David Kirby
I Just Didn’t Want to Listen to the Upchucks
I had a friend in college who was a brilliant artist,
just transcendent, but she decided to major in biology,
and when I asked her why, she said, “I want people
to think I’m smart,” and now she’s got this dead-end
lab job that she hates. She was like the W. H. Auden
who said, “When I find myself in the company
of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed
by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” Ha, ha!
No need to feel that way, W. H.! People who are
different just don’t understand shit the way you do,
which is something we scientists call neurodiversity.
Too, statistician George Box says, “All models are
wrong, but some models are useful.” Another way
to put it is to say that everything is wrong, especially
if you insist on it being right all the time. For example,
say your roommate is dating this guy, but they break up,
and two months later you’re at a party, and you see
someone you think is your roomie’s ex but who
turns out to be his twin, and you hit it off with him,
which makes sense because you feel as though
you know him already, so you take him home
and sneak him in and have whoopy-do sex and wake up
the next day and wonder how you’re going to keep
your roommate from seeing him or if you even have to,
because he’s not really her ex-boyfriend, but on
the other hand he kind of halfway is, not to mention
the fact that even after you’ve explained things,
she’ll still have hated you so much during
the two minutes that she thought he was her ex
that she may never be able to be friends with you
again or at least the way she was before. If you
get all worked up over whether or not you’re
doing things the right way, you’ll never do
anything. Kazuo Ishiguro says, “You can
think of me like an early aviator before airplanes
were properly invented. I’m building some sort
of flying machine in my back garden. I just
need it to fly. And you know how odd some
of those early flying machines looked? Well,
my novels are a bit like that. I put them together
out of anything I can think of according to
my thinking to make the thing fly.” Now there’s
a shovelful of practical and down-to-earth advice
for you. Preach, son! As Aaron Neville says,
tell it like it is. Don’t think, think, think, sheeple—
do, do, do! Think too much and you’ll be like
those conspiracy theorists who look at
the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial
and say they see the profile of Jefferson Davis
in the locks of the president’s hair despite
the National Parks Service’s insistence that
those are just wayward strands. Really, there’s no
understanding anything—why, just this morning
I was stopped at a light on Railroad Avenue
when a young woman in the lane next to me
opened her car door and upchucked violently.
Abba's "Dancing Queen" was on the radio, so
I cranked up the volume, at which point
the young miss shouted something I couldn't hear
and gave me the finger. Obviously she thought
I was making fun of her, but I wasn't, I just didn't
want to listen to the upchucks. Or say you pop
your vitamins into your mouth, but you think
maybe you dropped one, so you spit them into
your hand to make sure, and they’re all there,
so you pop your vitamins into your mouth again,
but you drop one. Yet are not these little contretemps
the micro-screwups that create life’s rich tapestry?
To think otherwise is to think that life is a novel.
Life is not a novel. It’s a dictionary. As a boy,
Robert Pinsky loved reading dictionaries.
“Read as much as you want,” says Pinsky,
“this word reminds you of that word,
you could just wander. It didn’t matter
if you lost your place. It wasn’t tyrannical
like a story.” See? Life’s not a novel,
it’s a dictionary, it’s just full of stuff.
Good Night, Barbara Strawitz
Bobby Williams writes to tell me of the death
of Miss Strawitz, our high-school chemistry teacher,
which is when I learn that her given name was “Barbara.”
In those days, we didn’t think of our teachers as having
a name other than the last: Mrs. LeBlanc, Mr. Teague,
Mr. Daigle, Miss Strawitz. If you’d asked us, we would
have guessed that when he was a toddler, Mr. Daigle’s mom
called Mr. Daigle “Mr. Daigle.” I write Bobby back to say,
“I loved Barbara Strawitz. I never did quite grasp
what a valence was, but that's my shortcoming, not hers.
She was open-hearted, happy, whip-smart, and devoted
to her students. It's good to be able to think about her again,”
to which Bobby replies, “David, you must have been out sick
when she taught us what a valence was. A carbon atom
has 6 electrons with an electron shell configuration of 1s,
2s and 2p (squared), meaning carbon has a valence of 4
since 4 electrons can be accepted to fill the 2p orbital—
actually pretty simple when you stop to think about it.”
Right. For Bobby Williams. What’s your go-to metaphor
for death? Kick the bucket, buy the farm, cash in,
assume room temperature? Old-school soul singers
used to refer to “a backover flip,” as in “you thrill me so
I turned a backover flip,” though they weren’t talking about
death so much as a certain kind of love, that which
the French characterized as un coup de foudre or thunderclap:
I see you or you see me and, pow—somebody just got zapped!
Somebody did a backover flip, or maybe both of us did.
That’s not the same as death, but maybe it is, since
philosophers say that sex and death amount to the same thing,
that is, a momentary dissolution of the self, though
in the case of death, that moment lasts a whole lot longer
than the uh-uh-UNHH! of wall-socket sex, as satisfying as that is.
Maybe what death and sex have in common is the experience
of being overwhelmed, of using your body as a means
to leave your body and forget all earthly woes. Try this:
put on a wool cap and some sunglasses and send a picture
of yourself to your beloved, who’ll reply, “You look like
the I-5 Killer!” to which you say, “C’mere and I’ll murder you”
and see if they don’t say, “On my way!” That night I dream
I’m making out with Barbara Strawitz, but it’s okay:
in my dream I’m my age now and not a pimply teenager,
and she’s the age she was then, so we’re the same age,
give or take. That’s the thing about death. It’s not a negative.
Death contains everything that came before it: nostalgia,
sorrow, longing, dreams, despair, hope, joy, chemistry lessons.
Sometimes death’s darkest moments even mix with laughter
the way a carbon atom takes on electrons. Comic Rob Delaney
recounts how, when his two-year-old son died of brain cancer,
his father-in-law wept and said, “I wish it were me instead
of Henry,” and Rob Delaney said, “We do too, Richard.”
The Voynich Manuscript
is known otherwise as the world’s most mysterious book as it is
not only written in an indecipherable language but has also resisted
scholars’ attempts to identify even its date and place of origin.
But I like mysteries, don’t you? Even the little ones, like why
would the pharmacy on my corner have a sign in its window
saying “We Dispense with Accuracy” unless they’re trying to
be funny? Thank god we know what we’re doing most of the time!
Take Giuseppe Verdi. Boy, did Giuseppe Verdi ever know what
he was doing most of the time. As he was putting the final touches
on Rigoletto, he realized that “La Donna è Mobile” was not just
any old aria, that anyone who heard it in the concert hall
would be whistling it in the street the next day, so he kept it
under wraps until his opera’s premiere, which is when
he gave the song to the orchestra and the tenor who’d sing it
just hours before the curtain went up. “La Donna è Mobile”
is a simple tune, it’s short and recognizable, and people did
whistle it in the street the next day and have continued to whistle it ever since,
not because they were at the 1851 premiere of Rigoletto
or one of the thousands of iterations that have taken place
since but because they’ve heard one or more of the tens of thousands
of uses of “La Donna è Mobile” in present-day ads and movies.
No such luck with the Voynich Manuscript: nobody talks
about it at all because no one can read it and or even
figure out where it came from and when. Best guesses suggest it was written
somewhere in what is now Central Europe in either
the 15th or 16th century and proceeded to appear
and then disappear into, for example, the library of Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II and then pop up again at a secret sale of books in 1903
by the Society of Jesus in Rome and, after that, in the shop
of rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, whence its name.
I’m glad we can’t read it. If we could, the Voynich Manuscript
would almost certainly disappoint, seeing as how it is
likely to offer either that be-moderate-in-all-things philosophy
that the ancients served up by the truckload to their rulers
in order to insure good governance or else a Machiavellian
cocktail of cruelty, genocide, and advice on the most effective
techniques by which one might extract secrets from one’s
enemies without actually killing them, also thought at the time
to be a sure path toward good governance by many nations then
and even a few today. Also, what if the Voynich manuscript
turns out to be pure visual art rather than a book-book
like any other, if the peculiar markings on its every page
are just that and not actual words with one-to-one
corollaries in English such as l’amour for “love”
and Unterseeboot for “submarine”? What if its author
just wanted make something, to be a presence, gin up
an eyepopper, spectacle, jimjam, hurlyburly, skillygalee,
gallimaufry, hullabaloo, wang-dang-doodle? In that
the unknown author would be a somewhat distant
if undeniable ancestor, if not in the biological sense
at least the artistic one, of the Shaggs, a three-sister
rock band so notable for their over-the-top ineptitude
that while one critic compared their melodic lines and structures
to the free jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman,
another described them as “sounding like
lobotomized Trapp Family singers.” Another critic still
said that while Dot and Betty Wiggin shredded
their out-of-tune pawn shop guitars in a way that both charmed
and unsettled, drummer Helen Wiggin was often
completely detached from what her sisters were playing.
Good for them, I say, and good for the person or persons
who wrote the Voynich Manuscript. Good for everyone
who ever lived, is living now, and will live who wants
to make their mark, do their thing, let their freak flag fly.
Nobody wants to be end up like Pancho Villa,
who rose from humble beginnings to become governor of the state
of Chihuahua and then a leader of the Mexican Revolution
and who, at the end of his life, was ambushed and shot dead
by rivals, but not before saying to his companions,
“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
Thinking About Jesus After Watching Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, During Which I Have a Drink and After Which I Consume an Entire Meal in the Company of Friends
Barbara and Sue and Fabio and I have front-row seats
for a production of Ariadne auf Naxos, which is just
about the stupidest piece of nonsense I’ve ever seen
in my entire life, meaning it’s excellent. What happens
is that the richest man in Vienna hires two opera
companies to stage their works, one serious and one
comic, but decides at the last minute that both must run
simultaneously so his guests can get on to the evening’s
real draw, a fireworks display in the garden. At the interval
I step to the bar to get a drink and a sandwich but end up
getting a drink as there are no sandwiches to be had,
making me doubly glad I’d bought a two-hander earlier
in the day at a little sandwich shop some blocks away,
where I’d been in line behind a man who had the distinct
appearance of a person you might expect to see elsewhere—
at a busy intersection, say, holding a cardboard sign saying
WILL WORK FOR FOOD or squatting on the sidewalk
with one saying HELP ME FEED MY DOG and a dog,
since people who don’t give money to people will sometimes
give money to dogs. Anyway, the line moves forward,
and one by one each ravenous customer scampers away
with his or her delicious sandwich, and when the man gets
to the front of the line, he orders a herring and onion
on ciabatta and then turns to me and says, “Buy me
a sandwich?” What am I going to say? The counterman’s
already making it. So I say, “Sure, I guess,” any resentment
I feel at being hustled far outweighed by my admiration
for his skill as a strategist, tactician, playmaker—I too
was hungry, meaning I empathized, plus I already had
my wallet out, and besides, if I hadn’t ponied up,
the person behind me would have or the person after that.
Another way to look at it is that my new friend was
a behavioral scientist of sorts, much like Professor Logan Ury,
who tells clients eager to find that perfect someone
to take to heart what behavioral scientists like herself
and the gentleman in the sandwich shop call The Secretary
Problem: if you want to hire a secretary and have 100
candidates, how do you pick the right person? The optimal
answer is that you should interview 37 candidates,
decide on the one you like best to that point, then hire
the next applicant who strikes you as superior to that standout,
a version of which method was used earlier by German
astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler,
a key figure in the scientific revolution that took place
in the seventeenth century and marked the emergence
of modern science, though I am shoehorning him into
this poem at this point not to celebrate his formulation
of the laws of planetary motion or his almost equally
important work in optics and geometry but to note that,
after he lost his first wife to cholera, he decided to choose
his next wife via a mathematical process very similar
to that used by Dr. Ury’s clients, devoting two years
of his life to interviewing and ranking 11 possible
candidates and then making a calculated choice,
even though, when he tried to go back and propose
to the fourth person he interviewed, she had already
moved on, whereupon he proposed to candidate number five
and ended up happily married to her for many years.
In all fairness, though, I should note that you might do
just as well by following the example of stage director
Peter Brooks, who fell in love with the heroine of War
and Peace at the age of twelve and decided to marry
someone named Natasha, which he did twenty-nine years
later when he proposed to and won the hand
of documentary filmmaker Natasha Parry, to whom
he was happily married for many years, as in whatever.
Anyway, nice work, Johannes Kepler! You knew how
to read the room, size people up, take their pulse
at least as much as American Bandstand host
Dick Clark, aka America’s Oldest Teenager, who in fact
invented the teenager or almost. It’s the 1950s, right?
A decade that saw the birth of rocket science, the racial
integration of major league baseball, the GI bill of rights,
the interstate highway system, Holiday Inn motels,
and fast-food restaurants. Whew! The Corvette! Mad magazine!
The Abby and Ann Landers advice columns, disposable diapers,
the telephone answering machine! Now imagine all these
images on a giant piece of butcher paper, through which
bursts a couple of gangly kids, the girl in jeans and a tight sweater
over a push-up bra (another Fifties innovation), the boy
in biker boots and a leather jacket with a bulge in his pocket
that might be a switchblade, though it’s probably just
a comb—yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Teenager,
a new breed that has its own ideas, own money,
own music. Before, teens were just miniature adults;
when two college kids meet for lunch in J. D. Salinger’s
story “Franny” (1955), they drink martinis, eat escargots,
and talk about European literature, doing their best
to imitate adult sophistication. To hell with that.
The teenager was driven by something called
rock ‘n’ roll, a type of music grown-ups feared because
they could tell right off that it promoted the mixing
of the races, featured “dirty” lyrics, and inspired unruly
behavior, that as music it was just crap. Though he
would later host Elvis on his television show, Frank Sinatra
went on record as saying “rock ‘n’ roll smells phony
and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part
by cretinous goons.” The market for the new music
was positively thrumming with energy, though,
so Dick Clark found a way to sell it by hosting all
the new groups on his TV show while harking back
to the imitation-adult model and instituting a strict
dress code for the enthusiastic boppers who appeared
on screens all over America: no shorts, slacks, or tight
sweaters for the girls, and neckties with either a sweater
or jacket for the fellows. “Nobody dressed that way
in real life,” said Dick Clark, “but it made the show
acceptable to adults who were frightened by the teen-age
world and its music,” meaning that while rock ‘n’ roll
looked like rebellion to America’s parents and pastors
and principals, overnight it become a business strategy
that made billions as a simmering post-war capitalism
began to roar. Anyway, back to Ariadne auf Naxos.
When Ariadne, the tragic heroine, is abandoned
by Theseus, she laments her lost love and yearns for death,
even though Zerbinetta, the comic heroine, insists that
the best way to cure a broken heart is to find another love;
conveniently, a stranger arrives, whom Ariadne assumes
is the messenger of death, but in fact is Bacchus,
who falls in love with Ariadne instantly. As the two lovers
celebrate their love, Zerbinetta claims that she was right
all along, and in this way do the two parts of Richard Strauss’s
opera mesh tidily, a development not lost on Barbara and Sue
and Fabio and me as we make our way to a neighborhood
restaurant and are soon tearing into the basket of bread
our server has brought us that is so good—just salty enough,
crunchy on the edges, fluffy on the inside—that we ask for
a second basket as our first courses arrive, which are
themselves so tasty that it is some minutes before we notice
that the new bread is really old bread, that the server
first brought a batch fresh from the oven and then trotted
out yesterday’s bread for round two, a tactic that, yeah,
disappoints the four of us, though not so much that
it keeps us from agreeing that, if we were restaurateurs,
we’d do the same and in this way follow a path
diametrically opposite to that of Our Savior, he whose mom says
to him at a wedding reception, "They have no wine,"
to which the Son of Man replies, "Woman, what concern
is that to you and me?” Ignoring the fact that he has
just called her “woman,” Mary says to the servants,
"Do whatever he tells you," whereupon the Only
Begotten Son, ignoring the fact that his mother has
decided to ignore him a second time and go ahead
with the miracle anyway, orders the servants to fill jars
with water, draw out some, and take it to the chief steward,
who takes a sip and says to the bridegroom, "Everyone
serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine
after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept
the good wine until now." Jesus: the ultimate bartender.
No wonder so many people buy the rest of his message.
Mary Biddinger
Rebecca Black
M. Cynthia Cheung
Joanna Penn Cooper
Isabelle Correa
Adam Day
Kendra DeColo
Lisa Dordal
Lise Goett
Camille Guthrie
James Allen Hall
Barbara Hamby
Rebecca Hazelton
Erin Hoover
Charles Kell
David Kirby
Keith Kopka
Cate Marvin
Marc McKee
Jennifer Militello
Jay Nebel
Kevin Prufer
M. Seaton & A. Smith
Diane Seuss
Martha Silano
Aaron Smith
Tana Jean Welch
Jeff Whitney
Jordan Zandi
