Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Fiercely ill the last day or two. Terrible hacking cough yesterday morning as I awoke (I awoke several times), temp of 101º in the evening. Didn’t feel too bad, so went out and got a couple books out from LPA and later a pint from Shirley’s. Went through that pint pretty quickly. Was schnockered by the time the VP debate came on. Verdict seems to be that J.D.Vance creamed Timmy the Bully.
Weather very pleasant yesterday. Cool and breezy. Sky clear for the first time in five days. The hurricane in Florida shut down power in the Gulf Coast and caused floods in Asheville NC, while sweeping us with a tail of cold mist. Peak of it came on the weekend.
Saturday I was setting up a fluid station and marshaling a half-marathon in Liberty State Park. In spite of the long hours (2:45am to 2pm) it was really one of the most enjoyable races yet. I had a new headlight (Amazon) and new gripping gloves (HomeDepot) and in spite of the constant drizzle didn’t get too soaked.
I spent much of the long first dead hour marshaling the HM (I was near the 10 mile mark) reading the LRB, a nice juicy review of what looks like a very find Kubrick book. At the LPA yesterday I was mildly surprised to see that there are already a number of Kubrick biographies out. In addition to the recent one I listened to on Audible and this one that was reviewed in the LRB.
What I got from the LPA was the Letters of Cole Porter and a bio of Joan McCracken, The Girl Who Fell Down. The Porter book was over- and ill-used, vile stickiness on the library cover, some of which I wiped off with Zep. Melancholy toward the end, of course, these Porter letters. He’s not writing the letters, even, they’re brief missives typed up by his secretary Margaret or Madeleine Smith, to Sam Stark or Abe Burrows or Irving Berlin or Solly Chaplin or some other Jew. Reason there are so many Jews is that after the double disaster of Aladdin and leg amputation Cole was still being prevailed upon to take a look at this or that property as a potential musical venture. Oddly enough, except for that Aladdin dud on TV and the so-so reception of Out of this World, Cole’s last working decade was his most successful. Kiss Me Kate (show and film), Can-Can (ditto), Silk Stockings (ditto), High Society (film), Les Girls. He was on a roll, and the producers and investors felt they could squeeze a few more hits out of him. After all, he was still in his 60s while Irving Berlin was about 80 and still tinkling away.
In looking at Porter books at the library, I went immediately to the index to see if that Egyptology professor were in there. I had a helluva time thinking of the name. Something for my ‘Stuff I forget’ list. There was a first initial and a Kelly or Kelley in there before the surname, two syllables. Now this is real brain-rot. It took me a good minute to remember: W. Kelly Simpson. Looking in Wikipedia I see he only died in 2017, age 89. I told Ben Bagley the only Yale person I knew who might have known Cole was this Egyptology professor, so he passed it on to a McBrien who came back with the embarrassed admission that he already knew Kelly because he’d “had a gay relationship with him.” I never met Kelly Simpson but Richard Beacham, Harry Scammell, and Nelson all seemed to know him, or know of him. Anyway, McBrien did not put Kelly Simpson in his biography of Cole, which came out about 30 years ago.
Last Thursday, when the rains began, I was in Jersey City putting up posters and flyers for the HM with Nick (Smerglio?) and Elijah something. Nice guys. Nick I run into all the time. Worked with him at the Brooklyn Half Expo in April, then I see him at the Ferry landing and on trucks, and last Wednesday at the warehouse when I dropped by to pick up my gear (a lanyard and badge, a yellow t-shirt, a long-sleeved navy sweatshirt from last year, when they had Adidas sponsorship), and now he’s taping up posters with me along the Newport and waterfront area of JC. And then he’s on a truck again on Saturday at 4am, dropping off tables and cups and ponchos so we can set up the fluid station. FS7 was the most remote of these stations, far behind the parking lot near Ellis Island, with a (remarkably distant) view of the Statue of Liberty (see photo above, from my marshaling station). Nick is moving back to Connecticut so won’t be around much for nruns. After postering in the drizzle in Jersey City, we took the PATH train back from Newport (formerly Pavonia/Newport but they’ve dropped the Pavonia part now). Crowded. Why? Middle of the day? We had to stand. Finally as we rumbled into Christopher St I said, “I can’t take this anymore,” and said goodbye. I had the notion of going up to Myers of Keswick to buy some pork pies. Which I did. Paul B and I had been discussing them recently on Facebook. I took them home and gobbled them down very quickly.
Around two weeks ago I met abject failure in two projects. First was the sourdough thing. That’s just not going to work out for me. I’ll keep jars of starter in the fridge, maybe try later. I made English muffins that were like hard, spongy, oily crumpets. Actually ate a couple with hamburgers. Quite filling. But I threw the others out. A big round loaf didn’t quite work out.
The other failure was with the Sharp Twin Energy Vacuum. It wore out or I destroyed it by mishandling a brush belt, but whatever, the brush does not turn. With great effort I put the last belt in the closet on the axle and brush, but it disintegrated into tar and smoke in a minute. It was the wrong belt. It was the belt for the Dirt Devil. I’d gone through two Sharp belts. So I bought two more belts through eBay, genuine Sharp ones, and put one on (much quicker operation). Easy-peasy. But the brush won’t turn and the belt’s rubber and remaining tar from the bad belt continue to burn and emit black smoke and powerful sell. I don’t think this Sharp is salvageable.
I feel bad about tossing it out because it was an actual purchase of Moki’s, in July 1999. I found the manual, and the receipt from a place out in Queens. Now, it happens that relations between me and Moki were at a low point just then. I tried to remain chipper and cheerful and he had made up his mind to get rid of me. I had become another Mary Durdines. He was so out of it he wanted to know if I could go back to Laura. Sure, I could have gone back to Laura…6 or 18 months earlier! Moki was troubled, but unnecessarily mean to me. Had he been a blood relative putting me through this, I might have severed ties entirely. But we semi-separated for a couple of years—I’d come by for a day or two at time, and he was particularly difficult in the winter of 1999-2000, and held onto some terrible habits like making drunken calls to me at work to ask about some Excel function or something—and somehow by the time 9/11 had passed, the worst was over.
Remembering those bad times will help me get rid of the Sharp. I’d thought it was the Sharp, not the Dirt Devil, that Moki had retrieved from the trash bay. The Dirt Devil had all or more of its accessories, the Sharp was missing some important ones: the extension tubes and crevice device. If I had those, and the machine wasn’t smoking too much, I could get rid of the brush and belt and use the Sharp like a canister vacuum. But no, too much trouble, and that’s no improvement on the Dirt Devil. I have woozy sentimental attachments to both vacuums. I was focusing very much on them in the short happy months after we came back from Palm Beach in 2021, and I figured out how to clean the hose of one and change the belt on the other. I kept the Sharp in the utility closet and and Dirt Devil over here on the other side of my night table.
Today I bought myself a sandwich at the deli counter at Morton-Williams, identical to what I’d get for Moki and me for years…his with lots of goop (has it really been a year since the last one? I think I recently dreamed of him telling me to ask for extra mayo), mine with none. Gobbled it down in an hour or so. It’s a day’s repast. The last time I got Moki a sandwich, almost certainly last October or maybe early November, he ate little or none of it. After four or five days the bread was stale and I tossed it. I figured I’d buy him a fresh one, no problem. He didn’t ask for another, didn’t eat anything more. Anything at all. He loved it when I got some Starbucks coffee downstairs, after experimenting with the phone app. That was November 6. The night of Nov 6-7 he shat heavily in bed and I never really got it all cleaned up. I imagine I’m still smelling the fecal pong, but there’s also a rather sewagey smell that comes from the bathroom: something to do with the pipes, not us.
A big surprise around mid-September was discovering the Nike Team Nationals shoes had sold, and I was a few days late with shipment. I bundled them up almost immediately.
One of my imagined nemeses, Hamburger Club’s E H F Maxwell, put a desperate long post on her Facebook timeline. I knew she was married to a Chinaman, or perhaps Korean (from her photos) but the marriage turns out to be anything but happy. He’s a sociopath who sold their house, moved away into a $6000 rental which he clearly cannot, is having her evicted as a result, is virtually bankrupt and living on credit; used up all of her assets, including her IRA. She has lived in virtual poverty for ten years, spending nothing on herself. Car was going to be repossessed but someone just totaled it. Her husband’s room is a rubbish dump but by going through piles of junk and wastepaper she’s found a couple thousand in loose cash. People have put up GoFundMe’s for her. Elyse is the diametrical opposite of me politically but she’s well-intentioned in her hopeless shitlibbyness. Also very pretty. Deserves better. Her mother a was chorus girl in some big Broadway shows. Her story reminds me of the pathetic tale of that Kirby in-law, Mary Alice Cooke or whatever, who went through a disastrous divorce 30 years ago in Westport, and her millionaire husband declared bankruptcy, denying her most of the assets from the sale of their house, but hid most of his assets away until the bankruptcy was over. I am toying with the idea of telling her this, but I think she 
Three weeks from tomorrow I see Dr Schiffman at Bellevue for the VCF. Have to get my weight down by then. Tomorrow I should wend my way over to MSK on 3rd Ave and request my own copy of my records.
I’ve been rewatching a lot of Kubrick movies lately. Getting back from the HM four days ago (Saturday) I rented Spartacus on Amazon Prime. Then conked out (vodka) and forgot about it for a day or two until when I attempted to rent it again and there it was waiting for me. In the second half came a brief scene the memory of which has puzzled me for many years (because I’ve seen this so seldom). There’s a dwarf dancing with a dog, when the mob of slaves are having a sort of Woodstock party on the hillside. I made a special point of watching the end of Shrek a few years ago because I thought it was a scene the cartoon party there. No, Spartacus.
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Gore Vidal’s birthday, right. I just discovered I never published yesterday’s entry so I’ll combine these into one.
I have now taken two 3-capsule doses of erythromycin today, and finished off the cough syrup I bought Tuesday night. Went to drug store across the street for some more syrup, and ordered a margherita pizza from Mangia meanwhile. Over $16 with tax. Yikes. Absolutely delicious though, and sustenance of the day, same as the Morton-Williams sandwich was yesterday. (Did I mention one of the sandwich punchcards is almost full, so my next sandwich is ‘free’?)
So many things I left out of my survey since early September. Two weeks before that Jersey City Half Marathon on the 28th, we had another nruns race on Gov Is, the Squirrel Stampede, and I didn’t have much to do at all except help put a tent up (I think) and marshal over by Division Road, a few hundred yards from the halfway point and the finish, and help pick up the delineators afterwards. Oh, had to put up and take down the decorative webbing in the corrals, too (see top pic). Absolutely no more work to do when I took off around noon. I think that was an easy day for me. These nruns days definitely seem less tiring, at any rate.
Did I mention anywhere I got a kitchen scale from Amazon in early September? My continued focus on the sourdough recipes had a lot to do with using that, I think. Now it sits there, unused, on a shelf in the pantry.
Mid-September I got around to buying a photo album on eBay. A rather old, but unopened and unused piece, from maybe 20 years ago, with the then-fashionable hole in the cover for your most favored portrait. Very few sheets in this, all of the top-loading type, but my immediate need was a place to transfer the 2011-2020 pictures from the squarish black album that began in 2001. This didn’t work out well because the posts with the album were short little mothers, couldn’t accommodate more than about ten sheets. So down to Dick Blick for album posts. (I went to Wegman’s near Astor Place as well, bought bacon for some reason, and chunky sea salt. And hamburger meat. I think this is where I made hamburgers with the soggy pucks of crumpets that were supposed to be English muffins.) Around the 20th-21st, the weekend in-between Squirrel Stampede and JC Half Marathon.
So I got the 2011-2020 photo pages into the new album, with the longer posts, but I still have a shitload of pictures I want to add to the album but can’t because I don’t have pages. 12×12 album pages are excessively difficult to find. Fortunately I also acquired some white-ink gel pens for writing on those black album sheets I put in years ago. So I can buy black sheets.
Another items I bought at Dick Blick was a picture frame. Plastic frame but glass front so cost about $11, more than I thought from looking at what I though was the shelf price. I had exactly one picture in mind for it, and that is the enlarged cover of The Wrong Set that is always hanging about. So here it is, looking very lonely.
I watched The Third Man this past weekend (I think it was). Visually superb, but not a good flick in so many ways. Too long, too expressionist. All these oblique camera angles. A gossamer, unlikely plot device that reveals itself at the end. Harry Lime staged his own death but is really hanging out in the Soviet sector because they won’t arrest him there. His presumed crime is obtaining bootleg penicillin from the hospitals and diluting and reselling it. This strikes me as highly unlikely, as does the notion that diluted penicillin would of itself kill one or make you go off your nut. Graham Greene wrote this screenplay as a new screenplay, not adaptation, sketching it out in novella form first; and meant it as an exercise in moral ambiguity. To illustrate ambiguity we have Harry profiting off the deaths of people who were going to die anyway. Other unlikely elements include the subplot of the Czech/Austrian woman with a forged passport, who is worried about being deported back to Czecho. But she was probably born about 1918, so wherever she was born it was still Austria, and it’s not likely the Soviets would make a stink about recovering her. Then you have the Joseph Cotten character, a writer of Western pulps named Holley Martens, whose Zane Grey-type adventures have a following even in England and Austria. The pulp writer is inveigled to lecture at a cultural society in Vienna one evening, introduced to it by a minor character played by none other than Wilfred Hyde-White.
A while back Joe Queenan tried to address the awfulness of Red Lobster in his usual wisecracking style, but he refused to take on the racial issue as he really wanted to talk about White Trash. So it was a limp takedown indeed. He even used this piece as the title essay in his next published collection. Significantly, you never see Joe Queenan cited when other people write about the awfulness of Red Lobster.
