Archive for family
Mother’s Day
My son Miles writes:
Happy first Mother’s Day to this amazing woman.
After what turned out to be the scariest day of our lives, Alie and I welcomed Colby Joseph Basil into the world three months earlier than expected on May 1st, 2020. Weighing in at just under two pounds, Colby is as cute as he is tiny and is growing and fighting everyday in his new NICU home. We already love him beyond words.
I could never begin to explain the bravery that this new mom had to display in the midst of incredible uncertainty and fear, and did it all with grace and courage that blew me away. She did it with great physical and emotional strength and she did it with a husband and new father at her side who was both terrified but also in complete awe of her.
This is a picture of Alie going to meet Colby the day after he was born. Less than 24 hours of recovery after emergency surgery, there is a genuine, beautiful smile behind that mask. In a world packed with anxiety, this mom is once again fearless, positive, and nurturing, and is ready to meet her new baby boy.
Colby is the luckiest boy on the planet to call you mom. Happy Mother’s Day!
I am truly blessed to be in all of their lives.
Friendships, my own + Ginsberg & Kerouac’s
I received a note from a dear old family friend the other day.
I wouldn’t have noted it, but one of the sites I peruse (“LitHub”) had a piece that last Monday was the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s death. Which means he’s been gone longer than he was here. Apparently, the town of Lowell had a small ceremony. I saw a photo of the grave where some folks had thoughtfully left a couple of bottles of booze. (Or thoughtlessly? He died of alcoholism.) I suppose they should also have a left a copy of [the conservative magazine] National Review.
I am reminded, once again, of the beautiful song “Box of Rain,” by Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter (RIP): “Such a long, long time to be gone; but a short time to be there.”
I replied:
I believe he and [National Review publisher] William Buckley were friends, actually. (One thing about both of them – they had gifts for friendship, Buckley getting an extra bonus point for being friends with his antagonists, too, for the most part.)
My feelings toward Kerouac have gone up and down over the years. He is unique in the Robert Basil pantheon in that respect, where once you’re in, you’re in for good (Barthes, Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, William Carlos Williams …). I once made a disparaging remark about Kerouac’s poetry to a close friend of mine (a Garcia-Lorca scholar and a poet himself), and he gently chided me, taking me through some of Kerouac’s poems phrase by phrase, waking me back up. Kerouac’s prose, it must be said, relies on some vocabulary crutches in ways his poetry doesn’t – but so many of his books are nonetheless absolutely splendid. (I taught Dharma Bums while I was at Stanford.)
And finally, he really really inspired me as a writer. The first Kerouac book I owned was a copy of The Dharma Bums that [my brother] Chris gave me – I must have been 19 or 20. I read about half of it sitting in the back of a pick-up truck zooming down route 17 to Manhattan, surrounded by fall foliage. One of my happiest memories.
To celebrate my graduation from university – this was a solitary activity, because literally *nobody* other than my girlfriend believed I had somehow graduated from college, having dropped out so often and, when actually enrolled, having spent almost as much time hitching around the country as attending classes – I read “On the Road” for the fourth or fifth time, cover to cover, back to front (how I read novels), drinking Miller Beer “ponies” and lying in bed, finishing at dawn. Another one of my happiest memories.
I want to share with you a quite moving piece from the New Yorker: “Allen Ginsberg: The Day After Kerouac Died.” It annotates some journal entries and a poem from “The Fall of America.” (My friend and teacher Robert Creeley makes a few appearances.)
The New Yorker / Allen Ginsberg piece brought some tears.
Memory Gardens
Covered with yellow leaves
in morning rain …
He threw up his hands
& wrote the universe don’t exist
& died to prove it. …
… Jack thru whose eyes I
saw
smog glory light
gold over Manhattan’s spires
will never see these
chimneys smoking
anymore over statues of Mary
in the graveyard …
Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work –
and what’s the work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
Be Wary of Praise
When I asked my mom if she liked anything about my first book, she said “the copyright page.”
Old Family Movie – 1966 or so
I had forgotten that little kids dance all the time.
Crest Road, Wellesley, MA.
Mother’s Day
My mother, Maureen Basil, was a grand, generous, and acerbic woman. We bedevilled one another for decades. During her last years, we achieved a courteous and warm back-and-forth. I love and miss her.
genius sister
I actually have two genius sisters! But it is the younger of my two younger sisters, Jenny Basil, who just won The Claire Tow ‘52 Distinguished Teacher Award. “The award, in the amount of $10,000, recognizes a senior member of the faculty for outstanding qualities as a teacher and for being a role model to students and other faculty” at Brooklyn College.
I am a pretty talented, even occasionally inspired professor, but I am not a genius by any stretch. I am delighted I can count on my siblings.
Andy Herko
My friend Andy Herko – I guess you could call him my brother-in-law – passed away last week. He was only fifty years old.
I went back to Buffalo last weekend to attend his services, which were filled with love and stories. Andy was an exquisite man.
We shared some eccentric, generations-old musical tastes, one evening driving at least one relative out of his living room after playing Helen Reddy’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” a half dozen times.
Family members have set up a GoFundMe site in his honour “to help ensure that his daughter has financial assistance for her future success.”
Ken Catalino drew the amazing portrait of Andy.
Wonderful to be a Dad
Miles and Alie Basil got married last weekend in Boston. It was a day filled with joy and love, and of families becoming family.
More from Jenny Basil and her work with the Nautilus
Really cool interview, Jenny!
“They’re not highly visual,” [Jenny] says of the nautilus. “Like, if you look at a cuttlefish, they look at you. Their tentacles orient to you. They look at you. Some of them will come up… and try and touch you.” The nautilus? Not so much. “We see nautiluses in the aquarium in the daytime, which is when they sleep,” Basil says. “You know if you looked at me at 3 a.m., you wouldn’t think I was that complex either.” These nocturnal habits, combined with their unusual eyes, may make us less inclined to consider the nautilus as impressive as lab tests have proven it to be.
Jenny’s students are very lucky people. (Jenny would respond, no doubt, that she is even luckier.)
The Chambered Nautilus and Memory
My sister Dr. Jenny Basil, Biology Professor and Department Chair at Brooklyn College, appears in this week’s “You’re the Expert” podcast. “Dr. Jennifer Basil studies how animals navigate the world and remember where they stored food. Her main research organism is the mysterious and beautiful chambered nautilus [link added]. Comedians Jo Firestone, Zhubin Parang, and Shalewa Sharpe discover what secrets lie hidden in the deep sea.”
It is an entertaining and illuminating half hour! My sister is an exceptionally fine explainer of things, and she is also super funny.
Created and hosted by Chris Duffy and produced by Pretty Good Friends, each episode features an expert in a specialized field. Through games, sketches, and hilariously misguided guesses, three comedians try to figure out what our expert studies all day. Over the course of the show, we hear about the latest findings and why their field is important.
Primary Progressive Aphasia
Harold Gulskin was an amazing acting coach who told his students “to emphasize the words of the script over any analysis of their characters’ motivation.” (His students included Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, and James Gandolfini.) That is, he did not believe in The Method. He believed in the script, and the actors reading that script. He passed away last week.
His wife, Sandra Jennings, said the cause [of his death] was probably a pulmonary embolism. He learned a decade ago that he had primary progressive aphasia, a rare form of dementia, she said, and had been living in a care facility in Park Ridge.
Primary Progressive Aphasia robs people of their linguistic abilities. Word by word, they can no longer understand names and terms; bit by bit, they can no longer find their own words in their minds; great big verbal parties become warehouses of nothing. Their other cognitive skills, and their memories, remain intact, for several years, until their brains and everything else fall apart.
This is what killed my Dad.
Reading Gulskin’s obituary moved me greatly.
As primary progressive aphasia gradually took away Mr. Guskin’s ability to speak and communicate, Ms. Jennings helped coach his students, filling in words he could no longer conjure and explaining his intentions.
Ms. Weisz said: “Even when he was down to about 20 words, I knew what he meant to say. We had a shorthand by then, and he would say, `No, no, no,’ when I wasn’t hitting the truth.”
My father was a stutterer well into adulthood. Learning how to speak out loud flawlessly and beautifully was I think to him his greatest achievement. That he was robbed of this toward and at his life’s end was utterly galling to him and our family. God bless Mr. Gulskin’s.
Rose Armani
My former mother-in-law, Rose Armani, passed away on Monday. Rose was a profoundly good person.
A new publication from Miles Basil, MD
“Weight Loss and Abdominal Pain Caused by Pancreatic Squamous Cell Carcinoma.”
The closing sentences are close to poetry. Really.
Family and friends
The holiday season was extra busy for me, with lots of family and friends visiting B.C. One consequence has been the slim pickings here at basil.CA and on my other online platforms.
Lots of eating activity, though, was accomplished over the break. Below is a photograph taken by the wonderful Lincoln Clarkes of Alie Sokol, Dr. Miles Basil, and me at The Flying Pig in Gastown a couple of weeks ago.
RSS - Posts