That Would Be Me (dot net)

My mother liked extreme foods. The tea she liked was smoked. I have no idea what the brand or type was, although I have a vague memory that it was something British. It came loose in a tin and my mother would put well over a teaspoon of it in a tea bell, put it in her large coffee mug and pour boiling water over it. Then she would let it steep for hours. Literally hours. Some days she’d make her tea right after breakfast and it would still be sitting on the kitchen counter in the late afternoon. The water would have cooled by then, of course, and there would be a dark grey-brown ring on the ceramic just above the level of the tea and the musky, smokey aroma of it would permeate the house. Tea should not be smokey. Scotch is smokey. Which, of course, is why I prefer a good Irish. Steak grilled over hickory chips should be smokey. Not tea.

Once my mother got her tea to this tepid, almost viscous state she would put a little more hot water in to warm it up, pull the tea bell out, stir it a few times to mix all the tannins evenly and contentedly sit sipping the venomous brew. I was sure the bowl of her spoon would dissolve while she stirred, but it never seemed to.

She also enjoyed Limburger cheese. Not the pot of mildly fragrant cheese you find at your local greengrocer, jar cheese that spreads smoothly across your rye cracker. This cheese was a gently aged block of runny offal that had legs. And feet. And armpits. I used to say Limburger smelled like dirty socks, but that’s not quite accurate. It smelled like athletic socks that had been worn for eight days on a forced march across a burning desert by a very masculine man who suffered from severe athlete’s foot and profuse sweating, then stuffed into moldy sneakers and left in a damp basement for a couple of years. It actually singed the hairs in your nose. Mom would store her chunk of precious matter in a small, tightly sealed Tupperware container in the fridge so that it could marinate in its own essence to its most piquant fullness. (I recently read that the bacteria that is used to ferment Limburger is the same found on human skin that causes body odor. So, in essence, if I wear the same tee shirt two days in a row, I’m a delicacy. Who would have imagined?)

She liked her Limburger in a sandwich, but not just any sandwich. She would cut two thick slices of bread which, I assume, was rye or pumpernickel. She just called it “black bread.” Then she cut a thick slice from a Bermuda onion. Then a couple of hacks from the cheese, put them all together and once again sit down to her special treat. She rarely made these sandwiches while we were around, from fear of Child Services, I suspect, but I would know she was indulging when I turned the corner at the end of our block on the way home from school. Something in the air would quietly whisper, “go visit someone for an hour or two.”

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother. She introduced us to some amazing culinary delights such as lox, pickled schmaltz herring and pasta con pesto so strong you sweat garlic for three days. And she never forced Limburger or smoked tea on us. It was there if we wanted it. We didn’t.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Yes, I’m verbose.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

One two three four five
He thinks he’s written a poem
Instead, it’s just words

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)

This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.

Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.

I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.

There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.

I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.

I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.

In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.

 _______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Spy Magazine, that wonderful satirical magazine that slowly started losing subscribers as it slowly devolved into a bitch fest, had a great feature called “Logrolling In Our Time” which presented two members of American intelligentsia giving favorable, often glowing critiques of each other on their respective pulpits. It was surprising how many pairs of mutual admirers they could find to keep the feature fed for as many issues as they did. This is a different kind of logrolling, more in line with birling, where a lumberjack perches on a log in the water and spins it with his feet in order to keep his balance. This is an essay inspired by a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event. It is, therefore, at least five times removed from anything that could possibly be considered important to anyone. And so I roll the log.

The movie, of course, is Infamous, which I finally saw last night on cable, about Truman Capote writing his masterpiece (and artistic swan song) In Cold Blood. In this movie Sandra Bullock proves she can really act, disappearing completely into her role. I don’t know if she accurately portrayed Harper Lee, I’ve never met, seen or watched video of the diminutive writer, but Bullock convinced me, at the very least, that she was someone other than Sandra Bullock. It is also a movie in which Daniel James Bond Craig plays one of at least two conflicted gay men he has portrayed on-screen. This essay, you may have guessed, is not about them. The log continues to spin under my feet.

It is, moreover, not about why we are as fascinated by the masterful In Cold Blood as we are by Capote, the silly, pretentious little gossip who wrote it. So fascinated that, within a year, there were two movies made about him creating it. (And there was a movie based on the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. And there was the Broadway play, called Tru, about Truman’s last years, as he faded into obscurity after bitterly betraying his high society friends by telling all their tales in one of the few books he was able to write after finishing In Cold Blood. And the television special based on the play. It’s not about those, either.) I think the reasons we are fascinated by him and by it, even though he and it seem on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, are really one thing: Voyeurism. We are a nation of voyeurs. We love getting inside the minds of criminals, watching them plan and execute their crimes. And then we love watching them be caught and punished for the crimes. We also love a gossip. And we surely love watching a gossip crumble and die. We love watching. And I love watching us watch. I’m a voyeur of voyeurs. Even though I’ve never read the book In Cold Blood. But, as you may have surmised, this essay is about none of that. I almost lost my balance for a moment, there.

So what, exactly, is this essay about? It started with a description of how a defunct magazine feature relates to a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event, then moved into a condemnation (or celebration, perhaps) of voyeurism and a confession of talking about something I don’t know anything about. It is about the random connections our spinning minds make, connecting immediate input with data stored so long ago its accuracy might be questioned, and thinking, in the moment the connections occur and coalesce in our conscious minds, that we have discovered or realized something brilliant that others will be moved or intrigued to read or hear. I have just plunged into the icy water and the log is now spinning on its own, quite out of my reach.

It’s not about anything, ultimately. It is logrolling. There is a website that sells a tee shirt that says, “More people have read this shirt than your blog”. I think I’ll buy that shirt. It makes me laugh every time I think about it.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I’m tempted to start this post with a fart or nose picking joke. You see, I have been told by many people who should know that my humor is too intelligent and I want to get along.

Hello, my name is Geoff and I’m a recovering intellectual. It all began in grade school when I started reading Shakespeare in secret. I started small, Twelfth Night was all I could handle. Eventually, of course, I moved up to Love’s Labour’s Lost, then on to Julius Caesar and Hamlet. By junior high, I was up to two or three monologues a week. By my senior year in high school I was mainlining Buckminster Fuller.

It came to a head about two years ago. They found me wandering around the West Side of Los Angeles. I was listening to Joni Mitchell on my headset, muttering passages from the Bhagavad-Gita. I was clutching a Thesaurus and had a copy of Jung’s treatise on male archetypes in my back pocket.

I was incarcerated. They only let me out when I agreed to enter the program. Now, thanks to my sponsor and my Higher Power, I have been clean and stupid for six months.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“