Bathsheba Monk's Blog, page 11

Two of My Favorite Poets....

Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple join me tonight on Lehigh Valley Arts Salon on WDIY 88.1 FM locally; streaming on www.wdiy.org at 6:00 pm.   It's poetry month and I don't know a better way to celebrate than listening to poets read their work and talk about how it happened.  Jerry's superb book The Artemas Poems take you to a day in the life of an ordinary/extraordinary man and Marjorie's collection Local News from Somewhere Else does that wonderful sleight of hand that good poetry does:  she makes the specific universal.  Support them by buying their books, s'il vous plait.  It's the way to get more!

How long do you keep friends alive on FB?

I was startled this morning to see that Nancy was having a birthday because Nancy died several years ago.  Nancy was the girlfriend of the best friend of my ex-B, who also died several...well more than several at this point....years ago, but he wouldn't even update to Word for Windows, insisted on writing his fiction on Word Perfect so it's not surprising that he wouldn't have a FB page so I am reminded of his birthday only if I'm melancholy already.

But Nancy was a with-it kind of girl and so naturally she did and we automatically friended when it was possible to do so and tacitly and mutually agreed to not follow other each because we didn't have that much in common really.  I first met her as P's girlfriend one Thanksgiving a thousand years ago.  She had a big apartment in a nice brownstone in Brooklyn.  She was a translator (Spanish) in the court system in NYC and was so good that a Nicaraguan friend of mine thought she was Puerto Rican when she first spoke to her.  Her real love was translating French Langua D'oc troubadour poetry into English.  She told me when she visited that part of France, the people couldn't understand how a Jewish woman would be interested in that language.  It would be like, they said, one of them deciding to translate Yiddish into French.  She was learning jazz piano and singing and occasionally she would jam with B who was learning jazz saxophone and she was not bad.

That Thanksgiving B and I were greeted at Nancy's brownstone by P's mother who immediately pulled pictures out of her clutch purse of all the women P had been involved with and I could see why P hadn't spoken to or of her for years.  She and her husband had been pharmacists and had several famous clients although the Pharmacists Code of Secrecy or some such kept her from dissing and the promise of really juicy gossip kept the attention on her a couple minutes longer than she deserved.

The turkey was late getting done--as it usually is--so everyone was plenty looped by the time we sat down to a dinner served on a white tablecloth Nancy's grandmother schlepped across the steppes of Russia escaping from enemies who were probably pissed that Jews had enough brains to learn Langa D'oc and speak Spanish like Puerto Ricans and learn jazz piano late in the game.  Faint with hunger and clumsy with wine, I knocked my glass of red wine over and red creeped across the heirloom tablecloth like blood in a horror movie.  Salt came out.  Hysteria reigned.  I was banished to a plastic tumbler.  Later when someone produced a spliff Nancy derided it and him as childish and immature.

Our relationship didn't get off to a good start.  Never took off.  A little respect when my first book was published by a respectable house.  That's it.  Although I always admired her, I found her as scary as a strict schoolteacher.   I would never measure up to her exacting standards.

It occurred to me one day last year to see "what's Nancy up to" and I found out she got sick then died not long before.  And today is her birthday.

Does Evil Exist?

Writing murder mysteries, I find myself awash in the cliches of the genre, specifically regarding evil.  In a murder there must certainly be evil as at least one of the parties has committed the most egregious crime we can imagine.  It goes without saying!  Certain scientists have spent the last several years lauding themselves for ridding us of the concept of evil though, saying if you believe (believe being the operative word) in evil, you must believe in good (read god) and no one has been able to prove that.  These scientists say that what we think of as evil is a malfunction of the brain in conjunction with the result of bad upbringing.  They explain Hitler by saying his "evilness" was a result of a mosquito bite in the trenches of WWI and the probable encephalitis that mosquito was carrying.  I can think of at least 6 million people who could give a damn about the reason for his evil, his madness.  So maybe the question is wrong.  Bad behavior most certainly does exist but when you call it bad behavior instead of evil you realize you have complete control over it.  It's not a devil that got inside you and is running the show, it's your own bad behavior which you can change any time you want.  It might not be easy--what with nasty chemicals and bad learned behavior--but the choice is still yours.  And that makes for a much more satisfying murder mystery, don't you think?

Time in a Bottle

After B died, I would hear Time in a Bottle, the Jim Croce song, like EVERYWHERE.   Flipping through the car radio dial, in the mall, a friend would find an old CD under the sofa and play it for me.  For about a year it seemed as if Jim Croce was experiencing a rebirth of sorts twenty years or more after his own death.  B was an aesthete who liked jazz, classical and early rock so it was surprising that he glomed onto a corny Jim Croce song to remind him of us.  But he did in those early wild frequently separated days and then we mostly forgot it as we grew together for so long it didn't seem to apply to our older selves.  Obviously we wouldn't have to collect time in a bottle because we were living it in real time.  But then, life and death always has its own timetable and it surprises me when my plans are written over.  And it's even more surprising when a half-forgotten song ambushes me and makes me slow down for a moment to savor the time I am living right now.

Somebody help me....

understand Twitter....does everybody actually READ  everything that the people they are following is posting?  Or what?  I can't keep up.  And it seems as if everyone is promoting their own stuff, which is fine, that's what I want to do, but who is actually buying anything?  Questions on a cold winter morn.  All answers will be respectfully read.

Am I my brother's keeper?

A man of my acquaintance had a heart attack and went to the hospital where they patched him up with stents and drugs and sent him home.  Because he is a ex-con he can't get work on top of the table, so to speak, and when he is sick he is without a net.  He is, however, a skilled and very hard worker and conscientious in that he was in despair at how he is going to pay his 125K doctor bill.  For some reason I can't discern--probably because he has no phone and no internet--he can't get any kind of assistance.  When he went for a checkup yesterday, the cardiologist told him that without his medication he will die.  His medication--the usual for heart patients I think--costs him way more than he can afford, especially because he hasn't been able to work for the past couple of weeks and without any kind of benefits he has no money.  The cardiologist told him that "because of Obamacare" he couldn't give him any drug samples to tide him over.  This is total jive of course.  Pharmacy reps with their black bags of goodies prowl the halls of hospitals giving out perks to the docs, including pills that could save this man's life.  And then the cardiologist sent my acquaintance home, basically to die.  We have to start asking ourselves the hard questions.

Answer to yesterday's question....

which is:  is there wisdom in crowds?

Answer:  if you're part of the crowd, no.

If you see the crowd from a distance, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Is There Wisdom in Crowds?

A Star is Born!

[image error]


Meet Babe.  When I first met my husband 14 years ago, I noticed that when he couldn't remember someone's name he called them "Babe."  So this is for him.  In case he slips up and calls him 'the other fish's' name!

Requiem for Trotsky

I don't know why Mary, the woman who sits our cat when we're away, thought it was a good idea to introduce a fish into the equation more than 9 months ago, but when we came back from a week away there he was--a big red betta fish--swimming with the decorative magnolia branch I was trying to force in a vase in the middle of the dining room table.  Fast forward to:  I became mesmerized with the fish.  Einstein, the cat, would jump between me and the vase when I talked to Trotsky--jealous? trying to protect Trotsky? my vaseline covered human senses will never know.  Although I don't ascribe cosmic purpose to random events--like having a fish appear in my life--I do believe in trying to see what's in front of my nose and what I saw in the vase was a creature who responded to me, to Einstein, and Paul--and not just the rattling of the food bag or the silhouette of a predator.   Who helped me discover Instagram and all the cool effects I get with photos of him and I took quite a few. He was quite a ham. Did he have a good life?  I don't know what that means.  He's in the freezer in a baggie waiting for the ground to thaw.  As are we all.