Howling with Mirth

Chicago

2011-04-17T04:02:00.004-05:00

The last week I was in Chicago as a Chicago resident I thought I should do a post about what I will miss and what I will not miss about my former city. Today I was reading something and it mentioned the dramas of Samuel Beckett, and an image popped into my head of Francis Guinan storming down the stage at the Steppenwolf Theater with a crazed look on his face and his arms held out in front of him at shoulder width, palms up and slightly pumping. He starred in the Steppenwolf’s production last year of Beckett’s Endgame. I have no idea if he actually did what I saw him doing in my head in that production, but it imagined real enough to me. Anyway. I miss getting to see plays featuring Francis Guinan—I love that dude. So I was reminded of my list, which is not exhaustive and not ranked in any particular order.

But before the list, I want to say that Chicago is a great city qua city. It has great neighborhoods, lots of theater, lots of sports, and all that. If you want to live in a proper city east of the Mississippi, it’s one of your best options. It’s has fewer assholes than New York, fewer douchebags than the District of Columbia, and fewer Red Sox and Celtics fans than Boston (of course those are gross generalizations, but…) But I have issues with Chicago for climatic and topographic reasons, which are not to be undervalued. I’m from the west (the real west)—my mom’s family has lived in the Pacific Northwest for as long as people have lived in what’s now the United States (in the parlance of Indian law, since “time immemorial”) and my father’s father’s father lived and worked at a brothel in Tombstone during the “gunfight at the OK Corral” era. This is where I want to be. A coworker told me yesterday that this is paradise, and I probably agree.

What I Will Miss About Chicago

(1) Francis Guinan, and to a lesser extent the Steppenwolf generally.

(2) Lou Mitchell’s, a breakfast institution and rightly so. Their eggs are buttery and airy and delicious, and their banana pancakes are even more delicious. Sitting at the bar with old regulars was always an experience that made me feel like a real Chicagoan.

(3) Hopleaf, a good beer bar and restaurant. The beer list was decent—which means excellent by Chicago standards—and the food was good too. I’ll most miss going there probably because I’ll miss listening to my wife talk about how she thought about ordering something else but couldn’t pass up her “execution sandwich” (what she’d want as her final meal if she were on death row), and afterward walking around Andersonville and getting amazing ice cream at George’s Ice Cream and Sweets.

(4) Myopic Books, a madhouse of a used bookstore. Several floors of bookshelves jammed too close together.

(5) The Seminary Co-op and 57^th Avenue Books. The Seminary Co-op is probably the best academic bookstore in the country (and because I’m an American I tend to assume that means in the world—I’ve been to the bookstores in Oxford at least and they don’t hold a candle to the Hyde Park shop). 57^th Avenue is warmer and less academic. The two together are bliss.

(6) Medici on 57^th. After #5 a meal at Medici is always a good decision. The food’s good, but even if it weren’t the feel makes it worth it. Tables and booths with writing all over them give it a slightly dingy surface that has its own charm combined with good lighting or something and it feels warm (I realize I’ve used that word in that way twice in the last few sentences, so what). Plus there are tons of students and academics in there and while sometimes I find the conversations I eavesdrop on to be incredibly irritating, I do like the college feel except to the extent it makes me pine for my youth.

(7) Portillo’s. You don’t actually have to be in Chicago, or even in the Midwest, to enjoy Portillo’s, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to eat there again. Big Beef, hot, dipped, with some of the finest fast food fries around. I really wanted to prefer Al’s Italian Beef for several reasons, most of which are probably not good reasons (Portillo’s is to Al’s what the suburbs are to the city), but I just couldn’t. Portillo’s was my first “beef” (thanks, Mr. Fenner!) and from that point forward that was what a beef should taste like.

(8) Pequod’s Pizza. Very late in my stay Pequod’s became my preferred purveyor of deep-dish pizza. Very delicious. A shout out to Bacino’s too, as my favorite deep-dish place before Pequod’s made its mark. Both places had acceptable beer options, which is good for Chicago.

(9) The Bourgeois Pig. My favorite coffee shop in the city, hands down. Yes, it’s relatively expensive and snobby and whatever, but talk about warm. I also enjoyed a few of their sandwiches very much (Pilgrim’s Progress, mostly). I couldn’t help but smile every time a song from a recording of Les Miserables (I think Broadway cast) popped on in what I assume was shuffle play, which if you went there enough (like I did) you knew happened somewhat regularly. I particularly enjoyed seeing/hearing others in the shop look up and, often, mutter “what the hell?” every time it happened. Here, unlike at Medici, the discussions of students almost always annoyed me and had little to no redeeming value. My wife once commented that such comments were bound to be worse at the Pig because of its proximity to DePaul. I suggested I detected a hint of snobbery and she assured me that it wasn’t snobbery it was just the truth.

(10) The Art Institute, Field Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, and the various other museums. They are way too expensive if you have to pay, but the number of free days/evenings they all had made them all fantastic places to spend a few hours during those free periods.

(11) ParkWest. An excellent music venue. I saw Billy Bragg and Kaki King there.

(12) Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Some of their productions irritated me tremendously, but I always enjoyed spending an evening there with my wife.

(13) Kuma’s Corner. There are way too many places that claim or are reported to have the “best burgers” but Kuma’s truly has the best burgers. Truly. The best burger I’ve ever had in my life I had at Kuma’s. Plus they have good beer, good music, and cool art (even if it feels like they are trying way too hard to be hardcore).

(14) Children’s Learning Place, Carver’s first school. I can’t imagine a nicer place to send a pre-k kid (well, actually I can, it would be CLP but in a location like Carver’s current school: on a five acre property removed from everything else, with an orchard and chickens and wild animals and plants all around). It’s hard to imagine nicer and better teachers of toddlers than Mlles Jessica, Arlinda, June, and Gina.

(15) The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, where I took Letterpress one and two. A beautiful little shop with a bunch of Vandercooks and type of all sizes, styles, and vintages. I never got to take a paper making class there but I bet that’s cool too.

(16) Autumn. The nice days during the fall are some of the nicest you’ll ever find. But see below. Brisk air, changing leaves on the ground; it’s the time when the city feels like it is in its true state.

(17) The Chicago Humanities Festival.

(18) The “bridges smell of chocolate.” I first heard this on This American Life and didn’t really get it. But it is true. At certain times, when the circumstances are right, you do get hit with the distinct smell of chocolate as you drive across certain bridges (I most notice it in the River North area, particularly when entering downtown from the Ohio Street exit off of 90/94).

(19) Its proximity to Michigan.

What I Won’t Miss About Chicago

(1) Wrigley Field. OK, so, unlike everything else that follows I actually don’t dislike Wrigley; it’s a very nice place to watch a baseball game when the weather is nice. I just put it here because I wanted to say that for a place that people call the “world’s largest beer garden” or whatever the beer selection is abysmal.

(2) The traffic. The worst I’ve ever experienced, both the “freeways” and the streets. Also, if I were ruler of Chicago, there would be no stoplights on Lake Shore Drive.

(3) The weather. The summer is worse than the winter. I loathe humidity. There are approximately seven weeks of the year when the weather in Chicago is almost reliably nice, early October to Thanksgiving.

(4) The lack of seawater. The lake does not cut it.

(5) The flatness. I hate flat country, it’s just wrong. No horizon to orient yourself, no rising and falling roads that are interesting to drive. No houses for the soul. Nothing.

(6) The politics. Why is it legal for the mayor and aldermen to stick their name on everything at taxpayer expense? And that’s not even scratching the surface.

(7) The taxes. I’m a tax loving Democrat, but come on. Sales taxes that exceed 11% are insane. Property taxes that make owning even a condo a painful thing, never mind an actual house.

(8) The traffic (and this is coming from someone who spent years driving all over southern California!), and the public transportation is slower than and not nearly as good as many Chicagoans seem to want to admit.

(9) That pedestrians have the right-of-way but are never given it.

(10) The number of bars that affiliate themselves with Michigan State. I mean come on. Maybe I’m overly sensitive but it seems like there are more MSU bars in the city than there are bars that affiliate themselves with all other Big Ten schools combined.

(11) Its proximity to Ohio. You can’t get far enough away.

Dog-eared 20

2011-03-30T00:08:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Caine Mutiny

“What makes you think he’d be good for the Caine case?”

“Well, sir, Maryk is a dead pigeon, the way I see it, and Barney goes for that kind of case.” Challee paused. “I guess you’d call him odd in a way. Very odd. I’m used to him. He’s from Albuquerque. Barney is interested as hell in the Indians. You might say he’s nuts on the subject. He specialized in Indian cases after getting out of law school—won a lot of them, too. He was working up a pretty good general practice in Washington, before he joined up—”

“What was he, ROTC?”

“No. V7, then switched to air.”

Breakstone pulled at his nose with thumb and forefinger for several seconds. “Sounds like he might be pinko.”

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny, pages 349–50.

Dog-eared 19

2011-02-10T00:30:00.001-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Suttree

Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from a cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, page 383.

Three Things, After a Long Absence

2011-01-21T01:35:00.004-06:00

Can I see some ID?

I bought a pack of cigarettes for my sister a few weeks ago. The girl at the checkout counter, who was just a girl, likely still in her teens, looked at me sideways for a bit longer than is normal for that kind of transaction, so at looked at her back, waiting. She finally scanned the pack and said, “I almost carded you there….” Somewhat flattered and somewhat shocked, I said, in my attempt at charm, “Well, you got it right. It’s been a pretty long time since I was too young to buy cigarettes.” And she quickly replied, as if to immediately shoot down any confusion, “Oh, yeah [clearly meaning: obviously]. But we’re supposed to card anyone who looks under 40.” No longer flattered, and somewhat crushed, I said, “Oh,” looked away, and started to pretend something else had caught my attention as she finished ringing me up.

God damn you, father time.

Carver and Zoë

My immediate family came to visit this weekend. That includes my grandniece Zoë. Zoë and Carver love each other. It’s interesting, as a parent, to see. Carver thinks Zoë could walk on water. If she likes something, he’s almost set on liking it himself. When he sees her, he lights up. And it is just obvious to someone who has spent a huge amount of time around Carver that he thinks about her in a different way than he thinks about anyone else.

I’m not trying to say something ridiculous, like they are bound to get married, or something. First of all, they are first cousins once removed. Second, Carver is two and Zoë is six, they don’t think that way yet and we don’t think about them in that way. And when it comes right down to it, Carver would miss either of his parents more than he’d miss Zoë, but the friendship is special. There’s something about how kids relate to other kids that adults, no matter how fun and cool, just cannot match. And that’s better than fine.

The Road

Anne and I just finished watching The Road. Here are some of my thoughts:

(1) It was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. With a few minor issues, some of which could be considered major depending on your viewpoint.

(2) Viggo Mortensen is a badass. He is the epitome of hardcore when it comes to acting. I love that dude.

(3) Anne thinks she’d take the route the mother did [SPOILER ALERT], which is to kill herself after the point when things get really bad. I like to think I’d stick it out and follow “the road,” clinging to hope. But who knows what one would do if things got really, really bad.

(4) Anne says she wouldn’t eat our dog. I say, you know, if you’re starving…

(5) Anne and I listened to the audio book of The Road when we took a road trip to South Carolina when Carver was a month old. During the movie Anne and I had a quick conversation about how the story is harder to bear now than it was then, because we have a child. We had a child then, but it was different. I figured that then the reality hadn’t really set in, and/or that it’s harder now because Carver is more of a person, with his own personality, than he was then. Either way it is true, and tells me something about love.

I love my son more than anything. Not to be flip, or silly, or spout some sort of cliché, or whatever, but I didn’t know what love could mean until Carver came along. I love my wife, and my family and dear friends, and have loved past girlfriends, and (particularly with my wife and past girlfriends) at various times I’ve felt I’ve loved them so much that I’d die if something ruined that relationship. But seriously it doesn’t even compare to how I feel about Carver. While it’s hard to think about and accept, I think if anyone I cared about other than my son died I’d be very, very upset, but I think I’d recover eventually. I’ve suffered that kind of loss before, and it’s awful but I can take it. But if something happened to Carver…I seriously, from a very informed perspective, cannot even imagine being able to go on.

And all of this informs my reading/listening/viewing of The Road. And let’s just say that the story is hard to take.

Also: I don’t think I ever fully appreciated what my parents felt about my sisters and me. When I think about how they probably think (or at least thought) about me the way I think about Carver, it makes me wish I were much, much nicer to them.

(6) The story also, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, makes me think that maybe those survivalist crazies aren’t so crazy. Of course I don’t mean those who think our government is out to get us, or those in the town I grew up in who thought they needed to arm themselves to the teeth during the LA riots because all the brown people from the city were going to storm our fair (literally, in one respect) enclave of privileged racists. But if something horrible happens and you want to protect those that mean more to you than everything else in the world, how frustrating would it be to not have an extra $10 in ammunition when you’re left with two bullets in your revolver?

Dog-eared 18

2010-10-27T00:03:00.003-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

In either event people continually looking in and out of windows is doubtless not such a ridiculous subject for a book, after all.

Even though Emily Brontë once struck her dog so angrily that she knocked it out, simply because it had gotten onto her bed when she had told it not to get onto her bed, which is the one thing Emily Brontë did that one wishes she hadn’t.

Even if, as I have perhaps said, there are also things Emily Brontë did not do that one wishes she had.

Although which may well be none of one’s business either, it finally occurs to me.

And meantime I would appear to have completely forgotten my russet cat’s name.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, page 134.

Practically every single day at Corinth, for instance, when I did remember to let the cat back in, I said good morning to it.

Good morning, Rembrandt, being exactly how I said it practically every single time.

Russet as a color that one automatically associates with Rembrandt having been the origin of this, naturally.

Even if russet is perhaps not a color.

In any case it is surely not a color that has anything to do with painting, although admittedly it may be a color that has something to do with bedspreads. Or with upholstery.

Although not being a painting a cat can be russet too.

And being russet is apt to be named Rembrandt.

Which in fact no less an authority than Willem de Kooning found to be a perfectly suitable name, on an afternoon when the identical cat happened to climb into his lap.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that my russet cat climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.

My russet cat once climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.

Page 135.

Dog-eared 17

2010-10-20T18:09:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Morrissey

Morrissey was asked what he thought of t.A.T.u.’s cover of “How Soon is Now?” He said he thought it was magnificent but admitted that he didn’t know much about t.A.T.u.

The interviewer explained, “They’re teenage Russian Lesbians.” To which Morrissey replied, “Well, aren’t we all?”

I do not like t.A.T.u.’s cover.

Note: I cannot believe I didn't already have a "Morrissey" tag.

Sweatpants

2010-10-20T17:55:00.002-05:00

The last two years of my life captured in a New Yorker cartoon.

"Look at you! Breaking out the good sweatpants today."

To the extent this was anyone's fault, it was mine.

Dog-eared 16

2010-10-19T14:35:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Need for Mountains

I climbed out of my father’s pickup at a train stop in Minidoka, Idaho, then I’m getting on a train bound for Chicago and I had never been east of the Rockies, for God’s sake. And when I got to Harvard, something wasn’t right. There was something gnawing at me. And it took me probably three or four weeks to figure out what it was—I couldn’t find the horizon.

Lou Dobbs, What I’ve Learned, Esquire Magazine, February 2010, page 94.

As someone from the west, I know exactly what he’s talking about. Those who were raised around mountains deeply feel their absence when there aren’t any around. At least I do. I’ve talked about this a great deal with many people when discussing some of the things about living in Chicago that are hard for me, and I don’t think anyone from the Midwest truly understands.

Note: Of course I imagine the same is true when easterners talk about how they miss living in a “real city” when they move out west.

Also note: Lou Dobbs is not one of my favorite people, but I liked the quotation so here it is.

Dog-eared 15

2010-10-14T23:36:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Words that Have to Do with Poop

. . . [A] tip for scatologically minded word-lovers: many of the most weirdly cognate and thoroughly obscene, cloacal, and stercoraceous words in the English language appear in unabridged dictionaries between coppice and copse.

From Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3^rd edition, page 204 (the last paragraph in the entry “copse; coppice”).

Yes, I haven’t posted anything in quite some time. I don’t really know why.

Reading, Watching, Listening, Et Cetera: July 2010

2010-08-13T00:30:00.003-05:00

I was checking out the website of this guy I kind of know. It was very nice, part weblog, part other stuff. Anyway, one of the things he had on his site was annual lists that contained every book he read, movie he watched, etc, over the course of that particular year. I thought it was cool. I want to try to do something similar and figure the best way to do it will be to create monthly lists so I remember to stay on top of things.

Books I Finished

2666, by Roberto Bolano.

Girl with Curious Hair, by David Foster Wallace

Books I’m Currently Reading

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky.

Ulysses, by James Joyce.

Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy.

Manhood For Amateurs, by Michael Cabon.

The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner.

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote.

Books I’ve Purchased or Otherwise Received

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry.

Ulysses Annotated, by Don Gifford.

Movies Watched

Predators (theater)

Inception (theater)

Visoneers (home)

Fargo (home, previously seen)

Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema: 1928-1954: Vol. 2 (home)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (home)

Twilight (home)

New Moon (home)

Stephen King’s It (home, previously seen)

Music

No shows or new albums, sadly.

One Fact and One Short Anecdote that Possible Reveal a Great Deal About Me

2010-08-12T23:55:00.002-05:00

Fact

I am a Sagittarian (see the “Dog-eared 14” post immediately below).

Anecdote

I was in my car with a woman I was trying to woo. We had spent much of the day together in a group with a common purpose and there was clearly some mutual attraction, or at least desire, but we hadn’t yet gotten to that moment when the mutual interest was made clearly known. It was late at night and we were driving through the trees [n.1]. We had just started driving and I excitedly turned to her and said: “Do you want to hear the saddest song I’ve ever heard?” [n.2] Simultaneously I reached for my iPod and started scrolling through my playlists with alacrity. [n.3]

Note 1: Not literally, of course.

Note 2: “Levi Stubbs' Tears,” by Billy Bragg. The lyrics of course, and the guitar—my God the guitar—it just rings with sadness and pain. [n.2a] [n.2b]

Note 3: She very delicately and politely laughed and said yes, but later, suggesting something a bit lighter for the moment. It was remarkably deft handling.

Note 2a: Billy Bragg is in my top-five of all time. He has a solid shot at #1.

Note 2b: Anne and I just saw the Four Tops in concert, but sadly Levi Stubbs is dead.

Dog-eared 14

2010-07-27T01:31:00.001-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Garry Shandling, Sagittarian

Romance has always been a challenge for Garry. Despite his expansiveness on most other topics, he’s evasive about love. “I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents’ influence on me,” he says when I ask him why he’s single. “I’ve talked to a therapist, I’ve looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is—” the slightest pause—“that I’m a Sagitarius. Please don’t make me reveal more than that. It’s tough enough as it is.”

From “The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian” by Amy Wallace, August 2010 issue of GQ.

And I’ll add: I had no idea how interesting, and how just plain cool, Garry Shandling is.

Two Unrelated Things

2010-07-09T02:29:00.003-05:00

Covering the World with Goo

I saw a Sherwin Williams truck today with this logo painted on the back:

After this whole BP Deepwater Horizon thing, I think Sherwin Williams might want to reconsider that logo.

What’s in a Name?

There was a time a couple months back when Carver’s class had 12 kids in it and three of them were named Dylan (one boy, two girls). One of the girl Dylans is always referred to as Dylan _____, the blank signifying the name of a currently much maligned red wine. The first time I heard it I thought, my God, that poor girl’s parents gave her a wine as a middle name. But it turns out _____ is her last name and is spelled differently.

Dog-eared 13

2010-07-09T02:12:00.001-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666: Pheasants

He talks about the friendship of Courbet (the artist) with Proudhon (the Politician) and likens the sensible opinions of the latter with those of a pheasant. On the subject of art, a politician with power is like a colossal pheasant, able to crush mountains with little hops, whereas a politician without power is only like a village priest, an ordinary-sized pheasant.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (page 730).

iPad Ad

2010-07-09T02:00:00.003-05:00

On the back of the May 3, 2010, New Yorker, there is an ad for Apple’s iPad. Here is a description of the ad: top right corner – Apple logo and “iPad”; photo dominated by a straight-on picture of an iPad displaying a page from an “e-book,” obviously being held (and thus read) by a woman (manicured lady hands and feet in women’s shoes blurred in the background).

The e-book displayed on the iPad reads as follows (sections in brackets are not displayed—I just included them for fun (the reason there are partial sentences in brackets is that the woman reading it in the ad is starting to “turn” the page and the “page” is starting to fold over)):

The Last Song

[He paused, chastened. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He reached for his glass again. “What did the judge say about her shoplifting?”

“Just what I told you on the phone,” she said with a resigned expression. “If she doesn’t get into any more trouble, it’ll be expunged from her record. If she does it again, though…” She trailed off.

“You’re worried about this,” he started.

Kim turned away. “It’s not the first time, which is the problem,” she confessed. “She admitted to stealing the bracelet last year, but this time, she said she was buying a bunch of stuff at the drugstore and couldn’t hold it all, so she tucked the lipstick in her pocket. She paid for everything else, and when you see the video, it seems to be an honest mistake, but…”

“But you’re not sure.”

When Kim didn’t answer, Steve shook his head. “She’s not on her way to being profiled on America’s Most Wanted.] She made a mistake. And she’s always had a good heart.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s telling the truth now.”

“And it doesn’t mean she lied, either.”

“So you believe her?” Her expression was a mixture of hope and skepticism.

He sifted through his feelings about the incident, as he had a dozen times since Kim had first told him. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a good kid.”

“How do you know?” she demanded. For the first time, she sounded angry. “The last time you spent any time with her, she was finishing middle school.” She turned away from him then, crossing her arms as she gazed out the window. Her voice was bitter when she went on. “You [could have] come back, you know. You could have taught in New York again. You didn’t have to travel around [the country, you] didn’t have to move here… you could [have stayed part of] their lives.”

Her words stung him, and [he knew she was right. But it] hadn’t been that simple, for reasons they both understood, though neither would [acknowledge them.]

The charged silence passed [when Steve eventually cleared] his throat. “I was just trying to [say that Ronnie knows right from wrong. As much as she asserts her independence, I still believe she’s the same person she always was. In the ways that really matter, she hasn’t changed.”

Before Kim could figure out how or if she should respond to his comment, Jonah burst through the front door, his cheeks flushed.

“Dad! I found a really cool workshop! C’mon! I want to show you!”

Kim raised an eyebrow.]

So, some comments:

(1) When I read the text of the book in the ad I thought: I bet that’s Nicholas Sparks. My guess was based on the subject matter and how bad it is, but there’s a chance that I subconsciously remembered that the recent movie The Last Song, staring Miley Cyrus, was based on a Sparks book.

(2) As for how bad it is, I’m temped to rewrite the whole thing to demonstrate how it is awful, but I don’t feel like taking the time. Examples of things that have to go: “she said with a resigned expression”; “‘If she does it again, though…’ She trailed off”; “she confessed”; “Her expression was a mixture of hope and skepticism”; “She turned away from him then, crossing her arms as she gazed out the window. Her voice was bitter when she went on”; and “Kim raised and eyebrow.”

(3) This dude sells many, many books, despite how bad the writing is. He clearly knows how to tell a love story that a large segment of American women find enthralling. So one could say who am I to say Sparks is awful. But I’m saying it anyway and I’m right. Call me a snob if you must.

(4) This is the original reason I wanted to write about this ad: Of all the books Apple could’ve put on the screen, they pick that? Really? They couldn’t aim a little higher, offer a challenge? But then I remember, Sparks sells a lot of books. Maybe they are trying to attract those currently thinking about beach reading, which for some reason many people consider as the time to lighten it up. Maybe they have a deal with the publisher.

(5) Maybe this isn’t the best ad for the back of the New Yorker?

(6) There are some who think the iPad ads are sexist. The claim is that the ads featuring women show the women either reading Nicholas Sparks or organizing their photos, while the ads with men show the men reading the New York Times. I haven’t paid enough attention, or seen enough of them, to figure out if there is anything to this.

(7) I saw a Kindle ad on TV where a woman was reading Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom. The man she is with is reading something on his Kindle but I can’t make out what it is. I know nothing about this Bloom book.

Dog-eared 12

2010-06-19T02:29:00.001-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

It’s Family

“I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It's not sacrifice; it’s family.”

Martin D. Ginsburg, husband of Justice Ginsburg, as quoted here.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 9: Freedom and Adventure

2010-06-19T02:05:00.002-05:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm; Tom Waits’s Small Change]

On to the eighth essay in Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs (for previous posts on Michael Chabon and MfA, click here). [n.1]

The Wilderness of Childhood

In this essay Chabon writes about growing up in his suburb in Maryland (I’m pretty sure it’s Columbia, a planned community outside of Baltimore), specifically how he and the other kids used to roam his neighborhood and the nearby woods. He also talks about how things have changed, and how his kids, and pretty much all kids these days, don’t get that experience.

I grew up in an exurb of Los Angeles that is completely ringed by hills that buffer it from the surrounding towns. It was a remarkably safe place in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s when I lived there—it probably still is. It was pretty consistently ranked the safest city in America with a population over 100,000, and even when it wasn’t number one it was always still in the top three. [n.2] I don’t think I ever once thought I was in any sort of real danger when I roamed my town.

And roam I did. I have memories of walking with a friend to the closest shopping center when I was six. Maybe even five. And because my house was almost square in the middle of our expansive housing tract, the store was about a mile and a quarter away. Through the course of my childhood I made that walk countless times. We used to go to the liquor store or the pharmacy and buy baseball cards and bubble gum, and later the video store to rent movies and games. When we got a little older we’d ride our skateboards or bikes, and we’d go much farther. We’d go to the movies, or Target, or a restaurant, or the hills, or wherever. The park, the library, friends' houses. Sometimes I’d go alone but usually I was with at least one friend. Often we rode in a pack—a little bike or skateboard gang racing down the hills. It was great. We explored everything, we took care of ourselves, and we did it all the time. We even did it in the middle of the night, when our activities were almost never malicious but were often…impolite.

Those sorts of things are things I can’t imagine letting Carver do. Chabon talks about this, about how things have changed. But what’s changed isn’t the level of violence, or abductions—he cites Department of Justice numbers that say the frequency of these things hasn’t really changed all that much, and that abductions by strangers (possibly the biggest fear of many parents) are extremely rare [n.3] —it’s that the horrors are much better known; that parents are practically encouraged to develop deep, irrational fears about things happening to their kids; that we’ve developed a cult-like obsession with protecting our children to a level of absurdity. But he acknowledges that he’s like that too, that he’d never give his kids the kind of freedom he had.

This change is most unfortunate. This is at least the second post I’ve written about how I’m concerned that my children’s childhood is going to be different than mine and thus extremely disturbing. But I honestly think there’s more to it than just a “kids these days” and “the world is going to hell” thing. Chabon talks about how children wandering their neighborhoods and the nearby wilderness is a historical thing that pretty much every generation so far has shared. And I think that’s true. My grandfather and father were raised in very different places (my grandfather in depression era Prescott Arizona, my father in post-war Los Angeles), but they still shared a similarity in their childhoods that were rooted in parentless adventures. My dad used to tool around his town on a Flexi Flyer or Flexi Racer and was in near constant peril of smashing into or under a moving or parked car. He has stories of riding his bike around town, going fishing, sand skiing, heading down to the beach, et cetera et cetera, without a hint of parental involvement. Much of my childhood was the same. I sometimes liken it to the movie Stand By Me—it was always a group of kids making their own adventures, heading out on their own quests, walking down railroad tracks out in the middle of nowhere, with no adults involved (or even informed). [n.4]

These parentless adventures were invaluable in creating independence, developing problem solving skills, socialization, and so on. I have been a fiercely independent person since I was about 13, and while I was a child in many ways for many years after that, I was quite capable. I was very prepared to leave home at 18, and I’ve never felt like I needed help in getting by (except when it comes to dry-wall repairs and electrical work—that’s an inside joke). What happens to the kid who doesn’t have that? I don’t know; all the people I knew very well when they were in their late teens and early twenties had it.

So when I think about this issue I can’t help but think about whether it would be better to live in the suburbs, or a small town, rather than in the city. Everywhere I’ve lived in the last 10 years has been near a city center. I want to live in the city. But I’m not sure if living in the city is the best thing for my son. My wife grew up in the city of Chicago, but I don’t know enough about her childhood to discern how it compared to mine pros and cons wise. All I know is that just about everything I loved about my childhood was possible only because I lived in a safe exurb. But I also don’t really know what I was missing by not being in the city as a child. So I don’t know.

But even if we were to move to a suburb or exurb or small town, would it even then be the same or similar to my youth? Or are parents so paranoid even in those places that that lifestyle of unsupervised children roaming the streets and hills and woods is gone everywhere? I think it might be. Chabon mentions how one of his kids got a bike and wanted to ride around, but the only thing he was comfortable letting her do was to peddle to the store with him walking behind her. He also mentioned that there are two nine-year-old kids on his street (in Berkeley), one kid a couple houses up the street and another a couple houses down. These two nine-year-olds have lived a few houses from each other their entire lives and have never met. So he notes: even if he were to stifle his fears and let his daughter ride around on her bike without supervision, who would she ride with? No other kids are out there doing it.

Note 1: I just looked back and realized that it’s been more than a month since I wrote a substantive post (stuff other than lists of what I’ve been reading on line and words from Sutree). I’ve also been thinking that I’ve been dragging out these Manhood for Amateurs posts for way longer than I thought I would. I’m hoping to get through the rest of the posts much more quickly.

Note 2: Thousand Oaks, a neighboring town, and Irvine were always the other two.

Note 3: 115 total in 1999.

Note 4: Coincidentally, after I wrote this part of the post (it’s taken me a few sittings), I got an email from a friend who mentioned that he always thought of one of our mutual friends as the Corey Feldman character from Stand By Me of our group.

Some Stuff I've Been Reading Online #3

2010-05-22T01:47:00.004-05:00

"Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt," by Umberto Eco. A list of features of Ur-Fascism.

No reading here: Roger Federer's best shot ever?

The words David Foster Wallace circled in his copy of The American Heritage Dictionary. How many of them do you know?

An old article in Slate: Which Dictionary is Best?

No reading here either: A great, great 84-minute interview of David Foster Wallace split into 10 parts on YouTube. You can find part five here (the others can be found from there). It contains these gems: (1) "There's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred." and (2) "Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need."

Instructions from Charles Mingus on how to toilet train a cat. Charles Mingus!

A Huffington Post post with a link to one of the most awesome videos on YouTube: Bronte sisters action figures! The video is a must watch. Seriously.

Coach Rodriguez gets his hair cut by my old Ann Arbor barber!

Pictures of Donald Judd's personal library. This is incredibly cool. I practically insist you go look at it. Read the instructions on how to browse (on the map, click on the shelf section you want to look at; on the picture, place your cursor on each shelf and it'll summarize what's on it; click on the shelf you want to see and it will show you that shelf; when you're looking at a shelf, if you place your cursor on a book it will tell you what it is). It's so great, I'm telling you.

The syllabus from a literary interpretation class David Foster Wallace taught at Pomona College (I assume) in 2005. It's seven pages and amazing.

A grammar quiz given by David Foster Wallace. Have fun!

This diagram (structure of the ballad) and this diagram (victory over temptation!) from the current edition of Diagram.

Lewis Black's fantastic takedown of Glenn Beck.

A video of Axis of Awesome doing their "Four Chord Song" medley. It's fun, if not exactly fair.

Love and Theft. A short video for National Film Board of Canada's online short film contest. Forbidden Tree is also worth watching. The Last Passenger and The Report Card are also good.

Words from Suttree, Chapters 2 Through 6

2010-05-22T01:31:00.003-05:00

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. Never in my life have I had to look up so many words when reading something. Here’s a list of the Suttree words I looked up in getting through chapters two through six (about 76 pages of text). The words from chapter one can be found at the bottom of another post. [n.1]

Chapter 2

Moiled – (moil) To work hard; to whirl or churn ceaselessly; twist.

Concatenate – To link together; unite in a chain.

Revetment – A facing of masonry or the like, esp. for protecting an embankment.

Brogans – Heavy, sturdy work shoes.

Nates – Buttocks, rump.

Limn – To represent in drawing/painting; to describe.

Chapter 3

Adenoidal – Pertaining to the adenoids (lymph glands near the pharynx), having enlarged, esp. to a degree that interferes with breathing.

Leptosome – A person of asthenic build; slight; weak; thin.

Bewenned – (be-wenned) Wen = harmless cyst, fatty secretion of a sebaceous gland.

Chapter 4

Anneloid – (annelid) Worms or wormlike animals of the phylum Annelida.

Marcid – Withered, shrunken, wasted away.

Accretion – Natural growth or extension by gradual external addition.

Barbican – An outwork of a fortified place; a defensive outpost.

Lazaret – Same as lazaretto = Hospital for those with contagious diseases, esp. leprosy; a quarantine ship.

Comestibles – Edibles.

Excrescence – (1) An abnormal outgrowth; (2) A normal outgrowth (hair, horns).

Electuary – A pasty mass composed of a medicine, usually in powder form, mixed with a palatable medium (e.g., honey, syrup), esp. for animals.

Decocted – (decoct) To extract the flavor/essence by boiling. [n.2]

Beeves – Plural of beef (!).

Abbatoir – (s/b abattoir?) Slaughterhouse.

Cambrelled – (cambrel) British for gambrel; hock of an animal, esp. a horse; gambrel stick = a device for suspending slaughtered animals.

Blueflocced – ? (Floc = a tuft like mass; floccus = a small tuft of wooly hairs)

Piscean – Person born under the Pisces sign; of/pertaining to the sign (here it probably means fish, or fishlike).

Placoid – Plate like, as scales.

Jowter – A mounted peddler of fish.

Kneecrooks – (made-up compound word) knee + bends.

Dolorous – Full of, expressing, or causing pain or sorrow.

Slaverous – ? (slaver = Dealer/owner of slaves; slobber, drool) (Here it probably means drooling).

Mummes – A person who wears a mask or costume while merrymaking; an actor.

Shriving – (shrive) Impose penance; grant absolution; hear confessions; confess.

Chancel – The space about an alter, usually enclosed and restricted to church officials.

Glaucous – Of a pail grayish or bluish green.

Sedge – Any of numerous grass-like plants of the family cyperaceae, having solid stems, leaves in three vertical rows of spikelets of inconspicuous flowers.

Relict – Organism or species of an earlier time surviving in an environment that has undergone considerable change; widow.

Ebonfaced – Ebony faced.

Wapsy – Waspy (having many wasps?).

Batboard – (batting = fabric, cotton, often used as stuffing) Here it’s likely a compound—board made of batting.

Jakes – Latrines, privies.

Serried – Pressed together, crowded, esp. in rows.

Brisket – Chest of an animal (the cut of meat was clearly not what was intended here).

Scupper – Opening on a ship deck or roof to let water run out.

Caustic – (as a noun) A caustic material or substance; a hydroxide of a light metal.

Adumbrate – To give a sketchy outline of; foreshadow; disclose partially or guardedly.

Chapter 5

Ermine – Of or pertaining to weasels.

Shako – A stiff, cylindrical military dress hat with a metal plate in front, a short visor, and a plume.

Baize – Cotton or woolen material napped to imitate felt and used chiefly as a cover for gaming tables, often bright-green.

Chapter 6

Kudzu – An Asian vine of the legume family used for forage and erosion control; a serious weed in the S.E. United States.

Creepers – A creeping plant/vine.

Datura – Any of a genus of widely distributed strong scented herbs, shrubs, trees, of the nightshade family.

Phlox – Any of a genus of American annual or perennial herbs that have red, purple, white, or variegated flowers.

Suppurating – (suppurate) To form or discharge pus.

Midden – Dunghill; refuse heap.

Talus – A slope formed esp. by the accumulation of rock debris; the debris at the base of a cliff.

Sleech – Thick river mud/sludge/slime.

Vitreous – Relating to/resembling glass; glassy; made from glass.

Chrysalis – A pupa, esp. of a moth or butterfly, enclosed in a firm case or cocoon.

Whelk – Type of marine snail; inflamed swelling (pimple or pustule).

Apostate – One who has abandoned one’s religious faith, political party, cause, etc.

Birdlime – A sticky substance that is smeared on branches or twigs to capture small birds.

Warfarined – (warfarin) A white crystalline compound (C19, H16, O4) used as a rodenticide and as an anticoagulant.

Pneuma – The soul or vital spirit.

Niello – Any of several black metallic alloys used to fill an incised design on the surface of another metal; such a decorated surface; the art or process.

Slattern – An untidy, dirty woman.

Hipshot – Having the hip dislocated; hence having a hip lower than the other.

Winksome - ?

Dogstar – Sirius (but that doesn’t seem to be what he means here).

Ordurous – Of or pertaining to ordure (dung, feces); filthy.

Sussurous – (s/b susurrous?) Whispering; rustling.

Dishabille – Partially or very casually dressed; casual or lounge attire.

Cordite – A smokeless explosive powder.

Tawed – (taw) To convert (skin) into white leather by mineral tanning, as with alum and salt.

Note 1: The definitions are mostly my abbreviated versions I noted when I looked each word up.

Note 2: I can’t hear or see the word “essence” without thinking of the scariest movie of all time—Dark Crystal. Watch this, if you dare. It is extremely disturbing. I can’t believe people let kids watch this:

Two Things About Bookstores

2010-05-12T02:50:00.004-05:00

(1) Anne, Carver, and I went to the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago last Saturday evening, and we stopped in a bookstore called “The Book Cellar” (clever, eh?). We found the store to be charming and cool. Carver needed to have his diaper changed so we used the restroom, and Anne, perhaps having acquired one of my public-bathroom-using neuroses, mentioned that we were probably then obligated to buy something. That is a dangerous suggestion to make to me in a bookstore. My self-imposed severe restriction on book buying, which had been going well until a few months ago, went right out the window. So I decided to get Anne a bonus Mother’s Day gift and bought a copy of Asterios Polyp. I wasn’t sure if she had any interest in graphic novels, but I’ve had people whose opinions about books I trust tell me that Asterios Polyp is insanely good and people who haven’t read it should drop everything and read it immediately. And even if she didn’t like it, I want to read it (yeah, not the most thoughtful gift perhaps, but hey, it was a last minute bonus gift).

So here’s the point I want to make: I derived some small satisfaction from buying the book at a small, independent bookseller, rather than from Amazon or one of the big chains (not that I don’t like Amazon or Borders or Barnes and Noble—I actually like them all and buy lots of books from them). But the thing is, I paid list price for the book + the absolutely insanely high highest in the country sales tax that is imposed on those who dare buy anything in Chicago = around $33. Had I ordered it from Amazon I would’ve paid $19.77 total, and it would’ve been delivered to me (I don’t have to pay for shipping from Amazon and there’s no sales tax applied). A difference of $13 and change is nothing to scoff at when you’re buying a book with an MSRP of $29.99.

I’m reminded of the time shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor when the Borders employees were striking and demonstrating outside of the original Borders (Borders #1) on East Liberty and they were singing songs of solidarity and such, completely blocking the sidewalk, and then some jackass got in my face about “crossing their picket line” when I dared to, you know, try to get from point A to point B using the sidewalk. At which point I told him: to fuck off; that I was only trying to use the sidewalk and didn’t so much as hint at going in the store; that the level of arrogance and self-centeredness required to think that every East Liberty sidewalk user should be required to accept being put out, annoyed, and accosted by him and his comrades because they are chagrined at Borders is mindboggling; that while I had no intention of going in the store, now, after our little chat, I was going to go in the store and I was absolutely going to buy something just to spite him; and that he can go fuck himself. Anyway. So my thinking at the time was: how do they expect Borders to remain competitive, and by extension remain in business, if Borders has to pay their employees $13 or more an hour and provide them with health insurance? Borders has a hard enough time battling Barnes and Noble as it is, and they clearly cannot come close to competing with Amazon when it comes to price. I’m not one of those people who thinks physical bookstores that you can go in and browse in are going to all be gone in the next decade, but they do have serious challenges they have to face, challenges that are bad enough without paying a clerk $15 an hour to do the exact same thing the cashiers at Ross and McDonald’s do (who you know are making way less than that) and providing them with health insurance. [n.1]

So, yeah, supporting your local independent bookseller, while worthwhile, is sometimes an expensive endeavor.

(2) I was in Borders in Lincoln Park on Monday. While I was in the store I decided I wanted to look at a copy of Native Son. So I went to the fiction section and looked in the Ws for “Wright.” There were no books by anyone named Wright. I thought: there’s no way they don’t have a copy of Native Son, a famous and relatively widely read book that is based in Chicago, that was stacked tall on several tables in front during African-American History Month. After spending a couple minutes very carefully examining the entire “W” section of the shelves, in disbelief, I could not find it or anything else by Richard Wright. So I go to the computer they have set up for people to search for books and such. The computer told me that they had Native Son in stock . . . in the African-American Literature section. So I went to the African-American Literature section and, sure enough, there stood many copies of Native Son and other books by Wright.

I also noticed that the fiction section did not contain anything by Colson Whitehead—all the Whitehead books were in the African-American section. I noticed a pattern, and it was somewhat disturbing.

I don’t really want to use such a loaded word, but the Lincoln Pak Borders (all Borders?) has segregated its books. By putting Colson Whitehead’s books, and Richard Wright’s and lots of others, only in the African-American Literature section they’re doing a bad thing. They’re limiting interest in those books (trust me, wrong as it is there are plenty of people who would enjoy those books who would be turned off by the label “black fiction”), books that are very good and important, books that are precisely the sort of books someone who would be turned off by the “black fiction” label should read. But I also understand that the existence of the African-American Literature section is a good thing; people who are interested specifically in black fiction probably appreciate that the section exists, that the sort of books they want to find are neatly collected in one place. Ideally, I think, the store would have the books in both places, but I also understand that a bookstore probably wants to avoid doing that—it complicates their stocking and inventory and such. It’s a complicated issue, for sure. But I still think it’s messed up that black fiction gets excluded from the seemingly catch-all category that is “fiction.”

Note 1: I recognize that the Borders employee would tell me that they do much more than act as a cashier, that they’re educated readers who are helpful in recalling and suggesting books, and so on. [n.1a] Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want that service, it isn’t a service I’m going to use, and I don’t want to pay for it. I just want someone there who will take my payment as quickly and courteously as possible so I can leave the store with the items I want without getting arrested.

I also want to note that I am not anti-labor. It’s just that I think unions have a place, and that place isn’t Borders. I also think strikers should not harass people on the street, block traffic, et cetera. And I am also often suspicious of unions as organizations—I have personal experience with more than one union that was led by obviously corrupt leadership and that also clearly had interests other than getting the best wage, benefits, and working conditions for its members. I could say way more, but this post isn’t the place.

Note 1a: This reminds me of two things: (1) that scene in You’ve Got Mail where Meg Ryan’s character, the small bookshop owner, is checking out the mega bookstore that just moved in around the corner and is going to put her out of business, and someone in the children’s book section is looking for a book that she can’t remember the name of. The mega store employee is not at all helpful, but Meg Ryan’s character not only knows what book the lady wants but has a whole warm conversation with the customer about the series or something; and (2) I was in a Borders in Lincoln Park a few months ago and witnessed a Borders clerk attempt to help two black women who were looking for a book to give as a gift to a relative. They wanted a particular type of black fiction, and this was clearly not the clerk’s area of expertise (if he had one). It was painful to watch. In the end he said, “Oh! How about To Kill a Mockingbird? I Just read it and it was great!” Umm, yeah. That’s a service worth paying a premium for, right?

The Magnetic Fields and Concert Crowds

2010-05-08T02:13:00.010-05:00

[Beer for this post: Dark Horse Brewing Co.’s Crooked Tree IPA]

[Music for this post: The Magnetic Fields I]

Anne and I went to see the Magnetic Fields a couple months ago (March 8) at the Harris Theater. [n.1] The show was really great, as I expected it would be. The Magnetic Fields are, as I’ve mentioned before, one of my top-five favorite bands ever. Stephin Merritt—the ukulele player, a vocalist, and the lyricist and principal songwriter for the group—is pretty much a genius. [n.2]

While I expected to love it nearly beyond compare, I was very pleased that Anne did too.

The band, and Merritt, is perhaps best known for its magnum opus 69 Love Songs, a three CD album that is one of the most remarkable achievements in music. But all of their other stuff is good too (I don’t love every single song they’ve ever done, of course, but generally it is awesome). I should create a Trent’s Favorite Magnetic Fields compilation, but until I do here’s a small list (in no particular order) of their really great stuff that you should listen to and love unless you’re soulless:

I Thought You Were My Boyfriend; I Wish I Had an Evil Twin; I Don’t Believe You; It’s Only Time; The Nun’s Litany; Seduced and Abandoned; I Think I Need a New Heart; The Book of Love; When My Boy Walks Down the Street; If You Don’t Cry; You’re My Only Home; My Only Friend; Papa Was a Rodeo [n.3]; The Way You Say Good-Night; I Shatter; Busby Berkeley Dreams; Yeah! Oh, Yeah!; The Night You Can’t Remember; I Have the Moon; and many more. [n.4]

In 2006, I saw Merritt perform with Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) at a benefit show for 826 Seattle. They played “The Night You Can’t Remember” and “The Book of Love” along with a couple Gothic Archies songs. I loved that performance too, but it was made much less enjoyable by my fellow audience members who seemed intent at laughing at everything, even things that weren’t funny. Now, I recognize that the event was mostly funny stuff, it was meant to be a good time. OK. But I mean, watch this:

Here’s the play-by-play of the video:

[Laughing…laughing…laughing…laughing…]

Before you left your garrison

you'd had a drink, maybe two.

You don't remember Paris, Hon,

but it remembers you.

[HAHAHAHHAHA]

It's true, we flew to Paris, dear,

aboard an Army jet

the night you can't remember,

the night I can't forget.

[HahahHHAHAHAHAHAHaahahahaHAHHAH]

You said I was terrific,

it meant zilch to you, ah, but I

have our marriage certificate

and I'll keep it till I die.

[HAHAHAHhaahhAHHAH—oh yeah, unrequited love that a person holds dear until death—hilarious!]

You were an Army officer

and I just a Rockette

[HAHAHhahummmm—All that leg kicking, and the sense of worthlessness, damn that’s some funny shit]

the night you can't remember,

the night I can't forget.

No rose conveyed your sentiments,

not even a petunia,

but you've got vague presentiments

and I've got little Junior.

[HhhahAhahhahmmm—Ah! Yes, a fatherless child. Ha! Man, you’re killing me.]

You said, nobody loves me,

and I said, wanna bet?

The night you can't remember,

the night I can't forget.

But the guy sitting directly in front of me laughed way more often than what you hear in the video. He found just about every line side-splittingly funny. I so desperately wanted to kick him in the back of the head. The crowd was also laughing loudly and obnoxiously, and often, during “The Book of Love.” What’s funny about that song? It’s lovely and beautiful, but it isn’t funny. Maybe it, like “The Night You Can’t Remember,” has a few moments where a sort of knowing, wry smile is appropriate, but not guffaws. I mean, come on. I recognize that I am not the sayer of what level of humor should or may be found in something, but come on. I also recognize that Stephin Merritt may have meant some of this stuff to be funny, but I think I’m reading it right. I think he means there to be a tinge of humor, however you quantify that, where knowing smiles are anticipated, but that’s it (at least with those two songs). At the show we just saw in March, we got to see a little insight on this point.

(I wish I wrote this right after the show so I’d have it exactly right, but this is the gist of what happened and was said) Toward the end of the first set Merritt was talking during a break between songs and he mentions how the next song is sadly appropriate, or coincidental, or something like that, referring to the recent earthquake and tsunami in Chili and I think also to the tsunami in Indonesia, and then he introduces the song as “Suddenly There’s a Tidal Wave.” Guess what happens. About a quarter of the crowed erupts in laughter. And Merritt says something like, “Why is that funny?” More laughter. “Yeah, thousands of people died. Ha ha.” Shockingly, still more laughter, albeit from far fewer people.

So, why the laughter? Is it that when people go out they just want to have a good time and laugh? Is it that they want to be in on the joke so they laugh when they think there is one (even if there isn’t)?

We saw Kaki King perform a couple nights ago and a slightly similar thing (in my mind) happened: Kaki and her band were playing “Doing the Wrong Thing” (I think, which, HA!), and toward the end the band slowly faded out and the lights were flashing about once a second with a very noticeable clicking sound. It was very clear, to me at least, that the song was not over, and given that no one really applauded, I think the bulk of the audience understood that this was part of the act, the song was still in progress. But it was quiet, the band had completely stopped playing, all that we heard was the click of the lights. At this point the guy in front of me said, not quietly, something like “What the fuck are they doing?” and shortly after that a number of other people took the opportunity to shout things to the band. Why couldn’t they let it be? Why couldn’t they endure more than eight seconds of relative, obliviously purposeful quiet before they had to start making their own noise? Why can’t people stand quiet? What are they so scared of?

I do think it is fear, of a kind. There’s fear behind those shouts, and there’s fear behind that laughter. My knee-jerk reaction when this stuff happens is to think the offenders are just jackasses. But I’m trying hard to be a more understanding person, so I’m trying hard to understand what’s behind that fear.

Note 1: The Harris Theater, by the way, is hideous. The interior of the actual theater, where the seats are, was fine, but the lobby areas and such are eye-gougingly ugly. Anne likened it to a subway station. It’s pretty clear that they were going for a modern look, but it just doesn’t work. The walls are covered with shiny white panels, the lighting is like pink and green florescent or neon stuff that is not only ugly in itself but also makes everyone in there look less attractive. It’s a nightmare.

Note 2: See him at work here. That’s a video from NPR that shows him create a song from start to finish (once you're redirected, click on the image of Merritt on the left that's marked "video").

Note 3: “Papa Was a Rodeo” always makes me think of Brokeback Mountain, something that would probably horrify everyone involved with either project.

Note 4: That’s not even counting stuff by The 6ths and the Gothic Archies, two other Stephin Merritt bands that have great stuff of their own.

A Word I Love; and Two Other Word Related Things

2010-05-01T01:59:00.008-05:00

A Word I Love: Lain

It’s just so very pretty, isn’t it?

Etymologies available here and here.

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

First Clown: . . . . Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.

Hamlet: Whose was it?

First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?

Hamlet: Nay, I know not.

First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

Hamlet: This?

First Clown: E'en that.

Hamlet: Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. . . .

Shakespeare, Hamlet.

And listen to this, one of my favorite songs of all time (song starts at 0:17, I strongly encourage you to stop it by 3:23 as the music they use for the end credits totally kills the mood):

Two Words I Used Earnestly in a Five-Day Period

(1) Cad – I referred to someone as a cad.

(2) Swell – When a friend asked if I’d like him to share some information with me, I said it would be swell if he did.

Relatedly: About six months ago I referred to someone as a “dickweed.” Immediately after it came out of my mouth I was shocked by it. That word was an often-used piece of my vocabulary when I was in my early teens, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it in at least 17 years or so.

Words from Suttree

I just started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. I’ve never read any of his stuff before, except for the first 10 pages or so of No Country for Old Men (I didn’t stop because I didn’t like it, I was just browsing the books on my mom’s bookcases). Never in my life have I had to look up so many words when reading something. There’s a saying about reading Infinite Jest: make sure you have two bookmarks and the O.E.D. handy. But, so far, on a words per page basis Suttree blows Infinite Jest out of the water on the words-Trent-doesn’t-know scale. So here’s a list of the Suttree words I looked up in getting through the first chapter (25 pages of text, but the dialog sections have way fewer words that I need to look up, so the words here are almost all from the 15 or so pages of non-dialog): [n.1]

Foetal – Variant of fetal/fetus

Alluvial – Detritus from running water

Hawser – Large rope for towing/securing/etc a ship

Interstitial – Relating to / situated in a gap

Striae – Stripe/line, groove, channel

Stele – The central vascular portion of the axis of a vascular plant, usually cylindrical

Pinchbeck – Fools gold, a counterfeit thing

Rictus – The gape of a bird’s mouth

Mucilage – Gelatinous substance of various plants

Reticulate – Resembling a net or network

Plover – Type of bird, like a sandpiper

Viscid – Sticky, having an adhesive quality

Volute – Spiral or scroll shaped; a type of mollusk

Gambrel – A stick or iron for suspending slaughtered animals

Incruent – Bloodless

Homunculus – A little man

Instanter – At once

Grapnel – Small anchor, usually with 4 or 5 flukes used especially to recover sunken objects

Stob – Stake, post

Flowage – An overflowing onto land

Rimpled – Wrinkled, crumpled

Agoggle – (Agog) Full of intense interest

Cerements – A shroud for the dead

Sulcate – Scarred with furrows, usually longitudinal

Terratoma – [s/b “teratoma”?] A type of tumor

Riven – To tear apart, rip open

Quadrate – Square, or nearly

Davited – (davit) a crane that projects over the side of a ship

Catenary – The curve of a cord that hangs between two fixed points

Cannelured – Ring like groove, the groove near the butt of a bullet

Breeks – Breeches, trousers

Parget – Any plaster or rough cast used to cover walls/etc

Gaitered – (gaiter) A covering for the ankle, calf, shoe top, compare to “upper”

Amphoric – Resembling the deep, hollow sound made by blowing across the mouth of a bottle

Note 1: The definitions are mostly my abbreviated versions I noted when I looked each word up. Also: A few of the words in the list are somewhat familiar to me (e.g., alluvial, interstitial, pinchbeck), and others are of the sort where I could’ve made a decent guess (e.g., viscid, instanter, riven), but I wasn’t sure so they made the list.

I See You (but not really) and Why I Write this Blog

2010-04-29T01:46:00.004-05:00

[Music for this post: Ben Harper’s Fight for Your Mind; and Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue]

[Beer for this post: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale]

Stat Counter

So, to get right to the point, a little over a month ago I added a stat counter to this blog—you may have noticed the little “StatCounter.com” icon at the very bottom of each page (but I’d be surprised). Anne has had one up on her blog for a while, but I had been avoiding adding one, that is until something happened that made me decide I really needed it.

I was avoiding it mostly because I didn’t (and still don’t, for the most part, really) want to know how many page hits I was getting and where my readers were coming from. See, I assumed my only readers were probably my dad, Anne, and a handful of my friends, but I also harbored a very small, secret hope that maybe I was getting a few more hits from other friends and perhaps even the occasional stranger. What was important, and what I didn’t want crushed by the information from a stat counter, was that these were assumptions that I was happy to make and did not want tested. My fear was that if I installed a stat counter I’d learn that no one was reading this, that the five or so people I thought cared enough to check it out occasionally actually didn’t, and also that my little hope of the occasional extra was foolish. There are a lot of websites out there, a lot of blogs, and to assume that people would take the time to read my ramblings, most of which are relatively personal and not specifically designed to be of wider interest, requires a certain amount of arrogance that I guess I have but don’t trust and am not comfortable with.

But I decided to add the tool after Anne told me that someone from the federal courts in D.C. had come to her blog through mine. This was shortly after I had applied for a clerkship with a federal judge in D.C., one who interviewed me in 2008 and who I’d love to work for. [n.1] Now, this reader (or viewer, at least) could have been anyone, it could’ve been a coincidence, but if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t. To get to my blog and then follow one of my links to Anne’s would require someone who was interested enough about me and my wife to bother with that. It could’ve been a mutual friend, but we couldn’t think of anyone we know who is currently in the D.C. federal court system. If I had to bet, I’d say it was either the Judge or (much more likely) one of her clerks. So, I decided to add the stat counter to see if this person came back to my blog.

What the stat counter tells me, if I go look at it: (1) number of hits in the current day, the previous day, the current month, and “total”; (2) the city, ISP, and IP address of each visitor; (3) how each visitor got there (a link from somewhere else, a Google search, et cetera); and (4) a bunch of other stuff that I don’t really ever look at. So, for example, if my dad views the blog today, and I go look at my recent activity, I’ll see that on April 29 someone in Montebello, California, using the network at Teac America, visited my blog by searching for “Howling with Mirth” using Google (Teac is my dad’s employer).

The information is very interesting. But if you’re reading this and are worried that I’ll figure out who you are and how often you read it, you shouldn’t be too concerned: first, because the information is usually too vague to make anything out of it; and second, because I don’t look at it that closely for the reason I talked about up above (I just don’t want to know). But when in scanning the thing I see something weird, I take note. Here are some examples of things I’ve discovered:

- I had a visitor from Qatar who viewed my post entitled “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.” He (I’m confident it was a he) managed to get to it without a “referring link” (he didn’t directly follow a result from a search engine) which is kind of strange.

- I had a visitor from Saudi Arabia who viewed my “Reading the New Yorker with Me…” post and got to it by searching “Play tits” on Google. I blame James Cameron.

- A visitor from Tehran, Iran, got to my blog by searching “hymen break videos” on Google. I guess that’s what I get for writing about Bad Lieutenant.

- And, the most disturbing one by far, a visitor from Frisco, Texas, who got here by searching “pre school little lolitas.” Fucking sick bastard. I write about one of the most beautifully written novels of all time and I get this sort of traffic. If any law enforcement officers from Texas or the FBI are reading this, he (obviously) connected via Grande Communications and his IP address is 72.48.62.230.

Other, less disturbing things I’ve discovered:

- I’ve had visitors from every continent except Antarctica. If anyone knows anyone at a research station down there, please ask them to visit my blog so I can complete my tour of the continents.

- I have semi-regular readers in Australia, Ireland, England, and a few other places. Who knew?

- When Chris at Smart Football linked to my “Ten Books…” post my traffic jumped to about 100 people a day for a few days. Thanks, Chris!

- If you really want to know, and I don’t but I can’t delete it from my mind, my daily average is about 10 people (with spikes occurring during the two days after I post something new), which is more than I would’ve dared to guess.

Thanks for reading, it means a lot to me.

Why I Write this Blog

I don’t write it because I think I’m going to become the male version of Heather Armstrong, a “daddy blogger” who can support a family on blogging revenue. [n.2] I don’t write it because I’m arrogant enough to think lots of people who don’t know me care about what I have to say. This is probably going to sound sappy, or whatever, but I write it because it is good for me. I write this to share.

Those who know me well, particularly my wife and ex-girlfriends, know that communication is far from my strong suit. I’m intensely private about many things and I tend to keep to myself most of what goes on in my head (which has to sound strange coming from someone who writes a pretty personal blog, but it’s true). But for some reason, and I realize I’m not unique here, I can write things I can’t say. I can share things here that I can’t share in another manner. [n.3] Some might think this is an example of what’s wrong with people today, what’s wrong with the Internet, this distanced, impersonal, electronic communication. They’d say that surely a face-to-face chat would be better, and maybe they’re right, I can understand that, but some of this stuff I am simply not going to say otherwise. I can’t share some of the things I’ve shared here in one-on-one conversation. Call it a fault of mine—it probably is—but this is what I’ve got, and I can’t help but think this is better than nothing. And in my defense, sort of: on top of the limitation caused by my usual inability to expose myself in person (heh), I think there is a depth achievable in writing that is hard to match in conversation. But whatever.

I’ve written stuff here that has touched certain people very deeply, made them cry with joy, and I’ve written stuff here that has led to friends sharing important, personal things with me that I am confident they never would’ve shared otherwise. This is not boasting, it’s the truth, and it’s my point.

I write about what interests me, what pisses me off, what I care about, et cetera and so on, because I want to communicate with other human beings. I’m reaching out. I’ve had people tell me that I should be really careful about what I write online, that I should restrict my communication, that I should self-censor. And I am careful, generally (e.g., I removed the Facebook link that displayed my full name on this site), but there’s a part of me that refuses to restrict my communication, that recoils at self-censorship. The point here for me is to share, to open myself to others, and I’ll be damned if I cut that short because I’m worried about what someone who doesn’t even know me will think about it.

Every time I read something or hear someone say that you need to be careful about what you put online, I think, “If someone doesn’t want to give me a job, or whatever, because of what I write here, or my often strange and easily misconstrued Facebook status updates, then fuck them.” [n.4] But I have to admit, when I was faced with that idea more concretely, when it became clear that the Judge I applied to (or one of her clerks) was probably looking at this blog, I thought about what I’d written here and kind of regretted some of it. But I quickly came back to where I was before: if they want to make a hiring decision based on what I’ve written here, without understanding where I’m coming from, my perspective, my slant, my humor, et cetera et cetera et cetera, then screw them. This stuff is for people who care about me, in one way or another.

Note 1: My instinct suggests that second "who" should be "whom," but I figured it would looked forced if I put it there.

Note 2: But I am convinced that there’d be a market for a decent “daddy blog.” The problem is that it would require a much tighter focus on fatherhood, and I want to write about what I want to write about without being concerned about staying on topic.

Note 3: No, writing letters or private emails to the people I want to share particular stuff with is not a viable alternative for me. Trust me.

Note 4: But I should note that I am not one of those people that has many hundreds of pictures, many of which involve bodyshots and/or extreme drunkenness, of me on Facebook. Or anything of the sort.

The Census; the NFRC; and William T. Vollmann

2010-04-17T01:32:00.007-05:00

The Census

Unlike my friend Neal [n.1], I’m typically not one to rail against government inefficiency and spendthriftyness. But I am somewhat baffled by the census mailings I’ve gotten in the last month. First, we got a letter that said little more than: “You’re going to get an official census form in a couple weeks, so keep a look out and please don’t throw it away.” Then we got the census form that informed us that our “RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.” Then we got a postcard that said: “You should’ve gotten your census form a couple days ago, please fill it out.” THEN we got another census form, identical to the first one, with a note that says, not as directly as it could, that we shouldn’t send this one in if we sent in the last one.

So, we got four mailings when one would’ve sufficed. I understand that the census is important and they want to get the most accurate count they can, but come on. Those that don’t respond to the mailing still get tracked down, in theory, by the census people, and for those people mailing them more things probably isn’t the best way to get them to respond. I’m assuming they sent four mailings—when one would’ve done the trick—to every household in America. (Number of households in America x 3 x pre-sorted first class mailing rate) + printing costs + cost of paper + other mailing costs + all sorts of other unnecessary costs = amount of money the Department of Commerce has pissed away. And on top of that, I guarantee you there are all sorts of confused people who sent in their form twice . . .

Every time one of my conservative friends talks about how a public health care option would be a disaster because of the gross inefficiencies of the government, I say it doesn’t have to be that way. But then I see things like this.

The National Fenestration Rating Council

I saw an ad for some window company and in it the guy bragged about their great rating from the National Fenestration Rating Council. I laughed hard. I decided I really wanted to look this group up. Here’s their website. I assumed they were a window rating group, and was all set to make fun of them for using “fenestration.” Much to my dismay, they define fenestration as “Products that fill openings in a building envelope, including windows, doors, skylights, and curtain walls designed to permit the passage of air, light, vehicles, or people,” and they rate windows, doors, skylights, and “attachments” (whatever that means). So I can’t make fun of them for calling windows fenestration, but I’ll still make fun of them if only because I got my mouth all set for some ridiculin’ and there’s just a swalla in the container. [n.2]

William T. Vollmann

. . . is an author and quite possibly a crazy man. This old story from the New York Times is a decent place to learn a few things about the guy. He published his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, when he was 27, and it was considered Pynchonesque and the sign of an amazing new talent. He’s since written several very big books, including Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3352 page treatise on the history of violence. Yes, that’s right, seven volumes, 3352 pages, about violence. And he squeezed it in between writing his many novels.

Anyway. What I really want to mention are his research methods. Instead of just reading up on some stuff, he goes out and lives it. Some stuff he’s done for his writing:

(1) Ran with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the early eighties.

(2) Immersed himself in numerous other war zones (Sarajevo, Somalia, Iraq, et cetera).

(3) Smoked crack more than 100 times to gain the trust of the prostitutes and street people he was studying.

(4) He’s been burned and beaten on several occasions in his effort to embed himself with street people.

(5) Slept with a great many prostitutes (he’s written about prostitutes in more than one book) (did I mention he’s married?)

(6) Kidnapped a child prostitute from a brothel in Thailand and then set her up in a school.

(7) Spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole without a way to leave or cut the trip short. His gear was woefully inadequate; he hallucinated from lack of sleep (his sleeping bag couldn’t keep him warm) and nearly died.

And so on. That’s a man dedicated to his art, and who's probably at least a little crazy.

Note 1: Neal once sent a FOIA request to the U.S. Post Office to try to figure out how much money they spent when they had their Star Wars theme thing a couple years ago, including painting a bunch of mailboxes to look like R2D2.

Note 2: That was a rather forced Harlem Nights reference. Watch this (the whole thing is worth watching, but if you want to cut it a little short, start at 1:33, if you can’t spare even that much time, start at 3:30).

Dog-eared 11

2010-04-14T15:14:00.003-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666 (again)

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (page 511).

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (three times)

“On purpose,” J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. “You don’t go to the client. You make the client come to you. That way the cap’s in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client’s convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell’s half acre like this just to find you.” J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father’s whole speech. Plus his summation:

“A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain strategem,” J.D. says. “It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 307).

It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it’s not very far to Alone.

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 308).

[In making an absurd argument that Hawaii Five-O is pure entertainment free of politics] “Especially in reruns, syndication, that you’ve seen before,” Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. “Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 317).

Lost in the Funhouse (two more times)

[Fat May is the large, grotesque mechanical lady at the entrance to the funhouse who projects recorded “laughs” through a loudspeaker]

Money spent, the three paused at Peter’s insistence beside Fat May to watch the girls get their skirts blown up. The object was to tease Magda, who said: “I swear, Peter M—, you’ve got a one-track mind! Amby and me aren’t interested in such things.” In the tumbling-barrel, too, just inside the Devil’s mouth entrance to the funhouse, the girls were upended and their boyfriends and others could see up their dresses if they cared to. Which was the whole point, Ambrose realized. Of the entire funhouse! If you looked around, you noticed that almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into Couples except the small children; in a way, that was the whole point of Ocean City! If you had X-ray eyes and could see everything going on at that instant under the boardwalk and in all the hotel rooms and cars and alleyways, you’d realize that all that normally showed, like restaurants and dance halls and clothing and test-your-strength machines, was merely preparation and intermission. Fat May screamed.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

The word fuck suggests suction and/or and/or flatulence. Mother and father; grandmothers and grandfathers on both sides; great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers on four sides, et cetera. Count a generation as thirty years: in approximately the year when Lord Baltimore was granted charter to the province of Maryland by Charles I, five hundred twelve women—English, Welsh, Barvarian, Swiss—of every class and character, received into themselves the penises the intromittent organs of five hundred twelve men, ditto, in every circumstance and posture, to conceive the five hundred twelve ancestors and the two hundred fifty-six ancestors of the et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera of the author, of the narrator, of this story, Lost in the Funhouse. In alleyways, ditches, canopy beds, pinewoods, bridal suites, ship’s cabins, coach-and-fours, coaches-and-four, sultry toolsheds; on the cold sand under boardwalks, littered with El Producto cigar butts, treasured with Lucky Strike cigarette stubs, Coca-Cola caps, gritty turds, cardboard lollipop sticks, matchbook covers warning that A Slip of the Lip Can Sink a Ship. The shluppish whisper, continuous as seawash round the globe, tidelike falls and rises with the circuit of dawn and dusk.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

Some Stuff I've Been Reading Online #2

2010-04-03T01:56:00.004-05:00

An article in the New York Times about how for-profit colleges and trade schools are benefiting from the bad economy, and how they are all basically a scam.

A slideshow from The Huffington Post about what they're calling the Texas Textbook Massacre (ha!). The lede: "A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade."

An article from Daily Finance about how enhanced electronic versions of books are "a boon for readers, a headache for agents." Basically, there are copyright issues that come up when the enhanced features are added to the electronic editions.

A series of posts in the New York Times blogs by Steven Strogatz on math. I've particularly enjoyed the post about complex numbers and the one about the Pythagorean theorem.

A Roger Ebert blog post about how Glenn Beck thinks Jesus was a Nazi.

A very interesting article from the New York Times magazine about how to "build" better teachers.

An old interview with David Foster Wallace where he notes that the coolest bookstore ever is the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. He had excellent taste.

A very interesting article from Michiko Kakutani about books in the digital age, touching on: fiction's loss of relevance; copyright questions; the Internet's cultivation of niche culture, or as Cass Sunstein calls it Cyberbalkanization; and celebrity as "the great new art form of the 21st century."

A short thing from the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Romans of the New World?" about an exhibition at the Getty Malibu Villa (which is beautiful and great, by the way) of Aztec stuff. Apparently the Getty is playing up the comparison of the Aztecs to the ancient Romans. The article is short and doesn't say much, but the comments . . . man the comments. Apparently you shouldn't compare the Aztecs to the Romans on the Internet, because the crazies will come out and go off about how barbaric the Aztecs were, how they sacrificed babies, et cetera, etc, and so on.

A story from NPR about "linguistic pet peeves." The author is of the opinion that a peeve cannot be pet unless it is rather unusual. But the whole thing is kind of fun.

Gail Collins on how jacked up Illinois politics are. My favorite part:

"Then there was the No. 2 slot. In Illinois, the candidates for lieutenant governor run all by themselves in the primary. Then the winner is yoked to the gubernatorial nominee on the ticket in November. Would-be lieutenant governors tend not to be household names, so the results of these primaries can be peculiar. (In 1986, Democratic voters nominated a 28-year-old follower of the extremely strange Lyndon LaRouche. This happened on a night that the Chicago LaRouchians were busy holding a mock exorcism in front of the home of a religion professor they had decided was a warlock. The gubernatorial nominee, Adlai Stevenson III, was so horrified that he bolted the ticket and ran as a third-party candidate. Everybody lost.)"

The March 27 Best Seller lists from the New York Times. I'm very pleased that Michael Lewis holds the #1 spot in both paperback and hardcover nonfiction (undoubtedly aided by the movie for The Blind Side, but whatever). Not so thrilled that Nicholas Sparks is the current king of fiction paperbacks.

My friend Marco's five-part series about Krzysztof Kieslowski's film White. It's loaded with spoilers, FYI.

The Awl's take on a new acid-trip-like commercial from Friskies.

OK, no reading involved here, but this Teletubbies video is amazing. I've never taken hallucinogens, or whatever, but I imagine the effect would look something like this. Either that, or the Friskies commercial.

And a New York Times Book Review essay about the rise of bad parents in Young Adult Fiction.

Oh, I almost forgot. Also an epic interview of David Lipsky about his forthcoming book that is essentially a five-day roadtrip with and interview of David Foster Wallace. It includes a question from a very cool guy with the same name as me.

Reading The New Yorker with Me: Notes from the Late February Issue

2010-04-03T01:19:00.006-05:00

My observations from the February 15 & 22 issue of The New Yorker, some of it at least:

And the Oscar Goes to . . .

The Comment in The Talk of the Town is about the Academy Award nominations, primarily the best picture battle between Avatar (or, Pocahontas in Space) and The Hurt Locker. A contextless excerpt:

Cameron knows a lot about science, but he’s happy to bag it when necessary, as suggested in this colloquy, from a recent interview with a men’s magazine:

Playboy: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?

Cameron: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.

Oh, where to start? How about here, at the first thing?

First: James Cameron is a loathsome and contemptible man. I have felt that way for a long time, but this just gives me more proof.

Second: Why does The New Yorker refer to the interview in “a men’s magazine” just to call it Playboy in the excerpt? What’s the point in keeping the magazine title secret just to disclose it on the next line?

Third: Cameron thinks only placental mammals have “tits”? Has he never seen a chicken or turkey? They have breasts. Oh, wait. He must mean teats. Nipples? But marsupials have nipples, last I heard, and marsupials aren’t “placental” mammals. So why talk about “placental” mammals, Mr. Cameron? Just to sound smart, or what?

Fourth: OK, Mr. Science (Fiction) guy: What difference does it make that, according to you, only “placental mammals” have “tits”? We're talking about aliens, or extraterrestrials, or whatever. So what difference does it make which Earth animals have “tits”? None. No difference. What’s the point of making up alien civilizations if you’re going to bind your vision to what makes sense on Earth? God I hate James Cameron.

Irony 101 (at Yale)

A group of current Yalies and alums working with the Yale admissions office created a 16-minute video entitled “That’s Why I Choose Yale” that has created quite a stir among those who care about such things. Apparently it’s kind of ridiculous. Here are some bits from the article, with commentary in brackets:

Three minutes into watching [it] Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75 . . . paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” On the screen an actor dressed as an admissions officer had begun singing generic collegiate propaganda in bouncy rhyming couplets. (“Of course you’ll get a first rate edu-cation, / But also thrive on classmates’ conver-sation!”)

. . . more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery . . .

[James Goodale, Class of ‘55] added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.”

[Undoubtedly loathingly uttered “PRINCE-ton.” And, what the hell?]

“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No they’re not.’ And I was depressed.” IvyGate, a college blog in the Gawker mold. Noted the video’s debut with the headline “‘That’s Why I Chose’ [sic?] to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

[Tony Award-winning librettist Doug Wright, Class of ’85] mentioned Yale’s “underground reputation as ‘the gay Ivy’” . . . and said that, either way, “with this, the admissions office has all but planted the flag.”

[Ha! Is it homophobic, or whatever, to find that funny? What about enjoying the fact that it was the theater guy who made the ”gay” comment?]

“Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this,” Professor Rodgers [Yale’s English Department’s resident Milton scholar] said. But he thought the video might be effective with kids today. “It says to a younger generation, ‘Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parent’s can’t understand,’” he said. “This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: “I can speak with more quotation marks than you.’”

[Great. Just what we need, more irony. I’ll let my son go to school wherever he wants (as long as it isn’t USC, Notre Dame, or Ohio State), but I’d rather he not go somewhere “saturated in an ironic mode.” And it isn’t because I’m too old or uncool to get it.]

Count Dick Cavett, Class of ’58, among the enthusiasts. “It sounds sappy, but I thought it was delightful,” he said, adding, “I wondered if it really was made in America, because there are no fatties.”

[ROTFLMAOQXZ!!!!!!1!! (While “LMAO” would be an accurate description of my reaction, this is meant to be “ironic.” And there is at least one “fatty” in the video.) [n.1]]

I kind of like the video. But, as far as I could tell, most of it is spent praising the awesomeness of residential colleges, something that is not unique to Yale. Hell, my beloved undergrad school, which is awesome in many ways but is certainly no Yale in many other ways, has ‘em. I think it’s a great way to structure a University, by the way, but it’s not terribly unusual.

Someone in the article mentioned that the video producers were probably trying to play off the "Glee" phenomenon, which is probably right. And: maybe this isn't fair, but it creeps me out when someone of Christopher Buckley's age writes something like "OMFG!"

A Thousand Days

So, some dude named Reid Stowe is setting a record for the longest non-stop ocean voyage (a record he broke more than year ago). There are probably many things I could say about this, but I’ll just write about this: He had a crewmember, his girlfriend, for the first 306 days, but she disembarked after she realized that her vicious seasickness was actually morning sickness. She got off at sea, met by another boat off of Australia, and has since had their baby. Reid, the father (obviously), has continued to sail around by himself ever since. I’d think that he might abort the mission to be there for his girlfriend and the birth of his son (born in July of 2008), but no. I mean, he was less than a year in, it's not like he was weeks away from setting the record or something. Maybe his backers/advertisers would've been pissed.

Taking Names

Suzanne Vega, long since dropped by her record label, has been recording acoustic versions of her songs on her own dime. She notes that other artists have done this so that they have something they can own (they don’t own the originals—the record companies do). Her career has been like a parabola—she started by working small shows, taking names and contact info for the people that are interested in her stuff, and she’s back to doing that again. Good for her. Solitude Standing was a great album, and one that meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. [n.2]

The Trial

[These are going to get shorter than the discussions above, because I’m getting tired and am starting to realize how long this issue is.]

Take 1: I don’t envy Eric Holder. He’s currently in a shit-storm over how and where to try alleged terrorists. Take 2: My God, people who should know better really are stupid, or at least disingenuous.

Riding High

An article about the resumed use of mules by the military. Highlights:

“[A mule] will carry as much as three hundred pounds, seven hours a day, twenty days straight.”

“...[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

The mule’s commitment to survival is interesting in a Darwinian context, because mules . . . have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feet, would interfere with that.”

“… mules did every sort of farm job: they pulled plows, dragged carriages, hauled loads, were ridden, and were happy to labor for a decade or two in exchange, as William Faulkner once wrote, ‘for the privilege of kicking you once.’”

Drinking Games

A Malcolm Gladwell essay. Gladwell is usually very, very good at what he does, which is to say, telling interesting stories tied to some research or findings or whatever. I’m not sure how good he is at getting the research right—I know people who think he’s really sloppy, or, worse, twists things to better fit his idea—but he is good at the story telling. No matter what he might be getting wrong, he sells a lot of books for a reason.

But this essay . . . this essay I just don’t get. The gist can be found in the subtitle and the caption to the artwork on the second page: (1) How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it; and (2) Culture and customs help shape the way alcohol affects us. I don’t know what to say, but I’m tempted to drop a “Duh.”

OK, so those two related ideas are interesting, but the essay doesn’t really do it for me. Over the course of a great many words (for a magazine article that doesn’t say much), he makes the following points: (a) There was this couple of anthropologists who went down to Bolivia to study something that had nothing to do with drinking. After the couple got back they met some guy from an alcohol journal and he wanted to know how the Bolivians drink, so the anthros write an article about it. It turns out that they, this subset of Bolivians, have these interesting parties every Saturday night (that sometimes last until Monday) where people tend to drink a lot. But! that's the only time they drink, and there is no alcoholism, no drinking related violence, no aggression of any sort. Also, the stuff they drink is 180 proof. (b) In New Haven the Italians drink quite a bit everyday, but it is relatively ritualized and is spread out over the course of the day. The Irish, on the other hand, are a bunch of crazy drunks (I’m summarizing here, but that was what I took from it). CONCLUSION: Repeat #s 1 and 2 from the paragraph above.

It just didn’t come together for me. Unlike some of my favorite stuff from Gladwell: his TED talk about pasta sauce and cola; and his New Yorker piece about genius.

The Guam Caper

OK, I’m seriously running out of steam here. So, a few quick points:

- St. Clair McKelway is an awesome name. It is also the name of an Army Air Corps officer who was stationed in the Pacific and worked with the B-29 squad. After going totally crazy he was quietly and gently pushed out of the way in the Army and contributed some amazing stories to the New Yorker about working with the Twentieth Air Force.

- B-29s are badass but a bitch to fly.

- Damn, B-29s killed a lot of Japanese people even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I knew this before, but I didn’t know the numbers. They are very high, more than 300,000 in less than five months, which is nearly six times what we lost over the entire course of the lengthy Vietnam War.

- Plus 1,000,000 points for use of the word "caper" in the title.

Done

OK, I’ve petered out here. I’ll just say, about the rest of the stuff in the issue: there is a nice spread of pictures of people who were involved in the Civil Rights movement; the short story takes place in Ireland and isn’t bad; and James Wood has a review of a couple novels about bankers and stuff, and it’s kind of boring.

Note 1: You’re the one for me, fatty.

Note 2: Tom’s Diner is, of course, a classic for people around my age, but Luka will always remain the most significant to me.

Dog-eared 10

2010-03-25T22:59:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Lost in the Funhouse

The ticket-woman, witchlike, mortifying him when inadvertently he gave her his name-coin instead of the half-dollar, then unkindly calling Magda’s attention to the birthmark on his temple: “Watch out for him, girlie, he’s a marked man!” She wasn’t even cruel, he understood, only vulgar and insensitive. Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her . . . and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

From Lost in the Funhouse, by John Barth, 1968.

Ten Books that Influenced Me

2010-03-20T02:19:00.009-05:00

One of the blogs I read is Smart Football. It’s written by a lawyer (I think) who also knows a great deal about the game of football--he's really into the "Xs and Os" and it's all good stuff. His most recent post is titled “Books that have influenced me most,” which is an idea he got from someone else and is something he encouraged others to do. [n.1] I encourage you to participate—I’d love to read about yours.

Here’s my list, compiled off the cuff and without deep thought or extensive reflection (I’m sure I’m missing something):

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read it for the first time as part of a seminar in college, and I read it again two or three years later. It was the first “big book” I ever read. It blew me away and taught me so much about families, men, relationships, doubt, faith, and religion. I was raised in what someone might now call a “secular” household—I’ll call it nonreligious—and the book’s detailed discussion of faith and doubt, particularly Ivan and Alexey’s conversation in the chapter titled “Rebellion,” really interested me. It had a profound effect on me.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. OK, so I just finished reading this two months ago, which might cause you to wonder how something I read recently and so relatively late in my life could be much of an influence. Here’s how: Infinite Jest struck me deep in my soul. It made me think and feel things that no other book has come remotely close to making me think or feel. It taught me an insane amount about fiction, how it works, what it can do, why it is important. It also showed me why contemporary and “post-modern” fiction does what it does, sort of. Since I’ve read it I’ve had this incredible explosion in interest in reading all sorts of things—my already incredibly long books-to-read list has grown massively in the last month, due almost entirely to the light Infinite Jest has shown on my reading world. I have a separate post that deals with my obsession with Wallace and why I love Infinite Jest.

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. I read this in my residential college’s “core course,” and it, like all the books in that class, had a great impact on the way I view some of contemporary society’s most notable issues. [n.2] Obviously the issue presented by Invisible Man was racism. As a boy who grew up in a very, very white town bursting at the seams with closet (or not so closet) white supremacists, Invisible Man was a vital part of my early education. That, and it’s very beautifully written.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. I read this in high school, and I absolutely loved it. There was something about fantasies of frightening dystopian futures that I really dug at the time--Orwell's 1984 could also have easily made this list. It taught me about corruption, vengeance, totalitarianism, rehabilitation, and the horrors of violence. Burgess’s prose was also often beautiful, and his creation of the Nasdat slang language was absolutely amazing to me (though, of course, I’ve since realized it was far from a unique achievement).

Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I was a philosophy major in college (actually a “double” with Politics, but I’ve always felt it was cooler to emphasize the philosophy), so I read a fair amount of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to contemporary thinkers like Lyotard (whose name I always got a kick out of) [n.3]. I, frankly, don’t remember pretty much any of it. Well, OK, I do remember little bits of Plato from the Symposium and The Republic, but I read plenty of Nietzsche and Kant and can’t tell you the first thing about what those guys talked about. I guess I had other priorities at the time… But, so I did one of my “exit” seminars (two special seminars needed to earn the degree) on the Philosophical Investigations and it was a real eye opener. Maybe it was because of the slow and deep look we took at everything (we read very few pages for every class, but we had to read them very closely), but I actually kind of started to get it. Before that I loved my logic classes, and enjoyed some of my other philosophy classes, but I never really got what the point was until Wittgenstein. In the Investigations, L.W. writes about language, symbols, categories, and such, and it’s all incredibly interesting.

Where I’m Calling From, by Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver showed me the beauty of the real. He showed me how, in the right hands, a very short story could quickly and completely rip your heart out. His stories “Cathedral” and “Beginners” (which is titled, in the book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” but I prefer to use “Beginners" to distinguish the longer version of the story (which is in Where I’m Calling From) from the much shorter, Gordon Lish-isized version [n.4]) are so masterful and beautiful they break my heart. If you need further proof of my adoration, how’s this: I named my son after the guy.

Letters to Felice, by Franz Kafka. I read this during my senior year of college, not for a course but on my own. It’s sort of a strange pick for this list, but I read it at what was a very sensitive time for me, personally. I had just broken up with my first and, at the time, only girlfriend, and I was also madly in love (or so I thought) with a friend of mine with whom I had a very odd relationship. The book is a collection of letters Kafka wrote to his love interest, a woman named Felice, to whom he twice became engaged before fate made clear it had other plans. The letters are…shall I say it?... Kafkaesque. They are love letters, yes, but they are also dark and frighteningly sincere. So I was reading these and I decided that sort of correspondence was charming and romantic, so I started writing daily letters to the friend I was enamored with. I should add that at that point in my life my prose was wildly influenced by whatever I was reading at the time, so my letters were…Kafkaesque. In hindsight it is perhaps unnecessary to say that these letters did little more than totally freak out my friend. And thus the entire course of my life was changed, or so I thought at the time.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. I read this during my first quarter in college, at the urging of my mother. I’m of mixed heritage and “white” by appearance, but I always identified as an Indian. I’m a member of my tribe, my mom grew up on the reservation, but I was raised in a white, middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. I knew my mom was a tribal member, and that I was too, and I cared about that. I also attended the "Indian heritage training" my schools put on (something in hindsight I am shocked that school district had). But for the most part my childhood involved being a visibly white boy in a white suburb of LA. It wasn’t until I first read Alexie that I experienced art about Indians that wasn’t Dances with Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. This was incredibly important to the development of the way I viewed my identity, and how I understood my mom’s.

The Selected Works of Oscar Wilde (I can’t find a link to anything close to the book I own, which is very old). The physical book itself is important to me, as it was a lovely gift given to me by my first girlfriend. But the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol were both very powerful to me. Wilde taught me about how witty wit can be, and he also taught me how beautiful prose can be. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, should also make my list for teaching me how incredibly beautiful English can be. Lolita has the most beautiful first chapter of all time, but then “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. If that’s cheating, then just The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My sixth-grade class read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud. It was probably the first time I got really excited about fiction. By the time I got to the other books, a few years later, I blew through them at a rapid pace, which was something that was previously unheard of for me.

Note 1: Chris’s (Mr. Smart Football) are interesting, but most of the guys he links to have some frightening lists. I’m being honest with mine, even though I might want to replace some of the books with something “cooler,” but I’m surprised how many of those guys have Ayn Rand (the “fifth rate Nietzsche”) on their lists. Now *that* is embarrassing.

Note 2: A Green History of the World, the first book we read from for my core course, and the first book I wrote a college paper about, would have easily made this list if I had read more than two chapters (we weren’t assigned the whole thing).

Note 3: Lyotard taught at U.C. Irvine. I can’t imagine a place less suited to deep thinking in the humanities than Irvine.

Note 4: The relationship between Carver and Lish is something that I care about. It deserves its own post.

Dog-eared 9

2010-03-19T00:55:00.002-05:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

A Cult of Cool

[David Foster Wallace has] twice failed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the first step toward entering the Catholic Church. (Wallace apparently referred to “the cult of personality surrounding Jesus Christ,” which did not sit well with the priest.)

From A Cult of Cool, by Elizabeth Weil, in the March 18, 1996, Los Angeles Times.

Bad Lieutenant, Forgiveness, and Victims' Rights

2010-03-19T00:38:00.004-05:00

Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant has been on my “movies to see list” since it came out. I really like Harvey Keitel, who stars in it, and I was also intrigued by the NC-17 rating (earned mostly for graphic drug use—the nudity, sex scenes, and violent rape of a nun probably didn’t help). A NC-17 rating attached to an artsy independent flick is always intriguing to me. I finally saw it last week.

It was pretty good, that’s all I’ll say about that. I’m not much of a critic in that way. [n.1] But I want to write about one particular part of the movie that got me all riled up.

- - SPOILER ALERT - -
(I can’t write about this without giving away key plot points in the movie, if you want to see it, you probably shouldn’t read this)

The movie is about Harvey Keitel’s character, a very ill behaved cop. He’s investigating the violent rape of a nun committed by two young men (they are referred to as “boys” a few times in the movie but they look like young men to me, maybe they were supposed to be younger but the movie needed more mature actors, I don’t know). The rape is very violent. - GRAPHIC IMAGERY ALERT - They pierce her hymen with a crucifix. And it’s, you know, a nun, which is seriously messed up. So, here’s what gets me. The nun knows who they are and won’t give them up to the cops because she says they are troubled and that she has forgiven them. Keitel says something like, “But they could do it again, we need to stop these guys.” She won’t give them up. Later on, Keitel gets another tip, figures out who the rapists are, and then arrests the guys. But then Keitel takes them to the train station and forces them to leave the city.

So when the nun says she won’t give the rapists up and that she has forgiven them, and it became clear that she’d remain steadfast in her position, I say to Anne (who was half watching the movie, half trying to work): “He should charge her. Bring her in.” We then have this discussion (paraphrased from vague memory):

Anne: “Wait. What?”

Me: “He should charge her. You know, for like interfering with the investigation. What’s that called?”

Anne: “You mean Obstruction of Justice.”

Me: “Yeah. He should totally charge her. Get her to talk.”

Anne: “You’re serious.”

Me: “Yes. Of course.”

Anne: “You think rape victims should be required to cooperate?”

Me: “Yes. Of course.”

Anne: “That’s messed up.”

So, yeah. I think he totally should’ve arrested the nun for refusing to give up her attackers. She made a big deal about having forgiven them, but that isn’t the point. She can forgive them in her heart, she can pray for their souls, she can love them, whatever, but she cannot forgive them for everyone else, for society. She can’t decide that they shouldn’t be arrested and tried before a court. That simply isn’t her decision to make. The strength of my belief on this point would rival that of Atlas’s shoulders. Why is this? I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s probably partly the lawyer in me, insistent that the law should be allowed to work. I think it’s also my somewhat fierce sense of vengeance and retribution—those bastards should not be allowed to get away with it, even if their (primary) victim wants them to. And maybe it’s that my role model for a prosecutor is Jack McCoy, from Law an Order, and Jack McCoy definitely would’ve charged that nun (unless his boss, the politico (before Jack was the politico), was buddies with the Cardinal and made Jack back down, then Jack would’ve just fumed, or something like that). Jack McCoy never hesitated to arrest a sympathetic character to get to the real bad guy—he’d charge a saintly child or a cuddly grandma if they were holding something back. Jack’s a badass.

(Obviously, the cop letting the rapists get away is even more wrong, but it seems too obvious to write about (except I'm sure it was supposed to say something about Keitel's character's nascent transformation.))

Note 1: Every time I think of what I’d say if asked to review something—be it music, a movie, or whatever—I’m reminded of a story Sarah Vowell tells about when she was asked to write a review of a Tom Waits album and the only thing she could think to say, at first, was “I quite like the ballads.” Which of course would’ve left her a thousand or so words short. [n.1a] That’s what would happen to me.

Note 1a: I don’t have a link to cite here, but that’s what I remember her saying.

Some Stuff I've Been Reading Online

2010-03-15T02:17:00.005-05:00

"Publishing: The Revolutionary Future," from The New York Review of Books. An interesting discussion about the future of publishing in the digital era.

What makes a word beautiful? What's the deal with "cellar door"? Language Log responds to the NYT's "On Language" column.

The Guardian (UK) posts the "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction" given by a bunch of authors. Part 1, and Part 2.

"Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity," from the WSJ, discusses whether the young are more creative.

A great essay about David Foster Wallace from The Point.

In a TED talk Ken Robinson discusses how our schools kill creativity (video).

"Five Tips for Writing Non-Fiction" from someone I've never heard of.

A Korean couple obsessed with gaming "Starves Real Child While Raising Virtual One." I'm horrified.

According to the NYT, some guy named Bill Geerhart sent a bunch of letters to famous people. In the letters he pretended to be ten-year-old "Little Billy." Many of the famous people (including Gerald Ford, Dan Quayle, Jack Kevorkian, Larry Flynt, Robert Shapiro, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas, and Harry Blackmun) responded. Now Bill Geerhart is publishing a book of "Little Billy's letters." This is kind of funny, and maybe the book will be interesting, but if I was one of the letter writers, I'd be seriously pissed.

Shakespeare for Lawyers: A Practical Guide to Quoting the Bard. Seriously? Whatever.

There's no such thing as a synonym, et cetera--an article from Michigan Today.

"Why Do the Archives of So Many Great Writers End Up in Texas?" A totally fascinating article in The New Yorker about the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas and why they are landing so many big archives treasures.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 8: Legos

2010-03-15T02:05:00.001-05:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm]

[Beer for this post: Green Flash Brewing Company’s West Coast IPA]

On to the seventh essay in Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs (for previous posts on Michael Chabon and MfA, click here).

To the Legoland Station

In this essay Chabon talks about Legos (the toys). He has several insightful points here; most of them involve how Legos have changed and what that means. He notes that the Legos of his youth were offered in only a handful of colors and very limited shapes, while now there are a huge number of very specialized pieces and kits so you can build Tie Fighters, Formula 1 cars, fighter jets, and the like. The main point I took from this was that he was concerned that the proliferation of specialized pieces and the massive manuals necessary to construct a perfect Tie Fighter, etc, would kill creativity—it was no longer about building things from your imagination out of numerous rectangles but rather carefully constructing a pre-imagined item using provided directions. But he found that his fear was unfounded—his kids, in the end, used the special pieces in interesting and unusual ways, making unique and beautiful creative creations.

I enjoyed Legos when I was a kid, but I didn’t own many—I usually just played with my friend Chad’s when I was at his house or when he brought them to my place. Chad also had a huge box of Lincoln Logs that we loved to go to town with. The only toys of that sort I had were a big collection of Tinkertoys pieces. The Tinkertoys were my favorite, but I can’t say why. Tinkertoys are just awesome.

I never really understood the purpose of the special Legos kits where you were intended to use the pieces to build the planned and pre-designed object. The ones that attracted me the most were the Star Wars ones, since I was a big Star Wars nerd, but in the end I couldn’t figure out why you’d want to build a Lego Tie Fighter when you could just get a regular Tie Fighter toy. The whole point of Legos, for me, was that you could build whatever popped into your head. If you want a Tie Fighter, just buy a Tie Fighter (the price was almost certainly comparable)—then your regular Star Wars figures would fit in it, unlike the Legos one that would only fit little Lego dudes.

I’m happy to hear that Chabon’s kids used the special pieces in their own creative projects. Chad’s big mix-and-match set of Legos had a few weird, non-standard pieces, and we always found a place for them in our creations.

The Wikipedia page for Tinkertoys says that the inventors (who were from Evanston and originally displayed their new toys in Chicago!) created the toys to “allow and inspire children to use their imaginations.” And that’s what Tinkertoys did, and that’s what made them so cool.

Not to toot my own horn, but for someone who never really formally studied engineering, I am very capable or understanding mechanics and just generally figuring out how things work. There are many reasons for this, but I don’t doubt that the Legos, Lincoln Logs, and Tinkertoys played a part. I hope Carver enjoys them as much as I did.

Dog-eared 8

2010-02-28T02:20:00.003-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666 (#2)

There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

I don’t think this is true. But it’s funny.

Scary Scarry

2010-02-28T02:11:00.003-06:00

I was a huge fan of Richard Scarry's books when I was a kid. And we have some for Carver that I hope he learns to love.

I came across this the other day and I was literally rolling around unable to control my laughter:

It's from a website that has a bunch of photoshopped Richard Scarry stuff. I like some of the others, but this is the only one that made me laugh uncontrollably.

My Obsession with David Foster Wallace

2010-02-28T01:43:00.003-06:00

So, a few posts back I promised to discuss my current obsession with David Foster Wallace. Here it is:

The Start

I first read Wallace in 2006, when my friend Jon sent me a link to an article in Harper's where Wallace reviewed Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage (I'm a usage geek and big Garner fan). [n.1] I read a little bit of it and decided I wanted to read the full thing (the Harper’s article was cut significantly), so I went out and bought Wallace’s book Consider the Lobster, which contains the full essay. I loved the essay, very much. I read the rest of the lobster book in a couple days and decided Wallace was wicked smart and he wrote about interesting things, but I wasn’t sure that I really liked Wallace’s style.

Wallace is known for his long digressions, use of numerous explicatory footnotes, and footnoting footnotes. This was totally new to me outside of law/academic stuff. As I read Consider the Lobster, I considered reading Infinite Jest, Wallace’s massive magnum opus, but decided I couldn't handle 1100 wild pages with 400 endnotes. I don't read very fast (purposefully), so the idea of going to that book to try a little more Wallace did not appeal to me at the time.

I didn’t read anything else by Wallace until after his suicide in September of 2008. I read an excerpt published in The New Yorker of his unfinished last novel, and I enjoyed it. Then, near the end of the summer of 2009, I finally tackled Infinite Jest thanks to the motivation provided by a large “group read” called Infinite Summer. And I'm so very, very glad I did.

Infinite Jest

Reading Infinite Jest was almost certainly the most profound reading experience I’ve ever had, but I’m not exactly sure why. What touched me so was undoubtedly what it was about, what it dealt with, but I think that was also aided significantly by my reading it as part of Infinite Summer.

First: Infinite Jest is widely considered to be a very hard book. And it is. Not only is it long, but its narrative structure is also challenging. The first 17 pages are the last things that happen chronologically. There are two main plots and a third somewhat lesser plot, all of which intersect, to some degree, by the end, and the book jumps around from one to the other, seemingly randomly [n.2]. There is an endnote that’s 8.5 pages (of six point type) that is nothing more than a filmography of one of the characters who is a sort of Avant-garde filmmaker (that you really can't get away without reading). There is another endnote that’s 15 pages (of six point type), an endnote that’s dropped in the middle of a ten-line sentence in the middle of the main narrative. There’s a four-page paragraph in a section that is narrated by an illiterate drug addict who can’t spell. And so on.

My wife, who hasn’t read anything by Wallace [n.3], does not like Wallace’s writing. Her opinion of his work, as best as I can remember, is something like this: he hates his readers and likes to show off. My opinion of Wallace’s work was much more favorable than Anne’s even before I started Infinite Jest, but, even still, Infinite Summer helped me keep such thoughts at bay. Some of the first things I learned from the folks at Infinite Summer were: (1) lots of people start this book and stop before they finish; and (2) if you get past the first 200 or 300 pages [n.4] you’ll be glad you stuck around. This was welcome encouragement to “keep coming back.” [n.5] And it’s true. That’s not to say the first 300 pages are torture, but once you begin to see it coming together all the work and prior confusion feels validated. Infinite Summer had several official “guides” who would write about each weekly section of the book and they also had guest writers who would write about all sorts of things, from Wallace as a person, individual parts of the book, to the book as a whole. All of this was extremely helpful. I understood the book better because they’d point out things I missed, and at times I could feel less alone in my confusion.

Second: The back cover of my copy says this about the book: “A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America.” This is maybe somewhat accurate. The book has plenty of very funny parts, but it is by no means a comedy in my mind (or Wallace’s, he intended to write a very sad book). It’s kind of about the pursuit of happiness in America, but that’s not how I’d put it. The two main plot lines involve: (1) an elite tennis academy in Boston, particularly a student named Hal, his friends, and members of his family; and (2) a halfway house located just down the hill from the tennis academy, particularly a staff member and former resident named Don. The third, somewhat lesser, plotline involves two “secret agent men” who are begrudgingly working together to locate a video (of sorts) that is so entertaining it basically turns everyone who sees it into mindless, useless vegetables (a film that just happens to be made by Hal’s father, the founder of the tennis academy, and stars Hal’s brother’s ex-girlfriend who later becomes a resident of the halfway house).

The larger summary on the back of my copy says:

Set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring one of the most endearingly screwed-up families in contemporary fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to dominate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

Again, I would never call it any kind of “comedy” much less a “screwball comedy,” but otherwise that summary is reasonably accurate, especially considering it’s a hard book to summarize in a few words.

The book deals with pursuits: filmmaking; academic and athletic excellence; interfamily communication; understanding; love and acceptance; a way to get by; and a high. The look into the world of addicts and AA was particularly interesting and enlightening to me.

While the book is hard, it is loaded with beauty and insight. There were plenty of times I was exasperated, but that was the point. I haven’t read much “post-modern” or “post-post-modern” fiction [n.6], and one of the things I really enjoyed about Infinite Jest was that it showed me there was a reason behind some of the “tricks” or “theatrics.” The book is hard for a reason. There are nearly 400 endnotes (rather than footnotes) for a reason. There are four-page paragraphs for a reason. And when you make it through it all, it is so, so worth it. [n.7]

The Aftermath

So after reading Infinite Jest, my respect for Wallace turned more into a love. And, being by nature a very obsessive person generally, I became mildly obsessed. I have since watched, listened to, and read every interview Wallace did that I can find on the Internet—I’ve watched/listened to/read several of them more than once. I’ve also read more of his stuff, from articles he published in periodicals to his other books. And that experience has deepened my love and respect. It would be easy for the casual observer to think that Wallace was unsympathetic, that he was making fun of certain people or sorts, that he was a snob, but the more I learn the more I come to understand that he wasn’t any of those things. While his eye was unblinking, and he never pulled a punch, he was as sincere and as compassionate as they come.

Note 1: My first exposure to Wallace was actually from Bryan Garner. Garner has these videos on his website where he talks to judges, lawyers, professors, and writers about language and usage. One of the videos is of Wallace, and, frankly, he kind of comes across as a disheveled nutjob (though I totally agree with his opinion that “before” is vastly superior to “prior to”):

Note 2: The structure of the book was not random. He wanted it to be like a Sierpinski gasket, a sort of fractal (if you don’t want to follow the hyperlink, think of it as a triangle full of smaller triangles, and smaller triangles, and even smaller triangles, et cetera).

Note 3: I don’t hold this against her. I know she would absolutely hate it, or at least most of it, and life is too short to read stuff you hate.

Note 4: There are some people who say 200, others say 300, others say something else.

Note 5: An AA catch phrase of sorts, at least in Infinite Jest.

Note 6: I hate to use such labels but I didn’t know how else to put it.

Note 7: Though I would never recommend Infinite Jest to someone unless I knew a great deal about their reading history and habits. It is a not a book most casual readers will enjoy. I will take the opportunity here to give a shout-out to my mom who read it at about same time I did. I was reading it when I went to visit her, she saw it, read the beginning, and decided to get her own copy. She made it through the book (much faster than I did) without having any prior experience reading Wallace, and without the Infinite Summer sort of encouragement and help—it’s a great testament to her prowess as a reader.

Dog-eared 7

2010-02-21T23:35:00.002-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

Yes, that was one sentence. My favorite part is “…more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape….”

Charger Fever Causes Man to Grab Wife By the Horns?

2010-02-21T01:21:00.006-06:00

There are clearly many people who do not like Dodge’s “Man’s Last Stand” ad that ran during the Super Bowl. I am one of them. Here’s the ad:

If you look at the comments posted for the YouTube video (which is rarely a good idea if you want to maintain faith in humanity) you’ll see: some mad women; and a bunch of men who think the video is awesome and the women need to just chill out. But, as at least one commenter noted, the ad is offensive to both sexes. It makes women out to be unreasonable nagging shrews, and it suggests that men are such brutes that they should be rewarded for maintaining their hygiene and mustering a bare minimum of civility.

My breakdown:

“I will get up and walk the dog at 6:30am.”

If it’s your dog, you better. If it’s not your dog, don’t do it if you don’t want to.

“I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast.”

Is this some sort of punishment? Fruit is tasty. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it.

“I will shave.”

I’d bet good money you do it for several reasons, at least some of which have nothing to do with your lady friend. Not to mention, she probably shaves, at least in part for you, and I bet you’d rather she not stop.

“I will clean the sink after I shave.”

I’d certainly hope so. You made the mess, you lazy bastard.

“I will be at work by 8:00am.”

My guess is you do this so you can keep your job, so you can have a home and eat and make your car payments. And so on.

“I will sit through two-hour meetings.”

Ditto.

“I will say yes when you want me to say yes.”

If you want to be a “yes man,” that’s no one’s fault other than your own, you gutless loser.

“I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say no.”

Ditto.

“I will take your call.”

How gentlemanly of you. If this is too much, perhaps you shouldn’t be in a relationship.

“I will listen to your opinion of my friends.”

Difficult, I’m sure.

“I will listen to your friend’s opinions of my friends.”

Remember when I called you a gutless loser? Yeah.

“I will be civil to your mother.”

Is civility too much to expect? Do your knuckles still drag?

“I will put the seat down.”

Always a good decision. And so much work, right? Being considerate is so trying.

“I will separate the recycling.”

If you’re doing this to be eco-friendly, that’s nice. If you’re doing it only because your lady friend is making you, then that’s your own problem.

“I will carry your lip balm.”

How sweet. And such a burden. You big strong man, you.

“I will watch your vampire TV shows with you.”

If you don’t want to, don’t. For the fourth time: gutless loser.

“I will take my socks off before getting into bed.”

Why is this a bad thing?

“I will put my underwear in the basket.”

Who else do you think should do it?

“And because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive.

Charger. Man’s last stand.”

The car you want to drive is a Charger? Really? It isn’t a 911 or an M3, or, perhaps more reasonably, a Camaro?

Dodges are the official cars of assholes. [n.1] I believed this long before the Man’s Last Stand commercial. My dad once complained to me about how watching a USC football game (a game my dad would only watch to hope that USC loses) was very painful because he had to sit through an endless barrage of Dodge ads. And I said something like, “Well, Dodge is just trying to reach their target audience. Dodges are sold primarily to assholes, and USC fans are almost all assholes, so there you go. It’s a match made in Heaven.”

Note 1: This is, of course, a generalization. There are some non-assholes who drive a Dodge, and there are certainly assholes who drive something other than a Dodge. But it is a solid generalization.

The 2010 Chicago Auto Show

2010-02-21T00:53:00.005-06:00

Anne, Carver, and I went to the auto show yesterday afternoon. Here are some comments, in list like form:

(1) The auto show is held at McCormick Place, Chicago’s main convention center. I’ve heard that the Place hasn’t been doing so well financially, that they aren’t attracting the number of conventions they’d like, and such. I’ve now been there twice (the first time was for my “swearing in” for the Illinois bar), and I now know why it isn’t doing well. It is poorly designed. I’ll spare you the details.

(2) The show was incredibly crowded today. I guess that’s what we get for going on a Saturday afternoon.

(3) At the VW space we saw a woman and man, clearly a couple, and the woman was insisting that the man sit his ass in the passenger seat of a CC (a snazzy VW sedan) so she could take his picture. So he got in and did his best badass pose. I saw them a few minutes later at the BMW space and the woman was asking the people at the information desk if there was an X5 that was open that they could get in for pictures. I then was pretty sure that these people just went from MFG to MFG to take pictures of themselves in cars they can’t afford. Part of me wanted to scoff at such ridiculousness, but there was a time when I did the same thing.

(4) The Porsche (which is pronounced por-schuh) space was not where it was supposed to be. So I missed it, and I am pissed off about it.

(5) Some auto museum and a company that makes replicas of cars from movies had a small space. That was fun. They had a ’69 Roadrunner, and it was sweet. They also had a replica of a car from The Great Race, and I was reminded that it has been far too long since I last saw that awesome film.

(6) Toyota had this extremely lame rip-off of Stomp where the group sang about how great Toyota is. It was cringe worthy, but I felt compelled to get close and stand through the whole thing because I figured Carver would enjoy watching the action and listening to the noise.

(7) The Army had a recruiting center, including a “hiring office.” And I feel really sorry for whatever poor souls start their day thinking, “Hey, let’s go to the auto show!” and then that night are wondering how they signed their life away to the Army.

(8) The winner of Trent’s most-awesome car of the show award goes to the Mercedes Benz SLS. It’s so awesome they need to come up with another word to describe how awesome it is. Here’s a picture:

(9) While I believe that car is very beautiful, of the long-nose, short-back look of the Jaguar XKE and BMW Z8, I also recognize that I am also probably moved by nostalgia for the ’55 300SL, one of the coolest cars of all time, which can be seen here:

(10) While the SLS wins the most-awesome car award, I’m sure it would get smoked by this:

Yes, that’s the new ZR1 Corvette. Buy that rather than an SLS and you save a 100 grand and 500 pounds, and get an extra 150+ horsepower.

Dog-eared 6

2010-02-13T01:23:00.002-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Dem Professors Don’t Write So Good

“The truth is that most of U.S. academic prose is appalling—pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargonridden, empty: resplendently dead.”

David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 81.

Catholic High School Girls In Trouble

2010-02-09T22:03:00.005-06:00

I was at a bookstore a couple nights ago and was very confused by the cover of this book:

For about 10 seconds I read the title as: The Body Sculpting for Bible Women. So I was awfully confused about two things: (1) the syntax or word choice; and (2) why there was a hot-body book specifically for bible women (what about it made it "for" bible women?).

Also, that picture strikes me as a bit too racy for conservative bible women, who I would guess make up the vast majority of women who consider themselves "bible women."

Note: The title of this post is a movie reference. Click here, if you dare (NSFW).

Aging and -Life Crises; and a Self-Image Paradox

2010-02-08T00:53:00.007-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Neil Young’s Harvest]

[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s India Pale Ale]

You’ll likely notice that both of my topics in this post include quotations from David Foster Wallace. And you may have noticed that several, if not all, of my recent posts have quoted or talked about Wallace. It isn’t my intention to turn this into a David Foster Wallace blog, it’s just that I’m currently obsessed with him. I’ll write about it in my next post.

Old Man Look at My Life, I’m a Lot Like You Were

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”

The quotation above (which is not a “quote”) is something David Foster Wallace said in an interview in 1991 (which is discussed in a New Yorker article that can be found here). He killed himself when he was 46.

I had a -life crisis on my 19^thbirthday, but, apparently being more optimistic than Mr. Wallace, I called it my “quarterlife crisis.” And that’s partly what the crisis was about: it occurred to me that my life was likely at least one-quarter over—I didn’t have just a foot in the grave, I had a whole leg in there.

I turned 19 a few months after I started college. I was living in a dorm room with my friend Brian, who I had known all through high school. My birthday was midweek, if I recall, and going home was not an option. I was out at a class, or something, when my dad’s good friend Garn, who lived about 10 miles away, dropped off a cake at my dad’s request. The cake was a lovely gesture, and in the end probably made things better for me that day, but my heart sank when I saw that thing. It was an object I associated with celebration and being with friends and family. That object, absent the celebration, friends, and family, was depressing.

So that was part of it, the whole being-alone-and-away-from-home at a time when I really wanted to be home. I imagine this is a typical moment for freshmen who have gone away for school. But there was more to it—the cake and the feelings of aloneness were just the start. It got me thinking, and that’s when I realized I was much closer to death than I wanted to be. I was a very young man, in most ways still a boy, but my life was a quarter done. This was not a happy realization.

Recognizing my rapidly impending demise, I got to thinking about the ages and approximate remaining life years of those close to me. After ruminating for a few hours, lying awake in the middle of the night, I resolved to have all the kids I was going to have by the time I was 30.

I had my first child at 31, am currently 33, and will likely have another kid. So obviously I failed my 19 year-old self. But I still think I was right in a way. My thinking was something like this: at 19 I still had three of my four grandparents, two of whom lived to see me graduate from college, and one of whom made it to see me enroll in law school nearly eight years after my little crisis. I thought that was a good thing, and I figured if I wanted my parents to be around to see my children go to college, and for my children to really get to know my parents, I couldn’t put it off too long.

As it stands now, my dad will need to live to 79 (or so) to see Carver start college, my mom will need to make it to 76 (or so). These days, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also quite possible that they won’t. And if I have another kid, the odds become even longer.

And given that I’ve experienced what I find to be the extremely common sensation that time moves faster and faster as we get older, those days will be here before I know it.

I don’t think I ever came to a happy resolution to my crisis—I just managed to stop thinking about it.

“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” – S. Beckett

. . . I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

One night [David Foster] Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."

Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."

When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"

That’s from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, published in Rolling Stone.

The last paragraph is what I’m interested in (I thought the rest was necessary and interesting context). I’ve been trying to decide how much more I want to say—part of me wants to just say “Yeah, what he said.” But I guess I’ll draw it out.

For as long as I’ve been aware enough to think about it, I’ve found that I possess what strikes me as a strange blend of superiority (perceived) and humility. More than one person has told me that I initially came across as kind of a smug, arrogant bastard, but over time it became clear that I am actually nothing of the sort.

This blend that I am is odd, and hard for me to wrap my head around. I have little doubt that I am more honest, trustworthy, sincere, caring, considerate, well-rounded, and others-centered than most other people (note that me having “little doubt” doesn’t mean it is true). [n.1] But I also recognize that I am so loaded with faults and failings that the mere idea of beginning to list them is exhausting, and in whatever way I may be superior, there are also many ways in which I am hideously weak. Nevertheless, like Wallace, I think points are in order for recognizing my failings and caring about them.

What is probably at work here is the combination of my hatred of pride with the extremely high expectations I have for myself. I hold myself to a very high standard, one that I rarely meet, and I do not forgive failure. When it comes to me, I am entirely unforgiving. I have a list of the things that I most regret, and I will not forgive myself for them. Many of them are things I did as a child, most of which would seem like minor childhood indiscretions to most people, but they matter to me. One of my girlfriends and I used to argue about this, about how it wasn’t good to not forgive yourself. Since then people I have paid to tell me what’s wrong with me have suggested the same thing. But I still won’t do it. If I forgive myself it would be like conceding that those things were OK, that I could go ahead and forget them. But they weren’t OK, and I don’t want to forget them. I need the shame and self-loathing to remember to try to be better. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. That’s worth something, right? [n.2]

Note 1: I also believe very strongly that pride is an ugly vice, if not a sin, and therefore I work at not being proud of anything. So when I note these things it is only that I see them as matters of fact. I am not boasting.

Note 2: You may have noticed that the heading to this part of the post doesn’t really make much sense. But so what?

Dog-eared 5

2010-02-04T00:13:00.001-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

David Foster Wallace on Fiction

From a March 8, 1996, interview in Salon, responding to the question: “What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?”

Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you’re thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what It’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that’s just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer. There’s another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I’m sitting in a chair. There’s real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn’t make me feel less lonely.

There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.

Tom Petty and Eddie Money (and the glories of the Internet)

2010-02-01T02:55:00.003-06:00

I’m in the process of putting together a “mixed tape,” one that, depending on how you look at it, could be considered long overdue. But in my defense these sorts of things are not easy for me. The first “draft” is going to have easily more than 20 hours of music. I’m guessing the whole thing will take me way, way more than 40 hours to put together. If you think I’m joking, you don’t know everything about me as well as you might think you do.

Just now I added some Tom Petty and some Eddie Money to the draft playlist, and I want to share a couple things:

Tom Petty

Old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stuff is just awesome. Unfortunately, Tom Petty seems to have had totally lost his mind by the late ‘90s. I blame it on what I assume is his totally out of control drug use. I don’t know how to feel about this. Can I damn the drugs that killed his brain, and thus ruined his later musical output, when I think the drugs probably had a lot to do with his earlier production in a positive and possibly necessary way?

An aside: One of my sisters once ran into him at a gas station in the Valley and shared a joint with him. I just heard this story and for some reason feel grossly slighted for not having been told such awesome news earlier.

Here’s one of my favorite Tom Petty songs and definitely my favorite TP&tHB video:

Don’t Come Around Here No More

Eddie Money

Eddie Money is the man.

One of my sisters died a little more than 12 years ago, when she was 29. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve suffered. She really liked Eddie Money. One of the most precious memories of my childhood—of my entire life—is of watching Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector perform Take Me Home Tonight on David Letterman’s show. It aired when I was 10 or 11, but I remember it like it was a couple years ago. My sister and I were simultaneously rocking out, and also laughing hysterically at the fact that Ronnie Spector spends about half the video facing away from the camera, shaking her butt. Never ending is the butt shaking. This moment was, seriously, one of the top-five most memorable moments of my entire childhood.

When I was thinking about this, just now, I thought, “I bet that video is on YouTube.” And sure enough, it is. In a few important ways I think the Internet is ruining my life, but this is one of its magical, wonderful, amazing properties. In less than 30 seconds I was transported back to the late eighties, was instantly taken back and offered the chance to live in one of my most precious memories. YouTube, with all the ridiculous crap on it, has allowed me to relive a moment, has allowed me to relive a brief few minutes with the memory of my sister, and for that I say God bless you Internet.

(Check out Paul totally rocking the keyboards! and I’m pretty sure that’s David Sanborn on the sax—who knew?)

If I could walk on water, and if I could find some way to prove—if I could walk on water, would you believe in me? My love is so true.

Self-loathing, an Excerpt

2010-01-30T01:51:00.004-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Red House Painters, Red House Painters (Rollercoaster)]

[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s Mild Winter]

There are a great many things I don’t like about me. Those of you who know me, which is all of you since I’m pretty sure my dad, my wife, and a handful of friends are the only people who read this thing, might find that hard to believe since you undoubtedly know how awesome I am. But it is true. For now, I want to focus on three things that I’ve been thinking about today.

(1) I will do almost anything to avoid doing what it is that I should be doing.

When I was in law school I would read just about anything other than what I was supposed to be reading. I’d pass the time reading briefs and listening to oral arguments in random cases that I had nothing to do with and had nothing to do with my studies. I’d read blogs and news about Indian law. I’d watch seven episodes of Law and Order back to back, telling myself that I was doing it to critique the evidentiary objections (or gross lack of them). What’s somewhat strange is I wouldn’t read fiction or something more overtly fun. I’d justify my extracurricular reading and viewing by telling myself that these things I was doing instead of what I should’ve been doing were actually good for me, legal education wise, and that was usually true to some extent. But it was rarely, in the grades-obsessed world of law school, as good for me as doing what I was supposed to be doing would’ve been.

The surest way to keep me from reading a brief or a book is to assign that reading to me or to otherwise make it known to me that what I am supposed to be doing is reading that brief or book. I am a great procrastinator, and this is part of the reason why.

I will not do what it is that I’m supposed to do until the last possible moment, often I will misjudge and I will start too late. One very recent example of this, and what made me think about this today, is this: I had a brief to write that had to be filed today. The person I was writing it for made the great mistake of telling me that she didn’t need it until the end of the business day. So that’s when she got it. I was up pretty much all night writing it and then got up and had to continue pounding it out all day today. This is incredibly annoying to me, and possibly to the people I was writing it for. I really wish I’d done it earlier. Why didn’t I? I have no idea.

When I was in college I developed the habit, after I realized I could get away with it, of not starting a paper until around 11pm the night before it was due. I figured out that I averaged about a page an hour—thus a seven-page paper would take me seven hours. Thankfully most of my college papers were in the five- to seven-page range (my thesis, of sorts, was the biggest exception—it was about 40 pages and took me way more than 40 hours to write). So I worked through many nights in college. Which leads me to the second thing I don’t like about me.

(2) I am a night person.

I used to think this was cool. Maybe I still do, in some respects. But I also really wish I were one of those worm-getting early birds. I have romantic ideas about the charm of getting up before the sun, being a farmer looking out my kitchen window surveying my fields while I cradle a cup of coffee, steeling myself to tackle my day. But I’m not. I’m a night person. The late night hours are when I am most productive, if I’m working, and are also when I feel most like me.

I did pretty much all of my college work after 10pm. I also did much of my law school work in the later hours. And even if I’m not working, night is when I want to be up. For a while I had to be at my first post-college job by 6am. Which meant I had to be out of my house by just after 5:30. Even then, I was often up until 2am, sometimes later, hanging out with my housemates or just with myself. I survived an extended, unnecessary period of getting three hours of sleep a night, all out of stubbornness.

My night-person-ness has been a cause of some strife in my romantic relationships. One of my girlfriends, who I lived with, made it clear that she thought it was important that we went to bed at the same time. But she went to bed at a regular person’s reasonable time, which is to say much earlier than I wanted to. My wife has not been as forceful in expressing this same desire, but I suspect that she’d appreciate it if we went to bed at the same time. The problem for me is that the night is when I want, almost desperately, to be up. In some powerful way, it is when I need to be awake to be me. Productivity aside, night is when I feel the most me, when I feel the most connected and in tune with my thoughts, emotions, and general self. Without that time, I’m scared I’d lose myself.

What bothers me about this is that I don’t understand why the time I spend alone, in the early morning hours, is when I am most comfortable being me, why I see that time as vital to maintaining myself. Why can’t I do it when I’m with my friends and loved ones? What does that say about me and my relationships? It makes me sad. But it is true. And I don’t know how to change it or even if I can change it.

(3) I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

Ever since I graduated from college I’ve felt that I’ve had the seemingly luxurious problem of having too many options. The problem has only gotten worse since I finished law school. I understand why many people would say it is a nice problem to have, but I think it is hard. Choosing, particularly when there is more at stake, is not an easy thing to do.

After I moved to Chicago and quit my job at my old law firm, I was both apathetic and torn about what I should do. The possibility of leaving the law suddenly seemed like something to consider. And, for lots of reasons I won’t get into, the decision would’ve provided a great deal of relief. I once told a friend, when I was first thinking about it, that as long as I thought I might want to stay in the law, my current situation would be agonizing, but if I just made the decision to do something else, to leave the law behind, I would be much happier and more free. But the problem was, and still is, that I’m not sure that’s what I really want, so the decision has lingered and has not become easier.

In a chapter from his unfinished novel, The Pale King, David Foster Wallace narrates the awakening of a college student named Chris Fogle (this excerpt is from an article in The New Yorker, I have no idea if the ellipses are the magazine’s or Wallace’s):

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

I find this to be exceptionally true.

I am convinced that my directional ambivalence has been the root cause of much of my psychic pain, my great angst. There are several things that I think I’d like to try but haven’t out of fear, the fear of it being the not-optimal decision. The flipside here, though, and a corresponding fear that helps bind me in my crushing ambivalence, is my fierce the-grass-is-always-greener nature, that if I make a choice I will be constantly haunted by what-ifs. Damn me and my gutlessness.

Dog-eared 4

2010-01-30T00:09:00.006-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Reality of Magnetic Fields

(They’re real. I’m really, really serial.)

One of my top-five-of-all-time bands, The Magnetic Fields, released a new album this week. It’s called Realism. On Tuesday, which apparently has been forever ordained by God or someone else powerful as new-record-release-day, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up the new record and they did not have it. Actually, they didn’t have anything by the Magnetic Fields, nothing, not even a little place card. I spent a good five minutes looking at all of the other crap in the “M” section and silently rampaged about how can they have all this crap and no Magnetic Fields. So I stopped at the next Best Buy (strangely only a mile away) and they didn’t have any Magnetic Fields either. Screw Best Buy. Their music buyer should be flogged. [n.1]

Anyhow. Here’s a bit from track 9, Seduced and Abandoned:

Seduced with a grin,

I was taken all in;

taken in sin

and in shame.

Seduced by a smile,

I walked down the aisle

then waited awhile.

No one came.

Seduced and abandoned

and baby makes two.

Baby abandoned by you.

Seduced and abandoned

and what can I do?

I think I might drink a few.

Abandoned to weep

I collapsed in a heap,

dutifully sleeping all day.

Abandoned to die

I did nothing but cry

in my one-ply négligée.

Seduced and abandoned

and baby makes two.

Baby abandoned by you.

Seduced and abandoned

and what can I do?

I think I might drink a few.

Yes, I think I might drink a few

and maybe the baby will too.

Note 1: You might wonder why I’m buying records at Best Buy anyway. Well, because they are cheap. Also, I was driving and Best Buys always have nice giant parking lots or garages. But it also probably has something to do with the fact that I can go in a Best Buy and be ignored and not care what anyone in there thinks. If I go to one of the many independent record shops in my neighborhood, which is something I’d like to do for many reasons, I inevitably feel like I’m not cool enough to be in there and that the obnoxious hipsters I’m surrounded by are judging me. There are all sorts of problems with that, but it’s the truth.

My So-Called Wife

2010-01-26T01:48:00.003-06:00

Sandra Tsing Loh has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times titled My So-Called Wife. She talks about the challenges of duel-breadwinner households, and how she fantasizes about the simplicity of the imagined-ideal of the stereotyped ’50s household with the “working” husband and the homemaking wife. One of her conclusions is that everyone wants a “wife” regardless of sex.

I think there’s something to the idea that the old system was, at least in some important ways, better. But I also think Loh has a point in that everyone wants a “wife,” which is to say many people today don’t want to be the “wife.” I have never studied domestic partnerships, or feminism, or anything even remotely related to this topic, so there’s much I don’t know about this stuff, but here are some of my amateur thoughts:

(1) There is something to be said about having very clear divisions of authority. In Loh’s fantasy, there’s the wage earner who couldn’t find the icebox and the homemaker who doesn’t want someone else messing up the organization system and such. As Loh mentions, conflict comes when you try to split these duties. In our household I’d say the majority of “disputes” involve who’s doing what around the house, how it’s being done, et cetera. We regularly battle over how to load the dishwasher, which is something that just wouldn’t happen if only one person ever loaded the dishwasher.

(2) I also agree that many people these days, both men and women, would not be content to be the homemaker. I certainly haven’t been. I’ve probably done less housework since I’ve been under-employed, and I don’t doubt that one of the reasons is that I fear becoming nothing more than the person who keeps the house tidy and makes dinner.

(3) Staying home with a baby is a great deal of work and is psychologically exhausting. I don’t understand how people can keep beautiful homes while dealing with an infant or toddler. In my experience, dealing with a young child is much more exhausting than going to work. Much, much, much more.

(4) Going back to #2 (heh), I realize that by saying “people these days . . . would not be content to be the homemaker” I’m suggesting that people were ever content with it, which is something I don’t know. And if watching The Hours suggested anything to me it was that being a homemaker could be a lonely and tedious job, even for a ’50s woman.

(5) Combining #s 3 and 4: being a housewife might be great if you’re Betty Draper, with a nanny and housekeeper to watch your kids and clean your house as you go out and ride horses, play tennis, and have afternoon cocktails with your friends. But most people don’t have the luxury of help. And even Betty Draper seems awfully discontent and troubled about her situation.

(6) There has been a massive increase in the U.S. divorce rate over the last 40 years. Is it because it has become more socially acceptable, women have gained greater freedoms, or is it because of the shift away from the divisions of family life? I’d guess it has to do with all three, and probably other stuff. But I don’t doubt that the shift away from clear division of obligations has led to more domestic strife. Even if it has led to other good things.

(7) Loh says what everyone wants is a “wife.” I think what we all want is servants.

Manhood for Amateurs, Parts 6 and 7: Artwork

2010-01-25T00:24:00.002-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: The Australian Open on TV]

[Beer for this post: Dark Horse Brewing Company’s Crooked Tree IPA]

On to the fifth and sixth essays in Manhood for Amateurs.

The Memory Hole

In this essay Chabon talks about throwing away his kids’ artwork. He says he keeps some of the better pieces, but throws most of it out. He also mentions how his parents kept very little of the art he created in his youth.

One of the first things that I think about when I think about this essay is: what did his kids think when they read it?

I have a hard time thinking that I’d ever want to throw away anything that Carver created. But I know the time will come, probably soon, when I will. Well, I might not want to throw it away, but I’ll realize that I need to. I’m kind of a hoarder by nature and we have too much stuff in our house already, so there’s no way we can keep every bit of art Carver makes. And even if we chose to, if we put it in bins and then put them in storage, what would be the point? Chabon says that the good stuff they keep just goes in a bin that goes in the attic and is never seen again. Carver, Anne, and I are probably never going to want to look at every single piece of art that Carver ever makes, so it would just sit there in the dark.

My mom has in her house a couple drawings I made in my early youth that she has framed. I love that they are there, and I love being able to see them, but I think having a few meaningful pieces is enough.

My dad maintains my “baby book” (his term), which now fills an entire armoire. And the thing is: what’s going to happen to it? When my dad moves on, it’ll be left to me to decide, and since I’m a hoarder who doesn’t like to throw stuff out I’m going to want to keep all of it. And then what am I going to do with it? It would inevitably just sit in some dark storage area. I’d probably prefer that it not be there, at least most of it. But I’d tell my parents: “Do not feel obligated to throw away my baby book stuff. Actually, don’t throw it out.” I could never encourage the destruction of evidence of my existence and testaments to who I am. Which is what that stuff is to me.

The Binding of Isaac

In this essay Chabon talks about watching President Obama speak at his election victory party in Grant Park. He has his five-year-old son on his shoulders. He’s caught up in the joy of the moment, but then he suddenly feels sorry for Obama’s daughters, for they are about to lose access to their father as they’ve known it. But then he feels sorry for Obama. And he talks about how a child’s want for his father’s attention is insatiable, and how all fathers abandon their children, in some small way, countless times.

First, I wonder if Carver is going to be mad at Anne and me for not taking him to the election night celebration (and, in case you don’t know us that well, it was a celebration for us too). We were about four miles away, holed up in our apartment. Carver was just shy of two months and I had no interest in fighting the masses to get into Grant Park that night while trying to pacify a two-month old. But part of me now really regrets not being able to tell him that he was there on that night.

I think a parent can be a positive influence even if they aren’t there all that often. I like to think that President Obama can be a fine father, and a fine example for his daughters, even though his new job undoubtedly keeps him extremely busy. I think the same can be true of military parents—even in absence their service can be a shining example. I think some sort of presence is required, but it doesn’t need to be constant. And I also think it is important to have happy and fulfilled parents, so if that means the parents need to tackle time-intensive jobs, then so be it. Setting an example is just as important as being available.

Dog-eared 3

2010-01-19T22:45:00.002-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Infinite Jest (again)

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (note the unusual italicization toward the end):

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works.

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you’d ever seen them before in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male‐to‐male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male‐to‐male hugs. Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who’d never particularly liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA‐Conference‐Approved‐Literature table, and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest.

But then a tall heavy Afro‐American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro‐American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group‐hug nearby, he’d spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk‐region.

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his bottom was squashed up against the edge of the Conference‐Approved‐Literature table.

‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly like to hug,’ he said.

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre‐hug lean, and stood there awkwardly frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what remote sub‐Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining from his face.

‘Say what?’ the fellow said.

Erdedy proffered a hand. ‘Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’

The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy’s proffered hand. A single styptic blink. ‘Roy Tony,’ he said.

‘Roy, how do you do.’

‘What it is,’ Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake‐hand behind his neck and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant dis.

‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound first name, hyphenated, "Roy‐Tony" and then a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest assured.’

‘Assured?’

Erdedy’s best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. ‘I’m afraid I just don’t particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was something of a joke among my fam—’

Now the ominous finger‐pointing of street‐aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’

Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms‐out and waggling in a like bon‐hommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple‐handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’

By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression:

‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James‐River‐Traders‐wearing‐Calvin‐ Klein‐aftershave‐smelling‐goofy‐ass motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro‐American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’

‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’

Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony’s fatigue jacket, shuddering mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she’d personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log.

‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow’s coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying ‘Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he’s just new is all’; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy’s neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

What's that?

2010-01-17T15:33:00.004-06:00

There's a giant version of this ad on a building near my house. I don't think that's what they meant to say. When you pour your heart into it (gross), coffee tastes like what? A giant billboard?

Built Ford Tough

There's a commercial that's been airing recently for the Ford F-150. I believe Dennis Leary narrates it (n.1), but that's not my point. Here's a transcription of the first half:

Alright [sic]. So you’re driving down the freeway doing about 60 when you notice the guy next to you is steering with his knees, eating a cheeseburger, and talking on the phone.

And that is exactly why the Ford F-150 is the safest truck in America.

No, that is not why the F-150 is purportedly the safest truck in America. The relative safeness of the F-150 is due to its design, construction, and features; it has nothing to do with who happens to be driving next to F-150s.

Note 1: Who was great in Suicide Kings, by the way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWKrncseUw8&NR=1

Sports and Parenting

2010-01-10T01:51:00.005-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm]

[Beer for this post: Brooklyn Brewery’s East India Pale Ale]

I was sitting at a table around the Christmas before last with Anne’s family and we were talking about Carver and his cousin Ryan playing sports. Ryan’s mom, Anne’s sister-in-law, was saying that Ryan would not be allowed to play football. I have a feeling that Anne would love to say the same thing about Carver, but it wouldn’t be true. Carver will play football, at least for a time, because I really want him to.

I played organized baseball for many years, but I never did play organized football despite talking about it a few times with my dad and my friend Chad’s parents. I was recruited heavily to play on my High School football team—my ninth grade P.E. teacher raved about my football and general physical abilities considering my size, at the time I was 205 pounds when the average guy in my class was probably 150, and I was still very quick, I have little doubt I would’ve been a monster of a fullback and linebacker—but football conflicted with Band, and I wasn’t going to give up Band for anything. There are parts of me that wonder what would’ve happened had I played football, would I have been as good as I like to think? But I also have a hard time thinking that I didn’t make the right decision; Band provided me with music, a huge amount of fun, great friends, my first love, and my first real school-centered community. I don’t see how I could’ve had it better.

So when I say I really want Carver to play football, I imagine many people will think it is the typical dad-trying-to-live-through-his-son situation. But I don’t think that’s it at all. I want Carver to play football because I love football, and I want to share that love with him. I also want him to learn to play music. If the time comes when he has to choose between music and football (or whatever), I would never begrudge him his choice. But I want him to experience both.

To me, football is the ultimate team sport, and I love it with an obsessive passion. Why would I not want to share that with my son?

Golfing with My Dad

My dad is an obsessive golfer. I enjoy golf, but it doesn’t mean that much to me. Golf, to my dad, is a very important part of his life. My dad plays at least once a week, almost every Sunday—he considers his Sunday golf rounds as “going to church.” When he started dating again after his most recent divorce he told me how he made a point to make it clear to his prospects that he plays golf every Sunday, and that every Sunday means every single Sunday, regardless of whether it is Mother’s Day, Christmas, or the apocalypse. My dad is committed to getting in his rounds. To him it is a sort of refuge, and a love.

So when he gave me a set of cut-down clubs and signed me up for youth lessons, I don’t doubt some might have taken it as is version of the typical dad-trying-to-live-through-his-son situation. But that wasn’t it at all, I know.

My dad’s dad was an excellent golfer, and my dad played with him on occasion. I imagine the time those two remarkably dissimilar men spent on the course as rare moments when they had a love in common, when they shared a pursuit. I imagine it as a time of bonding and father-son togetherness that my father appreciated deeply. So it should surprise no one that he shared the game with me at an early age. And the bonus was that he almost certainly did it with more care and love than he got from his dad.

I don’t play nearly as much as my dad does. I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly two years and I’ve played once here (granted, you can’t play half the year here, and I have played a few times while away on vacation). I don’t love golf the way my dad does, yet, at least, but that’s OK. I do enjoy playing, and playing a round with him is one of my favorite things to do, and I know it’s something he treasures dearly.

In the summer of 2005 my dad and I, along with two good friends, did a golf tour of Ireland. We spent a night in Dublin, stayed at some great hotels, drank pints of stout, and hand some great food. But it was about the golf, and the time before and after the golf, and us doing it together. Sure, we bickered a bit here and there, as anyone who has to spend 10 days with me will learn is inevitable, but it was a trip of a lifetime for both of us and it never would’ve happened with out my dad’s love of golf and his decision to share it with me.

Sherman Alexie wrote a great piece in The Stranger about keeping the Seattle SuperSonics in Seattle (which, unfortunately, didn’t happen). Much of the content of Alexie’s pitch to “save the Sonics” is worthy of its own post, but for now I’ll just share this part:

While my father was dying, he and I talked basketball. Three days before he died, my father still had enough will and character left to deride Kobe Bryant for being a rotten smallpox wound on the game of basketball.

"I know," I said. "I can't stand him."

That meant I love you, Dad.

"I still can't believe they traded Shaq instead of Kobe."

That meant I love you, too, Son.

Of course, no matter how much I hate Kobe, I still love to watch him play. He's a ferocious poet on the court. And I most especially love to watch him lose.

I hate Kobe like other people hate the New York Yankees. And, man, it feels good to hate like that because I won't start any wars because of it. I get to hate without fear of violence.

And my father hated Kobe like that, too.

When I look back at my relationship with my father, when I put a narrative to it, I realize that every plot point, every surprise, and every tender and/or painful moment has something to do with basketball.

My father was a great basketball player. I was a very good small-town hoopster but I couldn't beat him one-on-one until I was 16 years old.

And I have never felt better or worse than the day I finally defeated my father.

My father haunts every basketball game.

In every round I play with my dad, Great shot, Bud, and Nice putt! means I love you, Dad. And when he’s gone my father will, without a doubt, haunt every round of golf I ever play. And that’s a great and beautiful thing.

Dog-eared 2

2010-01-09T23:47:00.001-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Infinite Jest

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

“One of the troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.”

(A little extra, if you’re interested):

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always like about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

Christmas and Parenting

2009-12-28T15:43:00.004-06:00

Anne, Carver, and I have now lived together as a family for two Christmases, and for two Christmases Anne has jokingly but seriously tried to talk me out of getting a real Christmas tree. [n.1] Anne’s suggestions have, however, been unsuccessful, for I am adamant about having a real Christmas tree for Carver.

Not only do I insist on having a real tree, but I also am extremely particular about the lights that are on it, what sits atop it, and the music that is played throughout the season. I’m particular about how we do Christmas because I want Carver to have what I see as the right sort of Christmas accoutrements, so to speak.

After my mom moved out when I was just about 16, my dad and I became a bit lazy about Christmas trees. After a year or two we gave up on real ones, and decided to bring in a potted tangerine tree that we had out by the pool. It was a small tree in a huge pot, beanpole thin all the way up and topped by a nearly round plume of green and tangerines. While we noted that the tangerines served as fine ornaments, if not technically, we also threw on a small string of lights, a handful of cheap ornaments, and even some tinsel (something we’d never put on a real tree). It was awesome, and most of my friends viewed it with envy as the coolest symbol of bachelor ease they’d ever seen. The tangerine tree was all well and good for that point in my life, but for Carver’s early youth, I want him to have the things that I had and cherished about Christmastime.

I have many fond memories of Christmastime, but most of my fondest involve our tree in one way or another. I can still see in my mind’s eye the soft multicolored glow and twinkle of the lights as I lay on the couch, dreaming of Santa and enraptured in the joys of the season. I can still feel the excitement I felt when we’d go to a lot, or a self-cut farm, and pick out the year’s tree. I can still smell the evergreen. All of these memories remind me of good things, family and hope and joy and love. They are precious memories to me and I want my son to be able to have similar memories of his own.

Of course he would still have his own memories even if we had a fake tree, but no one can convince me that it would be the same, that the memories would be as sweet.

I have serious literary support for my obsession with the importance of the tree in Christmas memory making. Truman Capote, in his A Christmas Memory (hello? can there be a greater authority on Christmas memories?), discusses the joy of the hunt for the perfect tree. [n.2] There are also positive tree references in Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Cather, Cummings, Thackeray, and I suspect many more. And here’s a great, very apt one from Dickens:

"There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side—some of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses—made a lively realisation of the fancies of childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments at that well-remembered time.

Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.

Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top—for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth—I look into my youngest Christmas recollections!

Of course Carver is his own person and his life need not mirror mine. He can and will have his own memories. But why would I not want to share with him what I so loved? Isn’t that part of what bonds us? Isn’t that part of what parenting is? I say yes. When he becomes old enough to make his own decisions and have his own preferences, I’ll be perfectly happy to entertain them. If some day he, like my friend Marco’s son, decides that he doesn’t like the idea of cutting down a tree just to later throw it out (or, more properly, recycle), we can consider other options. But for now I want to share one of the most precious aspects of my life with my son, and I hope his Christmas memories are even greater than mine.

Note 1: By real I mean an actual formerly live tree, preferably some sort of fir.

Note 2: My Christmas memories don’t involve hiking into the woods to cut down a tree, but if I ever live somewhere where it is possible, I’d like to start that tradition.

Dog-eared

2009-12-28T15:33:00.003-06:00

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature (though I don't actually "dog-ear" my books—I'm kind of anal about keeping my books in nice shape). These posts will contain brief quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

From Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“But in college Ralph’s goals were hazy. He thought he wanted to be a doctor and he thought he wanted to be a lawyer, and he took pre-medical courses and courses in the history of jurisprudence and business law before he decided he had neither the emotional detachment necessary for medicine nor the ability for sustained reading required in law, especially as such reading might concern property and inheritance.”

Yes. I find his view of the requirements for being, and tolerating being, a doctor and a lawyer to be very accurate. He should be thankful he figured it out early.

“They had held hands the night before their wedding and pledged to preserve forever the excitement and mystery of marriage.”

When there’s a sentence like that in a Raymond Carver story, it’s a sure sign that something bad is going to happen.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 5: Drugs

2009-12-22T21:52:00.005-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: The White Album]

[Beer for this post: Port Brewing Company’s WipeOut IPA]

On to the fourth essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:

D.A.R.E.

In this essay Chabon talks about talking with his kids about drugs. He admits to having smoked quite a bit of marijuana between 1980 (his freshman year of college) and 2005, and much of the essay involves the various issues involved when a former, long-term drug user is trying to encourage his kids to stay clear of drugs. [n.1]

I have never done an illegal drug. Not once. I have never “experimented”—I have not had the slightest interest. I am convinced that my roommate Brian and I were the only people in our entire freshman dorm who did not smoke pot, and all the others not only smoked pot but they did it every single day. Along with Brian, my friends Chad and Gary, and my first girlfriend, Lianne, were also fiercely anti-drug. [n.2]

I don’t know why I have never had any interest in “experimenting” with drugs. My parents smoked pot well before I was born and well into my lifetime, a fact of which I was fully aware from a relatively young age. [n.3] They had also done other drugs, but I wasn’t so sure of that until more recently. One of my sisters also used drugs when I was young, and I was aware of it. I see that experience as having two possible effects: (1) either my exposure would make me more likely to try drugs myself; or (2) because my parents smoked pot and tried to hide it from me I’d develop an aversion to pot smoking. Obviously the first didn’t apply to me (though it did to a friend of mine), but I’m not sure how much the second applied either.

I’ve always been convinced that I am a D.A.R.E. [n.4] “success story.” I did most of my growing up during the ‘80s, a time when Nancy Reagan was telling us all to “Just Say No,” [n.5] D.A.R.E. was blossoming, and anti-drug after-school-specials seemed to be flooding the airwaves. I even went to a D.A.R.E. day-camp when I was 12. My young brain fully believed that drugs made you stupid, rotted your nose to the point that the divider between your nostrils ceased to exist allowing for disgusting tricks with tissues, and that drug users had all sorts of horrible, nightmarish experiences involving perceived spiders crawling all over their bodies, or young girls whoring themselves out, and so on. Some might use the term “brain washed.”

Aside from my parents, sister, and one friend, the only other people I knew who used drugs were schoolmates of mine who smoked so much pot that they did it at school. These people, “stoners” we called them, were invariably very stupid. So I could not help but deduce that either: (1) smoking pot made you incredibly dumb; or (2) only incredibly dumb people smoked pot. Either way, it would be an understatement to say it didn’t spark a desire in me to burn one down.

Chabon has this to say about the first time he saw someone (his mother) smoking pot (he was in his mid-teens):

“Nevertheless, smoking marijuana remained for years afterward nothing I had any interest in trying myself, not so much because I feared its effects or even because it was against the law but simply because I was a good boy, and as such I looked down my nose with a cosmic, Galactus-sized censoriousness at the kids I knew—stoners, burnouts—who smoked it.”

Now I would not usually call myself a “good boy,” but I can totally relate to this. I certainly have, and continue to, look down my nose with a certain censoriousness at most people I know who do drugs. I have a hard time with balancing this with my fierce libertarian ideas that those people can do whatever they like, and it has never bothered me to have friends or fellow dorm dwellers smoke a bowl right in front of me—to each their own. But I also think it’s dumb, and remain certain that it isn’t for me. And when it came to people I cared about, love interests in particular, the thought of them getting high has always been enough to gut me, emotionally.

I don’t know where this disdain comes from. There’s the illegality, but given that I freely break the law in at least one other context (I tend to view speed limits as loosely advisory), and also firmly believe that marijuana should be legalized, it would be strange if the illegality is what gets me. There’s also the mind-altering aspect, which has typically been something I disapproved of. I always viewed drug users as the weak who can’t deal with life, which is something at certain points in my life I would’ve considered one of the most damning things I could say about a person. But over the last year and a half, a time of much emotional strife in my own life, I have quite obviously self-medicated with alcohol, comfort foods, and self-pity, so you’d think I’d get off my high horse already [n.6]. Perhaps in this respect I’m like a Republican Senator—I see nothing wrong with drinking myself into a stupor [n.7], but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll condone some hippie drug.

Chabon and his wife decided in advance that when the drug conversation came up that they would be honest with their kids (though he does balk at telling his kids, when his son asked him how many times he smoked marijuana, that he has done it approximately one million times—he instead said “a number of times”). I’m not sure how my wife and I will address the drug conversation. Let’s just say that my wife’s experience with drugs is very different, perhaps even a near exact opposite, of mine. I’m not sure how I can be honest with my son about my ideas about drugs without saying things that he may construe as a direct attack on his mother. I will almost certainly have to qualify my old ideas that only dumbasses and weaklings do drugs, and my wife will have to come up with an explanation for why she did the things she did. I imagine we have several years before we have to get our story straight, but it’s something we’re going to have to work on.

Note 1: Chabon also says that 13 “is the age at which you begin to become fully aware of hypocrisy, contradiction, ambiguity, coded messages, subtexts; it is the age, therefore, at which you must begin to attempt to sort things out for yourself . . . .” I find the precision, and lack of qualification, in that statement to be odd.

Note 2: I have some truly excellent friends, and I’m convinced that my good taste (or good fortune) in friends has much to do with my relative success in life. But that’s a topic for another post.

Note 3: Note to parents, teens, and others: Spraying air freshener does not remove the odor of marijuana—it just makes it smell like marijuana and vanilla (or whatever bouquet the air freshener has).

Note 4: Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

Note 5: She even invaded one of my beloved sit-coms, Diff’rent Strokes:

Note 6: There was a time though, when I never would’ve considered ingesting anything mind-altering at times of grief and struggle—I firmly believed that I was supposed to feel what I was feeling, and drinking or using some drug would be a cop-out that would deny me what I was supposed to feel. I wish I had hung on to that.

Note 7: That’s not true.

Fearrington

2009-12-22T03:06:00.003-06:00

I noticed an ad in an issue of The New Yorker that reads:

"Retire to Fearrington - A charming country village near Chapel Hill, NC with bluebirds, belted cows and fascinating people of all ages."

And I thought, how strange that this little village in North Carolina is advertising in The New Yorker to try to attract some new residents. I thought I'd offer a kind suggestion to the good people of this quaint village: if you want to attract more residents, perhaps you should remove the word fear from your town name.

But it turns out, as far as I can tell, that Fearrington is nothing more than a new development created by an ambitious developer. The ad is much less surprising to me now.

What's that?

2009-12-18T00:06:00.004-06:00

"Made from 3% of the World's best coffee beans"

I don't think that's what they meant to say . . . .

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 4: Circumcision

2009-12-12T00:53:00.006-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Have Yourself a Jazzy Little Christmas]

[Beer for this post: Victory’s Hop Wallop]

On to the third essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:

The Cut

In this essay Chabon writes about his decision to circumcise his second son. He debunks many of the arguments for why people circumcise their boys, but he nevertheless chose to have the procedure performed on his sons.

In case you don’t know, my wife and I have a son. So we too had to make the “to circumcise or not to circumcise” decision. Anne left it up to me, presumably because I’m the one with a penis. [n.1]

A friend of mine had a boy several months before Anne and I had Carver, and as far as I can tell they never doubted that their son would get “the cut.” I, however, struggled with it for a few months. My mom, who’s a nurse, sent me some literature about circumcisions with a note saying that if she had known more about it at the time, she probably wouldn’t have allowed me to be circumcised. Like Chabon, I have very strong doubts about the arguments made in favor of circumcision—they all tend to be bogus, as far as I can tell. Some say circumcision reduces the chance of getting certain cancers and infections. Others say that boys will be confused if they don’t “match” their father or brothers. I don’t buy any of it. On the other hand, people say circumcision greatly reduces the pleasure a man feels during sexual contact.

In the end I chose to have my son circumcised. Why? you ask. That’s a good question. Like Chabon, I find the practice to be insane, yet I subjected my son to it anyway. And I’m not even Jewish, unlike Chabon, so there was no religious reason. I’ll tell you why I did it though, even though it might be hard to believe.

I did it for him. I was concerned that he might miss out on some blow jobs if he weren’t circumcised, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to cost my son even one blow job.

You see, just about every boy I knew growing up was circumcised. So to me, early on, a complete penis was an oddity. [n.2] I have little doubt most of the girls and women I knew growing up felt the same way. I know for a fact that certain women I know find uncircumcised penises to be a major turn-off. While I recognize that there are undoubtedly women who prefer complete penises, they have been either nonexistent or at most a tiny minority in the group of women I’ve known. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the same would be true for my son. So I had him circumcised so his penis would fit in. (Ahem.)

But I wouldn’t do it again. While I don’t really regret having Carver clipped—I’ve heard people who claim it is an extremely traumatic experience, but I was with Carver within minutes after his procedure and he seemed to recover remarkably quickly—if we have another son I won’t have him cut. My reasons: (1) I think it is absurd, yet the one reason I stuck with is that I didn’t want my son to have an odd penis. But the only reason it is odd in my (sub)culture, to the extent it is, is because of people like me. I now want to stop the madness. (2) While Carver's went smoothly, there is a degree of danger. There are stories about nasty infections and even boys losing their entire penis, which would suck, to say the least.

And as for the thing about it greatly reducing pleasure. All I have to say is: What? I don’t see why it needs to feel any better. It’s probably better that it doesn’t.

Note 1: It’s important that the presumably is before the because.

Note 2: An example: A friend of mine moved to a different town when we were just entering high school. He played on the football team there. One day he was talking with us, and said, “You know, Mexicans cut of the heads of their dicks!” I asked him to repeat what he just said. He explained that in showering and such he occasionally caught sight of his teammates’ penises, and how all of the Hispanic guys had snub-nosed members. I was in shock for a few seconds, before I realized that some of his teammates just weren’t circumcised. My friend didn’t know what a complete, natural penis looked like, and that what he thought was standard was in fact a modification.

A Word I Love: Caper

2009-12-05T01:21:00.003-06:00

Caper in the sense of “a capricious escapade” or “an illegal or questionable act; especially theft,” is a great word. I’d much rather be involved in a caper than in robbery, thievery, larceny, burglary, a job, a heist, a stickup, a holdup, an annexation or appropriation, a break-in, rip-off, score, deprivation, or to steal, pirate, filch, fleece, grab, pinch, lift, plunder, purloin, or swindle. Two of my favorite uses of caper are:

(1) The Great Muppet Caper:

(2) Strong Bad E-Mail # 68, “Caper”:

I’m disappointed I’ve never been involved in a jumble caper.

Poetry: Mothers

2009-12-05T00:02:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago, I saw Kay Ryan and Billy Collins speak at the final event of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival. They’re the current Poet Laureate and a former one. They read some poetry and bantered, and it was really, really good. The theme of this year’s CHF had something to do with humor and I was thinking that two poets wouldn’t exactly cause much knee slapping or side splitting, but it was very funny. The poems they read were almost all excellent too.

The Lanyard

Billy Collins has a great poem called The Lanyard. It’s about mothers and the debt that we each owe ours. I’d like to say something insightful about it, about mothers, but I think the poem stands up just fine on its own. I was going to post the full thing here, but I decided I don’t feel comfortable doing that, so you can find it here. If you’d like to hear and see the author read it, the Poetry Foundation has a video of Billy Collins reading The Lanyard and I highly recommend it. Actually, I beg you to watch it—please—it’ll do you good. Watch it here. Or here:

So, yeah, what he said.

Notes:

(1) Anne: The introduction to the video is by G.K. (yes, that G.K.), so you may want to start at the 20 second mark.

(2) Look at all those people listening to a poet! It warms my heart.

Jolene and Suicide

2009-11-24T00:23:00.002-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Ray LaMontagne’s Trouble]

I saw Ray LaMontagne perform last week. He was awesome, as usual. He mentioned how he was on Elvis Costello’s TV show Spectacle. He said that Elvis said Allison was a song that still resonates with people, and that Elvis suggested that Jolene was a song of Ray’s that might have the same qualities. Ray then played Jolene and I came close to tearing up.

Jolene

Jolene is almost certainly in my High Fidelity -like “top five songs of all time,” and it has a shot at being #1 with a bullet. I’m obsessed with lyrics, so most of what affects my opinion of a song is what the words say. I love many of Ray’s songs, but there’s something about the storytelling quality of Jolene that really does it for me. Take Shelter as an example in contrast: a great song, a song I love and is Anne’s and my “song,” so to speak, I love it, it is beautiful, but I don’t see anything when I hear it. Jolene is different.

With Jolene I can see the coatless man, smoking his cigarettes. I can see his pain. As with many songs, I insert myself in the role of the protagonist. I am Jolene’s man. I can see the picture of Jolene holding a picture of me, it’s cracked and faded from spending so much time in the pocket of my blue jeans—I can see it in my filthy, cracked, and shaking hands. I can see myself and feel the pain of the man who has woken in the ditch, with booze in his hair and blood on his lips. I know exactly what he means when he says a man needs a nine-pound hammer or a woman like Jolene. It’s a magnificent song about love and loss. I love it so much I easily forgive the mispronunciation of Spokane, which is saying something.

Maybe it’s the mention of eastern Washington, or the drug use and boozing of what I assume is a blue collar man, or the name Ray, but the song reminds me of Raymond Carver and his stories of working class love, drug use, and drinking.

Something about it makes me want to be the strung-out drunk who wakes up in a ditch with booze in his hair and blood on his lips—something about the pain on display that can’t be ignored, a pain that shows up in such an obvious and devastating way. It’s a physical manifestation of feeling, even if AA would say what he’s trying to do is not feel. [n.1]

But of course I can’t be the Jolene man now. I have a wife and a kid. I can’t be coked out and passing out in ditches, coatless. I now have responsibilities that affect others. But I’ve felt that way for the last dozen years.

My parents lost a child in 1997, one of my sisters, and it was undoubtedly the hardest thing either of them have ever had to deal with. I determined that they, my mom in particular, could never handle another blow like that. Which means that I have to do what I can to stay alive, for them, and now for Carver too.

Suicide

I have no problem with suicide. I used to. I used to think that it was a cop-out, a way for the weak to avoid struggle. But I don’t feel that way anymore.

I am not a religious man, and am pretty dubious when it comes to any sort of afterlife. So if someone’s life sucks and causes him nothing but pain, I don’t see why he should be chastised for calling it quits a little early. Maybe that’s hard on the people that get left behind, but that’s their problem. Staying alive for the sake of others is a strange idea in at least one way: if you hate life and want to die, why do they so want you to live to suffer more pain? Can their wants be anything other than selfish? [n.2]

Regardless of what I said in that last paragraph, I am one who will always do what I can to live for others. I want to live for me too, but I also want to live for my family. The idea of my son growing up without his father is something that I can’t even think about without nearly gagging with disgust. And I am not willing to take responsibility for my parents losing another child.

I had a discussion with a psychiatrist a few weeks ago about suicide. I had explained to her how I had basically led a rather charmed life, loaded with opportunities (relatively). She asked why I thought I might be so unhappy considering that I just said I was lucky in the life department, and I responded, I shit you not, by saying “Well, people are complicated.” As if she needed to be told. I then went on to talk about David Foster Wallace.

Dave Wallace was a writer of massive acclaim and much (relative) celebrity. He was also wicked smart, to the extent where I have no problem conceding that he was way, way, way smarter than me, which is not something I concede very often. He also had a history of depression. Dave Wallace was famous, brilliant, incredibly talented, had a rather large cult-like following that undoubtedly included beautiful groupies who would do his every bidding, had a very desirable teaching gig at a fancy liberal arts college that required little more than he be himself, et cetera, et cetera. And in September of 2008 he hanged himself with a belt from his back porch. [n.3]

The psychiatrist’s question, which was undoubtedly asked more to see how I would respond rather than in an attempt to be unpuzzled, applies to Dave Wallace at least as much as it does to me (almost certainly much more so). I don’t think I have a better answer than “People are complicated.” Depression is complicated too.

Note 1: Or so I’ve been told.

Note 2: This is true, if it is at all, only when the suicide is well considered; a teenager blowing his brains out because a girlfriend dumped him is a different matter.

Note 3: In David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, there’s a scene where one of the students at the tennis academy where much of the story takes place confesses his obsession with having his picture show up in tennis magazines. The sweat-licking [n.3a] guru to whom he is confessing basically ruins his dream by telling him that people who get that fame do not really enjoy it, and in the end their horror becomes a fear of the day when they no longer show up in magazines. Some have speculated that Wallace was working hard to surpass Infinite Jest but that he recognized there was a real chance that he never would. Need I elaborate?

Note 3a: Literally.

Manhood for Amateurs, Part 3

2009-11-14T00:12:00.002-06:00

[Soundtrack for this post: Flunk’s For Sleepyheads Only]

[Beer for this post: Southern Tier IPA (again)]

On to the second essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:

William and I

In this essay Chabon tells a story about how he is complimented in the supermarket for being a “good dad.” He talks about how the good dad standard is so different, and lower, than the good mom standard, and how fathers in the past had it even easier.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an experience similar to what Chabon recalls in his essay, how many times I’ve been stopped and praised for being a good dad when I’ve done, as far as I can tell, nothing to warrant comment (much less praise).

I’ve often thought about this double standard. The first time I really got it was when the three of us went to visit my mom for the first time since Carver’s arrival. My mom lives on the coast of Washington so we always fly into Seattle. On that trip we spent the night in Seattle at my aunt Merlee’s apartment, which we often do rather than tackle the four-hour drive on the same day as the flight. Carver was just shy of three months on this particular trip, and he still wasn’t sleeping much. My aunt’s apartment is all on one level and isn’t huge, so when Carver woke in the early morning, I figured I should take him somewhere so Anne, my mom, and my aunt could get a couple more hours of sleep. I took Carver to a Tully’s, which is a coffee shop chain similar to Starbucks, but much better. I got a coffee and bought the New York Times, and struggled trying to move my coffee and paper and get settled why carrying Carver. At some point one of the Tully’s ladies asked me something like this: “Oooohhhhh [spoken in that very sweet way that conveys that the speaker finds something adorable], are you watching the baby so mom can sleep in?” Yes. “OOOOoooohhhh [almost orgasmic], you’re such a WONderful dad! That is so sweet.” Almost from the moment she started asking, it was as if every woman in the coffee shop decided to eavesdrop and descend on me and Carver, cradling us in this ring of praise and adoration that seemed strangely tinged with lust. I knew that if it were Anne and not me no one would’ve even commented about her mothering. That was my first noteworthy experience with the parenting double standard, and I’ve benefited from it many more times since.

Chabon has this to say about how we as a society see mothering: “Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby’s gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory.” Good fathering, by contrast, apparently just means sticking around and seeming to be content with very limited parenting responsibilities. In some subcultures, it seems good fathering simply means still being around by the time the child is born.

Chabon also has this line about his father’s parenting: “My father educated me in appreciating the things he appreciated, and in ridiculing those he found laughable, and in disbelieving the things he found dubious.” As a father and a son, I find that to be a remarkably apt description of fatherhood.

I have always thought that both of my parents were pretty good parents, but that’s based on an extraordinarily limited sample size. They’re both imperfect and a little nuts, but my guess is that that describes just about everyone. I don’t have any reasonable complaints.

I have worried about being a horrible father for about as long as I’ve recognized that I might someday be a father. When I was in high school I developed a theory that parenting styles skipped generations. I used my own family as an example. My paternal grandfather was, in my young eyes, a harsh, mean, and scary man, and thus probably a bear of a father. By stark contrast, my father was, at least in my eyes, understanding, kind, and laid-back perhaps to a fault. My theory was that my father didn’t want to be like his father, so he was much easier going. My fear was that I would be like my grandfather, because I had a nice father and didn’t appreciate what it was like to have a harsh father. By that time I could see parts of my grandfather leaking through me: a fierce temper and an occasional severe lack of patience with others.

It has become clear to me in the last 15 years that I will not be my grandfather, but I will not be my father either. I have my own still developing way, and while I rarely manage to meet my own standards for what I expect from myself as a father, I do recognize that I am, relatively, probably going to be pretty good at it.