"Xmas Words," Roy Blount Jr.

Xmas Words
By Roy Blount Jr.

It is at this special time of the year, and especially of this extra-special year in particular, that we realize how urgent is our need to foster love and faith and brotherhood and —at any rate faith, and by that I mean consumer confidence. When Americans, of all people, are afflicted with what the singer-songwriter Roger Miller called “shellout falter”—a reluctance to spend—then the whole world is liable, as Mr. Miller put it so well in his song “Dang Me,” to “lack fourteen dollars having twenty-seven cents.”

Are we going to let it be said that all we had this Christmas to cheer was cheer itself? No! Let’s put the holly back in shopaholic, let’s get jingle-bullish. We owe it to ourselves, to the world, and to future generations. The more presents we spring for now, the lighter the tax burden is going to be down the line.

You notice how much more merrily that last sentence bounced along because I chose spring to express spending, instead of, say, plunge; and lighter instead of, say, less staggering. Words are important. So let’s say “bah, humbug” to b-words like bailout and bankrupt. Let’s digress from anything ending in -ession. Let’s entertain some new, upbeat holiday words.

Why not wake up tomorrow morning feeling consumptious? Rhymes with scrumptious, and approaches sumptuous. When we’re consumptious we’ve got that fire in the belly that’s burning a hole in our pocket. We’re going to be pumping bucks today, we’re going to open our hearts to goods and services, we’re going to take it upon ourselves to help America, and consequently the world, reconomize. In so doing, we can personalize what is just about the only appealing phrase regarding the economy that has emerged this year: each of us can be his or her own stimulus package.

The season of giving is upon us. Need that sound like such a threat? Let’s see if we can spruce up that venerable old word generous, which can be so cringe-inducing when we hear it spoken over the phone by a stranger calling in the interest of a charity. “I hope you will be as generous this year as last” puts us on the spot, so let’s spread generous out. I don’t think we want to go to heterogenerous, because people might think we’re talking about sex, and there will be plenty of time for that after we get our mercantile heat back on. (For this reason, even businesses whose appeal is essentially spicy should resist, for now, the temptation to send their customers illicitations.) But autogenerous, as in autobiographical, might remind us that giving unto others is also giving unto ourselves, especially if others give back unto us and therefore unto themselves, and we buy our presents at their store and vice-versa. Does auto- strike an ominous note? Let me just say that if each of us becomes a cargiver this Christmas, there will be a lot more shining faces this New Year’s in Detroit. And Japan.

Let us not shrink from taking a look at the word Christmas. It’s a fine old word and I for one would be loath to suggest that it has lost its edge entirely. But it doesn’t exactly sing. The only thing it rhymes with is isthmus, and that but loosely. How do you like the sound of Jingle Day? Says bells and sunshine, says catchy marketing, says plenty of change. The rhymes sell themselves: mingle, tingle, Kringle, Pringles, bling’ll, and hey, sleigh, pray, pay, hooray. We might even go a little more on-the-nose: Ka-chingleday.

And incidentally, when you take your tree down and put your ornaments away for next year (yes, of course there will be a next year, don’t even ask such a question), do you know the best way to protect those ornaments? By wrapping them in newspaper. Several sheets per ornament. Maybe a whole newspaper section per ornament. And magazines and books are good to put between wrapped ornaments for further protection. Not to knock the tissue-paper industry, but what has it ever done for, say, people who support themselves and their families (not to mention the Jingle Day puppies their families have been promised) by thinking up words?

From The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays by Michele Clark and Taylor Plimpton (Abrams Image, 2009).

Janine Pommy Vega (1942-2010): "The Last Watch"

The Last Watch

(from Poems to Fernando, 1968)

The monk's prayer sung bowed down in the dome
comes around ascending sound
calling far as the land reaches
Wakefulness now in the last watch —
Lord near us!
& churchbells toll no hour thrice….

dogs barking endlessly nightlong, a sign
of the ending of days, are lain down in stillness;
From my threshold of silence candlelighted I listen
alone, the flourish of wind through the trees —

dawn of grey rose, expansion of morning.

Awake! lone bird at my window exulting
each morning just now pure voice of clear water
over scales sings his varying plainchant,
Occasional cock’s crow of distance immersed
in his heraldry clear as the altitude of bells

: Delight of the First Day sings Origin’s creature
Joy blessed with creation, and the reigning of light!
A shower of thistlefall tongue could not tell
of this river I listen to, silver and lilting
and Swiftly Gone; merged beneath morning
he returns to his home unseen among fountains.

From flickering room, grey shades of the window
I come into clarity, deep blue beginning
the sky again round in the East, and extending
the breadth of horizon/ scarlet Ariel hearth until sunrise.

Dawn waiting under the branches,
Morning leaps out of my eye!
Celestial candles coinciding at sunrise!
Red-Golden the tolling of bells rolls over me!
Sounds falling in one enormous voice, foretelling
the day by its chorus, expanding horizons onto
heaven: for empty of thee the psalm perishes.



Word has come that Ms. Vega passed away yesterday, December 23. Here is a brief biography from her website: Janine Pommy Vega is the author of eighteen books and chapbooks since 1968. The latest is The Green Piano, (Godine, 2005). Her first CD, Across the Table, recorded in Woodstock, and from live performances in Italy and Bosnia, came out in November, 2007. An Italian translation of her travel book Tracking the Serpent (Sulle tracce del serpente, Nutrimenti, Rome) was published in July 2007. Her translations from Spanish of migrant workers' poems, Estamos Aquí, came out from Bowery Books in 2007. Vega performs with music and solo, in English and Spanish, in international poetry festivals, museums, prisons, universities, cafes, nightclubs, and migrant workers' camps in South America, North America and Europe. She is the Director of Incisions/Arts, an organization of writers working with people behind bars, and has taught inside prisons for more than twenty-five years. She currently teaches a course in poetics for Bard Prison Initiative. She has worked as well in creative writing programs in public schools, elementary through high school-all grades for over twenty years.

"A is for Armageddon": Happy holidays!

The end is nigh -- the happiest time of the year!

Or so the holiday bookends of December 25 and January 1 are merchandized, pitched, advertised, and wrung (both "-out," after the Christmas wrapping is thrown away, and by New Years, with our party hats askew, back "-in"). What better time to think about the end of days? Humans have thrilled and terrified themselves fantasizing about an event which few of them will ever be unlucky enough to see, although mankind threatens every so often to come tantalizingly close: war, plague, fear, disease, and sheer human nature are capable of capsizing even the warmest holiday thought of good will toward men.

And then there's the ever-threatening volatility of nature itself: the butterfly sneeze in the forest that leads to ultimate planetary destruction. It's a wonder that most of us don't spend the next ten days trembling in bed with the covers pulled securely above our heads. As the great philosopher Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan once phrased our eternal, daily doubts about the human dilemma, do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

A is for Armageddon: An Illustrated Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World As We Know It (Harper Books), just released in paperback, is a funny, nervous laugh at the end of days -- whenever and however it should occur. The eternal, open-ended speculation on ultimate doom-and-gloom, as both religious and secular soothsayers have always emphasized, is a game with a singular escape clause: it will happen to someone else before it ever happens to us....that is, if we heed the warning signs.

The book and its accompanying website, a "veritable panoply of impending doom," is a needed tonic to the never-ending round of mall-shopping and enforced jollity of the holiday season. Of course it's a cynic's cornucopia of unknowably bad things that will happen to good people -- and unsuspecting too -- which provides the chill. Those unlucky folks will not be us, likely, so pour yourself another nog and put another log on the Yule fire.

Part of a colorful periodic table of man's possible Doom

The author Richard Horne is an equal-opportunity doomsayer: Divine wrath is here (as expected) but one ought to be wary of animal flatulence as well. There are untold ways The End might arrive, and no matter how we prepare and contemplate ultimate Doom, it will still catch us off our guard; for those who like to quantify and identify such unknowables Horne provides a handy periodic table of possibilities. In any event, how can a reader know if it's the beginning of the end? The fully-interactive website offers the nervous and worried a glass-half-empty measure of your own Doom-monger status.

Horne is a kind of one-man-disaster band, fixated more on endings than beginnings. He's responsible as well for the list-making success of 101 Things to Do Before You Die. So it's expected that the ultimate end of the inexplicable, irrational human race is presented in all of its widescreen Technicolor glory: the end of the end, so to speak.

And if Horne is even half-right it will be a party with a real bang. At this annual festival season of self-congratulation -- we've made it through another year! -- there's always the realization that January bills are yet to come. Or as one wag put it, we should get down upon our knees and all be grateful that we're still on our feet.

However the reader celebrates the season, happy holidays. May the new year bring you all of what you really need, and most of what you really want!

Reynolds Price: reading for a cold and dark season

The approaching holiday weekend is, from a calendar view, the darkest and coldest of the year: the ultimate reason for an overstuffed and over-sleepy few days of excess and blissful forgetfulness. If any reading can be done at all, it better be on the light side of sugarplums and moral lessons from fictional characters named Ebenezer Scrooge, especially when staying awake past ten p.m. on any given holiday evening can be a mighty test of will. After a round of parties and gift-wrapping, the few days before Christmas seem to stretch out in early and never-ending darkness. It can be difficult to find reading that manages both to be both entertaining and illuminating in a dark season.

There is the work of Reynolds Price, however. Years ago I discovered Clear Pictures, his memoir of a North Carolina boyhood in the 1940s. Wit, sharp detail, youth observed as translucent as if it happened yesterday, and memories plucked up from the stream as by a hawk. Here he is describing his father's "welcome scourge" of practical jokes:

"From cradle to grave, Will's practical jokes were the welcome scourge of his friends, kin and in-laws. In that less analytical time, nobody asked if a concealed hostility was at work in his impenetrable disguises, ruses, forged letters and convincing crank-phonecalls. If there was veiled anger in his motive, then it seems realistic to see also what an imaginative and entertaining way he found to vent it -- our own home-theater, complete with regular catharsis. No one was ever so much as bruised; and no one ever expressed resentment, neither on the spot nor in after years. Those were tougher spirits in general then, not trained to expect kid gloves, day or night.

... Everyone was skittishly resigned to a turn as the object of one of Will's long-planned hoaxes. What removed all whiff of cruelty was his clear intention to amuse and everyone's delighted response, even the victims', and the fact that the victims promptly began to plot a turnabout, if he or she had the wits to catch Will unawares. In that crew of expert comedians, some did."

"Those were tougher spirits then": whatever nostalgia remains for mid-twentieth-century America from a childhood in the South, Price is bluntly honest about its bleaker aspects: there was war, poverty, deprivation. There's also surprise in the black humor of an early holiday memory: I can also see our black terrier, dead under the tree on a Christmas morning (the only explanation I ever heard was that Will dropped a laxative pill the night before and was unable to find it; but the dog succeeded, ate it, lay down to rest in the tree's cotton snow and died in the midst of my Santa Claus)."

Price continues to teach at Duke University after being diagnosed with spinal cancer in 1984, and continues to write; he's another in the lengthening line of "regional writers" who have made prolific writing careers, although he's careful about placing too much emphasis on being a Southern writer: as he says, "I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern." Still, he's been in some good company; Eudora Welty helped get his first books published. Like many writers, he's made a public career without much public ado -- an observation he would find dryly humorous if it weren't for the literary accolades his work has received. Clear Pictures was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989; in 1986 his novel Kate Vaiden won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and there have been many others.

Price has a wry sense of writing's place in American culture, or the very lack of one. In Feasting the Heart, his 2000 book of essays for National Public Radio, he writes about the growing number of British adaptations of English novels on American television and the movies, while noting our country's own "baffling neglect ... of the waiting riches of American literature." From his essay "Native Orphans":

"Look down the American fiction and drama shelves of your nearest library; locate the absolute first-class titles from James Fennimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, on through Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and their live-and-kicking peers. Search your memory for a single example of a first-class film adapted from any classic American novel or play -- a first-class film, now ...

My own recent search turns up only three such unassailable achievements -- Sidney Lumet's version of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Michael Mann's recent version of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1992). Period.

Oh, I may have forgot a contender or two ... I'm well aware of the many dozens of films made from lesser novels -- films like Gone With the Wind and The Big Sleep -- but I don't expect to hear a chorus of reminders of the brilliance I've neglected to mention."

He goes on to a list of intriguing contemporary possibilities, from Robert Stone's "parable of American havoc overseas," A Flag for Sunrise, to William Kennedy's Albany novels, "onward through a multitude of stories for the next millennium." These films will not be made, at least not by Americans. What causes this neglect? For Price, it's a familiar and disheartening litany that includes minuscule arts budgets slashed ever further in every legislative session, school systems without the arts, a failure of nerve in the face of popular culture. He -- and we -- wait.

Price continues to write both fiction and non-fiction on matters of faith and family. His most recent books include Letters to a Godchild: Concerning Faith (2007) and The Good Priest's Son (2006), a novel of 9/11.

After "True Grit": Charles Portis and "The Dog of the South" (1979)

My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410 -- a boy's first gun. I suppose he thought it wouldn't kick much, that it would kill or at least rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise or giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.

Now that Joel and Ethan Coen have their remake of True Grit to compare with director Henry Hathaway's original 1969 film, it may be time to for the brothers to consider a version of another Charles Portis story, The Dog of the South. The overlooked and long-out-of print 1979 novel, rescued from obscurity by Overlook Press in 2007, is a kind of a hundred-year bookend to the saga of Rooster Cogburn. As expected in the debauched and trembling era of the 1970s, Ray Midge -- even the name is a giveaway -- sets off in a wobbly quest made not of Cogburn's righteous vengeance but his own boozy, broke-down certainty: "I had to keep the Buick speed below what I took to be about sixty because at that point the wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex." What the Coen brothers could do with that!

Portis, whose filmed novels beside True Grit include the equally-deserving-of-praise Norwood, is now 77. His reclusiveness has only added to his cult status but also encourages admiration among other writers. He recently emerged to receive a lifetime achievement award from Oxford American magazine. Roy Blount, Jr. -- who himself is Decatur, Georgia born and knows a thing or two about such things -- has said that Portis “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.”

Midge, the passive-agressive, neurotically-perfectionist hero of The Dog of the South, is given to fits of stifling rage in this imperfect world. In a kind of Mutt-and-Jeff comic pairing, Midge and his traveling companion Dr. Reo Symes make their way with Symes' Maytag-wringer Spanish, wandering wildly to British Honduras in search of the disappeared Norma. Like much of what has gone before things never go quite right. The motion of the novel is more Quixote than Candide, and the twenty-six year old Midge's expectations are varnished with resignation more than youthful aspiration:

Now she was gone. She had gone to Mexico with Guy Dupree, for that was where my dotted line led....The last receipt was just twelve days old. Our Mexican friends have a reputation for putting things off to another day and for taking long naps but there had been no snoozing over this bill. I looked at Dupree's contemptuous approximation of my signature on the receipt. On some of the others he had signed "Mr. Smart Shopper" and "Wallace Fard."

Here he was then, cruising the deserts of Mexico in my Ford Torino with my wife and my credit cards and his black-tongued dog. He had a chow dog that went everywhere with him, to the post office and the ball games, and now that red beast was making free with his lion feet on my Torino seats. In exchange for my car he left me his 1963 Buick Special.

(Charles Portis at this year's Oxford American gala)

The novel's observational writing is part Barry Hannah, part Hunter S. Thompson. Tom Wolfe included Portis in his 1970s survey entitled The New Journalism (along with Gay Talese and Wolfe himself, Portis wrote for many magazines early in his career), and his eye for detail can be witheringly funny: "She had golden down on her forearms and a little blue vein or artery that ran across her forehead and became distended or pulsed noticeably when she was upset or expressing some strong opinion," Midge says of his beloved Norma.

It's humor of a sort that would seem right for a Coen film, with a befuddled protagonist and a world askew, where many things just don't come around right:

"I dozed and woke again. Baby frogs with a golden sheen were capering about at my feet. They were identical in size and appearance, brothers and sisters hatched from the same jellied mass, and they all moved as one like a school of fish when I wiggled a foot. I looked at them and they looked at me and I wondered how it was that I could see them so clearly, their placid frog faces. Then I realized it was dawn. The frogs only looked golden. I was lying in the middle of the road and I had slept for hours. The world's number one piddler had taken to his bed again."

"Not about a dog," one Amazon reviewer writes in her one-star review, aghast at the sheer un-literalness of the book's title. Herewith, her entire review, a quite Portis-like example of smashed expectations: "I'm sorry, but this is not all that funny and it's not about a dog. If you want funny, read something by Bill Bryson, a funny man who also writes about real life. Anybody can write a silly story about nothing much."

Unsuspecting readers have been warned. The rest of us should take up pens and write to Joel and Ethan Coen without further delay -- The Dog of the South is a silly story about nothing much at all, and an almost perfect one.

(photo by Rett Peek, Arkansas Times)

A poem for the winter solstice: "The Silence of the Stars"

The Silence of the Stars

David Wagoner

When Laurens van der Post one night

In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen

He couldn't hear the stars

Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,

Half-smiling. They examined his face

To see whether he was joking

Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men

Who plant nothing, who have almost

Nothing to hunt, who live

On almost nothing, and with no one

But themselves, led him away

From the crackling thorn-scrub fire

And stood with him under the night sky

And listened. One of them whispered,

Do you not hear them now?

And van der Post listened, not wanting

To disbelieve, but had to answer,

No. They walked him slowly

Like a sick man to the small dim

Circle of firelight and told him

They were terribly sorry,

And he felt even sorrier

For himself and blamed his ancestors

For their strange loss of hearing,

Which was his loss now. On some clear nights

When nearby houses have turned off their visions,

When the traffic dwindles, when through streets

Are between sirens and the jets overhead

Are between crossings, when the wind

Is hanging fire in the fir trees,

And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove

Between calls is regarding his own darkness,

I look at the stars again as I first did

To school myself in the names of constellations

And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,

I can still hear what I thought

At the edge of silence where the inside jokes

Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,

The C above high C of my inner ear, myself

Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:

My fair share of the music of the spheres

And clusters of ripening stars,

Of the songs from the throats of the old gods

Still tending even tone-deaf creatures

Through their exiles in the desert.

This evening marks the 2010 solstice, the shortest day of the year, and is the first time since 1638 that a full lunar eclipse occurs on the solstice. David Wagoner lives in the Pacific Northwest, and his poem "The Silence of the Stars" appeared in Reckonings, December 2009, under the post heading "A Winter's Tale."

A Guinness Christmas-pudding recipe

From The Bedside Book of Beer (Barrie Pepper), 1990

Just in case you've misplaced your Christmas pudding recipe (and, you thought, just in time, too -- lucky you!) your luck's run out; here's the replacement: step-by-step instructions from Barrie Pepper's The Bedside Book of Beer. It's his convivial compendium of beer and ale in British literature -- and, of course, English politics. (The book was originally published by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, complete with CAMRA application form in the back). Here are cartoons, limericks, poems, histories written by authors high and low and anonymous about the joys and sorrows of bitters, plains and smalls through the ages. No need during this Christmas week to belabor the point: there's too much to do to just sit and read about beer, when there's a holiday party somewhere we're all late for. Cheers ....