Howdy folks:
Welcome to Michael Perry’s Voice Mail, episode 112. This one’s available to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Click the player above to listen.
This is also where Mike’s “Roughneck Grace” columns will show up in the future (see text of today’s coumn below). For an update on all that, and more information about what Voice Mail is going to be like going forward, please see this typewriter post.
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Thank you from Mike, and thank you from the Sneezing Cow crew. See y’down the road.
ROUGHNECK GRACE — HUMIDITY, TARZAN, AND FRENCHNESS
The humidity today is such that the dew, rather than sparkling, was still sulking on the clover come noon. My shoes got soaked on the way to lunch. I broke a sweat while sharpening a pencil.
This is the Wisconsin that surprises outsiders raised on booming invocations of “the frozen tundra.” Little do they realize that come summer the land of cheese goes all jungly. Yesterday I spent some time cutting brush and trimming trees, and in addition to sweating like a sumo wrestler jazzercising in a sauna, I was reminded again how many vine-y things weave themselves throughout the pines and popples and oaks and maples. I flashed back to my days spent reading Tarzan books.
Folks tend to forget that Tarzan spent some time in Wisconsin, at one point swinging limb-to-limb through the forest with Jane in his arms, a stretch of the imagination no matter the circumstances, let alone should you ever have actually attempted to swoop your way through a spruce, or a lowly box elder. Perhaps the climate was such back then that vines were less profuse, or Edgar Rice Burroughs would have written in a few for his displaced jungle man.
In the interest of moving beyond Tarzan books and the weather, this morning I read a lengthy New Yorker profile of a leading contemporary French novelist. I do these things to broaden my scope of cogitation, but I am also forever trying to geolocate myself as I regularly feel I am in not-quite-the-right place. In part this has to do with my relating to certain aspects of the French novelist’s experience—yes, I too “distrust [my] responses to broad sociological and political questions” and I too am more comfortable with putting experiences into words than with the experiences themselves—even as I completely fail to equal his capital “A” Artiste persona as manifested through ad lib eloquence, intellectual fluency, and tumultuous affairs.
I, on the other hand, spend a lotta time just cutting brush. Both figuratively and sweatily.
Yesterday I spoke at length with a talented engineer. A man good at all the things I am not: math, electronics, construction, etc. Sometimes I think folks like this fail to understand how much I covet their skills and admire their understanding. It’s a theme I’ve beaten to death over the years—how my blue collar roots assign a far higher value to fundamental skills than anything tied to wishy-washy poetics—and I won’t reprise it here, but it also colors my reaction to the French novelist claiming that putting things into words was his reason for being. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “I’m terrifically lucky to have what’s known as a vocation. But all the same, how good it would be, how restful…if I could make fewer sentences and see a little more.”
It’s a line to chew on, rather than resolve. Just now a male cardinal has shown up and set to attacking his reflection in my office window. Life contains brilliant surprises.
Episode #112 "Humidity, Tarzan, and Frenchness"