The day after

Today, the day after the massacre and bombing in Norway, I wonder why I and other people I know tend to feel less anguished about similarly horrific events in, say, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Mumbai, Pakistan, Darfur, and Mexico. Are Norwegians less the Other than the others? I wonder what my Somali neighbors are talking about this morning.

Jim W. took his own life last week

A puddle of water on the black iron skillet begins to sizzle, then when the pan is lifted off the burner and turned sideways, begins to creep to the center, shrinking as it goes until it sizzles one last time and disappears. Is that what it’s like, he asked?

Fred Scherer and Walter Wiley departed at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 3, 1913 from Manhattan at the corner of Murray Street and Broadway, hoping to make San Francisco in 48 days. To pay for the project, they will sell post cards along the route. Poughkeepsie is their first stop, Schenectady the following night. They hope to average 70 miles a day, arrive in San Francisco on June 20. Whether or not they made it to San Francisco or even Poughkeepsie is not known.

Three girl singers

1. All for You, Diana Krall, vocals and piano; trio of bass, guitar, and percussion (1996)
2. s'Gershwin, Prudence Johnson, vocals; Dan Chouinard, piano (2003)
3. Surrender, Jane Monheit, vocals; orchestra {2007)

Chose these three CD's from the local library yesterday because jazz has been bulked up in recent years by an upsurge of women singers and I haven't paid much attention to them. My taste had been formed by Billy Holiday, Carmen McRae, Abby Lincoln, Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Sloane, Nina Simone, and others of my generation and earlier. The best of the three is the Krall recording, followed by Johnson. Monheit has the chops but this is an overproduced outing.

Finally, I begin The Journalist and the Murderer

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity,ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns--when the article or book appears--his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living."
The first paragraph of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer

Being homo on the prairie in the Fifties

When New York legislators passed the gay marriage law tonight, I thought about the early 50's in my western North Dakota high school where the words homo and queer were seldom mentioned. My fellow students and I assumed the drama and English teachers were lesbians because they were single and lived together, but the only joke I heard was that one of them was adviser to the Thespian Society which sounded a lot like lesbian. There was an unspoken acknowledgement that my classmate George had experimented sexually with several other boys but sex, hetero or homo, seemed an open book then. You learned on your own because no one, not even your parents or the parish priests, were interested in discussing the matter. After we graduated, George went to college and found some men who actually preferred the company of other men and a few, especially Korean war veterans, who were loudly hostile about same sex sex. After a veteran told George in front of others that he would kick the shit out of him if he ever touched him, George's sexuality evaporated. From then on, he was to all appearances a nonsexual person. I learned that sexual preference was dictated by someone stronger than yourself, be it that vet or eventually religious authority and or the state.

My son Eric is on a billboard in downtown Minneapolis on Park Ave between 8th and 9th.