The Strawberry Blog

In one week I have been socially thwarted by a Puerto Rican banker, inadverdently dissed by Quincy Jones, and chatted to, by, and with former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.

Pinsky and collaborator pal Michael Mazur were speaking as part of the University of Southern California’s “Visions and Voices” series (Quincy Jones will be there next month). As my professor friend and I tardily approached the lecture hall Thursday evening, we were stopped by a woman outside.
“The lecture has already started,” she said in a stage whisper and horrible skirt, “so please be quiet when entering the hall.”
Please be quiet? We took our seats and, as Pinsky and Mazur discussed collaboration on Dante’s Inferno, I stewed. Quiet? As in refrain from alerting the press, cueing the trumpets, and striking up the fanfare? Did she mean that kind of quiet? As the discussion carried on colorfully on stage I continued to ruminate on the meaning of this poorly outfitted, presumptuous nitwit, wondering why I didn’t fire back with something like “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an ill bred undergrad?” or “Gee thanks, I know I look like Lindsay Lohan but I promise I’ll behave myself in the auditorium.”
After these fantasized fair to middling retorts, I promptly got down to the business of listening. Listening and scribbling, which is what I do when I’m in lecture halls with brilliant minds and the palpable energy of enlightened people.
People who are in The Dante Club, as Mazur calls it, the unspoken guild to which one is automatically assigned when working on a translation or illustration of Inferno—a collaboration with every other artist in history who has ever worked on Dante.
It’s been a long time since I sat down with Dante’s Inferno and curiously, I had forgotten how, in Canto V, “Carnal Desire,” those fixated on sexual thought walk in a perpetual hurricane. And it gave me pause: what, then, might be the punishment for Gross Negligence in Engineering?

What would Dante do?

Might the punishment entail a perpetual state of coitus interruptus? Or prostatic congestion? Or would it involve drinking enough toxic concoction to make one sick—but not mortally injure? He might condemn the Army Corps of Engineers to be ignored in perpetuity. Or, confine them to a state of hopeless struggle, forever building a levee that is never strong enough—one never good enough for the people who commission it. That seems fair enough in hell, don’t it?
Dante ends the Inferno with this:
“Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
The other Pinsky, Dr. Drew, the M.D. better known for his radio show Love Line, in his recently published study cited that stars—or, more precisely, celebrities—are more narcissistic than the rest of us. No shit, Dante! The star of our evening, Robert Pinsky, very un-egotistically inscribed my book thus: “Best Wishes.”

So, maybe—just maybe—there are stars at the end of hell. If they’re Dr. Drew types and not the celestial ones, you’ll find me sipping a cocktail in Dante’s Fifth Ward—waiting for the lust filled to come in out of the hurricane

September 2006

Last week I attended a Jewish Sabbath dinner on Friday (a seder) and went to my first Los Angeles church service on Sunday. At The Forum. That’s right—the arena where the Lakers used to play; where Madonna rehearses for world tours.

I was a little skeptical about The Forum: how would the music fare at this non-denominational church-arena? How could it compare to New Orleans? Would there be brass? How could there not be brass? If Glenn David isn’t singing, then do I really want to be there? I had a litany of questions for my poor friend. I was such a pain in the ass about it, anyone else would have said, “You’re so concerned about the music? Stay home with Johnny Coltrane then.” But Nicole is a patient friend—a virtue with which I am unfamiliar. Spiritual and fairly regular about her bible study, she’s far too kind to let a little music snobbery get in the way of soothing my soul.

In the same way that my Jewish friends would never serve sweet traditional wine at their sabbath dinner because (A) They’d be celebrating alone, which means that B) in effect, it would get in the way of the communal spirit. My lovely friend, who actually hates chicken but felt compelled by tradition to make her maiden cooking foray into that pedestrian bird, blessed the garlic-spiked fowl in Hebrew—a language almost as unmusical as Kevin Federline. An unfortunate mix of spitting, choking, and complaining, it is jarring to the senses seeing a beautiful woman speaking such gutteral words. Like using expletives in the nave. At least German is…funny. I always laugh at the thought of myself barking German orders to my late (incredibly German) Shepherd. But Hebrew isn’t funny. It’s depressing. The seder—which was only religious in the sense that the chicken was baptized, kosherized and otherwise sanitized—was beautifully scored with iPod shuffled spirituals including The Harmonizing Four’s “Motherless Child,” a rendition that remains unparallelled. It’s like a world record in dulcet harmony, The Guinness Book for bass. How low does he go? How can he go that low and still sound like God?

Doesn’t matter; at least it offset the Hebrew. There was all kinds of good music that night while we downed Spanish and California bottles and tore the flesh of figs. As I marveled at their rice, I wondered too—perhaps to the point of blaspheme—how Christ got his word across if he was speaking Aramaic? It’s not exactly Italian. The rest of dinner was Hebrew-free, free-range fowl and free-flowing bottles and conversation, while my beloved wowed them with a limited but impressive Yiddish vocabulary. Impressive because his people hail from Acadiana, South Louisiana–essentially, they’re all from Spain.

How could the Forum on Sunday beat the seder score?

Forty minutes of song and praise lifted my eyes to the rafters where sodium lights threatened to make me squint, so I blocked them with my hands—which made it look as if I were prematurely raising the roof instead of protecting my vision. And high in the stands were flag draped liturgical dancers, little boys and girls, grandmothers with bellowed fabric. Sure, the music was amplified, I didn’t recognize a soul, and I couldn’t make out the faces except when I looked at the giant screens, but the gospel was good, the people were lively, the spirit manifest. After a chorus or two, in good spirituals style, you picked it up and carried it along… with the 5,000 other churchgoers. L’Chaim!