A dreary day prompts frivolous ramblings about basketball, music and books

It is true that T. S. Eliot nominated April as the “cruelest month,” but speaking personally, March has proven to be a much better candidate, and this is why I’m craving the predicted temperatures (near 70 degrees) this Friday.

Somehow the rain in March seems colder than any other time, and it serves to magnify the late winter bleakness. Notwithstanding a few buds here and there, the complete absence of greenery constitutes a dull blanket that accents the garbage and litter that has accumulated during the winter months.

The streets are filthy. Half the population, including me for two whole weeks, has been sick, and if the other half hasn’t, it will. Every day I see kids and cats out on the street, and in both cases: Where are your owners? Isn’t school in session? Aren’t there leash laws?

(Ah, but somewhere off-stage the Tribune’s Chris Morris is yelling at me … what’s that? March Madness? He’s saying I should be inside watching basketball, and the sleek timelessness of Indiana’s game would transport me beyond the dull ugliness outside. Brother, did you get that from Joe Dean or Eddie LaDuke?)

Sorry, but I no longer “do” college basketball. The hypocrisy and exploitation are a bit too much, even for a hardened cynic like me. NCAA Division One basketball players generate billions of dollars of revenue. They are remunerated with wholesale-priced scholarships – all well and good, but representing what amounts to sweatshop wages. All of it is to the detriment of higher education, as Murray Sperber rightly concludes in his classic study, "Beer and Circus."

Since I watch very little television beyond professional basketball games and seldom have the patience to sit through movies (most of them wretched exercises in gore, stupidity, product placement or all three), and with the weather, pneumonia and a return to work conspiring against the inauguration of bicycling season, the focus has narrowed to reading and music.

If not for the recent illness, a few beers might enter the equation, but I’ve had to restrict myself to tapping kegs for customers and not for me. However, perhaps by Friday … we have a delicious smoked beer on draft at present.

The ravages of time, alcohol and cigars have robbed me of my singing voice, so now I’ve graduated to the status of shower stall interpreter, but more importantly, the hearing apparatus remains functional.

There isn’t a musical bone in my body when it comes to talent or aptitude at instruments, but not a moment passes without songs playing in my head.

As for the CD player, current favorites are a Rough Guide compilation called “Mediterranean Café Music,” the reconstituted Brit-pop act Duran Duran (saw them at the Louisville Palace the other night), U2’s (they’re my age, you know) latest album, and Tchaikovsky’s amazing Sixth Symphony, “Pathetique,” which I’ve listened to twice today.

Being forced to lie down for long periods of time while stricken had an upside, as there’s been more time for reading during the last two weeks that I usually have in two months.

John Barry’s exhaustive but highly readable account of the Spanish Influenza pandemic, “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” was followed by “Lucky Jim,” a 1950’s-era novel by British author Kingsley Amis.

Next up was “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs," by Christopher de Bellaigue, a Tehran-based reporter for “The Economist” magazine. The book offers an unsettling elegy for Iran's own Lost Generation, the youth who overthrew the Shah and were killed and maimed during the 1980’s war with Iraq.

“Sideways,” the Rex Pickett novel upon which the noteworthy movie was based, provided many laughs and more than a few somber interludes contemplating the timeless metaphorical value of learning through the process of travel.

My friend Jon gifted me with “Where Dead Voices Gather,” by Nick Tosches, whom I consider one of the finest American writers of our time. Tosches specializes in biographical portraits of entertainers (Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin) and doomed outcasts (Sonny Liston), and he also writes novels.

In “Where Dead Voices Gather,” Tosches manages to top his own lofty standard, basing an entire volume of compelling historical, musical and cultural testimony around the almost completely undocumented life of one Emmett Miller, a stalwart of blackface minstrelsy in the 1920’s. As in all his non-fiction works, Tosches does not fail to address the simultaneously disturbing and exhilarating essence of what it means to be an American.

Finally, last night I finished Hanif Kureishi’s the novel “The Buddha of Suburbia,” a coming of age story set in London during the 1970’s that highlights the immigrant’s experience in Great Britain.

It is beyond me to relate any of preceding to politics, local government, the farmers’ market, why we all should support local businesses, my contempt for the exurb and the President it elected, or the fact that the Tribune’s lead story today was about bad cable reception at the Cold War-era retirement towers around town.

When it’s bleak, dirty and cold, and when you feel badly, and when it seems like what passes for news these days is entirely depressing … you fall back on the things that comfort you, like music and books.

In the end -- and I believe this completely -- there’s only one way to compete against the forces of inertia, decay and ignorance that sometimes seem so hopelessly prevalent.

That’s by getting smarter. As individuals, as a community, and as a society.

It doesn’t mean that we'll "win," because unlike college basketball, life's not that simple.

However, it does mean that we’ll have a chance to reclaim some measure of civility and to improve the quality of life in the community.