Plucking Around
For the week of March 21st 2022
I hope you’re enjoying my explorations, because now there will be more of them. I traded in my old commuter car for a lifted Subaru Outback, so I can drive deeper into the Pine Barrens with less concern. I call it the Hulk, which probably sounds cute to owners of F-350s, but it does what I need and gets the same mileage as my car did. I was eyeing a hybrid Jeep Wrangler, but they go for 50 grand, and the dealers are tacking 5-10 thousand more because they’re not selling any cars. They used to call this “price gouging,” now it’s a “low inventory surcharge.” There’s no supply, there’s little demand, but don’t expect late-stage capitalism to make any sense:
I’ve been reading the original “Lost Towns of New Jersey” books by Henry Charlton Beck, the tall-tale spinning journalist who began the hunt for oddly-named towns that disappeared off the maps back in the ‘30s. It makes for a fun game, finding evidence of hundred-year-old settlements that have been cannibalized brick by brick. Places with names like Ong’s Hat and Timbuctoo. Some, like the latter, are now archaeological digs. Others, like the former, are fodder for conspiracy theories and elaborate fictions. Either way, they are wellsprings of joy and delight.
Another source of joy has been my Slow Reading of three books every morning:
That’s Greek Myths, a retelling by Charlotte Higgins; Call Us What We Carry, poems by Amanda Gorman; and volume one of the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison. I read one or two poems each morning, and one segment of a chapter of Higgins’s retelling of Greek mythology from the perspective of women, framed by having them weaving tapestries at the loom, which was an ever-present device in the myths themselves, and a symbol of civilization. They weren’t wearing animal skins anymore, women were toiling at these looms, sending the shuttle back and forth, not always entirely of their own free will. So we get the myths told from what Athena, Helen, Penelope, Arachne, and others decide to weave, and how to depict it. It’s a wonderful read whether you know the myths in detail or not.
The poems of Gorman and Harrison are quite powerful; Harrison is often nature-inspired, and Gorman’s are very much of the moment, reflecting on and digging deeply into the feelings of the present and the last several years. While Harrison’s are chronological, and he died last year in his eighties, so I’m reading poems written by him as a young man in an entirely different era. They balance each other well, different perspectives entirely.
It sets me up well for the day. I highly recommend picking up a book of poetry and doing this yourself, or heading over to Poetry.org and going random, if you prefer. Just make a habit of it. Someone needs to make a list of Big Books You Can Read in Small Pieces. I read Boccaccio’s The Decameron last year, but some of the tales are very long. So it doesn’t lend itself to a morning read, unless you have more time than I do.
Last night, Sarah and I watched Drive My Car, and finished her quest to see all the Best Picture and Actor/Actress nominees for the Oscars. I skipped out on a few. I might watch King Richard later, I didn’t know it was about the Williams sisters, and I fell asleep during the Coen Brothers’ new adaptation of MacBeth. But I liked Drive My Car quite a bit. I never knew where it was going, but I was never bored. It’s a story about grief, love, and how we communicate; we all speak different languages, and we don’t always understand the words. Some people are easier to understand than others. It follows a couple: one is an actor and stage director, the other is a screenwriter. We meet with the writer telling her husband a story; we get threads of the story throughout the movie, and how she writes it is rather unique, and a way out of grief. It’s three hours long, and we get deep into a multilingual performance of Uncle Vanya before we meet the driver, whose story is quite gripping on its own.
We also watched Zola, based on a Twitter thread. Which somehow works. I vaguely recalled the viral thread, and the story is reminiscent of Hustlers and Spring Breakers in both style and content. The acting is quite good, and the nomination deserved. The story just sort of ends, and wasn’t entirely satisfying, but it was certainly worth a watch. Oh, we need to watch The Worst Person in the World for Best Screenplay, so we’ll probably squeeze that in tomorrow. I also have Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg waiting, which I think John Waters recommended. He loves difficult movies. I tried watching Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and gave up; I’m more of a Au Hasard Balthazar kind of viewer. The last time I took someone on a date, I took them to see The Rules of the Game at the Film Forum, right after we’d seen The Evil Dead Musical off-broadway, because I wanted to make sure they were well-rounded. That didn’t work out.
Sarah and I have worked out for 15 years now. We went to see the Tenacious D movie together, and then Shakespeare at the Public Theater. Tomorrow, we celebrate our eleventh wedding anniversary. I’m not sure we’ll have a twelfth, because I plan on dragging her around the country to see weird shit in the Subaru, and while she tolerated the Bigfoot museum, and loved the Paris catacombs—that’s a photo she took, below—I’ve been cooped up so long with this pandemic, that I may overdo it. Not everyone else is interested in seeing a 1500 year old trash midden of oyster shells dumped by Lenni-Lenape people. I may have to do that one solo.
But that’s how you get stories inspired by the Talheim Death Pit.
Oh, books again. I really liked Fox & I: an Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven. That’s the one about scientist who goes off to live in the woods to be alone and ends up befriending a fox, when all her scientific training tells her that animals are subjects, not friends. But Raven also loves The Little Prince and Moby-Dick and reading her Thoreauvian adventure living off-grid with abundant foxes and magpies while teaching budding biologists and evading wildfires was quite entertaining and thought-provoking.
Now I’m reading Lost Luggage, a lively crime caper by Wendall Thomas, and I’m loving. It’s a funny sexy tale of a Brooklyn travel agent on a trip to Tanzania with a rogue chiropractor to find the missing son of a murdered pet store owner, so she can escape her smothering Italian family. Great fun, so far. (If you buy through any of the book links, me and a local bookstore both make a few bucks, and the billionaire doesn’t, so please clickity clickity coo.)
I hope y’all enjoyed the teaser of the fifth Joey Cucuzza story I’m writing. The first, “The Cucuzza Curse,” is available to read for free at Tough Crime; the second, “The Green Manalishi with the Two Pronged Crown,” is in Collectibles, edited by Lawrence Block; it’s almost been out for a year, so it will be in The Story Archive soon! The third, S.L.U.G., is in the Gabba Gabba Hey Ramones anthology. And the fourth, “Joey Cucuzza Loses His Election,” will appear in Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3, out soon.
It will be a novel-in-stories someday! Get ready for The Big Cucuzza.
No links this week. I haven’t been reading much on the web. But here are a few of my favorite Substack newsletters:
Badreads by Lauren Hough
Wanderfinder by Hannah Fischer
An Irritable Métis by Chris La Tray
A Writer’s Journal by Joyce Carol Oates
The Audacity by Roxane Gay
I updated the post with the photo from the Paris catacombs. Ah, Paris.
You're ready to live in Missoula now that you have a Subaru. I really like the colors too.