Great Moments in Me -- Nailing the Nobel Laureate

The year was 1989, Gorbachev was king, Eastern Europe was cool, art, literature, what have you. It was in this context the Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1980 and a man with a deeply furrowed brow, came to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the "southern part of heaven," to give a reading. The University of North Carolina put him up in fine style, hosting the reading in a lovely newish 300-seat auditorium space in the addition to the art gallery. The house filled.

In comes Milosz, who swaggers around on stage and reads many a poem, including a new one, which included a line like

"and I look at you seated on the edge of my bathtub naked --
Jane, or Jennifer, or Mary, or Ingrid, or whatever your name is this week --
as at an abstraction."

This was not cool. I was not generally Mr. PC, but I knew odious when I heard it. He offended otherwise, as well, and at one point in time between poems he said: "One thing is certain, man's greatest enemy is abstraction." Hmmm.

I was dressed well that evening, wearing a nice blue blazer with a costume jewelry pin in the lapel and my great uncle RB's demi-bowler, so I was ready to testify. When question and answer time came, I raised my hand, was recognized, and stood up: "Mr. Milosz, you've told us that man's greatest enemy is abstraction. Which man?" Almost everyone in the house broke out laughing, save for the oldsters who were shocked, shocked.

And I sat down, having achieved my two aims. For I had escorted to the reading the stylish Claudine Murphy, Colorodan MA candidate in English, waitress at the esteemed Pyewacket, for whose attentions I was vying at that time with one Norwood "Chip" Cheeks, formerly of the Sex Police but more recently directing videos and appearing in VW and Sony commercials, and this tall floppy-banged guy Rick who looked like Brendan Fraser and rode and adult trike around campus in an act of substantial anti-macho defiance. In time, Rick and Claudine would hunker down and form a very tall couple, but on that evening, embarassing the desperately retrograde Nobel Laureate before a good-sized crowd as well as his date, your blogger did well in general and in particular.