Another Week: Number 105

The rumbling and pounding noises I have been hearing recently returned this week on Saturday evening. They seem subterranean and sound like construction, but it was an odd hour for that and I didn’t see any activity, so I finally ventured outside to investigate what was making my windows rattle slightly.

Warm (above-freezing, anyway) wind whipped through the neighborhood as I walked around my block, and distant sirens and voices added to the general atmosphere of commotion and upheaval. An inflated and internally-lit Santa Claus waved at me. A pit bull glanced dismissively, then crossed the street away from me.

But, of course, I detected no rumbling noise nor any potential source of one. Maybe it was just The Hum.

I really ought to find someplace quieter. I see that Bob Dylan’s townhouse in Manhattan is for sale. That would be perfect. The only thing holding me back is money.

Around the turn of the century, a self-help book called Eat That Frog! advised tackling unpleasant realities first, to get them out of your way. This year of grief has offered frogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It starts every morning with “our” coffee cups and goes all day. It has been a lot to swallow. I’m doing my best.

Sometimes I turn the TV on, but it’s hard to figure out what I want to watch since that was always a shared activity. Most often, I settle on sports because games are live, real, and meaningless. If you’re a Chicago Bears fan, they also condition you to truly breathtaking defeat, which comes to all of us eventually.

Other times, I select stuff that might be brain food — The Story of London, or How the Crusades Changed History, or Finding Your Roots with the inscrutable Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Having enjoyed various cable incarnations of Samantha Brown in previous decades when I had cable, I have now found Places to Love streaming on PBS Passport — seven seasons of it, so this should give me an added option for the next, let’s say, four or five months.

My family has always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, with a dinner featuring fish and pierogi. As usual in recent years, my sister Karen made the pierogi. I assembled “Cod with Lemon, Green Olive, and Onion Relish.”

The food was delicious — but afterward, some chronic family dysfunction boiled over. By 7:05, I was driving home with insults ringing in my ears.

Amy‘s sister Marianne did reach out and invite me to their family’s Christmas Day celebration — but her husband seethes at the mention of my name, and Amy was really the only connection I had with her sisters anymore, so a holiday gathering could be a bottomless frog buffet.

Instead, I just spent Wednesday by myself, reading William Faulkner’s tale of murder and rape in prohibition-era Mississippi. It did strike me as somewhat un-Christmassy, but then, near the end, it turned out that the main villain was born at Christmastime — a little miracle of synchronicity winking at me from the printed page!

Speaking of rape and murder, it was only this week that I learned singer Merry Clayton actually lost the baby girl she was carrying the night she recorded her blood-curdling vocals for the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” in her pajamas and curlers.

She suffered a miscarriage the next day.

I saw 20 Feet From Stardom years ago, but I don’t recall that enormous detail being mentioned — just Mick Jagger acknowledging that, upon listening back to the session, the track was “good.”

The inch or less of wet snow melting on my neighborhood’s lawns on Christmas morning was completely gone by Saturday when the temperature hit 51º and the sun made an appearance. With fairly green grass, the roar of motorcycles and dragsters, and the outdoor voices of children and dogs, Easter seemed around the corner.

On Saturday evening as I drove down to my mom’s apartment, a thin, blood-red sunset reflected from thick, blue-black clouds in the southwest sky. I was passing Palmen Motors. For a car dealership, they certainly have incorporated a lot of trees into their landscaping — and each of the trees was elaborately strung with white Christmas lights.

Beautiful — but now Christmas was over, and soon somebody would have to take all of those lights down. As a guy who did zero decorating this year, this made me feel ahead of the game and free. Also, our daylight hours are already getting longer.

I walked 0.42 miles this week — that one trip around the block.

Sanctuary, by William Faulkner

Having read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as a much younger man, I am just now working my way through William Faulkner.

Sanctuary is sixth on the list. I started it just before Thanksgiving and finished on Christmas Day.

I read the book alongside Reading Faulkner: Sanctuary, by Edwin T. Arnold and Dawn Trouard, the companion volume in the series edited by the late Faulkner scholar Noel Polk. It’s a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the novel, so I would read a chapter or so, then switch to this handbook to make sure I understood what I just read. Most of the time, I did — but Faulkner famously employs an unconventional style and allusions, so having experts at hand can save time and frustration, and add illumination.

Sanctuary itself is not so much a story as a labyrinthine fever dream. It starts off at a crumbling Mississippi farmhouse that a bootlegger has occupied with his girlfriend and a small group of associates. Later, the plot moves to a brothel in Memphis.

Along the way, there’s murder, rape, a perpetually unwell and unconscious baby in a box, an old man who’s both blind and deaf, a madame with two obnoxious poodles, characters barging in from previous novels, lots of cigarettes and alcohol, reckless driving, a nosey state senator, and a pathetic justice system. Faulkner breaks up the terror and revulsion with slapstick, drifts off into icky reveries of taboo lust, and tacks on an addendum in hopes of putting some meat on the bones of his thin central villain.

The narrative jumps back and forth between concurrent timelines, and characters cross paths haphazardly. Individual moments might feel vivid or real — but as a whole, the novel is just an elaborate contraption wired together and offered for sale. The main impression I got was that Faulkner might have felt disgusted by the bodily details of sex for some reason.

Nevertheless, he’s one helluva writer.