How is that the same as a sword? That doesn’t make any sense. But you can’t kill someone with a kiss, I thought. This “each man kills the thing he loves, the coward does it with a kiss” confused me thoroughly. It had been explained to me why Oscar Wilde went to prison, and as such, my young, titillated ears were on the hunt for some salacious homosexual detail in my father’s favorite poem. I remember the poem’s refrain: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves / By each let this be heard / Some do it with a bitter look / Some with a flattering word / The coward does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword.” One poem he liked to read to me was The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the epic that Oscar Wilde wrote in exile after serving two years of hard labor for a charge of gross indecency with men. Martin’s Press.Įager to civilize me and expose me to genius, my dad began reading me his favorite poems and passages from books when I was very young. There were also three copies of my father’s first novel: The Antarctica Cookbook, which he’d published in 1983 with St. The spines of my father’s books lining the bookshelves - their fonts, colors, names - stick to my memory as if they were wallpaper: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse The Tin Drum by Günter Grass Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut EDIE Why I am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell. I was allowed to read my father’s books on the condition that I observe these rules.
And you never ever fold the pages of a book you use a bookmark. In our house, books and writers and all things litera ry were very cool, very serious business.
“Well, sort of but it would have meant something different then.” “An Anglo-Saxon club, like White Anglo-Sa xon Protestant?” My Jewish mother had explained WASPs to me. So that would have been a sort of cool, literary, snobbish thing to do back then.” Your granny Esther started an Anglo-Saxon Club, where they read books in Old English, like Beowulf and things. “Were they cool? Did people care about being cool then?” “What about your parents though?” I asked. Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett were really, really cool.” “Well, when I was a teenager in England being cool was definitely important. “Like were your parents cool when they were teenagers? Or what did being cool mean at other times in history?” My dad cocked his head to the side and thought about it for a second, which signaled to me that I had asked a very good question. “What do you mean?” He was sitting at the dining-room table balancing his checkbook. “Dad, when was ‘being cool’ invented?” I was 12. I REMEMBER SITTING in the living room at my dad’s house on Orange Drive in Los Angeles, just south of Hancock Park and east of Miracle Mile, on our black dusty couch with my German Shepherd Maya, surrounded by the books and bookshelves that had followed us on our moves to various houses all over the city, and asking my dad a question:
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