new poem

I wake to vague memories of randomness

in the light

I can only guess at silk strands of nonesense

I mistook for logic

in the dark

my pillow knows better than I, I think

it’s memory is keener

still clinging to the impression

my head made

long after I’ve brushed the tangles

from my hair

along with any thoughts of dreams

haven’t figured out a name for this one yet…

As we sit

and drink tea

and discuss the faults

of the previous generation

a-lacking and lamenting

the impossibility

of social justice

in a world where some

have never even read

Faulkner or Hemingway

I marvel at how young

we’ve all grown old

Harold Q. Thomas

Men lost all sorts of things in wars. Some lost legs, arms, toes, eyes, hands and others lost less tangible things, like sanity and integrity. But Captain Harold Q. Thomas lost his hair. It really was impossible to be certain when he began shedding as it were, but there it was. When he left his fiancé at the train station in Delaware he definitely had thick mouse colored hair and when he returned (one of the last soldiers to return to the states after world war II) he was entirely bald.

Harold Quincy Thomas became a Captain through one of his greatest talents, his utter un-remarkabilty; he was mild in manner and looks and had a trimmed mustache. These qualities had served him well all his life. His politeness had gotten him a decent paying (if not intellectually stimulating) job as paperboy when he was just barely fifteen years old. By the time he was twenty-three he was assistant Editor for the very same paper. It was fussy, tedious work and that suited him perfectly because a well-done job was his delight and joy, the more cumbersome the details the better. Harold worked patiently, fastidiously, saving every penny he could and bought a house at twenty-seven years old. Now he was sure that his happiness was complete, he had a nice comfortable home, and a nice comfortable job, and nice comfortable parents who were in good health. And this was almost true.

Harold Q. Thomas turned thirty in 1940, he had everything he could ever desire, except for one thing. Sally O’Keefe the daughter of Daniel O’Keefe (Harold’s boss) was sweet in that round, frank, friendly kind of way. Harold fell in love with her the moment he saw her. Sally was exactly what he could wish, quick to laugh, and practical in everything. She could not resist his quiet, determined love. They courted for one year and the night before he left on a train Harold Q. Thomas asked Sally O’Keefe to be his wife. She accepted exactly as they both knew she would and Harold put a ring on her finger, kissed her bravely and then left for war.

In the army he was called things like “dependable” “amiable” “respectable” he was liked by commanders and soldiers alike and soon was ranked Captain and everyone thought it was an excellent choice. He wrote Sally every night. He wrote his parents every night. He rented his house to the widow of one of his soldier friends who had passed away in the first months of fighting, but never charged her a cent. He fought bravely and with dogged determination never feeling anything but patriotism and love for his country.

The war ended, like all wars do with the winners pretending it was inevitable and the losers…well, no one cared about them. And Harold Q. Thomas went home to Delaware, his mild mannered state.

On the train he self-consciously smoothed what he had left of his hair and hoped that Sally had no qualms about marrying a bald man. He ate a bologna sandwich that he purchased from the cart and coffee with no milk. Harold crossed his legs, smoothed the crumbs from his jacket and waited to be home.

Sally was waiting for him. He knew she would be. She looked beautiful and happy to see him and Harold swept her up in his arms and kissed her a much more passionate kiss then he ever had before he left.

They walked to her car arm in arm talking of all the things too sweet and intimate to be fully communicated by letter. Sally drove and he sat listening to her engaging ramblings about their wedding. Finally he asked her the question he could no longer contain.

“Sally darling, do I look different to you?” She looked over surprised studying him curiously, then smiled in an infectious way.

“You look like my Harold, dear. The man I love.”

He smiled back. The kindness of his wife was truly miraculous.

The months that followed proved to be happy ones. Harold moved back into his home (the upstairs was still to be rented out to the widow), settled back into work and married the woman he loved. They honeymooned in New York spending long evenings talking or sitting in companionable silence. Harold took to wearing hats.

On the Christmas Eve of 1947 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas visited the older Mr. and Mrs. Thomas for a family dinner. It was in celebration of more then just Christmas of course, the end of the war, the marriage of Harold and Sally, and the expected arrival of an addition to the Thomas family. It was the pleasantest sort of evening when all the company loves each other and the food is good and the snow is quietly floating past the window. Harold made a toast.

“I would like to make a toast, to this growing family,” he gave his wife a special smile. “And to the peace that is now in our home land.”

“Here, here!” Everyone responded politely and with real feeling.

“Even if I did lose my hair in the process.” Harold laughed a little self-consciously (this was the first time he had actually mentioned his glaring baldness out loud). His family looked at him quizzically.

“Did you have hair before the war, dear?” His wife asked curiously. Harold was rendered speechless, he mumbled some sort of reply resulting in neither denial nor conformation. A little pinker in the face than before Harold picked up his fork. “Merry Christmas, everyone.”

Rachel May Thomas was born to Harold and Sally Thomas in the June of 1948. She never saw her father wearing a hat.

a love letter to Capote

I love these pieces. Love. He has this eternal air of journalism about him – it comes across in both nonfiction and fiction, and makes me think that he sort of collects people. His fictional characters and his true characters feel no different in description and no different in style – he brings both alive with beauty and with empathy and with these sort of minute, dazzling details which turn them from character to person. His writing sort of – well, I guess it has this vibrancy to it, this sort of elegantly luscious quality which makes his people and his places shine in the most unexpected ways. Like: “even the cat had ceased to prowl, and lay dreaming in the corridor” (from “A Ride Through Spain”). The cat doesn’t doze, it doesn’t sleep or laze or get in the way – it dreams. Or: “Once, at a parting in the trees, there was something I’d wanted to see, a castle on the hill, and it sat there like a crown.” Perfect. This castle, presumably made of aged grey stone, doesn’t only shout history and whisper of being old – it sits with grace atop the mountain, with years of practiced royalty.

And that is what I love about Capote. He doesn’t simply write the happenings and personalities of people – he spins them into these webs of the uncommon and of the beautiful, taking perfectly normal traits and turning them vivid, these pieces of person that shouldn’t matter but do. I picture him as an incessant people watcher – he just loves people and their oddities. But he doesn’t ridicule these quirks – he embraces all traits, all wrongs and all rights. Like this part in Summer Crossing (which urrabody needs to read):

“In the last year, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed their most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not know who it was who replaced her*, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name. She never mentioned it to anyone, those pearl-eyed perfumed Negroes, those men, silk- or sailor-shirted, toughs or pale-toothed and lavender-suited, those men that watched, smiled, followed: which way are you going? Some faces, like the lady who changed money at Nick’s Amusements, are faces that belong nowhere, are green shadows under green eyeshades, evening effigies embalmed and floating in the caramel-sweet air. Hurry. Doorway megaphones, frenziedly hurtling into the glare sad roars of rhythm, accelerate the senses to collapse: run – out of the white into the real, the sexless, the jazzless, the joyful dark: these infatuating terrors she had told to no one.”

Now, now only is that achingly beautiful, it notices everything about everything. It’s perfect. His writing is perfect. The End.

*Capote? Mebbe?

Capote

He’s. so. good! I can’t even stand it. The little character sketches of Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe – you’re getting their whole lives in just under three pages, about, but you’re getting so much! Everything that matters squeezed into (or out of?) these little details that you’d think wouldn’t matter, but do. Immensely. And he does it in such a fantastic way – I’m breathless by the time I finish; his writing is filled with such a sense of forward motion that it feels urgent (as all good journalism should). And I love it. And, of course, his descriptions: his word choice! He’s a genius. Pound’s satyr-saint face (I wish I’d come up with that phrase), Marilyn’s “overspilling blondness” and air of the untidy divine – it’s luscious, it’s brilliant, it’s perfect. My favourite phrase out of all the readings might be this one (from “A Ride Through Spain”): “…the lovely girls leaned loosely, like six exhausted geraniums.” What an image! What cadence! What an incredibly beautiful phrase! And so fresh, so unexpected, so wind-blown and new! Oh Capote. I’m really sad you’re dead.

For Esme with love and squalor

Salinger is a flippin’ genius!!!!! I really loved this story. I loved his voice in it and how well he captured all of Esme’s and Charles’s gestures and oddisms – especially the part about the riddle Charles tells over and over. It’s so completely real and sweet, exactly what five-year-old boys really do. And I liked how  he wrote her “story” for her as she was getting married (at least, I assume that’s what was going down there??). Salinger is amazing – he chooses every word and phrase with such care. LOVED this story!

Innocence

I thought this story was extremly well written but I wondered at the end if they were really happy. He was at first so awed by her beauty and talks about her like she is something above the rest of the people around. But then when they have sex the first time, and he realizes how inexperienced she is, how “innocent”, his whole tone towards her changes. Suddenly it feels as though he thinks of her as sub-human. As if he was her superior or “parent”, if you will. He feels as though he knows her better then she does herself. Knows what is best for her. For example his fixation on her having an orgasim. Which she finally does at the end –  and then what? He is finally satisfied in what he wanted from her but she seems like she is kind of shattered. She is completely raw and insecure and bare to the point where she does turn to him for comfort, with no practiced emotions, or pretending. Is that love?

Hills like white Elephants

Ok, I did not like this story very much. The guy was a total dirt-bag! I mean, it was clear that the girl really kind of wanted to keep the baby and then he just kept pushing for the abortion. He was so sneaky about it too – he kept saying that she had a choice but then slipped in little things about how much happier they’d be if she just had the “operation” done. And how he loved her still but he couldn’t think about anything she said because he was so worried. (Side note: did anyone else notice how Hemingway describes the two characters in the beginning as the American man and “the girl” with him? He doesn’t even give her enough importance in the story to say whether she is American or not. Was he a total sexist or what?)

Hills Like White Elephants

Okay this one kinda confused me. I didn’t really get the point of this story, except that the man and girl were really wierd. They seemed to love eachother but were kind of arguing. The man wanted to do something but not if the girl didn’t want to. And the girl wanted him to stop talking. Very confusing.

Innocence

I was really surprised by this story, it was just so…different. You never think of sex as being about innocence and purity but the way this is writtien it is the only way to describe it. I was a little hesitant to read it at first because it was about sex, which is a very awkward topic, but after I got through it I was amazed by how much I loved it.

The description and the way the author seems to know about everything, from every angle there is, is amazing. I’ve never read anything like it and something tells me I never will again. This was just so beautiful and unique.