Fool's Gold Coast

DayGlo

It seems to me that my teeth whitening system doesn't exactly whiten my teeth so much as it turns them a brighter, more vibrant yellow.

I don't know that I'd count this an improvement.

ELSEWHERE:
My review of Theatre Y's The Misunderstanding is in this week's Time Out Chicago.

Baby, Baby

As I've mentioned before, I still have a baby tooth lodged in my head. There's no adult tooth behind it, and so, as the dentist reminded me again at my teeth cleaning appointment this morning, when the little fella finally falls out, I will have to get an implant to bridge the gap. "I hope you're setting aside money for it," he said, because implants are expensive and insurance won't cover it because insurance is fine with me looking like a gap-toothed hick the rest of my life.

When I was relaying this information to a pair of coworkers this afternoon, one of them said something like, "My, what a terrible thing to have looming over your head, just waiting to drop at any minute. I would be worrying about it all the time. Aren't you?"

Well I am NOW. Thanks a lot.

Doing Less with Less

Since I managed to squeeze two entries out of my efforts to downsize my book collection, I thought I'd try to repeat the feat with my CDs (for my younger readers: "CDs" were old-timey doohickeys that played music if you inserted them into a "stereo," which was sort of like an enormous, stationary iPod. You bought "CDs" at "record stores," which also provided employment for the nation's judgmental malcontents, who had nothing else to do because the Internet hadn't been invented yet).

I ended up setting aside 126 CDs to give to goodwill--assuming they'll take them--but I won't list them all here because I can't imagine anyone would want to read that. I will, however, share with you the seven categories into which I divided the doomed discs so that this entry isn't entirely a waste of everyone's time. Those categories are:

CDs I Bought Because I Had Heard One Song on the Album and Assumed I Would Like the Rest (9 discs)

CDs I Was Given as Gifts (7 discs)

CDs Reflecting Earlier Tastes (21 discs)

CDs I Bought Because I Admired the Artist's Previous Work (34 discs)

CDs I Bought on the Recommendation of a Music Critic: Pop Division (18 discs)

CDs I Bought on the Recommendation of a Music Critic: Jazz Division (33 discs)

??? (4 discs)

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Emma Unmatched and Two Pence Shakespeare's As You Like It are in this week's Chicago Reader.

Outrageous Fortune

Yesterday I cracked open a fortune cookie whose message inside read, "You will be involved in a social activity."

I admire this cookie's modest and pragmatic soothsaying. It feels very Midwestern to me. Forget the predictions of a new career or a new love with a handsome stranger or a transformative journey across a large body of water. Stick with what's in reach.

ELSEWHERE:
My review of 16th Street Theater's The Crowd You're in With is in this week's Time Out Chicago.

All That Glitters 129

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: Home at Grasmere by Dorothy and William Wordsworth [I felt bad for Dorothy. She only kept her journal in the first place to please her (rather humorless) brother, who raids her reminiscences for his preachy poems, until one day he's like, "Oh, by the way, I'm making Mary Hutchinson my wife, but don't worry, I can show myself out"].
COMING UP: Coleridge [and don't even get me started on that nutcase], Camus, Wharton.

Movies
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: The Circus.
KITO'S SELECTION: Dumbo (dirs. Armstrong, Ferguson, Jackson, Kinney, Roberts, Sharpsteen; 1941) [see Glitter, below].
MINE: The Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille, 1952).

Current Interests
Lesbians, gay guys, art, Mark Twain, Chicago theater critics, Jane Austen, the Internet, local news broadcasts, my day job, fashion, my adolescence, the right wing, Romantic poets, NU, my family.

Fool's Four
THE FIRST FOUR SONGS THAT SPRING TO MIND:
1. "I Speak Six Languages" from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
2. The theme song to The Nanny.
3. "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."
4. Christina Aguilera's "Candyman."

Flashbacks
TWO YEARS AGO: "I cannot believe that a grown, mom-aged individual could go her whole life without ever having heard that gay guys do it in the butt."
FOUR YEARS AGO: "How to Write a Fool's Gold Coast Entry."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "I have concluded that it's time I abandon dating altogether and start relying on prostitutes when the body electric requires release."
&
"Edith and her daughter Lana promised they would try to make it, but odds are good that they will be late, seeing as how Edith is a drunk and Lana is dead."

Glitter
And now, please enjoy these racially insensitive crows from Walt Disney's Dumbo.

The Gold Mine 130: Stay of Execution

Stuff I've dug up.

To make sure I wasn't being too hasty with the 44 books I decided to remove from my library and donate to the book drive at work, I determined to give each volume one last chance. One by one, I opened them to page 123 (or page 23 if the book had fewer than 123 pages) and read the first full sentence. I remember hearing once that when you're browsing at the bookstore or library, you should read that particular sentence to ascertain whether a book is worth reading. So I figured I would apply this very scientific process to the task of determining whether a book was worth keeping. Here are the sentences I found the most tempting:

“You like to fricasseed a bunch of my boys the other day.”
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

The upshot of this was he wasn’t afraid, even with this monstrous dog staring him down. --Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (trans. by Philip Gabriel)

And her doctor, he told . . .
he explain to me
that the bullet
destroyed the placenta
and went through
me
and she caught it in her arms.
--Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

The camp was a fever hospital, the suffering beyond experience. --Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison

The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. --David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe

Two Places have been agreed to be divided between them, namely the Church and the Play-House; where they segregate themselves from each other in a remarkable Manner: for as the People of Fashion exalt themselves at Church over the Heads of the People of no Fashion; so in the Play-House they abase themselves in the same degree under their Feet. --Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews [at some point I evidently found this sentence worthy of underlining]

Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes . . .
But every now and then, just weighing in
Is what it must come down to, and without
Any self-exculpation or self-pity.
--Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level

And as Mr. Potter walked toward Mr. Shoul and Mr. Shoul’s garage where five cars were waiting for five drivers and Mr. Potter was one of them, small drops of moisture, no bigger than the head of a pin, almost invisible really, gathered in the pit of his arms, in the small crevices of his body, between his toes, on the nape of his neck, behind the lobes of his ear, in the small hidden lines over which the fleshy part of his nose furled, and down his strong calves and down his strong shins and his arms too, and Mr. Potter did not feel uncomfortable; and then a soft breeze blew against his cheek and blew through his entire body and the small drops of moisture evaporated and Mr. Potter did not feel that he had been uncomfortable; and the soft breeze that blew against his body had once been a violent wind which had wreaked so much havoc somewhere far away form the world which Mr. Potter was in just then. --Jamaica Kincaid, Mr. Potter

Let the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners.
--DH Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers!

A little tongue of hellfire licks at our heels and the MG jumps ahead, roaring like a bomber through the sandy pine barrens and across Bay St. Louis. --Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Fancy going and getting married to a fallen woman for three hundred miserable dollars! --Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays (trans. by James McFarlane and Jens Arup)

In the end, though, I saved none of these. I did, however, rescue The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty because I remembered it has some good stuff on funerals, and also Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio's memoir about having Alzheimer's, because of this, the devastating last paragraph of the book:

I must now wait for the silence to engulf me and take me to the place where there is no memory left and there remains no reflexive will to live. It is lonely here waiting for memory to stop and I am afraid and tired. Hug me, Joyce, and then let me sleep.

[As it happens, DeBaggio died earlier this year.]

Book Drop

They're having a book drive at work, and I'm using it as an opportunity to downsize my library. I decided to part ways with every book whose spine I can't imagine ever cracking again. Using this sole criterion, I marked 44 volumes for removal. They can be divided into five distinct categories:

Books I Dislike
After the Fall by Arthur Miller
The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Books to Which I Am Indifferent
The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Valparaiso by Don DeLillo
Poor Folk and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. by David McDuff
Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
The Author's Farce by Henry Fielding
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
Personal Memoirs of US Grant
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. by Edward FitzGerald
Death and Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays by Tony Kushner
Dinner with Friends by Donald Margulies
A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, trans. by Tiina Nunnally
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Books I Like but Will Likely Never Reread or Regularly Consult
History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison by Henry Adams
Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing by Ian Buruma
Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's by Thomas DeBaggio
The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs
The Sagas of Icelanders
Eleonora Duse by Helen Sheehy

Books I Like but Can Remember Virtually Nothing About [only a vague fond feeling remains]
Famous Women by Boccaccio, trans. by Virgina Brown
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Close Up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. by James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford
The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney
Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
Birds, Beasts and Flowers! by DH Lawrence
The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra
Duse on Tour: Guido Noccioli's Diaries, 1906-07, trans. by Giovanni Pontiero
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter
The Weather of Words by Mark Strand
Mayflies: New Poems and Translations by Richard Wilbur
James Madison by Garry Wills

Duplicate Copies [or, how many Hamlets does one person need?]
Four Major Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans. by James McFarlane
Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin, trans. by Nicholas Rzhevsky
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

I think I'll do my CDs next.

I Speak Fluent Gershwin

Every morning I wake up with a different show tune running in a continuous loop through my brain. This morning it was "Smile, Girls," which was cut from Gypsy. Yesterday it was "You're Just in Love" from Call Me Madam. When I remarked on this phenomenon to one of my sisters, she said that I must be dreaming about the songs--a sure sign, according to her, that I'm fluent in show tune.

Well, duh.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Hamlet at Oracle Theatre and Geek Girl Burlesque's A Nude Hope: A Star Wars Burlesque are in this week's Chicago Reader.

Friend of Dorothy

I'm currently reading Home at Grasmere, a collation of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and the poems her brother, William, was writing around the same time (compiled and edited by Colette Clark). Here's my impression of every single one of Dorothy's entries:

April 11th, Tuesday. A fine clear sunshiny morning. I made bread, then sate in the garden staring at a single blade of grass for six or seven hours. William unwell--a blockage in his bowels. No letters. After tea, walked to Rydale. Saw a screaming loon, which reminded me of Coleridge. The moonlight shimmering on the lake. A lone foxglove still visible amid lichens and stones. I'm so fucking bored I could puke.

All That Glitters 128

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: Cymbeline by William Shakespeare, ed. by JM Nosworthy [get a load of these gorgeous lines from Iachimo's speech in Imogen's bedchamber (2.2.11-23):
The crickets sing, and man's o'er-labour'd sense
Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus
Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd
The chastity he wounded. Cytherea
How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily!
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!
But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagon'd,
How dearly they do't: 'tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o'th'taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids,
To see th'enclosed lights, now canopied
Under these windows, white and azure lac'd
With blue of heaven's own tinct.].

Movies
SAW: The Tree of Life [the Sean Penn bits are underdeveloped and the cosmic stuff is ludicrously grandiose, but the main body of the film is a stunning evocation of childhood--beautiful, frightening, sad, true].
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
MINE: Howl.
KITO'S: Freakonomics.
THIS WEEK'S THEME: The Circus.

Art
SAW: You Better Be Listening: Text in Self-Taught Art @ Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art [lots of conspiracy theories and nightmare visions from religious fanatics and the emotionally disordered. I felt scared].

Current Interests
My sisters, Northwestern, my childhood, Kito, my appearance, Alzheimer's, Canada, movies, Chicago theater, art, books.

Fool's Four
MY FAVORITE RIDES AT DISNEY WORLD:
1. The Haunted Mansion.
2. The Buzz Lightyear one.
3. Splash Mountain.
4. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride [RIP].

Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "Our great romance of adolescent passion."

Glitter
My favorite scene from my favorite Disney cartoon: