Last night the park was crowded with ex-prep-school cross-country squad members, their hair tucked under weathered ball caps or pulled back into pony tails. Lots of women who were capable of committing to a sprint-finish after five miles in a killing heat hurtled forward on quads more sharply defined than many of the entries in my weathered Webster's 9th (Collegiate edition). There are days in the park when I pass two runners for every runner that passes me. Last night the heat and the humidity and my recent capitulations to sloth made me one of the slowpokes, the weaklings whose snail-pace spurs on the others to better performance.

As I attempted to push my body up the steep incline that loops back toward Grand Army Plaza, I glanced over toward Long Meadow on my left. Nothing like the photo you in the above link, it had a Serengeti-like pallor, a brown deadness that spoke volumes about the lack of rain we've had over the last nine months. To see its barrenness is to feel even a bit more worn-out oneself, as when you glance in a mirror on a day when you've put on some piece of drab and shabby clothing, and think "Do I really look that bad?"

The irony is that our current weather keeps us fighting not dryness but moisture; humidity haunts us like a big damp ghost, lurking behind the apartment door at the end of the day, grown strong on our despair (the air conditioner now only banishes the spectre fitfully). The plants and the soil are parched, but the humans are drowning.

Where I did much of my growing up, humidity isn't just a fact of life, it's one of the two or three facts that dominate life, like race relations, Baptists, and mosquitoes. But during the months of intense heat and moisture there's also frequent rain. Nary a summer afternoon in southern Mississippi passes that isn't marked by rising thunderheads, ominous booming, and (somewhere) a violent and satisfying shower. The embrace of humidity there comes with the promise that a beautiful cataclysm is in the offing.

This summer in New York, the storms have been few and far between, and even cloudy weather invokes merely a white haze with which to torment us. Struggling through humidity, and knowing that no rain is in the forecast, is like wrestling with perpetual writer's block: inspiration of any kind seems witheld, hanging in the air all about you, refusing to condense, to coalesce, to fall to Earth.

Scene: Two cops stand motionlessly looking over the scene of an auto wreck. They exchange a few words of dialogue in flat, deadpan manner, without changing the expressions on their faces, manifesting a parody of cop-show seen-it-all affect.

Theresa: I hate David Lynch.

Scene: A mysterious and criminal figure sits, isolated behind glass, in a chair in the center of a deep red room. He communicates with henchmen through some kind of archaic intercom arrangement..

Theresa: I hate David Lynch.

Scene: After bidding Naomi Watts goodbye, the kindly older couple she had befriended on the flight to L.A. climb into a stretch limosine. They are shown grinning with a sinister-seeming delight.

Theresa: I really hate David Lynch.

The shameful lack of posts over the past week has spurred me to provide, along with today's quiz, a brief and fascinating excurison into what is a doubtless a properly ignored province of literary history. Go and reheat your coffee before we get started.

All set?

In 1839, Philip James Bailey published an epic poem entitled Festus, inaugurating a (for a time) wildly popular movement in Victorian poetry that influenced, but didn’t include, poets like Tennyson. Bailey and his followers wrote gargantuan, sprawling poem-treatises which were meant to illuminate the “vast completeness of one master mind.” Bailey’s poem, seems to have been composed of a stew-like combination of Byron, Goethe, and Milton, and sets for its scenes various corners of the universe, and was admired so greatly that nine years after its publication there was an American collection of excerpts entitled Beauties of Festus Compiled with a Copious Index by a Festonian. One of Bailey's followers, Alexander Smith, sums up the movement’s philosophy and questionable use of imagery when the protagonist of his Life Drama calls poetry “the grandest chariot within which king-thoughts ride.”

The movement rose to its dizzy peak in 1853, when Sydney Dobell produced the poetic drama Balder, which contained the memorable lines:

Ah! ah! ah!
Ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah!
By Satan! This is well. What! Am I judged?

The satirists got to work quickly thereafter, and the “school’s” poetic credentials were revoked.

Still waiting for the actual question? Patience, my friends.

What was the name by which this poetic school – in all seriousness – came to be known?

HINT: The answer has an etymological connection with the name of one of the most memorable characters from Ivan Reitman’s brilliant 1979 Arcadian fantasy of youth’s exuberance, Meatballs.

No Googling, of course, or references to Jerome Buckley’s classic work The Victorian Temper, to whom today’s quiz owes much. First correct answer posted to comments wins a cup of tea and a photocopy of Keats’s very worst sonnet.

Kathleen has already opened the discussion (so germane to her project) on Dale Peck’s surprisingly lengthy takedown of Rick Moody, who in Peck’s article stands in for a whole crowd of no-good postmodernist fiction-bastards.

But you can’t call Peck a literary conservative, since he gleefully rabbit-punches Joyce (hates everything but Dubliners and the first half of Portrait) and gives the late Faulkner a hearty boot in the rear as he sends him out the door. It looks most like he just really wanted to rip into Moody and then was reminded of all the things he freaking HATES about other popular writers, and then it got sorta fun and he started scoring points.

I can relate.

Weirdly, this seems to be part of an (admittedly slow-burning) trend, started about a year ago by B.J. Myers in the pages of the Atlantic. Myers’s piece bugged me at first – it seemed so relentlessly crabbed – but his meticulous close reading of his targets proved effective in shining an unflattering light on some reflexively praised current favorites of the literary establishment.

Now the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley is weighing in, with an argument that sounds not unlike Tom Wolfe’s pre-Bonfire manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”, in which he said people should write more big, sprawling social-comedy novels like he went on to do. Yardley marches us dutifully through a mind-blowing dull Greatest Hits of American Literature and gives us his Harold Bloom-style rundown of “indisputably great” American novels (hung up on a literary nationalism which has all but strangled American fiction, by the way; there’s been an incredible unwillingness in this country to look to the rest of the world for good fiction. “Booker Prize” is only just beginning to mean something here), which apparently concluded with The Adventures of Augie March. I’ll confess – unlike Myers, who is prickly but convincing, or Peck, who is throwing bombs to sporadic but noticable effect – Yardley’s “State of the Art” is an article which seems chiefly dedicated to avoiding surprising statements or choices that will make you think.

Still, this “what’s wrong with these goddamn writers today” is a game that’s so much fun to play that I guess I can’t blame even Yardley for wanting to get in a few innings (he ends with a baseball metaphor. It’s after midnight. I’m out of ideas here). God knows if I had my own forum to yammer about all the writers I hate and why they suck, I’d love to start my own little crank-essay about literature and my discontents.

Say... wait a minute...

The sentence which follows doesn't seem well-constructed, lashing as it does an introductory noun phrase and a lengthy participle phrase to a clause that doesn't begin, confusingly, until the words "this man." But this paragraph did appear as the opening to an obituary in a major American newspaper.

A survey of the events of two-thirds of a century--telling a story thrilling to every patriot, instructive to every observer of these times, and helpful to citizens in every station and of all beliefs who wish their country well--this man, humbly born, taught only in the nation's school, conquers a place among the great ones of the earth, restores unity to a divided people, and dies a plain American citizen, lamented alike by grateful countrymen, loyal comrades, and admiring foes.

Who was the deceased?

As always, Google not, but consult the history textbook of the mind. First correct answer to comments wins a Barnes & Noble "Book Browser" t-shirt, size Large.

Following up on what's been going on in the comments to the last post.

A check of the Stooges Name Index shows a rare case of Moe getting beaten by Larry; mysteriously, "Curly" doesn't even make the chart. Must be a glitch.

The trend in the rise of retro names in the 90's illustrated: Isaiah and Hannah.

And of course, everyone in my generation experienced the historical phenomenon known as The Jennifer Explosion.

I don't exactly recommend that you read The Leftersons. Or maybe I do. It's evidence, the sort of thing that should be noted, tabulated, and for better or worse, remembered. (My favorite part is the Hammer-and-Sickle clock the Leftersons have in their house.) The strip is hosted by a site which proves how plastic American political and cultural frames of reference are: it makes the Bush family name synonymous with a kind of raw-meat-eating, take-no-prisoners, keep-hounding-the-Clintons-dammit conservatism that the placid, mildly peevish fratboy living at 1600 Pennsylvania would seem hard pressed to embody. But I suppose that just means he'll have to work at it.

The following is part of a very long piece of email which I got yesterday, from two youngsters who signed themselves "Ryan and Jacob."

"The people on this planet are all fakes because the societies have made them this way. Ideas that populate people's minds have no logic or purpose. Concepts such as religion, god, morality, individualism, freedom, identity, happiness, love and billions of others are all just memes. Like parasites they infect the minds
and spread from one person to the next. They have no point or purpose; they exist without any logical basis or foundation. The fakes are completely controlled by them, and they will never see beyond them. To not be controlled by them one must do more then just realize that they exist. One must resist any ideas that have no point, endlessly question, and never accept imperfection or compromise in any answer."

R. and J. left me with a host of keywords, which, they assured me, could be combined in Google by the non-fake in order to find them, so that the forces could be joined for the battle. Among the words are defiance, dream, logical, fury, and perfection. Googling the whole set doesn't lead to the boys, but it gives a view of how large their spam campaign was.

One wonders what Ry and the Jakester would have to say to the U.S. Congressmen objecting to an HIV+ character on Sesame Street. Apparently our representatives are concerned that because the South African version of the show is going to address their devastating health crisis, our response should be to worry if American kids are too fragile. I honestly don't know what our young iconoclasts would think -- their lofty relationship to humankind doesn't leave me much room to speculate. But I'm pretty certain I know how this is likely to play out in The Leftersons.

Finally, speaking of lofty evaluations of humankind, the rib-tickling Martin Amis was up to his usual good-natured antics in the Guardian last month, in an article reprinted in the current issue of Harper's, which accounts for my lateness in seeing it. If you haven't already, you must check out this classic little collection of corkers like "Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful." That's what you have to love about Amis -- he's always got a line like that to give you a little lift on a weary day.

Looking for a new place to live -- particularly in New York -- is not only a good way to get quickly very tired (tired of walking, tired of real estate people, tired of the smell of musty basements), but it is a good way to ensure that one has neither the time nor energy to weblog. Because now that I've seen the true state of my real estate future, I am freshly freaked out about money in general, which in turn gets me freaked out about my job, which in turn makes me work longer hours, which in turn leaves me no steam to write after a Sunday of reviewing various former henhouses in Central Brooklyn.

But such dereliction from my editorial duties, friends, has resulted in a veritably sky-high pile of Things to Be Shared in this space. I therefore offer this little teaser, this promise of good things to come -- possibly even in a few hours -- including right-wing comix; insane teenage spam manifesti; Congressional Muppets; and Martin Amis.

We apologize for the brevity here; the week has disappeared like a child star's appeal after the voice change. We offer a little rock history this morning. (Gavin, stay away from those bookshelves...)

Among the ten first million-selling rock 'n' roll singles in the United States, three were performed by black men, six by white men, and one by a white woman (Gale Storm with "I Hear You Knocking"). They were all released in the 1950s, as one might guess.

Two out of the ten were performances of the same song, both released in the the same year, one performed by a black man and one by a white guy.

What was the song? (Bonus: name the two performers.)

As usual, Googling is contrary to the spirit of the thing. First correct answer to comments wins an obliquely appropriate postcard photo of some porky politicos found at the Museum of the City of of New York.

Rough Outline of Last Night's Dream

1. Scenic territory: a large "magnet" high school in a suburban area
2. Plot: Must steal immensely valuable something or other from school building, now forgotten, during the course of an ordinary school day. A confused but ultimately successful heist ensues.
3. Characters: Myself, Sean & Sheri, Robert DeNiro, the actor who plays "Mini-Me" in Austin Powers
4. Detail: I have never found the "Mini-Me" thing to be very funny
5. Complications: Once the item (jewel? device? sandwich?) is recovered, I have strong suspicions that DeNiro and Mini-Me will try to betray and kill me.
6. Climactic scene: As I flee the high school in terror that murderous DeNiro is going to put a bullet in yours truly (Mini-Me has left the scene, thank God), I run into Sean & Sheri, who are driving home. I convince them to give me a ride, but soon we are seen by DeNiro, who is riding a motorcycle along a parallel roadway, horribly elevated to our left -- he can see right into the back seat where I am crouched down! Sean urges me to cover myself with a blanket, but it is too late to avoid detection: the murderous actor/villain has leapt into the car with us, and orders Sean to help him kill me.
7. Unexpected twist: DeNiro doesn't want to kill me, but instead needs to jab a long pipe through the floor of the car, past me, in order to somehow, in violation of the already-flimsy reality clearly established by the dream thus far, blow life-giving air to trapped teenagers back in a part of the school which has been filling with water.
8. Shift in perspective: Now that I (and the drowning students) are out of danger, the visual scene shifts (I become a non-participating viewer in the increasingly film-like remainder of the dream) and a teacher emerges from a storage room bearing two Torah-like scrolls. She explains to another teacher that she's just figured out that the scrolls are incredibly valuable Kabbalistic documents, worth incalculable amounts, and much more valuable than whatever it was that was just stolen from the school.
9. Script Credit: Just before I awaken, it is revealed that the author of all of this is, of course, David Mamet.

We are fortunate enough to have friends who have a family place on a lake not much more than an hour north of the city – it has a deck and a hammock under trees and a very pretty view of various waterfowl doing their waterfowl things on the lake, and a rowboat docked there so that if you wanted to go bother the waterfowl up close you could do that sort of thing. It is in short a tremendously fine place to spend a couple of days when NYC’s atmosphere resembles nothing quite so much as a mangrove swamp at high noon. I spent Friday night unable to say much more than how I really hadn’t been able to imagine how nice and cool it would be there, and how lovely the breeze was, and how really surprised I was at the difference in temperature, and could I by any chance borrow a sweater?

On Saturday, full of the energy that comes from being rescued from the urban sauna, we all sauntered down the road to check out the annual post-Independence-day party held at the neighborhood “beach” (a small zone of sand from which hardy youngsters could splash about in the shallow lake) under the auspices of the neighborhood association. There was the usual assortment of grills and grillables, pillow-sized bags of snack product, assorted and rather delicious-looking versions of potato salad. In order that a sense of carnival might be truly invoked, several rented machines were in evidence: a child-sized dunking machine, which allowed a succession of gleeful victims to perch on a platform above a small tub of cloudy water, there to await the tennis ball that would collapse the board and plunge them into their lukewarm fate; a sno-cone making machine, which looked to have dated from the early years of the industrial revolution (though the flavored goop which was to go atop the shaved ice came in several hues probably not seen prior to the nuclear arms race); and one of those inflated chambers we used to know as a “moon walk”, designed for the bouncing-around pleasure of 5-10 kids. The activity in this one resembled a preteen mosh pit, and the younger kids hovered meekly around the periphery, waiting for the lumbering seventh-graders to tire of their WWF antics.

There was also a DJ. At the edge of the action, a bank of machines under a tarp, and a busy figure plugging multiple devices together, testified to the presence on the scene of an Entertainment Professional who would make, by his attention, the afternoon’s gathering not merely a party, but a par-tay. A few minutes after we were there, he got things off to an official start with a club remix of the theme music from the Fox network’s regular NFL coverage (I’m not kidding or exaggerating. That’s exactly what it was. I would have been no more surprised to hear a hiphop version of the theme to “ABC World News with Peter Jennings”). After laying a sanitized Kid Rock cut on us, he then launched a version (Lee Greenwood, I think) of “God Bless America”, which he embellished with some voiceover of his own, welcoming us in an aggressively hearty way to the party and suggesting that by enjoying ourselves we would be telling “someone who wants Americans to cower in fear this weekend” that he could “suck an egg.” (He repeated the phrase “suck an egg” for emphasis.)

We headed for the house at about this point, since it was well past lunchtime, to say nothing of hammock-time; and all and sundry made for various comfortable spots (such as the hammock) and prepared to enjoy a leisurely afternoon of Pretending to Read. We thought nothing more of the DJ.

Until the stillness of the afternoon, and the delightful efficiency with which sound carries over water, brought us back into his world. We were, it turned out, his captives for an afternoon. We heard the Macarena; we heard “Red Red Wine”; we heard that really stupid reggae cover version of “Angel of the Morning” (which prompted a lot of discussion about whether or not Juice Newton could be referred to as a “singer-songwriter.”) We heard a number of things that we usually hear in sports arenas, but with thumping bass added. Then the karaoke-style voiceovers commenced. I have repressed much of this, but I still have echoes of “My Way” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” contaminating my mid-short-term memories. When he started in with Carlos Santana (“Smooth”), I actually contemplated going back there to plead for mercy.

Eventually he stopped, and the sound of his stentorian voice and his ill-selected beats faded like a bad dream. But I will never forget him as a testament to the power of a single person and some amplifiers to really crap up a beautiful place.

A quick one for a holiday weekend:

On this day in 1865, a former Methodist minister established in London the forerunner of an organization that expanded to America fifteen years later, after changing its name to the one we know it by today. Among its interesting features were a belief in the power of music, and its provision for absolute equality of women within its organization. When the founder died in 1912, Vachel Lindsay wrote a moderately famous poem imagining his entry into the afterworld.

Although its most dramatic and visible impacts on American culture were in the first half of the twentieth century, the organization is still quite busy today.

What’s the name the organization eventually took?

As usual, answer without Googling or consulting your great-grandmother, who is trying to watch The Osbornes in peace. First correct answer posted to comments wins a Sanrio "Bad Badtz-Maru" eraser holder.

This story is a little old by now, but I just came across a mention of it in some publishing industry newsletter that circulated through my cubicle today. It seems that the Business Software Alliance has found common cause with Sheikh Ibrahim Atta Allah, who Law.com calls "the highest authority in Sunni Islam."

I find the BSA's embrace of Islamic clerical authority more interesting than the edict itself -- one presumes they keep at hand an expert staff of religious scholars on hand to enable them to parse the difference between righteous (and software-industry-friendly) statements of religious thinkers, and those which should be dismissed as not in line with the true will of God (sure, it's great that intellectual-property theft is haram, but what about those prescriptions against usury? Getting your startup financing becomes a mite more tricky if you have to follow the Sheikh on that one).

As regards "the highest authority in Sunni Islam," I note Google search on that phrase brings up a somewhat differing result in a BBC story. At least we know someone is in charge, even if we're not quite sure who.