Cripes, Suzette!

Budd and Alice

I was thinking about Budd Zzzyp today. If you lived in Manhattan in the 70s, you've thought about him, too. His was the next-to-last name in the white pages. The last name on that page was something unreal and  unpronounceable, made entirely of Zs and Ys. Budd Zzyzp was if not exactly an acquaintance at least a recognizable person, reliably occupying the same space one year after the other. For a city full of transients, that was comforting stability.

Some years later in a little throwaway filler in The New Yorker magazine, I found out that Budd Zzzyp wasn't real. The name was listed there by a well-known NY personage named Buddy Jacobson. The occasion of this revelation was that Buddy had been arrested for the grisly murder of a romantic rival and Budd Zzzyp, a device to help people remember when they wanted to contact him,  would be listed no more.

Googling "Budd Zzzyp" doesn't net much, but looking for "Buddy Jacobson" leads to a book that was written about the whole sordid thing.  Horse racing, drug smuggling, a "modeling" agency that shared a phone number listing with Budd Zzzyp, romance of a sort followed by the murder, an escape from a NYC prison with a manhunt that ended in California 40 days later where Buddy was taking skating lessons in anticipation of buying a roller rink - that sounds like it's worth a dollar from a used book site, doesn't it?

I ordered the book today. This is why I have nothing to say when people ask me what I'm reading. I can't easily explain my taste in reading material to the Oprah Bookclub people or to those who are busy with the paperback best sellers from the airport bookstore.

All of this phone directory nostalgia reminded me of Mrs. Alice Coolbaugh. I can't forget her, either.

Flash back to Wilkes-Barre, Pa circa 1968-ish. My mother came home from the dress factory one day with one of those little math tricks that ends up in a predictable number. This isn't mathematically correct - just an example here - but it was one of those things like "Take the number of letters in the month you were born, multiply by 5, add 2 and divide by three. The answer is 18." And the answer was 18. "Now" she said, "take the phone book and open it up to page 18. The 18th name on the 18th page is Mrs. Alice Coolbaugh."

Sure enough, Mrs. Alice Coolbaugh. Somewhere along the line, my mother revealed that the answer to the math trick was always 18 so she already knew the name that would be revealed at the end of the trick. Even then, I didn't have enough interest in math to explore the multiply/add/divide logic but I did try it out one more time on the sly using a different month as a starting point and it was still Alice Coolbaugh. I lost interest in it after that, but I was sufficiently impressed to remember that name for the rest of my life.

So that's all there is to the story. But I was unwilling to give up my seat on the nostalgia train, I typed her name into the Google search box, and would you believe that the very same woman is the #1 search result?  To my surprise, there are 11 pages of results for "Alice Coolbaugh".

Maybe it wasn't a math trick after all - maybe she's the 18th name on the 18th page of phone books all across America. You'd better go look at yours.

Another Door Closes on the New Yorker Magazine That Used To Be

One of my Christmas books this year was a copy of Updike's Rabbit novels. I've read or owned these novels before in various guises - borrowed from the library, falling apart paperbacks, one good hardcover - but this was four works bound into one volume. And it has a fine red ribbon as a page marker. I am a sucker for a ribbon page marker.

High on the list of reasons why I am fond of this body of work comes early in the series when we are first introduced to Harry Angtsrom's wife, Janice. She is describes as not pretty, dumb and athletic, with thin hair and a high forehead which is peeling from prolonged sun exposure on the tennis court. Which always struck me as an excellent description of Ethel Kennedy. 

R.I.P. John Updike

I'm Also Very Fond of Rickrack

A Book Review:
American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting by Steven Biel

When I first saw the painting, I was a child in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Although I couldn't identify the architectural style, I though the widow was pretty and was drawn it its exotic essence, for it was outside of my personal experience as far as private residences went. I didn't know then that it was an "an unstructural absurdity" or that a more schooled viewer would note "the false taste, the borrowed pretentiousness" of "a style originally copied from stone Gothic churches in Europe" and applied "to flimsy frame houses in America."

In the first chapter, I learned that

• the models were Grant Wood's  sister and his dentist
• the artist asked his sister to make an apron trimmed with rickrack, "a trim that was out of style and unavailable in the stores" so she ripped some off of her mother's old dresses and "after the painting made its debut, rickrack made a comeback. Grant was responsible for a rickrack revival."
• a pitchfork has four tines and a hay fork has three times
• the house is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is behind a city maintainence building.
• the house is still a private residence and now has central air conditioning

The first chapter - one of four - factually discusses the house, the inspiration for the artist's concept, the models and the initial unfavorable reaction to the painting. It's factual but interesting and the writing style  pulls you along for 28 pages. One might as well stop right there because the next two chapters string together footnoted quotes and references in the most boring fashion imaginable, rendering  it almost impossible to remain engaged. The style brought to mind notes written on index cards, laid out in logical sequence. Once the author got the information together, it seems as though he was satisfied with that much and needn't bother developing any actual narrative.

The final chapter begins by listing some of the many parodies of the painting in comedy, advertising and pop culture commentary. Ten lengthy paragraphs are devoted to the TV shows  Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies as related to the painting before things move on to Europe's opinion of "American middlebrow insipidness", the 2004 presidential campaign, "red-baiters", a direct insult to Ronald Regan and a positive mention of Bruce Springsteen.

The author is the director of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University.

Written in 2005,  it was too soon to catch the the ironic comparison between the Depression and the looming Age of Obama. In  a repetition of "a scathing scholarly assessment" of Wood's "sales appeal" and its link to "the substitution of Americanism (nationalism)  for esthetic values", the reviewer, H.W. Janson, "perceptively located the source of Wood's amazing popularity during the 1930s":

"In a period of economic and political crisis he placed before  the public a vision of stability and security, untouched by the depression or by the disquieting events abroad that were beginning to cast their shadows over this country. Nor is it surprising that his work should have appealed so tremendously to the urban population, whose need for 'substitute reality' was greatest."

This is the most common interpretation of and visceral reaction to the characters in the painting - that they "embody an enduring, essential American spirit ... They are upright and steadfast, determined to overcome hard times and fearlessly forge ahead into the future. Viewers do not look down on the man and woman; they look up to them, see their best selves in them." 

If we recognize that much, then we must also ask ourselves if we really need a happy shiny presidency to save us from ourselves.

I still think the window is pretty.

Rating: 2 stars  

The first chapter was good-to-very-good but the quality rapidly disintegrated from there. The sudden turn from story into into a list of references makes me think that the grad student who was working on this got married and had to go out and get a real job.