Eric The Blue

Driving home with our 4-year-old

This evening I was standing around with some other parents, waiting for our 4-year-olds at their "school," when they marched in from the playground with their teacher.  Catching sight of their own mom, or dad, they raced out from their single-file line and into the arms of a big person who looked a lot like them.  There are ten kids, and I honestly think that if you had lined them up opposite the parents on the first day, before I"d witnessed this scene a single time, I could have gone at least 8-for-10 matching them up. 

People have recognized since ancient times that offspring resemble their progenitors.  Of course, they were all wrong about how exactly this worked.  A close observer like Aristotle noticed that a person may resemble a distant relative more closely than a parent, and he developed the idea that heredity involved not the mechanical copying of traits but, rather, potentials and probabilities.  We now know that was a pretty wonderful insight, but, still, he was way off on some things.  He thought blood was the medium of transmission, for instance.

It's fashionable to bemoan the current sorry state of things.  I sometimes consider, for example while watching C-Span, that in 1780 there were fewer than 3 million Americans and among them were Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, and George Washington.  Nowadays a manifest popinjay like Paul Ryan is regarded with awe. 

On the other hand, when President Adams's daughter had a mastectomy for her breast cancer, she was strapped to a table so that she couldn't move and given a stick to bite down on while the cutting was  done.  We've made considerable progress in science and its applications.  Meanwhile, those most apt to wail about the decline of civilization are determined that creationism be taught in science class.

Toilet reading

Charles Simic fixes his high beams on one of my pastimes, toilet reading.  His is apparently pursued in private residences, when for example he feels the need to withdraw from dull society at dinner parties.    A seat on the toilet with any kind of reading material is preferable to self-medicating with too many adult beverages.  He mentions Halliwell's Film Guide, which is indeed perfect.  Every little review makes you think of something else you suddenly need to know, time passes, you notice nothing till your haunches are numb from lack of blood, and by then you are fortified by the prospect of rearranging the Netflix queue at the first opportunity.  The Baseball Encyclopedia is similarly utile.

While I agree with Simic about the suitability of reference works, I don't think I would retire to the bathroom at a dinner party, even if I ever received invitations to attend them.  (Probably it's becoming clear why I do not.)  How much can you read before your absence is noted?  Moreover, it's hard to get comfortable in the private bathroom of your host.  It's made for his comfort, not yours, and, worse, you can't count upon not being interrupted.  You're behind a locked door, but someone will soon knock or push on it--beverages are being served--and behind the door you sit in the open.  The key concept is withdrawal, and withdrawal is defeated when the world comes knocking.

Withdrawal is abetted by anonymity, which is why I take my Nook or my paperback with me to the citadel of anonymity, the public restroom.  The fact of the stall--extremely attractive.  You're alone even when someone else is very near.  Instead of worrying about interruptions I worry about the charge to my Nook. Society is a conspiracy against concentration and the refuges are contracting.  Sometimes I'm about as happy to come out of there as infants are to be born.

 

Recommended

Last night, I got sent our for a few grocery items.  The car radio was set to NPR--yes, yes, I drink lattes from Starbucks and vote for the Democrats, too--so I began listening to this, an interview with current Met and former Twin R.A. Dickey.  I found myself wishing the store was farther away.  When I got there, I sat in the parking lot and listened for another half hour or so till it ended.  Are you ever disappointed when hearing an athlete interviewed?  You admire their performance and for some dumb reason think the excellence must be comprehensive.  It's just the opposite, however: to get that far out at one end of the spectrum in one endeavor generally requires a certain one-sidedness.  Dickey is obviously an exception.  I could listen to that soft, modest Tennessee drawl of his till--Target closes.  Who thinks, while watching a game on tv, that as a kid the pitcher found empty houses to sleep in by reading "homes for rent" in the newspaper at the school library?  He'd gather up a few candidates, then check them out after sports practice.  If the house seemed empty, he could usually find a key under a mat or potted plant, and he'd let himself in and sleep.  He wasn't homeless, just damaged, and his story might remind you of Hemingway's dictum concerning how "the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

Meanwhile, at the always stimulating New Yorker site, George Packer writes about the Titanic and contemporary American inequality.  He links to this Times story on welfare reform and what it has wrought in the lives of those who have fallen out of the middle class, or never risen to it:

They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners--all with children in tow.

Those who tout the "success" of welfare reform point to the shrinking welfare rolls, as if welfare, not poverty, was the root problem.  If the success of welfare reform is to be measured by the number of people who get it, then let us just end it all as of a certain date; when the day comes, the rolls will go to zero, and we will have achieved a perfect success.  But people will still be poor. 

That's it.  One recommended listen and a couple recommended reads.

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Eric the Blue is looking for side jobs.  (Times are tough!)  I can write newsletters, fliers, technical instructions, blog content, and other business copy.  Reasonable rates.  Editing and proofreading services as well.  Contact me by e-mail at:

angstrom65@hotmail.com

M.A. in English.  Former editor of award-winning college newspaper.  If you're reading this, you're just n clicks away from n writing samples.  Not desperate enough to work for right-wing causes.

Flying home

Back to Minneapolis yesterday evening.  A week earlier, when we had just taken off and our plane was climbing to its cruising altitude, Rianna, our 9-year-old, who had a window seat, exclaimed, "Wow, is this ever cool!"  The gentleman in the seat in front of her was amused.  Turning around and addressing her through the space between the seats, he asked, or observed, "You haven't flown before, have you?" 

I guess I haven't flown so much that I've stopped looking out the window and thinking it's cool.  Yesterday, when the sun had set, and we were flying over I presume Iowa, or maybe eastern Nebraska, I was able to look out past the stranger snoozing in the window seat next to me and notice the way that small towns look from the air at night: two lines of crossing light that bulge near their intersection. 

Earth, I think, looks better from a few miles up than it does on the surface.

By the Pacific

We drove to La Jolla today, where I stepped into the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life. Spent most of the time trailing behind our two older girls and lifting them up out of the water when a wave threatened to knock one or the other off her feet. The other thing I noticed is that the surfers looked like regular people, not Platonic forms of southern California perfection.

Keats seems to have thought that Cortez, not Balboa, was the first European to make it to the Pacific Ocean--see his "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." The best poem about the view from the shore was written by a New Englander, Robert Frost. "Too far out, girls!"

Family vacation

We are on a family vacation in the American southwest. Phoenix, where my parents live in the winter months, is the hub for our activities, but yesterday we drove to San Diego. There is a kitchenette in our room, so we walked to a nearby Trader Joe's, where I felt like Ben Franklin entering Philadelphia and discovering that he could get three loaves for what in Boston would purchase only one: the wine known to me as "3-buck-Chuck" costs just $1.99 per bottle here. It's available in the grocery store, too. As is right and proper. When Amanda made a Facebook post concerning my satisfaction, someone pointed out that a 1000-square-foot house here costs at least a half million, thereby setting her up to reply that, factoring in the wine savings, we might be able to swing the house. Smart aleck!

Today we took the kids to the zoo. It would get a chapter in the Eric the Blue version of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The most exotic fauna on display are the ones that paid $42 to get in, and you don't have to go to the zoo to see them. I have to say, however, that I like the monkeys, especially the big apes. The fundamentalists, including I guess Rick Santorum, say it's crazy to think they're our next of kin, but I don't doubt it in the least. Maybe he's never seen one peel a banana.

 

Stingo and me

Stingo, the narrator in Styron's Sophie's Choice, says that the prospect of spending an hour alone with the Brooklyn white pages aroused in him a sense of anticipation almost erotic in its intensity, such was his attraction to words on paper.  I don't have it that bad but I have it bad enough to know what Stingo's talking about.  This morning, I was off from work so that spouse Amanda could keep a 9:30 gyno appointment without having to drag along three bundles of proof that all her parts were there and functioning as of nine, four, and one year ago.  The message I had published on our intranet attendance tracker said "in around noon."  When Amanda got home earlier than I'd expected, I put George Lyman Kittredge's Chaucer and His Poetry into my backpack and caught an express bus before 11.  Suddenly it was clear that I would have almost an hour alone with Kittredge and Chaucer in the corner of a skyway coffee shop between the morning and noon rushes.  Medical devices that measure the rate of various physiological processes would have testified to my excitement, could I have been hooked up during the bus ride.  And the actual event did not disappoint.  The skyways were mostly empty, the coffee shop vacant, and Kittredge coming up to where he discusses how, in what he calls "the marriage group," different Canterbuy pilgrims are by their tales responding to the views expressed by the Wife of Bath, "one of the most amazing characters that the brain of man has ever yet conceived." 

I know, I know, I am a dweeb, but permit me my enthusiasms because when have I ever knocked yours?Unless you are a Republican volunteer or a devotee of some other exotic creed, never.  We are all just trying to do what Dr Johnson called "filling the vacuities" of life.  Have mercy on us.

Gaming

I have been playing a lot of Yahtzee lately with Rianna, our 8-year-old.  If you've been exposed, you know that you play the game with five dice, and that the players in turn get to roll up to three times, setting aside after each roll the results they want to keep.  A "Yahtzee" is the same result on all five dice.  A pretty big part of the game is getting to three of a kind for all six numbers within the thirteen rounds that make a game.  Getting only two of a kind, especially for the higher numbers, will kill your score.  The first roll of a turn frequently yields two of one number together with three "singletons."  Rianna and I feel that it is an extraordinary run of bad luck not to pick up the needed third on either your second or third roll, yet it happens with sufficient regularity that I began to wonder just what the probability is.  The solution must be given by (5/6)⁶: the 5/6 representing the probablity that a single throw does not yield the desired result, and the exponent standing for the six (three dice times two rolls) straight undesired results.  This number turns out to be just about exactly 1/3.  In other words, the chance of failing to "triple up" after an initial pair is about the same as the chance of a major league batting champion getting a hit in his next at-bat.   He's more likely to make an out, but in a game in which he comes to bat several times you have to expect that he'll get at least one hit.  In fact, if he bats four times the chance of four outs is (2/3)⁴, which is less than 1/5.

Speaking of gaming and probability, isn't it sometimes in the interests of a football team to allow an immediate touchdown?  In today's Vikings game, for instance, Denver intercepted a Minnesota pass deep in Minnesota territory with the score tied and around 90 seconds left.  To me it seems obvious that the Vikings should have let Denver score a touchdown on the first play.  Instead, Denver ran a few plays, the last one being a quarterback keeper to position the ball immediately in front of the uprights, and kicked a winning field goal on the last play of the game.  If after the interception Minnesota had let Denver score an immediate touchdown, there would have been more than a minute in which to score a tying touchdown.  Isn't there a better chance of that than there is of the other team missing a chip-shot field goal?  But I've never seen a team pursue this strategy.  The commentators in today's game didn't mention it as a possibility.  It's almost as if it's against the ethics, but I don't see why doing what has to be done to increase the chances of victory should be frowned upon.  A team trying to win should pursue the optimal strategy.

Put downs

The other day I'm reading along in Walter Jackson Bate's biography of John Keats when I came to the section concerning the critical reviews of Endymion, Keats's first long poem.  The work was savaged in several of the conservative journals of the time, and Byron, in Don Juan, famously surmised that the nasty reviews had mortally wounded Keats, who died (of consumption) just a few years later, at 25:

 
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

Keats actually was not very much affected by the reviews, which nevertheless drew fire from his defenders.  There was Hazlitt's "Letter to William Gifford"--Gifford was the editor of Quarterly Review, a Tory magazine that could not abide Keats and his liberal, free-thinking friends--commencing, "You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of anyone you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it."  According to Bate, this "letter" is "one of the half dozen most sustained pieces of invective in English"--I wish I could find it online.  But Gifford was only the editor.  Of the actual reviewer, John Wilson Croker, Macaulay wrote that he (Croker) would travel "a hundred miles through sleet and snow, on the top of a coach, in a December night, to search a parish register, for the sake of showing that a man is illegitimate, or a woman older than she says she is."

It's good to know that such a fellow could find work in the journalistic organs of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  Croker: was he named by Dickens?

Keats himself wrote in a letter that "the commonest man shows a grace in a quarrel," for "the energies displayed in it are fine."  I read a lot, and almost all of it is completely forgotten, but bits of barbed invective lodge in my mind for years.  Possibly I am just not a very nice person.  Here are some examples of things I'll never forget:

• Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, on George Bush II: "He was born on third base, and acts like he hit a triple."
• A condensed review of "Beverly Hills Cop": "Eddie Murphy tricks the white dumbos.  For some  reason, audiences love it." 
• A golf caddy, after a country-club member, having made a score of incalculable proportions, complained of having drawn "the worst caddy ever": "Sir, that would be entirely too great a coincidence."
• To close with a recent example,  Christopher Benfey, writing about Mitt Romney at the NYRB Blog: "On television, Mitt looks like someone hired to play the president in a movie that couldn't afford Clooney."

I. Shameless self-promotion; and II. At the fair

Eric the Blue has taken note of the fact that his competitors in the CBS Minnesota Most Valuable Blogger Awards 2011 are shamelessly trolling for votes at their sites.  The particular category is "Local Affairs."  I'm late to the game but it's time to fight back.  Go here and vote for Eric the Blue.  I'd really like to do better than Pawlenty did in the Ames Straw Poll, and for that to happen, only two of my competitors can get more than twice as many votes as I. 

On the newsy front, I have the day off from work today, and the five of us went on a pilgrimage to the Minnesota State Fair.  Remember last year when my experience was ruined by having to hear some right-wing talk radio while standing in line for a pronto pup?  The most memorable event of 2011 was the man spotted in the Midway, in the seventh decade of life and about 30 pounds overweight, sporting a tee shirt with the message: "I'm not a gynecologist, but I'll take a look." 

Some advice for Poor Angus from Robert Pinsky

Our eight-year-old and I have evolving bedtime rituals.  The current one involves Shel Silverstein.  She has his book of children's poems, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and we take turns reading aloud our "favorites," first her, then me, then her, then me, and so on, till I put an end to it.  Her favorites tend to be long ones, so as to extend her day.  I actually have only one favorite, "Poor Angus," which goes like this:

Oh what do you do, poor Angus,
When hunger makes you cry?
"I fix myself an omelet, sir,
Of fluffy clouds and sky."

Oh what do you wear, poor Angus,
When winds blow down the hills?
"I sew myself a warm cloak, sir,
Of hope and daffodils."

Oh who do you love, poor Angus,
When Catherine's left the moor?
"Ah, then, sir, then's the only time
I feel I'm really poor."

I think I like "Poor Angus" mainly because it reminds me of this poem, by Robert Pinsky, which I like quite a lot more:

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Here is Pinsky himself performing the poem in an elevator. 

 

Fittingly austere.  Poor Angus needs to learn to court his sleep. 

Basement reading

We had dinner at my parents' house last night.  I went into the basement to find a certain toy for one of our girls and got stuck with the World Book Encyclopedia, 1968 edition.  It had been purchased, I think, in the earnest hopeful expectation that my sister and I would read around in it when questions arose and thus be "improved."  And there it was, neatly arranged on a shelf, all volumes in correct alphabetical order, all probably untouched since around 1975.  I began thinking of things I'm interested in and looking them up, an exercise that revealed that people probably don't change much after they're around ten.  I'd read  these articles 40 years ago.  They didn't seem very informative now.  For authors--Hemingway, for instance--there's not much to the articles beyond the years of birth and death, the titles of the books, a skeletal biography, and a kind of Cliffs Notes summary of "themes."  When I was in 8th grade, it must have seemed like reading a "report" written by a more advanced 8th-grader.

The article on Shakespeare is different.  It seems there were certain subjects--"Bird" was another one-- more worthy of elaborate attention.  I suspect now it was just marketing.  "Let's say you want to find out about Shakespeare," I can imagine a salesman saying, and, taking up the "S" volume, revealing to someone like my dad a detailed article twenty times longer than the ones on Cervantes and Chaucer, combined.

Anyway, I'd been through this Shakespeare article before.  He's the only author with a section called "famous passages," where I had my first acquaintance with some of the soliloquoys of Hamlet and Macbeth, as well as many pithy utterances that for one reason or another made a particular impression upon me, such as: "If ladies be but young and fair/They have the gift to know it."  I got summoned back upstairs just as I had come to these lines from The Tempest:

    O, wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
    That has such people in't!

The World Book doesn't tell you that the speaker is Miranda, a young girl trapped on an island who is seeing human beings for the first time, and that her exuberant speech excerpted in "famous passages" is followed by her father's four-word reply: "Tis new to thee." 

Hallmark card

When your blog has a following of millions, you get a lot of advice.  I think that is probably true because even I get some advice.  Why are you always so negative?  Why must you sneer at people with whom you disagree?  You should try being helpful once in a while.  Well, here goes.

I sometimes pick up from the shelf one of John Updike's collections of criticism.  My object is usually to see what he has to say about some book or author I've been reading.  What usually happens is that, studying the table of contents, or the index, my eye falls on something that seems at least as interesting as what I was searching for, so I turn to that page instead, and I'm off, somewhat in the manner of a more up-to-date person surfing the Web, until a couple of hours later I'm still immersed in the book, my original mission long forgotten.

So a couple of days ago I'm rooting around in More Matter and I come to a reminiscence concerning William Maxwell, editor of The New Yorker at the time Updike graduated from Harvard in 1954.  He (Updike) was on his way to England to study drawing, but he had had, as he says, "a poem or two and a short story" accepted by the magazine and so was invited for a visit with the editor before departing.  By that time the magazine had been the object of his intense admiration for several years, and he was so bedazzled (his word) to be in the office, speaking with the editor, that later the only thing he could remember of the interview was Maxwell saying, in response to a fear Updike expressed concerning his trip: "People imagine that losing their luggage is like death, but it isn't."

Losing your luggage is just one item on the list of things that seem worse than they are.  Probably only death is like death.  So buck up.  Whatever ails you is probably not that bad.  The earth will continue to rotate and revolve, as it has for more than 4.5 billion years, which is more than ten thousand times longer than human beings have been having bad days. It is half a paradox, but still true, that accepting your unimportance might result in a sunnier disposition.

Little Dorrit on my Nook

As throngs of this blog's devotees know, I've been reading Little Dorrit, and am now approaching the end of Book One, "Poverty," which is followed, naturally, by Book Two, "Riches."  That's all the books in this immense novel.  It's often grouped with Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, a grand triumvirate of Dickens's mature genius. 

I haven't mentioned, however, that I'm reading Little Dorrit on my Nook, the Barnes and Noble e-reader.  It's a gift from my wife, Amanda, who I think was hoping I wouldn't like it.  When I expressed initial pleasure, and still seemed pleased as the end of the trial period drew nigh, she went out and bought her own.  A second $250!  I hope that means next summer's vacation to Wisconsin Dells is off. 

If she thought I might not like it, she had reasons.  Imagine Henry David Thoreau charging up his e-reader on the shores of Walden Pond.  His masterpiece includes this judgment: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."  Thoreau wasn't the only book-loving reader to take a dim view of technological advancement. I have a theory that people educated in "The Humanities" are inclined to deprecate applications of scientific knowledge, which are viewed as "soulless" and "materialistic" beside the eternal Truth and Beauty contained within My Favorite Poem.  Amanda might have thought that I was, you know, one of them.

I sort of am.  I take pleasure in sitting on the couch, gazing at the crowded shelf across the room, letting my eye drift from one spine to the next while thinking of what I know about this book and that one, what was going on in my life when I first read it, what part I particularly liked, an exercise that sometimes makes me rise from my seat to take the volume in hand, the heft of it comfortable and reassuring as I seek out the remembered passage and find it, perhaps just as I'd expected, about a third of the way down a right-hand page three-fourths through the mass of it and marked by me with an exclamation point made with a ballpoint pen in the margin.  The Nook does not afford such pleasures.

It has its advantages, however.  Portability, for example.  From where I am sitting I can see on the shelf The Portable Tolstoy, The Portable Nietzsche, and The Portable Chekhov.  My Nook, which weighs a fraction of these three volumes and still has 4.82 GB (out of 5.00) free, includes The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  If you like books and reading, why would you not want to carry around a library with you?  This morning, in a coffeeshop with an electronic Little Dorrit, I was reading in Chapter 34 of the Barnacle family when I came to this sentence

Secondly, because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle.

and, contemplating the aptness of the name, Barnacle, wondered about zoological details of that creature.  Dunn Brothers was not equipped with reference books but I could press my finger on the word on the "page" of the Nook and be taken to the following definition

any of numerous marine crustaceans (subclass Cirripedia) with feathery appendages for gathering food that are free-swimming as larvae but permanently fixed (as to rocks, boat hulls, or whales) as adults

before, with a second tap of the screen, proceeding to the Wikipedia article on same. 

With the Nook, it's also easier to read the newspaper on the bus: you don't have to fold up the paper to keep it out of the face of the person next to you, then keep folding it in new places as you progress through the article.  There is such a thing as a useful gadget.  Thoreauvians: I'm just sayin'!

Unicorn

Amanda called me at work today.  "You'll never guess what I just saw!" she shouts.  "A Prius with a Bachmann sticker!" 

Maybe the driver was on "The Price is Right."

A geographical education

"War," someone has said, "is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

That I can name the countries that border Vietnam on the west, and more than one city in Iraq, and the approximate latitude of Seoul, South Korea--all evidence for the claim.  But for me natural disasters work pretty well, too.  I've been studying the map of Japan lately and can add, for example, Sendai to my list of Japanese cities, one that was formerly "filled" by Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Sapporo (host of the 1972 Winter Olympics and, I see now, to my surprise, having consulted Wikipedia, "the fifth largest Japanese city by population").

Anyway, I can tell, just from studying Google maps, especially the satellite pictures, that my conceptions about Japan are all wrong.  For example, there is a lot of empty green space between towns, many of which are plainly small villages.  And the pictures on TV give the lie to the view that the people are corporate automatons, the country just "Japan, Inc." 

Susan Orlean develops the idea. 

Car Talk and Puzzlers

On Saturdays, I like to lay about in the forenoon, drinking coffee, maybe roughhousing with the girls, and then, at 11:00, tuning into "Car Talk" on NPR.  Not that I care about cars.  I'm the kind of coffee-shop loitering, Obama-voting, public transportation-using urban liberal who, in my bachelor days, contemplated going car-less.  But then how would I get myself and my golf clubs to whatever course my friends were playing this weekend?  Plus, I had to travel forty miles each way on the big holidays.  So year in and year out I would drive 6000 miles, first in a Dodge Omni, then in another Dodge Omni, then in a Toyota Tercel that one of the regulars in our golf foursomes, the owner of a Suburban, nicknamed "Big Blue." 

I remember the first time I tuned into "Car Talk."  It was an accident.  I'd been listening to something else, and by the time this crazy car call-in show came on I was washing dishes and so didn't click off the radio.  The first caller was a woman with some car trouble, I can't remember what, that she described in considerable detail.  When she finally came to the end of the symptoms, one of the hosts asked: "What color is the car?"  I kept listening and soon was hooked.

Like other fans of the show I remember favorite calls.  One day Senator Tom Harkin called in with a car question.  I like the genre of calls involving women seeking an impartial adjudication of a car argument they've been having with the husband or boyfriend.  It's pretty clear to me that men, since they feel obliged to have an opinion on a car question, are more apt to be wrong than women, who are free to have no opinion and therefore only express one when they have an actual reason for believing as they do.  My favorite call of all time was probably the one in which the fellow's dog had gotten car sick and ralphed onto the dash, so that the puke seeped into the heat register, with the result that every time he ran the heater the car smelled of dog vomit.  They had a lot fun with that one, and finally advised the caller to sell the car--in the summertime.  They have a lot of fun with almost everyone before finally dispensing what I assume is consistently good advice.

I also like "the puzzler," a regular feature that is as often mathematical as auto-related.  (An ongoing good-natured joke concerns the utility of math and science over and against "the humanities"; whenever someone calls in and says they are a student, inquiries concerning their field of study are sure to follow, and an answer like "art history" or "comparative literature" elicits loud groans.  Of course they have  no clue what to do about their problematic vehicles!)  Since I haven't placed a post in my "Math" category for awhile, let me give an example of a recent Car Talk Puzzler.

There are three scraps of paper, each with a different number written on it.  You have to pick the one that has the biggest number.  If you want, you can look at one and then decide whether or not to choose it.  If you decide not to choose it, that one is out: you have to choose one of the other two.  If you look at one of the remaining ones, you must either choose it or the last one.  The question is: What's the best strategy?  It's obvious that just guessing at the start of the game gives you a one-third chance of winning.  Can you do better than that?

Yes, you can.  The best strategy, it turns out, is to look at one paper but never choose it.  Then, if the second paper has a higher number than the first, keep it; but if it has a lower number reject it also and make the third your choice.  Here is the way to analyse it.  There are only six orders in which the three papers may be chosen.  Let us denote the papers 1, 2, and 3, where 1 stands for the paper with the smallest number and 3 for the one with the biggest.  The six possibilities are:

i. 1, 2, 3
ii. 1, 3, 2
iii. 2, 1, 3
iv. 2, 3, 1
v. 3, 1, 2
vi. 3, 2, 1

Each sequence is as likely as another to represent the order in which you choose them.  In (i.) you lose, because you end up with (2), not (3).  In (ii.), you win.  Scenarios (v.) and (vi.) are both losers but (iii.) and (iv.) are both winners.  That's three out of six winners, which is a fifty percent improvement over just guessing at the start of the game.  (Uncovering first one and then another but always settling on number three is the same as just guessing that three is the highest without turning any over.)

An archive of "Car Talk" puzzlers is here.  The one I've described was for February 12 of this year.

The year in this and that

Some things you are a sucker for even though you understand in your head that the object of your affection is, you know, messed up.  (That is my idea of the way with-it people talk nowadays.  The Republicans win a lot of elections and with-it people, such as myself, are apt to say something such as, "That is, like, you know, fucking messed up.  Seriously!")

Anyway, like sports. My wife has patiently explained to me, more than once, that it makes no sense to care who wins ball games, that they're just fleeting and meaningless competitions between the multimillionaires of one franchise and the multimillionaires of another, and that it is a fantasy to imagine that the guys in the one colored uniform are "our guys."  No, they are not our guys, they are from Texas or California or possibly the Dominican Republic, and soon as the season is over they will go to one of their multiple residences somewhere away from here and daydream, when not patronizing strip clubs, about selling their services for several million more to another franchise.  Who cares?  She doesn't, and neither should I, says she.

Okay, maybe she is right, technically, but to me it is sort of like arguing that the actor playing Hamlet is only an actor, he's going out after the performance to knock a few back, and you are crazy to be affected in any way because it is not as if anyone really suffered or died, it's just a play, did you not notice how the actors revived to take a bow?  It's not exactly like that, but it's sort of like that, and if being interested makes time pass pleasurably for me then time is passing pleasurably for me. 

The above is all prologue.  The subject of this post is all the year-end rituals, the resolutions and the list-making and the journalistic retrospectives.  All quite stupid, I think.  If you are going to resolve to do better, you should start doing better, now, instead of waiting for the calendar to turn.  The chopping up of time into years, for such things as Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards and the "ten best of this year"--how much sense is there in that?  There is no logical connection between the time it takes for the Earth to travel around the sun and these human activities.  Also, it seems unfair in a random sort of way.  If your book is published in January, it creates a little buzz, and then, eleven months later, it's time for the year-end retrospectives, so it gets a second little buzz that crowds out any initial buzz for the book just published in December, which December book will not ever have a chance to get a year-end buzz because it was published "last year."  Two buzzes to none, and for no very good reason at all.

Notwithstanding, if you are a reader, you might enjoy going here as much as I did.  "Here," for those of you who kept reading, instead of clicking, is the New Yorker's Book Bench Blog and their year-end retrospective, "The Year in Reading."  Compare Tad Friend's breezy look at Franzen's Freedom with those, here and here and here, of Eric the Blue.  Notice that the only book that gets mentioned by two different contributors is The Imperfectionists, a first novel by Tom Rachman--I missed the "initial buzz" on this one.  Find out that Malcolm Gladwell is a self-described lover of "thrillers and airport literature," whereas Rebecca Mead spent a good part of the year with George Eliot.  Also, I did not know, but do now, thanks to Richard Brody, who enjoyed Saul Bellow's letters, that the author of Augie March was still having a hard time making ends meet a decade after that great novel was published.  (Editorial comment, accompanied by mournful string music:  Don't whine to Melville about it.)

Christmas burdens

Christmas!  I'd forgotten how burdensome it is.  I'm not speaking figuratively.  You get all these gifts, you drive home, it's late, also really cold, and you have to carry all this stuff in and it takes a lot of trips--garage to door, garage to door, garage to door but this time you have to do some rearranging so that there is room inside the door, then garage to door again . . . .  Since it can't just sit inside the door, you next have to find a place to put it, an exercise that reveals burdens of Christmases past. 

And that is just Christmas Eve.  The next day, you're with the other side of the family, and at some hour--like when you're packing up to leave--the quality of being overfed, a literal fact attested to by a roiling gut, seems an apt metaphor for the whole experience.  This is how it seemed to me five years ago, and now I have three young kids with sets of dueling grandparents and fawning aunts, so you can imagine. 

I think maybe my in-laws understand.  They came through with the perfect gift for me: a hundred-dollar (!) gift card to one of Minneapolis's best liquor stores.  And I got myself a Modern Library Little Dorrit and a Penguin abridged version of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The post-Christmas period is looking pretty good.

Maybe in the 18th century

You know the world according to Adam Smith, wherein the invisible hand of the unencumbered market creates a paradise here on earth.  Was there ever anything to it?  A recent news article details how, according to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota attorney general Lori Swanson, the Discover Card company signs customers up for expensive and unwanted products, such as identity theft protection and credit score monitoring:

The suit alleges that Discover's telemarketers lulled cardholders into thinking they were getting a "courtesy call," then read a sales script so quickly -- often running sentences together and skipping over key words -- that many cardholders reflexively said, "Yes," or, "OK." Discover treated these responses as agreements to sign up for a new product, even when there was no clear consent and the customer did not understand the terms, the lawsuit alleges.

This business practice reminds me of my first cell phone contract.  It was for two years, with Sprint.  While the contract was running, my work made a BlackBerry available to me, so I was eager to ditch the phone that I hardly ever used anyway.  On the 731st day I made the call, and was told that I would be assessed a $200 "early termination fee."  Turns out I had at one point decided to save a few bucks by changing my text messaging plan--I rarely used the phone but I never texted--and, the Sprint representative explained, in the voice of Hal from 2001, I had at this time consented to a new two-year contract, which began to run on that day. Now I was terminating well before the "new" contract was up.

It 's ridiculous that making a minor change to a billing option would result in a new contract.  But the other point, relating to the case against Discover, is that I never would have made the change had it been made clear to me that I was signing up for another two years.  

In the wonderful world of Adam Smith, there are willing sellers and willing buyers.   Now we have companies that sell people things without their consent.  It's like they had the idea: Why advertise?  You can try to persuade people to buy things they don't need, but it is more efficient just to send them a bill for it.

The private sector is a mostly seamless advertisement for big government.  You go, Lori Swanson!

At the hospital

Amanda and I are in the hospital with our youngest, born last Tuesday, who is lounging, blindfolded, beneath a lamp of blue light with a case of neonatal jaundice.  It hasn't been all bad. I get the distinct impression that the professionals here in "the family care center" have seen worse than what our newborn presents to them, and on my strolls to and from the cafeteria I sometimes glimpse sights that make the ones in our room appear bucolic in comparison.  We have two windows, a view of a freeway, TV, a mostly quiet baby, books and newspapers, a cribbage board, and, to remind us we're not at the Red Roof Inn, a surfeit of medical equipment and an occasional visit from a friendly nurse.

In keeping with the conceit that the sick have their own kingdom, the hospital campus makes its own self-contained world.  After a few days, it seems to shrink, and it's cramped to start with.  At the cafeteria I find myself eyeing with interest all those who, by their medical scrubs and direct routes between food stations, announce that at a certain o'clock they will return to their homes in the better kingdom.  Time is suspended for the rest of us.  Our departure times are unconnected to the certain movements of the clock.

Tonight, while I ate my mediocre beef pot pie, two women in street clothes sat down at the table next to mine and murmurred a table prayer together before advancing on their cafeteria food.  They might have been a mother and daughter, for the difference in age  looked to be about 25 years--50 and 75, something like that.  The older one faced me.  Her hamburger appeared to bear an oppressive burden of ketchup, which indeed squirted out the side onto the meaty part of her palm when she took her first bite about two seconds after the prayer ended.  She took a second bite, then let go of the burger with her ketchupy hand only and, having inspected the nature of the accident, used her tongue to make the necessary repair.  This seemed a more satisfying invasion of animal health than those staged by the white-coats wearing their stethoscopes like necklaces. I walked back to our room feeling, not on account of the pot pie, temporarily restored.

More on Lydia Davis

I've finished The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I first wrote about a couple weeks ago, here, when I was maybe half-way through it. There are 198 "stories" in all, and, as the book has 733 pages, you can see that most are very short.  Like this one, titled "Index Entry":

Christian, I'm not a

There are several others that aren't much longer.  I'm not sure what I'd make of any one of these if I came upon it, individually, in a magazine.  But in this volume, intermixed with longer ones like "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality," the cumulative effect is--here comes a paradox--overwhelming in an understated sort of way.  Perhaps nothing is more impressive than the portraits of old age, the depredations endured by those who live long enough to experience them and the responses of their children.  It's pretty clearly a subject close to Davis's own experience.  One can make out a sequence on the topic that concludes with this shattering prose poem, called "Head, Heart":

Heart weeps.

Head tries to help heart.

Head tells heart how it is, again.

You will lose the ones you love.  They will all go.  But even the earth will go, someday.

Heart feels better, then.

But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.

Heart is so new to this.

I want them back, says heart.

Head is all heart has.

Help, head.  Help heart.

Many in our neighborhood are mourning the death, last Saturday, of Dr Suzanne Grant.  The claims made in the obituary for her excellent personal characteristics are as true as the date of her birth, the names of her relatives, and the number of years she practiced medicine.  She was a great favorite of our 7-year-old and you can't trick people of that age.  Whenever she spotted me gardening, she'd hobble over and begin quizzing me about this plant or that one.  Finally one day I told her to stop wasting her breath:  "If there's something you don't know about these flowers, Dr Grant, it's a sure thing I won't know either."  One thing the obituary doesn't mention: hers was a death freely chosen.  She had a perforated ulcer, which might have been repaired by a surgery, but she declined, and now her many friends are hosting the head-heart colloquy.

Eric the Blue goes on a trip, rents a car

Back from St. Augustine, Florida, where a friend of Amanda's was married last Friday evening.  The author of a travel guide Amanda brought along called St. Augustine her favorite Florida destination before deploying the adjective "chic."  If that is so it must be because the rest of the habitable part of the state is filled with wide streets lined with every imaginable franchise restaurant and chain store.  At 4:00, the restaurants are full of senior citizens eating the early bird special.  Compared to that, St. Augustine, which sports art galleries and boutiques near its quaint inns, and shabby-appearing housing away from the destinations noted in travel guides, qualifies I guess as "chic."

I don't travel very much and was highly annoyed by our experience renting a car at the Orlando airport.  The agent, an unctuous flatterer, began his routine designed to screw us out of money by asking where we were headed.  Ah, St. Augustine, very beautiful, he loves it there!  Full of crapola, just like the author of the travel guide.  Would we like to pre-pay for the tolls along Florida's highways between Orlando and St. Augustine?  We don't know, tell us more.  Well, it costs ten dollars, and then we don't have to stop to pay at the toll stations.  Tell us one more thing: how much does one have to pay in tolls to drive from Orlando to St. Augustine?  "A little more than five dollars, one way."  That seemed a little too convenient.  We declined, and later paid $3.50 in tolls to get to St. Augustine, and $3.50 more to get back to the Orlando airport.

Quoting a price of $2.63 per gallon, he also asked whether we'd like to buy gasoline from the car rental company.  The trick here is that you pay $2.63 times the capacity of the tank in the car you're renting.  Since $2.63 per gallon is the going rate, you come out even if you use the whole tank--and behind if you don't.  Our experience suggests that driving from the Orlando airport to St. Augustine and then back to the Orlando airport takes about three-fourths of a Chevrolet Cobalt's tank.  No wonder they want you to buy gasoline from them!  What you pay for, but don't use, they'll sell to their next customer, too!

I almost forgot to mention the gambits that are easiest to see through, the insurance they want you to buy and, of course, the upgrade to a bigger car.

I hate all these songs of praise one hears for the vaunted "private sector."  Political conservatives tend to whisper the phrase--"private sector"--as if the words themselves are too holy to pronounce out loud.  Is it too much to expect that companies make money without cheating their customers and telling them lies--and complaining bitterly if they are as a consequence subjected to government oversight?  And the car rental game is a square deal compared, say, to the financial industry.  It's all crooked and rigged and we are asked to worship it. 

And what is with "The Department of Homeland Security"?  It seems we have honored our former mortal enemy by adopting the old Soviet practice of assigning bloated, ridiculous names to our government bureaus.  Travelling around in our country does not make me feel good about it. 

Freedom, Mary Tyler Moore, and jump balls

I have been reading with gusto Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom.  For me there is a kind of built- in "thrill of recognition," since the first 100 pages or so--that's how far into the 560-page work I am--are set in St. Paul and on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota.  The latter, especially, is my old stomping grounds.  The main character, Patty, plays for the Golden Gophers women's basketball team, and her husband-to-be, Walter, a first-year law student from The Range, goes to the games.  So did I!  During my years, from 1981 to 1984, you could display your student ID at the gate and watch a Big Ten women's basketball game for $1.  It appears I missed Patty by just a couple of seasons, for her career-ending injury occurs in the winter preceding Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister of Great Britain, which was in May of 1979.  I have tried, and so far failed, to catch Franzen nodding with respect to his chronology.  When Patty is 17, she is interruped while watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," which at the time "comprised the entirety of [her] knowledge of Minnesota."  The show ended its seven-year run in 1977, so that fits.  I thought I had him for sure when he has Patty resent the way in which back-up center Abbie Smith loses possessions by getting tied up, again and again, and then losing the ensuing jump ball.  The alternate possession rule had to have been adopted by then, right?  Nope, that didn't happen till 1981, so all the games Patty played in could well have been pockmarked by jump balls. 

I suppose no spoiler alert is needed before I let drop that Jonathan Franzen's Minnesota scene diverges somewhat from Garrison Keillor's. 

Incident

The Hennepin County Government Center, the building in which I work in downtown Minneapolis, has an "administration tower" and a "courts tower," both built around an open atrium.  The floor of the atrium is taken up mainly by a large wishing pool.  Yesterday, when I was passing through at lunch time, I noticed an African-American woman, on the border between middle- and old age, sitting by herself on the ledge beside the pool.  She was weeping soundlessly.  There were others all around, sitting nearby or, like me, walking past on their way to get some lunch.  I looked for her a few minutes later when I was passing through in the other direction, but she was gone.

Here is a poem by W.H. Auden that I like a lot:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.   

At the Fair

Went to the Minnesota State Fair on Saturday.  I do not care for it, but Amanda is a devotee, and I think there may be a state law requiring citizens to attend.  Anyway it sure feels like it while you are  maneuvering a stroller through the masses in the Midway, where throngs of people spend their money freely on "rides," several of which are not recommended for pregnant women (possibly a form of advertising), and around the lines at the booths housing the tricked-up carnival games and their elusive, kitschy prizes, the most popular still being the oversized stuffed animal.  The freak shows, however, are gone.

Several of the local radio stations broadcast live from the Fair, and I spent an agonizing ten minutes or so standing in line for corn dogs within earshot of "The Patriot," one of the right-wing talk outlets.  The host, Mitch Berg, had as a guest Phil Krinkie, a former state legislator and anti-tax, Tea-Party type.  Their candidate for governor, Crazy Tom Emmer, promises to close the state's gaping budget hole by "redesigning" government.  No one, including apparently Emmer himself, has a very clear idea of what that might mean.  Consequently, Emmer has been assailed, by Mark Dayton, the DFL candidate, and by Tom Horner, the Independent, for "having no plan," and journalistic critics have taken up the complaint.  The purpose of the Berg-Krinkie dog-and-pony show was to defend Emmer by depicting him as another victim of "The Liberal Media" and by distorting Dayton's plan, the centerpiece of which is a new tax bracket for the highest earners, then criticizing their own distorted version of his plan.  The middle-aged, overfed white men who were milling around listening could be counted upon not to interrupt their reveries. 

On vacation

I'm in Wisconsin Dells with my family.  We left yesterday and are driving back to Minneapolis tomorrow.  Don't tell our kids that "family vacation" is an elevated expression for two 4-hour car rides separated by two nights in a mediocre motel, a trip to the water park, and a pig roast at a relative's new house.  At work, on Thursday, I mentioned to someone that this was my last day at work for a few days. 

"Mine too," she said, "where you going?" 

"Wisconsin Dells.  How about you?"

"Stockholm."

It was about 90 degrees here today, perfect for the water park, and I saw a lot of exposed surface area of middle-class, vacationing Americans.  Since we like to watch sea lions floating around at the zoo, perhaps some higher form of life would enjoy the sights at the water parks in the Dells.  I can't say I did, but there was one special little moment.  I was standing alone outside a women's dressing room waiting for my wife to come out with our daughters.  A few feet away a woman was standing with her daughter, who looked to be about four. When after a few minutes her husband appeared, she began speaking to him very loudly in a foreign language.  He listened to the end, then said something in an undertone.  He must have been defending himself, because her reply, in heavily accented English, though just as loud as before, was: "Well, you could have done that here, you fucking asshole."

Encore

Seven days, says my dashboard, since I delivered myself of the definitive deconstruction of the political commentary of Michael Gerson.  What can I do for an encore?  That is the question reverberating in cyberspace.  Here on First Avenue South, in Minneapolis, however, the question has been: when the hell are you going to plant flowers in the boulevard?  And the answer has been: on some day when I am not at work for nine hours and the Twins aren't playing the Yankees on tv.  What a full life.  Reminds me of a cartoon in The New Yorker.  It's a graveyard, full of stones, and the only one you can read says, "Here lies So-and-So.  He watched a lot of sports on television."

The Twins, after disappointing Bronx losses on Friday and Saturday, salvaged game three yesterday by scoring five runs in the eighth inning, all batted in against Mariano Rivera, who walked Thome with the bases loaded and then yielded a grand slam to Kubel.  As for gardening, I can say that, while not an Olympic sport, you use muscles that apparently hibernate in the winter.  I lay in bed, weary and feeling hot on the tops of my ears, with the Modern Library's Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen.  We're going to see "Dollhouse," Rebecca Gilman's "droll and deliciously caustic" update of Ibsen's "A Doll's House," at the Guthrie on May 26, so naturally, like the A-student I wasn't, I'm reading up in preparation for the big night out. 

Being a hundred per cent Norwegian, I feel obliged to approve of every dropping from the pen of Norway's greatest gift to literature, though I have to admit that some of those earlier plays--the only ones I've read so far--may strike a Swede as melodramatic and cheap.  I'm thinking mainly now of Pillars of Society.  You think all is well at the house of the town's finest citizen?  Well, it's not, and some of the trouble concerns forbidden sex.  Oh, my!

Eric the Blue gets mail

Unsigned.  Various pictures of Obama dressed up as African shaman, et cetera.  And a picture of a black lab over text: "I signed my dog up for welfare.  Do you think he's eligible?  He's black, lazy & has no frigging idea who his daddy is. . . ."

If you're vile enough maybe people won't notice that you're an idiot, too.  I think that's the strategy.

At home

Fortified with Christmas cookies, I've been shoveling snow for lo these many days.  Since it has now stopped accumulating, the plowing of side streets has begun, and this morning I chopped up and cleared away the heavy crusty mass deposited in the night at the end of our driveway by a public employee getting time-and-a-half.  Before he did his work, our driveway was passable but the street was not.  After he plowed, the street was passable but we couldn't get our car to it. With the holiday now past, and our reliance on the automobile no longer mocked by circumstances, the world seems to have returned to normal.

If it hadn't been for all that snow I might have had more of a chance to do what I do every Christmas:  tenderly peruse the tables of contents and indexes, and selected random pages, of the books I get as gifts, which this year were Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor, from my sister, and the Library of America edition of Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, from Amanda.  The latter now sits next to its previously purchased mate, concerning the history of our country during the administrations of Madison, on a shelf filling up with these handsome editions--I have L of A volumes given over to the works of Thoreau, Clemons, Nabokov, Henry James, Howells, and Wilson, besides the Adams pair.

Speaking of books, over at the New Yorker site diverse writers and editors of that estimable magazine tell what they read in 2009.  Lauren Collins provides a list, because she'd written them down in a notebook.  As best I can in a listless moment remember, my own would look like this:

1. The Triple Thinkers, by Edmund Wilson
2. The Wound and the Bow (Wilson)
3. Classics and Commercials (Wilson)
4. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
5. Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman; and
6. assorted writings of Samuel Johnson, culled from one source and another, mainly Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and William Wimsatt.

Looking it over there is a kind of personal logic to the succession.  Dickens is the subject of the long opening essay in The Wound and the Bow, and, having only ever read Hard Times, I determined to take a longer drink from that deep river.  When I came up, a couple of months later, I was in the mood for something very different--a slim science paperback with the word "easy" in the title.  Well, it's not that easy.  Meanwhile, this being the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth, I had stumbled across some notices pertaining to him, especially this from Wolcott, and next thing I knew was plundering the PR3522 area of the public library.  Predictably, I am now submerged in Boswell's Life, though I have the good sense to limit myself to an abridged version--the one in The Portable Johnson Boswell, which includes a value-added introduction by Louis Kronenberger.  I sometimes find myself laughing aloud:

One night, when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble.  They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a night-cap, and a poker in his hand, imagining, probably, that some ruffians were coming to attack him.  When he discovdered who they were, and was told their errand, he smiled, and with great good humour agreed to their proposal: "What, is it you, you dogs!  I'll have a frisk with you."  He was soon drest, and they sallied forth together into Covent-Garden, where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to arrange their hampers, just come in from the country.  Johnson made some attempts to help them; but the honest gardeners stared so at his figure and manner, and odd interference, that he soon saw his services were not relished.  They then repaired to one of the neighbouring taverns, and made a bowl of that liquor called Bishop, which Johnson had always liked; while in joyous contempt of sleep, from which he had been roused, he repeated the festive lines,

Short, O short then be thy reign,
And give us to the world again!

They did not stay long, but walked down to the Thames, took a boat, and rowed to Billingsgate.  Beauclerk and Johnson were so well pleased with their amusement, that they resoved to persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day: but Langton deserted them, being engaged to breakfast with some young Ladies.  Johnson scolded him for "leaving his social friends to go and sit with a set of wretched un-idea'd girls."  Garrick being told of this ramble, said to him smartly, "I heard of your frolick t'other night.  You'll be in the Chronicle."  Upon which Johnson afterwards observed, "He durst not do such a thing.  His wife would not let him!" 

There is much to enjoy in this little episode, and it is only one of very many in the whole, but the figure of Dr. Johnson in the role of macho taunter of the hen-pecked married man, who can't go out carousing with his friends, lodges in the mind.  Kronenberger, in an astute remark in the Introduction, suggests that Johnson, conscious of his oddness, took inordinate delight in things he thought "normal." 

He's not big but he's slow

That's what my high school coaches said about me.  In other sports notes:

The University of Minnesota men's basketball team, which will play its tenth game of the season later today, is beset by legal problems--two of its better players are defendants in pending criminal cases.  One of these, ahem, student athletes, a freshman, is charged with shoplifting at the Mall of America and then assaulting a security guard who confronted him.  A couple days after these charges were written up in the newspaper it came to light that he is also a suspect in a dormitory theft complaint.  The other fellow had, if I recall correctly, a set-to outside a club in Miami.

At least none of the Vikings has been arrested recently for drunk driving.  Their star running back, however, was clocked doing 109 mph a couple of weeks ago.

It's been worse for the Gopher basketball program.  Their previous coach was ousted in the wake of an academic cheating scandal.  And the career of the coach before that coach ended when three players were charged with sexual assault after a road game in Madison, Wisconsin.  The players were eventually acquitted but the evidence presented at trial was, or should have been, embarrassing to them.  Yet one of these student athletes returned to the (basketball) court after his acquittal sporting a champagne glass design carved into his haircut by a clever barber.

The star d-back of one of the recent Gopher football teams was convicted of a sexual assault that occurred at a campus party.  The victim was too drunk to giver her consent.  This student athlete might have escaped punishment if a teammate had not taken pictures with a cell phone. 

Did I hear somewhere that Tiger Woods has been behaving badly?

Okay, maybe some part of this has to do with fame and visibility.  As a former Timberwolf basketball player complained after his forty-fifth brush with the law, "I'm a marked man!"  Moreover, the demographic group to which star athletes belong--males under 35--accounts for such a high proportion of all crimes that waxings and wanings in the crime rate are sometimes attributed, plausibly, to bulges or tapers in this part of the population. 

When a 30-year-old sales rep gets a dwi you don't read about it in the paper.

Still, I laugh to recall the sentiments expressed at all the post-season banquets I attended in my youth.  You know the ones.  Participation in athletics builds character, instills discipline, teaches teamwork and other important life lessons, like: "You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it."  All, strictly speaking, crapola.  The only lesson I learned is something like the opposite of that.  No matter how much you like to play, and no matter how hard you try or how much you practice, others are going to be better than you.  They are bigger, stronger, faster.  The discouraging facts of the case recommend a kind of rear-guard action.

Maybe that is a good lesson to learn, but no one ever talks about it, and it's axiomatic that the biggest, strongest, fastest, and best learn something else. 

   

Incident

I take the bus.  On weekdays, during the morning and evening rush hours, there is an express that carries manifestly affluent workers between their homes in Edina and southwest Minneapolis to their jobs in downtown office buildings.  On weekends, however, there is no choice but to take the local, which runs up and down Nicollet Avenue, through poor neighborhoods that the express speeds past on the freeway.  The local stops at every corner that anyone is waiting at, and "incidents" occur with regularity.  A passenger who cannot, or will not, pay the fare is a mild example.  I see the same faces every day on the express but I've never seen a single one of them on the local.  If they go downtown on the weekend, they drive.  The people on the local--not their demographic.

All that is a sort of preface to what happened to my six-year-old and me yesterday, Sunday, on the local.  She boarded first and headed straight to the back of the bus.  After paying the fare, I joined her on the back bench next to an African-American teen who looked like a reason for driving your car: baggy jeans half way down his ass, the elaborately decorated hero jacket, the cap worn in the manner of C.C. Sabathia--I would have chosen a seat closer to the senior citizens crowding the driver.  This black kid was sitting next to the window, which was open, and, soon as we were settled, he spoke: "Is it too cold for the little girl? I can shut the window."  I said she was fine.  He smiled.  "How about you?" he said.

Divorce & affluence

My job is in the Hennepin County Recorder's Office--land records.  We are developing new software to be used by our customers--mainly real estate lawyers and title insurance abstracters--when conducting their searches.  Testing successive versions of this system is one of my tasks, a bleak one that I try to make interesting by conducting name searches on people I know who may own real estate in the county.  I've learned that old college acquaintances with whom I have lost contact work best.  You never learn anything interesting by examining the trail laid down in the County Recorder's Office by people you know well.  You have to know the subjects well enough to be interested in the details, but not so well that you cannot be surprised by those details. 

So what surprising details do you turn up?  I have been startled by the number of divorces.  Maybe it is not out of the ordinary, given the divorce rate in the general population.  But when you know the people, however superficially, they don't seem like good candidates for divorce.  The college is affiliated with the Lutheran Church and makes much of its effort to instill in students "Christian values." My memory is of serious classmates who studied late into the night, attended the college's daily chapel service, and spoke earnestly of "vocation" in dormitory bull sessions. Oh, sure, some of us were revellers and miscreants, but, proportionately, there was a superfluity of these models of college-aged intelligence and maturity.

I can say that they do not appear to have failed in marriage on account of a lack of funds. Expensive homes. High incomes. Alimony obligations that exceed my annual income. Despite their intelligence they sometimes do not appear to have learned any practical lessons. One high-achiever, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and alum of one Ivy League graduate program and another Ivy League professional school, was divorced from three different wives inside of five years. 

Needless to say, I have a cheap-and-easy theory to explain why their college successes were apparently more predictive of financial success than of domestic stability. Near synonyms of "earnest" and "serious" are "humorless" and "pain-in-the-ass." Twenty years of that is more than enough. But let's leave the disenchanted former spouses out of it and imagine, at age 40, someone who acted 40 while still a teen-ager. They listened to their parents and teachers and the school counselors and the minister of their church and they took it all to heart. Two roads diverged in the wood, and they knew which one they were to take. They did everything they were supposed to do, so they got everything they were supposed to get, and perhaps became very disagreeable upon beginning to suspect that they should have done something else.  The stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments does seem a meager prize for all the hard work.  The spouse reminds them of how they spent their youth preparing for a success that now seems like too much dessert. 

On the other hand, those who are more appropriately casual about their "career path" may end up working in the County Recorder's Office, and that is not the greatest, either. 

Family vacation to the poor man's ocean

We've just returned from the first ever Jorgenson-McFarlane family vacation, a two-day and one-night trip to the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin.  The exalted phrase, "family vacation," is really part of a successful advertising campaign undertaken by the elder Jorgensons, who wanted to persuade McFarlane, 6, that this short trip is a great treat.  We saw the zoo and the aquarium in Duluth and went on a cruise of the harbor that shoved out from Barker's Island in Superior.  All fine, but for me the whole reason for going is just to see the lake, the way the water and sky merge in a vast blank of gray.  Everyone who reads Moby Dick must wonder what is going to happen when finally Ahab meets the great white whale--and feel bored, probably, wading through the several hundred pages of Melvillean prose that precede this showdown.  My favorite moment, however, occurs before the Pequod has even gone out to sea.  Ishmael boards in port for a job interview, and is asked by Peleg why he wants to go a-whaling. 

"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is," he answers.  "I want to see the world."  Peleg tells him to have a look out over the ship's weather bow.  Ishmael complies, and 

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"

"Not much," I replied - "nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?" 

No.  Had to go to Duluth. 

More enjoyable activities

What is new with Eric?  Well, the Torrens Twins, my entry in the Fantasy Baseball League of Hennepin County, are trying to be more than an also-ran, but an injury to Ian Kinsler and the prolonged slump of Jason Bay, now also hobbled, are holding them back.  What to do?  I thought I had made a shrewd move by picking up Jarod Washburn just before the division-leading Tigers acquired him in a trade, but I see that tonight he got beat up by the Orioles. 

On coffee breaks and in bed I read Bleak House and am now almost to the end.  At Caribou this afternoon Mr. Jarndyce stepped back so that Woodcourt could step forward, thereby clearing the way for Esther's bliss.  Such is the goodness and purity of Jarndyce that I have to suspect that the thirty or so pages in the 900s of my Penguin Classic paperback will relate yet more of his magnanimous acts.   But what was going on between him and Esther, all that "little woman" and "my Guardian" between people engaged to be married?  Even allowing for different courtship customs this one seems odd.  I see now, turning to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, that his discussion of Bleak House includes a section headed "John Jarndyce's Curious Courtship" wherein he advances the theory that Jarndyce, who is perhaps 30 years older than Esther, proposes that their marriage be platonic--that is what he means by repeatedly insisting that "nothing can change" and stressing that on this "one point" she must be "quite certain."  In this light it seems possible to criticize old kindly Jarndyce, since under the terms of his proposal Esther, who is really not in a position to turn him down, will be denied children as well as any lover.  The whole thing is very strange and makes you wonder just how badly disfigured Esther had been by the smallpox, another topic on which Dickens seems to equivocate.  

In her column today Miss Manners alludes to Bleak House--to Mrs. Jellyby, in particular, in whose honor she names the Jellyby Syndrome, a condition in which "those who work on behalf of other people in general feel free to annoy the particular people with whom they come into contact."  I have elsewhere published my admiration for Miss Manners.

Peculiar

The death on July 10 of historian Kenneth Stampp, whose 1956 book The Peculiar Institution put to rest the prevailing "moonlight-and-magnolias" mythology of the Old South, reminded me of an incident in my life from a few years back.  A colleague at work had asked me a question about something, and we had open before us on a table a map as I tried to answer.  One of the few African-Americans in the office approached and stood to the side, behind the other fellow but where I could see her.  When we came to a conclusion, the guy said, "Thanks, Eric, that was mighty white of you" and, turning, stood face-to-face with this woman.  Before anyone had a chance to feel nervous about what would happen now, she said to him, "That's a peculiar expression."  She then turned to me and started talking about work as the guy walked away.

In this corner

Amanda sits in her corner, her torso at seventy degrees to the bottom of her chair, the laptop open before her on the ottoman. I'm over here in my corner with Bleak House, just finishing the chapter wherein Elizabeth recovers from her illness and notices that Charlotte Neckett ("Charley"), who has nursed her, has removed from the room the mirror: her looks are gone.  That will be enough for tonight.  We have a built-in bookshelf in my corner and I reach in at eye-level and pull out a pristine paperback, Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, the six easiest chapters from his Lectures on Physics, of which his biographer, James Gleick, says that not since Newton had a scientist given such a comprehensive account of reality.  I begin skimming and come, on page 4, to this:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?  I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.  In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world. . . .

I replace it and pull out the fat one next to it, The 9/11 Commission Report, which begins: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States." I've read sections of it before but would like to read the whole thing.  I turn some pages and read, regarding the hijacking of United 175, the report of Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, a passenger on the flight, placed a cell phone call to his father at 9:00:

It's getting bad, Dad--A stewardess was stabbed--They seem to have knives and Mace--They said they have a bomb--Passengers are throwing up and getting sick--The plane is making jerky movements--I don't think the pilot is flying the plane--I think we are going down--I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building--Don't worry, Dad--If it happens, it'll be very fast--My God, my God.

The call cut off.  The elder Hanson turned on his television set and watched as, at 9:03:11, the airplane from which his son had just called crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

I replace that book next to The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene, the "Catholic novelist."  I've never read anything he wrote but would like to.  It's next to Word Freak, about the Scrabble subculture, another one I'd like to read.  Next to that is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.  I take that off the shelf and begin reading.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.  They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of the rucksack.  In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.  He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.  More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love.  She was a virgin, he was almost sure.  She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf.  She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed ten ounces.

I want to read the whole shelf and think of Stingo, the narrator of Sophie's Choice, who says that the prospect of spending some time alone with the Manhattan white pages stirs up in him a longing almost erotic in its intensity.  I"m not that far gone, but I know what he's talking about.

Employee engagement

The philosophic question (if that is not too elevated a way of putting it) most urgently confronting most of us ordinaries concerns the proper relationship between our jobs and the rest of our lives.  We need some money, that is clear, and the way to get it is to have a job.  But it is not at all clear that having a job in any other way advances our cause.  If you take public transportation (I do), check out the faces all around you on the commutes.  It sure doesn't look like what they're headed to, or taking leave from, promotes health, vitality, or overall well being.

And yet, working their Blackberries and laptops, the commuters appear willing participants in the theft of their own lives.  Does it stop when they disembark and enter their own houses?  Most likely it doesn't have to.  Exhausted at the end of the long work day, they eat a fast, bad meal and medicate themselves with television before starting all over again the next day. 

Some people, the relatively enlightened ones in my view, make a conscious decision not to play.  They need the money, poor slaves, and, in exchange for it, are happy to show up, put in their time, and lend their talents to the cause, probably not a very important one, for eight hours a day.  I call them "the relatively enlightened ones" but more often it is probably just circumstances that compel them not to give too much away.  The most stressful things in life are discouragingly common.  People use up all their energy coping with problems--marital discord, illness in the family, infirm parents, troubled kids--that are their problems, not their employers', and therefore have nothing much left to give beyond half their weekday waking hours:  a considerable contribution, it would seem, given what they may be up against on weekends and after 5 p.m. on weekdays.

Nevertheless it is in the interest of employers to get even more.  They are aided in the effort by the fact that people need the money and so if put to the wall will cave to demands, threats, and quiet pressure.  It helps, too, to keep people very busy.  They tend to be persuaded by their own industry that what they are doing must be very important.  Else why would they be so hard at it?  Reward them with a promotion and, impressed by their new title, income, and social prestige, they'll work even more.  

Where I work, "employee engagement" is the favored phrase for the task of persuading people to give more of their lives to work.  An Employee Engagement Survey reveals, according to the Employee Engagement Specialist, that 70% of our people are disengaged.  How can she tell?  Well, when asked, for example, whether "every day at work I have a chance to do what I do best," they circle a number less than 5, which signifies "strongly agree," and also less than 4, which signifies "somewhat agree."  Consequently we are all to meet with our supervisor to develop an Employee Engagement Action Plan.  Since twelve people on earth are referring to me when they say "my boss," I have to convene one of these absurd meetings myself. 

What is to be done?  The problem begins with the need for money, so a first step would be to cut back on the need for it.  Most of what's for sale is useless anyway.  You don't sleep better in a big house, and travel is overrated.  Save, keep your own counsel, comprehend that what you do to get money is not in any long view of things very important.  Do you seriously believe that, coming to the end of your days, you'll wish you'd been a more engaged employee and logged more hours on the job?  We are, as Thoreau wrote, too desperate to succeed--and in such desperate enterprises! 

Recent short readings

In the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin profiles the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and captures, in a single sentence, his judicial philosophy: 

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Okay, "judicial philosophy" is too exalted.  More like his policy preferences.  I recommend the whole article.  It includes Roberts's high-school graduation picture, which, I regret to say, reminds me of my own.

And, in the category of recommended reading not available on the Web, the newsletter from my daughter's school--Burroughs Community School in south Minneapolis--consists mainly of profiles of first-year teachers written by fifth-graders.  Here is a passage from the one devoted to Ms. Kilgore, by Rachel O.:

Before she began working at Burroughs, she was going to school.  She took mostly biochemistry, but then she became interested in reading.

The article on Miss Gilman, an evident polymath who teaches fifth-grade math and language arts in addition to kindergarten art, cruises along in prosaic style--her previous jobs, her hobbies, what she likes about Burroughs--before concluding, abruptly:

Even though her parents are divorced she feels that her family is very close.

The End.  I have a feeling that this detail made an impression on either Isabel B. or Hannah O., the co-authors. 

Update: Oh, I was wrong about the teacher profiles not being available on the Web!  Check them out here.

My many enjoyable activities

When not at work, or t-ball, or swimming lessons, or watching Twins baseball (brutal four-game series this weekend for the local nine in the Bronx), I've been happily sunk in Bleak House.  It's a joy to think that, considering the length of these later, dark novels--Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, in addition to Bleak House--I have months of acute reading pleasure ahead of me.  Preliminary judgment: it's the sprawl, the great tumble of words and action, the creation of a textured and detailed world, that are the source of my enjoyment.  Some of the things that are often mentioned in paeans to the greatness of Dickens are actually kind of a bore.  I'm not really very interested in criticism of the chancery courts, for instance.  What does it even mean, chancery? 

Moreover, some of the characters--Mrs. Jellyby, I'm thinking of you--are too cartoonish to be enjoyed, except perhaps inasmuch as it is enjoyable to mark the parts that don't measure up.  The unevenness, however, probably contributes to the grand total effect. 

Dick Cheney has penetrated the fog raised by my many enjoyable activities.  I see that torture is permissible because it works and that Rush Limbaugh, not Colin Powell, is the kind of quarterback around whom a retooled Republican party must huddle.  The answer to the first is that terrorism works as well as torture.  I guess law is in abeyance and anything is allowed, so long as it can be said to work.  It seems a strange doctrine for conservatives.

Regarding the second, there is really no answer, only the observation that he is plainly divorced from reality.

Among t-ballers

I am a coach for my stepdaughter's t-ball team.  Our games are on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  So on those two days, having pulled an 8-to-5 and travelled home on the bus among other worn down office workers slumped in their seats, working their Blackberries or scanning The Wall Street Journal, I get to spend a couple of hours with a bunch of 6-year-old ballplayers.  What a relief!  It's depressing, however, to think that the commuters were themselves once bright and voluble boys and girls learning to throw a ball, swing a bat, and run the bases.  One day my Lynnhurst Pirates will be on the bus, too.  It is fortunate, perhaps, that the generations usually lie down in order.  How many mothers, if they had a chance to cast an appraising eye on their 60-year-old offspring, would think it had all been worth it?

Yeats has a poem on the subject, "Among School Children." 

David Souter

I should not have been favorably disposed toward David Souter, as he was nominated by Bush pere on the recommendation of Sununu pere, and was quickly attacked by bleeding hearts for being a bloodless intellectual and a bachelor who, living alone in a house cluttered with books and music, could not be expected to have any sympathy for the problems of those Platonic forms of everyday virtue, "ordinary Americans."  I was inclined to consider certain details of the prosecution brief as an assault upon my dignity, and am pleased that Souter, by disappointing his original sponsors and infuriating the foam-flecked mob also known as the Republican rank-and-file, proved a good advertisement for chaste bookworms. 

I hope the new president can find someone even better to replace him.

Best laid plans

Scanning my Word files at work, I noticed a forgotten document, "Reading LIst," that I had started some months ago in order to remind myself of books, or authors, I"d like to read.

Lady Luck by Warren Weaver
Balzac
Edm. Wilson
Schopenhauer
Russell's History of Western Philosophy
Hughes on Goya; also, his memoir
The Red and the Black
Nietzsche
Kaufmann on Nietzsche
The Selfish Gene
The Merchant of Venice
Antony and Cleopatra
Robt. Sapolsky

I've since read The Selfish Gene, Lady Luck, and the 900-page Library of America volume devoted to Edmund Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1930s & 40s--basically, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, and Classics and Commercials.  So I haven't altogether failed to follow through.  I find now that my interest in most of the remaining items has waned.  When I finally make it to the end of Righteous Victims, I mean to tackle Dickens--Bleak House, and then, possibly, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit.  I also would like to reread the principal novels of Dreiser, all of which--Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, An American Tragedy, and The Financier--are of Dickensian heft.  I have a dim idea that Dreiser's stock is down, but I love him, and so did Saul Bellow, who knows something about novels.  Speaking of Bellow, I'd like to read several of his novels again, too.  Hell, why not Henry Adams's nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Proust, and the late novels of Henry James?

It's a good thing that I don't get to most of what I intend, for if I did Amanda would divorce my sorry bookish ass.

Native Son

Native Son is probably the the most exotic specimen on my list of Ten Favorite American Novels.  Remember, you can't really argue with me, or with Mailer, whose list moved me to make my own,  because admission is based only on how much I, or he, like the book.  But I know that to a lot of people Native Son will look out of place on a list that includes such standards as Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby.  So I have an explanation.

I first read Native Son when I was about 15.  I had always been interested in sports, and when quite young read a lot of books with titles like Babe Ruth, Boy Slugger.  As I got older, my interests didn't really change, but I progressed to I Never Had It Made (Jackie Robinson) and Go Up For Glory (Bill Russell).  These contributions to publishing history served up what you'd expect, including a measure of racial animus that, to a boy in an all-white suburb, was an exciting new topic.  I moved off the sports shelves and, for some reason I can no longer remember, chose The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Native Son followed, along with Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, and then many of the essays, stories, and novels of James Baldwin.  This was to me all news from another world. 

Years later, in college, I was enrolled in a seminar, "American Literature of the 1930s."  We were all assigned to choose a book from a list, read it, and report on it to the other participants.  Someone else took Native Son, a woman who, it developed when she delivered her report, hated it.  Mainly she couldn't stand the way it was written--"indulgent," "wordy," "sloppy." Since it was one of the books that made me a reader, I felt that my personal taste was under assault.  She didn't understand.  It was an angry book, the author was angry, and that was the way angry people talked.  They used a lot of adjectives.  The woman had mentioned that she was also in a "lyric poetry workshop," something like that, and so maybe she didn't comprehend that those conventions did not necessarily apply to novels.  Clumsiness, if that is what it was, can be expressive.  Bob Dylan's voice is fine for the songs he sings.  I worked up this defense after it was too late to air it in the seminar.  But I was on Richard Wright's side.

The woman in the seminar, by the way, was named Sarah Lindsay.  She is now quite a well known poet.  I can see how everything she said against Native Son was, from a certain perspective, true.  She might have mentioned, too, the melodrama and stock characters. Doesn't matter to me.  Irrelevant.  Native Son is the first grown-up American novel I loved.

Mr. Mom

Amanda is in Mexico with her mother and I am home from work with the kids.  While the older one was at kindergarten and the younger one napped, I reworked yesterday's post into a "letter to the editor." 

To the editor:

Pat Anderson, author of "The utter folly of 'taxing the rich'" (February 23), shows she has studied the "Tax" section of the Republican platform.  Her lines might seem less palpably memorized had she taken any account of some rather obvious things that could be said on the other side of the argument.  Like the fact that President Clinton's economic program, which included a tax hike on high earners, did not prove to be a jobs killer.  Like the fact that the tax-cutting policies of the Bushies did not slide us along a rainbow arc landing in a pool of milk and honey.
 
It's not just in religion that the Republicans are fundamentalist.  They saw only black and white when the bright world sped past them.

--Eric Jorgenson

Art History

This essay by Andrew Butterfield in The New York Review--where, unfortunately, it rests behind a subscriber wall--has sent me scurrying back to H.W. Janson's History of Art, which I acquired now more than thirty years ago for an art history course I took in college.  When it comes down from the shelf it is not usually to consult the portions I was obliged to study in order to satisfy a liberal arts "distribution requirement," but Butterfield on Mantegna and Bellini sounded just familiar enough to make me nostalgic for some of the sweet miseries of my youth.  It is funny the things you remember.  In the literature sent to prospective students, this college had quotations from students talking about their favorite classes, and one about this particular art history course I ended up taking has stayed with me.  "A ninety minute visual feast twice a week," the student raved.  But I thought it was a colossal bore.  All those crucifixions and madonnas with child and the angel making the big announcement to Mary--who cares?  Hardly any of it aroused any sensation in me, unless dull indifference counts. 

I find now that for once it is not necessary to withdraw a youthful, contrarion view.  I wonder whether the artists themselves felt much.  Religion was ascendant, so working on commission you inevitably were assigned religious subjects, and you turned them out, "great works" if you were one of the gifted ones.  People who know about these things can appreciate the brilliance and the technical mastery but it makes me feel nothing and I can believe the artist's heart was not in it.  Maybe you need more religious feeling than I have.  Being able to take pleasure in these works could be a gift, like an ear for music.  If so, I don't have it.

I say all that in order to highlight one stunning exception, the crucifixion painted in about 1510 by the artist known to us as Grunewald on the outermost panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece.  Of the entire work Janson says it "overwhelms us with something like the power of the Sistine Ceiling," and of The Crucifixion in particular he says it is "probably the most impressive ever painted."  The deep religious feeling (if an outsider may speak of it) arises, I think, from the austerity.  In a story by Flannery O'Connor the protagonist, O.E. Parker, determines to have Christ tattooed on his back.  He pages through the tattoo artist's book, back to front, past The Good Shepherd and Forbid Them Not and The Smiling Jesus and Jesus The Physician's Friend until he comes to "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."  My experience with The History of Art is a little like Parker's with the tattoo artist's book of templates.

A thousand crucifixions and in only this one does the cross appear as an instrument of torture.  Nietzsche, in a passage on the remoteness of Christianity, noted the absurdity of "the form of a cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and the ignominy of the cross."

Funeral

Yesterday I went to the funeral of my friend Tim Walmann.  He was just 42.  He died of a heart attack last Thursday morning.

It was very sad to see his family gathering at the back of the church before proceeding, at the start of the service, down the center aisle.  His wife was first and she carried the urn holding Tim's remains.  Then his brother, his kids, the young children of his kids, and, looking frail and defeated, his parents.  The officiating minister, a woman, did her best, but I have to say that the consolations of the Christian religion seem to me quite threadbare and only added to my desolation.  Does anyone really believe it?  To make extra money, Tim vended at professional sports events, and the minister envisioned him "selling beer to all the saints in heaven."  Sure.

I have an anthology of American literature that reprints the following poem by Philip Pain, a Puritan boy lost at sea in 1668 when he was perhaps 16:

Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other's dead; and to my ear
Me thinks it is no news; but oh, did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to die,
My pulses all would beat, I should not be
Drown'd in this deluge of security.

"What do we do," asks the editor in a brief headnote, "about a writer who wrote one memorable poem?"  I'm glad he printed it, for the figure of a teenager bracing himself fortifies me.

Youth is wasted on the young

When I started college, I thought I would major in a social science subject and enter a "helping profession."  But of course I had to take freshman English--"Literature and Composition" they called it--and this class, widely regarded as required drudgery, turned out to be my favorite.  It was aptly named, for we read literature and composed short essays about our readings, which included Hamlet, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, and A Streetcar Named Desire.  When we turned in our essays, we had to make an appointment to meet with the professor, who at the interview read aloud the paper and graded it in the student's presence.  This had the effect of concentrating my efforts, such was my fear of suffering humiliation in any of the sessions.  I was enrolled simultaneously in "Introduction to Sociology," which, in comparison to the subject matter of freshman English, seemed unrelievedly dull, the textbook and lectures an indigestible morass of jargon. 

My devotion to this new mistress was thoroughgoing.  I signed up for more literature courses, as well as other offerings in the humanities, but, excepting the "distribution requirements" for the liberal arts, eschewed not only the social sciences but also math, physics, chemistry, and biology.  My view was that these were "soulless" and "material" subjects not worthy of the attention of seekers after truth and beauty.  Also, the science classes were filled with "pre-meds" whose fanatical pursuit of high grades was inimical to my ideals.  Yes, I too was an idiot while young.

I have come to feel a bit like Henry Adams, whose autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, is largely organized around the idea that his classical education had not prepared him for citizenship in an increasingly technological world.  The title therefore refers to the self-education he undertook as an adult.  My own efforts along the same line have turned me into a science enthusiast of the kind that working scientists probably regard with a mixture of amusement and derision.  I think it is possible that science might explain everything, including human consciousness.  As human thought has advanced, stories involving such things as the gods and their chariots, and God and his garden, have had to make way for the real--that is, the scientific--explanation of things.  I see no reason to doubt that this trend will continue, and wish I had entered adulthood in a better position to understand what seem to me the most exciting developments of our time.  It's not as if the rate of technological change has slowed down since Henry Adams thought his Latin and his Greek had left him somewhat behind the curve.

The local and the national

I've been spending happy time with these maps of the presidential election outcome, courtesy of The New York Times.  Though it will not be reported on CNN, it pleases me to know that Barack Obama carried Watonwan County, in south central Minnesota, by 2562-2526.  My mother grew up on a farm in that rural county of Scandinavians and Germans.  The local culture is sufficiently conservative for both dancing and investing in the stock market to be regarded as markers of moral turpitude.  For my relatives, the country Lutheran church is the center of social life, and I can tell you that, when there is a funeral, the church ladies are in competition with each other to contribute the best dishes to the post-burial luncheon.  My grandpa used the word "nigger" without a trace of rancor.  I'm reasonably sure he would have been surprised to learn it was a slur.  He didn't know anyone who called them anything else.

Grandpa's dead, and I haven't been in Watonwan County lately, but last time I was I noticed brown faces on the streets of St. James, the county seat, about nine miles south of grandpa's farm.  I'm guessing Obama owes his 36-vote local margin to these Mexican immigrants who may first have come to the county to join a relative or acquaintance who landed there after following the harvest north.  If the only growing part of the local population is Democrat-favoring Hispanics, that would be one of the few "trendy" things about Watonwan County.  Four years ago, in New Mexico, Hispanics were 32 percent of the electorate, and they gave 56 percent of their votes to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, who nevertheless lost the state to George W. Bush by one percentage point.  This year in New Mexico Hispanics were 41 percent of the electorate and they gave 69 percent of their votes to Barack Obama, who carried the state by 15 points.  The story is similar in other growing and formerly red states:  Nevada (Obama won it by 12 after Kerry lost it by 3), Colorado (Obama won it by 8 after Kerry lost it by 5), and Florida (Obama won it by 2 after Kerry lost it by 5). 

It's doubtful that a non-Arizonan could have held that state's ten electoral votes for the Republicans this year.  And if Watonwan County is blue, can Texas be far behind?