Getting Past Father’s Day

Of course, I’ve been dreading Father’s Day for the past month or more…ever since the signs appeared in stores, I guess…the day after Mother’s Day. My Dad was never one to fully embrace the tribute day…he didn’t really care about holidays and celebrations that much and told me last year not to buy him a birthday present but that might have been because he could feel that he was dying (and wouldn’t need anything like a new shirt or an Artie Shaw CD with Kitty Kallen singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” – which is what they played on Jazz FM while I was driving to Waterloo yesterday – should have known…1946…Artie Shaw…my dad’s fav.) though the rest of us didn’t know it at the time…

Of course, I totally felt like a suck even worrying about Father’s Day. There are lots of people around me without fathers who blithely breeze by the day without a flicker, or maybe there is a flicker and I just don’t know about it at the time…after all, I didn’t exactly go around telling everybody how I felt either…maybe I’ll ask them now that it’s over and done with till next year…when, I assume, I’ll feel differently.

Fatherhood looms large in Seven Types of Ambiguity. I am proud to say I read up to page 106 this weekend. I still doubt that I’ll finish it by June 24 but I’ve been thinking about buying the book as I really would like to finish it now. I don’t know how I did all that reading actually. I was away all day Friday and it was a very busy weekend. I’m well into Part Two, the second ambiguity, I guess, which William Empson in his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) says “occurs when two ideas which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously”. I don’t know what the word is yet. I haven’t even thought about it.

Part 2 is a first-person narrative by Joe, who is Sam’s father. So far, Sam & Joe haven’t interacted much (though Sam is reading Winnie the Pooh when he and Joe have their conversation) but Joe talks a lot about how he is defined as a father by the people around him especially under the circumstances (I’ll keep it cryptic so I don’t spoil things for anyone who’s also reading or wants to read the book). Joe also seems intent on escaping from his own history and his own father’s legacy even as he seems to be playing-out the same drama as his father played (on page 104, even his eyebrows are conspiring to be like his father’s). At least that’s what I think…Joe’s being drawn into something dangerous now by Sid who also has a father issue…Hey, maybe the word is ‘father’.


The ambiguities which Empson saw as “stages of advancing logical disorder” are playing-out. I like the way Perlman can tell stories even through this increasing disorder which is, I guess, realism, in a sense. The only things that have really bugged me about the book so far are that Simon’s dog is named Empson which is dumb and that the female characters consist (so far) of a hooker with a heart-of gold, a dressed-for-success object of desire and an out-of-touch working-class mom. Reading Seven Types of Ambiguity is also interfering with my reading of Ivanhoe which is stopped at a very exciting moment…De Bracy is issuing his ultimatum to Rowena. She cracks and emotes and we see De Bracy waver – so we can see him as a conflicted character…will he play it safe and go for the straightforwardly evil path…or will he embrace complexity in a complex world? And where the hell is Ivanhoe…the book’s named after him and all he’s done so far is fight and faint!