Saturday, August 08, 2009

Joseph T Major, Louisville, Kentucky


http://members.iglou.com/jtmajor
http://www.efanzines.com/Alexiad/index.htm


"Merritt Green 1952-2008": My condolences to Rosy, Anni, and Joe on the loss of their brother, husband, and son.

A quality that sometimes gets us through challenge is not one that is greatly heralded, or made a Positive Influence. I've seen it referred to as sheer bloody-minded bulling through. Some might say it was Asperger's, if not outright autism.
One Saturday, Lisa and I were having lunch at a Denny's near the University of Louisville. We ordered, they had just brought our meal when ... a woman at a nearby table collapsed. The EMT were called, they came, moved tables around, treated her on the floor, and eventually shipped her out to the hospital. Lisa watched the obituaries for the next few days and there was nothing about her dying.

But, it seemed, she was dining with a granddaughter and infant great-grandchild. The granddaughter was really in a bad state; for example, grandmother was driving. All I could do was sit there, numb, and let her hold my hand. She was terrified.
They let her and the baby have a ride to the hospital in the ambulance, and presumably someone would come and get them. Then they thanked me. I'd been reassuring.

Breaking down wouldn't have done anyone any good, me least of all. There wasn't anything else I could have done.

However, we have never eaten at that restaurant since.

"Bravo Bevo!": And it seems
Bevo Francis has never been nominated to the National Collegiate Hall of Fame, either. This sounds like "Nobody Bothers Gus".

"Cricket for Novel Readers": And in P. G. Wodehouse's The Swoop!, his attempt to deconstruct the England Invaded novel, the news of the invasion of England was buried in the stop press items, amid the cricket results.

"I Call It Loyalty": You do realize that one of the other admirers of the Billy Goat Tavern was Mike Royko, who put in his columns many references to the Siannises and their establishment.
"Golf in the Con-Dom": It was Carson Napier who commented on golf, and he said, "Golf is a mental disorder." Lost on Venus (1932). I seem to be the only man in the family who doesn't like it. My brother plays with his son and son-in-law. The cousins who run the florists' greenhouses won a cancer-charity tournament, but then Mack is a cancer survivor. Cousin Dick down in Houston has been finding it easier to shoot his age of late.

"The Stars My Consternation": And Disch passed along from Samuel Delany a reference to a scene on a nonexistent page of Starship Troopers. The page might exist if Chip had been reading a Large Print Edition, but there is no scene such as he describes (Rico checking his makeup in a mirror).

What killed so much of the New Wave, as I understand Darrell Schweitzer to say, was not what was in it but what wasn't. So much of it was "non-functional word patterns"; things that looked nice but didn't say anything. This is the sort of thing that goes over very well in the Semotics of Deconstruction 325 class.

"Denvention 3 Diary": Alas, Larry Smith won't be in Montreal. Something about the difficulty of getting his stock through Douane Canada Customs. So the belly dancing will have to be somewhere else.

"The Chorus Lines": Me: Well, Curlin made the Breeders' Cup and Big Brown didn't. So much for my predictive abilities. On the other hand, in January we went to see Curlin, and he let us pat him.

An event charmingly described in that month's Alexiad.

John Purcell: Wondering "Which should I want most: a long life or a good pizza?" Since I don't like pizza, the question is a non-starter for me.

Curt Phillips: Shopping on-line is great if you know what you want already and the problem is how to get it. I don't think, for example, that I've ever seen Lord Mountevans' South with Scott in any bookstore anywhere. (Hint: he was the last surviving person to have seen Scott alive for the last time.) But if I want to look, there's no telling what I could find. The bookstore in Chambersburg that had The Log of "Bob" Bartlett for example . . ."Just Here for the Gelato": Now Nicki's gone and done it. The WWF will be doing "The Twilight of the Gods", complete with losing wrestlers being burned on a funeral pyre right in the middle of the ring. She HAD to suggest it!

Leonardo liked to experiment and innovate. This is why the "Last Supper" is in such bad shape; it was painted using a technique that he had devised and understandably has not been used again. InnovaTion is not always for the best.





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