“Pun Therapy (Never-ending)” by yours truly

“Your words are pun-gent, gent. But I am not sure what the last pun meant.”

“If you need help understanding, just consult my pun-stitution. I am not demanding.”

“Have you ever engaged in pun-sturbation?

“It is pun-ssible that I did, but I will not say for sure.”

“Stop pun-ishing me! I will not be pun-timidated!”

“What is you pun-t now?”

“Just get the pun out of here!”

“Okay, but for pun’s sake, please stop locking the door. I have had pun-enough.”

Just two quotes and comments

“The quieter you become the more you can hear.” — Ram Dass

Dass was a U.S. spiritualist who wrote about Asian philosophy and exercise. I blogged a bit about this subject last year. There are things about Eastern culture that I like, but sometimes I don’t want silence; sometimes words and music are better. One of my favorite novels is Shūsaku Endō’s Silence about a European priest in Japan who is forced by authorities to formally renounce his religious beliefs (there was a recent movie version of it). The idea of the novel is that he still believes until his death, but the powers that be wanted him to publicly renounce his faith to stay in their country.

“We’re fields of energy in an infinite energy field.” — e.e. cummings

Cummings is one of my favorite poets. I have not read his memoir The Enormous Room about being imprisoned in France during World War I, but I empathize. He was a Modernist and played with grammatical standards of the English language. My favorite poem by him is “maggie and milly and molly and may” included below.

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

On the novelist James Lee Burke

Read an article today on Burke, a U.S. popular novelist of detective fiction also interested in theology from America magazine. The article notes theology can come from different sources: Sacred Scripture, Church decrees, papal statements, writings of saints, or, as Burke says, St. Augustine or Samuel Beckett.

Burke, now in his mid-80s, has written 37 novels and two short-story collections mainly dealing with David Robicheaux, a law officer and private detective who also served in the Vietnam War. He starts off on the New Orleans police force and in later works moves to Montana for a spell. The villains in the works tend to be drug kingpins and others in organized crime. The article notes the novelist decries a police or legal official “sworn to serve but who deliberately aids a molester and condemns a victim to a lifetime of resentment and self-mortification.”

He writes in one novel that “God does slay Himself with every leaf that flies and that indeed there is no greater thief than that of time.” As with many crime novelists, he has a gritty sense of reality despite having a religious background in many works: “we want bad guys smoked, dried, fried, and plowed under with bulldozers.” And he writes of “theological questions to us that psychologists cannot answer.” He speaks of Louisiana Jesuit priests who “underneath it all are the Catholic equivalent of jarheads [Marines].” At one point another character says of the main character, “Under it all, you’re a priest, Dave.”

On James Joyce

Have in mind today a brief poem that Joyce inserted towards the end of his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man. I think it captures the feeling of unrequited love.

One of my grad-school classmates said this novel is really about whether or not to join the priesthood. Joyce decided against it and chose marriage overseas, fictional writing, and a bohemian lifestyle instead.

Here is the poem the main character writes for a woman he is interested in:

“The Temptress” by James Joyce

On The Coors

This is one of my favorite bands recently. The members are all siblings, three sisters and a brother.

In the CD I have of them “In Blue,” the sisters look so similar, they seem almost like triplets. They are not. I think the first song “Breathless” is the best, but I like the whole CD.

It depends on my mood whether I prefer to hear female or male singers in pop. Men seem to convey anger and bitterness better; women seem better with affection and sadness.

This post is a bit crude and explicit. Reader beware.

Reading more of Stephen King’s recent novel The Institute. There is a graphic excerpt towards the middle: “‘Save your wise mouth for your friends. Drop your trou and bend over the chair, or I’ll do it for you. And you won’t like it.’ … To break me down, Luke thought. To make sure I understand I’m a guinea pig, and when you have guinea pigs you can get the data any old way you want…Maybe it’s just a way of saying If we stick this up your a–, what else can we stick up there? Answer: Anything we feel like.”

Authorities can abuse their power in the mistaken notion they are correcting the behavior of individuals. I don’t like to use rape as a metaphor because the real thing is so atrocious. But police officers and other authorities can effectively rape people. Maybe they will not actually have forced sex with you, but they will sometimes physically torture you.

On actors

Don’t really have much to say today. Just doing chores. I was thinking of an actor.

I think many of the male actors in Hollywood are a bit vain and stupid, even though they are good at their jobs of acting. Many actors seem to have emotional problems.

Leonardo de Caprio seems like one. He has been good in a few movies like Romeo + Juliet, but he also seems a bit crazy in his political views. And he doesn’t come across well to me playing adult or middle-aged men. I think Brad Pitt is similar; he is a good actor but seems vapid and vacuous in person.

On a brief poem

It is difficult to know socially when speaking is too much or too little. Language can be deceptive, and it can be difficult to know when other people just don’t care about your polite words or opinions.

Emily Dickinson was very good about conveying bitter truths. Sometimes people just don’t want to talk. This is actually an optimistic take on the concept of language and conversation.

Here is the poem:

On a favorite poem

One of my favorite brief poems is “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost. It was used very effectively in S.E. Hinton’s 20th-century novel The Outsiders about physically violent adolescent men. Francis Ford Coppola made a good movie version of it (I think Coppola has been one of the greatest film directors of all time, even though his mafia movies don’t really appeal to me).

The main character recites the poem while in hiding from police because he had been in a bad brawl. The poem deals with paradox, sentimentality, and nostalgia. Green is gold, Leaf is flower. Gold, which is a strong metal, cannot last.

Here is the poem:

On Guy de Maupassant

Picked up a collection of de Maupassant’s 19th-century stories recently. He was famous for writing brief short stories that seemed to translate easily into English. In my adolescence, they called this kind of brief short tale “sudden fiction.” I think with modern technology distracting us, many people have short attention spans and can’t deal with long novels.

One of de Maupassant’s most famous stories is called “The Jewels” in English (He has another famous short story called “The Necklace” that deals with a  similar theme: appearance versus reality). It is basically about a marriage in which the wife has the two main hobbies of going to the theater and collecting paste apparently, paste meaning fake jewelry. The husband doesn’t share her interests but loves her. She dies of pneumonia after getting a cold while going out to the opera. The husband, a relatively poor public servant, tries to get rid of her “paste” at stores and finds out they are real jewels, and they make him rich. It appears admirers had been giving her real jewels. After her death, he starts going to the theater and sleeping with prostitutes. He later marries a virtuous woman who makes him “very unhappy.”

It is an interesting story because it deals with the question of appearance and reality and what people find valuable. The Japanese have a deep concept of the difference between appearance and reality, yousu and genjitsu. This dichotomy is a theme in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as the title character is deceptively apparently loyal to a king he plans to kill. In de Maupassant’s story, the husband had thought theater and “paste” were frivolous, and he lies for no reason about how much money he has at the end of the story; it seems his poor character could have contributed to his wife’s death.

It is questionable why people even find art like theater and jewelry valuable at all. Yes, real jewels do look pretty on a woman if you are in a romantic mood, but what does it really matter if it is paste or real? In the Internet age, I suppose many ask themselves if it matters whether relationships are real or only virtual.  It does.