Saturday 12/28/24
A text to my sister on Christmas Eve. They take this form as a joke when I ask her to pass something on to the children--or do something in this case.
You will give Charlie a handshake for me--with a firm grip--and hug Lilah and Amelia for me. Then you will hug Amelia again and say, "You know who that one's from."
That would be the Little Ghost Girl, if one hasn't been paying attention.
I mentioned the firm grip thing because it's important and too many people give you that limp-handed shake. Don't do that. Firm grip, while you look someone in the eye. That's how you shake a hand. Handshakes say something--and it may not be a lot, but it's something--about your mettle.
Picked up a volume of Emily Dickinson's complete correspondence. Her thing was to be coy and try and marry coyness with cleverness. You see the fear she had about life come across in her writing. The "quickly dip a toe in and get out" approach to life and art. That was her angle. Her words can be pretty contrived, and sometimes she nearly rubs up against smarminess, with but a thin layer of obfuscation between it and her. Her words often don't say much at all but they're kind of open so it becomes like some rock lyric where people can project what they wish. The difference with those rock lyrics is people have an emotional need to do so, whereas with Dickinson it's often a kind of person who has attempted to adopt her as a reference--or a proof--of their own intelligence and how cultured they are. Then there is the size of the whole of this volume and her collected poetry. The entire output. There it is. I write more in a month than all but a very few have written in their lives.
Walked seven miles yesterday. Went to the MFA. Trader Joe's. Learned the other day that my regular Trader Joe's--the one on Boylston near the Marathon finish line--is the smallest Trader Joe's there is. Need to do better on the fitness front today.
While at Trader Joes, Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula" came on the sound system. What a record. What a piece of art. I stood there and listened. Those two Cliff Gallup guitar solos--I mean, wow. Sounds so fresh. Hasn't aged at all. If anything, it's sounded better over time. I don't think Vincent sounds like Elvis at all. It was something he worried about. When he met with Elvis one time Vincent said something along the lines that he wasn't trying to sound like him, and Elvis was like, "I know, man."
Lot of inept, hack-y pieces about Bob Dylan being written lately because of this silly biopic. (Then you have all of the people who can't even get the title of it right.) It ought to be stunning how bad everyone is at writing and how little they know and have to contribute, but it's just the norm, the way, virtually you see, how it is, etc. I look at all of this hack-slop in so many outlets and it's worse than what I wrote about Dylan at like sixteen-years-old when I was trying to write about that kind of thing. By a lot. And I knew so much more at sixteen-years-old. And here are these people in whatever venue just slapping out the slop. Editors commissioning the slop. And the editors don't know any better. What are they going to do? Effect some quality control? The blind doesn't so much as lead on the blind as everyone is just blind and some people get hooked up. And when everyone is blind, no one can tell fuck all. (This is no dig at blind people who, I realize, can tell quite a bit with as a result of their sharpened other senses.)
It's funny--as in depressing: The most basic shit I learned about any band--like the first stuff you'd encountered, you know, the under-the-lone-photo-of-the-band in some book captioning--is now the basis in 2024 for entire pieces. Presented like it's new. Remarkable how remedial this garbage is. And you know what? When I was sixteen, I knew that was the basic stuff, not the basis stuff. Something maybe you'd put in--quickly--for the totally uninitiated. Look at the state of letters. Can't even really call it that. There's next to nothing worth reading. We're not even talking fiction now. No one writing nonfiction knows anything. And they certainly don't have any ideas.
Bad headaches the last two mornings. Have listened to the Your Truly, Johnny Dollar episode, "The Missing Mouse Matter," most days this month. Charming. I think it's the best of the Bob Bailey half hour episodes. It's of a piece with the best of the five-parters, though it doesn't hit like those do; it's meant to charm, to be the cozy warmth of the fireplace on a day more without the sun than with.
My niece Lilah was having four teeth pulled yesterday. She told me about this maybe a month and a half ago. I texted my sister and told her to tell Lilah that it would be fine and she wouldn't even know anything had happened.
Last week my mother was telling me about a friend of hers who has many adopted children, and one of these children recently learned that her birth father was trying to reach her. I have to say, it's important to me to not be related to anyone. One knows what I mean. I am my own thing. I was going to be my own thing--how could I, of all people be otherwise?--but this was useful in that all the same. There is no one I could look at and think that anything might be capped because I'd have to be like them to some degree. Which isn't a ceiling necessarily but it can represent the idea of a ceiling and I am not fan of ceilings or even the idea of them. My mother said that maybe it'd be good to know my family's medical history, but I prefer not to. That makes me more accountable and precautionary. Because I don't know. Maybe every man in my biological family drops dead of a heart attack in their forties. Would I have given in--however much--to that idea? I am more likely to assume that is true--hypothetically--and do what I can to make sure that does not happen to me. I am a tabula rasa person.
Bruins shellacked again by Columbus. That team blows them out. I was a little surprised that Swayman didn't get the start after the holiday "break." You can read that as the interim coach preferring a platoon or a quasi-platoon rather than having Swayman as the clear-cut starter, the go-to guy. I don't think he is a go-to guy, but it's not like the other guy was good yesterday.
I think it's impressive that there's an all BC line on team USA for the World Juniors. What are the chances that a college line is a national team line?
Latvia beat Canada 3-2 in a shootout, after losing to them 10-0 last year. I did not see this game, but anyone who knows hockey who sees a result like this will have one thought and that can be expressed thusly: Goalie. So I looked at the box score and saw what I excepted to see: a 57 to 27 shot advantage for Canada. That's a huge amount of rubber to put on goal. I wouldn't worry too much about this if I rooted for Canada. It may actually help them as a sort of bonus "wake up" call.
World Juniors is the best international hockey tournament, I'd say, at this point. Better than the Olympics. Happens more, means more. It's a proving ground. Gives you a sense, too, of what's to come with players on the professional stage.
Celtics blew out the Pacers yesterday after another setback at home on Christmas against a weak Philadelphia team. There's no getting around it--the Celtics are underachieving. They are, as I've said, too reliant on the three-point shot and it will be their undoing. I had said last year, during their run, when everyone else was saying that here was a dynasty in the making, that I thought they'd only win the one title. Most teams win once. Special teams win more than once. I don't think these Celtics are special. I think they won their one. Special teams--in basketball--are dominant at home. The three goes in, the Celtics win, the three doesn't go in, they lose. I believe they're playing back to back home games right now with the Pacers--I'd have to check that--and if that's true and the trend/theme continues, I'd take the Pacers in that next game at the Garden. Jaylen Brown finally had a good shooting game yesterday.
I watched some of the Navy-Oklahoma bowl game yesterday. Good for Navy. How do you not root for a service academy? I always like to see Navy and Army do well and with what they did in their last two games--knocking off Army and now a legacy program--Navy had a great year. (Will they end up ranked? Good chance. And I think that's cool.) A Navy player had a 95-yard TD run which was the longest in school history, to my surprise. A lot of rushing attempts at Navy--a school that used to be one of the top programs in the country--so you'd think someone would have gone for 99 yards at some point, or at least more than 95.
Thought the Pitt-Toledo multiple OT game was exciting, too. I'll be honest: I like bowl games. Yes, hardly anyone is there and you have a 6-6 team versus a 7-5 team, but teams usually play hard and you see unlikely match-ups--Navy and Oklahoma being a salient example--and there is just game after game so it's like one is always on and each bowl season you will see some cool things. They appeal to my affection for the esoteric, or at least not the expected. Whereas I find the prestige playoff bowl games underwhelming by comparison. Ordinary. There are fewer surprises, or maybe I should say discoveries.
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