In the spring of 2020, we live in an absurdist novel

People are struggling. They are sick and dying; their businesses are shuttered or they are unemployed, either for the duration or for good. Many are caught in a virus hot zone such as New York City or New Orleans. Health workers battle it out with an invisible enemy every day. Sometimes, the enemy wins.

Sometimes you eat the bear and, sometimes, well, he eats you.

As in The Big Lebowski, the world is, at turns, hilarious and deadly serious. Creative types take to Zoom and Instagram to sing, dance, and read poetry. Poetry, especially, is a balm for hard times. I've been reading a lot of it. It's also a counterweight to the heavy and feckless hand of Trump. Whenever he weighs in, I feel like Atlas with the weight of the celestial heavens on my shoulders. Trump should be like Roosevelt or Churchill, sharing the weight with regular folks and, sometimes, removing it altogether. But he lacks all empathy and compassion and leadership skills.

For now, we're stuck with him. His minions, too, like Turtle-face McConnell and the right-wing wing of the Supreme Court and the knuckleheads with guns who barge into state capitol buildings. All this repulses me. And, as a writer, it fascinates me. I am a big fan of absurdist lit with big themes: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Good Soldier Schweik, anything by Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Candy, etc.), Fran Liebowitz, National Lampoon writers, Lewis Nordan and other writers whom I can't remember right now. As I said, though, I'm reading poetry which is more about feelings and images that ripping off the mask of contemporary society. It's about that, too, but primarily the power of words. So much great poetry is short.

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

"The Pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel" by Gwendolyn Brooks. 

Sylvia Plath wrote "Poppies in October" on her last birthday following several suicide attempts. Her next attempt would be fatal.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly – 

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky  

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.  

Oh my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Not many of us could write so movingly of deep depression. And we can forgive her for palely and flamily, her turning strong adjectives into pale adverbs. But they work with carbon monoxides and eyes dulled to a halt under bowlers. She wrote this while living in London in the 1950s when men wore bowler hats. It invokes a grey day in London, crowds of faceless men wearing bowler hats.

You could say that these are depressing poems, and you would be right. But life is not a sitcom or a stand-up comedy routine. I take that back -- it is those and a thousand other things. Plath's last stanza echoes what happens to most of us if we live long enough and experience enough horror. Late-blooming poppies that "cry open" amidst the frost while dawn brings beautiful cornflowers.

I leave you with a Dad joke. These are the dumb jokes Dads tell which elicit groans and may be remembered fondly by their kids. The joke, as always, is on us.

Helvetica and Times Roman walk into a bar.
"Get out," shouts the bartender. "We don't serve your type here."

"That's some catch, that Catch 22"

"That's some catch, that Catch-22. 

"It's the best there is."

Those lines stuck in my head in 1969 and never left. I heard them again in the Hulu iteration of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." It was good to hear those words said aloud on a big smart TV. It acknowledges the elegance of the term, its evil logic. Yossarian would be crazy to fly the increasing number of combat missions. To get out of them, all he has to do is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane and thus must fly more missions.

Fifty years ago, we could easily see the parallel for our times. Yossarian would have to be crazy to go to Vietnam and fight strangers. All he has to do to get out of it is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane enough to go. It was a bind many of us found ourselves in.

Yossarian summed it up his self-centered beliefs during a talk with Clevinger who would soon disappear into a cloud. "The enemy is anyone who's gonna get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

We knew the people trying to get us killed in 1969. Johnson/Nixon/Westmoreland/Selective Service System. Also, our family and neighbors and teachers and all the people who were solidly behind the war. Fast-forward to this generation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its architects -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- and you can see through recent history what Heller was getting at.

In the Hulu version, by executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Yossarian is a wide-eyed antihero and a self-centered jerk. His acts of self-preservation hurts others. He whines and complains. He retreats to the hospital. As the scenes add up, it becomes increasingly clear that he is correct in his assumption that everyone is trying to get him killed. Still, he goes on his bombing missions, eager to drop his bombs so the planes can escape the flak field and he has one less mission to fly. The horrors multiply until Yossarian reveals Snowden's secret in the back of the B-25 (one of the book's proposed titles was "Snowden's Secret").

The most telling scene thus far comes at the end of the second segment, when Yossarian reaches out of the bombardier's window in mid-air and tries to erase a spot of blood. During the previous mission, the plane next to his is hit by flak. The plane's bombardier, his body streaked with blood, slides across the glass on his way to his doom. He leaves behind a bloody trail and we see the look of horror on Yossarian's face. On the next mission, some of the blood remains and Yossarian attempts to scrub it off, as if he could banish all of the blood that he has seen and will see. The music accompaniment: is Benny Goodman's "Goodbye," which can't be meant irony-free.

I finished watching the series late one night. That seemed somehow appropriate. There were plenty of laughs, many absurdities. The final scenes are eerie as Yossarian confronts the secret they all share and the blood of the innocents causes him to ditch his bloody uniform for the duration. Catch-22 loyalists may not like the last scene. It's not as hopeful as the one Yossarian chooses in the book. He revels in Orr's survival and his escape from the war. He contends to duplicate it or die in the attempt.

The Hulu series does not give Yossarian an out. The look on his face after yet another bombing run says it all.

Clooney and Heslov made other changes to the narrative. They work, for the most part. I missed Chief White Halfoat and Dunbar. Major ____ deCoverly gets very little to do. In the beginning, I thought it seemed a bit dated, maybe because we have been through so many absurdities (and absurdist fiction) since World War II spawned the book. And now, Trump, a true Scheisskopf, claims our attention.

Maybe it's not so dated after all.

It just doesn't end. There are so many enemies, those who want to kill us for nebulous reasons. Norman Mailer, another World War II combat veteran, said that Heller takes "his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him." That may be the biggest secret of all. Life is a trip through hell. Our assignment, should we choose to accept, is to make it heaven without losing our souls. At 18, "Catch-22" gave me an inkling of the challenges ahead of me. At 68, I see the road I traveled, how many choices I had to make along the way. I suppose that's the gift and curse of aging. Sometimes we get a little gift, such as the resurrection of a beloved book, to ease the journey.

The most thoughtful article on Hulu's "Catch 22" was by Jeffrey Fleishman in the L.A. Times, "Why Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' is a relevant antiwar satire in the age of Trump." You have to get by the firewall, but read it at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-catch-22-novel-hulu-20190515-story.html

In finding fault with Heller's depictions of female characters, he refers to Susan Straight, the writer who teaches a fiction class on love and war at UC Riverside. She lambastes Heller's treatment of women, especially the nurses. Most serve as just sex objects, an oversight that the producers try to remedy in this adaptation.

The following paragraph wraps up the article. To me, it sums up the real byproducts of war -- the damage done to the men who fight them, and the damage they do to the people who love them.

Straight’s memoir “In the Country of Women,” which will be published later this year, reflects in part on women in her family who endured their own private battles. “I’m writing about the women who fled all the men who had been in war,” she says. “My ancestors survived the men who survived the cannons and they were terrible men.”

Of course, you don't have to go to war to be a terrible man. Draft-dodger Trump is proof of that. But in "Catch-22," we see the bullet and the damage done.

"Lincoln in the Bardo" explores the gap between tragedy and comedy

George Saunders' novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" is eerie and hilarious. The novel is written by an experienced short story writer and is structured as a series of scenes set in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln visits the resting place of his 11-year-old son, Willie. Saunders has constructed an excellent novel from snatches of dialogue from dead people and swatches from books about he Civil War era in Washington, D.C. You can be excused for getting lost amidst the first few pages and wondering where the book was going. I did. But I persevered, as you sometimes have to do with a challenging literary work.

At the core of the story is a man mourning the untimely death of his son. How do you cope with such a loss? You could write a book about Lincoln's monumental depression. We have seen public figures deal with the death of their offspring. Joe Biden publicly mourned the death of his son Beau and Beau was a seasoned adult and war veteran. But mourning a young son or daughter is a special kind of hell, one that doesn't require a belief in the actual Hell of the Bible or religious iconography or even Dante. It's a hell on earth.

First, what is a bardo? From Merriam-Webster Online:

The intermediate or astral state of the soul after death and before rebirth.

As is true with all online research, you can use this dictionary definition as a launching pad into a universe of references. Bardo is a Tibetan term that's found in the Bardo Todol in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bardo Todol is translated as "Liberation in the Intermediate State Through Hearing."

Here's a quote from a Lion's Roar piece from April 2017:

More generally, the word bardo refers to the gap or space we experience between any two states. The lesser-known bardos described in the traditional texts include the bardo of dreaming, the bardo of meditating, and even the bardo of this life—which is, after all, the intermediate state between birth and death. 

A bardo can even be seen as the pause between one thought and another. I experience bardos on a daily basis but didn't realize it.  Once you know that, the shades that inhabit the cemetery where Willie Lincoln is buried take on a new dimension. They are not ghosts, really, or those dead people with unfinished business who haunt old hotels and abandoned mental asylums. You know, the ones who get the attention of the guys on TV's "Ghost Adventures." These souls in the bardo make up a compelling cast of characters who comment on Willie's funeral and Lincoln's nighttime foray to his son's final resting place. The two main narrators are printer Hans Vollman and Roger Blevins III, an eternally young man with some secrets.

In the reader's guide that follows the novel (Random House trade paperback), Saunders describes the core question in the novel this way: "How do we continue to love in a world in which the objects of our love are so conditional?"

Heartbreak is at the heart off "Lincoln in the Bardo." Lincoln is so heartbroken by Willie's death that he can barely go on, that he forgets he has another young son at home in a sickbed. Some of the most amazing lines in the book happen when each of the spirits admits he/she is dead and transforms into the next life. As they depart, onlookers get a glimpse into their lives before death and the lives they could have led had they lived to a normal life span. I was reminded of the graveyard scenes in "Our Town," when the dead comment on the fragility -- and ignorance -- of the living. Life is a mystery and a tragedy. Heartbreak is our destiny. The ones we love leave us and we are challenged to keep going in this sphere. Lincoln lost a son, lived with an off-kilter wife, and had a war to run. We often hear of "Lincoln the Emancipator" and "Lincoln the Rail-Splitter." The mythic Lincoln. In recent years, we have heard more about the Lincoln with crippling depression. I can hear R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe wailing "Everybody Hurts" as Lincoln makes his way home from the cemetery.

One note about Saunders as short story writer: I hadn't read a Saunders story in awhile. Not sure why. I picked up a 2016 Random House paperback reissue of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" at my local bookstore. I read the title story and beheld intimations of what would appear in "Bardo." We meet the "ghostly McKinnon family" who occupied the CivilWarLand site back during the Civil War. They met a bad end at the hands of Mr. McKinnon, who was never the same after the Battle of Antietam. The daughter, Maribeth, is "a homely sincere girl who glides around moaning and pining and reading bad poetry chapbooks. Whenever we keep the Park open late for high-school parties, she's in her glory." Maribeth is more real than the narrator's two bratty sons. Saunders makes the real absurd and the absurd real. As Joshua Ferris notes in the intro, it's the latter skill "is a much harder trick to pull off" but it moves Saunders from the pigeonhole of satirist and "into the open air of the first-rate artist."

In "Lincoln in the Bardo," Saunders skill as a writer helps us see that the human tragedy is also the human comedy. Maybe that's a bardo, too, the gap between tragedy and comedy.

Classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller -- with a twist -- opens March 23 at the Atlas Theatre

Tickets are on sale now for the CLTP production of The 39 Steps. Directed by Steve Lien.

Take a classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller, stir in a healthy dose of spy novel noir and a heaping dash of Monty Python hilarity and you might start to understand this intriguing, riotous and fast-paced comedy. A cast of 4 plays more than 150 characters in this full-throttle tale of an ordinary man on an extraordinary adventure to save all of Britain from a shadowy cadre of devious spies.

Performances are March 23-April 1 at the Historic Atlas Theatre. Special $10 ticket performance on Thursday, March 29, 7:30 p.m. 

Contact 307-638-6543 or online at www.cheyennelittletheatre.org

Roy Zimmerman offers a satirical antidote to Red State weirdness with a Sept. 1 Cheyenne concert

The Unitarian Universalist Church in Cheyenne hosts Roy Zimmerman on Thursday, September 1 at 7 p.m. Below is some information about Roy and there is much more on YouTube or his web site.

“Live From the Starving Ear” is 90 minutes of Roy Zimmerman’s wickedly inventive satirical songs.  The Tea Party, the economy, same-sex marriage, Socialism, Creationism, guns, taxes, abstinence and yes, Obama, all come under tuneful scrutiny. “There’s a whole new political landscape,” he says, “painted by Jackson Pollock.”

In twelve albums over twenty years, Roy has brought the sting of satire to the struggle for Peace and Social Justice.  His songs have been heard on HBO and Showtime.  He has recorded for Warner/Reprise Records.  He’s been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and he's a featured blogger for the Huffington Post.  Roy’s YouTube videos have garnered over six million views and tens of thousands of comments, many of them coherent.  And yes, he has a website: http://royzimmerman.com/

The Los Angeles Times says, “Zimmerman displays a lacerating wit and keen awareness of society’s foibles that bring to mind a latter-day Tom Lehrer.”

Tom Lehrer himself says, "I congratulate Roy Zimmerman on reintroducing literacy to comedy songs. And the rhymes actually rhyme, they don't just 'rhyne.'"

Joni Mitchell says, "Roy's lyrics move beyond poetry and achieve perfection."

Watch one of Roy's YouTube videos at http://youtu.be/qNi1sevKNd0

Lummis judges meat on "Colbert Report"

By now, you've seen (or heard about) Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis's appearance on "The Colbert Report." Here's a link to the clip:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221062/march-09-2009/better-know-a-district---wyoming-s-at-large---cynthia-lummis

Poetry and villainy get comeuppance at summer melodrama

As an actor, I'm a pretty good writer.

That's why I spend my stage time as a master of ceremonies at the Cheyenne Old-Fashioned Melodrama each summer. As one of the emcees, I fire up the crowd and keep the action moving. I occasionally do battle with hecklers or, during Cheyenne Frontier Days, drunken hecklers. I'm big and I'm loud, two important assets for any melodrama emcee.

The melodrama this year was written by Brooks Reeves and Rory Mack. It's called "The Rhyming Rapscallion" and centers around Tallen and Truly Handsome's shame at raising a son (Hardly) who wants to be a poet. His father, you see, wants Hardly to go into the family business of saving damsels in distress. He'd rather write poetry all day. Wouldn't we all! As always, there's the villain (BOO!) by the name of Dirk Degenerate and the villainess (HISS!) Shirley Take, or Miss Take if you prefer.

It's raucous fun. Just when it appears that Dirk Degenerate may win the day, there's the chase scene, the reversal of fortune, and the good guys triumph in the end, just as in real life. There are can-can dancers, too, and olio performances between acts.

"The Rhyming Rapscallion" or "A Tale that Goes from Bad to Verse" or "Dirk and Tallen Handsome" (a multitude of titles!) opens at Cheyenne's Historic Atlas Theatre on Friday, July 11, 7 p.m. For complete schedule, go to http://www.cheyennelittletheatre.org/.