Extreme Dinosaurs | National Geographic - December 2007

Extreme Dinosaurs - John Updike

I know that John Updike was a master of American letters.  Got it.  Heck, I even read Rabbit, Run once upon a time.  But what we have here is almost a total waste of time.  Luckily, a very short time.

We have a prestigious writer penning an essay for a prestigious magazine and what we get is the equivalent of a precocious 8th grader wondering what evolutionary forces brought about the fascinating variety in dinosaurs.

Which would be an excellent topic if it were given more than a cursory superficial glance.  Mr. Updike, however, was more than satisfied to raise basic questions, ones that I would expect to hear from an inquisitive child who pores over his or her first Dorling-Kindersley volume on the subject.

The essay is short, too short, because Mr. Updike never attempts to answer the questions he raises beyond saying that the mysteries are impenetrable.  He covers the bases of role reversal, imagining how dinosaurs would view us, and then finishes off the whole rough-hewn mess with a shot at how we are destroying the environment.

There isn't much here, except some passing anecdotes on how dinosaurs are named.  Read it if you want.  It won't take up more than ten minutes of your time.

You know, I could be wrong.  This could have been nothing more than a tone setting introduction to a whole issue devoted to paleontology.  I guess putting the Updike name on the cover would generate some interest beyond normal readers.  If that was its purpose, then ok, I'll call it good.  It just doesn't stand alone well at all.

BOOK: The Liar's Club - Mary Karr (1995)

The Liar's Club - Mary Karr

I remember clearly when this book came out and it was flying off the shelves.  This is exactly why I didn't read it until a couple of weeks ago.  For most of my life I have had this stupid and immediate disapproval of anything popular that I didn't discover early.  I always suspect mass manipulation and I do not want to be a part of the herd.  The irony is that it didn't matter to me if I happened to be the lead cow, but, by god, I would not be following along with no independent judgement, no ability to opt out of what was all the rage.

This spared me such works as The Bridges of Madison County and The Celestine Prophecy, for example, neither of which I will link to at Amazon.  But it also cost me for missing such works as this one or the Joan Didion book that currently sits on my nightstand.  You probably know Emerson's foolish consistency line from his essays.  Well, my small mind has plenty of hobgoblins and I am trying to get rid of them.

After I complete a book like this, I always read the reviews that feel the opposite of my own.  So, for this, I read all the negative reviews at Amazon.  I do this to see how my mind and taste compares with others.  Many reviews, for or against a work, are poorly reasoned, poorly explained takes that wouldn't pass muster in a third grade book report.  But there are others that are well written and considered, respectful views of the book.  These reviews are valuable learning tools.

Because this book is so well-known and so reviewed (I might be one of the last people to have read it who is older than 40) I will comment on what people have generally viewed as weaknesses.

The most common complaints are how Mary Karr has such vivid memories and the incredible insight of her primary grade self.  I link these two together because they are linked...tautologies are a specialty of mine.  Seriously, Ms. Karr wrote this as an adult.  Her mnemonic powers are good.  She is a writer, a poet.  We do not know how she makes her way back into her past, but I know how I do it.  I know that I can work myself into a reverie and remember very specific details.  I can hear the creak of a swing, feel temperature changes and breezes, smell the "granny gravy" simmering in a cast iron skillet in the kitchen, taste the smoke in the air from my grandfather's cigarettes, feel the heat and solidity of my grandmother's legs in what I know now to be caused by elephantiasis.

And that last point is the link to her insight.  As an eight year old, I only knew that my grandmothers legs from the knee down to her toes were abnormally huge, her right leg being about a third again the size of her left, both being at least three times the size of a normal leg.  I knew that sometimes the skin on the larger leg would crack and bleed, that both legs could swell and burn as if she had a fever centered there.  My grandmother only complained about them when that "acted up" yet they kept her from walking normally or ever wearing pants.  Now, as an adult with life experience, I can determine that she had elephantiasis, a word I would be unlikely to pronounce if encountered in print and would likely giggle about if told my grandmother had it.

But, if I am writing a memoir, I am going to call it what it is as I know it today.  Readers who would attach that intelligence to the eight year old me are missing the point.  I think it speaks well of Mary Karr's writing ability that people confuse her adult insight into her childhood memories.  She has convinced the reader of time and place so accurately, so deftly, that they are jarred by her adult self's intellectual intrusion.

Mary Karr has said that she made up the discussions of the Liar's Club, the actual group of her father's friends.  This is an admission that she was too young to remember the adult conversation.  So, she uses her adult powers to re-imagine the words so that she doesn't break the scenes.  These are important scenes about her father, about his milieu and her place in it.  The details of the story are not relevant and to call attention to them by focusing on her lack of memory of them would ruin our viewing of these men and their hierarchy.

Then there are the complaints related to structure.  Readers get frustrated that they can't lay out a narrative timeline of Ms. Karr's childhood except in the broadest sense: some time in Texas, some time in Colorado, and then some time back in Texas.  (I think Ms. Karr gets her hurricanes mixed up, too, but so what?)  But this is memoir, not autobiography.  Mary Karr is giving us episodes and feelings and character.  She doesn't have to lay out the months and years and tell the story chronologically.  She puts the structure in where necessary to explain motivations and behaviors.  (And if you want to complain that she couldn't possibly know the motivations of the adults in her life when she was a ten year old, go back and reread my earlier point.)

Perhaps the worst sorts of complaints about the book are those dealing with the two sexual episodes.  Many people feel that these were glossed over.  Then there were others that found them prurient and titillating, as if they were included only to sell more books.  I found them to be complete, dispassionate retellings, taking up less than three pages of the entire work.  Clearly the first violation angered her deeply.  The second, while described in more detail, felt as if she believed that she had to explain how something like that could happen, as if she was concerned that we would think she was somehow culpable.  I found the actions described obviously reprehensible, but the descriptions themselves striking the perfect note of storytelling and impact, which is what memoir should be.  Complaints about these reflect far more on the complainer than the writer, and I do not have the psychological wherewithal to explain those reflections.

Then there are the folks that want to read a memoir of childhood that is full of innocence and sugar and sunlight.  Those folks have never driven on any road southeast of Houston is my guess.  These folks have never had, or they have been meticulously shielded from, or they have psychically buried, anything negative in their youth.  Maybe, but not likely.  Look, Mary Karr probably feels like most days her childhood was fun.  What we see as incredible difficulty, she and her sister took for granted as part of living.  They knew their mother drank.  Trying to get food or candy from other households was just something you did.  Getting into fights happens.  Listening to their parents argue was the way things were.  Writing about the routine, the daily grind of childhood, playing and schooling and watching television and such would make for a boring memoir.  In fact, the memoir lags when she goes off on these tangents.

We're looking for episodes of interest when we read memoirs.  The car on the Orange Bridge, grandma's leg (hers, not mine), the trip to the beach, the two near deaths of Hector (poor guy was really used for two significant turning points in the life of the Karr family and then discarded to history) and a hurricane are examples of what we want to read about.  Conflict makes life interesting.  Conflict leads to growth, especially when the outcome isn't so great.

That's what makes this a great and entertaining book.  It took a couple of decades I guess for the family to finally figure out a few things.  Was it worth it?  You'd have to ask the Karrs.  I thought it was worth reading, though.

The Fifth Chair | Image - Fall 1998

The Fifth Chair - Mary Swander

Late in 1985, I was at an air base in South Korea, living in a dormitory for visiting airmen.  I woke up one morning and couldn't move.  My spine felt like it was made of steel and efforts to move my head or back or legs were met with intense pain.  It felt as if had I been successful at moving my body, my spinal column would have ripped out of my body and remained on the bed, heavy and as unbent as a length of railroad track.

My roommate, some guy I didn't know, was trying to sleep for a few extra minutes when I yelped at my first attempts to move.  This upset him and after a few minutes he angrily got up, barked at me about disturbing his sleep and went off to shower.  I, of course, needed to go to the bathroom.  I lay there until he returned.  I asked him if he would help me to at least get out of bed or go find one of the Koreans who start housekeeping work in the mornings.  He told me that he had to go, saying with exasperation, "I can't do anything about this," and he left.  Later, while I was at the primary care unit, he moved to a completely different building.

It took me a couple of hours, when the housekeeping crew finally arrived, to get assistance.  The Air Force sent over a couple of guys to help me get to the bathroom, to dress, and to take me to the doctor.  I was diagnosed with some sort of virus, I don't recall the name, I was out of it and alone.  They gave me pain killers for the symptoms and sent me back to the dormitory.  I stayed in bed for two days before the condition started to lighten.  I remember the joy of being able to turn my head without excruciating, cause-you-to-cry-out pain.

I have another Korea story about the time I managed to get food poisoned.  I was on the road with one other person who left me behind without even checking on me.  It's a pretty good story, but we need to get to Mary Swander's essay on pain, loneliness, and spiritual metamorphosis, all told with the metaphor of chairs as stages of being alone.  The essay is so much better than I am describing it to be.

My pain lasted less than a week.  While I was not surrounded by any friends or family, I was in close proximity to people.  Ms. Swander was about as close to alone as you can reasonably be in the United States.

Her story is painful and pitiful, but as she discovers more about herself and natural human behavior, she changes.  That transformation makes for edifying and entertaining reading, a fantastic mix when an author is making big life-changing points.  I don't want to sound like Pangloss here, and while I would guess that Ms. Swander would not have wished this upon herself in an infinite number of years, she is probably a better person for it.  Because she writes so beautifully and searchingly, we can partake of her growth and become a little bit better ourselves.

Sometimes you have to thank the essayist from the deeper part of your heart.  I'd like to do that now.  Thank you, Mary Swander, for writing this essay.  It will remain one that reread whenever I am feeling alone or depressed or I need a spiritual pick-me-up.

In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower | The Believer - July 2004

In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower - Gideon Lewis-Kraus

I've been to plenty of conventions in my days, but I have never been to one for academia.  Most of mine are trade-related, sales, user groups, and the occasional nerdy comic book or gaming convention.

It turns out, they're all about the same, only the names of the presentations differ.  Every convention is about seeking the interesting talks, finding the open bars, and getting invited to the party suite after hours.

I'm not going to knock the Modern Language Association or the current state of the humanities in the United States.  I really could care less whether these people have political affiliations and beliefs or whether they hammer those views into their students.  Personally, I would hope that students at the university are at least capable of thinking for themselves and that professors would be incapable of "indoctrinating" them into whatever political beliefs they might have.  If there is a crime committed when this situation occurs, it is, as Mr. Lewis-Kraus explains that they aren't teaching students to challenge dogma and to think critically.

This is a long essay, but it is wonderful and worth reading.  It helps if you have ever experienced the convention atmosphere.  It takes all types and they are well represented here.  Who in the heck has a convention the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, anyway?  The next MLA convention is the first week of January 2011.

Mr. Lewis-Kraus' host and chauffeur and roommate for the duration was Professor Charles Bertsch, Charlie, lately of Arizona State University, but an assistant professor at Arizona at the time.  The author treats him almost like the sole human link between the ivory tower professors of English and a real honest to god person.  Refreshingly enough, he is the latter, like, I would guess, most of the attendees.

There is a whole bunch of hullabaloo about writers going to MLA conventions and making fun of how insular and disconnected the attendees are with the world the rest of us occupy.  This is so much nonsense.  One need only attend another convention on another topic to understand this.  All conventions are loaded with ridiculous seminars and round-tables filled with esoteric topics and incomprehensible to the outsider jargon.

I'm attending one in Las Vegas in a couple of months.  I'll be listening to presentations on cloud computing and technology governance, project management and environmental performance, all of them filled with people dressed in slightly ill-fitting clothing, discussing ideas that will likely never see the light of day in their respective organizations.  Conventions are intended for the like-minded to get together and immerse themselves in their like-mindedness.  Thus, they're pretty easy to mock.

At least Gideon Lewis-Kraus treats them with some fairness.  Read it and see if you agree with his conclusions.  And try to see how many of his discussion topics you can locate in the text.

Patron Saint of Thrown-Away Things | Creative Nonfiction - No. 17 2001

Patron Saint of Thrown-Away Things - Greg Bottoms
This link takes you to the Utne Reader, the champion of thousands of small magazines and the alternative press, where this essay was reprinted.  Utne has steered me to many unique and strange literary discoveries.  If you haven't read it, visit the website or pick up a copy at your local newsstand.

Many people have written about the janitor, James Hampton, who lived in Washington, D.C. and created an  intricate, beautifully fabulous set of folk art pieces in a rented garage.  He worked on this for fourteen years and today it sits in the first floor of the west wing of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

But why did he do this?  Who was this man?

Greg Bottoms takes a look at his motivations and his life, including his loss of his older brother, Lee.  I won't recap his life here, you can read the essay.  Mr. Bottoms makes Mr. Hampton's faith the driving force.  And that makes perfect sense, because it would take something to drive such a supernatural passion to create.

You might look at this work of art and think that it isn't that big of a deal, but when you look at the materials used, when you estimate the effort expended, you can't help but feel awed.  Would it be more gorgeous in real silver and gold?  No.  It might shine more brightly, but it would lose its humanity, its underlying humility.  Gaudiness would be a complete falsehood in this humble exaltation of the belief of this poor, hard-working, dedicated janitor.

We're going to see it the next time we're in Washington.

BOOK: Roots - Alex Haley (1976)

Roots - Alex Haley

I have put off this commentary for too long.  I finished this 900+ page tome and felt like I had read an unspectacular family history, made powerful by the suffering of the people it describes.  I came to the book believing it was a classic, and there are passages of it that are so; I felt the descriptions of the cockfighting, for example, were as brilliant as Dickens describing a storm or Tolstoy's mowing scene in Anna Karenina.

Yet there were extensive passages that bugged me, beginning with the first 30 or so chapters describing the life of the Mandinka.  Everyone was good and honorable, life was troubled only when Allah did not send the seasonal rains on time or when animals attacked the goats.  News of pale skinned men dressed in odd clothing who stole people was alarming but too distant to be a constant worry.

This focus on Islam felt forced. The notion that whites were coming inland in small parties to capture one or two people at a time seemed like a bad business practice, hardly profitable and highly risky.

And then there is the famous story of Mr. Haley's alleged plagiarism of Harold Courlander's novel, The African, in which Mr. Courlander describes the Atlantic crossing of a slave ship.  There was a lawsuit and Mr. Haley settled before trial for over $600,000.

There are plenty more accusations of plagiarism and fiction (particularly, Mr. Haley's discovery of the Kunta Kinte's home village) leveled at this book, to which I am not going to link.  It is upsetting, unsettling, and taints one's reading of the work.

I started looking for problems with the text, how nearly all of the primary characters were good (if they were black) and noble and hard-working.  Some whites were good, some terrible, nearly all, until George Johnson (a mostly useless toss-in toward the end,) were completely trapped from effective acting by their own beliefs about the races and slavery.  This is about the only thing that rang true, except that obviously some whites were interested in the humanity and dignity of black people, though there is no reason to believe that any characters in the book would ever be exposed to such.

The endless use of the news device to relate "great moments in black history" was so contrived as to be laughable.  I kept expecting a public service tag to be appended to each of these sections.

But despite all of this, there is power in the book, undeniable power.  Mr. Haley revived genealogy for everyone, not just blacks.  The advent of the Internet and DNA fingerprinting will prove to re-revive the study.  Mr. Haley gave history to people that were defined by their former servitude.  He forced people to see these ancestral blacks as real human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.  Sure, we could read slave narratives, but most were written a century ago (at the time Roots was published) and the language, from a different time, keeps them from being popular.  The temporal distance also keeps them from that connectedness we feel when a contemporary is telling the "true" story of his family.

Roots is worth reading, but do not accept it at face value.  Read it as one would a novel.  The self-serving final chapters are a bit of drudgery to work through, as is the documentary description of life in the Gambia.  But there are plenty of rewards, too, descriptions of weddings, camp meetings, blacksmithing, and the aforementioned cockfighting are very well written.  The community of slave row is lively and real, too.  It's interesting to note that most of Mr. Haley's direct ancestors weren't field hands (Kizzy being the exception, but we only travel out there with her once or twice, and that's more for a look at baby George than for a description of the drudgery of plantation field work.)

Annunciation | Literary Review - Winter 2007

Annunciation - Stephanie Paulsell

Another essay pattern emerges (for me, the newcomer, that is.)  Let's call it the pregnancy chronicle, the gestation essay, the reproductive memoir, the journal of fecundity.  Similar to the cancer narratives, these essays can cover the full spectrum of emotion, from deep sadness to unbridled joy.

Stephanie Paulsell's story of her and her husband's apprehension at building a family and the trials they go through once they make the decision is told with overt spirituality.  (This is my second Catholic essay in a row.)  This is religious experience without proselytization.  This essay describes faith with its concomitant doubt.

I couldn't help but be moved by this story.  You want to hug these people, sometimes smack them.  We all have situations like this in our lives, where the worst possibility occurs, or so we believe, yet it opens opportunities for growth, for something new, something unexpected.  There are many paths to joy, sometimes we recognize them and sometimes we have to be pushed there.  Sometimes we have to be reassured that it is okay to hope.

It is okay to hope.  It is the ultimate sin to despair.

The Geography of Grace | Notre Dame Magazine - Autumn 2000

The Geography of Grace - Kerry Temple

While I haven't been writing this past week, I have certainly been reading, nearly completing three books and midway through a fourth.  Travel has taken me out of my routine and I have yet to adapt my writing to being relocated.  I'm too distracted by the newness of my destination, I can't settle down into a rhythm, finding that precious reverie that one falls into when the words tumble out.  (Not that they always tumble cleanly...if I've noticed one thing about my writing in this blog, it's that I don't edit myself all that much.  Whole words missing!  Awkward sentences!  Misspellings!  Overuse of exclamation points...and ellipses! and parentheses for that matter, not to mention hackneyed phrases...but who cares?!?)

Kerry Temple wrote this essay about a decade ago; a rumination on place, specifically the campus of Notre Dame in Indiana and her home in Louisiana.  She needed to get away from her childhood home and found herself in the cold north.  Yet as she ages, she reflects on how important it is to her that she have a place with roots.  Dutifully, she thanks her parents for remaining there.

She talks of change in place, which, if we ever leave the place we grew up, is nearly inevitable, and shocking to our memories when we return.  I lived on a street that looked like a cross section of a staircase if viewed from a plane.  The two ninety degree turns kept our little lane from being a site of high speed driving, working more effectively than speed bumps.  Today, the street has been straightened.  A warehouse occupies the field that I found impossibly huge.  The houses are still there, but they look old, tiny, worn out and they've effectively been placed on an alley that was my old street.  How are kids supposed to play there now?

I had some difficulties with Ms. Temple's essay and I think I know why.  She writes too prettily, seriously, too self-aware.  There are bits of alliteration that are amusing and distracting.  But mostly, what makes this suffer, for me, not for you necessarily, is that I was reading The Liar's Club by Mary Karr at the time.  Most of that memoir takes place deep down in southeast Texas.  Ms. Temple's roots are in southwest Louisiana.  Where Ms. Temple writes in respectful prose and laments the losses of bayous and flowers while never once mentioning the oppressive humidity or sharing a memory of mosquito borne pestilence.  Her views are so starkly romantic after reading Ms. Karr's book that I had trouble reconciling the two visions.

Yet our memories of home, if we're lucky enough to have lived in a place long enough to have them, are likely to be romanticized if the place and its people didn't take a figurative dump on us.  I would guess that Ms. Temple's parents, almost certainly Catholic, were a little more responsible and little less crazy than Mary Karr's.

There are times when I miss my home, but it really isn't the place that I miss.  Physical place is mutable, untrustworthy, even the mountains and shores are so.  What I miss are the people.  I miss hearing my grandparents and my parents talking together at the kitchen table in the morning, voices low and rumbling, sipping coffee, while I lay snug in bed, warm in the blankets and the sounds, not knowing what their words meant.  I miss my friends knocking on the door to see if I got some time to play ball or Hot Wheels or pick blackberries or set up our plastic army guys and recreate a movie we just saw or a book we read.  I miss my sisters, bugging the older one when she had her friends over, keeping the younger one away from my baseball cards or my chess set.

I miss myself, when I was innocent.  When my biggest sin was not cleaning my room or not wanting to eat lima beans.  Life was indeed easier, simpler.  Sure, my parents had ridiculous arguments and there was plenty of tension.  They had terrific money troubles.  I got into the occasional fight, though I never started one.  My older sister dealt with (and continues to deal with) serious congenital health issues.  But through all of this, I know that I was loved and protected.  Nothing too crazy ever happened to me.  I enjoyed living.

Place might evoke those positive feelings in me, but I would never rely on them to do so.  Not where I came from anyway.  Despite the roots to that place, I am disconnected from it.  We can go back physically, but I am far too different to ever go back for real.

A Gratitude Hard to Name | Threepenny Review - Summer 2001

A Gratitude Hard to Name - John Berger

If I am like most Americans, then most Americans know a handful of things about Vincent Van Gogh.  We know about the ear.  We have a superficial knowledge of the look of a Van Gogh painting.  We call out his name whenever we see the starry night image.  And those of us of a certain age know the song Vincent by Don McLean, a song that I listened to a lot as a kid, a song that came to mind as I read this love letter to the artist by famed art critic and writer John Berger.

In very few words, Mr. Berger covers the gist of the artist's fervid brush stroke and ink line.  Vincent was a lover, just as Don McLean's song declares.  He could not ridicule or exalt his subjects.  I visited a site dedicated to all of works of Van Gogh while I read this essay.  Doing so conflated Mr. Berger's words with the images to, I believe, raise my level of experience of the artist.  The critic helps us see differently, and he does so here.

Consider this image of two peasants digging up potatoes.  Most would glance at it, admire the colors, maybe, and then quickly move on.  Under the guidance of John Berger, we see agriculture, the melding of the energy of man with the energy of the earth.  They share contour and color.  Vincent meant us to see it this way, I'm certain (or at least convinced by the eloquence of this essay.)

So, in this case, I feel gratitude to you Mr. Berger.  I was skeptical at first, but now I am a believer.  Should I watch Lust for Life or will that ruin my mood?

BOOK: Death at an Early Age - Jonathan Kozol (1967)

Death at an Early Age - Jonathan Kozol

My libertarian streak tells me that government shouldn't be directly involved in education.  It runs the risk of becoming indoctrination or rigid and uniform, as it has in so many states with standardized testing.  What is an elementary education?  What is its purpose?  And if government is to be responsible for it and taxpayers are to fund it, how do we guarantee that it is democratized in both availability and content?

Jonathan Kozol doesn't address these questions in his National Book Award winning expose on the Boston Public Schools.  He takes the democratizing of education for granted.  Everyone deserves an education.  An education should be made available to all who seek it (or are forced to attend school.)  The Boston public schools, if you were black, especially poor and black, appear to be the worst kind of institution.  Their racism is hidden behind a facade of caring, though you wouldn't be able to tell by the descriptions that Mr. Kozol provides.

To say that the contents of this book are mere reflections of their time is to dismiss it as a simple piece of history.  What it is, is a window on racism, not the overt racism of the American south at that time, but the unrecognized paternalistic racism of the master.  Yet, even as paternalism, this racism fails.  Black children are treated as unwanted step-children who should be happy that even a little money is being spent on them.  They should sing the praises of the whites who deign to teach them.

The ingrained condescension found on nearly every page of this book is too much to bear for 21st century minds.  I doubt my children would understand this.  They would think it a work of fiction.  Yet, this still exists today.  Maybe it isn't as obvious, though I think it is.  Maybe it isn't tied to race, but it seems tied directly to class, to lack of wealth, and, unfortunately, this falls disproportionately on blacks.

I'm not going down the slippery slope of the causes of high rates of poverty among African Americans.  But one has to wonder, what effect would the same per capita spend on students at poorer schools have on educational outcomes.  Mr. Kozol heard constantly about how education begins in the home.  "If these children had a decent home life, maybe they would be better students," and other such comments appear frequently.

We want, as a society we believe, that education can break a cycle of poverty, that it is a lever in which to lift  suffering masses out of their soul-deadening lives.  I think we've proven that education alone is not enough.  There are other things that might help, which will undoubtedly be covered in other essays, but to name a few: drop the war on drugs and take the profitability out of the market; eliminate barriers to starting and sustaining a business--end silly licensing laws that only protect the status quo and eliminate all taxes and paperwork burdens for small businesses; stop equating education with passing a battery of standardized tests--let kids learn trades, music, liberal arts, sciences, whatever captures their fancy.  We don't need cookie-cutter outcomes.  We need successful happy citizens.

One last point about this book: Mr. Kozol sees busing as the primary solution to the problems he encounters (aside from more spending on basic infrastructure).  From our vantage point, we think that is a rather draconian and inconvenient solution to a basic problem of funding.  What Mr. Kozol and other liberal-minded people knew (assumed) was that unless you mixed the races in the various schools, there would always be a problem with predominantly black schools because racism would always make them a lower priority; they would inevitably get the crumbs.  By stirring the pot and mixing the student bodies, it would be impossible to play favorites with a particular school without creating benefits for the black students, too.  This is just treating the symptoms, but to attempt to change the culturally ingrained racism would take decades and black cynicism and lack of progress would steadily worsen.

How can we strike at the roots of racism?  Is racism an inherent quality of humanity?  Do we always suspect, in general terms, that which is different from us?

Nuts | Orion - Winter 2002

Nuts - John Price

Having children--fathering them--has not been a problem for me.  After a certain number of kids I had a vasectomy, and while I long to hold a baby (of my own or one of my kid's) again, I have never regretted the decision.

So, I cannot completely relate to John Price's dilemma in this essay.  He isn't sterile, but he and his spouse seem to be unable to conceive.  I know of a couple of couples who have had that problem, one ultimately successful and the other not, but that doesn't qualify me to do any more than sympathize with the situation.

Which is tough to do in Dr. Price's situation.  His neighbors are having the same problem, or so he thinks; he never comes right out and asks.  Every word, every sound, has significance for the Prices, well, for John anyway.

As I read this, I started to feel bad for Mrs. Price.  As she says at one point, "How did we become so desperate?"  I think she had the pronoun wrong.  Earlier she has to slam the table in frustration and tell her husband to stop the self-pity party.

I wanted to reach back through time and tell this guy to just relax and it will happen.  Sounds folksy and simple, I know, but if they aren't sterile, then what the heck?  Turning sex into a chore in order to make a baby is like a type of studious pornography; where's the love?  Even Dr. Price admits that they were becoming individuals and ceasing to be a couple.

Of course, desperation can make a baby, but where's the fun in that?

A Mother's Fury | New York Times Magazine - October 23, 1988

A Mother's Fury - Richard Selzer

In these day's of Discovery Channel (with Shark Week!) and Animal Planet, it's hard to imagine the rarity of nature shows on television.  We basically had two choices: The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (yes, that is an insurance company, sponsoring a show like they would a modern-day sports stadium.)  By the time I was a teen, PBS had started the show Nature, but if you're household was like mine, the local PBS station's signal was fairly weak and the antenna wasn't always able to obtain a clear picture.

These days, there always an IMAX theater showing some sort of film on nature, cable channels are dedicated to this sort of programming, and you can find online practically any video you can imagine regarding animals from whales eating plankton to cockfights.

We were Marlin Perkins men, my dad and I.  Like most people, our favorite episodes of Wild Kingdom involved Jim Fowler getting into trouble a la Steve Irwin (although not intentionally) while Marlin did the voice-over in that folksy chuckle whenever Fowler was charged by an elephant or chased by a crocodile.

For most of us, this is our exposure to the world of animals beyond our pets and our backyards.  We don't get to see the natural world doing its thing.  When we do go for hikes or a drive in the wilderness, we rarely have the patience to watch nature play out.  In her book, A Country Year, Sue Hubbell talks about having to sit still and quietly for at least thirty minutes before the birds and other animals ignore her and grow comfortable enough to act naturally.  I don't know if I could do it.  I know what standing still does to me; just thinking about it makes me need to urinate.

In this essay, from way back in 1988, Richard Selzer tells of a trip to Yellowstone where he witnessed an attack of a team of coyotes on an elk and her calf.  Dr. Selzer is moved by the elk's furious fight to protect her doomed calf.  His guide, Jim Halfpenny (who still works at Yellowstone), can see his distress and warns him against mapping our morals over this natural terrain.  "A calf dies," he says. "Three coyotes live another day."

Dr. Selzer can't help but draw parallels with his own career as a surgeon, when he had to tell a mother that her child died.

Dr. Selzer has seen many things that most of us will never see, and never hope to see.  It is special people who want to do the hard work of healing others, knowing that failure can be final.

If he were alone and came upon this situation, would he have chased off the coyotes?  Would you or I?

The Handmade Court | Ecotone - Fall/Winter 2006

The Handmade Court | Gary Fincke

Perhaps because I was a baseball player, I was never really any good at tennis.  When striking the ball, I always rolled my wrists, as if I were swinging a bat.  The ball either smacked into the net or sailed well beyond the court.  I knew plenty of people who played, but it wasn't my bag.

And, similar to Gary Fincke, I wasn't enamored with manual labor when I was fourteen years old.

This humorous gem of an essay is about the single-mindedness of Mr. Fincke's father to build a tennis court on a remote piece of Pennsylvania property that initially appears flat and thick with clay, perfect for tennis.  It's also about Mr. Fincke's summer of tennis tournaments and fact that he was in a bit over his head.  He complains of cheap rackets, out of style clothing, the wrong shoes and parents not properly dressed for the venues, but what he knows, and what goes unsaid, is that his father bought land to build him a tennis court.  Maybe that is why they didn't have a lot of extra money to buy dinner jackets and expensive rackets.

The essay captures teen boredom with physical labor and our youthful fantasies of success.  Then it ends with the young Mr. Fincke pragmatically assessing how long the court will survive a rainy period and plotting on the best way to beat his old man.

Reaching Home | Ninth Letter - Fall/Winter 2004

Reaching Home - Susan Perabo

The summer between kindergarten and first grade, when I was five years old, my father decided that I needed to learn about baseball.  He bought some baseball cards and would set them out in front of me.  He would point to one and I had to name the team.  I didn't know enough to understand that the team names were on the card.  I guessed based on uniform clues: "The Bears?" I asked when presented with the Cubs.  "The Friars?" when a Padre logo was placed before me.  (I knew what friars looked like thanks to Porky Pig's take on the role of Friar Tuck in the classic Robin Hood Daffy cartoon.)  My dad was frustrated.  I remember him yelling at me.

Then we sat down with a newspaper and he showed me the league and divisional breakdowns.  I had recently been looking at books about the Civil War, so I assumed the leagues were based on geography, specifically divided into North and South.  I grabbed a map and discovered that this wasn't true.  And there was a team in Canada!  Then I tried to understand the meanings of the team names.  What was the difference between the Reds and Red Sox?  What was a Dodger?

I was hooked.

Shortly after this, my dad bought me a glove and a ball, made of rubber.  He took me out to the street and we tossed the ball.  I never feared the ball.  I would stab the glove at it, knowing I had to snap it shut over the ball once I felt it hit.

My problem was throwing.  No matter how far away my father stood, the ball would drop right in front of him.  He got frustrated again, but he was more patient with me this time.  He told me to aim at his chest and not worry about overthrowing it or hurting him.  It worked.

We tossed everyday it seemed for a week or so.  Then he took me down to some ballfields where there seemed to be hundreds of kids throwing a ball around.  I was taken to a group of kids my age.  We played catch with some of the men standing around in sunglasses and baseball caps.  One guy, with aviator glasses, a raggedy red ballcap, a blue plaid short sleeved shirt, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, squatted down like a catcher and had a couple of us throw to him.  I had been following my dad's advice and whipping it at the chest of whoever I was throwing to.  Some of the kids couldn't handle it.  I did the same with this guy.  The ball popping into his mitt.  I remember him standing up and pointing at me and saying, "I think we found our pitcher."

This started my baseball career, which lasted through high school and then intermittently until I stopped playing in my early thirties.  Maybe, I'll write more on this so-called career later.  But for now, all of this little aside on the diamond of memory was caused by Susan Perabo's brilliant little essay on her own career in and love for baseball.

What a way to start the essay:  Ms. Perabo finds that she is in the Hall of Fame.  Yes, the one in Cooperstown.  Of course, it's only her name, but that would be good enough for me.  She is acknowledged for playing, no, starting, for a NCAA baseball team.

I'll leave it to you to read her story.  She tells it in a way that is absolutely believable.  She has not padded or romanticized the experience one iota.  Her love for the game and for her Cardinals is practically genetic.  If you love or have ever loved (because it's easy to understand why no one would love the game as it stands today) baseball, this is a good read.  If you don't care for baseball, it is still an entertaining read about gender and sports, and the pure joy in doing something for the sake of doing it.

BOOK: A Country Year - Sue Hubbell (1986)

A Country Year: Living the Questions - Sue Hubbell

There are some books that I would never read.  I'm not a fan of nature ruminations.  They tend to the exalted or the sentimental.  I don't need transcendence forced on me.  Who really wants to hear about someone's fantastic walk in the woods?  Birdsong and spiderwebs, dewy grass and a pellucid lake, sunlight striking a glade and butterflies on the wing.  Oh, geez, give it a rest.

I came to Sue Hubbell's A Country Year with a lot of reservations and skepticism.  She's a beekeeper in the Ozarks?  Lives alone on 90 acres?  Has a river and a creek and woods and wildlife?  This isn't promising.

Yet it was nothing like what I expected.  Did she try to make tenuous connections between animal behavior and universal human truths?  Kind of.  She does it half-heartedly, almost embarrassed by it.  Mrs. Hubbell is her most authentic when she gets to the fundamentals: of beekeeping, honey sales, VFW members, trucks stuck in the mud, roofing, her brother Bil, the community panic triggered by a proposed dam, and, as I discovered, pretty much any thing she wrote about after the first few tentative entries.  Or maybe that's when I dropped my caution.

My absolute favorite part of the book, the one that won me over, was her warning about thinking of her life as idyllic.  People, completely unsuited to the life, think they can leave the big city and move out to this remote place and be at peace.  Peace is not tied to place (though I would imagine living in continuous danger has a clear impact on feeling at ease.)  Peace is something you have to take with you wherever you travel.

This book's a keeper.

Backlogs of History | The Atlantic - May 1996

Backlogs of History - Cullen Murphy

I subscribe to the following magazines: New Yorker, Lapham's Quarterly, Mutineer, Imbibe, and Esopus.  Not included are the magazines that my wife receives.  And I am considering subscribing to Blue Canvas and The Sun.  When I subscribe to a magazine, I do not discard the back issues.  You can imagine the stack of New Yorker issues.

I'm also an avid reader of comic books and graphic novels, those written for adults.  And I keep most, if not all, of those issues.

How do I store them?  I have them professionally bound into either hardcover or softcover books.  This destroys their value as individual issues of the magazine, but it makes the collection more portable, easier to read, and longer lasting.  (In case you are a fan of the magazine, I assure you that I do not bind the inventive, avant-garde Esopus.  If you are a--reader is not the right word--devotee, enthusiast, of this magazine, then you will understand.  There is nothing quite like it out there.  Tod Lippy is phenomenal.)

It's expensive for sure.  I'm crazy enough to consider doing it for the NYT Magazine starting with 2010.  I need to be surrounded with my consumed words and images.  Why?  What is this need to collect and hoard and organize?

It seems that it is cultural.  Cullen Murphy wonders what the impact of this obsession with record-keeping and document storage will have on future generations of historians.  With technology readily enabling not only the creation but the capture of bajillions of bytes of data, how will we sort through it.  As he says, it might not be so bad if you know specifically what you are looking to find, but if you are browsing or doing research, what are the chances of getting complete information?

Mr. Murphy observes that historians have to make their areas of study narrower and narrower in order to even have a chance at reviewing all of the available material.  Some historians have resorted to sampling data.

It would seem that as long as we keep creating written records (and sound recordings) and the technology keeps improving to store them, we can spend lifetimes exploring other lifetimes.  What will that do to our ability to move forward?  If it takes a lifetime to read through a lifetime, when do we find time to live and create?

My guess is that the answer will be technological.  This will sound ridiculous, but I believe we will discover better ways of organizing and retrieving information and we will find a way to integrate this information with our brains.  Think of it as a super-Google immediately accessible by the human brain.

It'll happen.  Or maybe I should stop sampling the recipes in Mutineer and Imbibe and then writing in this blog.

The Importance of Being Remembered | New York Times Book Review - June 28, 1987

The Importance of Being Remembered - Susan Allen Toth

One of the scariest things about writing a memoir, whether a book or an essay, is the fact that someone you knew is going to read it.  They will recognize themselves.  They will either agree or disagree with your memories.  They might remember things differently.  They have their own takes on how things went down all those years ago.  They might feel nostalgia.  They might be angry.  Someone will read the memoir and they will know it is them that you are remembering, even if you change the names.

Susan Allen Toth writes in this essay that responses to her two memoirs cause her to fluctuate between her present self and her past.  Has she remembered the important things?  Has she written accurately and truthfully?

Her readers' responses are all rather personal, I thought.  They have a familiarity to them, such as a fan would have with a celebrity.  I think this is caused by the intimacy one undoubtedly feels with the author after reading the memoir.  Also, if you shared the same time and place with the author, if you knew her, then you would have no problem acting as if things could be picked up where they were left off all those years ago.

Mrs. Toth noticed that most of her correspondence was from readers who felt strongly about being remembered, about having their stories told.

When most people think of memoir, they believe that there must either be some event or some chronic problem that fills the past of the author.  Maybe that makes for bestsellers or juicy rounds on talk shows, but it  isn't a prerequisite for writing a memoir.

You could've led that mythical ordinary life, so what?  Write about it.  You don't need to worry about whether  anyone reads it, they will.  Who cares if some fools out their find your life boring?  Some people will relate.  We need to value our memories, our lives.  What better way than to write them down.  Will you find a publisher?  Does it matter?  Just the effort, the doing, is what matters.  You'll think of things you thought long forgotten.  You'll bring your wisdom to bear on that naive and innocent version of you.

Maybe you'll uncover something that was a critical life lesson.  Maybe you'll address those regrets.  The point is, even if you were not a pre-teen drug addict or a victim of abuse, you still have a store of stories about your life.  Write them down.  Leave that legacy.  Someone in the world will relate.  If you have children, they will appreciate it, as will your grandchildren and beyond.  You'll be adding your history to history.

Bill Roorbach has an excellent book for the tentative memoirist, Writing Life Stories.  I recommend it without reservation.

One Violent Crime | The Nation - April 3, 1995

One Violent Crime - Bruce Shapiro

Like most Americans, I have never been a victim of a violent crime.  To be sure, I've had a car stolen, things stolen out of my car, and a handful of instances of vandalism, but I have never been assaulted or robbed.

One would think, though, looking at the local newscasts especially, that we have all been victims or will be victims of violent crime.  We should live in fear of cities, of darkness, of people who are not like ourselves.  If you're black and alone, watch out for whites and vice versa.  You'll be attacked simply because you're different.  There is no such thing as a safe neighborhood in any large city.  You better carry a gun, spray, or other self-defense weapon if you want to stay safe.

Politicians tend to focus on punishments.  Tough punishments are supposed to logically lead to reduced incidents of crime.  Punishments, though, don't really have a deterring effect on those prone to violence, whether mentally ill or criminally inclined.

But I'm not the right person to argue about crime and punishment.  Bruce Shapiro, back in 1995, wrote this moving essay about the time he was stabbed, nearly killed, as part of an attack in New Haven, Connecticut.  Mr. Shapiro's attack took place during the Clinton administration, right after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress with the Contract With America promising, among other things, tough legislation on crime.

Mr. Shapiro makes a strong progressive argument.  The only problem I have with his arguments are the assumptions that more funding for things that he believes will help is taken for granted as effective solutions.  But that's a problem that most everyone of strong political persuasion suffer from.

Where Mr. Shapiro resonates with me, and where he is obviously most emotional, is when he takes on the question: "Why didn't anyone stop him?"  People who ask that question have likely never been in a situation similar to the one he describes.  They assume you're either a hero or a coward.  Why didn't anyone stop him? It angers me even reading the question.

When the news came out about the passengers and crew of Flight 93, the notion of heroism in the face of crime reached its zenith, thanks to the fact that it was real.  We already had countless examples of this stuff in movies, but now, people, in real life, had done it.  And then it happened with the shoe bomber and then again this past Christmas on the flight to Detroit.  But in the first case, the people had time to think, communicate, and organize resistance.  Then in subsequent cases, passengers seem to be ready and waiting, aware, that this sort of thing is possible.  I know that when I fly I think about what I would do should someone try something; what would I use for a weapon, where the children are sitting, who looks suspicious, who looks strong, etc.

But we can't live our lives like we're flying.  We can't constantly be on edge, ready to strike when someone attacks.  We're not a nation of Jason Bournes.

Mr. Shapiro talks about his behavior in the aftermath of the attack.  I think about how I felt after my car was stolen, how I woke up during the night to check on it after we got it back.  To survive such a physical assault, I'm not sure how I could have continued.  He discusses his need for justice, carefully trying to separate it from the notion of revenge.  I'm not sure I could do it.

As of his writing of the essay, the assailant was still awaiting trial--over a year later.  I don't know how long it ultimately took, but one wonders what would happen if we decriminalized non-violent, victim-less crimes.  Maybe there would have been justice for Mr. Shapiro and the other victims far sooner, helping bring them some peace.

Whole Hog | Ecotone - Spring 2007

Whole Hog - Tenaya Darlington

Just when I needed an essay to lighten things up (Roots and Death at an Early Age are on my nightstand, where I am midway between both, while The Liar's Club awaits its turn) I stumble on this beauty about the power of the urban barbecue party.

Ms. Darlington lived next door to Kim, the master party host and meat-eater who hosts an annual pig roast in the most politically correct section of Madison, Wisconsin.  He is surrounded by masseuses and vegans of all types who are horrified at this celebration of gluttony.

As I read this, the only thing I could think was why hasn't this been optioned into a movie and a subsequent sitcom.

Kim has a typically tiny urban yard in which he has crammed on his patio a hot tub, a tap handle through the wall so that beer flows without the need to enter the house, and a ledge for his large high def television; the better to watch the Packers apparently.  While Kim and his buddy Tim are a hoot, they pale in comparison to the self-conscious, self-righteous co-op shopping, high-minded neighbors.  I especially loved the late night argument between a motorized wheelchair-bound white senior citizen and a black woman, her neighbor from down the street.

This is comedy gold.  And just what I needed.

I need to host a party here in my eclectic neighborhood.

But right now, I want a pulled pork sandwich.

Smoked Heads | Salmagundi - Fall 2006

Smoked Heads - Christina Thompson

American Variations, indeed.  Christina Thompson, an American married to a Maori man, starts the essay by telling us about a photo of one General Robley.  Seems like a typical 19th century British soldier, except that in the background, hung on the wall behind him are nearly three dozen Maori heads.

This sets off a description of the heads, the process for making them, and a bit of history.  Mrs. Thompson explains what the heads used to mean before Captain Cook navigated his way to New Zealand.  She tells an interesting story of the role of the heads as sacred objects that preserved loved ones and enemies alike.  Only the horrible discovery of the power of the musket and the warlike Maoris desire to possess such power combined with the British desire for anthropological curios did the heads become something baser and more common.

What really interests the author is the reaction of others to her photograph.  Why are some horrified and others, like herself, emotionless?  She and her husband find a cooperative curator who shows them the real deal, but neither of them are emotionally affected by seeing these heads.  'They are smalled than I expected," is about the most emotion they can muster.

The essay works as an excellent peek into Maori culture and the "collision" it had with the British explorers and traders.  I would love to read more about some serious self-examination by Mrs. Thompson.  Why has she grown attached to this photograph?  What is her fascination with the heads?

Even without this, the essay is an interesting enjoyable read (I know, it sounds like faint praise, but I mean it) and I recommend it.

The Last Americans | Harper's Magazine - June 2003

The Last Americans - Jared Diamond

It seems like our academic writers having found themselves with a book length thought build a following for said thought by publishing what amounts to a mini-version of their book as an essay in a relatively popular magazine.  Not all make it into Harper's or the New Yorker, but it is a common practice.

The problem with this, for me, is that the writing has that academic feel but the author gets to avoid the vexatious interruptions caused by having references.  Do the words flow more naturally and smoothly?  Sure.  But I find myself driven to irritation by the fact that so many facts can go unchallenged without me trying to Google every second or third sentence.

So it is with The Last Americans, where Jared Diamond warns us of the very likely possibility that we are destroying American civilization.   See Collapse for the book length treatment on this topic.

I don't even pretend to know anything about any of this.  Dr. Diamond has won awards (a Pulitzer and a National Medal of Science), he's graduated from and taught at prestigious schools (though now he is at UCLA...I kid, I kid), so his expertise won't be challenged by me.

Does this mean that I have to agree with everything he says?  Well, no.  He is driven by his own opinions and leanings on the subject.  He spins his words while trying to make his points.  And this is what bothers me most here.  He lines up the straw men for execution--I assume their straw men because of the lack of references situation.  For example, does any serious thinker really accept that human need trumps environmental preservation?  Of course this is an overly broad question, which requires some scope reduction to remove the ambiguity.  Don't most people think of a healthy environment as a critical human need?

There are the random jabs at then President Bush, which annoy me as much as the random jabs take at President Obama today.  It undermines the credibility of the writer, as if it is a ritual that must be performed in order to appease the political group within which one belongs.  It doesn't advance any arguments and just calls attention to the political leanings of the author.

Realizing that Dr. Diamond likely develops his arguments far better in a book length format, it is probably unfair of me to hammer away at the weakness in his mental gymnastics.  I'm sure any weaknesses were due to space constraints.  I hope.  I might check Collapse out of the library...a brick and mortar one.

The bottom line is this reads like a lecture.  He's at his best discussing the "facts" around the Mayan civilization.  For the rest of the lecture he basically says that optimism is for chumps...unless you're Dutch?  I'm not sure what his prescription is.  Actually, I'm one of the dumb ones who is still unsure of the disease?  Is it being human?

I get the feeling that if we manage to fall apart over the next decade or two and Dr. Diamond lives to see it, he will at least have the smug satisfaction of saying he told us so.

The Library in the New Age | The New York Review of Books - June 12, 2008

The Library in the New Age - Robert Darnton

Writing a blog with the expectation that it will last forever, or even taking for granted that it will be eternally available, strikes me as illogical.  I worry that blogs will someday be lost, their texts disappearing as the plug is pulled on servers and memory, as judgments are passed on what is worth retaining and what will be thrown into the ethereal dustbin, truly as if it never existed.

I believe that blogs-to-books technology will continue to improve and that more and more folks will publish their blogs in a material form, suitable for keeping and selling.  Avid readers will want to have volumes of their favorites, maybe a selected "best of" anthology of favorite entries from their favorites blogs.  Could they aggregate these, favorite them, or in some other way keep them all in one electronic place?  Sure.  But that isn't the point.  There is some permanent and tangible about a book.  The best writing will find its way into that form.

Robert Darnton takes on the idea of Google digitizing the contents of libraries.  People who read Dr. Darnton's work, such as his recent The Case for Books, too casually will think that he is against the idea of digitizing.  No, he is not.  He is against the notion that this is somehow a death knell for brick and mortar libraries.

Dr. Darnton brings some cogent and, I believe, successful arguments to bear on the topic.  Google's approach is for the here and now, not for long term storage.  There are a great many varieties of a single book or document. Which is best?  Who makes the call about which shows up first in a search?

The biggest argument for the continuation of libraries is simply the magnitude of published material.  Who digitizes what?  Who guarantees the accuracy?  Google cannot do this alone.  I predict, if we do digitize everything (which is unlikely), then we'll have a variety of libraries; Google being just one of many, like the Library of Congress is one of many, though an enormous one.

I use libraries.  I can't imagine trying to read a book on the laptop and I am not going to buy any e-reader that only uses a proprietary format--I'm a reluctant iPod user, too.  Yet, I rely on digital versions of every essay I discuss here, including this one.  I can't afford every literary magazine and it would suck royally if I couldn't provide a link to the essay so that if anyone ever happens to read this, they can share the experience.

My world needs both avenues to information.

On the Zeedijk | Georgia Review - Spring 1989

On the Zeedijk - Richard Watson
The link takes you to the Prologue to Dr. Watson's book Cogito, Ergo, Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes, which is the essay that was originally published in the Georgia Review.

I do like philosophy, though I am no intellectual.  Discussions of first causes, morality, the nature of the cosmos, questions of divinity, they all get the brain going.  Many of my favorite non-fiction books are lay works on philosophy.  Among the large gaps in my knowledge though, is the actual lives of the philosophers.  What was Kant's life like?  At least with Rousseau we can read his Confessions.  But who the heck was Hegel and would I buy him a beer?

Well, Dr. Watson, wrote the above biography of Rene Descartes in order to find out what sort of person he was, not to deify him as a master scientist or mathematician.  In order to do this effectively (or to have a great vacation with Mrs. Watson) he lived and traveled in Europe wherever Descartes lived and traveled.

The essay covers Dr. Watson's stay in Franeker, in Friesland, in the Netherlands.  This place should be underwater, except the zeedijk holds back the sea.  Dr. Watson intersperses discussions of why Descartes came to this place and his own interactions with the locals and their food and geography.  Claims of wild variations in topography and flavors are met with doubt by the author and the enthusiasm of the initiated by the local population.

Dr. Watson wants to know why Descartes stayed here, having immediately dispensed with why he came there originally; implied threat of death or imprisonment being the primary motivator.  Is it food?  Does Descartes love cheese?  Is it solitude?  Did the Dutch have the habit of entering a home, uninvited, or looking in windows then as they do now?

These little tidbits are charmingly told (if you're in the right mood, otherwise Dr. Watson can seem like some sort of jerk) but it is tough to picture Descartes dealing with these same issues.  Were there dozens of varieties of licorice and gingerbread in those days or has that evolved over time?  Did kids vault between the dikes on twelve foot poles?

The essay closes with Descartes fatal trip to Sweden to visit the court of Queen Christina.  Don't make trips to visit young queens in cold places was the best lesson I gleaned from this fiasco.

A very enjoyable read and I might pick up the entire book.  Apparently, there are some historical inaccuracies with the names of kings and members of courts and such, but I wasn't intending on committing those to memory any more than I would try to categorize the thousand cheeses of Friesland.

Mulberries | Agni - Spring 2002

Mulberries - Rose Moss

I believe that for many Americans my age there are certain triggers that readily evoke our pasts: the smell of cut grass, a wave rolling on a beach, dropping a fishing line in an isolated stream, seeing a certain breed of dog, the taste of soft-serve ice cream (with sprinkles), the music of your favorite band when you were thirteen.

These evocations of the past are not mere memories; you are actually transported, vividly, into the time, the emotional turmoil, however insignificant now, roars back unbidden.  When I smell grass, I think of summers with my grandfather, helping him mow lawns.  The heat and humidity, my fear (which I still have) of hitting a rock with the mower and sending it flying to harm someone, my grandfather's patience with me.  He treated me with respect, correcting me, but never getting upset directly with me.  He knew when I was overworked and would stop for a break.  I fretted over grass stains on my Converse and money to buy baseball cards.  If my mother wanted a carton of Pepsi, I dreaded the walk home.  The six heavy sixteen ounce glass bottles were carried in a cardboard six-pack holder and the handle cut into my fingers forcing me to stop every hundred or so feet.  My grandfather drank RC, so that meant that sometimes I had to haul two from the corner grocery.  It was my least favorite chore, though I usually got to pick up a couple of ten cent packs of baseball cards to offset the pain.  If I pull out my albums of baseball cards today, it triggers even more events from the past.

All of the above came from just thinking about cut grass--there certainly isn't any chance of encountering that smell here for a couple of more months.

When this happens, you are caught in this reverie, this mental replay and you shut down like some science fiction robot doing heavy calculations.  My kids inevitably get concerned if they're around when this happens.  "You alright, Dad? Whatcha thinking about?"  They wonder why I am smiling, or if I am about to cry, or why do I look angry.  When I snap out of it, I want to answer with what I was experiencing, but I sense that they really don't want to hear it; my words or their experience are not adequate to create an interesting emotional connection for us.

When we read an essay that manages to do that, as in this one by Rose Moss, we realize that it takes some life experience to truly appreciate how something as simple as picking some mulberries can drive you straight to your past.  (For me this would be blackberries.)  Ms. Moss, from South Africa, puts her memories into the larger picture of apartheid and how the suppression of dissent marred what is otherwise a beautiful country filled with a diverse mix of perfectly normal people wanting perfectly reasonable rights.  (To be sure, Ms. Moss does not use the hackneyed prose of yours truly...you need to read her essay after all.)

This is a short essay that's packed with symbolism and meaning.  No wasted words here.

We might not have the profound insights in our memories that Ms. Moss has put forth here, but this is her job as an essayist.  Perhaps we just need to stop when we find our own mulberries to pick and immerse ourselves in the memories, see what our minds dredge up for us, let the significance be revealed on its own schedule, but give it time to arrive.

My son and I are going to do some serious house painting today.  I'll remember my grandfather and his patience with a young grandson, knowing the boy needed to make his own mistakes and calling for breaks at just the right time.

Land of Wizards | Popular Mechanics - July 1986

Popular Mechanics - Tom Wolfe

You know you've done it.  You've dealt with something around the house or at work or in the car and you've thought, "Wouldn't it be great if this worked a certain way?" or "I wish there was a thing that helped me do this."

When you are thinking that way, you are thinking like an inventor.  Everyone wants a shower that is personalized, delivering the exact water temperature that each showerer prefers.  We would all love a car that would drive itself to a specified destination or a traffic system where vehicles could not collide with each other, yet traveled at a maximum speed for those who need to move fast.

What about a table, with the top being an interactive computer screen, that ran a virtual Vegas application?  By selection you could play blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps, and any of those other tables games from Pai Gow to Caribbean Stud.  The dealer is virtual.  Other players can be real or virtual.  No cards, no dice, no chips, all of it taking place on the virtual (that is horizontal) table top.  And it's waterproof so you can sit a drink on the rail.  You don't have to know the rules cause the dealer and the pit boss (virtual, too) will be there to help you out.  What a gas.  And when you aren't playing, it serves as a nice piece of furniture.  Of course, the table is wireless, too, so that upgrades and new games arrive unnoticed (depending on the settings).  The tables also work together over the network so that you "gamble" with your friends.  This is not much different from regular PC gaming software with the exception that it is furniture, larger than a normal screen, and horizontal.  I would love it, until one of my friends placed a magnet on the screen.

I'm sure you have a few ideas bouncing around in your head.  Or maybe you've had them in the past and then magically they appear on the market, as if someone read your mind.  I remember when CDs came out, I thought it was only a matter of time before we could store massive amounts of information on ever decreasing memory chips and therefore the ability to keep thousands of hours of music in your pocket.  To be sure I didn't expect the devices based on disk drive technology.  I'm a solid state guy, not trusting the durability and reliability of stuff that has mechanisms to work properly.

But, if you don't think it through, write it all down as specifically as possible and submit to the patent office, well, no one will believe it was your idea and no one will pay you royalties for your invention.

But, again, even if you did do all of that, there is no guarantee that anyone will pay you a license fee to use and adapt your invention.

Tom Wolfe, using prolific inventor Jerome Lemelson as his subject, wrote this essay to describe the sorry state of affairs that enforcement of patent law has created.  America was once a land of wizards, innovative people creating, on their own, the things that make this country tick (or turn, beep, drive, grow, etc.)

This essay is a bit dated (nearly 25 years old) but the story is a good one.  Corporate America, always at the forefront of describing how they are the job creating backbone of the US economy, comes across as anathema to innovation and invention.  Tom Wolfe does not spend too much time stating the position of the corporations; both he and his audience would have a predilection for supporting the lone wolf inventor.

Still this is a superb bit of history.  I would recommend tracking down some other views on the topic, just to keep the appearance of even-handedness.  Ideas are difficult things to claim ownership to.  One thinks of Newton and Leibniz each inventing the calculus at nearly the same time without having met or known of the other's work, though that obviously is not a modern American patent case.

Despite the lopsidedness of the essay, it isn't difficult to believe that a business concern would weigh the cost of litigation against the cost of royalties and choose the lesser of the two.  It's fundamental.

Read this and then go read more about Lemelson.  He should be as well known as Edison.

BOOK: Paper Lion - George Plimpton (1966)

Paper Lion - George Plimpton (1966)

Every August for the past few years, HBO has produced a short run weekly documentary on NFL training camp called Hard Knocks.  The documentary style series follows a team during their summer camp and preseason football games.  It is an entertaining series, though a common criticism is that players and coaches behave differently knowing the cameras are rolling, so it might take away a bit of authenticity.

The show covers all aspects of training camp from arrival to the dreaded cut down days; injuries, contract disputes, fan interactions, rookie hazings, field drills, film review, and more.  You see the raw emotion and physicality of men competing for jobs, most of it based on merit, because, let's face reality, it is difficult to cut a guaranteed multi-million dollar player because a college free agent shows flashes of talent.

The show is quite popular with the football faithful and even the casual fan as they get a rare glimpse inside the coaches' offices, the locker rooms, and the front office.  During the season, nearly all of the exposure to this is funneled through press conferences where anyone who pays attention could write the question and answers before they're asked and answered.

In the 1960s however, there was no summer HBO documentary for professional football, which is one of the things that makes Paper Lion so special.  This is a piece of Americana.  We get a decent look, through the eyes of author George Plimpton at the Detroit Lions training camp in 1963.  Mr. Plimpton, the founder (and at the time, editor) of the Paris Review, isn't much of a sports figure.  Though he did write a series of books where he participated in various sports.  Paper Lion was the second; his first was about his attempt to pitch to Major League all-stars.

The Lions, if you follow football, are usually not a very competitive team.  But back in the early 60s, the Lions were perennial powerhouses.  They went to four NFL Championship games in the 50s, winning three of them.  Of course, the Green Bay Packers were the team of the decade in 60s, winning seven championships, including the first two Super Bowls.

So, for Mr. Plimpton to be able to attend training camp, play in a scrimmage, and suit up for a preseason game, was a big deal.  He covers the territory just like Hard Knocks does today, though he refrains from letting most of the expletives loose when relaying the banter among the players.  At times, it seemed like Mr. Plimpton's memory invoked his own voice.  There were some sentences that were structured by a Harvard graduate being passed off as the utterances of some midwestern blue collar baller.  It didn't ring authentic in those cases.

The game has changed a bit, especially in the rules regarding safety.  Also the leap in medical technology and knowledge, nutrition, and exercise we have made since the 60s leaves you wondering how anyone survived playing in those days.

The profiles of the players are superb.  Morrall and Plum, the QBs are a study in contrasts.  Night Train Lane is a gifted hoot, a forerunner of Deion Sanders.  Gibbons, Bingaman, Cogdill, and LeBeau, and many others are all given space.  Even the missing man, Alex Karras, who was serving a one year suspension for gambling is covered in detail.  My favorite player is Harley Sewell, the lineman from Texas.  He just seems like a great guy.  Read it...I'm not telling you why.  He's just ferocious, earnest, and nice.  Today a vapid analyst would say, "He's a stand-up guy.  A real team player.  And he has a great motor!"

The epilogue speaks volumes about the impact that the media and communications technology has had on that most special weekend in the NFL offseason: the draft.  Twenty rounds.  No breaks.  That wouldn't make for good television.

Any NFL fan should read this book.  You'll be bothered by some of the tame language and some of the less than compelling anecdotes.  The book is a bit dated.  But, like getting caught up in whichever team is featured on Hard Knocks, you get caught up in the Lions, even at this temporal distance.

Where the Shah Went Alone | Reason - July 2003

Where the Shah Went Alone - Iraj Isaac Rahmim

There's nothing quite like the ludicrous cartoonish aspects of a despotic tyrant.  The Dear Leader images everywhere, the inscriptions found in every book, the fawning journalistic coverage, the religious zeal of the street all make it seem more like a movie to the typical American.

So, who am I to judge the experiences of Mr. Rahmim?  He is a Jewish-Iranian, born into a comfortable middle-class, not starving or in need of shelter, yet not fabulously wealthy.  This worked out well for him for the most part.  They weren't poor enough to be too oppressed and not rich enough to be concerned with the danger of politics.

Many Americans do not know much about Iranian history.  We kind of know something about Cyrus the Great or Xerxes, when we remember to connect Persia with modern Iran.  Then there is a gap of over 2000 years until we have the embassy in Tehran captured by supporters of the new theocracy.  Most Americans, of a certain age, know of the 444 day captivity of American hostages.  Iran has been part of the national consciousness ever since.

Mr. Rahmim gives us a quick stroll through the final two Shahi of Iran.  He relates stories from his family.  While I know that they were in danger, I never get the sense that he ever felt threatened as a child.  He was a well-traveled kid, too.  This place doesn't seem like North Korea or even the old Soviet Union.  Iran feels more like a well-to-do country with a uniformed martinet running the show, only he's ok with rapid capital punishment.

The comparisons of culture with his American girlfriend and her family reveals the impact such tyranny can have on adults, but it doesn't seemed to have overly affected Mr. Rahmim.

The Equality Equation put forth is a hoot and a wonderful depiction of a logical mind dealing with envy and esteem issues.

In the end, Mr. Rahmim provides an informative and entertaining glimpse of living in Iran as a kid.  When we mostly know Iran from Ahmadinejad and Persepolis, it's helpful to have another perspective.

A King's Holiday: A Personal Reminiscence of Dr. Martin Luther King | Antioch Review - Fall 2002

A King's Holiday: A Personal Reminiscence of Dr. Martin Luther King - Kenneth A. McClane

Many people in the United States, and the world over, tend to think in saintly terms when discussing Dr. King.  A strong minority exists that believe he is a total fraud; someone who cheated on his dissertation, plagiarized the speeches and sermons of others, and couldn't keep his fly zipped.

Kenneth McClane thinks this argument is senseless.  Dr. King was a man.  Men (and women) are not saints.  One has to wonder if saints really exist or could exist in recent times.  To be a saint requires a true separation from the working world.  Dr. King worked in the world.  He spoke nearly non-stop in efforts to raise money for the freedom and equality (in civil rights) for all Americans, and specifically Americans of color.  Dr. King made mistakes and committed sins.  So, let's stop all of this sainthood talk.

Mr. McClane relates a story that takes place when he was about eight years old.  His parents, well-to-do, comfortably middle class, if uncomfortably not white, routinely sheltered exhausted and battered Freedom Riders in their homes.  To see these young people, cut and bruised, telling stories of abuse and hatred, when you are only a early primary grade aged child must have been confusing and scary and left an everlasting memory.

The McClanes met Dr. King on a train ride in New England.  A friendship developed (not being cynical here, but one would think it was important for Dr. King to network with wealth wherever he could find it) and Dr. King was invited to the McClane's home on Martha's Vineyard.  Mr. McClane tells of that visit, an abbreviated one of only 36 hours, to explain why Dr. King was what he was, not saintly, but a good human being.

As Mr. McClane admits, this isn't "earth shattering" but it is real.  We too often treat Dr. King as a mythical being, some glowing saint of racial equality who could do no wrong, who never had a misstep, whose feet never trod on the same mundane getting by earth that ours do.  And almost as often, we overreact to this near deification of the man by cataloging and magnifying his shortcomings, his flaws, in order to destroy his legacy and diminish the message he brought.

Neither of these positions are correct.  Dr. King was out there working to bring in money to help people fight the good fight for such simple things: to be able to sit in the same room with whites while waiting for a train, to drink from a public water fountain, to sit at a lunch counter, to enter a restaurant through the front door, to sit in any open seat on a bus, to buy a house in any neighborhood, to vote, to work, to attend a school of one's choosing, and so many other things that we all take for granted today.

This is what today is all about.  Dr. Martin Luther King Day is about not forgetting that we must struggle to be free.  Our tendency is to give up our freedom for security or comfort.  We have Independence Day in July to remind us that as a country we have fought for freedom.  We have this day in January to remind us that freedom is for everyone, not just a select few, and we must continue to be vigilant in keeping that promise as a nation.

You don't have to celebrate the man if you don't want to, but we should be celebrating his work, what he ultimately stood for, and, as Mr. McClane points out, his many simple examples of "human-centered love."  We can, indeed, count ourselves lucky if we may find it.

No Camping on City Streets | The Sun - November 2006

No Camping on City Streets - Frances Lefkowitz
This links to a .pdf file that requires Acrobat Reader.

Once upon a time, when I was a young man, my first wife and I parted ways.  I was on an extended business trip when the divorce was finalized.  She placed my belongings in a storage unit, packed up everything else, including our two children and moved thousands of miles away.  When I returned, I had a dilemma.  I had nowhere to live.  It didn't occur to me that she would simply move.  We didn't discuss it and, after 20 years, I still hold a grudge.  (I have a number of them from that time period.  Many involve her, but I've learned to successfully suppress them.  Or I maybe I haven't.)

What was I to do?  I've never been much of a YMCA guy.  Hotels were tourist priced and I felt that I would be burning up what little cash I had.  My divorce required about $1600 per month in child support and alimony.  I remember thinking that getting rid of her was worth any price.  After the fury dies down and the fiscal reality sets in, your tune does change.

So, I did what any newly singly guy in his mid-twenties would do in these circumstances.  I imposed on friends.  For two months I hopped around from place to place staying a few days at a time.  I slept on floors, couches, cots, sofa beds and the occasional futon and spare twin bed.  I even spent a couple of nights in my car (a Ford Pinto station wagon!) until I finally found an apartment that I could afford.  That apartment will be covered in my memoir, I'm sure.  I'll never live in a cinder block three story walk up again, I can say with certainty.

That has been my only brush with anything that resembles homelessness.  In this essay, Frances Lefkowitz, whom I am convinced would make a charming Mrs. Hutton, tells the story of her ninth summer, when her family receives an eviction notice and her father takes them from San Francisco to the country in search of "Land".

She is the middle child (as am I), the only girl (I am the only boy).  She and her brothers are piled into the homemade wood camper shell covered pickup and off they go on a summer adventure.  Ms. Lefkowitz doesn't dwell on many negatives.  She and her siblings miss their friends and the ease of play in a dense city neighborhood, but they adapt to their surroundings as only imaginative children can.

They rummage through empty campsites, they dig for clams, fish, play tag with the ocean, and have a grand summer.  Ms. Lefkowitz gives us knowing winks about her parents, such as the sometimes broken intercom that links the camper shell with the cab, and the direction from her dad that the kids should go play and not return to the camper until they are called back.  Wink wink, nudge nudge, indeed.

We can see some cracks in her parents' relationship, that makes you wonder if her mother continued putting up with it or if she finally dispensed with the often angry interactions with her husband.

The quest for Land collided with the realities of the American countryside--surprisingly similar nationwide--and the family heads back to the city.  There they arrive in that in-between time where it is too early and too late to interrupt the lives of others.  So they did what I did when this happened to me.  They slept in their vehicle.  They should have stopped near the city without entering, waiting for morning, perhaps at a wayside or a rest area.  Because as the title says, there's no camping on city streets.

Scheherazade Nights | Washington Post Magazine - July 9, 2006

Scheherazade Nights - Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham might be an award-winning novelist, but by god he was a struggling artist, too.  He had to bartend to pay the bills to support his writing.  He had to work with beautiful buffoons whose simple minds could easily be tolerated because they had large biceps and moved gracefully.  Some even showed genuine, if superficial, interest in his work.

Now don't misunderstand, this is a fun essay to read.  Mr. Cunningham weaves a simple memoir of his time among the elite in the bartending world.  He is funny and self-deprecating and he makes it easy to place yourself right there, at the bar, in this distant time.  I can see the skin tight shirts and mustaches on each and every one of them.  I can picture the lonely customers, the cruisers, the regulars who'll have no one interrupt their rituals and customs.

My problem with this is Mr. Cunningham's underlying attitude.  When he returns he has these thoughts: "But I was finally ready, in my own skin, to see them again, if any of them happened to be there still. I no longer felt like a beggar at the banquet."

It's a strange and normal thought process--I know nothing of psychology, and it shows--that Mr. Cunningham was part of a group that he physically admired.  And he was in that group in a milieu where physical admiration and desire were the primary driving forces of relationships.  One of these Adonis' shows the slightest interest in the fact that Mr. Cunningham writes.  Clearly, it left a deep memory.

After he has met some success, he feels comfortable enough to return, finally secure in his own worth.  Yet he assumes that these "simple, hardy young men" wouldn't be impressed with his modest success.  (I don't know the timing of these events, but geez, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, for god's sake.)

You can read the essay to see what he finds.  It allows Mr. Cunningham to wax profound about life's inequities.

I don't care to be mean, but I think he was slightly disappointed that he couldn't rub it in a little with them, or maybe see their approving looks.  We all want that when we reconnect with the people in our pasts.  Hell, the entire high school reunion industry is based on this.

I wonder though, if Mr. Cunningham was straight, and let's say he was a barback or a cook at a place like Hooter's or its ilk, would an essay like this generate some heavy criticism?  Wouldn't it likely be seen as an middle-aged man's thinly-veiled gasconade?

"Oh, how I came so close to giving those big-breasted, long-legged Barbie dolls their comeuppance.  Alas, they no longer worked there."

(I must be grumpy...Mr. Cunningham, I don't mean any of this.)