In Which We Go To The Grave of Marilyn Monroe

Notes from California

by MARY GORDON

I

M. takes me to the grave of Marilyn Monroe. The roses on the grave are held together with pink ribbons. On the ribbons are messages in gold paper letters. The letters say:

Sweet Angel Marilyn
With God In Heaven Forever
In Heaven Your Home
Pray for me Here
I Love you only forever

On another grave are the words:

Leesa de Bois
December 25, 1977
What Shall We Do With Our Lives?

II

In the evening, in the room where I work, not in the historic room where I can see the tower, in the blank room here, I read this in a book by Kierkegaard: "I knew a person who on one occasion could have saved my life, if he had been magnanimous. He said, 'I see well enough what I could do but I do not dare to. I am afraid that later I might lack strength and that I might regret it.' He was not magnanimous, but who for this cause would not continue to love him?"

I cannot think what this could possibly mean.

III

A local artist has created an installation of retablos and ex-votos, images of saints, expressions of gratitute for favors granted. But his retablos commemorate unanswered prayers. Among the flowers and the images of saints, such things as this are written:

Because my mother who cared so much for us and who we really loved felt depressed to see us without home or money, she killed my little sister Summer and my little brother Brian while they were asleep and then she killed me in spite of my screams, and then she committed suicide. I ask Saint Dominic Savio, protector of the poor, Why did she do this to us? And I will ask him for all eternity.

IV

A man I sat next to at dinner tells me this:

"I was traveling from Denmark to Germany. It was 1959. I took a ferry into Germany, and after that a train. From the train you could still see the devastations from the war. I don't read German or Danish. The papers, the immigration papers, were in German or Danish. I made a mistake on the immigration form. I wrote in the place of entry for the place of exit and vice versa. I knew I'd made a mistake, but I didn't feel like changing it. When I got to Berlin, they told me there was trouble with my papers, and they put me in a detention cell. I was guarded by a Russian soldier. I didn't feel in danger. I lit up a cigarette. The Russian soldier knocked it out of my mouth. But I knew he was only pretending to be angry. I knew he only wanted to communicate. I gave him a cigarette. He looked around to see that no one was watching him. He lit the cigarette. He put his gun down. He smiled at me. Then he said, 'Jack London.'

I smiled back and said: 'Tolstoy.'

He said: 'Mark Twain.'

I said: 'Dostoevsky.'

'OK,' he said.

'Spasibo,' I said. 'Da.'

I knew that he could have killed me but that he was not going to kill me."

V

I am waiting to get my hair cut, reading a crumpled copy of Life magazine. There is a picture of an old Greek woman standing behind a church. She is wearing the traditional old woman's garments: black kerchief, black shoes, long black dress. She is toothless, grinning. She is holding in her hand a grinning skull. In the back of the church there is a graveyard. Against the walls of the church there are piles of bones, sorted by type: skulls in one pile, leg bones in another. The old woman asked the photographer to take her picture holding this skull. She could tell, she said, that it was the skull of one of her old rivals. She did not say how she could tell. But she wanted her picture taken, she said to the photographer. "Because she is dead and I am not dead. You can see me here, alive. I want everyone to see me here, alive."

VI

Everywhere I have been I have thought at least once a day of my dead father. He has been dead for over thirty years. In a book he inscribed for me are these words, in his handwriting, a translation of a line of Virgil: "Among the dead there are so many thousands of the beautiful.

VII

At the cemetary where Marilyn Monroe is buried, some of the gravestones have inscribed on them the likeness of a mountain and a lake. Two people, a husband and a wife, have inscribed their signatures in bronze. A dentist has his name and D.D.S. A famous drummer has below his name "One of a Kind." Flowers frow in pots on the flat gravestone of a famous murdered girl.

People are buried with their nicknames: Fannie, Muzzie, Poppy.

People are buried with testimonials: "She left the greatest legacy of all. She left us love."

The famous dead of movies, and the dentist, and Leesa de Bois, December 25, 1997, Christmas, no other date inscribed.

Did she die on the day of her birth?

"What shall we do with our lives?"

The famous dead of movies lie in the shadows of the green buildings that seem made of bottle glass.

An art collector has constructed for his death a mausoleum bigger than a house.

This essay is from Mary Gordon's collection Good Boys and Dead Girls.

"Ensemble" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

"Intermission" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

"Comme des Enfants" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

cdp myspace

In Which It All Started With The Big Bang Theory

The Theatre of All Our Struggles And Ideas

by ELEANOR MORROW

The events of The Big Bang Theory occur in three primary locales, each of which bears a closeness to reality without touching on anything quote-unquote real.

The first are two apartments in California. One is a male dwelling, occupied by two men, Leonard and Sheldon. The other is the female side of the coin - messier, more colorful, occupied by Penelope. The second setting is a university lunchroom where the men gather to eat. It is the budget version of a cigar club, or group therapy. The third place is Penelope's work environment, a Cheesecake Factory, but an early one without the amenities we've come to expect from the venerable chain.

As far as this show in concerned, there are very few places in the world. There isn't really an outside "world" as we conceive of it. There are just a series of interiors. And we can believe, in fact we don't even have to be convinced, that there is no other world than this.

"nerdier! more nerd! more nerd!"On the back of his phenomenally successful Two and a Half Men, executive producer Chuck Lorre was driven to create a sitcom even more sexist than his first. In short, he has done it, but not in the way you might have imagined it.

The centerpiece of the show is Sheldon Cooper, played by 37 year old Jim Parsons. Dr. Sheldon Cooper is the smartest man on the planet. He is at the very least the smartest Texan on the planet. His work in physics is on its way to being legendary, and when he took up residence in California, he put out an ad that said, "Roommate needed, no whistling."

leonard got the time machine on ebayThis is how he found his partner Leonard. For although there is no explicit homosexuality in The Big Bang Theory - indeed in Chuck Lorre's world gay men are heterosexuals with a fey way about them - we are dealing with individuals who are barely able to relate to women.

Thus we meet Penelope, or Penny. Although she might have been cast as a dumb blonde in another generation, she is actually the show's protagonist in disguise. Penny is a relatively normal young person in her twenties, and because of this she represents something of a television first. Beyond St. Elmo's Fire and Cameron Crowe's Singles, sheis here to tell us with all certainty that the young people of this generation are completely lost.

your nerdiness is comforting right now leonard. i will give you a handjob, but only one handjob

She moved into her apartment with vague dreams of becoming an actress, before realizing that she was neither pretty enough or ugly enough or thin enough or good enough to do exactly what she wanted. She toils in a job she is overqualified for, and she meets men, the best of which can only be considered boys.

"who's up for a circle jerk? sheldon?"Naturally, Leonard (Roseanne's Johnny Galecki) is infatuated with her from the moment he sees her pretty blonde tresses. The show's first season saw her date the inevitable series of jerks, culminating in the jerk of all jerks, who blogged about their sex life in the internet in a storyline shameless lifted from news headlines, Law and Order-style. Leonard took that opportunity to offer the possibility of himself as a mate. She said, "Why not?"

one of many possible reasons why notThis is a terrible lesson for both men and women to absorb, although I am not entirely sure if it is sexist or not. It is probably unfair to both the sexes. It is unfair to women because it gives them a false agency - they can choose their partner, but their choice is more of a concession than a selection, and ultimately disempowering. It is unfair to men because it suggests that all they have to do to win a woman is to wait. This isn't really unfair so much as it is true.

you think WHO is a cylon?There were days in which natural selection mandated that women had to be recruited and pursued with all due force, or there was to be no reproduction to ensure the future of the species. These days all men have to do is text a lot and hold down a regular job. What possible incentive is there to lead a life without peer with standards so low?

that's the 'you weren't on roseanne, were you?' stareLeonard and Penny did get together, but it was as unsatisfying for both of them as you might think. Now she's patiently waiting for Leonard in California while he spends the next two months in an Artic hut doing hard research with Sheldon and the boys. Leonard doesn't know it yet, but he gets far more out of his relationship with Dr. Sheldon Cooper. And this is how nerds could potentially end the reproductive potential of the human race.

Sheldon Cooper, Dr. Sheldon Cooper, and his band of merry intellectuals aren't too keen on reproducing. One day we may have to take a more eugenics-based view of the reproductive enterprise, but for now childless lives are deemed more fulfilling to the upper middle class, and they have the benefit of being cheaper too. You never see a child in The Big Bang Theory, which is strange since the show's title describes the most important birth in history. You never see a child except when he is in a man's body.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

"Symmetry" - Little Boots (mp3)

"Stuck on Repeat" - Little Boots (mp3)

"Hearts Collide" - Little Boots (mp3)

listen to the new album in full on her myspace

In Which We Dreamed of the Way I Was For You and You Were For Me

Edward Hopper's 'Early Sunday Morning'What Could As Easily Not Exist

by WILL HUBBARD

I've been listening to Astral Weeks once every night. I like thinking about how the instrumentation was recorded after the vocals were laid down. I've gotten back into this album so many times that it no longer takes me back to the first time I heard it. For the record, though, that was on a dorm-room floor in the days when ecstasy had hold of us and I secretly believed I'd be a great painter one day.

In a gated-off patch of grass and brush along the waterfront near my house, a man has been living for some time off of the land. There is a hole in the gate that fastens shut with a padlock, a trail leading back to his tarpaulin, cardboard, and scrapmetal dwelling. Apparently he has a tape-player of some sort, because every time I pass along the gate "Madame George" is pressing out faintly through the ironweed. He might have gotten the single at a gas station music kiosk.

Last night, I had two thoughts about Astral Weeks, one leading from the other, that bore the mark of indelibilty. Still this morning, a Sunday, both thoughts would repeat, easily delineable. Now, hours later, the task of constructing an IKEA bedside table dividing me from them, I can get to but where the ideas were. A path, a channel. A locus of memory now deteriorated. I have the form of them but they are irrecoverable. I stand at the grave but it is empty.

I do however remember that a big print of Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning hung in parent's room when I was a child. We moved a bunch of times, but in every new house the faintly menacing, entirely tranquil scene would appear over my father's bureau. I suppose one day I will have a bureau, and important things to put into (and above) a bureau. I fear that I already have a bureau, and that I am typing into it right now.

There is a another man living down the street who is always on his stoop when I pass. Once a month he gets out his tools and constructs, with great precision, another steel bookshelf or storage rack. The sale of them apparently pays the rent. He has two children and a wife, all of whom are constantly around him, never at work or in school. They are the most cheerful and open children I have ever seen. She is a solemn but evidently content wife.

The more you think about it, the creepier it becomes ever time Van Morrison says chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild on Astral Weeks. Sure, the nymphet theme can be beautiful in literature and music, but does he have to keep saying chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild like that, all raspy and suggestive? At the same time, I guess I'd probably talk like that if I smoked. (Instead I'm breaking apart the last remains of a nicotine lozenge with the tip of my tongue and a molar.)

I was once told that those happy people down the street were Spanish—they speak Spanish to one another, good English to everyone else. The front door to their basement apartment is always wide open, children or dogs calmly coming and going, carelessly. Tonight they were grilling sausages out on the sidewalk, smiling at me as if in invitation to join their twilight celebration. I smiled back, as I always do, as if to say ‘thank you, but it is not in me.’ Their essence is constancy, the embodiment of the adverb always. 'To be born again, in another world, darling' is another thing I could have said to them but did not.

Come to think of it, I don't have much to say about Early Sunday Morning either; not that it's a boring painting, it's just that it doesn't bother drawing attention to any particular aspect of itself. Something electrifies the paint the moment before you look, and when you see the painting it bears what Frank O'Hara once termed "post exertion visibility." Funny how you can have no idea what a line of poetry means until you apply it to an otherwise indescribable phenomenon.

The love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves. Almost like a Kanye West lyric, except with more grammar.

Edward Hopper's father was a dry goods merchant. (What is a dry good?) Despite early potential, he did not sell his first painting until he was 31 years old. It is reported that the decade leading up to this sale Hopper spent long periods sitting despondently in front of his easel, unable to think of anything to paint, let alone paint. Van Morrison had no such trouble, already touring Europe with his band The Monarchs at the age of seventeen. His father raised masts at a shipyard.

Have you ever noticed that when something rises vertically above eye-level it seems to overhang? For example, standing on the ground between two large buildings, they enclose one's upward view as they rise, seeming to hang over the street in an incomplete pyramid. Toward the locus of our vision all things tend. It is the same with the mind—the superior idea immediately, as though by some magnetism, tends toward what already exists in our frame of reference. The phenomenon is more dangerous in the case of the mind, for while the building will surely not fall, new ideas have a tendency to implode in the presence of our pretensions to knowledge.

There is a black square in the top right corner of Hopper's painting that breaks its general symmetry. I experienced considerable stress as a child wanting to erase that black box. Why was it there? Was it a mistake? An error? Now I chalk it up to the shadow of a tall building meant to signal the imminent inexistence of the small town 'early sunday morning' peace. Yet it is not this also, this anti-focal point. Like the pause in Van Morrison's phrasing between "fourteen...... year old," the black box is something we can, depending on our present condition, ignore, worry about, or savor.

Early this morning, a Monday, I was running down a dark street lined with crumbling relics if the East River's industrial era. A man sleeping in a corner pulled back the heavy felt covers from his face just as I passed and yelled, all raspy and suggestive, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" He was right. I had no answer.

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of this publication. His tumblr of the week is here.

E'rybody loves that Wavves meltdown.

 "So Bored" - Wavves (mp3)

"No Hope Kids" - Wavves (mp3)

"Sun Opens My Eyes" - Wavves (mp3)

"Goth Girls" - Wavves (mp3)