The NYTimes reports on our ongoing war against the grotesque—and consequently against fun, against childhood, and against the imagination. The war’s a pity, since it will never be won.

By excising Scream masks from public schools, officials will only encourage children to go home and experiment in the “Satanic” (as Halloween is described in the Times piece by one Illinois school district spokesman) on their lonesomes. Sales of Left For Dead and True Blood DVDs will rise. The truly maladjusted will continue to torture housepets and use depth charges to destroy their parents’ bowls of Grape Nuts. When all is said and micromanaged, keeping schools free of darknesses, real and imagined, will not drive those darknesses from the world.

Meanwhile, children will miss out on a wonderful holiday, a non-religious day of atonement on which reckless merrymaking, sugar-consumption, and grotesque miming lead us down too-often unexplored paths in our minds.

Grotesque miming does us a real mythological service, I think: It allows us to confront our demons in the daylight, in the shapes of our friends and frenemies. A dance party full of Franken-people, vamps, James Browns, cosmonauts, Elvises, and unicorns becomes a vivid, tangible dream wherein before there was an empty floor and a pair of speakers. (Nightmares serve a similar function and can be similarly cathartic.)

A classroom full of Kanyes and zombies (oh my) asks children to externalize their own fantasies and terrors, and to confront those of their peers. The pooled child-mind purges itself of gorillas, Beyoncés, pirates, and ghosts. Darkness is made grotesque, overwrought, impossible, silly—in a word, real. And thus its power vanishes.

I wonder what is to be learned in a realm of positive costumes, where approved archetypes (unicorns) and the mimesis of role models (Beyoncés) are okay, but confrontations with fears real (pirates) or imagined (zombies) are not. On a day of what should be cathartic, real-problems-preventing rule-breaking, the enforcing of vague rules of costume-etiquette and pseudo-taste strikes me as imagination-hamstringing, at best.

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

• Novel-T Bartleby shirt. 4 mai scrivenin.
• Animal mummy, pref. a chimera (duck + snake + autistic rabbit; leopard + macaroni; two cats who hate each other + okra + Nile heron missing right wing; &c.).
• Box of crayons w/Latin color names. (1st grade teacher: And what color is your bedroom painted, Wythe? Me: Smaragdinus. With a bright xanthinus architrave 4 mai G.I. mothafuckin Joes and NaS cassettes.)

It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Many moons back, my friend Seth, who writes under the nom de plume “Sparrow Hall,” asked me to work with my friend Sam, the rock paragon behind the bands Arpline and Courtier, to create a tripped-out hip hop song for the soundtrack to Sparrow’s new… novella?

He wants a soundtrack to a story? I thought, remembering McSweeney’s #6, for which They Might Be Giants and a few other decidedly un-crunk musicians created a soundtrack, one designed to exactly complement the stories in the journal from front cover to back.

But Seth’s idea is more grand in scale: He wants to publish stories and books that involve rich multimedia packages, including songs, videos, dances, &c., each of which reflects rhizomatically the progenitive central piece (in this case, a novella about love and memory loss called Two Blue Wolves).

I had a blast making “Stranger In The Strangest Land,” the ant-mentioning ekphrastic song-about-the-novella with Sam. I also ended up editing the novella.

And now it’s all finally available, on SparrowHall.com. Check it.

The soundtrack features music by a dude from Elefant and many other fascinating artistic souls, including several good friends.

Also, 15% of sales benefit the Alzheimer’s Foundation.

So once more, Gentle Reader, I murmur “check it” into the windy crevasse of the internet. Stories have finally entered the post-postmodern age.

Gentle Reader, check it: “Six Meditations On Re-Reading,” a short essay on reading and re-reading and re-re-reading (&c.) whilst trying to learn history, all of it. Thanks to Electric Literature’s Outlet for the hook-up.

So there’s a British prisoner named Charles Bronson who named himself after the actor Charles Bronson. And this prisoner has, courtesy some anonymous British media djinn at Wikipedia, gifted us with a truly worthy list for us. From Wikipedia:

Bronson has been involved in over a dozen hostage incidents, some of which are described below:

• In 1994, whilst holding a guard hostage at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
• In 1998, Bronson took two Iraqi hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh prison in London. He insisted his hostages address him as “General” and told negotiators he would eat one of his victims quickly unless his demands were met… He later told staff: “I’m going to start snapping necks - I’m the number-one hostage taker.” He demanded a plane to take him to Cuba, two Uzi sub-machine guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cup of beans. In court, he said he was “as guilty as Adolf Hitler.” He said: “I was on a mission of madness, but now I’m on a mission of peace and all I want to do now is go home and have a pint with my son.” Another seven years were added to his sentence.
• In 2007, two members of prison staff… were involved in a “control and restraint incident” in an attempt to prevent another hostage situation, during which Bronson (who now needs spectacles) had his glasses broken. Bronson received £200 compensation for his broken glasses, which he claimed were made of “pre-war gold” and given to him by Lord Longford.

A fascinating monster, an artist, or an aberration utterly unconnected with the reality in which the rest of us participate every day? Gentle reader, you make the call. I am too busy laughing my ass off at “pre-war gold.” It’s even funnier if his specs really were given to him by a Lord.

But I’d rather not know the truth of these tales. The man, a bad-ass (pointlessly so) in real life, invented himself in homage to an actor who played a bad-ass on the big screen. The amphisbaena wriggles in both directions.

I haven’t read the work of recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, a Romanian-German novelist, poet, and essayist who’s married to a guy named, no lie, “Richard Wagner.” And yet, skimming Müller’s Wikipedia entry, I am tickled various shades of light red by her titles. I’m a big fan of mysterious and engaging titles, and now I’d like to read a few of these books. Perhaps others share my epiphilia*.

A selection of Müller’s titles, courtesy Wikipedia:

• Drückender Tango (”Oppressive Tango”), stories, Bucharest 1984
• Wie Wahrnehmung sich erfindet (”How Perception Invents Itself”), Paderborn 1990
• Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (”The Devil is Sitting in the Mirror”), Berlin 1991
• Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (”Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter), Reinbek by Hamburg 1992
• Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (“A Warm Potato Is a Warm Bed”), Hamburg 1992
• Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm (”The Guard Takes His Comb”), Reinbek by Hamburg 1993
• Angekommen wie nicht da (”Arrived As If Not There”), Lichtenfels 1994
• Hunger und Seide (”Hunger and Silk”), essays, Reinbek by Hamburg 1995
• Der fremde Blick oder das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne (“The Foreign View, or Life Is a Fart in a Lantern”), Göttingen 1999
• Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (”A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot”), poetry, Reinbek by Hamburg 2000
• Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird (”Home Is What Is Spoken There”), Blieskastel 2001
• Der König verneigt sich und tötet (”The King Bows and Kills), essays, Munich (and elsewhere) 2003
• Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (“The Pale Gentlemen with their Espresso Cups”), Munich (and elsewhere) 2005

*I think this technically means “love of surfaces,” but since we often use epi- to indicate “something to do with titles,” I’m sticking with it for now. Suggestions as to a better title-lurvin word = welcome.

My man Roger Cohen writes, in the New York Times:

I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits, and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.

The final sentence of the four quoted says it all. Why wouldn’t we want a public option again? Oh yeah, millions of dollars are lobbying against it, and money weighs more than sound logic, goodwill, public service, or common sense.

But, the healthcare debate aside, we must also consider Mr. Cohen’s use of a powerful verb in “chillin.” Chillin. Chillaxin. The only verb in the infinite tense. Synonymous with “lazin” and “nothin-doin.”

The verb is contrasted with labor, a Marxian work-horse who functions more typically as a noun, an unit of economic power, a push towards birth, a word championed by Soviets and grandfathers. Rugged types.

Cohen goes on to point out:

Individualism is more “rugged” when housed in a healthy body.

Word up, Mr. Cohen. Individualism is the jam, for sure, but why should it conflict with a public option (option being a key word) for healthcare? Options are, generally speaking, most chill, in the adjectival sense, in which something “chill” (or, strangely enough, “ill”) is dope, or is hell of all right by this guy [points to self w/thumb].

Word up, indeed, Mr. Cohen. Now, if only I could make this common cold I’m getting chill out… perhaps with a pill…