Lunar Lanthanum

New Lanthanum.

re some obscurities in this poem -

1. Yesterday was 40th anniversary of moon landing.

2. I went to school with now-Sen. Al Franken. We were on the wrestling team (sparring partners in the daily practices), & in the literary club together. Franken & classmate Tom Davis were already a budding comedy duo then. One of their first shows together was a dramatization of a short story of mine, which was staged in the school chapel. The story was titled "The Movie-Maker"; the Shirley-Jacksonish plot involved an intrusive TV film-maker & his entourage, invading a small town in order to document "real American life" (barging in on town meetings, picnics, ball games, funerals, etc.). They are finally undone by 3 ancient codgers, usually found seated together on a park bench, "as still & silent as stones, and old as the trees around them." The story was published in the school literary magazine, Talisman, around 1968.

(I'm not sure what the phrase "Al Frankenstein", in the poem, means, exactly; but it's certainly not meant as a personal put-down of Al, whom I like & admire a great deal. I'm thinking about how public figures & political personae are to some extent fictional creations of the public "mind"....)

One of Al & Tom's first collaborations was a stage version of a short story of mine titled "The Movie-maker". It can be found in the Blake School literary mag for 1968, I think (Talisman). It was a kind of Shirley Jackson imitation, about a film-maker coming to a small midwestern town to do a documentary about "real small-town America". He is opposed and finally defeated by three ancient men who never move from their park bench: "still and silent as stone, and old as the trees around them."

it's all coming back to me...

The Times really watered down my letter to the editor about Al Franken. Took out most of the funny stuff, I thought. Al was not a great wrestler. He was a great all-around theater guy. He and Tom Davis took one of my short stories & produced it as a one-act play, which was a high point for me in high school.

How strange to read about old classmate Al Franken in the NY Times Magazine. The whole article structured on the theme of wrestling (didn't they do that with Rummy, & Jesse Ventura too, a while back?). I wrote them a letter about it.

name, grad. class     weight class

Jim Gould, '71             95
Henry Gould, '70          112
Al Franken, '69           120
Chris Kraemer, '70        133

Jim & Chris were the really good wrestlers.

What bothers me about the liberal talk radio schtick is that it imitates Rush Limbaugh's project : macho-aggressive- ressentiment-parlayed-into-political-influence. & which reminds me of the role of hate radio in the Rwandan genocide. (I guess I shouldn't take it so seriously.)