Bing! (Was: Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Pentecost)
Bing has written a book. He gave a Gray Lounge presentation two Sundays ago and just about everyone stood in line to purchase a copy and have Bing sign it. Ostensibly, it was about the power of prayer and focused on the two weeks he spent in the hospital two years ago, a moment I captured as it unfolded from my own selfish point of view https://johnwesley73.livejournal.com/507137.html.
I've read most of it by now and am here to tell you that this is about Bing's hospital stay in the way that Moby Dick is about a whale. The subtext is much more interesting than the superficial text. By page sixty, the narrative lifts off into a stratospheric exegesis of Bing and Colette's marriage and that, to me, is the real reason to read the book: it is an earnest love story, all the more powerful for its modest, kitchen sink style. The Bings are not royalty or great historical figures in the larger scheme of things. They are smart baby boomers who managed to find their way in the metropolitan, world-wide, commercial, financial and cultural stir-fry that rewards the college educated. Let there be no doubt about it: the system has worked for them. But, as Bing makes clear, it hasn't shielded them from life's ordinary cruelties. Parents grow old and sick in their world, too. Infants must be taken to the emergency room. Children have doubts about their futures.
Indeed, it is incredible to me that Bing ever got his children's permission to relate some of the things he does. I knew, for example, that The Mysterious Stranger was a bit of a wunderkind growing up. But, who would have guessed that between he and Crosby, it was the successful capitalist who seems, oddly, the more in touch with his feelings? I feel almost as though, through his agnosticism, I have missed out on knowing the most interesting of all the male Bings.
The painters and carpenters are still in my kitchen and I will have to try and sneak a few more pages of Bing's book in-between answering their questions. It has been a remarkable month of demolition and rebuilding, of seeing the center of my apartment stripped to its bare walls and slowly built out again. There is dust everywhere. But, it is beginning to look like Christmas.
I've read most of it by now and am here to tell you that this is about Bing's hospital stay in the way that Moby Dick is about a whale. The subtext is much more interesting than the superficial text. By page sixty, the narrative lifts off into a stratospheric exegesis of Bing and Colette's marriage and that, to me, is the real reason to read the book: it is an earnest love story, all the more powerful for its modest, kitchen sink style. The Bings are not royalty or great historical figures in the larger scheme of things. They are smart baby boomers who managed to find their way in the metropolitan, world-wide, commercial, financial and cultural stir-fry that rewards the college educated. Let there be no doubt about it: the system has worked for them. But, as Bing makes clear, it hasn't shielded them from life's ordinary cruelties. Parents grow old and sick in their world, too. Infants must be taken to the emergency room. Children have doubts about their futures.
Indeed, it is incredible to me that Bing ever got his children's permission to relate some of the things he does. I knew, for example, that The Mysterious Stranger was a bit of a wunderkind growing up. But, who would have guessed that between he and Crosby, it was the successful capitalist who seems, oddly, the more in touch with his feelings? I feel almost as though, through his agnosticism, I have missed out on knowing the most interesting of all the male Bings.
The painters and carpenters are still in my kitchen and I will have to try and sneak a few more pages of Bing's book in-between answering their questions. It has been a remarkable month of demolition and rebuilding, of seeing the center of my apartment stripped to its bare walls and slowly built out again. There is dust everywhere. But, it is beginning to look like Christmas.