Thursday morning

2 February 2017

— Heavy overcast for the groundhog, oh happy day!

Good Morning All,

As a kid, I always loved Groundhog’s Day, for one reason because the national celebration of a rodent was so obviously nutty; for another reason because it meant my birthday was now only three more mornings away, and for the third reason because it seemed to my young and already contrary brain so deliciously counter-intuitive. 

It seemed to me if the groundhog saw its shadow, that would indicate good weather, and hence spring just around the corner. But no, my dad, the meteorologist, explained. A sunny day, he said, meant a high pressure system and dry cold. Overcast skys meant a warm-front was passing through, bringing its warmth and the promise of spring. Of course, I liked that, too: him explaining something scientific to me, as though I were a big kid.

Unpacked now—finally!--are all my DVDs, including Groundhog Day, which is actually one of the real top-ten of the fifty or so movies I usually list in my top-ten. At school, I used to show it every year after my twelfth graders and I had read Waiting for Godot together. The two works of art go so well together. I was planning to watch the flick this after, but the DVD is not—rats!—in its plastic cover.

Today is James Joyce’s birthday. He is the only author I know of whose work went consistently from great to pretty good to okay in parts to just plain awful. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, is flat-out wonderful! Not a dud in the bunch. It’s up there with Salinger’s Nine Stories, Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, and the short stories of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor. Eveline, which my tenth graders read every year, is especially good.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published two years later (1916) is also well worth it. It’s a kunstroman, an artist-coming-of-age novel, which was required reading my sophomore year at Rutgers. There are spell-binding passages in it, notably a long description of hell.

For reasons I have been unable to fathom, lots of otherwise sane critics rate Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as the best novel every written. (Yeah, well, you can piss off, Cervantes, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Melville, and Twain.) To me, that’s like rating Kennedy as the best president. The first fifty pages of the book (I waded that far twice)  and Jack did have their moments, but not enough of them. Happily, as many other critics rate Joyce’s Ulysses as one of the worst 100 novels ever written.

Finnegans Wake (1939) … what can I say? What I was able to read of it seemed impossibly pretentious and littered with the most obscure literary references. If any of you has actually read this sucker and liked it, tell me what I’ve missed! (Special aside to one member in the audience: No, you cannot simply say, “Hey, what do you know? You think Up the Down Staircase is a classic.)

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron