I just found out that my recent letter to the editor about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago was printed in the Sunday edition of New York’s Newsday. You can find it right here.
Thanks once again to Newsday’s editorial staff for allowing me to share my opinion through this outstanding regional newspaper.
43rd Street and 6th Avenue, New York.
John Eric Albert, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“When I have found a way to express the inexpressible, I will tell you how I love you.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, diary entry circa 1911
Photo: Edna St. Vincent Millay in Mamaroneck,[4] New York, 1914, by Arnold Genthe.
Where would we go, you and I?
The sea which breathes, in aquamarine,
its rhythmic, salty epic at our ankles
and inundates a foam refrain,
over and over, in rolling green glass:
the tide — the oldest poem — an immutable meter preceding
words, or man, or even ears to hear?
The unvarying sea
takes no notice of poets —
you and I, ourselves inconsonant poems,
varying as all our kind are wont to do …
faithless at the foot of the green, returning tide,
both our lives arrhythmic and
bitter with metaphor.
Where would we go, asalam?
The staid and angled mountains, vaulting up?
Mountains are always odes. The miles of stone
which rise to cut their rival heavens
lance the air, and spin the winds to narrative.
Those winds were singing long before us,
will sing when we are gone.
The mountains will not know our names
even as we whisper one another’s,
or the rise of your breathing where we lay there —
the blithe and meadowed slope that will not blush beneath us,
where we are ribald lyrics, songs out of our lawless senses,
lascivious and nearly wordless.
Where would we go, my muse?
The river that rushes like a fugitive ghost
absconding with its own requiem?
Rivers’ roars are always dirges, for rivers run past
lives beside their banks. Lifetimes
are as seasons to them, always ending.
This timeless river
is unconcerned for poets
and will not slow to note us.
Only our own faces on its hastening, dim and opaque surface.
answer back our gaze. We are elegies, reflected
in heedless, racing waters moving on.
Stay with me, here, for now.
We have two temporary
yet temperate pages all our own
over which is the script of our ardor:
my gray-grizzled Irish cheek and your Iranian skin,
to read and study, see and know, slowly and tenderly, in this ordinary room,
in this little city, in this waning light, in this fleeting moment,
in these fleeting lives.
I am inelegant free verse, but you …
you are my perfect poem.
We will draw the sheets over us,
over our moving euphony,
and frame to evoke one another —
the rounded warmth of your white shoulder,
the cadence of my pulse.
We will hear one another, and speak
in sedulous repetition
the particular rhythm of each of our names,
measured in the meter of tremulous breath.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2022
Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Santorin (GR), Exomytis, Vlychada Beach — 2017 — 2999 (bw)” / CC BY-SA 4.0
From time to time I’ll find an artifact from the old days of broadcast television on Youtube, and I’ll share it in a Throwback Thursday blog post — people really seem to enjoy the clips. (And the credit for that belongs to the Youtube users who originally uploaded them, not me.) One of this blog’s readers asked me about the intro for WOR-TV’s (Channel 9) “Fright Night” movie series.
Here it is below, courtesy of FrightNight7387 on Youtube. (Unless I’m mistaken, this would have been seen only by viewers in the New York metropolitan area between 1973 and 1987.)
I’m … actually not sure I remember this program. The music feels more familiar than the (pretty neat) visuals, and I think I’d recall a montage like that. I’m running it here for those who do remember “Fright Night” and might enjoy the clip.
Anyway, if you want to know more about Channel 9’s show, Jim Arena developed a terrific rundown on it over at DVD Drive-In.
It should not be confused with that other “Fright Night” of 80’s lore, the 1985 film starring Jonathan Stark, Chris Sarandon and Roddy McDowell. That movie also depicted an in-universe movie series named “Fright Night,” which … apparently bears no relationship to the very real eponymous series that ran in New York. (Kinda weird.) The 1985 movie was a lot of fun back in the day, though if it feels mostly forgotten today — even after it spawned a a damned cool 2011 remake.
I was so pleased this morning to see that The Roanoke Times published my letter to the editor about the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. You can find it right here.
I’m honored that my thoughts about the occasion appear to have struck a chord with people. This same letter was featured first on Wednesday by New York’s Newsday (with a weekday circulation of 437,000), and then here in Virginia by The Bristol Herald Courier (with a circulation of 39,000). As The Roanoke Times has a Sunday circulation of 85,000, this would mean that the letter was distributed to 561,000 readers.
Here’s a big word of thanks to the editors of The Roanoke Times for allowing me to communicate with with my neighbors through such a superb regional newspaper.
I’m not sure who our mystery predator is here. As I’ve noted before, there is a notable dearth of stray cats in Roanoke. I occasionally see one — but it’s nothing like my native New York, where stray cats outnumber people with a clean driving record.
Maybe the pupper next door did it. I dunno. He seems to be one of those gruff dogs who’s nevertheless timid (and adorable). He sort of grumble-barks tentatively and then goes instantly quiet when you make eye contact with him. He wandered into my backyard last summer and spent at least five minutes literally trembling in front of an empty tent, before he got up enough courage to bark at it. Eventually he even ran away from that.
Whatever the case, I hope that the little patch of ground below doesn’t lie along a suburban game trail. The is a place where bunny buds are known to roam. And the last one I startled there just ran in a confused figure eight — and then mistakenly ran at me for a moment instead of away. (Little brown fella had some kind of spatial relations problem. Or maybe he was channeling General Woundwort.)
No, I obviously don’t remember “The Lone Ranger” during its initial run between 1949 and 1957. (At least I hope that’s obvious — I’m a couple of full decades younger than that.) But I absolutely do remember this show’s reruns from when I was a baby … maybe around 1976, if I had to guess? I would have been about four years old. (I was five when my family moved out of that house in Queens, New York, to rural Long Island.)
I know that people who claim early childhood memories are often viewed with skepticism — I get it. (And I think many of us are more prone to confabulation than we’d like to admit.) But I’ve actually got a few memories from when I was a toddler — and this is one of them.
I can remember my Dad putting “The Lone Ranger” on in the tiny … den or living room or whatever, to the left of our house’s front door and hallway. You see the part in the intro below where the horse rears up at the .31 mark — and again at the 1:53 mark? That was a verrrrrry big deal to me as a tot.
Go ahead, tell me I’m nuts. I can take it. You and I live in an age in which conspiracy theories have gone completely mainstream. If I share something online that seems implausible to others, I figure I’m in a lot of company.
Anyway, I pretty much forgot about The Lone Ranger after that. There was a 1981 television movie, “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” that was remarkably well done — especially for a TV movie at the time. I remember being pretty impressed with that — its plot-driving scene where the good guys get fatally ambushed was unexpectedly dour.
But I never bothered with the infamous 2013 film. I occasionally enjoy movies that everybody else hates — something that earns me a lot of ribbing on Facebook — so maybe I should give it a shot. Hell, the trailer makes it look decent. And HBO’s “Westworld” has really whetted my appetite for westerns … which is weird, because “Westworld” is decidedly NOT a western — that’s sort of the point of its central plot device. But still.
New York, H. Holt and Company.
