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“Further (That Should Be Farther) Round the Bend” by yours truly

“D— W—, be careful. People have literally died laughing. The poor do it all the time.” “Yes, I’d rather live clapping, to the sound of one hand clapping, if you know what I mean.” “Yup, just keep it unseen.” “That would be obscene. You’d be arrested.” “And detested.” “Then mol… Where’s M—?” “Get the hell away from me, W—. I mean it.”

Two jokes

“Mr. B—, there’s a scurrilous rumor going around that you are short. Don’t believe it. It is merely scuttlebutt.” “Yes, I have heard murmurs.” “It’s your wife’s opinion that really matters anyway.” “Between you and me, she doesn’t think so.” “Good. I just wanted you to know because there are some rumors about me too.” “Yes, I’ve heard.”

“You’re dead.” “No, you’re dead.” “No, let’s be clear: it is you who are dead.” “I beg to differ: you are dead.” “Do I have to spell it out for you? D-E-A-D.” “What? Like ‘dead in the head’?” “No, simply dead.” “Now, she’s dead.” “No! Don’t bring her into this.” “My name’s Ed, but I’m thinking of changing it to Ned.” “Because Ned won’t be dead?” “No, he’ll still be.” “Well, enough said.” “Yes, let’s go to bed.”

“The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted young Gatz in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain. To him that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world.”

This is Fitzgerald’s description of his lead character Gatz’s attraction to his key mentor Dan Cody. In his meeting with this shipmaster, Gatz “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy  would be likely to invent…” What do we invent in our late teens, and do we ever escape from this invention? Gatsby doesn’t seem to be able to escape this creation and his infatuation with Daisy.

Maturity is difficult. It has to do with rejecting the opinions of those closest to you. Sometimes it is difficult to know what else there is.

Got a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary,” initially published in 1881, recently. Bierce has always appealed to me because I like his horror short stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Damned Thing”; he was called the 19th-century Stephen King by one critic.

The introduction to this edition says the “dictionary” is quintessential Bierce in that the author can be summarized by one of his entries for this book: “Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they should be.” Nineteenth-century realists had a good point: The Romantics, Aesthetics, and Decadents had gone too far. But I still prefer Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

There was a pop song I liked in my youth called “Tales from the Riverbank” by The Jam. Here is one stanza:

Now life is so critical
Life is too cynical
We lose our innocence
We lose our very soul

Two more entries on haunted places. I don’t think my apartment has a formal Halloween party. I may just walk around the city a while in my scariest costume, myself.

Washington Irving wrote of “a drowsy, dreamy influence” that “seems to hang over the land and to pervade the very atmosphere” in “The Legend of Sleep Hollow,” his 1820 short story about a lovelorn schoolteacher. I have been to New York City a few times but don’t really know the upstate parts of the area. They appear to be very beautiful; an the entry says Irving was “enchanted” by the area. I thought this story was very funny, but one of my grad school classmates who was better read said Irving was racist. I thought “Rip Van Winkle” was an interesting story because it seemed to imply the American revolution was a mistake, yet it was written by an American.

Angkor Wat is dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu in Cambodia, built in the 12th century. It is now part of a 154-square-mile park with ruins from the Khmer Empire, which lasted about six centuries until the 15th century. The site is “the world’s largest religious monument and an architectural work of art.” Heads in the sculptures “smile so mysteriously they might just make the Mona Lisa look like Kim Kardashian.” The temple gives visitors “an overwhelming sense of awe and disorientation.” Cambodia has a pervasive belief in ghosts and the supernatural, especially in agrarian areas. The quietness of forests at night seems to reinforce this. Weapon bearing scarecrows, called ting mong, scare away evil spirits who haven’t entered heaven because “they are still very angry.”

Two jokes:

What do religious people chant at Church protests? “Hell no! We won’t go (to hell! No!”) “Hell no! We won’t go (to Hell! No!) …

“Shut the f— up!” “No, shut the f— down and give me 20, wait, no, 50! You’re not athletic, but I hear that while it’s hard at first, it gets easier and is pleasant after a while. I’ll watch.”

“Beware D—: I’m a big, strong man and I will KILL you! And don’t ask if you have a soul, you a–h—- because you do, even if you think you don’t. And it will go to HELL! And ‘hell is for children,’ you pedophile.”

Two more entries from Life on haunted places ahead of Halloween.

The first is on the Dakota apartment building in Central Park West, Manhattan, New York City. It’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved in in 1973 and knew the building was rumored to be haunted.  The building was completed in 1884 for Singer Sewing Machine president Edward Clark in a part of the city that was then rural (it is hard to believe now). It is a German Renaissance construction. Lennon was murdered there in 1980, and Ono still lives there. I don’t really know why Lennon’s assassin killed him, but I think Lennon was doing so much heroin that he didn’t understand death threats about his atheism/egotism were serious. The building is also the differently named site of the 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, a place where “canabalism, witchcraft, satanism, and murder” occur. Supposedly, elevators in the building move on their own, footsteps are heard mysteriously (see Beckett’s Footfalls), rumblings are heard in the walls, “and the past seems to coexist with the present.” The building’s basement seems to be the source of many of its problems, which is called “kind of creepy.”

The other entry is for the “paranormal prison” of Alcatraz, where in 1946 six prisoners overpowered guards on the the island in San Francisco Bay. Over the next two days, two prison officers were killed and 18 injured;  three prisoners were killed. A reporter about the incident spoke of a “tremendous feeling of anger” there from the place where three men from the attempted outbreak died. Men in the prison were called “The Incorrigibles,” and it was said if you even step on their toes, a death results. Al Capone spent time in the Alcatraz prison before retiring to Florida to die insane before reaching 50. The island continues to have a reputation of being “haunted.”

Two thoughts. I am a bit surprised the entry doesn’t mention the 1979 film based on a non-fiction book, Escape from Alcatraz,  about a 1962 prison break that appeared to have actually worked. Three men got out. Sometimes imprisoned people don’t deserve their punishment. The other is that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was very popular when performed in San Quentin prison in California. Institutionalized people aren’t necessarily stupid. Sometimes they are paying for sins of people in the outside world.

Reading an entry in LIFE on haunting of the Forbidden City in Beijing, “one of the world’s largest palaces” where jade jewelry, greedy ghosts, music, and ladies in waiting accompanied by eunuchs are part of the environment. “If any structure in the world has the right to be haunted, it’s the 9,000-room imperial palace” that served dynasties from 1421 to 1911, the entry says, noting an associated amount “of intrigue and violence.”

The entry notes that haunting is often associated with old buildings, and much of modern mainland China “is determined to raze reminders of its past in the name of ‘progress,'” citing the 2001 opening of a Starbucks in the Forbidden City.

This entry mentions the role of eunuchs more than once in Forbidden City intrigue. I think losing one’s sexuality must change a person’s mindset greatly. One of my favorite literary theorists in graduate school was Canadian writer Northrop Frye. His archetypal theory seemed to emphasize the interplay between male and female forces. What would drive continued daily existence without either of these? Supposedly, eunuchs were more trusted and even happier to some extent than others.

Today’s entry from Life magazine on global haunted places is about China’s Great Wall.

The “wall” stretches more than 5,500 miles from near North Korea to the Gobi desert, built more than 2,200 years ago to protect from invasions by northern nomads. “Not a wall so much as a series of fortifications erratically erected by discrete states, changcheng (“long wall”)  was completed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when it became the world’s largest man-made object,” the entry says.

The haunting has to do with the nearly 400,000 lives lost in pursuit of the Great Wall’s construction from overly onerous labor by hand, with even boys being employed at one point for the project. The rumor is that women feared giving birth to boys because of their use in child labor for the wall. Visitors today speak of feeling imbalanced or sick, and others have seen the ghosts of prematurely deceased laborers on the wall.

Two thoughts occur. The first is that the Trump administration has promoted the idea of a wall to keep things out of the U.S. southern border. Some say this amounts to racism, but the wall was already there; I think Trump is really just talking about improving it. The magazine entry suggests the wall was porous in China too. The second is a pop music reference. As a teenager, I really liked Pink Floyd’s The Wall; I think the basic point of the album and movie was that personal psychology has a lot to do with international warfare. People like me have taken it too seriously in our youths, but I think the band had a point.