What’s Shelly Winters to Him or He to Shelly Winters?

[mallorys_camera]

Haley ran across the best received of Annie’s novels on one of the bookshelves in the Spruce Street house. Texted us cover photos.

Last time I was at the Spruce Street house was when Ichabod graduated from law school, and I was struck then by how shabby it had become. A bit of a shock, that. And sad.

I remember the house from my wild youth in Berkeley as the citadel on the hill, filled with exotic fixtures like functioning dishwashers and plates that were part of a china pattern. A bohemian house, of course—Rik lived there. The arrangement was very unconventional for those times: Rik had a bedroom; Janet, the second wife, had a bedroom; Katherine had a bedroom. They seemed to coexist more as roommates than as a married couple and their child, which at the time, I thought was very liberated and wonderful, though now I’m inclined to see it as dysfunctional.

Rikky was a voracious reader! Am I misremembering, or was one of the glories of the Spruce Street house an enormous set of built-in bookshelves? Rik read very widely on a broad assortment of topics. The bookshelves contained hundreds of books, and every couple of weeks or so when I got bored with nonstop sex and drugs and partying, I would take a book break and spend 24 hours curled up on the brown velvet couch in the living room at the front of the house, deep in the pages of Future Shock, Parkinson’s Law, or T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, glancing up every now and then to enjoy the view of the Bay Bridge glittering against the backdrop of the wide, blue San Francisco Bay.

I suppose Rik never intended to die on Orcas Island, but die there, he did. He and Janet had made fewer and fewer trips back to Berkeley once they built their house on Orcas, though they did come back a few times—I remember once dispatching Ichabod there—emergency!—upon Janet’s impassioned plea when Rik was becoming paranoid and agitated. This was after the dementia had set in. Janet couldn’t control him.

Janet never went back to that house after Rik died. She lives very happily in Orcas today where she is something of a local luminary, active in environmental causes.

But she didn’t sell the Spruce Street house either. Which I always thought was kinda weird, given that historic brownshingle + location, location, location = low six figures at the very least. Nor did she clean it out: Rik’s books are still on his shelves, his matched china set still in the kitchen cupboards. I wouldn’t be surprised if his clothes are still hanging in his closet. I don’t know whether the dishwasher still works.

I suppose this is evidence of how utterly miserable Rik had made Janet. At one time, she had been his student, so you know—Daddy issues. And then she was supplanted in his affections by her own daughter.

She must have confided in me at least once because I have a distinct memory of walking down Spruce Street with her, telling her bluntly, “You should really leave him, Janet.”

That was me in those days. Blunt!

I can remember the exact slant of the light through the trees and also the look she gave me then. Sideways through slitted eyes.

My true loyalties lay elsewhere, of course.

We did not have that conversation more than once.

But anyway. There was Annie’s novel on those probably-misremembered built-in bookshelves.

###

“Did you read it?” I asked Haley.

We were doing Family Zoom.

In one of the Zoom windows, Annie herself—for whom I’d first organized the Zoom some weeks ago—sat silently rocking back and forth, a vacant look upon her face.

“Well. I looked at it,” Haley said.

“It’s a very good novel,” I said. “Extremely well-written, well observed. Poignant.”

“You were a stripper, Ga?” Haley asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with sex work,” said Ichabod primly.

Alicia was rolling her eyes.

“Not a stripper,” I said. “A topless dancer. A related but different beast. Did you not know your grandmother was a writer?”

“I kinda knew.”

“That novel is what bought the house on Glenhaven Road,” I said. “Your grandmother paid for it out of the advance and royalties she made off that novel. You didn’t know that?”

Haley’s pretty, petulant face grew momentarily more petulant. Was that the ghost of an eye roll? Why should I know that? I could practically hear her thinking.

And indeed, why should she?

When I was her age, I wasn’t interested in old people, either. They didn’t know anything about the cultural references that were my bible, they dressed weird, and let’s face it: They smelled funny. Some musty whiff of broken body parts and decay rising from them even at their squeaky-cleanest.

“And the novel continued to pay off over the years,” I said. “It got optioned by Hollywood several times.”

“Shelly Winters,” Annie said suddenly.

“What?” asked Haley.

“Shelly Winters optioned it. And thank you, Patty. That was such a kind thing to say. Poignant.”

I shook my head. “It’s just the facts, Annie. It’s a good novel, and I’m not known for my kindness.”

“Who’s Shelly Winters?” asked Haley.

I can’t even describe the epiphany that hit me then.

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?

These cultural artifacts that are our currency—we spend our entire lives collecting them, storing them up, hoarding them greedily, but really, they all have an expiration date of 30 years max, which makes them absolutely valueless as a medium for any kind of real exchange.

They are wampum.

All that babble. Shelly Winters is meaningless, Kim Kardashian is meaningless, Donald Trump is meaningless, because in 30 years, new archetypes will spring up from the kitchen midden of the collective unconscious to usurp our attention, and these names—gliding past one another in the slippery sequences of respective humans’ present tenses—will be no more important than momentary reflections ever are once a light source has shifted.

So, why pay attention to them in the first place?

For that one split second, I felt so, so close to the secret of how the universe works!

But that moment passed. Quickly.

And I turned back to Haley. “Shelly Winters was an actress in the 60s and 70s. She’s probably best known for playing the mother in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita—”

###

In other news, the exercise bike works well! I put in the entire first hour of the Nicole Kidman sob fest The Undoing on it. If I’m to believe the exercise bike’s AI, I burned 203 calories.

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

Trump's name, if nothing else, will make repeated appearances in history books, for those who read and study them.

This is an amazing story.

I am among those who love Orcas Island, I am only slightly reluctant to admit.

I had lost track of the idea of earning money in a profession that is lucrative enough to have the free time and bandwidth to do more personally meaningful things.

[mallorys_camera]

Orcas is wonderful!

Yeah, you're right about Trump's shelf life. 😊

[bleodswean]

A lovely, lovely post, P.

[mallorys_camera]

Why, thank you, my dear! 😊

[johnny9fingers]

Well, I guess we have Homer and the redactor to aim for in the cultural longevity stakes. Chaucer and Shakespeare for English speaking cultures. Virgil and Dante for those of your antecedents’ culture. France and Spain have their own greats: Cervantes, Montaigne, Racine, Voltaire... Germany has Schiller and Goethe.

But lasting more than a century is a bit difficult even if your work is brilliant.

Will Joyce outlast Tolkien in this culture? I’d say it unlikely.

In the long run we are all Ozymandias. As is all human effort. So, as for me, I celebrate the mayfly; given that the moment of the yew tree and the rose are one.

[mallorys_camera]

Oh, didn't you know? Woke culture doesn't like The Odyssey. 😊

https://newrepublic.com/article/145138/people-just-dont-like-odyssey

I'm not sure about Tolkein's longevity. Lord of the Rings gets its punch from weaving together various Manichean i.e. very Western mythic strains. But I'm fairly certain that the various Chinese cultural traditions are going to supplant Western cultural traditions within the next few decades, which will make all Western classics irrelevant and uninteresting.

[johnny9fingers]

Not sure whether Prof T will translate that badly into a dominant Chinese culture. Manichaeism runs deep through all human societies. And Prof T has dragons. But even if not so I guess his "fucking elves" will outlast Joyce; and Bloomsday will become the tourist equivalent of going to church to make a show of piety for the neighbours - or is it that already?

I don't care if folk don't like the Odyssey. I do. I can't read the original, alas. My godfather was the only man I knew who read Greek for pleasure; and the also the only man I knew who wrote his diary in Attic. (But then again he was top scholar of his year at Winchester, despite being a commoner; and got an exhibition to Trinity.)

Ergo, I make do with translations. I have many different ones. Quite fond of Fagles; but Logue's 1960's recasting is the English version I prefer, just for the way he imparts meaning to words under stress to breaking. Also he gets the declamatory aspect of it all rather well. (And influenced Fagles too IIRC.)

The ending to Logues translation of Book XVI is burned into my memory.

Three times Patroclus climbed Troy's wall.
Three times his fingers scraped the parapet,
Three times, and every time he tried it on
The smiling Mousegod flicked him back.
But when he came a fourth last time,
The smile was gone.
Instead, from parapet to plain, to beach-head on,
Across the rucked, sunstruck Aegean, the Mousegod's voice,
Loud as ten thousand crying together,
Cried:
"Greek,
Get back where you belong"
So loud
Even the Yellow Judges giving law
Half-way across the world's circumference, paused:

"Get back where you belong! Troy
will fall in God's good time, But
not to you!"
It was Patroclus' turn to run, wide-armed
Staring into the fight, and desperate to hide

(To blind that voice) to hide
Among the stainless blades.

And as he ran
Apollo dressed as Priam's brother stood
Above the Skean Gate, and strolled
With Hector for a while, and took his arm,
And mentioning the ways of duty, courage, love,
And other perishable joys infecting men,
Dissolved his cowardice with promises,
Observe the scene:
They stand like relatives; the man, the God,
Chatting together on the parapet
That spans the Gate.
The elder points. The other nods. And the plumes nod
Over them both. Patroclus cannot see
The Uncle’s finger leading Hector's eye
Towards his flesh,
Nor can he hear Apollo whispering:
"Achilles’ heart will break..." And neither man
Thinks that a God discuses mortals with a mortal.

Patroclus fought like dreaming:
His head thrown back, his mouth-wide as a shrieking mask-
Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind
And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,
To lock them round his waist, red water, washed against his chest,
To lay tired necks against his sword like birds.
—Is it a God? Divine? Needing no tenderness?-
Yet instantly they touch, he butts them,
Cuts them back:
- Kill them!
My sweet Patroclus,
- Kill them!
As many as you can,
For
Coming behind you through the dust you felt
—What was it?—felt creation part, and then




Apollo





Who had been patient with you,

Struck.

His hand came from the East,
And in His wrist lay all eternity;
And every atom of His mythic weight
Was poised between His fist and bent left leg,
Your eyes lurched out. Achilles’ helmet rang
Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of Trojan horses,
And you were footless… staggering… amazed...
Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,
Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes,
The noise—like weirs heard far away –
Dabbling your astounded fingers
In the vomit on your chest.
And all the Trojans lay and stared at you;
Propped themselves up and stared at you;
Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
All of them lay and stared;
And one, a boy called Thackta, cast.
His javelin went through your calves,
Stitching your knees together, and you fell,
Not noticing the pain, and tried to crawl
Towards the fleet, and-even now-feeling
For Thackta’s ankle-ah!-and got it? No….
Not a boy's ankle that you got,
But Hector's,

Standing above you,
His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
Putting his spear through... ach, and saying:
"Why tears Patroclus?
Did you hope to melt Troy down
And make our women fetch the ingots home?
I can imagine it!
You and your marvellous Achilles;
Him with an upright finger, saying:
Don’t show your face again, Patroclus
Unless it’s red with Hector’s blood.”
And Patroclus,
Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
“Big mouth,
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A God, a boy, and last and least, a hero,
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles' face
With Death's voice coming out of it,"

Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand
Hector withdrew his spear and said:
"Perhaps.”

[mallorys_camera]

Manichaeism runs deep through all human societies.

Not so deep in Chinese society, I suspect. (Outside of its utility as a propaganda tool.). Confucius is revered even today, and Confucius emphasized the need for balance. 😊

[asakiyume]

Cultural wampum--I was thinking about a time recently when I was so thrilled and wanted to name-drop left, right, and center, but in order to do so I would have done so much explaining that in the end I realized the person was definitely more of a big deal to me than she would be to anyone else. Oh well!

Good on you for exercising through a movie. I ironed clothes while watching one. I probably burned about 23 calories during the whole 1 hour and 35 minutes.

[mallorys_camera]

(1) You don't need to burn calories. 😊

(2) If I don't exercise, I turn into a bitch on wheels. I doubt that you are capable of turning into a bitch on wheels. 😊

[smokingboot]

I think we're adding to the wampum all the time. We're not just story tellers, we are the stories.

Your post is fabulous. I am still looking for an unused version of Thunder La Boom!

[mallorys_camera]

Haven't read the novel recently, but I remember thinking she was heavily influenced by Richard Brautigan. So, if you like Brautigan, you'd like Thunder La Boom, and if you don't, you won't.