Dog-eared 14

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

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

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

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

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

[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

"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.