Tuesday, April 19, 2005

OK. When I was associate editor of a national magazine, no columnist, no matter how popular or indispensable, would have gotten away with ending his or her column in the same way twice in a year, much less issue after issue after issue. And that was just at a little hobbyist rag (Videomaker). So who's asleep at the wheel at Vanity Fair? I haven't kept all the back issues, but I have gathered enough evidence to indicate to me that Lisa Robinson, who writes the "Hot Tracks" monthly music column, either has a serious, disabling Sinatra fixation, or she is bored to death with her job and overtyping old columns every month changing as little as possible, or she's playing a great joke on everyone, or the magazine is. Can someone explain this to me? Here's a sampling of the final sentences of Robinson's "Hot Tracks" from the VF back issues I have kept, and those just received: AUGUST 2004 "And available only on television and the Internet is Frank Sinatra: the Concept Albums (sic)...          "When you've lived and loved the way Frank has, then you know what life's about." [I'm missing September and October issues, and VF's online archives aren't working. I remember that October, at least, ended similarly, because that's when I first noticed it.] NOVEMBER 2004 "As for great crooners from the past who are now deceased, there is no one greater than Frank sinatra--whose Sinatra at the Sands, with Count Basie and the Orchestra, quite possibly ranks as the most swinging album ever recorded.          "When you've lived and loved the way Frank has, then you know what life's about." [Missing December through February 2005.] MARCH 2005 "(Get Rhino's four-CD Bobby Darin boxed set to hear the swinger who some considered the pretender to Frank Sinatra's throne.)          "No one understands a life like Frank's." [What does this even mean?] APRIL 2005 "[C]rooner Michael Bublé releases another of his soundalike Frank Sinatra albums.          "No one understands a life like Frank's." MAY 2005 "And the Live from Las Vegas series brings us Bobby Darin recorded in 1963 at the Flamingo, Dean Martin recorded in 1967 at the Sands, and Frank Sinatra recorded in 1986 at the Golden Nugget.          "When you've loved and lost the way Frank has, then you know what life's about." I know I ought not to criticize--just how often can feral get away with describing the weather or ecstasizing about chorus frogs or complaining of menopausal symptoms before I alienate everyone, including myself? But VF is a Condé Nast publication, slick, high-end. If their editors don't care, on their budget, and with so much advertising at stake, then what's the world of hard-copy print coming to? 1:57:09 PM    comment []

We live in a gale today, and the blue promise of morning is brought firmly back into the daily gray--now you stay put!--and it seems certain more snow is on the way. I suppose I'll have to fire up the Goddess; I'd thought we were done with her, could get by with just the small intense evening fires in the little stove at the back of the house, but not so yet, I think now. I'm reading in 3-D, so to speak, still working my slow way through Kalstone's critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop, and also reading every work referred to in the text as I go along. This means I have the biography on my lap and a growing stack of books at my side--copies of Marianne Moore's and Bishop's and Auden's and Wallace Stevens' complete poems, Bishop's and Moore's complete prose--and more to come. We're only up to 1937, and haven't met Lowell yet. It's a fascinating education in the East Coast, Ivy League, upper-class, WASP school of the mid-20th century that I rejected so forcefully in my youth. For, I suppose, political reasons. Being a complete ignoramus. Ah, there it is, a fierce sideways snow, a solid sheet of it. What a bizarre month April has been hereabouts. Hillside blossoms try to force spring into being, but winter's having none of it. 12:10:38 PM    comment []

It's ten before 5 in the morning and only now does the melodious birdsong penetrate--make its way past creek rumble and the hum of the laptop across the room trawling diligently for mail, past the sighs of sleeping dogs and Greta's purr, who is so contented to have me to herself so early. I hear the birds finally and wonder that they sing in the dark--the sky seems not one whit brighter than it was when the volcanic hot flash brought me out of sleep at 1:45. And I sip the tea I've made and sweetened with rice syrup because there is no honey and lightened with spoonsful of dry milk, and I concentrate on the birds I hear, for clearly many sing in the dark. How deftly their voices weave around one another, their rhythms offset one another, their--wait. Oh no. The cobwebs clear. These are chorus frogs bleating and competing and getting ready to get ready for morning. These weird sensory displacements happen a lot and lead me to wonder just what lies ahead in addled-old-age land. The other morning I opened my eyes (I wrote to Dr. Omed later), and "focused blearily on an image on the wall before my face, a painting or photo. I looked down on an Italianate scene from high above. A black waterway passed through the scene and around a peninsula. On the peninsula and on the hills and ridges near and beyond it stone buildings rose. Brown and yellow and ochre structures, round-roofed, engoldened by sunlight. The buildings lay in orderly rows separated by dark narrow winding avenues. And then I was pulled from the semi-dream state/revery as the image revealed itself for what it was--your Diamondback-rattlesnake postcard stuck to my wall, and the black shadow the waterway, and the head the peninsula, and the brown and ochre scales the round-roofed buildings in orderly rows on the coils that were hillsides all around." And the strange dyslexic (aphasic?) direction of my reading comprehension, which has me exchanging, for example, "bedslob" for "bobsled." (I did like that particular exchange, though. It conjured a vivid mental picture of my slovenly self seated on the mattress at the back of a single file of my dogs and cat, screaming happily around a chute.) Oh but since infancy I've enjoyed a greater-than-usual tendency to spot beautiful pictures in random design--the Bambi in the confetti wallpaper, the angels in the walnut veneer. Hm. Just lucky, then, I guess. That's how I'll think about it from now on. 6:25:17 AM    comment []