bowl!

Of course, the man isn’t responsible for every scrap of the show’s dialogue, but his writers will tell you that when they’re complemented on a line from one of their episodes, ninety percent of the time Joss put it in. He’s that good. He’s so good that when he overcompensates, we go apeshit. Worried that the fans weren’t embracing Willow’s love interest, he wrote Oz the following speech.

“Sometimes, when I’m sitting in class—you know, I’m not thinking about class, cuz that would never happen—I think about kissing you. And, it’s like everything stops. It’s like freeze frame: Willow kissage… Oh, I’m not gonna kiss you.”

“What? But freeze frame!”

“Well, to the casual observer, it would appear that you’re trying to make your friend Xander jealous or even the score or something. And that’s on the empty side. See, in my fantasy, when I’m kissing you, you’re kissing me… It’s okay. I can wait.”

Willow-Oz Everyone immediately fell in love with Oz—women and men, puppies and kittens, slugs and sewer rats…everyone. I know people (people who could be me) who replay that forty seconds seven or eight times every time they watch that episode. Genius. The truth is I could quote like that all day, but I won’t. I have a life to lead. A living to make. An ass to work off. I just needed you to know, he had me at Willow kissage.

Slayer Slang I could touch on the deeper meaning behind the mythology, the philosophical symbolism, the metaphorical representation of the many villains, but there are volumes of academic and commercial texts out there to rival Blanford Parker’s chalkboard charts. Yes, there is even Slayer Slang. And I figure, at this point, I’ve either sold you or I’m not going to.

However, there is one more Miltonian parallel I would like to explore: the audience. Milton expected an educated readership and dubbed them the “fit though few.” I always thought that was pretty cool. Today, in an age when content is no longer crafted to pander to the lowest common denominator, but to cultivate it—at a time when a pop-culture fanatic like myself can’t even stand to have television in her home, it’s a phrase I’ve really come to appreciate. Because the fit though few are the revolution, people. They’re the rockers of the boat. And when they’re loud enough, they become the voice of change.

Nothing illustrates that point more clearly than the making of Serenity.

Do it again! (Part One)

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Posted on 6 March 2006 by Hillery

I went to NYU as an undergraduate and after about five minutes as a film major, I transferred to the English Department. It was a cool time to be there because they were just starting to lure professors away from the Ivy League. The department was still in a transitional period and the faculty was a strange mix of big names and obscure talent. I remember sitting in The Violet, the campus café, overhearing E. L. Doctorow being interviewed at the next table and considering slipping him a note regarding his gratuitous overuse of the word raucous in The Waterworks. I restrained myself.

I also remember Blanford Parker, who taught Milton and Dryden, a class I wanted to drop after the first reading assignment. As far as I was concerned, Dryden was dry and Milton was a bible junkie. But Parker, a zealot of 17^th Century English poetry, would not let me leave. I can’t recall if he talked me out of the drop or was simply too intimidating to address outside of answering a direct question. Whether or not I actually proposed resignation, I feel he saw it on my face and met mine with a look that demanded surrender. And I did.

When we got to Paradise Lost, Parker went to the board and, instead of a list or an outline of important points, he wrote out a mathematically configured compendium of the epic poem. Specifically, it covered the structure of the twelve books. It made the chalkboard chart in School of Rock look like a frat boy’s grocery list. In time, there were charts for each of the books, for characters and symbolism. I think there was one solely devoted to the words that Milton had invented in writing the poem.

Parker did all of this in a blasé posture without notes of any kind. I remember thinking that he was pulling knowledge out of his ass. He later told us he’d begun his study of literature as a translator and had done Paradise Lost into Latin and back again. Maybe it was Greek. More than likely, both. The man had memorized the whole thing.

The last work of any length that I had memorized was the complete dialogue of the Real Genius 1985 Val Kilmer vehicle, Real Genius. “Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of Sun God robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?” This is the sort of material that, as it passes through my ears, I lock onto with my mental tractor beam. It’s what my mind deems worthy of the vault. I don’t know why, but I can only retain the whimsical.

Because he performed so proficiently that which I could not, I quietly became a Blanford Parker groupie. Everything he said was art. For similar reasons, I suspect, he was ignored by most of the other students. The class discussion was basically me and BP, and one other kid, sometimes. To my mind, this student-teacher ratio was the bomb. Parker, on the other hand, was disappointed.

Once near the end of the term he lost all patience with the class. We were discussing Samson Agonistes, and by we I mean he and I, when he asked a question so simple it was obviously meant to invite even the most dunderheaded pupil to speak up. That is to say, a pupil other than me. I can tell you that the answer was Delilah and that, for once, I kept my mouth shut. So did everyone else.

After a frustrated pause, he regarded us twenty-some navel gazers with intensity and said, “You know, I am envious of you.” That’s when he told us about his early career in translation, how he’d read the Canon front to back and over again, and in dead languages. “You have it all in front of you. Think about what an opportunity that is.” What we were thinking was that we were in for a shellacking. But he was just speaking honestly, trying to make something more than light of our apathy. “I will never read Shakespeare for the first time again. You can’t imagine how it feels…to have nothing left.”

That sentiment made a huge impression on me. What Parker meant was that he would never, for the rest of his days, be surprised by the bard. What his admonition meant to me was that I must take care to relish new experiences, especially those that I knew would be satisfying. As with most everything, I ended up over thinking this.

Pb1 I possess a library that, by the standards of New York City apartment square footage averages, runs to the extensive end of the spectrum. The paperbacks, along with the hardcover Library of America section, take up one of the long walls in my office. The hardcovers, alphabetized in reverse to allow Virginia Wolf, Oscar Wilde, and E. B. White to sit on the top shelf where they rightly belong, requires only slightly less space in my bedroom.

These are the titles that made the cut after eight years of working in publishing, where the one financial gain is that you never, ever have to pay for a book. Far from merely a keepsake, the primary function of this collection is to remind me what I have left to read. I listened to Parker and paced myself. I still have surprises in store from Shakespeare and Nabokov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Sartre and Roth and Fowles and Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. I’ve read all of E. M. Forster’s novels and most of his short fiction (By the way, he wrote sci-fi short stories! How cool is that?), but I haven’t touched his criticism. Of course, I couldn’t be expected to hold out on Salinger. But that’s okay; he’s done it for me.

Lately though, I get the feeling I’ve taken a valid observation to the point of ridiculousness. Every time I pick up Catch 22 I reread the first chapter and then put it down again. That might be the best first chapter I’ve ever read. What does that say about the rest of the book? Am I ready to read this entire novel for the first time? Let’s face it; Joseph Heller will never get a second chance to make a first impression on me.

If only the nuttiness ended with books. I have lived in New York for thirteen years and I have never been to the Frick. I know I’m going to love it. I have this funny feeling it might be one of my very favorite places in the city. But I haven’t gone because there was never anyone I wanted to go with, you know, to make a moment of it. I wanted my first time there to be extraordinary—so much so that I’ve been missing out on the place for over a decade.

But let’s stay on topic, for once. Milton. I may have loved Blanford Parker, but it took me some years to warm up to Milton. He was a bible junkie and he took liberties there. He also practically enslaved his daughters when he went blind, dictating his writing and editorial revisions to them hours upon hours a day. Still, when I think of all those words he pulled out of thin air to articulate ideas as no one had before… When I think about those words, along with the careful structuring and symbolism that went into all of Milton’s work; well, naturally I think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Hillery… Occasionally

Hillery eventually learned not to say everything that came to mind. Some were too good not to write down.

Monthly Archives: March 2006

TV is King!

You Don’t Get to Bake Your Own Slice of Cake

Life over 50!

Do it again! (Part Three)

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Do it again! (Part Two)

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Do it again! (Part One)

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