The Crisis That Was Christmas

...was no such thing here. The Christmas 2012 After-Action Report.

I’m still reeling from yesterday’s warm and easy—and even productive!—Christmas Day. Given our negative cash-flow situation, anxieties among all of us in the family where we’re going next (both children are on the brink of young adulthood), we had no right to be mildly amused, let alone jolly. We made it happen anyway.

Recycling our gift boxes - by
putting them away for another year!

It helped that we stayed home, kept the gifts reasonable, and made up our minds to enjoy ourselves regardless. We’re not homeless. We’re not gunshot, sick, dying of cancer, etc. So far, so good. The furnace works, and we’re running it. There’s ham and sweet potato casserole with monster marshmallows on top; cranberries cooked with half an orange and regular mashed potatoes with gravy on the stove. No one’s going hungry.

[Sidebar: I am astonished at my good fortune for being married to a woman who knows how to shop, knows how to cook, and likes to cook. There’s no perfume like the smell of holiday cooking in the home.]

To all of my readers, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I’ve got one down and a good head start on the next. Here’s wishing you all the best with yours.

Postscript from the Crypt: Amy Winehouse’s Sad Remains

Amy Winehouse, Lioness: Hidden Treasures

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Amy was two albums and done; this is not the third album we were looking for. Download tracks 8, 9 and 10 as worthy bonus tracks to those collections. The rest—including the much ballyhooed duet with Tony Bennett—is overproduced, out-of-character schmaltz, or, as in the case of that much ballyhooed duet, just a subpar song.

____________________________________

Apparently, one of the tragedies of Amy Winehouse’s life and career is that she didn’t record much. Well over half a decade since Winehouse’s release of Back to Black there were only a handful of finished songs for a third album. As these songs are nowhere near the level of material that made people like me look past the photos of Winehouse drunk/stoned and held up for laughs on BBC America’s The Graham Norton Show, those songs should have ended up as bonus tracks for the anniversary release of a much better album.


The first track is particularly telling. Winehouse should absolutely slay a song like “Our Day Will Come,” but once I heard that awful, ill-timed, and flat unnecessary reggae guitar scraping in the background I wanted to break that guitar over the producer’s head. 


A lot of the trouble with this album is the badly mixed, scattershot arrangements. For many agonizing tracks it sounds as if her producer wants to make her into some kind of Andy Williams-esque crooner, complete with those horrible, overwhelming background choirs enjoyed only by people of a very narrow demographic, i.e., really, really old. Not wise, kindly, been-around-the-block old. Obnoxious, stupid, ugly-trousers-pulled-to-the-chin old.

Ironically, Winehouse’s genius was in synthesizing the old and new in ways you’d never expect to work. I’m talking slow, snarling Billie Holliday 1940s lounge sass mashed with 1960s British pop horn arrangements laid over that shuffle-shuffle-THOOM! beat we all know from driving in town among the happy citizens of Hip-Hop Nation. It’s not until tracks 8 through 10 that we finally get a taste of that—and it was all I could do not to skip Winehouse’s terrible reading of Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” let alone eject the disc and throw it the window. Then there’s the weak tea that is “The Girl From Ipanema,” another horribly arranged and mixed song she should have owned. 


It turns out that, of these three most listenable songs, two are from the time of her first album, Frank. “Half Time” features Winehouse and her acoustic guitar; no lush arrangements here. Although it name-dropped Frank Sinatra and was technically the song the album was named for the track was deemed not quite good enough. Given the amazing stuff on Frank—in my opinion, a much better album than Back to Black —I can understand. On this dog’s breakfast of scraps from the cutting room floor, though, it’s welcome relief. 


According to the liner notes the haunting “Wake Up Alone” was the first track recorded for the Back to Black sessions, and all in one take. “Best Friends, Right?” was reportedly a show opener from Winehouse’s Frank days, and it has the sharp wit and clever rhymes that made me fall in love with this singer in the first place. I recommend their download, but once you hear these songs you in the context of the albums they were originally left off of, you understand why they were left off.

Yes, Amy Winehouse was a hot mess. I don’t think we were supposed to notice but it’s all there in the photos included in the CD booklet. In at least one she’s appears so emaciated one wonders why no one called an intervention for bulimia. Her signature unkempt beeehive, her ragged couture and tattoos look laughably out of place in some photos, especially outside in broad daylight, even more so on a Caribbean beach. Amy Winehouse was a one-of-a-kind creature specific to a very particular time and place: ‘round about midnight in the booziest, smokiest, stankiest hole-in-wall gin joint with a stage.

Seven p.m. on a bright Vegas stage surrounded by old people farting out the remains of the all-you-eat seafood buffet simply won’t do it. Don’t get me wrong, I respect Tony Bennett even if his songs or style don’t appeal to me. Besides, no one could make this crap sound good. “Body and Soul” is supposed to be a 1930s jazz standard but I can’t think of anyone who did their careers any favors singing these tin-foil on the teeth lyrics:

My heart is sad and lonely,

For you I sigh, for you, dear, only

Then Winehouse sings, and her signature rasp is gone. Was this the producer’s doing, or was Winehouse toning down her tough-girl smokers voice to gel with Bennett’s smooth croon? Whatever the reason, Winehouse doesn’t sound like Amy Winehouse. Just some baffled chick trying to make the most of a lame “standard” with Tony Bennett.


So it’s settled, then. There will be no third album. Frank and Back to Black will have to do. Still, what albums!


As far as posthumous releases go, let’s hope it’s one and done. The poor child has suffered enough. So have we.

Nymphomagic Electroshock

The ice cracks and weeps

black running veins in the road

and it’s warmer, sure,

but this is the worst

time in Alaska

because

the melt-off will take

weeks, maybe

until the end of

May to clear out

from the yard and

meanwhile

October’s dogshit emerges

from the gray stink of

April meltwater and damned

if it isn’t just dirty-ugly, the

dirty ice, dirty snow

and what grass that

shows is as

brown as the

dogshit not one of these

stupid moose-humpers feels

obliged to pick up

when they walk their

dogs

and it was at this time of

year called “Breakup” (no shit) that

I was feeling every second of my

41 years walking out to

get the mail and

I looked

down

the street and

there was this

blonde child

of about

18 or so

her blonde hair

flowing over

the collar of her

puffy blue jacket like

molten life everlasting

when saw me 
seeing her she

waved and

smiled so large
her teeth 
smiled with her

and

most unnerving

of all was
the creeping
feeling

she meant it.

Throughout the

long breakup season

I treasured her

starshine slap

letting it

sustain me though a

fitful drowse of summer

and the sad breakaway from

Alaska that happened that

Fall, when I drove

my family across Alaska

into Canada, through forest

and city and canyon and

settled for a while across

the sound from Seattle, among

some of the most hideous and

warped humanoids I ever

saw in a climate that

was too bleak to be

believed.

It was two months longer

than the longest year before the

Navy ordered us cross-

country to Virginia.

It was in Sioux Falls, South

Dakota, a frozen gray fogbound

sinus of a morning after a day of

winding around the Black Hills and

Mount Rushmore and a sunset chase on

the prairie with my wife and children by

the rest stop before the long straight

deadly dull night drive into a

cigarette-stenched hotel room. 

We were so glad to be out

of our smelly hotel room for a

free waffle breakfast even though

it looked as if we’d have to fit

ourselves in among a girl’s

high school basketball team on

their way to play a game in

Nebraska

a long way south but

that’s what they do here.

No, this wasn’t at all like

the last time, this time the

smile-blast was buckshot with

meaning as I

motioned her to

go on ahead of me to

the waffle iron and

up went the corners

of an otherwise

undistinguished mouth

and I stood 
caught

dazzled, as she

told me without

speaking “It’s all

right, Daddy, I’m still

waking up but for

this I love you so

very much and

so I grant you

this

“while denying the

vampiric old

slug within you

which would like 
nothing more than 
to rub its soft naked 
decay against my taut 
springtime warmth for 
the sake of affirming 
its value as something
which somehow hasn’t 
died yet, instead

“I affirm and

celebrate the

innocence you so

mistakenly mourn for

gone in everyone, 
especially older teenage 
girls like me and even

(believe it!) yourself.”

and with the

revealing light of

her smile, a wild

fresh wind

blowing, as

the Great

Bukowski

so aptly put it,

breathing life

into so many things

I didn’t know

still breathed

though now I

wonder, did I

have to go all

the way to Alaska and

South Dakota to

experience this or was

it just a matter of

being such a

cranky old Daddy in

form, appearance and

(sometimes) function that

these rare Girls

couldn’t help but

respond?

I never knew such

guileless and sweet-for

sweet’s sake Girls growing

up in South Carolina, they

were as much out for

something as I was,

circling predators competing

for the biggest chunks of meat

from one another

and I presumed that

was the way it was

everywhere

from Mobile to

New York City I saw

nothing so much as

to suggest an

alternative

so I count myself

lucky for being

where I was and

for what I have

beheld

even if I sometimes 
think that the good 
things that keep you 
going are sometimes 
the worst

enabling more

useless struggle against

a decidedly unpleasant

inevitable, still

years after that

first smile among the

rotting ice and  

thawing turds and

thousands of

miles removed from

the basketball

player standing

out amongst her

blandly chattering

teammates with a

singular flex of

Olympian

heart

I still get a

lift from these

visions and (oh

hell yes) I

live for the

possibility

of one

more

maybe from the

pretty young

nurse as I lie

abed

right before

the final

lights

out

I could die

richer than

God.

___________________________________________________________________
From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2004, 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

The Toughest Writers Against the Toughest Holiday

There are things even the bravest and best among us will not face. 

I don’t care how tough you are.

It’s big enough to hurt you.

He had a soft spot for cats, so there’s that.

Consider Charles Bukowski. The last of the Great American poets along the lines, if not the precise subject matter, of Robinson Jeffers and James Dickey, Bukowski is probably best known today for writing the loosely autobiographical 1987 movie Barfly. Among his vast body of work—thousands of pages of poems, stories and essays—Bukowski wrote about his Depression-era childhood and his abusive father. He wrote about discovering alcohol and the city library as avenues of physical and psychic escape. By way of describing the complete experience of Life As It Is Lived, Bukowski made passing mentions of his bowel movements and how he would invariably vomit before reading his poetry before audiences.

The one subject he avoided was Christmas.

Bukowski recalled his father beating him with a razor strop in the bathroom doorway. He spoke of being chased over fences by bullies. He wrote of the rains that kept everyone indoors for days at a time in the spring.

Never once does Bukowski recall a boy’s happy anticipation built from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve.

Amid Bukowski’s many thousands of pages you will find one of two passing complaints about the “forced jollity” of Christmas. Bukowski devoted all of one poem to an adult memory of writing with the radio on during Christmas Eve, the sound of an ambulance signifying how life’s usual tragedies didn’t stop for O Holy Night. There are a couple of other adult memories that show up in his novel Women.

Growing up poor and abused, this is just another party you
weren’t invited to.

Yet for all of Bukowski’s memories of childhood—from appetite-killing family dinners to his father’s gratuitous alpha-dog violence against him and his mother, from having the severe acne on his teenage face drilled to the poverty he saw warping the families of other children he knew in 1930s Los Angeles—never once does Bukowski recall opening presents on Christmas morning. As unflinching as Bukowski was in describing the most hateful and cringe-inducing scenes he’d endured throughout his life, he wasn’t going anywhere near those memories.

No Red Ryder BB guns for Charles Bukowski.

For that matter, no Christmas sweaters for Hemingway. His mother was stone crazy and one can imagine what A Very Hemingway Christmas with her was like. Imagine is all you can do, because among Hemingway’s thousands of pages, encompassing locales from Spain to Africa, from Italy to Cuba, I cannot recall once reading a description of a Hemingway character participating in a Christmas scene.

There are more Great American Cat People Writers than there
are those who spare any space at all for Christmas.

Of course, he might just have found the whole thing beneath him. Unmanly, even, the domain of children not old enough to drink liquor for breakfast and fish for trout. Certainly not for men who speak abruptly with their women and think often about the war.

I’m only speculating, of course. Honestly, it’s not like I expect everyone to burst out singing “Joy to the World” or anything like that.

My contention is that Christmas season involves one full month, maybe more, depending upon how Thanksgiving lines up in November. It is the major touchstone for the entire year, the penultimate celebration before New Year’s Eve and the start of New Things. You can’t sleep through it and pretend it isn’t happening. Christmas commands everyone’s attention—except America’s best writers. Even the British seemed to give up on it after Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Of course, there are the complainers. They can be fun to read, and why not? The best of them recognize the same things we do: the syrupy-sticky-awful music running ad nauseam in the stores immediately after Halloween, the crass commercialism, etc.

There’s a lot to hate about Christmas the way it is prosecuted in these United States. The shameless buy-something-because-fourth-quarter-earnings-drive-the-economy message we get from our “news” media, for one. I’m not arguing any of that.

In regards to Bukowski and others whose childhoods are something best put behind them, I also understand how Christmas is ruined for some people. I’m just saying there’s no reason to throw Christmas out with the filthy bathwater of our pasts.

I say these things as someone who has had Christmas ruined for him at age seventeen, who wasted the seasons throughout his 20s with nothing more than a bottle of gin and a bud of weed to get him through, I can bear witness: Christmas cleans up real nice once you decide you’re tired of getting beaten up by it.

This is not surrender. This is you declaring a different level of engagement. One that requires another kind of fight from you.

There is no better answer for a bad childhood, or against the hateful sham our Mammon-worshipping culture has made of the season than to create a Christmas that is good and true. A Christmas that reflects who we are and what we aspire to do. Or should aspire to do, assuming aspiration itself isn’t as dead for you as Christmas.

If it is, that’s okay. It’s all part of the package. A gift bigger than any box, yet accessible to all who are open to receive it.

Build your own Christmas. Let the right ghosts in.

The Post-Apocalypse as Process: Reviewing EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart

EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart

Paperback, 368 pp. With an Introduction by Connie Willis,
Del Rey 2006. (Originally published 1949)

Cover of original Random House 1949 edition.
Love, love, love that old pulp paperback cover art
even if it doesn’t match up with the text inside,
which it most certainly doesn’t here.

I’ve been a fan of post-apocalypse fiction since childhood so it surprised me to discover this 1949 novel at this late date. Given its age I note that many have dared call it “classic,” though that tends to bring me back to the question as to why I hadn’t heard of the book until now.  

Granted, George R. Stewart‘s Earth Abides isn’t perfect, and the negative reviews on Amazon raise strong points I’ll need to address as I go along. For now I wish to invite you, Dear Reader, to bask in the amazing outside-the-box thinking that produces an End of the World scenario so unlike the one expected by a reading public barely four years removed from the radioactive fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What takes down humanity is neither fire nor ice, but disease.

Sadly, this is an original conceit only in the context of Harry S. Truman’s post-atomic America. In 1912 Jack London wrote a story called “The Scarlet Plague,“ in which a mysterious disease wipes out 99% of humanity, leaving everyone else to form tribes by way of survival.


Having re-read “The Scarlet Plague” I also can’t help feeling that London had the clearer view, that the survivors and their descendants will find themselves ruled by the most ruthless and clever of the remaining alpha males, and that technology will be rapidly re-adopted once those alphas realize how technology (in this case, gunpowder) can be used to terrorize and subjugate other tribes. 

George R. Stewart, however, as befits a man who wrote notable books about the life-cycles of storms and wildfires, is fascinated by Process. It is Stewart’s fascination, and the thinking he applies to it, that makes Earth Abides such an absorbing and worthwhile read. 


The story opens with a brief, italicized passage fulfilling the role of Greek chorus, filling in the metaphorical forest for the reader that our main character can’t see for his own personal and physical limitations. In this case it’s the so-classic-it’s-clichéd Final Broadcast from the U.S. government letting us know that It’s Over. The feds are telling the surviving military personnel to report to the authorities in the states they’re in but it’s a reasonable (and accurate) assumption that there are no more state governments, and no remaining military to report.


There’s no time to dwell on this though because right after that our main character introduces himself while getting bitten by a rattlesnake on a morning hike.

Our man Isherwood Williams, hereafter known as “Ish,” is a graduate student of anthropology who’s holed up in a cabin in the woods while what Ish later calls The Great Disaster burns through the human population of Earth. Lest you think it’s the cabin in the woods trope that saves our hero, it’s made clear that the virus is airborne and that even the most isolated pockets of humanity are affected. In what is probably the lamest narrative device Stewart employs, it is the rattlesnake bite that saves Ish, while natural immunity saves the few others he meets later. Ish passes the time in a convenient venom-vs.-mystery-plague delirium while civilization sickens and dies.


Speaking of narrative devices, Stewart’s handling of them in this novel are what puts Earth Abides above a lot of novels, and not just those of post-apocalyptic flavor. If the rattlesnake venom as plague-denier is eye-rollingly cheesetastic, Stewart’s other tricks to move the narrative along are inspired. For instance, a lesser writer (i.e., every other writer) would have made much of the rattlesnake bite and used it to complicate the part at every dull turn a complication seemed called for. That does not happen here. Ish recovers, and though the bite is mentioned every now and again, it’s not a factor in plot development.

The same goes for Ish’s awakening, his discovery of the disaster, and subsequent road trip across America to seek out survivors. A road trip across America, with maybe one stop to work out a major conflict with an antagonist and his tribe, would have formed the entire narrative arc of most books. Although Stewart took at least three cross-country road trips in the pre-Interstate days, the first in 1924 when such adventures were an almost unimaginable novelty, he doesn’t let Ish linger over as the journey as much as you would expect. Ish drives out from his San Francisco bay area digs, meets some people, gets as far as New York City, and comes back, meeting a few more people along the way. Some thought is given to the changes in the landscape, to the chances of various survivors he meets, to the evolving ecology now that man’s domesticated animals are loose on the land and the other animals are free from the threat of the gun. 


Even the botany of de-populated America is considered. I found these passages engrossing, but a common gripe in other reviews of Earth Abides is the time spent on Ish’s observations of the land and what kind of people it will take to build a new civilization as opposed to merely surviving. Fair enough: if you’re into the disaster-as-backdrop-for-compelling-human-drama trope that cripples current genre television offerings like The Walking Dead and Falling Skies, then you will not like Earth Abides. Stewart brings you as much human drama as he feels he must, but again, the fascination with this book is Stewart’s own fascination with the Process: how the way things are might become the way things will be once a new variable is injected into the equation — or something else is taken away.

A lot happens in these 345 pages. Characters go and come, even those you expect to be around forever, but the ever-expanding tribe of Ish and Em, as with the Earth, abideth. There are setbacks. Still, more incidents that would blossom into page-killing melodrama in other books are resolved with breathtaking efficiency. Stewart’s mastery of avoiding such rabbit holes was what impressed me more than anything else in the book, more than Stewart’s open scorn of reactionary politics and superstition.


We get more of the italicized Greek chorus, though those passages rarely go on for more than a page, if that much. Years go by. We see the roads disappear beneath the creeping plants. We see the houses crumble from disrepair. We see Process. I found it refreshing that Ish and his crew often talk about things yet never get around to doing them—natural human inertia is taken into account in a way I’ve never seen before in novels.


Still, there’s plenty to argue with. As some reviewers have pointed out, canned goods would spoil quicker than one thinks, and the gasoline would be useless well before 20 years is up. Also, Ish and Em’s people are downright lazy. I say this as the laziest person I know—even I would be willing to sacrifice a day or three at a time if it meant keeping the water and electricity running.

I was also puzzled and disappointed by the way the Tribe handled education among their young people. Despite the premium Ish places on imagination and vision it doesn’t occur to Ish to adapt his curriculum and the way it is taught to the needs of the children of a post-apocalyptic society. I can’t help wondering if this, along with the letting-go of indoor plumbing and electric light, wasn’t deliberately serving Stewart’s need to see humanity go back to a simpler, quieter, more pastoral state, the tribes too spread out to engender conflict and war.

Again, I can’t help thinking that Jack London understood human nature better. A tribe like Ish and Em’s would be a stark exception, and in grave danger of the rule.

Yet for all of the faults which become more and more apparent as I think through what I just read, I’m still pleased to see such a mind as Stewart’s at work. Earth Abides is not a perfect post-apocalypse novel but it’s a fine book nonetheless. 


A postscript: Stewart cites the cause of his xenocidal catastrophe as the natural result of a population expanding into its tipping point—and tipping. Birds do it, bees do it, we all do it until a corrective plague or famine puts the populations back to barely viable numbers. Sometimes it means eventual and outright extinction. We see this in nature. It’s part of the Process.

There were 2.4 billion humans on the planet in 1950, the year after Earth Abides was first published. In 2011 we have an estimated 7 billion, with more and more coming every day.


Just sayin’.