Eugene Francois Marie Joseph Deveria, Portrait of Charles Theodule Deveria, 1864
I am woefully self-centered, I think. I don't keep an address book as I don't send letters. Every time I want to mail anything to anyone, I have to call or send them an email and ask for a mailing address. And I don't keep a book of birthdays. I have friends, and they have birthdays, but I never know. I can't remember the birthday of a single old girlfriend. I know my father's and mother's by heart, but only those. No other relatives.
I think that it might be because I've always hated my own. Birthday are awkward horrible days that bring unwanted attention, yet if it doesn't come. . . pills and alcohol barely succor the misery and loneliness. I am told that a woman's birthday is more important to her than is Christmas. I am told this by a friend in his seventies, so you will have to take that into account.
But I know my friend Q is like that. He is a social devil if there ever was one. He is part of Generation X, that woefully happy social party group who could not live up to their hype (see today's article), a group to whom "Generation" means everything, a generation of conformist. That's my friend Q.
O.K. I'm kidding him. Needling him, anyway, to take away my guilt and shame for having missed his recent birthday. I think it was Tuesday. I had to go on my faux-Facebook account to correspond with the fellow (not) making my Frankencamera, and you know how it works. There was a posting by Q that told everyone it was his birthday. Subsequently, he got about a thousand "Happy Birthday" wishes in various clever forms. I was going to link his Facebook page here so you could see for yourselves, but I don't know if he would be glad or mad. Seems to me the idea is to collect as many "friends" as possible, but I will have to leave this to the experts. Anyway, maybe you can go over to his blog and leave him a belated birthday wish.
Happy Belated Birthday, old man. Your self-absorbed friend,
What is Christmas?
ReplyDeletePerhaps someday students and scholars will clamor to read the blogs and responses shared by you two.
ReplyDeleteThey will try to decode the hidden messages and meanings - flock to listen to the songs, watch the movies and read the articles (which are obviously stored in some time capsule cloud vault accessed via technology Steve Jobs couldn't even dream about inventing).
Of course they'll need access to everything Barkley knew as well.
Once I was involved in a poetry class in which the teacher was a huge fan of Charles Olson - he gave us an assignment (something he was just really trying to figure out) to read and decode letters shared between Olson and Michael McClure. Fuck if I could figure it out.
:)
I'm up to Boston tomorrow to meet the son and check out the Degas exhibit. I'll let you know.
stimix.
Q, The holiday between your birthdays.
ReplyDeleteL, Our correspondence will be ranked right below that of Click and Clack.