Lorrie Moore

On Friday morning I did a little bit of writing ideas towards my

essay. I’d forgotten how short that February is so I fooled myself into thinking I have more time to get this paper done, but there are only 18 days till the deadline.

            I wrote about some of the references to Carl Solomon:

Ginsberg is with mother finally. The only desired woman for the poet. She is a finality something that’s been waited for held away from him and so being with her brings a sense of relief. Carl Solomon imitates the shade of Ginsberg’s mother. He serves as a maternal figure. A personage of comfort. He offers compassion. Solomon has murdered his twelve secretaries. Besides references to the poet’s mother, only Solomon and Cassady have contact with females in Howl and there are no individual women, only generic groups of them. But Solomon has not actually killed any women. Secretaries of course are not necessarily women but the association of secretaries with the female sex is very common. But secretaries serve the purpose of organizing the superficial aspects of someone’s life, including their appointment calendar, which consists of twelve months. And so Carl Solomon murdered his own sense of organization and time upon entering the mental hospital.

I lost wifi reception in the late morning.

            I adjusted the connection for my left speaker at the back of my new receiver because it had been fading out every now and then. I think there was less light when I’d originally set them up, because after taking the wire out and screwing it back it seemed fine.

            Since there was no internet and my journal was up to date I spent several hours finishing up most of the reading for my Early 20^th Century US Literature course.

            I re-read all of Pat Parker’s poems that we’d been given to read. They seemed better the second time around but they still didn’t seem that innovative. It’s the kind of poetry one hears a lot on the open stages of poetry readings.

            I finished reading the first act of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which I read a few times ten years ago when I wrote a research essay on the play and earned my first A.

            I read Bharati Mukherjee’s short story, “The Lady from Lucknow”, about a woman from Pakistan living in the States, who cheats on her husband with a white guy. When the man’s wife walks in on them in their bedroom she treats her like the affair and she is nothing.

            I re-read Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”. I’d written an essay on that too but only got a B+. Coyote had been looking for someone to play ball with because the Indians were tired of how she was always cheating. So Coyote danced and tried to think up some playmates but when Coyote thinks something always goes wrong and so she caused Columbus and his men to come. But Columbus wouldn’t play ball either. He just took Coyote’s friends away.

            The last story I read was Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here”. I have never cried so much while reading a story in my life. It was very well written and she throws a lot of humour into the narrative but the story is so sad that the funny parts serve to amplify the sense of despair like nails and glass added to the contents of a bomb increase the weapon’s cruelty. It was the story of a mother that finds blood in her baby’s diaper, calls the doctor and is told to bring him in right away. The child turned out to have a Wilm’s tumour, which is a cancer of the kidneys that only affects male children. Moore’s descriptions of what the baby and the parents go through leading up to and after the surgery put me through two heart-wrenching fits of sobbing before I was done with the story. Lorrie Moore should be shot for causing a man to cry that much.

            In the evening, the audio walk signal at the intersection outside my window was on the fritz and kept on going all night.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplay starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. Randall played an alcoholic advertising executive. One morning when his wife catches him sneaking some cooking wine for an eye opener after having come home drunk the night before, she promises him that if he gets drunk one more time she will leave him. The rest of the show bounces back and forth in time. The next morning he gets up and calls for his wife only to discover Jayne Mansfield’s character lounging seductively in the living room. He has no idea who this woman is at first but then slowly recalls having been picked up by her in a bar at closing time. It seemed that they’d just written Mansfield into the part for the sake of having a star on the show, since she doesn’t serve the plot to any great degree. He goes to work to discover that he’d also forgotten about having been fired the day before because he’d been staggering drunk during an important presentation. He comes home, calling again for his wife, only to find Mansfield’s character still there. In trying to throw her out he almost strangles her but then gives her a bunch of money and she leaves. He starts looking for something to drink but can’t find anything but empty bottles. He tears the place apart and finally remembers that there was a bottle he’d hidden in the basement. Downstairs he sees the end of a silk scarf sticking out from closed closet door and then he recalls having bought the scarf for his wife. He flashbacks to coming home drunk and presenting it to her but she tells him she is keeping her promise and leaving him. He tries to make her wear the scarf and see how beautiful it is. Then we return to the present as he opens the closet door and finds the corpse of his strangled wife inside. That was the end. In a rare departure Hichcock’s goodnight was not humorous, as he reminded the audience of the serious problem of alcoholism.

            The wifi came back up for me a little after 11:00; around the time the donut shop closes.