Domestic comedy

“I’ve done that inadvertently.”

“You should do it vertently.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

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Bix to Yoko in three or four Now with two paths.

Bix to Yoko in three or four

I like thinking about degrees of separation, which seem to work — always — in dizzyingly unpredictable ways. E.g.: Barack Obama – Buddy Guy – Son House – Charlie Patton. Guy played at a White House function; Guy and House played together on the television show Camera Three. And then we’re back in the Mississippi Delta.

How many degrees of separation are needed to get from Bix Beiderbecke to Yoko Ono? There’s at least one way to do it in four moves, and at least one way to do it in three. And there may (I hope) be ways to do it that have not occurred to me. Each person after Bix, including Yoko, counts as one move.

Can you solve the Bix to Yoko challenge? Leave your solution as a comment. If no one gets it, I’ll reveal my solutions tomorrow.

A related post
Six degrees of Richard Nixon

[My having met Barack Obama gives me four degrees of separation from Charlie Patton.]

*

June 18: One Bix to Yoko path is now in the comments. Here’s the in-three that I thought of: Jack Teagarden played with Bix and with Chuck Berry. (Really: Teagarden was part of the Newport Blues Band on the stage with Berry at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.) And Berry performed with John and Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show. Bix to Teagarden to Berry to Yoko.

RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky died a year ago. The one thing I have learned about losing a friend — or losing anybody — is that the losing goes on for a long time, taking different forms at different times. In other words, you keep losing.

How many times in the last year have I read or noticed something that I’ve wanted to tell Rob about? Many.

I wrote these words for Rob last year. There’s a poem of his there too that I love.

Bloomsday 2014

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and stretches into the early hours of June 17. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s catechitical next-to-last episode. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are in Bloom’s kitchen, sharing the sacrament of Epps’s Cocoa.

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen’s present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom’s present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. Union City, New Jersey. November 28, 1957.]

I looked up the date: it was a Thursday. What we were doing posing for pictures on a weekday? And then I realized: it was Thanksgiving.

I am very thankful to have Jim Leddy for a father. Happy Father’s Day to him and to all fathers.

From Robert Walser

I always walked along the same path, and every time it seemed entirely new. I never tired of delighting in the same things and glorying in the same things. Is the sky not always the same, are love and goodness not always the same? The beauty met me with silence. Conspicuous things and inconspicuous things held hands with each other like children of the same mother. What was important melted away, and I devoted undivided attention to the most unimportant things and was very happy doing so. In this way, the days, week, months went by and the year ran quickly round, but the new year looked much the same as the previous one and again I felt happy.

Robert Walser, “Spring,” in A Schoolboy’s Diary, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

Other Walser posts
From “The Essay”
From “Reading”
Robert Walser, Microscripts
Staying small

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Another school principal borrows from DFW’s commencement speech Now with added technology to prevent plagiarism.

Visualizing our solar system

Worth the scroll: If the Moon Were Only One Pixel. I’m with Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

[Found via Creative Good’s newsletter.]

Darger and Maier

Watching Finding Vivian Maier (dir. John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, 2014), I thought again and again of Henry Darger. The similarities between these Chicago phantoms are unmistakable: years of low-paying work, secret lives of creativity in multiple media, a strong inclination to collect and hoard, a fascination with violence, and a devotion (both tender and cruel) to children. (It’s reasonable to speculate that both suffered abuse in childhood.) There are uncannier similarities too: Darger and Maier both claimed to have been born abroad (Darger in Brazil, Maier in France), and both have last names whose pronunciation is uncertain.

But the contrasts between Darger and Maier are just as unmistakable. Darger labored in the Realms of the Unreal (to borrow from the title of his master narrative) and lived in near isolation. Maier documented urban dailiness and lived in relation to her employers and her charges. She seems to have been at home anywhere, traveling the world, even interviewing strangers in the supermarket (tape recorder running) to get their opinions on current events. I can imagine Maier walking up to Darger, microphone in her hand, and Darger shuffling away and muttering.

What Darger and Maier ultimately have in common is a dedication to their work for its own sake. I like what the photographer Joel Meyerowitz says about Maier in the Maloof-Siskel documentary: “She didn’t defend herself as an artist. She just did the work.” So too with Darger. These artists are fortunate, I think, that their work became known only after their deaths, when public attention could not violate their privacy, when no one could ask anything more of them. Their stories make me wonder how many other secret artists might be at work in our cities.

[Multiple media: Darger: visual art, narrative fiction, autobiography. Maier: photography, home movies, tape recordings. Darger’s name is said to be pronounced with a soft g, though I can no longer recall who says so or what the evidence is. Finding Vivian Maier settles on a long i : my - er .]