Hi! And welcome back to the popular shame game “So You Think You Can Rant?” where it’s your words against the troll-a-verse! I’m your host, Seymour Bittame!
For those of you who haven’t played before, the rules are simple:
A scenario pulled from a real social media post will be put up on the screen and our four panelists will have one minute to respond to it in the worst possible ways imaginable. Oh, yes, without violating FCC rules on taste and profanity.
Audience laughs.
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The bifurcated psyche of a world-class athlete who grew up in a literary household.
Now, that has all the makings of a great novel.
Not coincidentally, these are the circumstances that led world-class athlete Ivy Pochoda to become an excellent novelist, with six titles and counting. But getting those two lives – high-powered athlete and high-powered novelist – working together, well that was the topic of a most entertaining talk by Pochoda on Tuesday as the inaugural headliner of the Art of the Story conference.
Pochoda’s life story fits in quite well with the overall theme of San Miguel de Allende’s newest literary festival. That is – if I may interpolate from the list of fascinating workshops and events scheduled – inspiration is all around us, if you know how to look for it.
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“(His) gift for artifice notwithstanding, he’d spun such dense layers of fabrication that inevitably he lapsed into self-contradiction.” – “Fantasia for Piano” By Mark Singer, Sept. 10, 2007, New Yorker magazine.
When the end came, it was a mere shadow of the audacious and raucous life that led up to it.
How sad. Imagine a man who promiscuously craved attention his entire life dying alone in a cold and dark room in a cold and dark dacha in the midst of a most unforgiving Russian winter.
Or nearly alone. With him was the sullen old nurse who spoke little English and seemed to know more about boiling cabbage than ministering to a dying man. In her defense, boiled cabbage was valued more by her people than this corpulent and grotesque American who knew only how to complain.
“Everything,” she often told her husband as they ate dinner in the dacha kitchen. “There is nothing in this existence which is not out to make his life miserable. Just ask him. Jesus Christ did not suffer as much for all Mankind as this man thinks he suffers when the temperature drops just a few degrees.
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He awoke with a sharp grunt. Like someone had kicked him in the balls.
Come to think of it, it hurt down there, too. And he had to pee. Again.
“Driver,” he called to the front of the black town car. “Pull over. I have to piss again.”
“Can you hold it for about 10 minutes, Mr. Trump? This is a pretty bad place to pull over.”
“President. I told you to refer to me as President Trump. I don’t want to say it again.”
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News headline: Hallmark has created 42 movies for the holiday.
Subsequently, House Beautiful magazine gushed about the “comforting predictability of these flicks … No matter which title you switch on, the best thing about a Hallmark holiday movie is knowing that pretty soon you’ll be watching a happy ending.”
I don’t know if people who watch all 42 of these movies get a participation medal or a stay at the sanatorium. And Hallmark isn’t the only one flooding the zone. Somebody, noticing the overwhelming whiteness of characters in Hallmark movies, began putting out ethnic versions with the same insipient stories.
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She was in our house when we moved in five years ago. She’s been here much much longer than that. I venture to guess that she has been on this planet longer than we have.
She is an old-school Catrina. Her wide-brimmed chapeau with the enormous winged and flowered bow on top looks like the one José Guadalupe Posada, drew on his original “La Calavera Garbancera” back in 1910. So does the hairstyle.
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Gertrude Stein had a problem. She’d always had the problem but it was all the more acute in 1934 when she stood before 500 people and tried to speak.
She stuttered.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her stutter caused obvious discomfort among her adoring fans and that caused her to lose confidence and when Gertrude Stein lost confidence, she lost her line of thought. Which was not easy to follow to begin with.
The first couple of lectures on her long-awaited U.S. tour were described in the American press as disappointing and worse, confusing.
And this would never do, as she had six months of lectures across the United States lined up, each limited to 500 people maximum and each had been sold out months ago.
In a bit of a panic, Stein told an assistant to reach out to her good friend Mina Loy, a bohemian Everywoman sort, living in Paris. A feminist, painter, poet, playwright, novelist, designer — god knows, if it was about art, Mina had done it. If anyone could punch up a speech and clear up her, um, diction issues, Stein reasoned, it would be Mina.
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It is clear to me that the single greatest invention of our civilization has been the wooden toast tongs.
Since the time of Medieval toasters, this device has safely extracted piping hot slabs of bread. Perhaps even earlier, if certain Egyptian hieroglyphics are to be interpreted correctly.
Suspected fact: Leonardo da Vinci may have invented the wooden toast tongs before there were electric toasters, once again anticipating the needs and aspirations of future generations.
Toast tongs made it possible for countless writers and poets through time to sit at their humble desks and create, undistracted by the burning sensation on their fingertips that a tong-less household brings.
Continue readingRecently I was asked to read a selection of my writing at the Prose Cafe in San Miguel de Allende.
In better times, Prose Cafe is a gathering of writers and others (mostly other writers, I think) in the beautiful Belles Artes. Three or four writers would each read something and take questions. I always found the cafe sessions inspirational. I imagined myself — some day, not right away — being just like them, having something of worth to share with other writers.
These days, Prose Cafe and its sister gathering, Poetry Cafe, are ZOOM affairs. They are both the offspring of the San Miguel Literary Sala whose wonderful Writers Conference is currently underway — on ZOOM, of course.
I shared the ZOOM space on Thursday, Dec. 3 with two accomplished authors, Molly Giles and Fredrika Sprengle. Both have published works — award-winning books, short stories. I have nearly four decades of newspaper clippings. A good mix, as it turned out. We all leaven our prose (and pain?) with humor.
What follows is the story that I read. As I told the ZOOM audience, this is a work of fiction, except for the parts that are true. (You figure it out).
It is one of a number of short stories in the file marked “Seminary Life” that may yet grow into a full-sized novel.
Declaring war on … well, everybody
It was the beginning of the end — the end of my days as a Catholic seminarian. It came the moment I picked up that heavy metal bucket full of dirty water and heaved it out the third floor window. Sending a loud and long string of curses cascading after it.
Two things occurred to me in the moment.
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A lot of you have been asking me, “Bob” you say, “how did you come up with the award-winning and fabulously successful reality TV cooking show “Dark Pastry.”
To date, my natural gift for modesty has kept me from spilling the beans on the cooking/horror reality show but so many urban legends and out-and-out lies by a very jealous POTUS have forced my hand.
Is it my fault that my reality show has been so much more-fabulously successful than his ever was?
Yes.
Yes, it is my fault. Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 
