19 June 1999: WFNX

Knowledge is Wealth.
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Friends had a cook-out Friday. There's a problematic term. It wasn't a barbecue. "Friends had a grill Friday" looks like a typo for a stork delivery. Anyway. I did my usual party thing, talking to almost everyone there including people I introduced myself to. Is this rude, to join conversations at parties? You never know whom you'll meet, and commenting on your mutual acquaintances--their attractive border garden or someone's silly apron--is always safe. Our usual suspects mostly hung out together for the evening, which is nice but limiting, I think.

I would have finished the second Harry Potter book on the way over but hadn't taken my Dramamine so had to stop reading in the car. But I'd read enough to find my favorite joke so far: a wizard has a Phoenix named Fawkes. I doubt most U.S. kids would understand the joke; certainly enough U.S. lit majors didn't Friday night. Someone thought the name was Fox, as in foxfire (or Mulder?). They knew James Bond's chicks' names instead: Pussy Galore, Felicity Shagwell, Octopussy. Those are too obvious for me. Perhaps Fawkes isn't as subtle a name to a Brit, though.

I read some children's books on their shelves and wound up in the study with a collection of John Cheever. I read "Fall River," which is allegedly very Hemingwayesque but which reminded me of Eugene O'Neill--Fall River's closer to New London than to Upper Michigan--and "Long Day's Journey into Night" because of the wretchedness and the placement of a house on a hill. I maybe shouldn't read at parties, but so I always have done.

The day I booked my flight home, I exchanged our tickets for the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit. So this Saturday morning we went. This time we got the audio tour (which we eschewed at an earlier exhibit of Egyptianh work) and it did have much more information than the plaques. I knew nothing of Toulouse-Lautrec except that I could recognize his obvious style, and surprised myself doubting the scripted information instead of just taking it on the museum's authority: all the criticism and interpretation were biographical, which assumption is currently out of vogue. He painted people from below because that's how he (at 4'11") saw them. He depicted people's weaknesses--the acrobat no longer limber, the prostitute no longer lithe--because of his own physical abnormalities. Maybe I doubted it because my own interpretation of anything is biographical and I like examining the connections between an author's writing and life and whatever I like must be wrong.

Is it so wrong? Amy Tan is of Chinese descent: she writes books about Chinese people. Well, that's probably just Write What You Know. But no one should assume she is the kitchen god's wife.

This Friday night and last, when we had dinner chez another couple, people remarked on how well read I am. English lit professors have commented on it as well as English lit grad students. I don't understand. I am not well read and I know no criticism and I cannot even discuss a book in any literary or scholary way. I can't talk about books with my workaday compadres and so I do want to talk about them with my social circle. My social circle, however, deals with books and criticism and composition so much in their work that I guess they don't want to at parties.

I heard something recently that stopped me in my tracks, a biting comment distilling everything everyone dislikes about a friend's husband into one pithy drop: "I knew he was hopeless when I saw that he air-guitared without irony."

A coworker at the UConn Co-op once sniggered at a friend of mine whom she had spotted air-guitaring as he gamboled along the sidewalk. I defended him: whom does it hurt? So he's making an ass of himself--in your perception. Deal with it. I didn't point out that I found her height--maybe just 5 foot nothing--as aesthetically offensive as she found his strumming, or that this man actually knew how to play guitar and therefore charitably could have been interpreted as practicing, like in "The Piano" when Holly Hunter played the carved-up kitchen table (but I couldn't because the movie didn't exist yet.)

But now. Air-guitaring without irony. I sniggered myself. It harms no one still, but I appreciate how ludicrous it is--especially if you don't know how to play.

Back to Toulouse-Lautrec, or at least to the museum. After we examined that exhibit, we checked out the recently re-opened 7th floor, currently featuring art from the Royal Academy of the Victorian period. The plaque read that since the Academy firmly frowned upon innovation, no one submitted anything adventurous for diploma works, which these were. I'll say. The realism was grotesque. And so we left for our lunch reservation at Palettes, the museum restaurant. That's another perfect name, not as funny, but appropos.

I spent the afternoon by the pool with a book until the splashing and smoke drove me away. Blake and I sat outside and read and napped, and in the evening RDC and I blew off another party and were slugs again, finding "Love and Death" on TCM and watching that. Actually he watched and I dozed and wrote, which is a useful approach for many Woody Allen movies.

 

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Last modified 21 June 1999

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