From: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (aml-list-digest) To: aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: aml-list-digest V1 #563 Reply-To: aml-list Sender: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk aml-list-digest Monday, January 7 2002 Volume 01 : Number 563 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 09:13:51 -0800 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: [AML] Twenty-five Years of Hearing with One Ear Saturday, Dec. 29, 2001. Sarah and David's wedding day. Sarah came to live with us five years ago when Donna's mother got well enough to travel down here on a bed in back of her hometeachers' van. (They went the extra thousand miles.) She went on her mission a couple years ago reasonably sure her grandmother would die while she was away, and she did. When we told Matthew Grandma was dying he said, "That's what the doctors always say." Hadn't happened yet, so he didn't believe it would. Sarah and Matthew fight like brother and sister, and in some ways she's about 10 years old, his age. I hope she and David can build a good marriage. I've been so focused on the wedding that I didn't notice for a while the coincidence, the 29th is a quarter century anniversary for me. When we came back from Finland in 1971 I took a routine hearing test at Farrer Jr. High, and we got a phone call a while later about a 15% hearing loss in my left ear. Went to an ear doctor about once a year for a few years. Couldn't find anything. In the meantime I would have this odd sensation occasionally, as if things were expanding and contracting around me--a bit like being in the middle of an accordian. It was pleasurable, but maybe a bit dangerous. I remember one Fast Sunday I had been lying on the living room floor and I got up. Next I knew I was lying in the stone entryway, my head under the lower railing. My parents thought I had fainted from fasting, but I've always thought this accordian thing was involved. Read Huckleberry Finn while the dr.was stitching my head up--we were reading it in Miss Nelson's AP English class (so I would have been a sr in HS), and I had pages to read. About a year later I had just started at BYU and was working on the moving crew, moving books from the old section of the library into the new section. (About the time that the library changed namesakes from J. Reuben Clark--who had just gotten a lawschool, whose library would eventually be named after Howard W. Hunter, the jazz-playing prophet--to Harold B. Lee.) The accordian thing was getting more frequent, and even bothersome, as I was putting together ranges for the books. They were a little taller than I and I had to reach up and hold a screw in place then drill it in with an electric screwdriver. But every time I looked up--in-out, in-out, whump whump whump. Got so bad I could only assemble the ranges by touch, holding my head down. "How long have you been dizzy?" the nurse at the McDonald (yes, there is an eieio.com) Health Center asked me. Dizzy? That was the name for the accordian thing? Dizzy is rolling down Laurie Lloyd or Jean Newey's lawn (same hill, opposite sides of the street) then standing up and everything spins around. She also told me I was foolish, given the dizziness, to walk on the wall of the footbridge between the WC ("our WC can hold 1500, and even has banquet facilities") and the law school--not to mention the wall of the footbridge to the Mariachi Center (Mr. Mariachi asked that it not be called the Big Mac, as the EIEIO people were his competitors.) In the five years we had been back from Finland the measure of hearing loss had changed from percentage to range. That's one of the things I learned after the catscan. I also learned that I soon wouldn't have _any_ hearing in my left ear, not just a loss in certain ranges. Dr. Lynn Gaufin (gofayne) a neurosurgeon just moved into Provo from LA asked me if I wanted to spoil Christmas by anticipation or by being in the hospital? (That was at Thanksgiving, which was already spoiled--I had tickets with some friends to see A Chorus Line, and Katherine Hepburn in A Matter of Gravity in LA, but spinal taps are unforgiving, and while I never did blow up I did throw up if I tried to move very far from the couch.) I chose anticipation, and at Christmas my father, brothers and brothers-in-law (believers, questioners and doubters alike) laid hands on my head and fortified me against the coming 9 hour ordeal. Early morning Dec. 29 1976 (I must have gone in the horse spittle the night before) I told the anesthesiologist, "I don't think you gave me enough of that, I don't feel sleepy at all." Dr. Gaufin made a cut from my neck up the base of the skull then drilled three holes and cut out a triangular piece between them. He was after a benign but growing sub-occipital neuroma on my eighth cranial nerve, a group of nerves that conduct hearing, balance, and I forget what else (memory?) He told me this occurs in about one in 64,000 of the population, but 10 years later a dr at UW (or was it Stevens Memorial in Edmonds (Tucker wasn't there, thankfully)) said, "I don't know where he got that figure. Autopsies, maybe. This is rare enough that it probably put your hospital on the surgical map." Dr. Gaufin couldn't save my hearing, but he did want to save the nerve that controls facial muscles, and not have to graft one in from my tongue. He said it was like cutting one layer of Saran Wrap into two layers. Took him an extra 4 1/2 hours, and he still couldn't get the whole tumor because the end of it was too close to the brain stem. (Years later when Leslie Norris introduced me to Danny Abse's poetry I came across a horrifying poem, "In the Theatre" about his father's experience sticking a metal probe in someone's brain, mucking about to find a tumor.) Of course, no one thought to tell my parents, and my mother was frantic. ("From Pacific to Atlantic, gee the pace of things is frantic.") Dec. 31, 01 I think it was tonight (give or take 25 years) that my mother came into the intensive care unit--might have been last night, terrific headache, and somewhere in there the IV came out of my hand and it took the nurse 9 tries to get it back in--to wish me happy New Years, and read me a J.D. Salinger story. I was surprised she would read Salinger, given how shocked she was at the language in Jack Nicholson's film _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ or Kurt Vonnegut's play, "Happy Birthday Wanda June." (It was playing across the street from the Salt Palace when we went up to June conference one year. I had read the play and not noticed the language, and apologized profusely and repeatedly.) I was in the horse spittle something like 9 days. There was some kind of heavy duty painkiller available, but my father advised me to be sparing in its use and I didn't see any reason to use a lot. Big thick bandage back of my head made it difficult to sleep. I dreamed I was an unembodied spirit who got to live forever but I could only sleep in other peoples' dreams--and they kept waking up. I also dreamed I was travelling naked around Europe with Bucky Swindle (long time next door neighbor, till they moved up to the top of the hill and Kimballs moved in--later Bucky started a couple of art galleries, Frameworks and Repartee, and married one of his artists, Liz Lemon. Nice reception at his parents. They have a very large and beautiful Minerva Teichert western painting with horses in their stairwell. (I used to clean the Physics dept at BYU--a bunch of Teicherts hanging around the dept orifices. Lovely way to start the day). Bucky kept telling me to put my clothes on. I was only in the hospital about ten days, got out in time to watch Gary Gilmore's lawyer on TV describing the little red stains on Gilmore's shirt and how they spread. (I found out later, reading Mikal Gilmore's _Shot in the Heart_ that it wasn't his lawyer, it was the fellow who negotiated literary rights to the story with Morman Nailer.) I was thinking about all this as Advent drew near, which includes Tim and Mary Slover's party and the male-bonding song (something about being together "comfy and cozy are we," "in a wonderful fairy land")--more wonderful than Christmas morning, when Tim always reads some new piece, like, "If 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause' were a Disciplinary Council." This year he read a first-person piece about a member of the Babylon Diner's Club who decided to go on a little trip with Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, but got there too late and they left without him and he wandered around the desert. Very funny, but touching at the end, as he's dying and has a vision. So what was I going to write for this party (and the Christmas newsletter?). I got a title immediately, "Twenty-five years of Hearing With One Ear." The title was supposed to convey the sense of hearing all truth but hearing it slant, and I wanted to talk about my one-eared slant perceptions and how they had changed over the years. I was particularly thinking about a pome I'd written circa 1992, something I'd had on my mind for years and years. Baby Jesus My primary teacher told me you were never naughty Never fussed, or flushed the toilet when Joseph told you, "No" Never cranked around the house & through the night, cutting teeth Never soiled your parents as they were changing your diaper (Which never needed changing anyway) Never sent your food falling to the floor like manna Never robbed your parents of so much sleep They would wish you an angelic babe of ages past Who took all grief and gave none. Never. I sent it out with our 1992 Christmas letter, but didn't like it, and tried to alleviate the sarcasm with a note, "All those with babes in arms wish for that perfect child, but settle for their own precious, not so perfect one." I wanted to use the pome as an example of my slant perception because for years and years I thought my primary teacher was serious, really believed Baby Jesus never fussed or cried. I treated her remark as a sign of our cultural ambivalence towards children, who we both revere and abort, want to be like but not ish, and allow millions to live in poverty with our continual cuts to social programs. But somewhere in the last twenty-five years it occurred to me that my primary teacher was probably just exhausted with a new baby. I decided to revise the poem with that in mind, and started getting all manner of good phrases for it--I found the pome I hadn't known how to look for in 1992, and wrote it up for the Advent party (Decided the essay title would make a nice title for a writer's notebook.) Donna thought Matthew would be embarrassed, but he loved the part about pooping all over me. So here's the revised version, followed by a question. Baby Jesus My primary teacher told me you were a never naughty baby, perfect. I thought she meant you Never fussed, or flushed the toilet when Joseph told you, "No" Never cranked around the house & through the night, cutting teeth Never sent your food falling to the floor like manna. Perhaps she meant you Never took your parents' sleep to burp and feed Or that fresh diaper, burped belly, soothing sounds Never failed to comfort you, That laying you down would not wake you I suppose she has grandbabies now, And their parents know that Even grand babies use their diaphragms to make tireless sound, Empty mouths of sour milk on flowered silk (or any handy thing). New parents know you shat on Joseph As new Matthew once brimmed his diaper in the grocery store-- Poop dripping from the shopping cart before I reached the car Where he squirted more once diaperless. Six years since I'd been caught unawares by anything under a diaper, Six years since his brothers' mother took them and left And left me to ask, For all the grief you gave Mary, How her legs had strength to hold her ears High enough to hear your labored words, "Behold thy Son." And here's the question. A year ago we had a thread on "First Attempts to Be a Writer," and learned that Sharlee Glenn once wrote, Oh wicked world! I scorn thy ways Thy lusts and passions wither cold . . . but couldn't figure out how to finish it (got some good suggestions, though). So how about a thread on mature attempts to be a writer (immature in my case?) How have your own perceptions changed over the last twenty five years or fifteen or five? How have your changing perceptions affected your writing, or how has your writing affected your perceptions? How have you changed? There has been a bit of discussion of doing a poetry issue for Irreantum, and it might be interesting to readers to learn, say, how pomes grow in a writer's mind and thought and feeling--the technique as well as the experience behind a poem, or prose, or stories. Harlow S. Clark ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 15:47:42 -0600 From: Jonathan Langford Subject: [AML] Moderator Note Hi, Just wanted to share with everyone out there in AML-List land that tomorrow is one of those "landmark" natal celebrations. Specifically, my tally will reach half of fourscore. Have fun everyone. Jonathan Langford AML-List Moderator - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 10:38:23 -0700 From: Barbara Hume Subject: Re: [AML] God in _Lord of the Rings_ At 09:27 PM 12/28/01, you wrote: >"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic >work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is >why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to >anything like 'religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. >For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." >(Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 172). Could this be one reason why LOTR succeeds in the national arena and LDS fiction does not? By the time many LDS publishers and editors have finished bowdlerizing and blandizing novels until the characters are cardboard and the plots are superficial, no one wants to read them. There's nothing left but didacticism and preachiness and sappiness. I say this, and I'm one of the people who likes happy endings, and prefers sentiment to sarcasm, so I can imagine how it seems to readers with less delicate sensibilities. Barbara R. Hume Provo, Utah - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ End of aml-list-digest V1 #563 ******************************