I went to Chicago this weekend to help celebrate my sister’s (and her husband’s) birthdays, and my other sister was there, too, so all my four nephews were in one place, and as always it was great, and there are lots of pictures somewhere, but not any with me in it because I only pose for money. (Or maybe because I’m not nearly as cute as four boys aged six months to three years. It’s a possibility.)
Today, I’m going to be in Brooklyn to help my friend Steven research beers for his soon-to-open bar in Sunset Park. It’s going to be a retro bar (you can tweet him ideas for retro drinks you’d like to see — via his Twitter page). It’s also going to be an experimental jazz venue because Steven was bummed when the Tonic Jazz Club in Manhattan shut down, as Steven (for some unfathomable reason) really likes experimental jazz. I’m more about the drinks than the jazz, but then my favorite songwriter is Taylor Swift, so what do you expect… I don’t know what Steven’s having tonight, but I’m going to go for dark beers, my favorites.
(I’m posting this from Southside Coffee in Brooklyn, by the way, where I’m waiting for Steven to get past whatever traffic snarl is keeping him and which I chose because they have wireless and serve Intelligentsia Coffee, a Chicago brand some consider the best in the States and that I pay too much money for when I get it, but there you go – Chicago beats Brooklyn so far in my day. On the other hand, a man with a string bass just walked in.)
Speaking of irrational decisions, I flew out of Newark to Chicago, and because I knew how depressing that would be I remembered this video in which John Green gets really excited because his book Paper Towns made first place in the 2009 YALSA popularity contest, which is a contest where teens vote on their favorite book, and he beat out Stephenie Meyer, which recommends him strongly as far as I’m concerned. Oh, and his book was presented by the Bella Twins, which also recommends him, in a way. Also his nerdiness is off the chain. So I read the book. It’s not half bad, if you’re just wanting some light entertainment, which I did – something about a high school’s most nerdy guy crushing on the high school’s queen bee after she breaks into his room one night dressed as a ninja and makes him be her getaway driver while she wreaks vengeance on lots of other popular kids and then disappears and maybe is dead, but she leaves weird clues that only he and his nerdy friends can decipher before it’s too late, and he has to do it all before prom, and it ends in a road trip. That sort of light entertainment. On the way back I read Lyndsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow, which is about Sherlock Holmes taking on Jack the Ripper.
As my friend the poetry critic Everett Reed pointed out to me earlier, one of my favorite poets, Ted Hughes, died eleven years ago today. Most people remember him for being British Poet Laureate or his unfortunate marriage to that suicidal poetaster Sylvia Plath, but I’ve always liked him best for his poem “Pike” (not the pointy stick, rather the ugly and very predatory river fish):
“Pike”
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-
One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.
It’s from his book New Selected Poems 1957- 1994 (Faber, 1995). You can’t just buy the one poem, but, if you were so inclined, you could buy the entire collection here and put it on your bookshelf and look all literate and impress your bookish and artsy friends next time they are bored at your party and are scanning the bookshelf so as not to seem like losers who stare into space since they’ve already looked at all the photos on your refrigerator and captioned them with your magnetic poetry magnets and can’t stay and stare at the Monet print in the bathroom because someone else is worshiping the porcelain god in there.
Finally, as promised, here are the links for the complete Held by the Taliban series from the New York Times. I’d be surprised if David Rohde doesn’t receive a Pulitzer for these. There are a bunch of interactive features there as well.
Held By the Taliban (Part One): “7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity”
Held By the Taliban (Part Two): “Inside the Islamic Emirate”
Held By the Taliban (Part Three): “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers”
Held By the Taliban (Part Four): “A Drone Strike and Dwindling Hope”
Held By the Taliban (Part Five): “A Rope and A Prayer”
Held By the Taliban: “Epilogue”
I love the series not just because it’s well-written and entertaining, but also because it unwittingly hits all the stereotypes we know and love from adventure novels written in colonial times – and all that’s different, really, is that the serious tone of Victorian Manifest Destiny is replaced by the just-as-serious tone of Postmodern Manifest Destiny. Others with interesting questions/ insights about the series and what it reveals have been brought up my friends in the wider intelligence community (Small Wars Journal twice, Abu Muqawama, Baghdad Bureau, Danger Room twice, and Interesting Times), as well as religion reporters who address the question that nags me the most: Do the Taliban really believe that wearing a necktie is a secret signal that the necktie-wearer is a Christian?
