Fly Melon

My roommate and I are embroiled in a disagreement over noise pollution with our down stairs neighbors.  These bright-eyed and marginally tone-deaf youngsters are students at the New School and are, as they succinctly and matter-of-factly put it to me, “in a band.”  Because that settles it, yes?  You’re strumming multiple string instruments amped up to maximum volume and shouting off-key nonsensical lyrics in patterns that you seem to think are harmonic, and this would, your tone implies, be totally unacceptable if not for the fact that you are…IN A BAND.  My room mate and I form part of that ambitious minority of city-dwellers who aim to do some intellectual work after business hours, and we form part of that larger minority (in Brooklyn) that goes to bed at midnight and rises early.  We’re not senior citizens or fogies, I swear, and we do understand that it’s New York, but, but….we can’t sleep, and we have to attend early morning meetings!

Pardon me for spewing vitriol across the screen, but we’re at a dead end here.  The leader of the band has agreed to look into the potential solution of installing insulation on the ceilings of his apartment, but he warns that they are students and not particularly well off.  Meanwhile, our admirably conscientious landlord has let him know that it is perfectly fine, by New York law, to play music at any volume until 10 p.m.  We’re f’d. 

Can anyone think of some crafty (legal) tactics for making a downstairs neighbor’s life unpleasant?

“Fly melon” is a Southernism I only learned about yesterday.  As explained to me by my mother, experienced picnic-ers will cut open a cantaloupe or some such, fill the flesh with poison, and set it out a little ways away from the fesitivities.  Flies settle in, eat, and pop off (as the freshly-Nobeled Doris Lessing would say) so that the picnic-ers can enjoy their outdoor spread in peace. 

So the question on any given day might be, who do you identify with–the picnic-ers? the flies? the melon?  Are you even the sort of person to go on picnics and, if so, would you be comfortable glancing over, between bites of potato salad and angel food cake, at this open mellon teeming with doomed flies and maybe a malicious yellow jacket or two?

Speaking of Doris Lessing, last night I picked up The Golden Notebook again.  I’d spotted it in many a library, but I only bought the book when she won the prize. (Sales must have shot up that week.)  I put it down almost immediately–there’s a heavy-handedness and an earnestness that I couldn’t stomach–and shelved it.  It stuck in my mind though, and last night I was trying to read Mating by Norman Rush (another enormous novel that I have no business getting into when I have report on a 500-page ms due tomorrow).  So I was settling in with the Norman Rush when I realized I had this yen or craving for something else–something, something, what could it be–and it was The Golden Notebook.  Those slightly off-putting qualities were still there, but it was exactly what I wanted to read, and I have just had a minor personal literary epiphany, dawdling here over my first blog post…The first scenes of The Golden Notebook resonate with those of another bulky, uncomfortably sincere book of ideas for which I have an overwhelming and perhaps irrational love and which, further more, I credit with changing my life in ways both major and minor, get ready for it, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.  Thoughts?  I’ll let you know after I finish the Lessing, but twenty dollars says she isn’t Lawrence’s equal for sheer emotive power and, I’ll just say it, genius, however rough-hewn.