READING: Lost Illusions (and why I hate the French)

Fuck you, Balzac. You broke me. On page 250, after the eleventy millionth time Lucien cried, I gave up. I just couldn't find it in me to trudge ahead 500 more pages. I wasn't getting anything out of it. I wasn't looking forward to reading. Many times, I contemplated death. Not mine: Lucien's. But since there's another book after Lost Illusions (A Harlot High and Low) -- the only way that would happen is if I took time out to write some fanfic which: not so much.

So yeah. I'm done with Balzac. Unless someone writes in with a compelling reason to pick him up again, Balzac's dead to me. 'Course, he's dead to everyone else. Which means Balzac's fucked me again. Goddammit.

I was going to blame French literature in general. I kicked off this year of reading with Stendahl's The Red and the Black and hated almost every page of it. Two hundred and fifty pages of Balzac didn't endear the French to me much, either. Both novels were pretty similar: unlikable heroes struggle with unlikable secondary characters towards some sort of unsatisfying finish. Throw in a lot of irony and sardonicism (which is totally a word, so don't even bother looking it up in the dictionary) (no, really: stop) and you've got yourself (I'll come to your home and take that dictionary away) a French classic.

Just when I was getting ready to write off an entire country and its literature, though, I remembered how much I love Alexandre Dumas and his Musketeer novels, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas, unlike Stendahl or Balzac, isn't necessarily trying to comment on French society. Mostly, he's just writing kick-ass adventure stories. (Though The Count of Monte Cristo is a little deeper than that. I mean, yeah, it's a lot of fun and there are cross-dressing lesbians in it -- but I think Dumas is saying some pretty profound and interesting things about the nature of regret and revenge.) Stendahl and Balzac want to be the conscience of their times -- and that, for this reader anyway, leads to some pretty uninteresting reading.

I'm also a fan of Victor Hugo. Both The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables are pretty fantastic reads -- though I gotta tell you, the musical of Les Miserables? Made me motion sick, what with that damn spinning stage. And again: he's not commenting so much on the irony of the society so much as he's telling some powerful human stories with interesting characters whom you actually end up caring about. Lucien, from Lost Illusions, cries to much to really care about.

My favorite French book of all time, though, and maybe one of my Top 10 Books, is Madame Bovary. Emma Bovary frustrates me and breaks my heart. She's also a hand mirror for me, sometimes, as she famously was for Flaubert himself. ("Madame Bovary c'est moi.") Emma Bovary finds herself in the unfortunate position of tragically discovering that life really isn't at all like a novel -- and things don't end well for women who don't grasp that in time. The way Flaubert ends Emma's life is a bold move at a time when realism wasn't quite so hip with the kids. It's jarring, fitting, and upsetting all at the same time.

So, clearly, it's not the French so much as it's these two particular Frenchies that have me staging beret burnings in the courtyard of the apartment building (though burning them indoors might actually help combat that old-person smell). The downside is, it's a book I bought that I couldn't finish. The upside is, I've got two free spots on my bookshelf.

Up next, Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Based on the cover alone, it's gotta be better than Lost Illusions, right?

Right?

READING: Lost Illusions

One day you'll have a boyfriend who will make a mixed CD and that mixed CD will contain Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and you will realize that you enjoy that song now unironically -- and that, actually, you have always enjoyed that song unironically but only pretended the irony to be mistaken for hip. Being 33 means never having to say you're sorry about Wilson Phillips.

And it feels great.

So, I've been reading Balzac's Lost Illusions for almost a week and let's go ahead and get something out of the way right now: if you're always going to giggle like a 10-year-old everytime you read Balzac's name, this journal is going to be a real rough time for you. So, let's try to get those giggles out now:

Balzac sounds like ball sack. Yeah. I know. You're a comedy genius.

I haven't been very fair about the Balzac (come on now...). I feel like I'm angry with him all the time for not being John Galsworthy, and for Lost Illusions not being The Forsyte Saga. Maybe Lost Illusions is my rebound book, and I should have taken more time to think about all the great times Soames, Irene, Old Jolyon, June, and I had. We were so right for one another in so many ways.

Lost Illusions is about two guys who read poetry to each other, but because it's France, and because it's the early 19th century, they can't homo their way down the Champs-Elysées. For one thing, they're not in Paris. Also, Lucien and David aren't really the Jack and Ennis of their times; Balzac doesn't really see the inherent gayosity of these two cats, and has given them women to fall in love with: Lucien with the beautiful and married Mme de Bargeton and David with Lucien's sister Eve.

But dig this scene:

"When he came to the line, 'If theirs be not happiness, is there such on earth?' he kissed the book, and the two friends were both moved to tears, for both were in love with Chénier, to idolatry."

I've got two words for those guys: Gay. And wad.

This novel is suffering from the same problems that The Red and the Black and The Princess Casamassima have, at least for me. Stories about poor boys blundering their way through high society are a tough tale to sell. We're usually meant to root for the hero in these cases, but why? Why do I want him to be in high society when high society, at least the way presented in these novels, is filled with gaseous airbags who poison intellect more than enrich it? On the other hand, sometimes the whole thing is supposed to be "satirically ironic" -- but a whole novel of that? Grates.

This novel is of the satirically ironic school. Lucien is a poet, or wants to be, and Mme de Bargeton loves him or at least loves the idea of being the lover of a great poet. French society, though, is so busy being witty and French that they don't seem to have time for true talent. And I'm taking Balzac's word that Lucien is talented because I'm not much for the poetry, and I skip over the long passages of poetry that the novel throws in like it's J.R.R. Tolkien with the elf songs all of a sudden.

Here are some other things that are bugging me about Lost Illusions:

1) Hi, Balzac? Here's the thing about chapters. They're useful. They help break up the reading. Chapters should be, really, no more than 10 or 12 pages. You can fudge that up to 20 if you have to -- but let's not get ridiculous. Your first chapter, though, is 150 pages. That's, like, 15 chapters right there. And it's the only chapter in Part 1: Two Poets.

Do you see how that's, like, 17 different kinds of irritating?

Why even bother calling it Chapter 1 if there isn't a Chapter 2 following? You could just have called the whole thing Part 1: Two Poets and left it at that. I'd still have been a little annoyed with you, but now you're up to two dings just on technical things alone. We haven't even gotten to the writing yet.

2) The writing. Meh. The novel only really caught my interest around page 90, when Lucien shows up for his first society poetry reading and it flops like Nixon on television. And it picks up because everyone in society has their bitch on, and it's directed directly at Lucien.

3) I peeked ahead. Part 2: A Provincial Celebrity in Paris has more than one chapter, but you're still piling on the pages. One hundred and thirteen pages now? Are you kidding me?

*sigh*

To wrap up this entry, let's have a quick talk about classic literature. It's primarily what I read, unless prompted by one of my two book groups to pick up something written in the last 50 years. Having said that, I don't necessarily believe that any classic is a good classic. For instance, The Red and the Black and The Princess Casamassima are two "classics" that I'm pretty not so much about. In fact, Henry James in general is usually a tough sell for me (which is going to suck when I get to the J's in my bookshelf), as is Dostoevsky. I've also been nursing a dislike for Elizabeth Gaskell that may or may not be deserved. I've only tried a couple pages of Mary Barton, but they left me cold with her over-flowered prose. She's on this year's reading list, too, though. So we'll see. I like the classics I like usually because the writing is better, the plots are interesting, and the insights are universal rather than navel-gazingly blog-like (and I include myself in the list of navel-gazers).

I'll give Balzac 50 more pages. If this story isn't chugging along better, then I'm moving on to Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. I'm hoping that Lady Audley's secret is better writing. It's about time.

Shameful Reading (and straws that are too long)

Uncle Cliffy, who dispenses words of wisdom from his cabin in the woods, asked me to list "five guilty pleasures -- books you love but would be embarrassd to admit to or read in public." This oughta be good, I thought to myself. I love making an ass of myself in front of friends and people I don't really know.

True story:

[This is the first time I've ever written this story down, and there's a chance that it won't work out as well in print as it does when I tell it, because the telling involves some acting on my part that I feel deepens and enrichens ("enrichens"?) the experience. If, by the end of this anecdote you don't feel like you got your funny's worth -- let me know. I'll make it a point to meet you one day and I'll re-tell the story, complete with visual aids. If, however, the cruelty of the universe should manifest itself in our never meeting, I'll also include stage directions. It's not exactly the same, but it will have to do.]

So I'm living in Portland, Oregon, on Schuyler Street near the Lloyd Center. The Lloyd Center doesn't really figure, I'm just setting the scene -- and if any Portlanders read this they'll know where I'm talking about and they'll feel a special connection with this story. This is called "audience manipulation." Anyway, I'm living on Schuyler, it's a Friday morning, and I'm running late for work. So late, in fact, that I've got a terminal case of bedhead [at this point in the audio/visual version of the story, I hold some fingers up behind my head to represent said bedhead], only I'm not popular enough to pull off bedhead and look sexy. Bedhead on me looks regrettable. I don't remember exactly what I'd done the night before; even that day, I'm not sure I could have told you what happened the night before. I do think it involved shot after delicious shot of vodka. There may even have been some late-night weeping over this guy, Dan, I worked with who I loved but who showed no signs of loving me back. Probably because of my bedhead. [In early tellings of this story, I'd pull out a picture I had of Dan, stolen from his desk one late night at work. I no longer have the picture; but also? It never really helped. "Wait, you cried over that?" was usually the question that accompanied the unveiling of the image of my only true love. And it's not so much that Dan was unattractive; it's that Dan looked 40. And we were both in our early 20s. He had some trouble with the posture, and he shuffled when he walked. "You're jonesin' for Punky Brewster's dad," my friend Misty the Stripper helpfully offered.]

Anyway.

Normally, I'd start my mornings with a pot of coffee before heading out to my bus stop, only I was late and out of coffee so that wasn't going to happen. No problem, I thought, I'll just pick up some Texaco coffee and pray for a swift death. Yeah. That didn't work either, since the Texaco was also out of coffee that morning and I really didn't have the time to fuck around, yelling at the Texaco staff for ruining this, my worst of mornings. Instead, I grabbed a fountain sodie with one of those obnoxiously long straws, and sort of drag-limped my way to the bus stop on the corner in time to catch my bus. [You're asking yourself right now, "Sodie?" And yeah: sodie. Because here: Once upon a time, Barq's Rootbeer had some radio spots that were brilliant, all about how much "bite" Barq's had. My personal favorite involved a mother/daughter team trying to get the daughter ready for some formal event that required some big-ass hair. "I want my hahr higher, Mama!" "Try this, darlin'." "A sodie, Mama?" "A sodie, Sugarbaby." And then the commercial guy broke in and talked about Barq's great flavor and crisp finish which, I guess, okay, but then the gals come back for this brilliant finish: "How's my hahr now, Mama?" "It's standing tall like a blonde marine!" And: fin. And that's why I'll forever use the word "sodie." Live it, learn it, love it.]

Back to the straw for a minute. I'm not kidding for its obnoxicityness -- you'd need a step ladder or something to climb up to drink from it. I guess the idea was, no one drinks from the standard 12- or 16-oz. cups anymore; everyone was moving to their own personal barrel-sized cups, and they needed straws to match. Only I wasn't drinking from the barrel-sized cups. I'd gone for medium because I'm demure. [At this point in the telling, I've pantomimed climbing a stepladder, and then made some "I can't quite reach the straw" faces with my mouth. Comedy. Gold.] So I've got my bed head. I've got my normal-sized sodie with my pole-vault of a straw. And I'm getting on my bus.

I make my way unsteadily to the back of the bus where I find the last seat and I just kind of collapse in a pile of tired and backpack and hangover. It's at this point that it occurs to me that while I have vague memories of being naked in the shower, I don't recall washing anything with soap. I do remember almost washing my hair with toothpaste; but I also remember catching myself before that happened and actually brushing my teeth. However, I think I get a fail-grade on the rest of that particular shower experience. And what leads me to believe that is when I reach up to rub my eye sleepily, I feel a huge chunk of what I thought at first was rock salt, but instead turned out to be sleep. I may have sobbed a little, quietly, as I realized how unfit for human consumption I was, right at that moment, in the midst of all that humanity.

Now, sitting across from me on the bus that morning was the World's Most Beautiful Man. He had teeth that shone like 1,000 suns and hair that fell perfectly into place when he ran his fingers through it. His skin had that clueless-about-acne quality, like his pores thought that the word "pimple" was a cute euphemism for something they didn't understand. "A puppy?" his pores would ask, "doing something cute?" And then his pores would giggle or something. His clothes looked recently laundered and freshly pressed. My clothes? Only barely passed the sniff test, and that was after spraying my pants with lemon pledge. He also knew enough to mix patterns and fabrics into interesting and fashionable combinations. I'm still waiting for Garanimals for adults. To wrap this paragraph up: he was a God. I still smelled vaguely of booze and furniture polish.

Go get 'em, tiger.

The World's Most Beautiful Man looked up in time to catch me staring both blankly and openly at him. Rather than make a disgusted look, or change seats, he smiled at me. And not one of those pity smiles, you know? Not, "Gee, guy: sorry times are tough for you." Or, "I may have a couple quarters if you need 'em to pick up a hot meal at the shelter." Or, "It smells like someone has a drinking problem." This was one of those nice, open, and dare I say it, a touch flirty smiles. "It's nice to see you," that smile said. "I'd like to see you again, and then I'd like to marry you and you'll never have to work again because yeah, I'm on the bus, but that's only an eccentricity that I have because I'm insanely wealthy -- but that's as far as my insanity goes, so you don't have to worry about anything, it's not like I collect Franklin Mint dolls that I sit at the dinner table for meals and shit. And once I marry you, you'll never have to work again." I may have embellished a bit on the smile. But he did smile. And there was no pity or awkwardness in it.

The smile caught me off guard. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with the smile. Granted, I was so hungover at this point that the person next to me could have been on fire, and I'm not sure I would have necessarily known what to do. Clearly, I could have smiled back. That would have been the simplest thing to do. Instead, though, I panicked a little. Instead of trying to smile, I decided to take a drink from my sodie. And that wasn't the best idea.

Remember how that straw was three yards long? Imagine two of those yards going right up my nose. Yeah: not just a little bit. We're talking full-on nasal penetration. You could see the outdent of the indent that straw was making. Horrified, I looked up to see that The World's Most Beautiful Man was staring right at me, witness to my straw faux pas. Again, I was caught off guard. Do something! I remember screaming in my own head. Yougottafixthis yougottafixthis yougottafixthis. And so I did. I pulled the straw from my nose and started drinking from it, all, "What? What's the problem here? There's no problem here. Haven't you seen anyone drink from a straw before? I mean, dude, it's a straw. Also: impolite to stare."

He got off at the very next bus stop. I died inside and wished I was home and that I didn't have an electric stove.*

And that's the straw story, friends and neighbors. One of about eleventy million where I appear like a douche or an ass. And since I love telling these stories, I really don't have a lot of shame. Which means that I'm not really going to be able to answer Uncle Cliffy's question satisfactorily.

That's not the only reason, though. Last night at dinner, I asked Zach if he could think of any books I've read that I should be embarrassed about. I'd come up with Jurassic Park and If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? by Erma Bombeck. But even those I'm not so ashamed of. They show an alarming lack of taste, sure; but it's not like I'd scurry with them all troll-like to some dark corner.

"Where you should be ashamed," Zach said, "is in your appallingly appalling bad taste in movies. But books, you're always reading that 'good for you' shit written by someone in a bustle and a corset."

So, sorry, Uncle Cliffy. I wanted to debase myself better. I'll try harder next time.

______________________________

* So there's a postscript to the straw story. The next week, on a Wednesday I think, I'm back at my bus stop and this time I've got my game together. Clothes, though stridently unstylish, were freshly laundered. I'd spent a full 15 minutes in the shower lathering like it was nobody's business. (Which it wasn't. A man's lather is his own personal castle.) I wasn't late. I'd been able to have my coffee at home before walking leisurely to the corner.

So I get on the bus, make my way to the back, sit down, pull out my book to read, look up, and guess who it is sitting across from me?

Yeah. I know.

"So what," he asks me, "no soda?"

I got out at the very next stop and waited for another bus.

In which our intrepid adventuress succumbs to a meme, and backpedaling ensues

I've sort of held my nose at the thought of memes. First off, I'm never sure how it's pronounced. Then, there's the fact that I don't know that I really get what they are. They're viral, that I get. And they're usually uninteresting. I don't care which Care Bear you are, or the reason why you prefer Burger King to Wendy's, or any of the other really insipidly awful questions that get asked in those things. Mostly, though, when I've come across the word outside of an internet setting, it's in some fancy-pants grad school paper, and the person is trying to sound like he's worth all the money he's spent on his education.

And yet, here I am, about to participate in a meme. Because I'm a hypocrite. And I have no moral code other than, if someone cool asks me to do something, I'll do it.

That someone cool is Doppleganger: a woman who represents all that's right with the world, coupled with the silkiest elbows known to humankind. I think the world of Doppleganger; she's a reader among readers. And since the meme she tagged me with is book related, I don't feel like a total sell-out. I mean, I am a total sell-out; I just don't feel it.

So, here are the questions:

1) Name five of your favourite books.
2) What was the last book you bought?
3) What was the last book you read?
4) List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order).
5) Name three books you've been dying to read but just haven't gotten around to it?
6) Tag five people and have them fill this quiz out on their own.

And here are my answers:

1) Name five of your favourite books.

First off, this is how it must be: Are you from Britain? Canada? Somewhere European? Then that "u" in "favourite" is fine. Are you from Ohio? Denver? Never been out of the United States? Than that "u" in "favourite" is pretentious. It's also pretentious in the words "colour" and "neighbour." Also, it's g-r-a-y. Not g-r-e-y. Unless, again, you have a European exception. In this case, since Doppleganger is Canadian, all she does linguistically with her extra u's is fine and good and natural and the way God intended. The rest of you, though? Totally on notice.

Moving on.

My five favorite books, in no particular order:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy -- First off, yeah: it makes me sound like a pretentious, over-read asshat. I get that. But that's not my fault. The book, because it's Russian and eleventy-million pages long, has received this bad rep as some kind of behemoth that cannot be tackled.

They're wrong.

You can totally read and finish this book.

War and Peace will break your heart and kick your ass and make you gasp and make you cry. It's one of those flannel-and-couch-time books where you'll sit down to read and 3 hours will fly by. You'll accidentally learn things about Napoleon and Russia. You'll see why Tolstoy kicks Dostoevsky's ass every. single. time. But only read the Constance Garnett translation. The Maude sucks.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë -- Lucy Snowe knows what loneliness is all about. By the time you get to the end of this book, you will too.

Once upon a time, Fametracker had some message boards that almost became my entire reason for visiting the Internet. Someone in one of the reading threads mentioned Villette, and how odd it was, and how they couldn't reconcile the end with the beginning. Since I'd only read Charlotte's Jane Eyre at that point, I figured I'd give Villette a try and see if I could figure out the answer to that beginning/ending question. And I hated it. "Fuck you, Charlotte Brontë," I remember muttering. "I'm too old for this shit."

I don't know why, after muttering obscenities at Charlotte, I found myself picking the novel back up and reading it again. And maybe I was having a low blood-sugar day the day I flung the book aside all "never again!"-ly because that second (and third, and fourth) time through I absolutely loved it. I don't have a clear reason why it's on this Top 5 list over other books. All I know is that if I think about scenarios where I never get to read Villette again, I get real sad in my reading places.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen -- I am madly in love with Mary Crawford. I also think that, out of all the Austen, this is the one that gives the reader the most to do. There are characters, like Fanny Price, that make the reading uncomfortable sometimes. And yet, there you are, rooting for her a little, and feeling a little hit in the stomach every time she's taken advantage of again and again. I think of Mansfield Park as a companion piece with Villette; and if my world of delicious ever comes true and I'm in a position to teach students about books, I'd probably assign them together. Lucy Snowe and Fanny Price are mirror girls.

The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll -- This was, and has continued to be, my favorite kids' book. I read it for the first time when I was 10-years-old, and I remember laughing until I (literally) peed in my pants a little at the scene where Alice is imagining walking arm in arm with her cat Dinah, and Alice asks her, "Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?"

Lewis Carroll wrote for children, but not in the way an adult would write to please a child. I think he'd find that too condescending and intentional. And I think that's why the book still works for me now, and why I'll always champion it over the Harry Potters and Lemony Snicketts of the world. They just don't hold a candle as far as I am concerned.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins -- On dark and stormy nights, when I want to feel delicious chills down my back, and when I really want to root for a hero (especially if that hero is a woman hiding on a roof in a silk dressing gown in the rain), and when I want my villains both seductive and evil -- this is the book I return to again and again. I've lost count of how many times I've read it.

2) What was the last book you bought?

I haven't. We're almost three months into Mike Buys No More Books in 2006, and it's hard I've gotta tell you. I have to think of books as dirty whores when I pass by book stores. I almost broke my rule and purchased this edition of The Forsyte Saga -- a book I already owned just because I like that cover a whole let better than the edition I was reading.

Hence, my resolution to not buy any more books this year until I'd read a good chunk of the books I've already bought and not read.

My final book purchases of 2005, though, were beautiful hardbound editions of both Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ.

3) What was the last book you read?

The Forsyte Saga. And you should, too. It's everything I love in a novel. In fact, if I had to do my Top 5 over again, I'd try to squeeze in The Forsyte Saga.

4) List 5 books that have been particularly meaningful to you.

Hm. This almost seems a repeat of question 1, no? Or maybe this is where I can throw in things like The Forsyte Saga and other books that didn't make the list?

Maia by Richard Adams -- I was in the 6th grade, and I loved any book that was huge. I also wanted to be any profession that had a long name, like "archeologist" or "entomologist" or "sanitation engineer." So, I've checked out Maia from the adult section of the library because I had read, loved, and cried my eyes out over Watership Down and figured that every book by Richard Adams would have talking rabbits.

This one didn't.

The only scene that stands out is when Maia's stepfather makes her reach in his pocket for a piece of sweetmeat, and then the whole thing goes horribly literal and there's some icky rape stuff that happens. I stopped reading it, but continued to carry it around with me because it was hella thick and I wanted people to think I was smart. And apparently it worked, because not long after I began lugging Maia about with me I was moved from the regular reading class to the advanced reading class. "Must be because this book is so thick," I remember thinking. And advanced reading was so much better than regular reading because there weren't many of us in the class, and we got to read cool things like "Jabberwocky" and The Little Prince, and the reading teacher was young and crazy and told us this story once about how a black man had proposed to her in a park -- she told this story because she had tried to act it out for us in a game of charades we were playing, only none of us ever guessed, "Oh! It's that time a black man proposed to you in a park, but you had to say no!" Miss Onjuka? If you ever read this: What the fuck?

Later, as an adult, I realized that it wasn't the fact that I carried around Maia that got me into advanced reading. It was the aptitude test we'd taken the month prior. This might explain why I never advanced very far in math or science.

Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford -- This book was meaningful because I read it when I was 13. I haven't written much of anything at all here about my mom. There's a reason for that. This book helped me realize, though, that no matter how bad I had it, there was another boy out there named Michael who got strapped to his bed every night. Things could always be worse.

Everything you always wanted to know about sex* -- (*but were afraid to ask) by David Reuben, M.D. -- This book taught me, at a very young age, that male homosexuals had sex in department store and gas station restrooms, and that they'd do this by touching each other's shoes with their shoes. I've never been able to pee comfortably in a gas station or a department store restroom since.

The Happy Hooker: My Own Story by Xaviera Hollander -- My mom owned a second-hand store, and books like this were all over the place. This book taught me that we could never have a German Shepherd or a pool -- especially at the same time. I really can't say much more.

5) Name three books you've been dying to read but just haven't gotten around to it?

Doppleganger's answer to this was much better. I'd love for there to be a set of Lost Novels by Jane Austen. I'd also not mind it at all if there were some more sagas involving the Forsytes. But I'll treat this one seriously.

1) A good vampire novel.

2) Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady, because of the glowing review Doppleganger gave it once upon a time.

3) Something like Focault's Pendulum and The Club Dumas that isn't the goddamned Da Vinci Code.

6) Tag five people and have them fill this quiz out on their own.

This isn't a command. I'd totally understand if they didn't. But here's who I'd like to see answer this:

uncle cliffy
amanda mary
desideratum
jenfu
josephnotjoe

Scenes from a Relationship: The music edition

Mike: [singing]She'll tease you, and she'll something,
And something something something
She's precocious, and she knows just
what it takes to something something.
[louder now, more assured]
All the boys thinks she's a spy; she's got: Bette Davis Eyes."

Zach: How many songs would you say you know all the lyrics to?

Volleyball

"Don't aim where your eyes are staring, faggot." It was 6th period gym class and I was in 7th grade. I had also just hit Ike Kaler in the ass with a volleyball during a poorly delivered serve. It wasn't the first time I had been called out as faggot. The first time I was called faggot was in 4th grade and I wasn't. "Stop stepping on my toe, fucking faggot." That was Becky Poe, and we were learning square dancing, only I wasn't picking up on it so well.

I wasn't even attracted to Ike Kaler. Ike Kaler had a troubling chin and squinty eyes. He was one of those natural athletes, though. Maybe I was attracted to him. If I was, though, it was one of those dark secret crushes because there was no way I could even think about liking another guy -- especially in gym class. Especially in the gym shower*.

Like a lot of young homosexuals, I wasn't so much with the gym class. I was trying so hard to be someone I wasn't -- namely heterosexual -- that I couldn't be comfortable enough with my body to let my inner athlete shine. And heck, maybe I didn't even have an inner athlete. All I knew was that gym filled me with a loathing and a longing, and that I didn't want to do anything to draw any attention to myself whatsoever.

Which is why hitting Ike Kaler's ass was so mortifying.

It's not often that gym teachers in small towns like Klamath Falls, Oregon, do the right thing. They're in Klamath Falls, for christsakes: it't not like they've proven themselves as wise decision makers -- and I haven't even gotten to the "teaches gym" part yet. And yet my gym teacher, Mr. Roberts...

He was an odd man. He walked with a limp; some 'Nam injury, he said. He smelled of Winstons and Vic's Vap-o-Rub. His voice combined sand paper, glass, and an ill-performed tracheotomy into this oddly soothing dulcet tone. Only he never said dulcet things. "What are you, gimps? I've seen retards -- no offense, Pete" -- Peter was a retard -- "move quicker than you!" Then there was the time he screamed cocksuckers! for no reason in particular, and we had an assembly shortly afterwards about constructive ways to work through anger.

Mr. Roberts pulled me aside. "Bevel," he said. "We've got some work to do." He left everyone in the larger gym and took me to the small gym. "We're gonna teach you how to serve," he said. "And then those cocksuckers'll shut up." And then, for the next 20 minutes, it was just me and Mr. Roberts. I let my guard down. For one of the first times in my life, I had a male adult's attention; I wanted to make him proud. "Swear a little," he advised. "Under your breath. You can do this. No reason you can't." "Dammit," I said. "Yeah. That's a good one. Try goddammit." "Dammit." "Okay," he said. "You just work with that." And I kept serving. "Those guys, you know they don't know what they're saying, right? Those words they call you -- they don't know what they mean." I kept serving. "You can do this. You just needed a chance to know it."

And I kept serving.

It didn't last, my newfound confidence. I didn't leave the small gym a changed guy, more secure in what bits of masculinity I'd engendered. What I did leave with, though, was a newfound respect for the word "cocksucker." And the memory of a man's man who didn't think of me as a sissy.

Fuckin' keep fighting the good fight, Mr. Roberts. Wherever you are.

______________________________

* Dear Straight Guys,

I've looked at you. In the shower.

Peeping Tomingly,

Michael Bevel
British Adventuress

READING: The Forsyte Saga (fin)

That's a bit of a lie. I've still got 50 pages to go -- but it's all resolution from here and I seriously doubt, unless Galsworthy secretly invites goddamn Henry freakin' James to finish the novel for him, that I'll change my opinion to "Suck a fuck that was awful." And actually, even if Henry James did find a way to wriggle in there, I probably wouldn't hate it. The novels are worth it for the two short pieces, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" and "Awakening," that connect them.

Here is a lovely moment from "Awakening" (and to put this and the following passage in perspective, Jon is about 9):

------------------------------
"Bella!"

"Yes, Master Jon."

"Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd like it best."

"You mean you'd like it best."

Little Jon considered.

"No, they would, to please me."
------------------------------

And another:

------------------------------
"What exactly is beauty?"

"What exactly is--Oh! Jon, that's a poser."

"Can I see it, for instance?" His mother got up, and sat beside him. "You do, every day. The sky is beautiful, the stars, and moonlit nights, and then the birds, the flowers, the trees--they're all beautiful. Look out of the window--there's beauty for you, Jon."

"Oh! yes, that's the view. Is that all?"

"All? no. The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with their foam flying back."

"Did you rise from it every day, Mum?"

His mother smiled. "Well, we bathed."

Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.

"I know," he said mysteriously, "you're it, really, and all the rest is make-believe."
------------------------------

I know you're it, really, and all the rest is make-believe. That sentence totally took my breath away, and I had to put the book down and bite my lip a little.

After spending a full month with these characters, I am both ready and a little loathe to leave them behind. So many wonderful people have died beautiful deaths. I've gossipped with June and Fleur. I've attended engagements, weddings, sick beds, and funerals. I've watched Soames make mistake after mistake, and, unless something happens in these next 50 pages, I haven't seen him learn anything at all -- and yet I'm still hesitant to call him an entirely bad man. I've watched the waning of the Victorian era and the dawning of the '20s. If any book deserves the mantle of saga, it's this one.

Up next, I think, will be Balzac's Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low. I figured the best way to attack my bookshelves would be alphabetically. This means I may die when I get to Dickens. There's a lot of Dickens I own that I haven't read.

Pray for me.

23 Reasons Why I Love Zach (in no particular order)

1) I love that, while the rest of America watched the Super Bowl, Zach wept openly at Puppy Bowl, complete with the Kitty Half-Time Show.

2) I love that he sometimes will hide my socks in places like the medicine cabinet. Or on the bathroom door handle. Or stuffed into my pillow where I put my head, thankyouverymuch.

3) I love that when the Eurythmics song "Regrets" is on, he'll shake his finger admonishingly and chant "that's right that's right that's right that's right" along with Annie Lennox.

4) I love that he knows where things like countries are. Because I don't.

5) I love that when I'm trudging along with everyone else on the Metro trying to get home, that I get to go home to Zach. At the end of a craptastic day, this means a lot.

6) I love that Zach uses too little water when making spaghetti, and then overcompensates for his pasta-shortcomings by claiming I use too much water. (I totally don't.)

7) I love that Zach gave me a second chance after I totally stood him up on our first date.

8) I love our first date.

9) I love that when I've gone too far with my backseat driving, all it takes is the soothing voice of a papersack puppet to make things all okay again.

10) I love that Zach was there when mom decided we needed to kill the dog for Christmas.

11) I love that Zach believes in me, even when he doesn't always believe me.

12) I love that Zach thinks I know the answer to everything. I love it even more when it looks like I do.

13) I love how angry Zach got after a documentary about Fidel Castro where over-privileged white kids with Urban Outfitter backpacks and cell phones kept shouting, "¡Viva Fidel!" and "¡Viva la revolucion!"

14) I love that Zach let me drive without a license on my 29th birthday.

15) I love that Zach tears up at the mention of otters.

16) I love that Zach and I can never watch The Color Purple together because the movie still means too much to him.

17) I love Zach's horrified obsession with anesthesia. We watched a program on Discovery Health about people who woke up during surgery and he was so totally paralyzed with fear that I had to be the one to turn the channel.

18) I love that Zach won't eat Mexican fare and that he calls it "peasant food."

19) I love that Zach thinks he wears a 32 inseam.

20) I love that Zach loves board games as much as I do -- including Scrabble, Boggle, Trivial Pursuit, and Risk. Oh, and Uno.

21) I also love that Zach thinks that since I let him get away with P-R-I-Z-M once, he can go ahead and make up any number of additional words.

22) I love that he lets me sing loudly in the car.

23) I love that I didn't run out of reasons.

READING: East of Eden

I'm still reading The Forsyte Saga. It's just, I've now got to re-read East of Eden for one of my bookgroups.

I first read East of Eden maybe three or four years ago. The only other Steinbeck I'd read had been The Grapes of Wrath which, okay, not really my bag what with the relentless and, eventually, monotonous bleakness. "Can't someone give the Joad family a hug?" I kept thinking while reading it. "Or a puppy? But not a puppy that they'd have to worry about feeding, nor a puppy they'll have to kill to eat." Eventually, though, I just kept thinking, "Can't someone give the Joad family a bath?" I don't think one good thing happened to that family. Not one. And the end? With Rose of Sharon breast-feeding a hobo? Are you kidding me?

So, I picked up East of Eden and I'm pretty sure that first time I loved it. It was large and grand and sweeping, and not in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck wasn't winning any points with me as a writer; there were never any sentences where I stopped and thought, "Now that is writing." But the story/saga engaged me, and come chapter 8, when the treacherous Cathy Ames is introduced, I was hooked. She was just so incredibly and unapologetically evil that I figured I had to like her or she'd do something awful to me with knitting needles. Towards the end of the book, Cathy stopped being as awesomely evil and sort of became this caricature of evil; the kind of person who hisses and shrinks from the light of the sun. But by that point, I didn't care as much; I just wanted to be done with the novel and I wanted to find out what was going to happen to the Trask family.

And now it's March's book for my book group and I picked it up a couple nights ago to start it because that mofo's long, and I'm still neck-deep in Forsytes.

In the 3+ years since I last read it, I guess I'd forgotten a lot. Like, Cathy Ames isn't introduced immediately and there's a lot about the Salinas Valley that I don't know is terribly necessary. We get it John: it's a valley. Between two mountains. Can we get to Cathy now? But no, we can't, we've got to wade through all this stupid backstory about the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and every five minutes I'm checking my watch and thinking, "You know what this page needs? Cathy Ames."

Steinbeck is a little more misogynistic than I remember, too. Twenty pages in, I stopped and took stock. In that time, we'd been introduced to four pretty wretched and not entirely redeeming women: Liza Hamilton, too religious to be any fun and a total teetotaler who never smiles; a "Negro girl" who gives Cyrus Trask the clap; the first Mrs. Trask, who gets the clap from Cyrus and then commits suicide; and Alice, the second Mrs. Trask, who has consumption and never smiles and has to be married to Cyrus Trask. At another point, Steinbeck writes of one character, "[He] was glad...the way a woman is glad of a fat diamond, and he depended on his brother in the way that same woman depends on the diamond's glitter and the self-security tied up in its worth." But I have to tell you, none of the women in this novel that Steinbeck has introduced us to up to the point where he writes that sentence (page 21) seem at all like woman who would give a plug nickel for a fat diamond of any kind.

Right now, I'm on chapter 8 -- the chapter where finally we get some Cathy Ames action, and again I'm noticing some clumsiness on Steinbeck's part that I didn't pick up on my first rush through the novel. Chapter 8 opens with Steinbeck musing, "If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?" This is his way of saying, "And now: Cathy!" Which, heh, yeah. That's Cathy all right: she's got a malformed soul. But thinking about the implications, I don't know that I agree with Steinbeck here. First off, it's a pretty tragic misunderstanding of biology and genetics. More importantly, though, I think it's a misunderstanding of monsters.

Cathy Ames is a monster, according to Steinbeck; heck, according to anyone after a quick perusal of her laundry list of accomplishments: she murders her parents, drives a school teacher to suicide, tries to abort her babies with knitting needles, and then becomes this crazy pimp/madam in a bad wig. But if we pretend for a moment that Steinbeck's biological algebra is correct, that twisted genes or malformed eggs can influence a soul -- does she have any control over that? Is it her fault that she's evil? If the answer is no, then what use is the word "evil" in this context? If she's genetically predestined to be wicked -- and wicked, in this case, is supposed to be pejorative -- well, it can't be. Because she has no control over it. But Steinbeck wants her to be both evil, and for it also to be her fault, even though he's spent all this time trying to say that Cathy is born this way.

I think that it's now better apparent, to me at any rate, that Steinbeck is too married to his source material: the Bible. East of Eden is the land of Nod, where Cain finds a wife after he murders Abel. The novel is a retelling, of sorts, of the Eden/Fall of Man story. Steinbeck, though, wants it too many ways (and some of them illegal). He wants to examine evil and the fall of man; but then he wants this predeterminism crap that just don't hunt.

READING: The Forsyte Saga (still...)

I was stuck at page 327 for about a week. I was afraid that if I turned the page, Old Jolyon would die and then I would start crying. A lot.

After Irene, Old Jolyon may be my favorite character so far in the Saga. He starts out a wounded father whose son, Young Jolyon (who has a son also named Jolyon because why not?), has disgraced the family by leaving his first wife and daughter to live with another woman. One of the side plots of the first novel in The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property) is Old Jolyon's reconciliation with his son. By the end of the novel, and in the novella Indian Summer of a Forsyte, Old Jolyon is the only Forsyte to extend any kind of olive branch to Irene.

Things, they did not go so well for my girlfriend Irene.

This happens to me a lot in books, my over-involvement. When I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I yelped out loud at a particularly gruesome and gripping scene (there's a guy, hiding under the stairs, who ends up covered in someone else's blood by the end of the scene). I was on the Metro when I discovered that someone who wasn't Marian had signed her secret journal in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. I gasped, alarming the man sitting next to me. "Fosco!" I hissed under my breath, once I had regained my composure. The gentleman decided he'd rather stand. And most recently, I yelped when a character in George Gissing's The Netherworld had acid thrown on her face, ruining her acting career. The bus driver slowed the bus down and asked if I was all right.

I'm also a vocal reader. When Zach and I first started dating, I was reading The Unconsoled, and every two or three pages I would mutter, "This book is so weird." Other times I would say, "But why is he giving a eulogy in his pajamas?" At first, Zach would think these were actual questions that I expected an answer to. By the time I got to East of Eden, Zach would turn a deaf ear to my constant outbursts of, "Ooh, that Cathy!"

"I don't know how you can sit there, so calm, when Cathy is pregnant with kids she doesn't want and a set of knitting needles!"

"Huh?"

"KNITTING NEEDLES!"

"..."

Back to The Forsyte Saga, I finally gave in and kept reading. Old Jolyon dies at the end of Indian Summer of a Forsyte, sitting in the shade of large tree and waiting for the beautiful Irene to arrive for luncheon. "Shhhh," Zach said. "It's gonna be fine. All you have to do is flip back a couple of pages and he'll be fine."

Heaven-Haven

Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil

     I have desired to go
        Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
     And a few lilies blow.

     And I have asked to be
        Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918

There are many things to love about Gerard Manley Hopkins. That he looks like Adrien Brody is only one of them. (Only let me interrupt here for a second: Adrien? Hi, it's Mike. You're thisclose to losing my love forever. It was bad enough when you "starred" in that godawful Diet Coke commercial, but need I remind you that the thing I love the most about you is your nebbishy Jewiness? And that nebbishy Jews don't dance with artificially sweetened diet drinks in disco clothes? And nebbishy Jews certainly don't star in movies with Ben "Coke-n-Bloat" Affleck and Diane "Watch Me Masturbate on a Train While Thinking About a Stinky French Guy" Lane. Capiche?)

I'm not so much often with the poetry. I don't seek it out the way I seek out novels; but I like what I like. And I really like my man Manley Hopkins. I love his surprising cadences and unexpected rhythms. It's pretty rare that I feel energized after reading poetry; Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, is like a jolt of ice water in my veins. Only that would probably kill me, now that I think about it. Or is it air bubbles? Something like that, with either water or air bubbles, happened in an episode of Quincy that pretty deeply affected me as a child. Oh Jack Klugman: so surprising; so versatile; so astonishingly not dead yet. He's totally going on my dead pool list.

Hopkins lived from 1844 until he died at the age of 45 in 1889. ("Lived until he died." Nice one, Mike.) He was ordained a Jesuit in 1877, and burned all of his early verse as being too "worldly." (Kinda like Tolstoy after his crazy-go-nuts religious conversion post Anna Karenina.) "I am a eunuch," he wrote to Robert Bridges; "but it is for the kingdom of Heaven's sake." Which I find a little hot, in the same way that the Vicomte de Valmont found Madame de Tourvel a little hot (only not when she's played by Michelle Pffeeiffeffer). There's something corruptingly sexy about moral certitude, especially when it can be so easily broken.

Let's just close that door into Mike's psyche, shall we?

The other thing that I love about Gerry is this anecdote from my on-its-last-legs 1973 edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (which starts with Walt Whitman and ends with James Tate -- and apparently at some point I liked James Tate's poem "Stray Animals" and here's what I'd like to say to the Mike from the Past who clearly loved this poem: What were you, high? That poem's awful):

"[Hopkins] had also read another poem by Yeats, 'The Two Titans,' and while he thought it absurd to set two titans down on a rock in the sea with no indication of how they got there, he could see, and say, that the poem had many fine lines and vivid images. W.B. Yeats...wrote later that he had not cared much for the Jesuit priest, who seemed a querulous, sensitive scholar, alien to a young man with Whitman in his pocket. But actually, Hopkins carried Whiteman in his pocket too."

In 10th grade, I was in Mr. Dow's Advanced English class with such intellectual illuminaries as Frank Burkholder, Ian Woods, and John Horn. We had to work in groups or individually (the "individually" part was added after the fact since no one wanted to work with me, and Mr. Dow didn't want me to feel pariahically left out) on reading and presenting a poem to the class. I don't remember the name of the poem I picked -- it was something modern about Orpheus and Eurydice and dancing trees were involved. Anyway. I picked it because I had been obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology as a child. (I tried loving Norse mythology, but it gave me too many nightmares about wolves and dragons and the end of the world.) I loved those stories, and read them again and again. My favorites: Arachne and Athena, and Theseus and the Minotaur, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Only I had never read them aloud before; no one in my family new from Greek anything, let alone how to pronounce the exotic looking names. So when I read my poem aloud, and when I pronounced Eurydice as "Your-e-dice" -- Frank, Ian, and John snickered derisively and corrected me in that bored way the over-educated and insecure have of correcting everyone. There were several other words I ended up not knowing how to pronounce in the course of that poem. They were sure to catch those, too.

I bring up that story because Greek myths were the Walt Whitman in my pocket that no one assumed I had. I think it was assumed that, because we were poor, literature was beyond my ken. Literature, actually, is what saved me I think. I don't know that I could have survived that long childhood of Klamath Falls heartbreak and monotony if I didn't have books. In poverty-ridden Oregon, the fact that any of us could read without moving our lips made us suspect and outsider. We should have been there for each other.

But I digress.

I picked this poem to look at and write about because I am interested in the message. Knowing that Hopkins becomes a Jesuit, and that this poem is about a nun taking the veil -- what's he saying?

The novice seems to be thinking that cloistered life is going to be somehow safer than what she knew before. She wants quiet and peace and "no storms come." But is that true? I think that a contemplative life would be filled with its own storms. That yearning of the flesh for flesh; that questioning of the soul about God. Quiet isn't necessarily peaceful, and I'm worried that she believes that this is going to be the case. "Oh, honey," I want to say to her.

The other question this poem prompts me to ask is, how appropriate is it for this person to want to absent herself from the world? If we pretend for a moment that Jesus existed and said some of the things he's supposed to have said in the Christian bible -- he's pretty clear: "Feed my sheep," he tells Simon Peter. Jesus doesn't say, "Lock yourself up in a community of women and then pretend to marry me. Do you have any idea how many wives that would be?" I've never been interested in Jesus as a supernatural mythical figure who raises the dead and redeems the world (from what again? Original sin? And where are y'all getting that from?). I am interested in Jesus as a radical figure for social justice, and I think he would be appalled with the idea of those early communities of men and women who vowed chastity and only experienced their own suffering without doing anything in the world to lessen the sufferings of others. I think Jesus would have been fine kicking it Hebrew and quoting Micah: "What does the LORD require of you but to do justice and love kindness?"

The poem is short, and Hopkins doesn't affirm her choice or condemn it. He merely reports. That's the strength of this poem, I think; that the reader grapples with these issues with no help from the class. And I wonder if Hopkins himself struggled with these same doubts. His poetry may have been his attempts to influence beyond the walls of his cloistered heart.

FYI

I've taken down several entries. The plan is to take them, expand them, put them in some semblance of an order, and then see what I can get for them. I've also got three essays that I'm working on that I haven't posted here at all.

Hence my absence.

I'm not a disciplined writer. In fact, it was a lot easier when I didn't think of myself as a writer at all. "I'm a reader," I'd tell people. "I don't enjoy writing all that much." And that's partly true. These entries that I dash out sitting (shh) at work or in Zach's ugly but really comfy barcalounger (and P.S.: Are you kidding me with that family? And that living room? And is the daughter missing her freakin legs? And what the hell are they watching?) (And another thing: why couldn't they just have passed the pizza down to the Sassy Black Neighbor™?) are pretty easy and don't take all that much effort. But actual writing? Like, where there's supposed to be a point and some thought? How does anyone do that?

"So you wanna be the next David Sedaris?" I get that a lot when I tell people I write essays. I'm pretty sure that the David Sedaris we have now is just fine. I'd like to be the first me, I say. "Yeah. That David Sedaris is really funny." Which he is. Mostly. I've gotta say, the last two books didn't wow me as much as pretty much all of Naked and most of Barrel Fever did.

Anyway.

To wrap up this, the most boring entry of all, two things:

(1) For those who asked for books, they're shipping out this week. As I ship your book, I'll send you an email. That way you can begin waiting anxiously by the mailbox daily.

(2) I have two non-sucky entries that I'm putting the finishing touches on. Look for one, if not both, tomorrow. At least I hope they're non-sucky.

Aaron

I share my bus ride to work most mornings with a retarded guy named Aaron. Aaron rocks. Aaron looks like Art Garfunkel* and uses lip balm like a condiment. Aaron understands the rules about my morning routine; he reads his sports page and I read a chapter of whatever book I'm reading before we start talking and catching each other up on our days. Aaron goes to the mall a lot with his girlfriend Barbara, and last Saturday he went to Hooters for lunch. I made a face.

"What, you don't like the Hooters?"

"Well, it's a little--"

"Dirty?"

"Yeah. In both senses."

"Sexist?"

"Definitely."

"I like the wings," he said.

We joke sometimes about how many people Aaron has working for him. He has a counselor who visits him and his roommate in their apartment. He has a couple of job coaches. He has a social worker. "Do you ever make them carry you around on pillows?"

"No!"

"You should look into that."

"Off with their heads!"

"That's the spirit."

On the bus this morning, after Aaron scanned the sports page and told me he was rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl**, he said, "That stupid idiot kept talking last night." Aaron lives in a houseshare situation in the building Zach and I used to live in. There's a woman in his program there who talks to coats, and an aggressive 'tard who tried to take $10 from me once in the elevator before wishing me a hearty "Shabbat Shalom!" There's also the Ladies' Man 'tard who spends all his free time flirting with the front desk concierges and dressing like Thurston Howell III when he hangs out by the pool during the summer. There were too many options for me to know which stupid idiot Aaron was talking about.

"The President. He's an idiot. A stupid idiot." And then Aaron sort of chanted "stupid idiot" for a while before telling me how excited he was about the speech class he was starting on Saturday. "My girlfriend's gonna meet me there and then we'll go to the mall."

Regardless of your politics -- and I'm a dyed in the wool liberal democrat (with socialist leanings and a song in my heart for the intellectual days of communism) -- being called an "idiot, stupid idiot" by a retarded man who eats lip balm, that's gotta carry an extra sting, right?

______________________________
* Poor Art Garfunkel's kid.

** So, I'm not a sporty guy. I don't know the differences between the Super Bowl and the Splendid Bowl (P.S.: What's a "bowl" in this context?) and any other kind of "-bowl." So, I go to www.superbowl.com thinking that there would be something on the site that would tell me who the two teams were so I could tell you who Aaron picked because, not being a sporty guy, the team he mentioned didn't make an impression and I forgot before I got a chance to write this down. Does www.superbowl.com tell you anywhere on the front page who's playing whom? Not in any way that this homo could figure out. There were two helmets, I'm assuming of the opposing teams -- but again: hi. I just thought somewhere in big letters it would say SUPERBOWL [insert Roman numeral here]: _______________ vs. _______________.