My uncle Dick died on February 4, the Thursday before Ash Wednesday. Last week, on Good Friday morning, I rented a U-Haul and headed to his house in Beverly to claim some of his goods. 

The windfall of inheritance is odd. At times that day it felt cold and mercenary to sift through a dead man's things--especially someone I loved and admired. Or maybe it is more accurate to say-- I was periodically surprised that I was perfectly fine with it. I loved him, he was a great guy, I wish he did not die so suddenly, but hell yes I'll take that dining room set and anything else that is cool. 
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Among the cool things I snagged were a bunch of books, including a partial set of Everyman classics--and I mean classics-- like Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Erasmus and Montaigne. I also picked up William H. Prescott's "The Conquest of Mexico" and "The Conquest of Peru," which are each giants and here bound in one volume. I landed a hard-bound "Origin of Species." If I ever decide to read my copy of "Finnegan's Wake," (helped a friend move-- he died and went to California), I now have Henry Morton Robinson and Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key" to assist me.

In a post I wrote only a few hours ago, I lamented the popularity of opinion pieces in America. It occurred to me while writing it that I am a big fan of artistic criticism and have no intention of reading less of it. I also intend to write more of it. Isn't criticism a type of opinion?

It is, but I am talking about punditry. Politically charged opinion. There are far more honest music, TV, poetry, and fiction critics than purely honest political pundits. It is far more likely that one critic will change another critic's opinion about a movie than that one pundit will change an opposing pundit's opinion on Planned Parenthood. Or Obama. Or guns. Or terrorism. This also goes for economic and religious commentators. An op-ed columnist and their kin at various online outlets are warriors for a cause--usually of a hundred causes, each addressed with the same pretense of expertise. A movie critic tends to focus on a limited area of expertise, and is thus more likely to thrive as a writer.

Criticism, aside from even being an opinion of whether a given piece of art is good or bad, makes you appreciate things on a deeper level. A film critic makes me a better viewer, and that is cool. A pundit can make me a better citizen, sure. Too often he just makes me an angrier one-- at him or at those dumbasses who have the temerity to disagree with us on what is so obviously the Truth.

So, my official stance: Read criticism as much as possible. Read opinion sparingly.

I’m 174 pages into Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers.” It’s been a breezy slog so far, and I have 50 pages left. At one minute and thirty-nine seconds per page (I timed myself on the el this morning), that is one hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go.
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Is it worth it? My wife just got me a great book on how to make pizza and I need to bone up on the science of crusts. Plus there is writing like this here blog post that I want to do more of; it’s in my blood, man. Then there’s being a good father and husband and well-informed citizen and all the prayer and study that goes with semi-pro Catholicism. Plus there’s fitness and over-all self-improvement beyond just reading. All that takes time. Do I really have 1:22:30 to spend on this book that I am not exactly enjoying?

Last night I smoked six wings and four legs. The unnamed animal in that sentence was a chicken. If I had a photo I could have posted it beside this paragraph and you would have known it was a chicken (or, rather, chickens) that filled my belly and my wife’s and my friend Marty’s bellys. You also would have admired the uncommonly red skin and finely mottled dry rub. You may have said, “Where’d you get it?” as if I must have had to purchase what is clearly the work of an expert. I would have been able to respond, “I made it MYSELF, dog,” as a sort of culinary muscle-flex to the cheering crowd.

“Food porn” is too coarse a term for the photo that does not exist. It would have been food erotica. Humanists would have held up pictures of the wings and legs while making life-vows during their DIY marriage ceremonies. “This is what you are to me,” they would say over the Unity Bush. Grandmothers would cry tears out of their mouths. That’s called salivating, ma’am, and wait till you see the spread at the reception.

On Sunday, February 24, 2013, my friend Sonari and I sat in a bar outside Dallas, Texas, each staring at a phone and barely speaking to the other. The specificity sounds portentous but it was just a random Sunday, easy to look up because it was that year's Oscars night. A decent crowd had shown up to watch the ceremony. We neither paid attention to the TVs nor, as I said, to each other. We'd just driven 450 miles from Memphis with a long mid-day stop in Little Rock. Google Maps says the drive takes about six and a half hours, but I recall it taking three times that.  It was a fine time, not complaining, but it was 10:00 at night and we had not had dinner yet. I recall feeling completely exhausted. 

The line between cliché and colloquial expression is fine. Consider, for example, the idea that there is “a line” between two categories and that the thickness of it is“fine.” Cliché to thee, adage to me.

Or what if I say, “Friendo, this here toilet’s flushing mechanism just hit a home run.” Have I uttered a tired cliché or used an expression that, like my accent, tells the listener that I am an American? I choose the latter interpretation. It’s not that I am fond of stock phrases. I am just a generous soul who would prefer to think that the speakers and writers I encounter are displaying hallmarks of their culture, not foreign objects clogging their mental pipes. Lack of eloquence is not crime, and stock phrases “are there for the taking” so people who don’t know how to say something clever “can get through the day.” 

So the merely inelegant does not invite the sting of my mace, nor the heat of my blade. Nay, my wrath is reserved for the lazy cliché, the phrase too graceless to be colloquial, too devious to be polite, and too faddish to mean anything but that the person has not thought about what he is saying. Or worse, what he is writing.

I have compiled a brief list of internet-era clichés that we need to put onto a raft in the middle of the ocean, along with the collected works of Aerosmith and Starbuck’s Coffee’s roasting methods. After a small ceremony we will give the raft a shove, and then never look upon their like again:

A few years ago I met a guy in a bar--a friend of a friend--who was loud and confident and obnoxious and, at the moment, hanging out with his father-in-law. Within a few minutes of our meeting he made a joke about how his wife liked to give oral sex.* Everyone laughed, including his father-in-law, because MAN! That guy will say anything.

I politely forced a smile since I had not yet mastered an expression of patrician disapproval. Plus I wanted to be nice. I mean, I had just met him. Maybe his next sentence was gonna be about how he met his beloved on a Doctor's Without Borders mission and that the physical act of love was a small bit of solace in this broken world. It wasn't, though. Just more off-color jokes and swears and non-insult insults because we're all friends here, right assholes? He wasn't my type.

I'm not a prude. I have probably said grosser things than you have ever thought, and I have said them onstage before Republican strangers in rural areas. Back when I was an improviser, I often had to point this out to other performers when we debated the subtle art of when to go blue onstage. My belief is embedded in that sentence--that it is a subtle art. Not thinking that every moment was right for a sperm joke usually earned me the rep of "team prude." 

One of my teammates once told me that swearing and sex jokes were integral to his style. "I bring thunder," he said, and italicized thunder with his voice and fist. He sort of gathered his fingers into one as he uttered the syllables. I thought he played to the childish in the audience, and did not so much surprise people with his language as shock them. Unfunny people, then, confuse this moment of shock with the surprise that is so central to comedy. His shock winds up derailing the show with inorganic choices. The rest of us must then mop up, shall we say, all that spilled sperm. (I remember this conversation because it was a particularly bitter argument amongst the whole team, and I was really only in a support role on the less-is-more side.)

The ironic thing about shock is that after a very short while it fades. It winds up appealing only to bullies and loudmouths, neither of whom are funny and neither of whom could possibly be surprised or shocked after much of it. They just like it because it's a taboo being said out loud. But for the rest of an audience, it's not a great choice. Dice Clay, the bawdy nursery rhyme man who now seems as remote as a character in one, became like piano-key tie patterns and couches made out of the back-seats of cars--something that makes us think of the 1980s, but that did not make it out. You can do blue material well, of course. But there has to be a strong emotional element to it and a logic that fits the rest of the piece, like with my fantastic joke about mopping up sperm in the paragraph above. 

I thought of this since that friend-of-a-friend is in the paper today. Figuratively speaking-- his business is featured in an article on a website, and I thought, "Hey, that's the guy who told his father-in-law about his daughter's sexual preferences." I wondered what he is up to. My guess is that he is still a total nut, saying all the things the rest of us Sallies wouldn't dare to. I bet he tells people about his wife's boning habits and swears around kids and jabs at his friends. Shock is about that predictable.



*It's all in the language, of course. If he had said it exactly like that, "My wife likes to give oral sex," then it would have been funny.

The night after my daughter was born, I had an urge to call my brother with a warning. An order, really.

Find a baby, I’d hiss into the phone. Change its diaper. Do it again and again and again. Do it until you are good at it.

And then, I would hang up. If my brother was smart, he’d walk to the nearest maternity ward and get started.

Before that day, I’d never changed a diaper. I had no experience as a baby sitter. Even when merely holding a baby, I was incompetent. I’d sort of hug them at chest level like I might hold a greased duffel bag full of sand. My wife, Angela, with seventeen nieces and nephews, was an old pro. I figured I’d watch her for a few years and by the time I got the knack, my daughter would be driving herself to the store for diapers.

A C-section nixed that plan. Angela now had orders to stay in bed, and you know, take it easy. “Just take these here pills and groove,” the doctor said. “Let your husband do all the diaper changing for the first few days.