I was not raised on Mallomars. I only discovered them as an adult, at first in the pages of novels and memoirs, later, upon repeated requests, in boxes brought as gifts from New York, a city built on Mallomars, Mallomars and dreams of Mallomars. When did I first find them in Charlottesville? Many years, but not so long, ago. How many make their way down here? Not many, but I find them. As with any religion it’s the converts who are the worst.
Crucial to the magic of the Mallomar is that it is a seasonal cookie. Not just a holiday treat, as Lebkuchen are for Christmas (outrageously — they are too good to be in that ghetto) or the strangely addictive Cadbury mini eggs for Easter (but cleverly sphereized and diversified by Cadbury to make them ornament balls for Christmas and also “Harvest Handfuls” for the fall, both of which are well worth looking out for), this is a product available throughout the colder months of the year, but not the warmer ones. Because, we are told, the cookie cannot handle the heat.
Last night, walking into Charlottesville’s Wegmans, it occured to me that it was just about Mallomar season. Somehow Wegmans always gets their Mallomars early but then never restocks, so you must check elsewhere for your winter supply. Sure enough there they were, in a special display, and at $1.50 off! Three boxes went in my cart with the now overshadowed and forgotten broccoli, yogurt, butter and sundry supermarket trash. As I wheeled away toward my next objective, I think it was noodles, I was pondering the subject and finding it hard to believe that Nabisco, with all of its resources, was unable to safely move Mallomars through the summer months. If, in the middle of July, you can buy sushi in Chattanooga, why not a Mallomar in Queens?
Then I got home and opened a box, and this is what I saw:
Notice the distinct bloom on this Mallomar, the gray coloring caused by fat rising to the surface of the chocolate coating. That is the effect of an exposure to excessive heat. They were all like that. Though at the time of purchase temperatures were low, these cookies would have been transported during some quite hot September days, and they showed it. Nabisco’s food scientists had made the right call, they may have just failed to take global warming into account, probably because of the damned Republicans. The opening of Mallomar season might have to be pushed forward into October.
Fortunately the issue is mostly just cosmetic. There is some debate within the community about how much blooming affects the texture of the chocolate shell, but no one disputes that once you chomp the thing into mouth-goo the flavor is unaffected.
I have never tasted a German Schokokuss, Israeli krembo, Austrian Schwedenbombe, Danish flødebolle, Serbian Munchmallow, Swiss Mohrenkopf, or even a Canadian Whippet. I am sure some of these are tastier than our Mallomar, maybe all of them. But I am an American, American I was born and American I will die, and my marshmallow cookie is the Mallomar (fuck Pinwheels). I make no great claims for their pillowy goodness. It is modest, like Pat Nixon’s cloth coat. But if that goodness is just about the only goodness you have in your life, how could anyone dare to take it away from you? I am not saying anyone is trying, I am just saying that if they did, the homicide would be justified.
In closing I would like to quote another American, albeit one who tried to die an Englishman. Henry James was last in America two years before the first Mallomars were sold in 1913, in Hoboken. But it is possible that at some point between then and his death in London on February 28th, 1916, some goodhearted man or woman carried a box of Mallomars across the Atlantic, landed in England with it, made way to the home of the Master, and there, after a preliminary exchange of courtesies, offered him a Mallomar, and of Mallomar he did taste. This is a possibility we cannot rule out.
His words, from the essay “Ivan Turgenieff,”
His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.
What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
–from Ulysses
It is a beautiful Bloomsday here in Charlottesville. July wants us dead but June is a cat playing catch and release and today, release. What’s the difference between the ad-man’s dream and his creator’s? Well the middle, by inversion. All extraneous accretions added, increased to its most complex and least efficient terms definitely exceeding the span of casual vision. That would be Ulysses. But this too, wiggled a bit: some one sole unique advertisement (for itself) to cause readers to stop in wonder, a novel novelty, congruous with the velocity of modern life.
I was reading something not long ago that singled out James Joyce as unusual, among his peers, for being a liberal. I do not remember exactly the terms of peerage — major modernist writers, the 20th Century avant-garde, or something like that. I disagree, because I think they were all liberals. Sometimes with kooky opinions and unsavory associations, but to create real art, genuine literature, in our times (I say ours and want to keep saying ours), is always to further the liberal cause. We say the liberal arts, we say a liberal education. A liberal pour of whiskey. We are talking about the free and generous creations of free minds, freely shared. Liberal is the public library, and if your book is in it, you’re ours.
But regarding Joyce, yes. He was not fashy, commie, churchy, or a snob. He supported Irish independence, deplored Irish bigotry. He was interested in ideas for their power to enliven human minds, not dominate them, and never forgot their comedy. He made Bloom a hero armed only with curiosity and kindness. He was into butt stuff before it was cool.
A phrase comes to mind: The Liberal Baroque. That might be a fitting category for Ulysses. Like all of the most baroque of good baroque art (music excepted), it not only triumphs over its own questionable taste and bodily grossness, it makes those qualities essential to its excellence. It grants to ordinary urban life the splendor and pageantry, the plethoric exuberance of a 17th Century court. It defies the sadly common notion that the liberal mind must tend toward the plain and sensible. When we see each other as free and equal beings meaning proliferates wildly, every element of ordinary life is freed to burst out and discover its imaginative possibilities, if permitted by an open mind. An Irishman’s jailbreak frees the English language to blossom and pulsate like a coral reef in the tropical sun.
I think I will wrap up there, the day is too perfect for keyboards and screens, I am going to the bookshop. Thank you for once again joining me for my annual Bloomsday jazz set. I would like to point out that in theory you can subscribe to this blog, and some bold heroes already have, but I just tried testing that function without result. Maybe it will work for you. I have my next post, “Who’s Cooler Than Lester Bangs” already mostly done, I just had to put it on pause to do some research (dextromethorphan). It will be posted soon. I have plans for others, like one about the little bit of Charlottesville you can find in Central Park and another about something in my kitchen that I don’t understand.
Happy Bloomsday!
The following was, for the most part, written last year for MLK day. But something that day, January 20th 2025, discouraged, one might even say bummed out, the author to such a degree that he left the work incomplete (some say due to drink, but that was sadly not the case). The original vision (which included a tie-in with the concurrent birthday of another great American, the recently deceased David Lynch) will never be fulfilled, as the author has since only become a more and more broken man, and so will continue to become, until death shall gently sweep away the fragments of his forgotten occasion. But now, with the promised reward of a succulent pork tenderloin for dinner, he has roused himself to finish off the post, so that it may be duly interred in the internet, for the benefit of testing the assiduity of future bots, and for you.
My Dear Fellow Ordained-by-Mail Clergymen & Others,
Many years ago I read a book by Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, in which she mentions a passage in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. (I once went looking for the passage, but the text is too dense to skim and I quickly gave up.) Aristotle was not a citizen of Athens, but he lived and taught there, and in Athens rhetoric was understood as a democratic art, used for the purpose of speaking as a citizen to an assembly of your fellow citizens. And so, according to Allen, or my memory of what Allen wrote, he made a point of the distinction between a teacher and a public speaker. A teacher is in the position of a superior, conferring knowledge upon his students and judging the extent of their learning. But the public speaker is speaking to his equals. And they are the judges. He offers them his words for their consideration. The democratic speaker is not an instructor, but a petitioner or advisor, a contributor. This is a role, not an identity, because when others speak he in turn takes up the job of considering and making judgment upon what they have to say.
This is a point that struck me quite strongly, as it seemed both very important and overlooked in our modern politics. I thought immediately of the condescending way certain activists talk about educating people, rather than persuading, or inviting, or encouraging, or attracting them to the cause. And also of how so much of our political discourse, in this internet age, is just a heap of abrupt pronouncements, zingers, mic drops, and put downs. All of which translates to: me, me, me, me, me. Nothing is really being offered, the only judgment to be made is “what a jackass,” and the only question to answer is “is this jackass on my side or the other side?”
But you know who wasn’t a jackass? Martin Luther King Jr.
This weekend I read, for the first time in many years, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I suggest you do the same, because it is fantastic. And since I had also been reading Wayne Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (interesting book, if not a must-read) I was inclined to approach it with a consciousness of its rhetorical nature. Rhetoric, ideally construed, is a gift, a gift we exchange among ourselves to create a shared understanding, and to fashion ourselves as articulate beings. For the democrat, the notion of rhetoric as a kind of sinister manipulation can only be a cop-out. Because you, the listener, the reader, are a judge, not a victim. Undoubtedly you, we, will make mistakes in judgment, but that is the price of democracy, and of every other way of life. When people bemoan rhetoric as nothing but illusion and lies they always mean to replace it with some Authority, which would destroy democracy.
So I took in the rhetoric of the Letter as a gift and a pleasure and as food for a badly depleted spirit. How exciting it must have been for King to write this, what a way to pass the time in jail! How exciting it must have been just to have the idea, after seeing a letter eight clergymen sent to the local newspaper, protesting the protests. It is funny to read the two letters together, like seeing a squirt gun answered by a fire hose. I wonder if any of those men would later take a sheepish pride in their brush with history: “You know that famous letter King sent from jail? Well, it’s a little embarrassing now, but yeah, that was to me.” It was just a little fart of a letter to the editor, not worth caring about, except as a perfect opportunity to make an unforgettable statement. It is often a good rhetorical move to, as it were, avoid looking straight into the camera. The letter was directed at the clergymen, but meant for the world. This allows us as readers to slide into the argument, observers not participants, neither targets of the argument nor draftees in its fighting forces, disinterested and therefore more available for persuasion than we might be with a more direct, frontal approach. And it allows King to be high-toned and erudite without seeming pretentious, because presumably this is just how the clergy communicate with each other. It is a trick but not a deception, a way to make it easier for us to receive the letter for what it truly is, a gift. It is like the cunning of love as it makes its way past our defenses.
King is a good writer, but he is not just a writer, and the Letter has an authority that draws from the wide range of experience that comes from comprehensive leadership. He sees the Movement whole, from its most abstract philosophical principles to the aching feet of its marchers to the backroom negotiations of grunt-work politics to the constant quest for the perfect photo op of cruelty. He is a working man, as he reminds us at the beginning, only free to write this letter, we are left to infer, because of the enforced leisure time given to him by the Birmingham police. He is theoretician and practitioner, he follows his vocation wherever it takes him, from the pulpit to the street, the most august corridors of power to the stankest jailhouse.
This is the work of a man in full. He is in complete possession of his own dignity and capability as a thinking, feeling, soulful human being. And he treats his readers as no less than him, in this or any other respect. Which makes the letter not only a pleasure to read, but an honor. King, as a writer and orator, was a master of creating a sense of elevation in his audience. He brings us to a greater sense of ourselves and of each other. He gives us a vision of our own integrity. The shared reality that he is working to summon forth is one of circulating dignity and graciousness. Feeling honored, we honor. Receiving, we give. Hate begets hate, but love begets love.
The Letter demonstrates rhetoric as love; argument as love. The whole thing is a series of arguments. Not argument in the sense of an expression of conflict, but argument as an attempt to resolve conflict. King is giving his arguments; they are gifts for the purpose of reconciliation. He understands himself to be responding to people of good will. He has heard them out and is now offering a response, honoring them with the best arguments and explanations he can make. This act is itself meaningful. With the Letter he is not just calling for brotherhood but enacting brotherhood. This enacting did not just take place in the writing but continues to take place in the reading, as far as we accept and embrace it.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
At this point the stirring of hunger compels me to stop. The sky has darkened and that tenderloin is not going to cook itself. This is one advantage King had in jail — catered meals. Much remains to be said but I leave that to you to ponder for yourself. If I have only convinced one person to give another look at “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” I feel that my efforts have been well spent, and my meal, which will include potatoes, well deserved. In a future post I will bring my thoughts, informed by the Letter, back to the present day, which, I will conclude, sucks. I hope you will join me for that journey. And I hope this letter finds you well and full-bellied and strong in whatever you need to be strong in, both my fellow Ordained-by-Mail Clergymen and my beloved Others.
Yours for a cause still to be determined,
Alonzo Subverbo
The following was sent to the legacy Subverbo email list. It has been stripped of all subliminal content and non-Aristotlelian logic, which are not allowed by terms of the WordPress service agreement.
I should begin with an apology. I know many of you have traveled far since your time in Charlottesville and cannot easily return on short notice. Flights have to be booked, child/pet care provided for, your job resigned from, etc., and these things take time. Plus, the burdens of age may have crushed the spontaneity out of you. If you are just now learning about Friday’s Mass Sabbath show you may be learning too late. That could be a painful experience. I remember reading online about a big Robert Irwin show at the Hirshorn back in 2016. I had been very eager to see Irwin’s work for many years, ever since I read Lawrence Weschler’s book about him, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (another Weschler book is mentioned in my last blog post). My excitement turned to horror when I realized that at the moment I learned about it the show was not only on its last day, but its last hour. I still think about that from time to time, and I still feel a twinge of pain. If only I had found out earlier! I am very sorry if I have put you in a similar position.
Nonetheless, attention must be paid. After sixteen years, Mass Sabbath has returned. Halloween night, at The Southern, with opener Please Don’t Tell.
Along with the Graves Street block party, Mass Sabbath was one of the defining traditions of 00’s Charlottesville that was just too good to last. Every Halloween, our finest musicians assembled to form the World’s Largest Black Sabbath Tribute Band. With more musicians and no Englishmen, it was a big improvement on the original. Halloween became the hardest rocking night of the year, and therefore, the best. But it is not easy to keep a band of such size together, especially when they get to play just once a year, and eventually what I can only assume were creative differences, problems with drugs and alcohol, and possibly the death of one or more members and/or an Onoesque love interest broke the band apart, like the nucleus of a metal just too heavy for stable life, such as polonium.
But now, in celebration of the death and descent into hell of Ozzy Osbourne, Mass Sabbath is back! Better than ever? Before we hear them, who can say? But at least very large. All the usual suspects are in the band. Some unusual suspects are in the band. You are in the band. So do not miss this show!
After my second, but before my third, visit to this year’s JMRL Friends of the Library Fall Book Sale, it occured to me that I might write a little something about the books I bought, and thereby save them from the oblivion that otherwise awaited. Because the books I buy are not the books I read. There are exceptions, but not many. When I have library books I give them priority, as they need to be returned. And I always have library books. A good healthy two or three stacks of them, more than I can read, so they push all my chattel literature to the back of an endless line. Yet still I buy. And with every book I buy comes a sincere intention to read, or at least occasionally peruse. But time is linear, pitiless, and running out.
So after I had gone to the sale on Tuesday and Friday and was feeling pretty good about it– having succeeded in keeping my attention only on immediate pleasure and not the greater scope of earthbound life– I thought I might write this post. Then came Saturday, which was the first half-price day, and I went again. I do not want to talk about Saturday. The books from Saturday sit in another part of the house and will not be included in this inventory. Maybe two slices of the cake were enough. What follows is a list of the books I bought from my first two trips to the Fall Book Sale, in no order but accident, annotated in the spirit of something only a little less than accident.
New Collected Poems – George Oppen I like that his name feels like his poems (I mean Oppen, not George). This is the most I paid for a book at the sale, five dollars. It is a big handsome trade paper in mint condition, and I won’t complain, but still it seems odd that it was priced so high. I did buy one book, a collection of erotic photography with a windowed slipcover, that was priced at six, but that was on Saturday, a half-price day, so I am not talking about it and only paid three.
The Quadruple Object – Graham Harman I was very surprised by how much the philosophy section yielded this year. I have been a Harman fan since Guerilla Metaphysics caught my eye on a new books shelf twenty years ago. This is a shorter effort, a condensation of his basic philosophy for the French market, that I expect to be quite useful. I have quoted Harman at length elsewhere on this blog.
The American Religion – Harold Bloom One of Bloom’s best, an old friend, and I am not entirely sure I don’t already have a copy. I can see myself turning to it for comfort, if I ever thought I was capable of being comforted.
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s – Otto Friedrich A favorite of the Coen brothers. Despite my interest in film, I know very little of this history. I have also, to the best of my shameful recollection, never read a book by an Otto. Two birds, one stone, nice.
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy After I finish a novel I rarely want to see it around my home anymore. So I get them from libraries, mostly. This is the only novel here (I did buy another, but on Saturday, so I am not talking about that, and later on I was irked to discover that the downtown library had a copy on the shelf, just waiting for me, so that was a waste). But I found this classic, which I am long overdue to re-read, in one of those hardback Everyman editions that I just love. Back when I roamed the stacks of Alderman like a feral beast hunting wordflesh, I was always on the lookout for the Everymans, the unjacketed covers a distinctive gray with gold lettering on the spines. A delight to hold and read, and this one in perfect condition.
Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order – Erving Goffman I feel that I am greatly informed by Goffman, but how much of his work have I actually read? Not the copy of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that I have had forever– it is too small and tight-spined for easy reading. I think of him as a point-out man; once he has pointed out you can just see the point and move on without a lot of fuss. But his prose is often praised, and his inventiveness, so maybe I should spend some time with him.
True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction – Helen Garner Last Australia Day I took a picture of a stack of my books by Australian authors and WhatsApped it to Australia, just to show that I cared. This is one more book for that stack. Looks like a good introduction to an author I have had my eye on for some time.
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler I used to tell everyone I knew going to Los Angeles that they should visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. At least a couple of them thanked me upon their return. Unfortunately, due to an unresolved dispute with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, I have never been to that state myself, and only know the museum through this delightful book.
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke I hesitated to buy, because I thought I might already have a copy. But eventually I remembered that that had been a library book, long held but little opened, which I finally returned. It is good to have Roethke back, even just to be neglected in a way that I imagine he might be fairly used to. But really I should put this bedside as a balm for the terrors that slip in between sleep and the settled mind.
Some Versions of Pastoral – William Empson A long time ago, I drove a carful of idlers into Nelson County to look for Jesco the Dancing Outlaw. We had been misinformed; he actually lived in Boone County, West Virginia. So our search was hopeless. But in the course of it, knowing he was a demon-haunted substance abuser prone to psychosis, we stopped by the county’s public library. Finding it closed, we took a look at the books in the donation box. Donations for this very book sale, though back then they held it downstairs at the Gordon Avenue branch. In that box I saw a copy of Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity that I coveted, so I took it. I already had a copy at home, but in a different edition with a less attractive cover (which I later gave away under some pretense of reward). This one had a big beautiful “7” on it, against a plain white background, and if you have ever seen it you will understand my impulse. I have it on my shelf still, paired with Guy Davenport’s 7 Greeks. I consider my debt for this theft now cleared, after a listless old man at the last Spring Book Sale, whom no one should have entrusted with any task of sums, overcharged me by eighteen dollars. Anyway, this is another Empson book, fairly purchased for two dollars.
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origin of Our Time – Ira Katznelson Looks like it offers an interesting new perspective on the New Deal and its era, possibly offering insights about Our Time. I was actually looking for this book at the sale; it seemed likely to turn up, and it did.
Fear and Trembling & The Sickness Unto Death – Soren Kierkegaard A Dane amuses God.
Bench Press – Sven Lindqvist A Swede writes his bodybuilding book.
Don Juan – Lord Byron Auden wrote that this is an example of a book that, when you are in the mood for it, you want to read nothing else. I thought I should have a copy, just in case that mood strikes me.
Illuminations – Walter Benjamin It’s not really Benjamin’s fault that he is overrated. Includes the essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” which might be relevant to this post.
War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ – Vladimir Solovyov This book, published in 1900, was the basis of Cristi Puiu’s film Malmkrog, which I love. It is 200 minutes of philosophical dinner party conversation, occasionally punctuated by enigma. So I have long wanted to read the source material, not just to compare to the film, but to encounter ways of thought that, as a late 20th Century American now unhappily marooned in the 21st, are intriguingly unfamiliar. Such as a discussion of why Christianity ain’t shit without the bodily resurrection of the dead.
The Sociology of Philosophies – Randall Collins I loved Collins’ Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory and anyone who got drunk with me in the late aughts was very likely to hear about his Interaction Ritual Chains before the night was over (good times!). An unusually entertaining sociologist. But I always hesitated before this book. It is just too big. Physically, yes, but also in ambition and scope. Could Collins have really gained enough knowledge of the whole history of world philosophy (not just western, world!) to create a persuasive sociological analysis of that history? All for just one book among his many? As a feat of scholarship it seems insane. I am happy to finally welcome this heavyweight into my home.
McGonagall: A Selection William McGonagall’s is famed as the worst poet in the history of English letters. An accomplishment generally assumed to be unintentional. But in a recent episode of his podcast, Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford suggested that McGonagall was, in fact, a knowing artist, a comic genius who never, in his whole life, broke kayfabe. I love it and I believe it. All hail McGonagall!
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus Should have read this when I was younger, probably.
Prayers from the Ark & The Creatures’ Choir – Carmen Bernos De Gasztold Not sure why I got this book of French animal poems translated by Rumer Godden, but whim must have its place at a library book sale. Admirably slender.
The Forest People – Colin Turnbull Pygmies!
The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath – Robert B. Pippin A collection of essays by the kind of academic who gives academics a good name. There are more of them out there than you might think– intelligent, conscientious, imaginative and lucid scholars ready to pass on what they have learned. They are worth seeking out.
Twelfth Night – Wm. Shakespeare Once, in Alsace, I told my mother that I thought, since everyone else was so into Shakespeare, I would avoid him. I was only fourteen, and this particular contrarianism did not endure.
Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being – Paul Feyerabend His last, unfinished, book. I think it is what it says it is, which is something of great interest to me.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa – Peter Godwin For the reader, ignorance is the prelude to pleasure; I know nothing of Zimbabwe.
Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Best Left on the Drawing Board – Vince Hoghton A little light non-fiction, individually packaged.
On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry – William Gass Not what the subtitle says it is, though the title is accurate enough. Some people take Gass too seriously. Drunk on language, but an angry drunk.
Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse – John Hollander What the subtitle says it is. Hollander writes about verse in verse (& some prose).
Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul – Roy Porter I remember this being very well reviewed when it came out in 2004, and the name of Roy Porter has been bouncing around my mind ever since, though I had thought I might read one of his earlier titles.
The Complete Upmanship – Stephen Potter I remember looking at one of the books in this collection as a kid and thinking it must contain some vital clues to the secrets of adult life. I am still hoping to find those, but now I suspect this is just British Humour.
The Civil War, Vol. 1 – Shelby Foote We all remember Shelby Foote from the Ken Burns show, and I have long wanted to read his Civil War chronicle. My interest was renewed by the high praise heaped upon it a couple years ago by one of our best youngish critics, Blake Smith. (Read Blake Smith, he is on the internet.)
So there they are, the books I still think I am going to read, though I know I won’t. Not mostly. I am glad to have done this exercise, which brought my attention back to these books and to their splendor. I look at these stacks of paper sitting beside me and it staggers my imagination to think of what they contain. All the human life and feeling, all the articulate thought, all the truth and all the invention, the passion and pain and tireless effort, the absurdity, the delicacy, the compressed expression of cosmic reality– so much animal sound so neatly marked and kept and left for us all, in hope. So much beauty. And I know why I buy these books, I buy them out of love. How can I not want to pick them up, to hold them, touch their pages, and take them home? They are irresistible. Of course I want to read them all and of course I cannot read them all. Even what I do read I will forget. What we love always slips away from us. We never have it. But it feeds the life in us nonetheless. The love is the life in us.
So I will no longer regret my wild and reckless book sale weeks. I will no longer fret over the footage of my haul. I am ready to go to the other room now, and renew my acquaintance with those Saturday books, my half-price friends. The one resolution I do have is to pay more attention to the books I already own. Even if I don’t read them I can always pick them up, flip through a few pages, and marvel at what they are. A little dusting wouldn’t hurt, as well.
Last fall, at the Virginia Film Festival, I got to see the Alex Ross Perry’s quasi-mock-doc/rock-doc/biopic about Pavement, Pavements, which has since then gotten a narrow (in the sense of the opposite of wide) theatrical release and is now streaming on Mubi. One of the events of the Pavement story that the film singles out as particuarly dramatic and important, but not really, is their infamously brief Lollapalooza set in West Virginia, when they cut their performance short after being pelted with mud (and possibly a rock) from the crowd.
I was there. I witnessed it all. And now, finally, I have decided to break my silence and tell all.
I went to Lollapalooza that year with GJ and 1. GJ and I had gone to a ‘looza show in North Carolina the previous year, at which an alarming number of plastic water bottles had been thrown in the air during the Beastie Boys set. In hindsight, a clear harbinger. Nonetheless, we decided to give the festival another try, because we were young and dumb and full of enthusiasm for several of the acts on the tour. Our roommate 1 was also game, so we all got tickets for the venue that was closest to Charlottesville: Charles Town Racetrack.
The ride up in 1’s conversion van was, as far as I can recall, uneventful.
It was a brutally hot and sunny day. It did not take long before all I wanted to do was sit down in the shade. But there wasn’t any shade. Or seats. Eventually I found a tiny sliver of shadow formed by a tent towards the back of the field. There I sat alone, on the grass, already exhausted, while Cypress Hill played on the main stage. I mean no disrespect to either Cypress Hill or the sun when I say that the juxtaposition of the two, both at full power, was an obscenity that would never be allowed in a world governed by a benevolent god.
Like many people, I have no memory of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but apparently they preceded Pavement that day. I was still in the shade of the tent at that point and I don’t think I knew who was playing next. But then I heard a voice. “Beer,” it said. “Tits.” It was Malkmus, teasing — some might say taunting — the crowd. I got up and started walking toward that voice, toward the stage, completely reinvigorated. At that time Pavement was my favorite band. I had seen them play once before under better circumstances, at Trax in Charlottesville, and I would see them there once again, but this was the only chance I ever had to see them in full sunlight surrounded by people who did not necessarily know their music, or care to. More than anything else, I was in Charles Town to see Pavement.
As I walked up they started playing. I do not remember what the song was. It did not matter, I knew them all, and at that point any one of them would have felt like coming home.
Because of the heat, the festival had some firehoses set up, with nozzles on swivels, that sprayed up in the air to cool down the crowd. And just as I came up, with that first song playing, I got hit by the hose. It was like having a bucket of water thrown on me. It felt fantastic. But then I got it again, except this time the stream of water was just at the end of its arc, before moving back in the other direction. So it paused, directly over me, out of all of those people just me, the cool bright water pouring down, engulfing me, as the music played. It could have only been a moment, but it was one of those moments of dilated time; a moment like a space, carved out of eternity. I can still almost be there. It was ecstasy.
Not long after that moment people started picking up clumps of the mud created by the hoses and throwing it at the band; not long after that the band quit the stage. I must have been disappointed, but somehow I don’t remember that, like the water washed it all away before it even happened. The show went on. I vaguely remember Beck prancing around on stage, like a supremely suave seventh-grader. And then Sonic Youth finishing it all up in the blissful cool of the night air. GJ and 1 were very impressed by Sonic Youth, but I think I was too tired to appreciate them. Plus I was distracted by people crowdsurfing, not from the front where you can see them coming but from the back, which made me nervous. I was happy to support a random young woman by putting my hand under her butt, but I would have preferred to do that while one of the lesser bands was playing, not while I was trying to lose myself in the cosmic wonder of “The Diamond Sea.”
That is about all I can tell you. It was a long time ago. It used to not be so long ago, but now it is. Except for that one moment under the waterfall.
After all the excitement of the June holidays comes a hangover period, the days between the solstice and the 4th of July that we in Charlottesville call the Eight Forties. When the weather is good this is a magical time to be alive, as every evening the sun sets as late as it ever does here, 8:40. It is as if life with its light had reached out as far as it could into the mystery of night, reached out and then just held itself there, suspended in the summer heat, holding its breath. The light slides into darkness as gently as we hope death comes, not with fanfare but just a fading fall. Here we find eternity.
That is when the weather is good. What you want is an evening cool, maybe with a breeze, that invites you to sit on a porch, or a lawn chair at a backyard barbecue. This year there has been none of that. All of our Eight Forty days have ended either hot or wet or wet and hot, smothering every fine quality of the human spirit under a diabolical index of misery. Most people around here who believe in God believe He is an Asshole, and you can understand that when the weather is like this. He put paradise in an armpit.
I have spent this miserable time just hunkered down, listening to Barbara & Ernie, pretending to go back, back to the womb and before the womb, back to the Seventies, to begin again. Barbara & Ernie’s first album was also their last, which makes the title more profound than you might think. It is a prelude to nothing, like life. They look like nice people.
After the Fourth we will see the light recede again, slowly at first but then faster, the twilights growing less languorous, more brutal gray, until the darkness spills past the evenings into late afternoons, with our southern approximation of winter. There is nothing to be said for that.
It may not be good to be alive, but you can’t help wishing it was.
“I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared to its leprous and scabrous horrors. All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ…. The book is already the bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and every civilized country.” — James Douglas, review of Ulysses in Dublin’s Sunday ExpressÂ
Happy Bloomsday::
God bless James Douglas and all his kind, the best enemies you could ever hope for: grandiloquent, amusing, and defeated. Even in his time his time had passed. It is understandable that we would like to hold on to James Douglas, keep him as our enmity’s vision and voodoo doll. He is as sweet a foe to us as Roscoe and Boss Hogg were to the cousins Duke. A harrumphing flat-footed prig serves as the perfect foil to the leaping imagination and razor-edged wit we celebrate today. But his clear delight in luscious language makes him also our secret ally.
Sadly, we have more to worry about than a doddering doofus of yesteryear. Darker forces are at work. Never have I seen the Spirit of Bloomsday under such assault as now, never have I heard its music grow so faint. It has never been a worse time to be a middle-aged mild-mannered liberal-minded horny Jewish cuck in the newspaper business that it is today, not since the Nazis. Pork butchers are being increasingly being priced out of our walkable urban cores. Nightown has moved to the internet and left three banks and a Starbucks in its place. The kids today see no future in bookish puttering or thoughtful wandering. They aren’t even willing to do their own bullshitting; they have their machines do it for them. And have you even tried to get a decent drink in a maternity ward recently? They’re not having it!
The Anti-Bloom is afoot. The Anti-Bloom grows stronger.
So I could not in good faith mark my “Happy Bloomsday” as an exclamation. The best I could do was the double colon, the sign of fortitude and determination, a sturdy box of full stop. We must hold on and remain unbowed as the winds of untroped turpitude blow, chickenshit flies, and a hard hail strips the color from our flowerbeds. The time to play is always, but sometimes the game is Hide Your Pickle, and you have got to hunker down to win.
But know this and know it well: I am here to the end (that probably means my death rather than some broader world ending scenario, but either way really). This blog is here to stay (this is a good opportunity to point out to our old-timers on the email list (also here to stay) that there is a blog), reporting on the state of Bloomsday and related topics (mostly on an annual basis but ideally I’d like to pick up the pace a bit, possibly to ambi-weekly). I know some people are calling for a clandestine shortwave radio station. I don’t really have the equipment for that but it’s a good idea. Others suggest a print edition. That has been tried before and the problem is sourcing the defunct microwave ovens. Also, the university computer labs no longer offer free printing for any rando who shows up in the middle of the night. But maybe you know another way, and maybe you could start lending your own voice to this great cause. In which case I can only say: welcome to the fight, welcome to the feast, my potato is your potato.
Keep Cool & Stay Blooming,
A. Subverbo
This letter in honor of Martin Luther King Day has, regrettably, not arrived. The author was known to have been busy at work on it on this very day, January 20th, 2025, for publication on the same (also notable as the almost last birthday of another great American, David Lynch). But something happened, it seems. An obstruction, distraction, interruption, occlusion, depression, infarction, divine intervention or Man from Porlock situation– we do not know. The letter is not here. But we hold the space. We keep hope alive. That it may still be out there, speeding on its way, faster and faster now, through the darkness coming toward us, a single bright point unstoppable, closing in, a breath just about to be felt on this cold and lonely cheek.
With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.
    — from Ulysses, by James Joyce
Yes,
This year to prepare for Bloomsday, besides the usual fasting, calisthenics, windbaths, potato shopping and ritual summoning of gerunds, I read a book entitled The House of Ulysses, by Julian Rios (there are a couple of accents in his name but this is America and we reserve our diacritical marks exclusively for metal bands, bars, and boutiques). On the cover it is proclaimed a novel. In reality it is a fairly straightforward guide through Ulysses, beginning to end. Rios literalizes his guided tour by creating characters in a tour group going through the book as if it were a house, but he does not really do much with this fictive element. It just gives him the framework for his commentary. Originally in Spanish, it would be ideally read in that form by a bilingual reader, who can catch the wordplay of both Joyce and Rios, the Spanish responding to the English. Much must be lost in the translation. But what remains is a very enjoyable companion to Ulysses, which would make an ideal Bloomsday gift, if you are ever so lucky as to find someone worthy and appreciative of such a gift, someone you want to spend every Bloomsday with, every Bloomsday from now on, until you have no more Bloomsdays left, none but those of the grave, which even then may bring a visit, a potato left on the stone, a generous pour of Irish into the hallowed earth. Or you could just give it to your sister’s kid who’s an English major.
Rios reminded me that both Bloom and Daedalus walk through their day in mourning clothes. No book is more packed with life than Ulysses (some say overpacked). The presence of death is not despite this, not in contrast or dialectic with this life. Only part of it. Death is the creature of life. Life is the sole witness and provider of death. For this Sunday Bloomsday sermon, I say to you: live every Bloomsday as if it were your last. Because that way when you’re wrong you’ll be lucky, and when you’re not lucky at least you’ll be right. And I also say: live every Bloomsday as if you’ll live to see another. Because everyone can afford to be wrong once. Do both of these things, and thirdly I say: every day is Bloomsday.Â
Happy Bloomsday to you, if happy it can be. May your potato not fail you yet, and your luck hold. May the streets you walk be filled with the usual wonders, the rooms lead on to more rooms, discoveries never ceasing. May your food fill you up and your drink knock you down, and your thoughts never bore you. May your ghosts be kind and your enemies have the sun in their eyes. May you not miss the key you must live without. And when you take that open-air star-lit piss in your backyard late tonight, may it be with a new friend at your side, like Stephen and Poldy.
Bloomsday is a mortal holiday, an earthly one. It does not celebrate the regal, unitary, unapproachable sun. Nor honor the occult mysteries of the silent moon. It is a wordful feastday of the human earth.
