(news)letter                       
     
                                                                  
     
                   "Say the thing with which you labor."          
     
                                 Thoreau                          
                                                                  
     
                                   from the porter.micro.press

Volume 1, Number 2                                     January 24, 1994
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This week began with the Sunday night movie, Russia House,
starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. I would have watched
it just to see those two, but I was mainly interested because Tom
Stoppard, one of the most brilliant contemporary playwrights,
wrote the screenplay. For those of you who have seen the movie
but are unfamiliar with Stoppard's style, the scene where Sean
Connery was originally interrogated by the British espionage
agents was Stoppardian in tone. If you'll remember: Connery was
being interrogated, one agent was eavesdropping, and the speeches
were often repeated, so that the viewer couldn't really tell
which scene was in the present. In fact one whole section of
dialogue was repeated, played completely anew, as if to clarify
for one of the agents. 
      If you haven't seen this movie, the premise is that NATO
spies are alerted to a Russian who smuggles out notebooks filled
with Russian nuclear secrets. The agents use Connery as a go-
between for this Russian, who tells them that America has
overestimated the Russian nuclear potential -- the Russians don't
even have the technology to reach American soil with a nuclear
bomb. The American spy network, when it learns this, decides to
kill the information. Such information is too unpopular because
the American armaments lobby is too powerful and provides too
many perks to congressmen. To concede that the arms race was
based on false information is just too embarrassing to the
Americans. 
      But Russia House is just a spy-thriller movie; this past
week we found out more about some silencing that went on in our
own government. Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh finally brought
out his analysis of the events surrounding the Iran-Contra
fiasco, and the conclusions are unflattering towards the Reagan
administration. Reagan, Walsh reports, knew what was going on and
his most trusted associates actively covered their tracks so as
to protect the president. 
      Now who does this really surprise? Walsh concludes that
Vice-President Bush was right in the middle of things, not "out
of the loop" as he so consistently maintained while he was
President. That's not very surprising, either. My problem with
this whole Walsh report is that it cost so much and came out so
late. He spent around $40 million, and what does it hope to
accomplish? If it just lasts long enough as a piece of history,
to provide later generations a different representation of the
Reagan administration, then it will serve at least one purpose,
though it's not a very good investment. The American people just
don't want to believe that Reagan did anything illegal. Look at
Oliver North: his hands were as dirty as anyone's and now he's
running for Congress in Virginia, a true folk hero. 
      Which leads to another bit of Virginia news: Lorena Bobbitt
was acquitted of the charges she faced by reason of temporary
insanity. The Virginia Commonwealth attorneys went zero for two
in this case: John Bobbitt was also acquitted of the charges
brought against him. It's almost as if the juries are telling
Virginia that the courts have no place in this particular marital
argument. I found myself agreeing with Rush Limbaugh in his
article in this week's Newsweek ("No Tears for Lorena"): "Let's
face it -- John and Lorena Bobbitt are both losers" (56). 



                              Beat It, Wimp
President Clinton's choice for the Secretary of Defense, Bobby
Ray Inman, withdrew because of some weirdness. He claimed that
New York Times columnist William Safire and Kansas senator Bob
Dole were in league to ruin his nomination and his reputation.
Doesn't this make you wonder what's wrong with the guy? Just what
was going on in his head? He hadn't even faced any heat yet and
he goes around accusing Washington of harboring a neo-McCarthy
attitude. Makes me kind of wish the press had jumped on his case,
just to see the putz squirm. 



                       The Big Picture, Explained
I read this week Bill Morris' Motor City, even though I've been
resisting this novel for a long time. Morris, a columnist for the
Greensboro News and Record, has always struck me as an
interesting guy, but the last thing I thought I wanted to read
was a book about Detroit in the 1950s. This is the story of
Buick's attempt to surpass Plymouth as the third biggest US
automaker by their marketing of the brand new Buick Century.
Everyone who was anyone in the mid-50s makes an appearance in
this book -- Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Ray Kroc, Ornette
Coleman, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, hell, everybody -- though
Morris has problems keeping all of the personalities relevant to
the main story. The introduction of Elvis Presley, for example,
is superfluous and detracts from the main characters who are so
interesting. By then, though, I couldn't put the book down.
Morris is a breath of fresh air on the GNR staff and his columns
consistently fall on the side of the little man, the underdog,
the maligned. That didn't keep me from being surprised at the
quality of this novel: not only is it well-written, but the
amount of research that he put into it just boggles this mind. 



                        The Anatomy of a Breakup
Elizabeth Cox' novel, The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love,
details the process that one family goes through when the parents
decide to divorce. The effect on the children is profound, of
course, and it made me think that there's a new point-of-view
appearing in contemporary literature, one that comes from the
children of divorced parents. Especially hard for the children in
this book is the first vacation to a familiar place with only one
parent. Since reading this section, I've noticed the use of the
same theme in other works: in the movie Intersection (don't even
bother paying money for this one), for example. Molly, the
heroine, presents an intriguing idea when she introduces notes
from her Astronomy class in order to examine her own confusion at
the changes in her family life. "What if the stars and their
companions are subject to the same rules we understand for
ourselves? What if the manipulation and balance of each other are
already determined by the galaxy we live in?" (53). A wonderful
book, and the most fun part about it, after reading the oh-so
male world of Bill Morris' book (cars in the mid-50s -- could
anything be more male?) was the feminine style: description by
indirection, the here and now, colors and correspondances,
feelings, the emphasis on the malleability of relationships. 
      In fact, relationships and their falling apart provided a
refrain for much of the week's reading. One short story, Mary-
Beth Hughes' "Blue Grass" (Georgia Review, Winter 1993),
addresses the break up of a relationship through the eyes of a
woman convinced she has lost her beauty. In the process of losing
her mate's interest, she experiments with makeup, trying to
regain the spark somehow. Her ineffectual attempts to improve
herself make her look worse, but she must try in the only way she
knows to instill some comfort, some confidence, in her bearing.
How else can we hang on when all seems lost? Like most short
stories worth reading, this one provokes more questions than it
answers, and it's hard to believe that it's Ms. Hughes' first
publication.






                  I'll Hit the Jackpot One Day, B'Gosh
In direct contrast to Elizabeth Cox and Mary-Beth Hughes is one
of Tom Stoppard's earlier plays, Enter A Free Man (1968). This is
the story of a relationship that's kept intact despite the most
determined efforts of Riley, husband, father, inventor, loser
extraodinaire. He's left his wife so often, striking out on his
own, but he never gets further than the bar next door. But he can
be a man's man when he walks in that bar, just witness his
entrance: "Enter a free man! ... Free as the proverbial bird. ...
Unashamed I have left her" (10). But he will return, defeated, to
his family. Riley doesn't see the way in which everyone puts
things over on him, teases him, knows better than he that he'll
never amount to anything. 
      The wife, Persephone, as much as she's wronged in the play,
strikes the reader as the epitome of a hero for her determination
to provide stability for her family. She's the only family member
who could leave the house and survive, but she doesn't because of
her duty to family. Stoppard's dramatic emphasis is directed
toward Riley, but it is the presence of Persephone that prevents
the play from being a total downer. Despite the failures, the
reader comes away from the play feeling that the situation will
ever remain the same, but that the situation is positive in its
way. 






                 Ways to Ruin a Relationship: Number 86
Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, is first
and foremost concerned with relationships. Tom Hanks plays a gay
attorney stricken with AIDS. When he is fired from his position
with a prestigious law firm, he hires Washington to represent him
in a wrongful dismissal suit. This movie gives a human side to
AIDS, and it's a credit to Tom Hanks for taking the role. Within
the context of this (news)letter's theme, I began to think of the
finality of the AIDS virus, and the intrusion of death in a
relationship. Death plays a role in both Elizabeth Cox' novel and
Mary-Beth Hughes' short story, but in this case it is the main
character that is dying. Most of us are healthy, and the most
heart-wrenching moments of the movie (and it's full of them), is
the utter loneliness of the AIDS victim in public. Nobody wants
to be near him. His family circle draws closer, but to the
average Joe on the street, the AIDS victim is persona non grata,
totally unwelcome. It just makes you realize how much a friendly
word or a smile from a stranger would be welcome in such a life.
Love is not the only relationship -- to be robbed of casual
contact must be devastating. To be so totally shunned must be the
worst of all punishments for a social animal like man. 





                       Milton Rote, Paradise Lost
I found an encouraging anecdote from Nicholas Delbanco's
commonplace entries ("Travel, Art, and Death") in the Georgia
Review: 
      A certain student in college, in order to graduate with a
certain honor, has to take some oral exams. He's an english
major, but there's this perverse streak in him and he really
wants to be an actor. So before his oral, he tries out for this
oratory prize, and for his speech he memorizes the first 300
lines of Paradise Lost. Well he doesn't get anywhere close to the
oratory prize, and he's kind of depressed about it, but he keeps
his head up and commences to study for the english orals. When he
arrives at the test, the first question comes from the most
intimidating professor: "can you scan the first three lines of
Paradise Lost?" Of course the student can; the same professor
then asks him to continue, up to the tenth line. The student
complies; another professor then asks him just to keep going.
After seventy-five emphatic lines the professors stop him,
enthusiastically applaud his efforts, and of course crown him
with the honor. 
      The point Delbanco wanted to make was that these odd little
hobbies that some of us have, they have a strange way of coming
to the fore at important times, of serving a larger purpose. "The
benefits of a ruling passion can be unexpected," he reminds us
(653). As one who constantly finds new areas of interest, often
obscure, I take comfort in this anecdote. Maybe one day all of
the years spent studying baseball statistics will come in handy.





                               On the Net
After last week's discussion of the modem, I thought that for
this week I would discuss Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). A BBS is
a computer and its resident software through which one might
connect to receive services. For argument's sake, I will limit
this discussion to local BBSs. BBSs offer a variety of services,
depending on the operator, and often one can find different
Internet services through a local BBS (the Internet being a topic
to be treated later). There are many different kinds of BBSs: for
example the government operates several different ones dedicated
to different agencies, there's a BBS for Deadheads and a slew of
them devoted to Trekkies. 
      Usually a local BBS is operated by an individual out of his
or her own home as a hobby. The operators provide the services
because they want to, not because they're driven by making money.
When your computer calls their computer, a phone rings in that
home, and when you make the connection, you are actually playing
with their computer. It's best to be polite to a BBS operater
(called a "sysop") -- otherwise you'll find your access limited
and your name mud in the area. There are different services a BBS
might offer, such as file archives, a message service, even
interactive games to play. Fees depend solely on the operator,
though increasingly I'm discovering that if one looks hard
enough, one can find just about anything one wants in the BBS
realm, relatively inexpensively. One local operator, for example,
offers Internet electronic mail service for twenty-five dollars a
year, which can be a steal depending on how much you use the
feature. Very few local BBSs demand payment, except for special
services (access to adult files, for example). 
      The best part of a BBS system, though, is getting to know
other users in your area. If you buy a modem and jump right into
the Internet, then you encounter people all over the world, but
rarely a user that lives down the street. Through a BBS the
computer operator can become familiar with networking protocol,
get to know area users, and determine if access to the Internet
is desireable. 




                          Weirdness for the Day
I often browse the library looking through the huge selection of
magazines, convinced that I'll find some obscure title that will
answer all of the questions on some topic or another. And there
are some strange titles to be found. One that I particularly
liked is the Fibonacci Quarterly, "The Official Journal of the
Fibonacci Association." The Fibonacci Sequence is a set of
numbers in which the Nth number of the series equals the sum of
the two previous numbers. Therefore, the set consists of the
numbers {1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,...}. I have no idea why the
Fibonacci Sequence is studied, other than that it occurs in some
organic structures, and maybe some math whiz out there will let
us know just what is the deal with the numbers Fibonacci. But
doesn't it strike you as odd that a magazine devoted to such an
interesting set of numbers would come out with the regularity of
a quarterly? Or is it just me?



                            Quote of the Week
This comes from Fred Chappell's review of some contemporary
poetry in the Georgia Review:

      Poets used to be famous lovers. They were admired, often
      adored, because they were such willing fools of Venus.
      Casual as Byron or faithful as Dante, devoted as Keats or
      prodigal as Burns, the moony midnights kept their passions
      fierce and their fingers restless as they poured out upon
      the complaisant ear of the world such a symphony of
      delighted praise and dazzled anguish that one nigh swoons to
      remember.                                                   (775)

I don't know why I like this so much. Maybe it's trying to
picture any reader "nigh swooning" because of the way someone
writes about any topic, let alone love. 



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