Models, Nerds and Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got a sense of loss?

Let us continue last week’s topic of nerds, as an excuse for two more War of the Worlds poems. 

It seems to me you might hear a pretty lady say, on a TV commercial, “Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” but you won’t hear the same plea “… me because I’m smart,” partly because too many of us were too criticized at school, and so being around smart people hurts too much to mention. For my part, being an avid reader, or “smart,” I keep in mind how I might hurt others who “don’t read too good.” 

Have you ever noticed how those glossy page entertainment stories often include lines about a glamorous woman once being too skinny or too shy or something? It’s for (figuratively) setting you at ease around her. I once, as we two drank in the bar, reassured an international advertising model by saying, “There are categories of people that intimidate me, but models and show business are not one of them.” At the next party we attended together, I observed another model, just in from a shoot in Germany, setting the other people at ease for my friend by saying “she used to have hips up to here!” A good friend, doing for the model just like I would read in a glossy article.

If I had said in the bar whom I would be at ease with, then I could have included celebrity media-types, journalists and famous best-selling writers—stemming from my days as a volunteer student newspaper reporter. (As for show biz actors, I took theatre career classes in college—I knew them well) 

I have lost count of the times I have been on the TV news—but, being a journalist myself,  I have never once bothered to watch myself, even when, as often happened, I was near a TV set at the time. Once, when I was on CBC, I snacked with someone in a student food court rather than suggest we go downstairs to the student restaurant, directly below us, having an idiot box up in the corner. 

Note: The students don’t have a “real restaurant with cutlery” anymore, this was back during the capitalist reaction-swing of the pendulum: the Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney years. (Update: the fancy graduate student lounge, just under the posh faculty lounge in the student building, has been opened to undergraduates)

And of course, having earned a degree, I’m not intimidated by scientists. Speaking of knowing smart people, my buddy Blair was so smart he attended medical school without taking any Greek or Latin: He had already picked up those ancient vocabularies on his own. I essayed about him among regular guys in Blair, Being Smart archived September 2011. 

…Poems…

I once complimented a fellow worker, Tracy, in the presence of our peers, for having enough self esteem that I never have to worry or hold back. She held up two hands to show that I bring her up towards my level. 

Here’s a poem of how nerds have to know their own strength, from the years after the Martians are gone.

A Regular Human

In the Museum of Natural History,

    —Don’t say, Museum of Flora and Fauna—

a Martian is pickled in brine.

    —Don’t say, is preserved in a solution of formaldehyde—

A motionless handling-machine,

once so graceful,

stands in the British Museum.

    —Don’t speak of polarized discs and quantum mechanics—

As for that long spar,

explain, 

while motioning with your hands,

it goes at right angles, straight out like this—

    Don’t simply say, perpendicular.

It’s what you don’t say that matters,

if you wish to pass among regular humans,

undetected,

lonely.

As a nerd amongst regular society, it took awhile to believe in “just being myself.” How relieved I was to read computer startup millionaire Paul Graham. He pointed out that startup nerds don’t prefer the same cities as normal people and rich investors, instead preferring Boulder and San Francisco to Miami and Vegas, preferring quiet conversations and used bookstores to thundering discos and fashion malls. I read Graham and thought, with all due respect to the regular majority, “Hey, me too!”

From my poetic War of the Worlds poetry manuscript, from the part where the war’s aftermath includes a sense of loss, comes this metaphoric look at second hand bookstores (in Edmonton) now being hard hit by the digital age.

Gone the Bookstores

With top of lungs anticipation

I have enjoyed strolling past pretty meadows,

pockets of golden canola, dandelions, daisies

and five or six second-hand bookstores.

Not now.

With it’s yellow door atop a long flight of stairs,

the Untitled Bookstore is gone.

Strathcona Books is no longer a meadow but a drab crater,

dull, vacant.

Athabasca Books has long bare birch wood shelves,

in a bare room.

Alhambra Books was smacked by a dragon,

swayed on its foundations;

No one allowed inside, now;

an accident, they say.

With all the pretty meadows gone

I walk on sidewalks of broken slate.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~As an enthusiastic writer, and nerd, as advised by Rita Mae Brown, one of the best things I ever did was take a vocabulary class in ancient Greek and Latin: taught by the classics department for science majors. See my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012.

~While the culture shock was immense if I went from “there” to the physical education students lounge, nevertheless, one of my joys in life at university was “being there,” huddled in a corner of the theatre students lounge, eating my lunch, watching all those shy people be as flamboyant as God intended, without fear.