Deborah Lipp

I try not to read my blog spam as I delete it, but sometimes you see things…

“Disney Belle porn.”

Seriously. I’m crawling under my desk and assuming the fetal position NOW.

I was talking with my sister about relationships, and I mentioned that there was a passage from an Indigo Girls song that I thought encapsulated a lot of what we were discussing. And I opened my mouth to quote it and…

Nothing.

A complete blank. So then I tried to paraphrase. Nothing. Mush came out of my mouth. Pure mush. I couldn’t come up with a single line, or the basic meaning, or the name of the song or the album or anything.

So this morning I finally remembered enough of a passage to do a search. The song turns out to be Mystery from Swamp Ophelia, and the passage is:

So what is love then,
Is it dictated or chosen?
Does it sing like the hymns of 1000 years,
Or is it just pop emotion?
And if it ever was here and it left
Does it mean it was never true?
And to exist it must elude
Is that why i think these things of you?

So yes, I think that encapsulates most of the questions we ask about love. It doesn’t, however, encompass the questions I have about what’s happening to my frickin brain.

I totally get tired of all the business reporting on the radio. I like listening to NPR when they’re doing interesting things like All Things Considered, but sometimes it’s like all money, all the time. So fine, when “Market Watch” comes on I change the station.

But this morning, there was this interesting news from Turkey. The vote for President is undecided and there have been voting boycotts. Almost a million people rioted against the candidacy of a conservative Muslim, fearing their secular identity is at risk. So what was the headline on the radio? “Markets in Turkey dropped more than 8% in response to anxiety about…”

This wasn’t the financial news. This was the lead story on the international news segment.

“Markets dropped eight percent”? Not “Protestors filled the streets” or “Turkey’s government in a showdown” or something, y’know, about the story? It’s as if the only way to present news to Americans is to talk about American dollars first. Because otherwise it’s not interesting.

Maybe that’s not just an irritating way to present the news. Maybe it’s actually offensive.

All solved!

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Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84, and I suspect there will be many obituaries with the same title as mine. (There’s a wonderful and thorough biography in The Guardian.)

I also considered the titles “Hi Ho” and “Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.”

As a teenager I read every novel and short story Vonnegut had written up to that time (and have continued to read his work, albeit less voraciously). I had an amusing exchange with a high school English teacher in a class on the American novel. He handed me Slaughterhouse Five, and when I said I’d already read it, he handed me Cat’s Cradle, and when he went back to the cabinet for a third time, I said “I’ve read that one too” without even looking, so he went back the fourth time and came out with Ethan Frome. Which I hadn’t read.

As a writer, what I’ve learned from Vonnegut is that it’s okay to be simple, and in fact, simplicity is a virtue. And that rhythm matters. Vonnegut wrote in beats. He was a bit of a Luddite, and probably knew nothing of the Internets, but I think he’d have liked the way that blogs play with language. The. Punctuation. Experiments. Changes to rhythm and form. Grammatical anarchy in the cause of a conversational tone of voice. Vonnegut cared about ideas, thoughts, tones, beats, and letting the audience listen. He didn’t tell you what to think; but in a gentle voice, he showed you what he saw, inviting you to see it his way. I don’t recall words like “evil” or “angry” in his work. You just read the events, and met the people, and saw the irony, and made your own decision. Yet for all that, his work was full of morality and caring:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

(From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.)

Mr. Vonnegut, you were kind.

Over the weekend, cartoonist Johnny Hart died. He was the creator of both B.C. and the Wizard of Id, and continued with B.C. until his death.

In later life, Hart published cartoons that were anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, and racist. Making him a funny subject for me to eulogize. But here I go.

My father buys lots and lots of cartoon collections. Peanuts, Tumbleweeds, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Doonesbury, Zits, you name it. And we kids would read them all. You have a dull afternoon, a pile of cartoon books, you’re set. I think I absorbed those cartoons through my skin.

And one of the bits I remember best, one of the truly funniest things that stands out among all the funny things, was from B.C. I mean, I don’t think I could quote from many of the hundreds and hundreds of cartoons I read, but I can tell you all about one thing:

Clams got legs.

I can only find one real example online (below the fold).
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