By TRB
Sometimes I wish I was back in my room listening to my mother as she complained about all the neighbors, of whom we had approximately six, two whose property actually abutted ours. Naturally, these were the worst. Back in those days I lived in a wonderfully boring world with real wit and irony, not of the type that would later be invented by various non-writers who began to believe they could write.
At least that is how I remember it. My mother has to come down to this paragraph for a minute or so to complain about the widow next door, the one with all those "kids." Really, who could possibly have all those kids? Were there eleven of them? No one could ever get a really good count on the kids, who were very active always jumping into the pool or darting into the woods across the street. Or mixing in with their friends. We never really did discover how many children they had.
About this widow. She was Italian. I don't remember her name, but it was like a short song when you said it. She, 11 children and all, was impossibly beautiful and the argument could easily be made that she and her now deceased husband, who was also rumored to have been quite the looker, just couldn't stop having sexual relations. Good Catholics and all that. Hence the impossible to count children.
I remember they were wealthy. He had owned something, a factory perhaps. She had a driver and a maid and even security people if memory serves me right. Of course none of this bothered my mother, who was convinced things next door would be even worse if the woman didn't have all that help.
But when you are young you never really use all your ear to listen so I can't with absolute certainty tell you what bothered my mother about the woman with the melodious name. It might have upset her, however, if she had learned my father was having an affair with her.
Yes it was mundane and a bit naughty. The gossip alone was worth the entire ordeal. You have to remember that Joyce's Ulysses and a few other attempts at "shocking" literature were really all we had. And Joyce with his garbled prose never made it easy to visualize sexuality in the right light - if you know what I mean. Dirty books were necessary for that.
These were also available for the right price delivered in a brown paper wrapper, maybe even illustrated. And Hugh Hefner had that magazine with all the airbrushed breasts in it. I do, however, remember these ghastly magazines with names like "City Confidential." Most of them were about awful murders sometimes with real crime scene photos. They also covered the worst sort of car accident you could imagine. That is how I first discovered that movie "bombshell" Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in a car accident. There was a photo of the decapitated head in one of these magazines.
I thought about decapitation quite a bit after that and even purchased a book about Mary Queen of Scot's final days in hopes of learning more about it . Funny to use the name "learning" now when discussing my desire to see these truly grotesque things. Learning is not what one receives from terrible images of the dead or awful descriptions of the truly evil living. There is nothing to "learn" from these things. Further they are not "art," in this era when what is stuck to the bottom of your shoe is "art."
For example, and to get on with this, I think film maker John Carpenter and novelist Stephan King were the first to take the horror genre over the top and just let it drop, where it was quick to become stale, even spoiled. Now we are stuck with all of these overproduced alien invasions and resentful Japanese ghosts who somehow have unhinged mouths. All very boring.
Over-the-top is the way everyone goes today. It is the selling point in Hollywood, where it is quite possible to hear a director say to a script writer "I don't believe this goes over the top enough." Over the top usually means above and beyond what really would have occurred had reality been allowed to take its course. You see it in the work of young writers a lot these days.
First there's the over the top thing to get out of the way, then you have to deal with the Jerry Seinfeld irony thing, where irony has been virtually written into every conversation people ever have in their lives. Some may see some semi-competitive stirrings in my complaint about today's artistic habit of catching the ball and running either off the field or in the direction of the wrong goal posts. But it is not that.
I know that so much of this life is really nothing when seen through a normal lens. I understand the temptation to make more out of it than it actually is. My mother knew life was more than it seemed and perhaps this is why she was always so frustrated. But she also knew that a good part of life is already filled up.
It is like a full glass. The more you pour into it, the more leaks onto the table and creates a mess. To me, this describes today's writing to some degree. We seem to have lost the talent to simply describe a scene that has already taken place or is taking place at the moment. Instead we create full-blown scenes out of nothing.
Maybe first we ought to learn to describe the full glass - the so much of everything that is really nothing.
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