'Merry Christmas from the Family'

It’s the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Today we witness the “Great Conjunction,” when Jupiter passes 0.1° south of Saturn at 9 a.m. (EST) – a distance equivalent to roughly one-fifth the diameter of the full moon. At twilight, low in the southwestern sky, the alignment will become visible as the Christmas Star. The planets haven’t been this close and visible since 1226. More reasons to celebrate: December 21 is the birthday of Rebecca West (1892), Anthony Powell (1905) and Frank Zappa (1940). In this squalid age, taking my cue from Nige the buoyant blogger, I see reasons to be cheerful. 

Rebecca West surprises me by saying in her Paris Review interview: “Well, I longed, when I was young, to write as well as Mark Twain. It’s beautiful stuff and I always liked him. If I wanted to write anything that attacked anybody, I used to have a look at his attack on Christian Science, which is beautifully written. He was a man of very great shrewdness.”

 

Anthony Powell has this to say about cowboys and narrative: “A sort of ignorance makes writing easier, I think. Simplification makes it easier. Take a fairly low form of novel narrative. You can write about cowboys perfectly easily, but you don’t contemplate what their inner troubles are, only Indians, broncos, etc. Nobody bothers what a cowboy’s psychology is like. (They probably do, nowadays. I don’t mean Midnight ones.)”

 

Frank Zappa would have turned eighty today. Listen to his 1969 cover of the Four Deuces’ 1956 hit “W-P-L-J.”

 

Lately, the song that has made me happiest is Count Basie’s “Shoe Shine Boy” (1936), with the great Lester Young solo.

 

On Sunday afternoon we attended the annual cul de sac Christmas party in front of our house. It was good to see so many kids and socially distanced neighbors, several of whom are musicians. They set up a stage and covered, among other things, the funniest Christmas song I know, Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family.”