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The Clash, Falafels, and An Almost Affair
When an acquaintance sets you up
The first time I heard The Clash it was to the tune of their brilliant “London Calling.” Weirdly, I did kind of live by a river then — the Tennessee River, as it flowed through old Knoxville.
The first time I heard of a falafel, I thought the person describing it said “waffle,” as in, “I’m bringing some waffles for our picnic today.” When you’ve never heard a word before, your mind latches on to whatever is close, though for the life of me I couldn’t understand why anyone would bring waffles to a picnic or why I was supposed to get excited at the prospect.
The first time I saw Pat was at the graduate library. She worked at the circulation desk and was quite friendly, helping check out my volume of A.C. Bradley’s criticism of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Bradley is such a lucid critic, but he’d be the first to recognize that what I was getting involved in was no tragedy, a work that begins with disorder and ends in a new order with the flawed tragic hero being defeated, killed, or left broken in some wayward ditch.
Actually, I don’t think Shakespeare himself would have been able to attach a specific genre to this affair which, in pop culture parlance, has to be called a soap opera, though a daytime or nighttime episode is hard to decipher.
