La Cuadra » From The Recesses

From The Recesses – The Death Of The Book

John Rexer — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:21:39 +0000

The Birth Of the Book – A Holy Rant

For almost 2000 years, on our half of the planet, when you said you were reading The Book, everybody knew which one you meant. And, it’s one Hell of a Book if ever there was, filled with subtext below subtext below subtext. Just take the first words of John. Not me, but the Evangelist.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word was with God? Then the Word was God? Forget the Song of Solomon, that’s some suggestively sexy scripture. By my reading, The Word and God got at it through some glorious, hermaphroditic auto-eroticism of self-pollination and ontological orgasmus, but begetting what?

Begetting: The Book.

Book.

Book, The Finite Infinite.

Book, The Bound Unbound.

Book of Winged Pages.

Book both Demonic and Devine.

Book that delights itself between the covers and was (one presumes from its first breath) an enfant terrible, telling embarrassing truths about its parents (particularly God, that stuffy old patriarch) in front of the guests. Both parents, Word and God, must have feared Book’s pagan and patricidal tendencies from the start. In the ancient, ethereous aeons, long before Sophocles sat down to scribble, the rumblings of Oedipal rage echoed through the halls of heaven.

God probably would have been safe enough until Book started spending time with His other scion — Man. Man and Book soon grew beyond Word and God, creating New Men and New Books with every passing generation. Books became companions to Men. And New Men were the ever multiplying audience for New Books. The physical unity of Book and Man mirrors that of Word and God — that sublime, textual, sexual, terrible and terrific shared existence between idea and reality, between potency and existence, between essence and descent.

Thank you, T.S. Eliot. Thank you, Word. Thank you, God.

Thank you, Book.

Book, without you, Man is a terrified and lonely creature. Book offers Man answers to the unanswerable and allows him to reach beyond himself, beyond his limited time. Book gives man his history and allows him to write his future. It is different than his relation with The Word or God. They are the progenitors. He and his Book are the present and coming generations — and Man abandons Book at his own great peril.

They are one.

The Death of the Book – A Temporal Contemplation

Recently it occurred to me that the book, the physical book, with a cover and pages, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, like God. And as with God, the worship of books may soon become an anachronism of tinier and tinier cults as decades pass on.

This would be sad beyond sad. I’ve learned to live without God. According to Nietzsche, he was gone a good 100 years before I showed up on the scene. Even though I was raised religiously, the whole process seemed cultish and reliquary — more sepulcher than cathedral. But the real soup in which I’d swum since my childhood was a hopeful nihilism, always buoyed by words, pages, libraries and bindings.

I’m not sure I can live without the book. Books give me hope and already (though I’m surrounded by parchment and print) I can already feel the cold, digital gloss as we communally click our culture into a world more virtual than visceral.

Give me the tangible! Give me something that does not require a battery or a plug, something that does not hum! Give me something that does not offend the beach or the hammock, or the stars or a pace that encourages both lingering and malingering! Give me a book!

Though the e-book has been around for several years now, and though we have all become accustomed to getting our news, communication and entertainment from our laptops or some permutation thereof, the decline of the book in public spaces did not hit me until recently. I was in an airport waiting to catch a flight and there were hundreds of other people waiting at their gates, too. I took a book out of my bag, a dog-eared Cortázar, and began to read. I felt peculiar, but I didn’t understand why. I almost felt shabby. Then I looked about and then saw it: No one else was reading a book, just me, the quaint, slow to evolve, soon to be extinct Luddite.

There were a few people thumbing at magazines but most everyone else was checking their iPhones, or pecking away at laptops. They were all part of the great universal hug of over connectedness. I felt very out of place.

A week later, back in Antigua, I went to my coffee shop, Y Tu Piña También for lunch. The place was full. I again looked about and saw that no one, not one person, was reading a book. Most were propped in front of laptops, emailing and Facebooking. One woman was reading a on a Kindle. Someone was reading a back issue of this magazine. But no one was reading a book. At a coffee shop!

Five years ago this would not have been. Some, many, most of the travelers enjoying an afternoon in my coffee shop back then would have been reading books, talking about books, exchanging books, connecting through books.

I noticed the same thing a few months later while riding a subway in New York. Nearly every person on the train was texting or reading from smart phones. Ten years ago one would have seen The City reading to itself even during rush hour. The subway ride used to be one of the most oxymoronic experiences of the urban world: in the most public space in NYC, everyone could retreat into privacy to read for an extended length of time. Alternatively, you could look into a fragmentary window of The City’s soul by peering around the train at the covers of the books your fellow commuters were reading — Bibles, self-help books, technical manuals, legal texts, romance novels, Dan Brown. By looking at the cover of each of their books, you could know something about them and about your world. They were part of our shared space, signposts in the urban wilderness.

And each book’s cover was a sly invitation, a conversation starter, part of the stitching that held the old, odd quilt of a culture together.

The Book was.

Some might say the incipient disappearance of the book is no big thing, especially as digital media are allowing us to transport whole libraries in devices that weigh nary a few pounds. Some will say that people are still reading — perhaps more than ever — and now they have greater access to any text ever written.

True. As far as that goes — and I’ll stipulate that it goes a long way. But that is not the point.

Consider how much is being lost. The medium, the specific technology of a book, is so much more than the words its binding contains. A book is a totem, a talisman, a memento, a badge, a quiet comfort, and old friend, a personal extension, an aspiration, a piece of art, a legacy, a traveler. It is something to love, to covet, to care for and to come back to. It is a physical thing that can be bartered, abandoned, hunted down. Books are old loves and new ones. They are measures of self. Of what else do we say with such relish, “I was too young when I tried that book. Maybe I should give it another chance,”? Books are constancy and change. Inspiration and exhalation. Books respire, perspire and they can expire. They live. Their backs can be broken, and in the right hands, they can be brought back to life.

From The Recesses – My Little Revolutionary

Michael Tallon — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:00:57 +0000

I used to muse with my colleagues at FDR High School in Brooklyn that one way we could make a million dollars and retire early was to figure out how to aerosolize Ritalin. At the time the diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and its meaner big brother, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were zipping through the nation’s schools like the flu in December — and Ritalin, a costly prescription drug, was on hand to treat the afflicted. I joked that we, as teachers, might want to take some of the control in our own hands and carry around little mace-like canisters of it for when the kids started to get a bit wild.

A student starts to wiggle and fidget during my lecture on agricultural discontent in the early 18th Century and “psssssssttt . . .”

Problem solved.

Now, of course, I wasn’t serious, and a modern psycho-pharmacopeia is a boon for many families, but one can also safely acknowledge that a percentage of those diagnosed ADD or ADHD are just kids bored out of their minds by school. It is not a remotely natural thing for fifteen year old human beings to sit in attentive silence on hard wooden chairs for seven hours a day. In generations before the advent of Ritalin, teachers got to crack a ruler across the knuckles of upstart kids to keep them in line, but our society is no longer comfortable with that method of behavioral control. We prefer our coercion to be invisible, internal.

Which in some ways is even more insidious.

A few years after ADHD, another diagnosis started to make the rounds: Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or ODD. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology, symptoms of an ODD child include frequent temper tantrums, excessive arguing with adults, rage and resentment, the questioning of rules, active defiance, and refusal to comply with adult requests. And you’ll forgive me if these parameters also seem to diagnose a very NORMAL child, too. And yet we medicate: sometimes appropriately, sometimes not.

Years back I had a wonderful kid named Jenny Limon. To listen to the scuttlebutt around the faculty lounge, Jenny was in danger of being diagnosed ODD. A number of my colleagues thought she should be either expelled or sent for a psych evaluation. For all I know, she may have been. As I recall, she didn’t even make it through a full year at FDR. She was a kid that sorely didn’t like busy work and she let her teachers know it. She hated the little things, like being given grief when she asked for the hall pass or to get a drink of water. She was known to throw a temper tantrum or two. She had rage. She had resentment. She relished arguing with adults. And she was one of my favorites, maybe because she was so confrontational. I’d love to know what became of her, but she’s one who ran past me while I was busy looking elsewhere in the rye. Yet, something tells me she’s going to be alright in the end. Maybe even heroically so.

The semester Jenny was in my class I’d been selected by my assistant principal to participate in a “staff development program” focusing on the use of dramatic techniques in the classroom. In general “the staff” made rude (and entirely predictable) hand gestures about “the development” being offered by the administration, but this program seemed like it might actually be cool, AND it would get me out of the classroom for a few Friday afternoons, so I willingly signed on.

After those few Fridays the two dramatists with whom I’d been training came into my classroom for a week of direct work with the students. At the time that class was wandering around the plains of Northern Europe in the early 1500s, so the director suggested that we get the kids to re-create, in sweeping terms, a scene that must have played across Europe in the days after Martin Luther, an oppositional and defiant young man if ever there was, tacked the 95 Theses to the doors of the Castle Church at Wittenberg.

We started on Monday with a short reading from Pillars of the Earth describing a town that was building a cathedral. To change the mood of a normal classroom, the director asked all the students to read the photocopied pages while wandering away from their desks. While the kids were reading, and looking very much like actors running lines, or monks studying a text, the director and I moved the students’ desks into a circle and laid a blanket over some book bags we’d placed in the center of the room. As we were doing so, the assistant director lit candles and pulled the shades, which darkened a room like a theater with only the curtain warmers left up. Then, as the students finished their reading, the director improvised a role — speaking as Chorus to an audience he’d slowly pull into the story. The blanket that covered the book bags became the rolling hills of a Medieval Town. He named the trades and titles of the city, stopping and gently touching the students on the shoulder incanting, “. . . smithy, fishmonger, tavern owner, lord . . .” Then, maintaining the magic that suspends disbelief, he spoke of a physical world into which we’d set our action, indicating where their homes would be, where their fields would lay, where the sun would rise and set in their valley. It was brilliant.

Then the director spoke of the abbey and the half-finished cathedral that sat upon the hill. He spoke of its history and our sacred duty to carry on the work that had begun fifty years before by our grandparents’ generation. We had the opportunity, here and now, to commit to the cathedral’s completion. To do so would put our children and our children’s children that much closer to salvation. Yet, sadly, the coffers were empty and we would need an enormous sum of money to complete the Lord’s work.

He then produced from his jacket a letter and told the assembled that he’d recently received orders from the Vatican. Construction MUST continue despite economic hardships, no matter what. Construction must continue.

His presentation was excellent. It evoked a mood. It employed accents and a visceral sense of the space. It was hokey as hell, but it brought a bunch of Brooklyn teenagers and their teacher into a phase-shifted world outside the normal classroom, and in the back of the room, oppositional and defiant Jenny was taking it all in.

The set up for the week was pretty straight forward. We were going to create a morally and ethically charged condition for our students and then make them fight their way out. On the second day we shifted the scene into the abbey itself. Candles were again lighted. An image of the Rose Window of Chartes was projected on the back wall of the room. Moments of silence were enforced while Gregorian chants played on my boombox in the background. The students were asked to take on the role of monks who had been ordered to raise money to continue building the cathedral. If a monk wished to speak, they need only stand and be recognized.

The problem was presented: We must build the cathedral, but where to find the gold?

From The Recesses – Middle Men

Michael Tallon — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:31:19 +0000

Tallons Pub, County Wicklow, Ireland

Some 15 years ago, my parents took a trip to the old familial sod in Ireland. They were traveling with my father’s cousin Barbara and her husband Joe. For as near as we can tell, it was the first time a Tallon from our clutch had returned across the pond since arriving in New York City sometime in the mid 1800s.

They were there for a holiday: to see with their own eyes the forty shades of green, to visit the Mother of all Pubs at the St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin and sample a pint of Guinness crafted from the dark waters of the Liffy. And if the opportunity arose, they were prepared to dance with leprechauns or lift a few bob from a pot-o-gold, should they find one.

Tied into the trip, however, were also the stirrings of a genealogical quest to find out who The Tallons were, and from whom we had descended. After emigrating to the United States, my father’s family made homes in various neighborhoods and tenement hells around New York City for generations — exactly how many generations we are still not sure. But when my Da was just an infant, his parents moved their family upstate to Binghamton, NY and away from the Brooklyn brood. My Da rarely visited his extended family back in the borough; and growing up, my brothers and I had only the faintest of contact with the Ebbets-Field-adjacent part of the clan. Yet, somewhere along the way, Da wanted a better understanding of our place in the scope of time.

That probably happened when he looked around at his three boys and realized that in the grandest scheme of things, once we have children, we’re all just middle men.

So after decades of short weekend vacations, often to Washington, DC or the Saratoga Race Track, my mother and father headed off to Ireland.

A year before that holiday the New York Times ran a story about The Wicklow Way, an old post road (and current hiking trail) that runs from Dublin City to Clonegal in County Carlow, a region — according to family lore — to which we’d been chased by a band of angry Frenchmen sometime in the late 13^th Century.

According to the article in The Times, along the Wicklow Way there sits an establishment called Tallon’s Pub, better known locally by a different name altogether; that name intrigued the group and they decided it was worth a look.

My folks and Da’s cousins knocked around Wicklow for a day, asking questions about the pub and any Tallons that might still be in the area. There are many of us still there, and, as it happens, the pub has been firmly held in Talloned hands since it opened in the late 1780s.

Upon arrival at the establishment (a stone hovel, just large enough for four stools and a few tables in the corner) the publican, a short and scantily-toothed woman in her 50s, greeted them warmly. They were the only customers she’d had in a few days.

She herself was a Tallon, and they got to talking about the mutual family name. Over the course of a few pints, she was kind enough to pull the leather-bound record book from under the cash box in the till. It was replete with royal charters on parchment and 18^th-century dispensations to sell booze under the authority of the Crown. That crown, of course, was foreign and it weighed sorely upon the proud Fenian heads of the Wicklow Mountain men. The governess noted that plans for The Rising of the Moon in 1798 were said to have been discussed in this very pub, likely with pro-generative Tallons on either side of the bar, ready to stir up a mess of trouble for the Brits.

Those Brits, as occupiers, knew that they had to allow for a certain amount of drinking amongst the indigenous population, but they also feared booze-and-romantic-gesture-fueled rebellion, and as such there were a number of blue laws established to regulate the publican’s affairs. One of those laws was the provision that on Sundays no Irishman could drink within three miles of his own home. This, effectively, shut down local pubs like Tallon’s one day of the week and the sheer mean-spiritedness of the decree might have drawn an earlier me to the field of battle, pint in one hand, pike in the other.

But on a Sunday, sometime when the great powers were fretting over the fate of Napoleon’s Army and Wellington’s fleet, a member of the Carlow constabulary wandered down the Wicklow Way and noted that the craic was overly good at Tallon’s Pub. He entered the doorway, saw it was jammed to the rafters with locals and was ready to shut the place down permanently, as they were in blatant violation of an order from the Crown.

Fortunately, the family has long been blessed with a silvery tongue and current publican Tallon was able to talk the officer down by explaining that, just hours before, his heifer was with calf, the calf was breech, and that without immediate intervention, both calf and cow would surely have died. Sweet Jesus, you should’a heard her wail! Sweet Jesus, the gathering storm! Sweet Jesus, the troubles it would’a caused come the winter!

He’d sent the boys running through the fields and over the stones to fetch help from near and far. God bless the neighbors. They were the finest neighbors in the entirety of the world and when they heard that it was the Tallons in need, they came on the fly and were able — through strong rope, joint action and the grace of a loving God — to save both heifer and calf, and now wouldn’t it a been both a shame and a sin to turn them away from the bottles after such excitement and decency? And did not the Lord Jesus Himself turn water to wine? Sure, He did. Sure, He did. And what day do ya’ tink that happened? ’Twas fer a wedding, it ’twas. The Wedding at Canna, it ’twas . . . and on a Sunday, fer sure, it ’twas!

That explanation and the proffer of free drink turned the officer’s mind, and a legendary session was held under the consent of the Crown. From that day forward, for several hundred years now, those along the Wicklow Way have called the bar The Dying Cow.

Most of the locals are still farmers, and many of them are my blood relations. To them I raise my glass.

From The Recesses – “Let’s Get Out Of Here, T.”

Michael Tallon — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:10:36 +0000

Just under a year ago Alex, a former student and close friend, called me with the news that Anna Parachkevova had been murdered by her husband while she slept in their apartment in Brussels. It was never a message I expected to receive about anyone I knew and loved, at least not from that part of my life. Certainly not Anna. It was the first of many disjointed, dissociated conversations I would have over the coming days as friends reconnected and tried to understand the metaphysics of what had happened. Alex, in that moment, was preparing to buy a plane ticket from New York to be with Anna’s twin brother who had already made the flight to Belgium. The most recent news, which was tracked and traded down the telephone line as if it actually mattered, was that Anna’s husband, after fleeing to Luxembourg, had turned himself in to the police. The Luxembourg police then notified Belgian authorities. Those authorities in turn sent officers to Anna’s apartment, where she was discovered lying in her blood-soaked bed, with not a single defensive cut on her hands and arms to balance out the twenty stab wounds they found in her neck and torso. Anna’s husband remains in a Belgian jail, awaiting trial. I have no idea what triggered such violence. I have not been able to discover anything about his intended defense or the sentence he is facing. After those first few frantic days it dawned on me that I just don’t care about him in the least.

I never visited Anna in Brussels. And, of course, I never witnessed the scene of the crime, but I’ve been haunted by a bewildering desire to know how the room appeared when the police arrived — as if understanding exactly what happened would allow me to fix it, to track it all backwards. As if I could categorize the scene with precision, then I could play the tape in reverse. Protect her somehow. That such a thing is irrational doesn’t matter. I want to bring her back home, and so I’m drawn there. But when I picture the scene, Anna always slips away. In my imagination I can walk into the room, see the pool of blood on the floor, the gory linens, the bathroom door ajar. If I’d like, I could sample the bottle of wine, half empty, that I imagine is on her kitchen table next to her laptop and ashtray. I can see the murder weapon thrown in the corner. I can browse her bookshelf and wonder what poetry she’s been reading most recently — but try as I will I cannot bring the image of Anna into that room. I’m always alone seeing a nameless tragedy. I cycle my vision from walls to bed to floor to window several times, but the scene is red and black — and there is no body.

Yet, every time I leave that room and go back into the hallway, there she is, leaning against the wall: her smile, her hazel eyes, her black hair, her fair skin. I can hear her voice clearly with its liquid Eastern European accent as she takes my arm and says, “Lit’s get out ov here, T.” I can hear her laugh, an unusually abrupt shotgun blast of both joy and derision. I can feel her leading me away from that abyss.

She won’t allow me to see her as she appeared in that room. And as I try to fight my way in to find her, I’m thankful for her vigilance, even as it carries with it an infinite sadness. It’s part of how I know she’s still here. I push at the edges, Anna pushes back.

You may not see it, but there is grace in that dance.

A few months back I started spending time with a Spanish woman from Extremadura, a province near the Portuguese border. On our first date we talked well past dessert and a second bottle of wine — one hell of a feat, given my limited proficiency in Spanish and her equally suspect skills in English, but we found a way. It took concentration and creativity and patience, but we were able to feel our way towards one another. The heart of the night came when I asked about her arrival in Guatemala a year before. A look came to her face that was both indefinable and self-evident. It was the look of someone who, just for a flash, left herself for somewhere far away.

She sat quietly for a moment, and then told me the story. Two days before she left Extremadura, Victoria was with her best friend, her non-biological sister Yoyita. There was singing, drinking, dancing and toasting the coming year of Victoria’s adventure on the other side of the world. Two days later Victoria was on a plane, the next night she was in Antigua. The following morning she checked her email and discovered that Yoyita had died, having somehow contracted an exceptionally aggressive form of cerebral meningitis that spiked her fever and killed her within 24 hours. She was 27 years old. Victoria didn’t have the money to turn around and go home. She never saw the body, never attended the funeral. On the inside of her wrist was a tattoo of both of their names.

Victoria’s hands turned upwards, her fingers flowered outward and then fell to the table. She looked at her wrist and touched the names.

“Gone, but not all gone,” she said in English.

I took her hands and we sat quietly for a while. I then told Victoria about Anna. It was the first time I’d unearthed the story since the previous summer sitting around a table at an Italian café in Greenwich Village with Alex, Anna’s brother and a few other central members of the tribe. Even then I’d never told anyone about my picturing of the crime scene. I tried to express to Victoria how not being able to see Anna in the room, but always meeting her in the hallway, meant that she was “gone, but not all gone.” I told her how two distinct worlds exist on either side of Anna’s apartment door, and how that leaves an uncertainty, a lack of finality and a nagging, yet reassuring faith that there is still something of her left in this world. I told her how trying to picture Anna dead is exquisitely painful, and yet how not being able to see her as dead is achingly beautiful. She nodded her head.

“Eso es saudade,” she said.

Saudade, she explained, is a Portuguese word that has no direct translation to any other language. It is a deep and resonant idea that a non-native speaker will likely never fully comprehend, but it is giving even at the edges. As Victoria explained that night, one manifestation of saudade is a longing for someone who is lost with the absolute assurance that that person is gone forever. Yet living in the heart of that finality is the smallest seed of hope for a return. Saudade is a keyhole in the door down a long, dark hallway through which you can see a small, distant light. Saudade is what the captain’s wife feels as she looks at the sea years after her husband was to return. Saudade is the hope that makes hopelessness so unbearable and yet so galvanic, so alive. “It is the most real feeling, the most real thing I know, but it can’t be touched,” she said.

I have saudade for Anna. Victoria has saudade for Yoyita. The last glass of wine was shared silently, her right hand resting in my left.

From The Recesses – God Gives a Wink

Michael Tallon — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:49:36 +0000

I don’t have any rational way to explain Oriel Laurent’s presence in my life, but I’ve got to chalk her up to something. When my non-religious friends hear the story, they tend to rationalize it as random chance, pure dumb luck. But they have the luxury of leaving her on the far side of their memories, an outlier best forgotten lest she disprove their hard-won atheism. I can’t do that. Alternatively, upon hearing the saga of Oriel, my religious friends tend to explain its meaning just as easily. They say, “Well, that’s quite a story. But everything happens for a reason, you know!”

But no, no it doesn’t.

I can’t accept that everything happens for a reason. Everything happens “for reasons,” sure. I punch you in the nose, your nose bleeds. But one singular reason, one Grand Plan which dictated in time immemorial that I would be compelled (as a cue from the same stage manager who directed Cleopatra’s finger dive into the asp pit and Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland) to punch you in the nose? Nonsense.

Just imagine the ennui of an Almighty in such a universal diorama. One grand plan would mean that he, at the very beginning of time made a wind-up toy of a universe and ever since has been watching from on high, alone and bored off his tits, muttering to himself, “And now they do this. And now they do that. And now they do this. And now. And now. And now . . .” Forever.

Yet, still we need (or at least I need) a way to explain the inexplicable flashes of spirit that punctuate our lives, and so my mind drifts to a different cosmology, a different Creator, altogether. Now, before you laugh, remember that there are billions of human beans on this planet that take the truth of talking snakes and burning bushes quite literally. There are a billion or so more that believe we live hundreds of thousands of lives (as many as there are leaves on all the trees of the forest) with a final reward of never having to live again. Also, there are those who believe that heaven is hierarchical and filled with willing virgins (somehow recycled, one would imagine). There the purest of the pure transcend to a penthouse in the sky, colloquially known as “7th Heaven” from where they can actually gaze upon the face of God.

In my metaphorical metaphysics, no one can actually see God. The room’s too crowded and the Creator too crafty for such a thing. In my mind, the unseen universe is a grand old speakeasy with an infinitely long, elbow-polished oak bar. And God? He’s the most silent of silent partner, hidden amongst the revelers, but watching. Always watching. Whoever he is — maybe tonight he’s that old man in the corner by the jakes wrapped around his dead-end whiskey, maybe he’s the high-roller in the banquette with the three dames from Chicago, maybe he’s your barman, so you might want to remember the tip — you’ll never know. Still, my God, he’s always checking out your action, watching how you treat the staff, seeing if you stand to greet both friends and strangers, eavesdropping on the stories you tell and noting how much you pitch in when the inevitable tragedy comes to visit the bar.

And in this world, every once in a while, when he decides you deserve a buyback or little special attention from the house, he gives a wink and tips his hat to the manager, and for a while anyway, your world becomes magical.

Oriel.

Back in 1982, when I was a fifteen-year-old kid, so gangly and weightless that my friends described me as “squiggly,” a French exchange student moved to my hometown. She was eighteen and after a few weeks, through miracles beyond mini-miracles, she moved into my house. She was exotic and brilliant, erotic and beautiful. Nothing at all like the girls I knew at Binghamton High School. One of the most important differences was that she liked me. She really liked me. Her name was Oriel Laurent.

Over the following months, Oriel was either my first or my damn-near first on just about everything, physically and emotionally. She was the first woman who let me linger in her eyes for hours. The first one who listened to my heart beating and told me her fears, her head on my chest. She was the first woman with whom I sensed the living pulse of it all and who showed me to look for beauty in the whole world around me. She was my first love. I fell for her in a way that, nearly 30 years later, I find difficult to explain. I was in tear-your-hair-out, shout-it-from-the-roof-tops love. And when she left, I was a mess of smoldering, emotional ashes. Something powerful had happened.

We promised to stay in touch. But after a few months, we failed. Despite it all, I was still a kid. But I thought of her every day and believed that I’d never love anyone again. I remember wondering if a day would ever pass during which she wouldn’t drop into my thoughts, if only for a second. And she did, for years, every time I saw the arc of a seagull or took a walk through Recreation Park, past the statue on the top of the hill, or smelled a clove cigarette. Much changed over the years, but into my twenties, Oriel was still in me. Deeply.

Years later, in the Spring of 1989, while walking home from the Ladbroke Grove tube station in London, I finally decided to give her a ring. I’d moved to London a few months earlier, landed a job at a West Kensington pub and had been thinking for some time that this was the closest, physically, I’d been to Oriel since the early 1980s. Why not give her a ring? The day Oriel left, she gave me a piece of paper with her phone number and I’d transferred it from wallet to subsequent wallet over the years. There was a phone booth outside a small grocery store near my flat. I went upstairs and emptied the pilfered pint glass that I’d been filling with pound coins on my dresser, took out her number and sat on the edge of the bed wondering if I should really do it after all. What if she’d forgotten me? We hadn’t spoken in nearly 7 years.

I took a few deep breaths and went downstairs.

I dropped in the coins and dialed the number. The phone rang six times, and just as I was about to put the receiver down, she picked up the phone.

“Oriel?” was all I said.

She paused for half a second, and said, “Mike? Is that you?”

The number I called was to her grandmother’s home in Nice. Oriel hadn’t lived there in years, but was visiting at the time. Within the frame of the ten-minute call she’d convinced me to come to her as soon as possible.

I quit my job, settled affairs around London, and a few weeks later, I was on my way to Paris.

From the Recesses – Do You See It?

Michael Tallon — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:11:03 +0000

Regular readers of this magazine likely know that I spent 13 years teaching high school in Brooklyn, NY, before moving to Antigua. They also probably know that shortly after arriving here I’d generated an enormous bar tab, and had to put myself into indentured servitude in the mezcal bar of Café No Sé to try and pay it off. And I’d be willing to bet that, over the years, a number of you have heard me joke that the two jobs require remarkably similar skill sets, because in both positions you have to know when to let the kids run a bit wild and have a good time, but also how to pull back on the reins when everything starts to go pear-shaped and sideways. And in either a Brooklyn classroom or a dark Guatemala bar, you often feel like you should be armed.

Any number of times down here, across the bar and in quieter conversations, I’ve been asked why I became a teacher. And I’ve been thinking about it lately as I approach the 20th anniversary of my first time in front of a classroom. The simple answer is: Mr. Burns, my high school Shakespeare teacher. The more dramatic answer is a retelling of the time when Mr. Burns first cracked my thick skull open with a particularly deft bit of magical compassion and saw some light shining through.

My hometown, Binghamton, NY, is a small city, so it’s no surprise that Mr. Burns, aside from being my teacher, was also a family friend, and one who lived a remarkable, adventurous life: World War II veteran, businessman, mayor of our hometown, friend to Bobby Kennedy, poet, painter, advocate for the mentally ill. And in his late fifties, wanting for a new kick, he became an English teacher at our local high school. By the time I had him as a teacher he’d been there for ten years or so, yet he still loved teaching and had passion for the job. Years later, as I watched fellow teachers flame-out within months, I came to understand how rare such a long-burning fire in the belly really is.

Teaching is a very hard job. It’s rewarding if you’re doing it right, but still it’s a job that carries lousy pay, crazily early mornings (what other job expects you to be at your desk and to function with a group of sullen teenagers at 7:15?), constant late-night headaches of paperwork and lesson planning, the more-than-occasional sociopathic colleague, the incessant ridiculum of office politics and a hierarchy of superiors, many of whom chose a path in administration when they discovered that they hated children.

There’s no getting around those realities, so if a teacher is going to keep their drive and their passion, they’ve got to have something else to spin their jets. Mr. Burns had it, and he inspired it in me.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally got Mr. Burns as a teacher. He was running an elective on Shakespeare and I wanted in. The word in the halls was that Mr. Burns was cool, and also that he was “an easy A.” Moreover, I’d been doing some acting in the school’s Shakespeare Club for a few years — as were many of my artsy, intellectual, adventurous and chemically-altered friends. At the time I wasn’t a bad kid, just kinda wayward, and if Shakespeare was a way to hang around after class with my friends, then fantastic! Bring on the Bard.

I remember digging school for the social scene, but academically . . . I just didn’t really care. I didn’t see much of a point, and I had a solid low-70s average to prove it. If the teacher was cool, I’d have fun and maybe learn a little bit. If the teacher was a jerk, then I’d block away incoming information like the Karate Kid. I took the entire academic experience without much concern. It was all, “much ado about nothing,” as far as I could tell.

But from the start, Mr. Burns’ class was different. With Bill, as I came to know him in the last few years of his life, there was utterly no sense of authority — which made it flat-out impossible to rebel against him. He treated his students with civility and decency (though he did possess a wicked “teacher’s glare” if you did anything mean-spirited). This method worked wonders with me, to the point where I took it upon myself to be his friend and ally in class if things started to get too far out of hand.

Our three big works that semester were Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Lear. In class we would sometimes read aloud for a few minutes. On Fridays we’d do something distantly akin to acting. Most nights we had a few pages to read, but the course didn’t hurt the brain and you could get away without studying much text. There was never a sense of great pressure, and at least half of the time in class we’d just talk about stuff. More often than not Mr. Burns would start class by telling a story about his family, often about his wife, Ellen, or their children, one of whom lived in the State Hospital up on the hill, institutionalized for most of his adult life as a schizophrenic. Or he’d ask us about love. In particular I remember the day that Bill asked whom amongst us believed in love at first sight. My girlfriend at the time, Karla, and I looked at one another and our hands shot straight up. Bill loved Karla and me, and when he saw us sitting in the back row with our hands reaching for the sky, he smiled and told us about when he first laid eyes on sweet Ellen.

There were some deeper, maybe darker, classes, too, spent discussing the cruelty of Fate or God or Chance. Or even if there was a God, and if so, how He could he treat His own creation with such heightened disregard. We spoke about what children should expect from their parents and what they owe in return. Then there was the class when Mr. Burns spoke of the bonds that can exist between the young and the very old — and personally, I like to think that he slipped that one in there just for Karla and me. I’d enjoyed these conversations thoroughly and obviously saw that there was some overlap between our talks and our text, but up until the day that I walked into class to find Mr. Burns staring out the window overlooking Oak Street, nothing much of it had really sunk in. Still, in his class, I was afforded the opportunity to speak and to be listened to. In return I got to share in Bill’s particular wisdom and Karla’s natural and deeply human insight. And even to gain some valuable fodder for deeper thinking through classmates’ comments from time to time.

But what seemed back then to be conversations designed for their ease, I came to understand as Bill’s pre-surgical prep for the time that he’d bust my head open in a way that I simply couldn’t have understood before the windowsill and the momentary madness that followed.

From the Recesses – Everything Was White

Michael Tallon — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:52:29 +0000

Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs. She said that the East Coast was in a deep freeze and that New York City was bracing for a monster snowstorm that might drop up to two feet around the Metro Area. I was telling a friend about the email and the impending storm as we were walking across town on our way to a meeting. We were running late, and, since I’m a New Yorker (and therefore genetically inclined to fast-walking even while holding hands on strolls through the park) I was practically at a jog. Being oblivious of so much in life, I was surprised when Ingi grabbed my wrist and indicated without words, “Hey, you’re walking too fast. Slow down!” She was right, of course. Who’s ever on time for a meeting down here anyway?

Charging around town like I’ve got a million things to do is the one part of my New York character that has been most resistant to change. But, intentionally, I slowed my stride and started talking again about the storm bearing down on New York and, for the first time in a long time, actually wishing I was up there. In general, I’ll take the 75 and sunny of Antigua six months a year. But there is something magical about a snowstorm, a storm so powerful, and so delicate, that it can take an entire city by the wrist and, without saying a word, convince it to slow down. And those days are important, because it’s tough to see the magic that’s everywhere around you if you’re constantly flying by at Mach 2.

Einstein said it better; at least he did according to the bulletin board Ms. Alvarez from the math department posted outside her classroom back when we were colleagues in Brooklyn. It read:

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Damn straight, Al, and anything that reminds us of that wisdom has a very special value. And snowstorms have a way of showing us the magic of it all.

After our meeting, as we were walking, more slowly, back across town, I found myself still lost in whited-out memories and I began telling Ingi about the last great snowstorm of the 20th century and how (as could only happen on such a day) I ended up sitting in a dark bar with a few old friends, listening to a leather-clad dominatrix sing a jazz improvisation off a 9th century Persian poem while sipping Irish Whiskey.

What can I tell ya? It was one hell of a storm.

In February of 1996 an enormous, cyclonic blizzard (a “crab-nebula of a storm,” wrote the New York Times) blew up the coast from the Caribbean where it met a wall of frozen air straight from the Arctic. The resulting cloud bank which stretched 1200 miles, from Maine to North Carolina, was 500 miles wide and, almost unheard of with winter storms, actually developed an eye, like a hurricane. By the time it had passed La Gran Manzana, 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most since they started keeping records back in 1869. At the storm’s peak, over a foot of snow fell in under three hours and the skies lit up all night with silent flashes of high altitude lightning. If a band of ancient people were to have experienced it, virgins assuredly would have been sacrificed to appease the angered Gods of Winter. To the jaded romantics of The City nearing the end of the millennium, it seemed like a far more humanistic God maybe just wanted to remind his hipster children that he still had the keys to the magic store and the legerdemain to blow our minds with one of his simplest tricks, the ice crystal. Watch my hands.

When the snow started to fall, I was sitting at Flannery’s Pub on 14th and 7th with my friend, John Moynihan. The newsmen had said to expect some weather, but no one was talking about any meaningful accumulation, so we weren’t paying it much mind. As such, the storm slipped in stealthily. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of the first signs of a truly beautiful storm – it somehow arrives before it’s there. Before you know it, it’s slipped in your backdoor and is sitting at the table next to you. When you do finally see it, when you first notice the rate of accumulation and the strength of the storm itself, there’s a moment of hope – real, honest to Einstein hope. I’m sure it’s biological. The mind quiets down, the heart opens, and the possibility of a purpose in this life reasserts itself in even the bitterest amongst us. I’ve become more of a cynic in recent years, but still well remember the fervent prayers of an innocent childhood offered to the heavens from a frosted bedroom window on those nights when the snows began to fall. In rapture and sincerity I prayed, as I’m sure you did, too, for once to a God we actually believed in, “Please, God, please…Let this one be real… Don’t stop snowing all night long. Please please please please please let the snows cover it all… and give us a snow day. Amen. Please.”

Instinctively, as he looked out the wall-high windows at the front of the bar and saw the storm’s force, Fergel the Barman’s jaw dropped. John and I saw his face and turned around to look out at the street scene, too. This one was real and it had us by the wrist. The city was wearing white.

When we pulled up stumps at the bar and headed home for the night there was half a foot on the ground and no sign yet of the plows. A few hours later I peeled my ears open just long enough to hear Howard Stern, himself, tell me that it was fine to go back to dreamland. There were 16 inches out there and the city was frozen to still-life.

From the Recesses – The Funniest School Riot Ever

Michael Tallon — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 04:53:47 +0000

With the exception of my first few years, I grew up in a neighborhood essentially devoid of ethnic diversity. When I was really young my family lived on lower Mary Street, one of the few blocks of Binghamton, NY that could reasonably be considered a multi-racial ghetto. Yet, by the time I’d turned five we’d managed to climb the ladder enough for my parents to move us to the side of town without epic roach infestations and straight-from-central-casting slumlords. But our new home on the West Side was also without our neighbor, the friendly but felonious Redbone, who used to bring my brother and me up to his apartment to share bowls of sugared popcorn when he wasn’t in jail, or my friend Big Mike’s dad, Charles, who was always warning us kids about Blacula and how he was gonna “get us” if we were bad, or our downstairs neighbor, Scrappy, whose jealous boyfriend once set our house on fire.

While Redbone, Scrappy, Big Mike, Charles, Darlene and Roy, Richard and Gloria and a host of other early friends remain part of my memory, the images from childhood that abide most are from the somewhat wealthier, and much whiter, side of town. And with Facebook now providing my generation a whole new opportunity to pore over grainy elementary school photos, I see that all my West Side friends until 7th grade were white. I’m wracking my brain, but I don’t think there were any children at Thomas Jefferson elementary school who drew from genetic roots outside of Europe: McCauley, Rapinski, McCormack, Polanski, and Rogan and Clements and Mott. Lawrence and Wilcox and Walters and Goosely and Keuter and Kirtland and Kirch. All white, all working-to- middle-class families. Still, because of the early years I knew other-flavored folk in the world existed. I just figured they were happily playing manhunt in their own neighborhoods.

At no point in my formative years, on Mary Street or Orton Ave, did I feel pitted against an “other.” On Mary, we weren’t all white, but we were all poor. On Orton, we weren’t all poor, but we were all white. Neither one of those conditions ever caused much thought. It just the way it was – and as such, there was peace.

Sadly, that innocent-if-untested sense of racial and economic unconsciousness hasn’t thrived as much as I would have liked it to over the interceding decades, as conversations overheard at some local Binghamton watering holes can attest. And while a strong argument can be made that the rising racial animus in America is being intentionally encouraged by Fox News and the radical right, in places like Binghamton it also has something to do with economic decline and demographic changes that make it dangerously easy to blame some nearby “other” for the troubles America is now experiencing.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and it is that hope which brings me to a retelling of one of the stranger experiences of my teaching career: participating in a beautiful night of cultural diversity at the high school where I worked and watching it collapse into a race riot, and yet somehow finding a bit of humor, and some insight, between the blows.

After getting my teaching degree from SUNY Binghamton in the early 1990s, I kicked around Upstate New York looking for a job, but as the long and painful economic collapse had begun, nobody was hiring anywhere along the economic food chain. After banging my head against that wall for a year, I expanded my job search to New York City and managed to get placed at F.D.R. High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

New York City, in general, and F.D.R. specifically, were gob-smacking eye-openers for me. Just listening to the universal chorus that assembled twice a day on the F-Train was both humbling and inspirational. And F.D.R. was a unique school in the NYC public education system. I was never clear if it was intentionally an immigrant funnel school, or if our demographics were just a by-product of being situated in a neighborhood that was half Italian and half Ultra-Orthodox Jew. Understand me here: we only had a handful of Italian kids in the school and no Hasidim. The Italians mostly sent their children to Catholic school and the Jewish kinder went to Yeshiva. So maybe we ended up with the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, African-American, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Moroccan, Georgian, Egyptian, Pakistani, Mexican, Ukrainian, Indian, Guatemalan, Guyanese, Haitian and Bangladeshi kids from the rest of Brooklyn by default.

Either way, the school was a veritable United Nations. When I left teaching six years ago there were 55 languages spoken in the school. I remember a 10th grader in my global studies class once telling me that at home he spoke “Old Farsi.”

“Hmmm,” thought I, “I didn’t even know there was a New Farsi.”

F.D.R. High School was one of the richest and most diverse populations you could find anywhere in the known universe — and generally peaceful. Sure, the kids self-segregated in the cafeteria, but in the classrooms and the school yard, they got along pretty well. As such, we held an annual “Multi-Cultural Night” to celebrate, and it was always one of the most entertaining and beautiful nights of the year. The kids who participated prepared for months. About 65 percent of our students were either just-off-the-plane, or just-crossed-the-river immigrants and this night was a chance, both for them and for the more established immigrant populations, to shine.

The night, in the Spring of 1999, started with performances in the school auditorium. There was a Russian jazz band — which might seem odd, but jazz in the post-Soviet era exploded from Belarus to Balakova to Brighton Beach with conservatory-trained young musicians longing to break out of the bonds of formality and classicism. There was Chinese opera, which is weird as hell and totally awesome. There was Greek dance and Vietnamese dance and Peruvian pan-pipes and ponchos. The Mexican kids sang Cielito Lindo, maybe better known as the “Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay . . .” song, and got the audience to “ay ay ay” along on the chorus. Seven beautiful Indian girls in saris danced interwoven circles as two turbaned boys engaged in a mock battle around them, each wearing more eye makeup than Clara Bow or the most depressed of your Emo friends.

And in the penultimate act a Pakistani girl danced herself right off the stage.

From the Recesses – Great Kids

Michael Tallon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:57:58 +0000

It is standard-issue humor amongst education professionals that the three reasons teaching is a great job are “June, July and August,” and throughout a 13 year career, I wouldn’t have disagreed. I’ll never understand the “two weeks vacation for your first five years” insanity of most professions in the States. Madness. Complete and utter madness. And Americans willingly do it, which proves that, as a nationality, we’re not very smart, or at least not terribly introspective about what’s actually important in this life.

As a teacher, I enjoyed every minute of my summer vacations, not to mention my winter and spring breaks and, since I worked in New York City, a Jewish holiday or two every few months, even for the goyim. Go Purim! But since we did have to spend some 9 months of the year in contact with the students, it helped if you enjoyed their company, too. And for the record, I really did.

I taught high school, so the kids ranged in age from 15 to 18, with the exception of a few outliers who couldn’t quite seem to graduate before their unemployment checks began rolling in. I loved teaching that age and could never get my mind around teaching the really little ones. All the drooling, the paste eating, the odd classroom vomiter, the crying, the cubby holes and the lice… Eggggghhhhh. Not in this lifetime, Bub. Even worse was the idea of taking on a middle school classroom. Not a chance; not even with reincarnation.

The late teens, however, is an age range when the hormone-to-humanity ratio starts to click back into a range of tolerability, but also before the reinforced fears of being judged by other people have hardened like concrete around their souls. I knew a number of colleagues who either didn’t give a damn about the students, or actively disliked them. They were the teachers who claimed that, “You can’t teach these kids anything,” which was total bullshit. If you paid attention to their lives, if you listened to their needs and didn’t give them grief about their diction or their previous life decisions, then they were generally cool with learning a few things. Some of them even worked at it. The elusive key was actually caring about their lives.

In my department there were a few teachers that really did love their kids, and we tended to gravitate towards one another. In fact, a few of us created a kind of bi-weekly ritual we called “Great Kids Nights.” Those nights, typically at a local dive bar in either Brooklyn or Manhattan, always picked us up. Matt and Brendan and I would get together and talk some shop, but as we’d managed to ferret out the downers of our department who would just rag on the kids no matter what, we’d end up trading stories about some of the funny or brilliant stuff that our kids came up with that week. The night got its unofficial name when we noticed that almost every story started with one of us asking the others, “Hey, do you know so-and-so? Great kid. Great kid.”

Those “Great Kids Nights” always put me in a better mood, and as it’s been a pretty rough month or so down here in Antigua, I could use a better mood right about now, so let me introduce you to Lady Macbeth Rios. I changed her last name in a pretty lame attempt to protect her privacy, but the Lady Macbeth part is completely true. She had a brother named Hamlet and another named Shakespeare. I don’t know why. Maybe the parents were admirers of the Bard. Maybe they were functionally illiterate and thought that the big ole book on the shelf was the Bible and they just pulled names at random. I can’t say, I never met them. You might say they were like ghosts.

From the Recesses – An East Facing Rock

Michael Tallon — Sat, 29 May 2010 03:50:22 +0000

Back when I was a teenager one of my favorite words was “cosmic.” It’s kind of embarrassing now, but I’m sure you had your own silly colloquialisms, so no harm done. I remember many “cosmic” moments in the adolescent years: like when Craig and I wandered up to Grand Boulevard and were hammered to the quick by a thought that strikes everyone at one time or another, normally when you’re 16 and a little bit high.

“Hey, when you look at blue and I look at blue, how can we know if we’re seeing the same thing?”

“Well, because… um… yeah, wow. That’s cosmic.”

“Wait, how would you describe red, like, if you couldn’t call it red?”

“It’s hot. Blue’s cold. But still… you could be seeing what I’d call green or purple and still say that. To really know I’d have to be inside your head. Or you’d have to be inside mine.”

“Man, that’s cosmic.”

Or then there was the time that Kathy — after holding a long hit of Leroy St. Purple — exhaled and said, “Infinity is… Incredible.”

At which we all weed-giggled, then conceded it was, in fact, “Cosmic, Kathy. Cosmic.”

Or then there was her observation one summer day at The Reservoir when she declared that “the only way this could be better would be if it were spring time and we were cutting school.”

We laughed at Kathy a bit then, too, but had to accept that, to the very grain, her observation was “cosmically true.”

And, you know what? Those moments were cosmic. They were times, however hokey in memory, when the brain took a leap beyond where it was to where it could be, even if it occasionally crashed down into the shark tank like Fonzie with a bad carburetor. Those were the moments when the mind broke out of the linear nature school tried to inflict upon us. And while I feel a bit foolish to remember once being that Cosmic Kid, I have to admit that those experiences were far more central in creating my character than entire years of CliffsNotes, chemistry class or calculus.

But the one early cosmic realization that stands out above all others happened years before I had ever heard of Kathy or Craig or smoked any chronic.

In the summer of 1979 I went on a weeklong canoe trip with my brother, Jay, and his Boy Scout troop on the Saranac Lake Chain in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. We were four nights into the trip and our Scout Master, Paul LeBlanc, had just whipped together a dinner that I’ll always remember as one of the best of my life. He called it Wheat-a-Moo Stew and it had it all – both wheat and moo. It was spicy. It was filling. It was shared around a campfire with my closest friends, and most importantly for a 12-year-old boy, it possessed the essential attribute for culinary perfection: the prodigious production of late-night, tent-bound farts.

After dinner, and before the poison-gas wars were to commence, the Patrol Leaders told some of the younger kids under their charge to police the campsite for any garbage that had been dropped and others to search for fallen wood to fuel the fire for the night. I wasn’t officially in the troop as I was a year too young, so having no Patrol and being a bit of a turd, I decided to sneak away and avoid any unwanted chores.

Like an Iroquois of my imagination, I crept out of camp and stalked the 100 yards from our campsite down to the water’s edge, trying to avoid stepping on twigs that might snap or breaking branches on trees that could give away my position. At the edge of the island, I found a big, flat east-facing rock. It angled towards the shore and away from my troop. I settled in, out of sight from Mr. LeBlanc, my brother and everyone on the island. Feeling satisfied with my successful escape from work, I kicked out my legs, scraped up some moss for a pillow, laced my fingers behind my head and lay down.

And then it happened.

I saw, right there in front of my eyes, the moon rise for the first time. Of course I’d seen the moon before. I’d seen it risen. But never had I actually watched it climb. I had never seen anything like it. Never had I witnessed a beauty sing itself into existence. And from the first note, the first glimpse of its white crown, I was stunned, enthralled. It moved perceptibly, it didn’t hesitate a second. For an hour or more I watched it rise, arc-second by arc-second above the High Peaks, not daring to wiggle a finger for fear of unsettling its progress. There was something about the near perfect stillness around me — just the water washing the shore, just the crickets’ legs and bats’ wings — that further illuminated the magic inherent in the moment.