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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

[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.