A Calabash Pipe, Catch-22, and Writers who don't do homework

There is absolutely no way I personally can sit down to write after a quick check of my emails and facebook page.

No Way.

Pretty much I can make it through my emails; I don’t actually have that many.  Right now I’m negotiating with a fellow on eBay about a used calabash smoking pipe.  I “need” this as a prop for a Sherlock Holmes tour I’m putting together.  I have to “extend and enrich” the learning experience.  The hassle is that I can’t get into my PayPal account because I’m in England, and I have a different sim card in my phone.  PayPal can’t verify I’m who I say I am.

That leads to another completely separate rant about “smart” systems and the removal of humans from the loop.  Everything works perfectly until it doesn’t work at all.  Right now the really cool pipe is stuck in a loop while this other fellow and I work it out.  Over my teaching career I probably bought five thousand dollars worth of stuff on eBay to support my teaching habit.  Everything from a green sheet metal cash box and a dozen Riker-mounted moths and butterflies (Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and Homer’s “Odyssey”) to older  English pound coins with “NEMO ME IMPUNE LECESSIT” in their rims.  The Latin motto “no one insults me with impunity” figured in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”  I have also seen it embroidered in white on black mourning bands across police badges after officers’ deaths.  That motto is no longer on the current English pound coins.  I had Shakespeare-themed postage stamps from (as I remember) Saudi Arabia that had been sent to a German philatelist and a wooden Shakespeare Tea box on my desk.

I had sardine labels from almost every country in the world, but especially from Cannery Row in Monterrey, California, to connect to Steinbeck’s “Log from the Sea of Cortez,” from the year we followed a current reenactment of that journey.  The original book appeared in print December 6, 1941.  The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor caused it to get considerably less press coverage than the publisher expected.  That was also the year and reason a big statue of Will Rogers on his horse “Oatmeal” didn’t get constructed in Los Angeles.  Associations like that, connections like that, are why I want this calabash pipe.  That big pipe, incidentally, was made a visual icon by the actor William Gillette.  A long-stemmed “churchwarden” pipe required jaw-clamping and resulted in the actor’s mumbling his words.  It also required considerable arm movement to control it, sometimes obscuring his face.  Ergo: the distinctive calabash pipe.

Then there’s Google for crosschecking things I’ve observed during my rambles.  Yesterday the four-part series “Catch-22” based on Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name came out. .  That book was hard to get into.  I had started it at least four times and really couldn’t get into it.  The fifth or sixth time I started it, I was a Navy petty officer stationed ashore in Naples.  I slipped into that book like butter melting through a hot biscuit.  I kept a small dry-chemical fire extinguisher by my chair while I read, I was turning pages so fast.  Anyway, I picked up the free “Evening Standard” at the Barbican Underground station yesterday, and the inside and outside of the front-and-back cover of that issue was a four-color advertisement for that movie or whatever it’s called.  Well, that was cool, I suppose.  But the first thing -the very first thing- I noticed after the humongous headline was the shiny plastic model of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator lying atop a map of Italy to remind the reader that this was a story about World War-II bombers and their aircrews.  The central character Yossarian was a bombardier in a squadron of North American B-25 Mitchells.  B-24s are four-engined heavy bombers.  B-25s are smaller twin-engined medium bombers.  That “little” detail literally shrieks from the page.  I’m glad George Clooney and Christopher Abbott and everybody else are going to make a bazillion dollars, or pounds, or whatever, but that kind of detail is important.

Talking about absence of accurate details depresses me.  There was/is a series about “Casca; the Immortal Mercenary” that was started Barry Sadler in 1979.  The first one I stumbled across was number fourteen: “The Phoenix,” set in Vietnam.  It was bad.  As in “stinker.”  Huey helicopters were referred to as “gunboats,” not “gunships.”  That was one of the most egregious errors.  Also the character had only tenuous interaction with chains of command,  an incredibly important aspect of military responsibility.  I tried another; I don’t remember which.  Again his terminology is atrociously inadequate.  This infuriated me, just to call it the way it is.  Here is the incredible premise: Casca Rufio Longinus, the legionnaire who thrust his spear into Jesus of Nazareth’s side is cursed never to be able to stay dead, never to find peace, and must constantly return as a soldier for the rest of history.  Now, -that- is a premise with for all intents and purposes an infinite possibility of iterations.  But the writer has to do his homework.  Sadler didn’t do his homework, and his details grate the reader as thoroughly as the kitchen tool shreds a yellow onion.  And it causes more tears for similar chemical reasons.  I have wanted to grouse about that for decades.  Now I’ve said it out loud, in print, even, and I feel so much better.  Maybe now I can swing down off my high horse.  Having just looked it up, I find that it’s one of those series where new talent for the publishing house gets tapped to churn out some of this kludge.  Maybe that makes it alright.  Maybe.  I don’t think so, though.

Whew.  That’s done.  Now where?  What do I talk about now?

Well the Catch-22 thing.  I didn’t catch it on television last night.  Kathryn and I were coming back from her night out whooping it up with a group of rowdy knitters at The Village Haberdashery over in West Hampstead, half a dozen Undergrounds stops from here.  One of the ways I stay happily married is to enable her fabric arts habit - in Missouri, in Texas, in Spain, in Portugal, in France, and now in England.  I’m not sure it’s socially macho for me to admit I enjoy the quality of people she associates with, the vivacity of almost all the shopkeepers, and the fascinating variety of wool and fabric in their hues and tints and shades and colors and tones and textures.  It is never-ending.  My job is to escort the Lady, primarily as beast of burden and visible guard dog.  I go along with that because it lets me visit the shops surreptitiously.

 On the way back to the apartment yesterday evening we caught the Jubilee Line train at West Hampstead Overground station heading toward Clapham Junction.  Our stop was at Willesden Junction where we transfer to the Bakerloo Line north for our stop at Harlesden Underground.  Except that there was some kind of service interruption on the lines toward the center of the city.  The train coming our way couldn’t get past it; the train that had just arrived from the other direction could not continue.  Thoroughly bollixed.  The train directors reversed the train that had just come into the station, and we rode it to our transfer point, and everything worked out well for us.  Everybody else probably made their own adjustments to their realities.

We got home to find our landlady had been planning to cook something Jamaican for us, but hadn’t said anything and hadn’t got started.  We, at the same time, had scored a couple of perfectly ripe avocados which we jumbled with onions and tomatoes and a lemon and salt and generated an evening meal of guacamole on whole-wheat bread.  No proper chips in the local shops.  As I was doing the monster mash with the avocados, the young couple from upstairs rolled in from their evening carrying some exotic take-out they’d picked across the street from the grocers, and we and they and the landlady spent the next three hours discussing and remedying the problems of the world.  It’s fascinating how much so many of us have in common.

At any rate, the curtain rang down about midnight-thirty, and everybody wended their separate ways.  Except the landlady.  She stayed up who-know-how-late cleaning the kitchen.  After we all washed our own dishes.

Because Life is Good.

I’ve shut this session down after an hour and a half and over thirteen hundred words.

I’m going to grab some lunch, then edit this thing.  It’s done at a little under fifteen.