Roger O Green

FFAPL Literary Legends Gala 2021

Eugene Mirabelli, Lydia Davis

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library is having its Literary Legends Gala 2021 on Saturday, October 16 from 6 to 8 pm. It will be held at the Pine Hills branch of the Albany Public Library, 517 Western Avenue. The first six annual galas were in person. The one in 2020 was, no surprise, virtual. This year’s event will be a hybrid because that’s what 2021 looks like.

The FFAPL “provides critical financial support to the Albany Public Library in order to help the Library provide education, literacy, career development, cultural enrichment, and lifelong learning.” These include supporting specific Library programs and projects, beyond the budget and scope of APL.

Our guests

The honorees are Lydia Davis and Eugene Mirabelli, each a professor emeritus at SUNY-Albany.

Lydia is a short story writer, novelist, and translator. “Her honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Man Booker International Prize.” I bought her Collected Works (2009) in 2013 when she was honored by the Friends, a predecessor of FFAPL.

I attended Gene’s book launch for Renato! earlier this month. It is revised and reassembled from three of his earlier works. At the reading, he read from chapter 3 of what was part of The Goddess in Love with a Horse. It was so engaging that I bought the collection. Thirty years ago, I met Gene a few times, then hadn’t crossed paths with him until this year. He is just as engaging now as then.

The event

The gala features an online auction, already started and going on through October 16. And you don’t have to be in the Albany, NY area to participate. Here’s the link.

Tickets: ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF IN-PERSON TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE. All In-Person Tickets are “Honorary Committee” tickets at $125 each. All in-person attendees must show proof of vaccination. Virtual tickets are pay-what-you-wish, with a recommended donation of $25.

Two nearby banks have given the event organizers permission to use their parking lots for the event, Citizens Bank, 501 Western Avenue (enter from the West Lawrence St. side), and Trustco Bank, 1084 Madison Avenue, both nearby.

Some John Lennon Beatles songs

The Beatles in Italy

Sometimes, I just want to play some Beatles music. And since it’s what would have been the 81st birthday of John Lennon today, I opted for some of my favorite Fab songs I associated with him. I described all of these more fully here. But as an exercise, I’m not going to look at what I said at the time.
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I Want To Hold Your Hand – this is the archetypical Lennon/McCartney song. Lennon told Playboy magazine in 1980; “We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball… I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u/ got that something …’ And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s noses.”

Ticket To Ride – I was at a program for the Albany Institute of History and Art which featured the Fab Four almost 20 years ago. I even had some of my records on display, such as my Japanese singles (I think) and the 1965 album The Beatles in Italy (for sure). That LP title suggests a live performance, but it was just the songs that were not yet on albums. In other words, singles, B-sides, and the four tunes from the Long Tall Sally EP. Ticket To Ride, of course, would subsequently appear on the Help! album.

In the beginning, I misunderstood

The Word – my favorite three Beatles songs in a row on an album are on the US version of Rubber Soul: You Won’t See Me, Think For Yourself, and The Word. (The UK version has Nowhere Man between the McCartney and Harrison tunes).

Day Tripper – one of the great hooks in all of pop music.

Twist and Shout – one of the greatest covers, ever.

Good Morning Good Morning – I did not know for the longest time that McCartney, not Harrison, played the guitar solos.

A Hard Day’s Night – in some ways, I think the whole album is their greatest, done in the midst of Beatlemania, touring, making a movie. And the title song was done on deadline.

I Want You (She’s So Heavy) – I bought the Abbey Road box set in 2021. It’s interesting to hear the Billy Preston organ explode. It’s much more subtle in the final mix.

Help – my daughter has sung it publicly. I relate to it greatly.

Tomorrow Never Knows – a much better title than The Void.

Blogging easier or harder in retirement?

eight hours on the front porch

Arthur – you know Arthur – asked:

Now that you’ve had a bit of time to adjust, do you find blogging easier or harder to do now that you’re retired? Anything else stand out as being harder or easier to do now?

It’s a bit of a rollercoaster, actually. The summers have always been tricky because one doesn’t want to be shut off in the office while the family is around.

Fall 2019: it was quite productive, actually. Time to do those pieces that might take a little longer.

March 2020: At the beginning of the pandemic, my wife was teaching school from the dining table. This was really awkward; if I wanted to do anything downstairs, such as washing dishes in the kitchen, or watching TV in the living room, I felt that I was intruding on her classroom. Meanwhile, my daughter was sequestered in her bedroom. So I pretty much HAD to be in the office or the bedroom. This was advantageous for blogging.

When I petitioned for her to use the spare bedroom for her teaching, she initially resisted. But she soon found its advantages, not just teaching but for ZOOM church meetings, and the like. The daughter then would go downstairs and listen to her classes on the living room sofa. Again, I retreat to the office, which was good for blogging.

Blogging on the road is easier when I’m alone, virtually impossible when I’m with others. Back in the day, I’d go down to the “business center” and use one of the public machines. But now, I’m not able to remember to gather up all the things I need (clothes, room key) before leaving in the dark. Typing in the bathroom is not only suboptimal to me, but audible to the others.

Quit the blog?

But, and this might be an age thing, but I really can’t blog at night anymore. The best time on weekdays is from when I get up until my daughter leaves for school, with certain regular interruptions. They would be making sure my daughter’s up, watching 90 seconds of news at 7 a.m., saying goodbye to my wife, feeding the cats, and not hovering (as she puts it) when my daughter leaves.

And when I was having major problems with the technology of the blog, when it was down for 28 hours, and when it was assaulted by malware, it was really difficult. I dithered between quitting blogging and going back to my arcane Blogger blog that I used for the first five years. Unlike you, I never had a technological mentor.

The melancholy means it’s been much harder recently to blog. And NOT blogging makes me MORE melancholy. So my pieces in the queue have shrunk to about three dozen when six months ago, it was about five dozen. Given many are evergreen pieces I’ll only use if I’m desperate, or dead, I’m not all that far ahead.

Time is on my side. Yes, it is.

On non-blogging issues, I’ve found I have the capacity to actually access my bank, the credit union of my wife and me, and my primary credit card, all online. I check them all about twice a week, move money from our savings to checking on the joint account, and pay off the credit card each month. It wasn’t difficult, it just required time.

I know I say this a lot, but it’s no less true for that. I’m too busy to work. No way I do the ZOOM event for the library, for which I got an award if I’m employed.

Of course, this means that some people think I’m readily available. Not really. I did spend eight hours sitting on the front porch with my oldest friend from college. But I had to find a day I wasn’t working on something or going to the doctor or doing the shopping I promised to do, or…

Musician John Mellencamp is 70

Blood on the plow

In the late 1970s, I heard about a singer named Johnny Cougar. Without having heard a single note from the musician, I had immediately dismissed him. I later learned that a “suit” insisted that John Mellencamp change his name because the Germanic surname was too hard to market.

When he achieved some commercial success, he could get his record company to list him as John Cougar Mellencamp in 1983. But it wasn’t until 1991 that the Cougar went away.

Mellencamp claims to have invented alt-country, and perhaps he did. For sure, he helped organize the first Farm Aid benefit concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young on September 22, 1985. It’s now an annual event that has raised over $60 million for family farmers who are struggling financially.

Big Daddy

I’ll admit I haven’t heard that much of Mellencamp’s music since the late ’80s. I did listen to some recommended cuts on his Wikipedia page and liked quite a lot of them. He doesn’t seem to have the rock star instinct, though. When he released Big Daddy in 1989, which he said at the time was his best album, he decided not to tour. He was heavily involved with painting at the time.

John Mellencamp has been lauded by folks such as John Fogarty, the late Johnny Cash, and Bruce Springsteen, who has played with him occasionally. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. A decade later, he got into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis said: “Mellencamp has created an important body of work that has earned him both critical regard and an enormous audience. His songs document the joys and struggles of ordinary people seeking to make their way, and he has consistently brought the fresh air of common experience to the typically glamour-addled world of popular music.”

On CBS Sunday Morning, he told fellow Indianian Jane Pauley that smoking got him the voice he wanted. He’s riding her on this motorcycle but where are their helmets?

Some songs

Chart action per Billboard pop charts

Rumbleseat, #28 in 1986
Save Some Time To Dream. This is from his 2010’s lo-fi CD No Better Than This, the only album of his I actually own save for a greatest hits collection.
R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to ’60s Rock), #2 in 1986 – if a little cheesy, I got what Mellencamp was going for. And I appreciate the ocarina, which I associate with “Wild Thing” by The Troggs
I Need A Lover, #28 in 1979. It’s a very long intro
Cherry Bomb, #8 in 1988

Paper’s In Fire, #9 in 1987. Lisa Germano’s fine violin
Authority Song, #15 in 1984. He says it’s his band’s version of “I Fought the Law”
Lonely Ol’ Night, #6 in 1985
Jack & Diane, #1 for four weeks in 1982. I’ve become a sucker for this song for the past quarter-century because my wife’s cousin Diane married a guy named Jack a while before I met them. I was really fond of Jack, as he, my late FIL Richard, and I talked about baseball at length, especially from the 1950s and 1960s, every family reunion. Jack was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. When he died in 2021, dear Diane made sure some of Jack’s books were sent to me.
Rain On The Scarecrow, #21 in 1986. “Do you want to buy a farm?”

Optimism: is it always good?

After I had written about my melancholy/depression, I allowed that my default position about events is not optimism, but pessimism. My friend Cee had heard the benefits of optimism.

And indeed, if you Google “Is optimism good?” the first thing one might find is this quote from Kids’ Health: ” Optimism Is Healthy. It turns out that an optimistic attitude helps us be happier, more successful, and healthier. Optimism can protect against depression — even for people who are at risk for it. An optimistic outlook makes people more resistant to stress. Optimism may even help people live longer.”

So it’s settled. Wait a minute. The next article is a 2015 piece from the Washington Post stating that “Researchers have found a really good reason not to be an optimist.” It references an NIH study.

That Wapo article: “Optimism isn’t merely unhelpful at times—it can be demonstrably counterproductive. Telling someone ‘you can do it’ when they actually can’t doesn’t change the outcome, and it makes them more likely to exert time and effort on a fruitless task. There might be no clearer example than the fact that optimists spend more time looking for Waldo, but are no more likely to find him.” But the piece allows that pessimism is not curative either.

Ben Franklin

I had mentioned to Cee that I had long been attracted by a portrayal of Ben Franklin, on, of all things Bwitched. His character [said]… that “he always going through life expecting negative outcomes so that when something positive happened, he would be pleasantly surprised. It was a punchline that was supposed to be funny – the canned laughter told me that – but, to me, it made SENSE… ‘Perhaps I’m an optimistic pessimist — prepare for the worst, but when the very worst doesn’t happen, I’m pleasantly surprised.’”

I’m more vulnerable when I’m optimistic. I’m thinking of someone in a particular position who despised the action of a perpetrator, and rightly so. When they were in the same situation as the previous villain, I was optimistic that they, remembering how crummy they felt, would act differently. Nope, they performed the same damn way. As bad as the mess was, it was my optimism that bit me in the butt.

This is why, for instance, I’m not disappointed in politicians anymore. If they end up being better than expected, I’m pleased. But if they have feet of clay, well, what did I expect? I suppose this sounds cynical, but it tends to regulate my highs and lows, which in the main, works for me.

So the fact that I was optimistic that we’d be out of this damn pandemic by now is why I crashed emotionally a bit. This commercial really spoke to me.