Phoenix, mid-1990s
Jeff [Shay] has jobs on and off, waits on tables in a food court
somewhere, and spends tremendous amounts of time with his computer. He
visits a website devoted to miracles....
He enters seventeen characters and then "dot com miraculum." And the
miracles come scrolling down. At dinner one night he tells us about a
miracle in the Bronx. Jeff is shy about the Bronx, shy and guilty. He
thinks it is part of the American gulag, a place so distant from his
experience that those who've emerged can't possibly be willing to spend a
moment in the room with someone like him. But here we are at the table,
sharing a meal, and he tells us about a miracle that took place earlier in
the decade and is still a matter of some debate, at least on the web, the
net. A young girl was the victim of a terrible crime. Body found in a
vacant lot amid dense debris. Identified and buried. The girl
memorialized on a graffiti wall nearby. And then the miracle of the
images and the subsequent crush of people and the belief and
disbelief....He is shy. He feel he doesn't have the credentials to relate
a tale of such intensity, all that suffering and faith and openness of
emotion, transpiring in the Bronx. I tell him what better place for the
study of miracles.
Myron Lounsbury
Keystroke 2--Sister Edgar in Cyberspace
There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is.
There are only connections. Everything is connected, All human knowledge
gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact
referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password--world without
end, amen.
But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of
systems. That is why she is so uneasy. There is a presence here, a thing
implied, something vast and bright. She senses the paranoia of the web,
the net. There's the perennial virus of course. Sister knows all about
contaminations and the protective measures they require. This is
different--it's a glow, a lustrous rushing force that seems to flow from a
billion distant net nodes.
When she decides on a whim to visit the H-bomb home page, she begins to
understand. Everything in your computer, the plastic, silicon and mylar,
every logical operation and processing function, the memory, the hardware,
the software, the ones and zeroes, the triads inside the pixels that form
the on-screen image--it all culminates here.
Myron Lounsbury Cyberspace: Sister Edgar & Language
Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around?
Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?
A word appears in the lunar milk of the data stream. You see it on
your monitor, replacing the tower shots and airbursts, the detonations of
high yield devices set on barges or dangled from balloons, replacing the
comprehensive text displays that accompany the bombs. A single seraphic
word. You can examine the word with a click, tracing its origins ,
development, earliest known use, its passages between languages, and you
can summon the word in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic, in a thousand
languages and dialects living and dead, and locate literary citations, and
follow the word through the tunneled underworld of its ancestral roots....
Peace.
Myron Lounsbury
South Bronx: The billboard miracle
They gather....onto a traffic island in the bottmmost Bronx where the
expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards
stretch towards the narrows, all that old industrial muscle with its
fretful deolation--the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner
coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem
River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in
persistent wind....
[Sister Edgar and Grace] follow the crowd's stoked gaze. They stand
and look. The billboard is unevenly lighted, dim in spots, several bulbs
blown and unreplaced, but the central elements are clear, a vast cascade
of orange juice pouring from top right into a goblet that is handheld at
lower left--the perfectly formed hand of a female caucasian of the middle
suburbs....And the six-ounce cans of Minute Maid arrayed across the bottom
of the board, a hundred identical cans so familiar in design and color and
typeface that they have personality, the convivial cuteness of little
orange-and-black people....
The train....
The headlights sweep the billboard and she hears a sound from the
crowd, a gasp that shoots into sobs and moans and the cry of some
unnameable painful elation. A blurted sort of whoop, the holler of
unstoppered belief. Because when the train lights jot the dimmest part of
the billboard a face appears above the misty lake and it belongs to the
murdered girl. A dozen women clutch their heads, they whoop and sob, a
spirit,a godsbreath passing throught the crowd.
Esmeralda.
Myron Lounsbury Nick Shay on an airplane, heading to Kazakhstan, 1990's
I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste.
I don't know exactly what. He smiles and puts his feet up on the bench,
something of a gargoyle squat. He says maybe one is the mystical twin of
the other. He likes this idea. He says waste is the devil twin. Because
waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig
out the history of early cultures, every sort of boneheap and broken tool,
literally from under the ground.
Myron Lounsbury
Nick Shay, Museum of the Misshapens, Kazakhstan,
1990's
{Victor Maltsev] takes us to a place he calls the Museum of the
Misshapens. It is part of the Medical Institute....Viktor is a man who
likes to deepen the texture of an experience. The fetuses, some of them,
are preserved in Heinz pickle jars. There is the two-headed specimen.
There is the single head that is twice the size of the body. There is the
normal head that is located in the wrong place, perched on the right
shoulder....
Viktor gives directions to a radiation clinic on the outskirts of the
city, and we drive out there in a mood of some disgruntlement....
Every time he has gone to the Polygon he comes here. This is a man who
is trying to merchandise nuclear explosions--using safer methods, no
doubt--and he comes here to challenge himself he is not blind to the
consequences. It is the victims who are blind...It is the dwarf girl who
wears a T-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hamburg,
Germany....It is th woman with features intact but only half a face
somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her
shoulders like the crescent moon.
She is wearing a T-shirt like the dwarf's and Viktor says this is the
result of a marketing ploy gone awry. A local businessman bought ten
thousand T-shirts without knowing they were leftovers from a gay
celebration in Europe. Very crazy thing, Viuktor says, bringing these
shirts into a place where Islam is stronger every day.
But this part of the same surreal, isn't it, that started on the
forty-second floor of that Moscow tower.
Myron Lounsbury Bronx, 1951-52, Father Paulus and Mr. Bronzini on the game of
chess
Paulus sat upright in his chair, formally withdrawing, it seemd to a
more objective level of discourse.
"Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly leave me cold. The
game is location, situation and memory. And a need to win. The
psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of
danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant,
contemptuous and dominating. Willful in the extreme. All the sins,
Albert of the noncarnal type.'
Myron Lounsbury
Bronx, 1951-52: Bronzini and family, taking a
bath
Bronzini lay beaming in the massive bath, a cast-iron relic, raised on
ball-and-clawfeet, only his head unsubmerged.
Salt crystals fizzed all around him.
His wife leaning against the door frame, Klara, with their two-year-old
affixed to her leg, the child repeating words that daddy issued from the
deeps.
"Tangerine," Albert said....
"Do you know the old painting, he said, "that shows dozens of children
playing games in some town square?"
"Hundreds actually. Two hundred anyway, Bruegel. I find it
unwholesome. Why?"
"It came up in conversation."
"I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say
that it's not that much different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of
death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a
little sinister to me. It's some kind of menace, some folly.
Kinderspielen. They looked like dwarves doing something awful."
Myron Lounsbury Bronx, 1951-52: Sister Edgar Teaching
Sister prowled the space between her desk and the blackboard, moving in
a rustle of monochrome cotton, scrubbed hands flashing. She recited
questions from the Baltimore Catechism and her students responded in a
single crystal voice.
Matty believed in the Baltimore Catechism. It had all the questions
and the answers and it had love, hate, damnation and washing other
people's feet, it had whips, thorns and resurrections, it had angels,
shepherds, thieves and Jews, it had hosanna in the highest....
He liked the way the response to each question repeated the question
before delivering the answer.
Sister said, "What do we mean when we say that Christ will come from
thence to judge the living and the dead?"
"The class replied in unison. "When we say that Christ will come from
thence to judge the living and the dead, we mean that on the last day our
Lord will come to judge everyone who has ever lived in this world."
Myron Lounsbury
Bronx, 1951-52: Mr. Bronzini Teaching
Bronzini stood before his class, forty-four stoical souls in general
science. Most sixteen years old, a few older, even eighteen, the dopier
ones, the discombobulates, left back at some point in the long alpine
march to knowledge....
"We can't see the world clearly until we understand how nature is
organized. We need to count, measure and test. This is the scientific
method. The observation and description of phenomena. Phenomena. Things
perceptible to the senses. The seasons make sense. At a certain time the
cold diminishes, the days grow longer. It happens at the same time every
year....The planets move in an orderly fashion. We can predict their
passage across the skies. And we can admire the mathematics involved.
The ellipsoid passage of the planets around the sun. Ellipse. A slightly
flattened circle. Here we detect form and order, we see the laws of
nature in their splendid harmony. Think of the rhythm of waves. The birth
of babies...Carrying the fetus to term. Nine months. Seven pounds two
ounces. We need numbers to make sense of the world. We think in numbers.
We think in decades. Because we need organizing principles. Alfonse
Catanzaro, yes, to make us less muddled."
A voice piped up in the back of the room.
"Call him Alan."...
"Don't call me Alfonse. Call me Alan. I want to be an actor in the
movies."
Myron Lounsbury Little Italy, Martin Scorsese, late 1940s (Mary Pat
Kelly)
The young Queens immigrant found two refuges, both huge, dim, quiet
buildings where miraculous dramas unfolded--Loews cinema on Second Avenue
and old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. First came the
movies.
Martin Scorsese: During the first five or six years of my life, I was
mainly in the movie theater. I had asthma as a child and was not able to
participate in children's games or sports of any kind, so my parents took
me to the movies. My brother did too. It became a place to dream, to
fantasize, to feel at home.
Mr. Scorsese: I took Marty to the movies a lot. Marty was more for
cowboys and Marty, the first time he saw...what's that one? My little
Rosebud. "Citizen Kane," that's it. "Citizen Kane," he went crazy for
that. And John Wayne. Forget about it!....
Martin Scorsese: I became enamored of the church when I was seven. We
had Italian priests and Irish nuns. I went to Catholic school and the
nuns taught us that this terrific thing happens; at 10:30 every morning
God comes to the altar, and it's great...
My feeling about God was a good feeling. Of course there were always
fears, like, if you see the face of God you're going to die, or the story
about the man who tried to save the Ak and touched it, and died on the
spot. We always had those fears as kids. But the sense of God was loving
and great, really wonderful. Especially Jesus, the incarnation. What he
did. I became an altar boy because I loved the ritual, the chance to be
close to that special moment when God came down to the altar.
Myron Lounsbury
Jonas Mekas,
Hudson
River, August 6,1950
Took a boat up the Hudson.
On the upper deck a group of teenagers sat and sang, accompanied by two
guitars. Somebody beat a bongo drum. On the lower level, downstairs, a
piano played and was very crowded. People danced, drank beer and whiskey,
and the piano player, and everybody was very exuberant, in shirtsleeves,
the girls in swimsuits. I stood leaning against the rail, on the steps
leading down, and watched them. They danced, and the dances were
unfamiliar to me, American and Latin dances.
Yes, this was life. They lived--I thought. They pushed each other,
and it was crowded, very crowded, and they kept excusing themselves, and
they danced and hummed tunes and words I didn't know. A few pairs sat
under the stairs. I don't know whether they were lovers or had just met
there a few minutes before, but they were very close, the girl didn't pay
any attention to the people around and was in a trance of kissing and I
was an invisible observer of all this. What could I be but a voyeur. A
displaced person as Voyeur. Immigrant as Voyeur. A good title for my
life, right now.
Myron Lounsbury Now that I have read much of the novel, I can definitely see a
continuity and unity in it. It is not apparent right away, but there are
connections that become apparent - not only with the book characters, but
with what we've studied. The Bobby Thomson home run ball that Manx tries
to sell becomes Nick's. Ishmael the graffitti artist in part 2 shows up
again in part 4 connected to Klara Sax 's life - by way of her friend
Esther. As for connections to what we've studied, I see many. The fact
that Klara goes to see a viewing of Eisenstein's Potemkin is the clearest
connection to the class, but others connections are how her friend Acey
stays at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, and the discussion of Marilyn
Monroe reminds me of the Warhol
portrait of Monroe we saw earlier.
Maryellen Armour
One movie clip that stands outs in my mind is the black and white
boxing scene where one fighter was being demolished by the other fighter.
Our classes dislike for this scene reminded me of a similar response to
Scorses seven minute film The Big Shave in which most heads of the class
turned to the back of the classroom.
A few days after this clip, I read the chapter in Underworld in
which Nick hits his close friend, Brian Glassic for his illustrious affiar
with his wife. I imagined the two of them partaking in a similar boxing
event - Nick demolishing Brian due to intense internal hostility and
Brian's tired and weak demeanor.
Amy Eichenwald