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Diagramming Sentences
Oct. 28th, 2015 09:14 amWhirlwind trip to Tburg so B could work on the sick computer.
No surprises there – the hard drive turned out to be completely fried, but I did get the files I wanted off it, and B put in a new hard drive. Easy fix. Next time, I’ll do it myself.
Trip was melancholy. Trees are completely bare throughout the Catskills, and in the absence of picturesque nature, the derelict little towns in Sullivan, Delaware, and Broome Counties with their histories of 19th century prosperity are disturbingly desolate. Imagine having to live in one of them!
When B and I were together, we had what I can only describe as a type of mental telepathy. His talent; not mine: He mind-melds with anyone he has a close bond with; I’ve only done it with him.
We’re good pals these days, but the telepathy is gone. What lingers is a kind of… stickiness. Not nostalgia. Something else. So that when I was driving home through Ellenville – an absolutely bleak little town with a huge prison and a Main Street filled with shuttered shops, some of them fronted by peeling Hebrew letters – I kept remembering the day B and I explored it together last spring; memories of insignificant details and random snippets of conversation kept burbling up.
Same thing happens with just about every place I’ve spent random time with B.
Got back in time for my lunch date with Leslie. Absolutely hideous restaurant, a buffet featuring a lot of artificial crab meat and probably the worst salmon I’ve ever eaten. “This is pretty good, isn’t it?” Leslie asked. “I mean for this kind of place.”
Leslie has this combination of cockiness and gallantry that’s immeasurably touching. In the month since I last saw him, his dog had died – dropped dead suddenly with no warning – and his wife had sunk much, much deeper into her dementia. He’s a small guy and not in particularly good shape, and so, can no longer maneuver her in and out of bed without assistance.
I mentioned – I think – that he and I have almost what amounts to a familial relationship. He went to Wingate High School in Brooklyn, and knew my demented Aunt Jane – had a crush on her, in fact. And his father and my grandfather were close friends.
Leslie’s tendency to want to lecture me about subjects I probably know more about than he does is immensely annoying, but I swallow that annoyance (for the most part) because, well… He’s clearly so lonely and in so over his head, yet he continues to fight the good fight. Continues to soldier.
He writes poetry. It’s not bad poetry. But, as I explained to him, I don’t read poetry.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Well, I think, maybe, I’m just too lazy. Good poetry demands work. Remember how when we were kids, they used to teach us grammar by making us diagram sentences on the blackboard? That was so much fun! They don’t do that anymore, do they?”
“No,” Leslie said.
“Pity. Well, anyway, I always feel like I have to do something like that when I’m reading poetry. It’s so dense. There’s so much subtext packed into poetry. And my head is already filled with the lyrics of bad rock ‘n’ roll songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There’s no room for anything else.
“Plus…”
“Plus?”
“Well. I think most contemporary poetry is a cop-out. There’s really nothing that distinguishes it from prose except the way it’s formatted on a page. I like poetry that rhymes.”
“I see,” said Leslie. He writes unrhymed poetry.”
“Like W.H. Auden is my favorite poet!” I said desperately. “You know. It’s like with anything. There are structural rules, and you have to master those structural rules before you can go rogue –“
“So, I’m thinking of getting a new dog,” said Leslie. “Maybe a Jack Russell terrier.”
The trip to Ithaca set me waaaaaay back on revenue generating goals, but when I finally got back to the casa last night, I was ghastly ill. It’s not just that I don’t like artificial crab meat; there’s something in it that physically makes me ill. So I watched multiple episodes of Dead Like Me on Hulu instead. Probably the best TV show in the history of television on this planet.
No surprises there – the hard drive turned out to be completely fried, but I did get the files I wanted off it, and B put in a new hard drive. Easy fix. Next time, I’ll do it myself.
Trip was melancholy. Trees are completely bare throughout the Catskills, and in the absence of picturesque nature, the derelict little towns in Sullivan, Delaware, and Broome Counties with their histories of 19th century prosperity are disturbingly desolate. Imagine having to live in one of them!
When B and I were together, we had what I can only describe as a type of mental telepathy. His talent; not mine: He mind-melds with anyone he has a close bond with; I’ve only done it with him.
We’re good pals these days, but the telepathy is gone. What lingers is a kind of… stickiness. Not nostalgia. Something else. So that when I was driving home through Ellenville – an absolutely bleak little town with a huge prison and a Main Street filled with shuttered shops, some of them fronted by peeling Hebrew letters – I kept remembering the day B and I explored it together last spring; memories of insignificant details and random snippets of conversation kept burbling up.
Same thing happens with just about every place I’ve spent random time with B.
Got back in time for my lunch date with Leslie. Absolutely hideous restaurant, a buffet featuring a lot of artificial crab meat and probably the worst salmon I’ve ever eaten. “This is pretty good, isn’t it?” Leslie asked. “I mean for this kind of place.”
Leslie has this combination of cockiness and gallantry that’s immeasurably touching. In the month since I last saw him, his dog had died – dropped dead suddenly with no warning – and his wife had sunk much, much deeper into her dementia. He’s a small guy and not in particularly good shape, and so, can no longer maneuver her in and out of bed without assistance.
I mentioned – I think – that he and I have almost what amounts to a familial relationship. He went to Wingate High School in Brooklyn, and knew my demented Aunt Jane – had a crush on her, in fact. And his father and my grandfather were close friends.
Leslie’s tendency to want to lecture me about subjects I probably know more about than he does is immensely annoying, but I swallow that annoyance (for the most part) because, well… He’s clearly so lonely and in so over his head, yet he continues to fight the good fight. Continues to soldier.
He writes poetry. It’s not bad poetry. But, as I explained to him, I don’t read poetry.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Well, I think, maybe, I’m just too lazy. Good poetry demands work. Remember how when we were kids, they used to teach us grammar by making us diagram sentences on the blackboard? That was so much fun! They don’t do that anymore, do they?”
“No,” Leslie said.
“Pity. Well, anyway, I always feel like I have to do something like that when I’m reading poetry. It’s so dense. There’s so much subtext packed into poetry. And my head is already filled with the lyrics of bad rock ‘n’ roll songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There’s no room for anything else.
“Plus…”
“Plus?”
“Well. I think most contemporary poetry is a cop-out. There’s really nothing that distinguishes it from prose except the way it’s formatted on a page. I like poetry that rhymes.”
“I see,” said Leslie. He writes unrhymed poetry.”
“Like W.H. Auden is my favorite poet!” I said desperately. “You know. It’s like with anything. There are structural rules, and you have to master those structural rules before you can go rogue –“
“So, I’m thinking of getting a new dog,” said Leslie. “Maybe a Jack Russell terrier.”
The trip to Ithaca set me waaaaaay back on revenue generating goals, but when I finally got back to the casa last night, I was ghastly ill. It’s not just that I don’t like artificial crab meat; there’s something in it that physically makes me ill. So I watched multiple episodes of Dead Like Me on Hulu instead. Probably the best TV show in the history of television on this planet.
