Tonight the Dude Will Abide

Lebowski" style="border: medium none ; display: block;" height="440" width="298">Image via Wikipedia

By which I mean we are going to the home of H. and of N., a surviving Chronicle reporter, for a little New Year's Eve fictionary.

She is not the Dude. The Dude is the hero of the Big Lebowski and will be a topic of conversation if I am called upon.

Or if I choose to thrust myself forward, which I may: My wit bears fruit if watered, though isn't it a grand language in which one may be watered with things other than water? I mean after the second glass of wine I may feel like being heard. But with what thoughts shall I bruise the air?

Thoughts about the Big Lebowski. I just got done reading today's Arts section of the New York Times for the express purpose of finding stuff to talk about with the bright middle-aged things that we will be thrust among tonight.

And in an article therein I learn that The Big Lebowksi is:

the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings.

Its fans have yearly conferences at which they, well, vaguely drink, I guess, and play trivia with names and dialogue. (Nice marmot??)

And just now a volume of Lebowski Studies has been published by Indiana University Press, filled with so-called scholarly articles by so-called scholars, some of which sound like satire on themselves, but journalists are such little bitches, aren't they?

More than a few of this book’s essay titles will make you groan and laugh out loud at the same time (“ ‘The Big Lebowski’ and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”).

Is it all Pomo nonsense, applying academic electrolysis to the shaggier elements of popular culture?

I'll get back to you after the conversation tonight. I haven't decided which end of this stick I will grab and start flailing about.

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Midnight in California

Today Yesterday back in Florida, E. dropped a double-hung window on her fingers and thought she had severed her finger tips. That did not happen. When she visited her sister at the rehab center where the sis is recovering from hip replacement, she showed the wounded fingers to one of the nurses, who said she didn't need stitches.

But E. was very tired, depleted in mind and body, when I talked to her about 9 p.m. EST. She said she was going to put her mum to bed and then go to bed herself and not wait up till midnight.

Midnight here I was answering email and sipping a glass of heart-healthy wine for just that reason. Didn't hear any sounds of celebration. Odd thing. If you are with people, you feel the arrival of the new years. I suppose it has something to do with the sense that the passage of time has meaning only if it is shared, part of the call and response of relationships.

But sitting here by myself, I think: Did the clock stop? Did all the clocks stop??

Michael Robertson is Unwell

By which I mean I have a heavy cold but not the flu I'm pretty sure.

My symptoms are mild, though after I walked down to the shops on Lakeshore to buy my Trader Joe's pizza for my supper, I had to lie down. Still, anyone with the nerve and verve to walk down to Trader Joe's for one of their pizzas has clearly not been clapped with a serious case of anything.

By the way, the hed for this post comes from the play "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell," which I claim for my own because E. and I saw it performed in London in 1989 during our first trip to England with my late cousin Joan. It was a one-man show, starring Peter O'Toole, who looked a bit unwell himself, and this was 20 years ago.

The premise was that the eponymous character had just awakened to discover that he was in his favorite bar and that he had been locked in for the night. It was a rather neat frame and an improvement on the "well, hey there" convention of most one-man shows. A person locked in a bar might ramble to himself to while away the hours.

My cousin decided we should sit in a box. The view was exceptional. O'Toole did not seem to be feigning the dilapidation one associates with too great an intimacy with alcohol.

The title of the play referred to the not infrequent explanation in the Spectator for Bernard's absence. Apparently, it meant he was too drunk to write. I, on the other hand, am too sick to drink. Thus, I am rehabilitating the euphemism.

I really am unwell here on New Year's Eve, sick and alone if you want to be vulgar about it. I am incapable of accepting any and all invitations to come celebrate the new year with you.

But you already had heard I was ill. That is why you did not add to my discomfort by actually tendering an invitation, was it not?