Dr. True's Soup and Read

The Birthplace of the Tomato

2012-02-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I made this short movie about tomatoes. Right now seems like a decent time for some summer.

Spelling Trouble

2012-02-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

Winsome, adj., "Attractive or appealing in appearance or character."

Maybe I was that in fifth grade, maybe not, but one thing's for sure: I was a top-notch speller, and I was often left on my own during Language Arts to compile five words for my extra-special-top-notch-end-of-the-alphabet spelling test, while most of the other students toiled with words like toil and test and trouble.

I'm on W, I might have taunted. Have fun back at T.

Tasked thusly, I took to the classroom Webster's--which we kept next to the giant black-and-white throw rug we used as a chessboard, next to the Ukraine-less globe, next to our Starter-jacket-stuffed cubbies--to find my words.

Winsome would work. Hard enough to satisfy the teacher, Mrs. Kimball (who sometimes referred to herself as The Dragon Lady for difficult-to-discern reasons), and easy enough that it wouldn't give me any sort of real trouble. Winsome. An attractive word, mnemonically simple. I winsome, I losesome. I get my golden star.

Whydah, n. "Mostly black African weaverbird."

We were studying African-American history--including the Revolutionary era black poet Phyllis Wheatley (W-H-E-A-T-L-E-Y), whose struggles, for difficult-to-discern reasons, caused me to giggle uncontrollably--and I had already started to develop my love of really sketchy tangential connections, so maybe I figured Whydah would work as an addition to our curriculum.

Whydah would also allow me some cursing opportunities, as in Whydahhell not? (I loved to curse innocently and I added "damn" onto the end of any popular song lyrics I could remember--"Say Live and Let Die, Damn, Damn, Damn"--which incited more giggles among my fellow W-word chums).

We were weird.

Wholesomeness, adj., "conducive to or suggestive of good health."

(If I don't know what wholesomeness means I promise I won't know what conducive means, Webster. You don't understand my problems.)

Meanwhile, I was pretty wholesome at the time, as you can probably tell by the fact that I found "damn" to be a most scandalous curseword. I remember tattling to my teacher about a paraprofessional who muttered the word under her breath. (Nothing was done and she was left unimprisoned).

Damn aside, it was in fifth grade that my cynicism started to bud like a useless--totally useless--simile. Take my treatment of former slave Phyllis Wheatley. How could I giggle about her travails: her impoverished circumstances, the fact that her grocer husband, John Peters, was sent to debtors' prison?

I remember that his arrest seemed like a grand hoot of misfortune after my gleeful recess. And I guess I can understand laughing at the most inappropriate thing in class, or at the troublemaker's struggle, or even sneering at what seemed to be the exaggerated opulence of Mrs. Wheatley's pain.

But it seems like all of those reactions require a weird kind of maturity--a recognition of standards--that also should have kept me from being so cruel. Somehow, though, I was old enough to notice the dark humor of desperation, but not old enough to wipe that smile off my damn face, or recognize an actual person's actual damn humanity.

In other (spelling) words, I was edging out of Wholesomeness but hadn't come close to Wisdom.

Wistful, adj. having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing.

What was I then, anyway? Shortpantsed spelling champion, or rebellious curser? Wholesome or wise? And where would I be headed in sixth grade? With the kids who already wore deodorant and undershirts, or with the kids who'd always smell forever and ever?

And why couldn't I be wholesome and damn-trumpeting at the same time? For that matter, what was to stop me from saying "shit" on my birthday and still kiss my mother with that mouth?

All of these questions. All W's. Who. Where. Why. What.

I wasn't sure of the answers, but I knew I wasn't what I'd been in third grade, nimrodishly studying long division while somehow still captaining the schoolyard soccer team; powerful enough to institute rules that only benefited my team of jocks while brainstrong enough to semi-master all things quotient.

How had the Davids diverged?

Wistful. It seemed easy to spell.

Whore, n., the same as prostitute.

(If I don't know what whore means I promise I won't know what prostitute means, Webster. You don't understand my problems.)

I don't remember picking this word as a prank, but is it possible I was unaware what a prostitute was? Yes, I think so. Pretty Woman had come out and its ads are among my first pop culture referents, but the meaning of the movie definitely evaded me.

And I think it's possible I thought that the new spelling word was an archaic question--whither, wherefore, whence, whatsoever, wherewith, howsoever, whore. And I wouldn't have been able to conceive that something so naughty could actually appear in a school dictionary anyway.

Mrs. Kimball dealt with all of this very well when I presented my list to her. She said I should find a replacement for this particular W. I wondered why.

"Is it a swear?"

"Not really. It's just not a polite word," she said.

"Oh."

She probably thought she was being duped, the target of a nasty 11-year-old's nasty joke. Either that or she felt sorry for me. I was, after all, about to be fed to the middle school wolves and, as I've painfully catalogued elsewhere, I had a limited vocabulary when it came to crudeness. How would I survive? Would I have to ask what a prick was and be thereafter labeled prick-ignorant?

I replaced whore with whatever.

After I passed my test, the group of us got demoted back to T, task and toil, and I remember having some unexpected trouble spelling trouble.

Spring Lit Fest Update

2012-02-06T12:20:00.001-08:00

Fiction Writer Amy Hempel will visit OU for Lit Fest this year.

Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of stories. Her COLLECTED STORIES won the Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and was named one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Hempel has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Foundation fellowship, the REA Award for Fiction, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

Her stories have appeared in Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, The Quarterly, The Yale Review, Tin House, Playboy and many other publications; they have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and others.

Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Vogue, O, the Oprah Magazine and many more.

She co-edited, with Jim Shepard, the poetry collection UNLEASHED, and is a Contributing Editor to Bomb magazine.

A founding board member of The Deja Foundation, she teaches creative writing at Harvard and at Bennington.

Madel(e)ine

2012-01-31T15:11:00.001-08:00

In the book In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, as every poseur knows, writes about a tiny cookie--a madeleine--which has the power to transport him back to his childhood, or, in the other direction, to bring his childhood into the present. One whiff of this little cookie and back he goes (or here it comes), and he can feel his little-boy cheeks squeezed by all manner of aunt.

When I hear the song "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes, I don't think of my childhood--it was recorded 19 years before I was born--but I do experience an immediate association, a kind of Madeline Moment.

I misspell that for a reason. Because "Be My Baby" puts me back with Madeline Adams herself, a young woman I met in my formative years. This Madeline was very beautiful, almost mythically so, and I've never heard the opening four-beat drum-burst of "BMB" without thinking of her smiling and then riding off on a school bus with me, farther and farther into the distance, oh won't you please.

Fine. So Madeline may have been made-up, a character from The Wonder Years on whom Kevin Arnold had a desperate and scandalous crush, but my cause-and-effect memory of her is very real. Be My Baby = Madeline + the creepy-sweet teen lust she seemed to represent.

I'll make you happy, baby. Just wait and see. For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three.

(Quick aside: until this week, I'd never considered that the title The Wonder Years is a double meaning, encapsulating both nostalgia--the noun--and debilitating adolescent doubt--the verb.)

(Quicker aside: "Be My Baby" was written and produced by notable murderer Phil Spector, a fact which only adds to its haunting nature).

You know I will adore you 'til eternity.

I can't dance about architecture or write about music, but I think what's so effective about the song is the mix of a sweet, intimate declaration--"Be My Little Baby"--with the sultry, invasive backup-singer repetition of that declaration. The speaker of the song is the ultimate crush-come-true who, unfortunately, turns out not to be in full possession of her marbles. She has multiple personalities or, at the very least, she's got some home-girl-voyeurs chanting from her closet, and they all really want you to stay over and make mistakes. Both the angel and devil on your broad shoulders are whispering "Be Her Little Baby," and it's too late to run.

And if I had the chance I'd--never let you go.

***

In the years since I saw that Wonder Years episode--"Heartbreak" it's called--I've played the soundtracked scene back in my brain--my consciousmess, my wit mine, my thoughtjockey, my grey lady, my me blob, my skullbug--an estaimted eleven times. Kevin and Winnie are on a field trip. They've broken up because Winnie saw Kevin standing with Madeline and because Winnie likes another fellow. They board their buses--K & W are now at separate high schools so they've got separate rides--and the buses turn in different directions. Madeline, the symbol of all this teen-anguish, is still on Kevin's bus and she's still totally smoking. But he doesn't care any more: "Be My Baby" plays: I tingle.

It's all very simple. And it's so cemented in my wit mine--I'm sorry, my brain--that I've told Megan about its effect on me whenever we hear The Ronettes. Or any band I mistake for The Ronettes, including: The Marvelletes, the Chirelles, the Shantelles, the Shrangri-la's, and the Velvelettes). I sometimes share this Wonder Years plotline even when I listen to "Please Mr. Postman," which is the virginal twin-sister of "Be My Baby."

At every rate, the scene is a dominant memory.

When I was a sophomore, I constantly shirked my Chemistry homework to watch Wonder Years reruns from 9 to 10, so I probably saw "Heartbreak" half-a-dozen times (poetic clause). Maybe that constant watching set me up to have some strange romantic expectations. Anyway, I'd just started going to a school that had girls, I was a serial idolizer of them, and, reinforcing that unfair perception, I took doses of girl-next-door-schmaltz in the form of The Wonder Years every night. I was hoping that, just as I tried to jump into the screen, my very own Winnie-Madeline would jump off of it and save me with her virtue.

All that is to say that there was no way I wasn't going to check out that episode when it became available to me on Netflix the other day. I shepherded Megan toward the TV, as she shepherds me toward certain episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I asked her to wait 21-minutes for the knee-buckling conclusion.

First she lightly chastised me for still having a TV-crush on Madeline. I proposed to her that this was an instance of Alex-Mackification; that is, TV characters, like Alex Mack, who were older than us when we first watched their shows will always be remembered as grown-ups, so therefore it isn't totally creepy when we're retroactively fond of their formerly contemporary 14-year old faces.

(Totally more than a year older than me).

Megan mostly agreed with the logic--probably because she still has a crush on Rufio from Hook--and then we found out that Julie Condra, who played Madeline, had been 20 when the episode aired. So I was absolved of any suspected fourth-degree-skeeviness.

Meanwhile, in the show, the buses pulled away, here it came, oh since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you. . .

And then the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows" started playing. If you should ever leave me, well, life would still go ON believe me. This was totally wrong. How could a memory so specific and, let's be honest, obsessive, turn out to be invaded by Brian Wilson?

I stammered only for a minute, and then refused to give up on my own Mem-o-matic (again, I'm referring to my brain. Please try to keep up). "Be My Baby" must have been featured in another episode. And I did find, after a time, that "Be My Baby" had played during "Ninth Grade Man," a minute of which is included below.

Madeline appears while the song plays, and it's ominous. I was right. But wrong. And I had to wonder at/about my own memory, which had been sharp enough to connect a pop-song from the 60s with a 20-year-old actress in a 20-year old dramedy, and sharp enough to develop an uncanny association. But it was also too dull to actually be accurate.

Here, we see the beginning of the end of Kevin and Winnie and "Be My Baby" plays. In a later episode, Madeline actually figures in the end of their relationship and it's "God Only Knows" that plays. My patternsmith--i.e., brain--must have decided that the songs ought to have been switched, and would have been even more unsettling if they had been.

Or, more likely, the frazzled traffic cop above my neck--i.e., ibid--just threw up its hands at my memory-jam and said, as Ronnie Spector does in "Be My Baby," wait, oh wait, wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Hydrants

2012-01-29T14:38:00.000-08:00

Megan came home a couple days ago, surprised. She'd heard from a few local friends that they didn't have fire hydrants in their neighborhoods, and that when the occasion arose, firefighters would pump water from a lake before rushing to the hypothetical scene. This was another reminder of how rural the surrounding area is.

"But, wait," I said, ever the curious contrarian. In my own 0ff-the-sewer-grid childhood neighborhood, did we have fire hydrants?

I never danced in the flow of a broken hydrant on a pavement-shimmering summer afternoon. And I can't remember using hydrants as finish lines in bike races. So I called my mom yesterday to check on the geography of my nostalgia. She couldn't confirm anything.

"We've had fires, so we must have hydrants," she declared, laughing at her logic before she'd even finished the sentence.

And, in fact, we have had some fires on Brookside Avenue, a post-war outcropping of single-family homes about three miles from Greenfield Center. The most ironic one came only a few hours after the decommisioning of our volunteer fire department, a tiny garage at the first loop of Brookside that blocked the path to the Gravel Pit (I never, ever went to the Gravel Pit, which, if my mom was to be believed, is about as dangerous as a motorcycle ride; playing there would result in gruesome dismemberment--or at least some pretty nasty abrasions).

In that tiny garage, a tiny fire truck lay idle, breeding ghosts (besides ghosts, there were also many beetles).

That early-morning fire--The Koblanski Fire--has always been my symbol of Harlot Fortune: HF being the nasty, androgynous world-spirit who plays arsonist just a few hours after anything can be done about the flames.

But besides that attention-getting neighborhood legend--only retold because the Koblanski house was spared--fire was never on my mind. Maybe we didn't have hydrants. Maybe we too would have had to wait for a pumping truck if our fireplace-flue ever got really gunked up, or if a wayward casserole went forgotten in all its blackening-Durkee-Onion-glory.

My belief in my own hydrantless childhood grew.

"Nutmeg never peed on a fire hydrant. And if we had hydrants in the neighborhood, we would have joked about her going on them," I told my mom, with the sort of air-loose logic that might be hereditary.

"Girl dogs don't go on hydrants," she countered, echoing Megan's, "she was a girl dog so she wouldn't lift a leg."

Why must they always gang up on me? I knew my dog. And if there had been a hydrant in her realm, she would have figured out a way to do something disgusting to it. And if she did that, I would remember it, I thought.

But as today's photographic evidence proves, I was wrong:

(This hydrant sits near where an old, excellent VW bug with white window shutters used to hang out. The green house in the background always had very scary dogs. Across the street in a vermillion colonial (not-pictured) lived a witch).

(The opposite curve of our circle was filled with very ancient people, all nice, all with sun-porches).

(I can barely even see this hydrant so I almost refuse to believe in its existence. Even if I stipulate to the pictorial evidence, I assert that this hydrant is a post-2000 addition).

(My mother points to the memory-jogging hydrant. Seeing my breath, enduring my soggy feet, I almost feel Nutmeg pulling me with her flexi towards this oasis of urine. The red house behind it is not ours; the house behind that house is ours. I probably should have remembered this one, seeing as how it's a couple dozen yards from my old bedroom).

English Interlude

2012-01-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

Here are some lines from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," most of which I knew and could quote back during the Wanczytron era. They (the bolded) were sort of my early-college slogan (important to note that Holy Cross was extremely hilly). Now that I read them again in context, they seem even better.

"While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills, when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all--I cannot paint
What then I was.
_____

I mean, I can kinda paint what then I was, but I take W's point.

Mrs. Megs51015 Wanczytron

2012-01-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

For the last many years, I've been a crank about online socialness, but I should always remember my 21-year-old self, churning away at Instant Messenger until 2am, craftily crafting perfect away messages, sometimes in Polish, to project just the right image of me--flippant, unafraid, socially disastrous in that cool way, intelligent, impenetrable.

Impenetrable because one of the great joys of Instant Messenger was the ability to write with candor while at the same time being concealed, to mean what I said without having to own it. IM was a Halloween costume, a foreign language. It topsy-turvied who I could be, and as much as I too-strongly decry facebook for doing the same thing for my self-conscious students, IM may have allowed me to get married.

Explanation: at Holy Cross, Megan was only Megs51015, a pale blue collection of letters that rarely popped up on my screen of their own volition, but which dutifully appeared when called upon. Megs51015 wrote in complete, well-punctuated sentences. Megs51015 seemed to be on my side. Megs51015 also put up craftily crafted away messages, sometimes from British novels.

Megs, the real person, though she was much more compelling than a pale collection of intermittent letters, tended to stay to herself. In the guise of Megs51015, she could interact with Wanczytron. Wanczytron was a fine collection of red letters, perfectly safe. Wanczytron was, after all, easy to turn off. But Dave was an over-tall, overly-stumbling goofball who wanted way too much to type/talk to both versions of Megs. But that would never work.

So, we slowly built up some trust with weekly IMs, mine too-clever to be understood (and so not really very clever at all--those of you who knew me between 1997-2006ish know the sort of interaction I'm talking about).

Her writing, meanwhile, was perfectly patient, full of witty deflections and actual communications about life-stuff, meals, things people actually care about. Really, I'm not proud of the fact that this is how we kept alive a tiny paramecium of friendship, but I can't help thinking that, without those chats, we might not be together at all, might never have become, to continue the metaphor, as close as a Paramecium Aurelia and its bacterial endosymbionts.

In fact, after I asked her out blurtingly over the phone, and then months later, blurtingly in person, it was an IM response that sparked out first date: ice cream at Friendly's, three hours of built-up talkativeness, followed, ultimately, by eight years of built up long-winditude. Now, we never shut up.

So, are technologies that allow for low-impact friendships actually gateways to high-impact, see-your-smile, possibly-make-some-babies friendships? I obviously see how they can be. But what continues to worry me is that most low-impact friendships are actually giving us just enough social nourishment to stay to ourselves. Like images of Italy instead of Italy itself, they give us a warm feeling, just enough to convince us that we're worldly, connected. And, in too many cases, they may not taste as nice as the real gelato.

When the image of Italy encourages the trip, of course, I'm all for it.

And I'm thankful there was a Megs51015. I'm glad there was a Wanczytron, too. But I'm glad they've retired now, traveled to Florence. When I looked at Megs51015, I had to keep staring at Wanczytron, right at all of my silliness. When I look at Megan, there aren't any blinks or beeps, and there's none of my own fooling.

All of A.D. History, Most of It Incorrectly Thought to Involve Alexander the Great

2012-01-17T14:44:00.001-08:00

Can I list something that happened in every century, A.D.? (If you want to try this, too, take a few minutes and then compare your results with mine. You will feel great about yourself, I'm sure).

This shouldn't be hard. There are only 21 spans, and I know at least 21 Red Sox, more than 21 phone numbers, a couple dozen British Monarchs, bazillions of capitals, and the name of each of Megan's 21 cousins (approximate). But I think I'll have a blank spot somewhen. How can that be? I think I've been reckless with my time, and with my time-knowing. But here I go.

1st. Jesus exists. Born, strangely, 4 B.C. (riddle: Who was the only person born before himself?). Did some (sometimes angry) stuff in the temple, made some (sometimes reliable) friends, spent a lot of time alone in the desert, empathized with the suffering of humanity, died (but then there's this really shocking twist).

2nd. And we're finally, after a tenacious struggle to get through the torrential centuries on a raft of facts, overwhelmed. What, oh what, could have happened between 100 and 199? I've heard the Gospels got written quite a bit after Jesus's life, but more than 70 years? I can't be sure. Something undoubtedly occurred in Rome--however, that something is unconfirmed by my dullard, hot-cocoa-sipping synapses. Was there someone once named Theodocius? It sounds like he would have lived around then. I'll come back to it. (Update: I've come back to it with a guess: Paul writes letters to Corinthians. Many future weddings are made pleasantly cheesy by his quilled-in declarations about love and its somewhat vague qualities. Then we all eat shrimp.

I'll check and let you know how I did at the end).

(Was Hadrian's Wall constructed in the 2nd Century? Would I have known that an hour ago?)

3rd. Again, trouble. So, at first glance, there's a good 100-200 years of human history on which I have nothing. When was Alexander the Great? I'm going to have to venture AtG in one of these slots. (Update: last ditch guess: Eli Whitney's ancestors invent grain).

4th. Make that 200-300 common era years of which I have no knowledge. Fine: Alexander the Great plunders world.

5th. Ok, I've got this one. Rome falls to the Ostrogoths, 476. 1300 hundred years later, to the day (unconfirmed), a portion of Britain falls to the Washingtongoths. Alright!

In Rome, July 4th would have been known as Julius IV (unconfirmed). In the Ostrogoth language, July would have been denoted by a series of shield-thrusts and plenty of public executions.

Working backwards, it may be safe to say that Rome was falling for those last 300 years. And is that all I've got?

6th. St. Benedict starts a bunch of monasteries.

7th. Muhammad, in around 622, gets some revelations from God, spoken to him from the length of two bows (what does this mean? I don't know exactly. I read it today. I think it means God spoke to him from the distance that an arrow, shot twice, might travel. So, like a football field? I've never hunted, or received prophecies, or taken a reasonable history survey, but I can guess that God might speak to one from beyond the goalposts); founds Islam.

8th. Well, I'm once again gobsmacked. Council of Something? Battle of Whichway Bridge? Alexander the Great?

9th. Charlemagne had a lot of power in France/Gaul. Yes!

10th. Is it possible Charlemagne was still alive? Doubtful.

11th. Battle of Hastings, 1066. Normans conquer England/Saxony(?).

12th. Genghis Khan born. I know this from a video game.

13th. Genghis Khan takes over much of the world, including Country 12, which is led by Qelkubud. Ibid.

14th. I want to say Printing Press.

15th. Columbus sails the ocean blue, lands on the island brown, stares at the vegetation green, gets a sunburn red.

16th. Shakespeare born and active.

17th. Protestant Reformation. Also, Guy Fawkes invents fireworks.

18th. American, et al. Revolution(s).

19th. John Quincy Adams becomes a congressman after losing presidency.

20th. Cola wars fought in 80s. Sprite gains market share.

21st. (This took me a long time because I was unsure of the tone of the above: am I mocking my own intellect, or the collective intellect, or cursorily exploring how small facts plant themselves, or actually trying to win a self-imposed quiz?).

Regardless: Parks and Recreation debuts; Lady Gaga emerges; Samoa crosses international dateline for reasons of Australian Trade; All of the above.

How'd I do? 1. Jesus! Correct! 2. Obviously wrong. St. Paul lived in the 1st century. 3. Eli Whitney's ancestors did not invent grain. 4. Right number century. Wrong suffix. Alexander the Great was waaaay B.C. 5. Rome fell. Correct! September 4th, not July 4th. 6. Shoots and scores on St. Benedict. 7. Yep. 8. Alright! The Second Council of Nicaea. I answered "Council of Something." 1/4 credit. 9. Sweet. Charlemagne was alive and crushin'. 10. Sour. Charlemagne was long dead (814). 11. This--1066, Norman Conquest--is the fact everyone knows about this 1000 year span. And I know it too. And for a long time anything that cost $9.99 rang up as $10.66, and then I thought about the Battle of Hastings, took my mid-priced bottle of wine off the gas station counter, and felt extremely satisfied. Now, Ohio sales tax is slightly higher and I have no inkling about 1068. My guess is William was still conquering and levying slightly higher sales taxes on his new vassals. 12. Genghis Khan was indeed born, sometime around 1162, but I'm only giving myself half a point because, at the time of his emergence, he was named Temujin (which I should have known from my video game). 13. Genghis Khan did do some business, but I can't suss out the identity of a Qelkubud, either historical or Nintendonical. 1/2 Credit again. 14. Bah! Take away my English degree. Give it back again when I can behave. 15. Columbus. Correct. 16. Shakespeare. Good. 17. Embarrassingly wrong. I was thinking of The Glorious Revolution. 18-21. Correct. Even the thing about Sprite.

13 and 1/4 out of 21. 63. D-. I pass!

Boethius and Bowser

2012-01-11T15:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, at the public library, grading short papers on St. Augustine's understanding of Original Sin (strangely, it has something to do with the molecular composition of Edenic semen), I found myself stopping every arcane paragraph or so because a middle-aged man sitting at the next carrel over was loudly playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on some new device--an Acer or Pad--and, for some reason, had chosen not to turn the sound down, thereby sending a cascade of coin-twinkles throughout the entire reading room every time his Italian-avatar jumped, boobeepishly, over a mushroom and onto a spinning piece of gold.

When this got egregious--as it did while he no doubt encountered, via pipe, an underground cache of life-giving bullion--I gestured to the air and sighed, muttering, "really, why is this allowed to continue," as if appealing to a cosmic jury. Unfortunately, God, or his twelve small-claims court sub-angels, declared a mistrial.

It is odd to me that this man didn't seem to have any public consideration at all. And it's odd that collecting coins gives you extra life in Super Mario Bros. 3.

"Are riches naturally precious, or are they precious because of some virtue of yours?" asked the character, Philosophy, in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. "What is precious about them, the gold metal or the pile of money? [. . .] Riches are miserable and troublesome."

Philosophy might have been surprised to find that by the early 1990s, gold would actually have palliative powers for animated video game characters, giving to the player of those games, as I used to say, "Extra Guys."

I couldn't take the implications, or the noise. Rather than giving life, those video-riches were sapping mine.

So I stood up to approach the man, steeled myself for confrontation, but found that I just couldn't be the one to chastise him even though his behavior was really unsupportable. Returning to St. Augustine, I held my useless tongue. Just as the Bishop of Hippo predicted in the 5th Century, my free will was powerless in the face of sin and Super Mario.

And yet, for Boethius's character Philosophy, "nothing is miserable unless you think it so"; I, therefore, ate my granola bar, grew to twice my size, and stormed through that august stack of freshman papers, undaunted by the local man's considerable and vexatious skill.

Now, my dear Philosophy, spurred by that experience, I'm home. And I'm ready to count my blessings and my coins as I once-and-for-all defeat the offending Nintendo game, alone and silently. "How can glory be great that is severely limited by such narrow boundaries?" you ask. Good question. But for the next 45 minutes, I choose to ignore it.

Super-Hasty Best Of Movie Party List

2012-01-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

I always want to do a best-of movie list at the end of each year and then cop-out because I also always want to wait until I've seen more, and then it's April by the time I've seen more, and more reviews loom, and such a list seems worn out. Enough of that! These are the 18 movies I saw in a theater in 2011, in order of greatness:

1. We Bought a Zoo

At one point, I had a tear tracking down my right cheek in the precise place that Matt Damon had a tear tracking down his right cheek. He is my favorite non-Pullman movie star. And this movie is so charming (Elle Fanning) and happy-sad (there's a devastating setting, but there are cute animals, kids, and Johanssons). My concerns that it's cheesy are overcome for now. And there is no Crowe-ish manic-pixie-dream-girl even though there easily could have been three.

No one really teaches anyone any lessons. Also, Lowell Mather.

1a. Midnight in Paris

I'm somewhat worried that I put a tear-jerker first and that, in the coming weeks, the immediate power will diminish (I saw WBaZ on New Year's Eve), so Midnight in Paris comes in at 1a. Its humor and its cleverness about nostalgia (and Salvador Dali) won't diminish. The only marks against it is that Rachel McAdams is too one-notedly mean, and, as in some Woody Allen movies, the characters don't necessarily have real human feelings. What's French for Human feelings are sometimes over-rated?

2. The Tree of Life

LACRIMOSA!

A see-by-yourself movie.

3. The Muppets

I'm a very manly muppet!

4. Moneyball

Constantly entertaining and funny. Brad Pitt is a great non-Pullman/Damon movie star. We have solid movie stars these days. They'll be looked on fondly, I think.

5. Captain America

Speaking of nostalgia, this is a movie set in the 40s which, like The Rocketeer, knows it's being schmaltzy about said-40s. Exciting and funny.

6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I enjoy it when I love movies that graduate-school-me has pre-decided he won't like. Ergo, I may go see Contraband with Mark Wahlberg. James Franco is a fabulous movie star. We have great movie stars these days.

7. Winnie the Pooh

Saw this at the drive-in and it was 56-minutes, catchy, and sweet as honey. Fantastic evening with Megan (despite the bottom of this list).

8. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I was 80 percent confused by this movie because whenever the phrase "double-agent" is uttered, I start to turn off a little bit. But every British-y detail made me envious of (and scared for) anyone who was in London in 1971. I dream of owning a giant red phone booth in which I can store my various cell-phone chargers.

Also, a dude duels an owl.

9. Bridesmaids

Funny, but I don't really understand what was so groundbreaking. Many of the jokes seemed to come from the same 14-year old boy's mind that's imagined most buddy comedies of the last decade. I'm cool with that brain.

10. Water for Elephants

Classy. Solid. Saw it in Nelsonville.

11. The Adjustment Bureau

Sharp. Semi-solid. Saw it in Nelsonville.

12. Rango

Imaginative. Draggy: I might think that because a little girl's light-up shoes and a little boy's terrible, sopping cough had me feeling a skosh uneasy. Saw it in Nelsonville.

13. Margin Call

A movie about stockbrokers making shady decisions. Not much else.

14. Super 8

This is so low because it was my biggest disappointment. The first half was so perfect and Elle Fanning is a great pre-Winnie Cooper, with all of the attendant middle-school charm. Then there are aliens and the people become much less important. Why? Why must there be unsustainable twists, J.J. Abrams?

15. Submarine

I thought I was liking this while I saw it, but I don't remember much. Maudlin standing in for edgy?

16. Buck

Good enough documentary about a horse-whisperer, but not a lot of conflict or purpose.

17. Cowboys and Aliens

This was the second half of the drive-in, Winnie-the-Pooh-begun double-feature. I thought it would be the perfect idiocy for such a setting, but it was a little more idiotic still, and I fell asleep.

Meanwhile, today I read the following in Elaine Pagels' Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:

"In Greek, the term 'Idiot' literally referred to a person concerned solely with personal or private matters instead of the public and social life of the larger community."

Cowboys and Aliens was not concerned with the larger community of the folks at the Skyview Drive-in in Lancaster, Ohio. On a scale of zero to five, I give it zero extraordinarily large milkshakes.

_______

UPDATE on my complete movie list: I finished the wikipedia scan and have found that I've seen approximately 1,011 movies that were released between the years 1896 and 2011, including the very enjoyable Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) and the very enjoyable Adventures of Tin Tin (2011), which I took in yesterday. I've seen no movies released in 1930, and I intend to remedy that swiftly in 2012.

The Muellers

2011-12-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

As reported in the New York Times this morning, the baseball player Don Mueller died Wednesday at 84. This news made me think of two people: Bill Mueller and Don Miller.

First, the scoop on Don Mueller (pronounced Myooler). He's known for delivering a single right before Bobby Thomson hit The Shot Heard Round the World, which led the NY Giants to the pennant in 1951. Mueller, known as "Mandrake the Magician," had a way of directional hitting that made him difficult to retire. In that famous game, he singled past Gil Hodges, later injured himself sliding into third, and was taken off the field.

"Mueller was lying on the clubhouse table when he heard the crowd erupt. 'I couldn't be certain that it wasn't something good for the Dodgers because there were plenty of Brooklyn fans in that park [. . .] There was no radio in the clubhouse. But I knew pretty quickly what had happened once the players started to pour Champagne over my injured ankle."

Bill Mueller (pronounced Miller) meanwhile, is known for delivering a single up the middle for the Red Sox, sending Dave Roberts homeward in Game 4 of the epic 2004 ALCS.

Don Miller (pronounced Miller) is my mother's father. If we were Swedish, he would be known as Morfar--Rob Strong recently gave me this speech: "Your mother's mother is Mormor; your mother's father is Morfar; your father's mother is Farmor; and your father's father is Farfar."

Don Miller was not Swedish, so I called him Grandpadon, which sounds like a really sweet dinosaur.

When Don Mueller hit his single in 1951, my mom was 25 days old and Don Miller was 32 years old. Bill Mueller was 33 years old when he delivered his single. My own Far, Robert, is 60 and once hit a homerun in Hadley, but this might have been a tale he told me when I was little. Little is known about whether he ever had Champagne poured on him. Dave Roberts once pointed at me on Boylston Street after the 2004 World Series while I was reverently shouting his name.

Little is known about whether Don Miller ever singled or homered or drank champagne. He did break his pinky playing basketball in Hadley, leading to an amputation, but this might have been a tale he told me when I was little. And he did like whiskey sours.

He, like me, was color-blind.

John Ruskin was not color-blind. The greatest art critic of the 19th Century, he often studied the work of J.M.W. Turner. My Mor's initials are J.M.W. (Jean Miller [not pronounced myooler] Wanczyk).

Ruskin said this about art:

"Now, I want a definition of art wide enough to include all its varieties of aim. I do not say, therefore, that the art is the greatest which gives most pleasure, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to teach, and not to please. I do not say that the art is greatest which teaches us most, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to please, and not to teach. I do not say that the art is the greatest which imitates best, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to create and not to imitate. But I say that the art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas[.]"

By no means are my Mueller/Miller ideas great, but the thing which brings to mind the greatest number of ideas for me is the New York Times. Is it art? Probably not. But it helps me sink into pattern-making of a Saturday morning, and that is my favorite pastime.

So, thanks to my Mor and my Far, who bought me a home delivery subscription to The Grey Lady, I read for awhile this morning, reconsidered my Morfar and my Mueller, and had a way to pleasantly bandy with the one-page of Ruskin I read on the toilet.

English Interlude - An Epitaph, Now with Puns

2011-12-29T19:06:00.000-08:00

As regular readers know (hey dad!), I've been pulling pieces of paper out of my Milwaukee Brewers hat and those pieces of paper have been telling me what part of the British Canon I need to read next--that meant I spent much of my holiday season thinking about World War I.

Well, I finished Vol. F and felt triumphant, then a little perplexed, then mildly lonely, ecstatic, persnickety, peckish, and finally inspired to cut up more prophetic little slips of paper. So I now have a couple dozen in that old hat, each corresponding to a piece of literature from Volume E (The Victorian Age).

Today I read some Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)--who seems to have coined the phrase "days of wine and roses," and I also took in a spot of William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), who wrote a poem called "Invictus." There was a footnote on the title that suggested that "Invictus" meant "medicated bandages." Hmm, I thought, audibly, and then spent a couple seconds figuring out how the movie Invictus, which I have not seen, could have possibly been about medicated bandages.

Maybe that Rugby team of Matt Damon's was like a medicated bandage for South Africa. Yeah, that's it. I was satisfied.

Of course, as my eight years of Latin (and my toddler's logic) should have made clear to me, "Invictus" means "Unconquered." I'd mixed up the footnotes (Henley's poem "In Hospital," situated above, references "Plasters").

That's the most interesting thing I can think of to write about Henley, who is troublingly jingoistic. I'm troubled by troublingly jingoistic British poems (cf. my late immersion in World War I literature).

N.B.: Two other things I learned today which my eight years of Latin should have made clear to me. 1) I.e. means id est, "that is." 2) Cf. comes from conferre, and means "bring together." (I already knew what N.B. means).

Dowson and Henley having been consumed, I turned to Michael Field, who I assumed to be a straightforward, straight-laced Victorian poet writing about work/god/godlessness/fairies and the like. Turns out "Michael Field" was two women--Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (1846-1914; 1862-1913). Ironic enough? Not in the least. These pseudonyminous ladies, who were also romantically attached, were more than pseudo-related! Finding out about this aunt-niece pair shocked me into reading all of their poems.

They insist that they will never be ones "to take heed" of judgment. They want to continually dwell with those who are "Indifferent to heaven and hell."

Even wearing my aesthete, continental, moral-relativist hat, my best analysis of their poetic arrangement is still "ick."

After I considered these relations, I moved to a heavy hitter--Christina Rossetti.

Rossetti's poem "Song" could fit on a gravestone or come out of the mouth of a sedated Fozzy Bear. Such is the moroseness. Such are the puns:

"When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming
through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget."

"Wilt" in the first stanza makes us think of the green grass just above it but also of the archaic "will," and perhaps even "will it." It seems like the speaker wants to leave her beloved with two messages: 1) be comforted by forgetting me; 2) don't you dare forget me. 1) Be as natural as the grass, and happy. 2) Be so obsessed with me, and grief-stricken, that you become the grass above my grave.

The second stanza turns on "haply," which I can't help reading "happily." But, literally, the last two lines mean "maybe at the point of death I'll have enough left to think about you and my life, and maybe I won't." But with the pun, that double-message of the first stanza seems to resonate. The speaker seems worried that she will have consciousness and worried that she won't at the same time.

You can still be you, offers death. Only, you'll be dying and then in the ground.

Or, you can be absolutely nothing, no one will remember you, and/but/so you won't even know any better.

Both would have their happinesses, Rossetti seems to suggest, with the help of some wordplay. Wokka, Wokka, Wokka!

(This reminds me of Thomas Hardy's poem, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?")

Meanwhile, CR got quite a little bit happier in her poem "A Birthday," during which her "heart is gladder [. . . / ] Because my love is come to me."

The following is just a terrific evocation of loveuphoria, and I can sense Rossetti about to burst into a musical number as she writes (The British are always sitting at a desk on the left side of my imagination, windows at the right, and it's always 11am).

Despite what follows, Rossetti never married, having turned down two proposals for religious reasons. Still, one day when she was around 27, she felt like this:

"Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me."

Bullish on Analogies

2011-12-29T13:23:00.000-08:00

While I was preparing my essay today, I got involved in a lengthy back-and-forth with Rob Strong--who has an Economics degree--about Economics. As is often the case, this diversion seemed more interesting to me than what I was straining to work on. So, if you'd kindly wait until tomorrow to see the fruits of that daily strain, and to see further mixed metaphors, I'd be much obliged.

In that strained fruit's stead, I present. . . "Strong and Wanczyk Discuss Investing and Develop Ludicrous and then Incrementally Less-Ludicrous Analogies about Same" (brought to you by Maybelline: "Maybe She's Born with It. Maybe It's Maybelline.")

For a number of years, Rob has been developing a theory that the stock market cannot be intelligently navigated by an individual lay-investor. He believes, correctly, that there are many millionaires who have already outsmarted said lay-investor, that those people-bots have thought, 100 times, whatever clever thing the lay-investor has thought before the lay-investor gets out of his PJs.

But he also believes, perhaps incorrectly, that knowledge is essentially useless for the lay-investor in this context.

One of the great things about this discussion is that neither of us necessarily cares about it. And so it's perfect ground on which to construct analogies. The discussion becomes about whose analogy illustrates the debate more than it is about who's right.

Today, he began his argument with a forward of an article by the very tall libertarian Megan McArdle, a section of which I include here:

(Photo Credit: the awesomely-named David Shankbone)

". . .I am rather skeptical [that] specially clever investment allocations are really possible. We can argue about whether Warren Buffett's results are random chance or inherent genius, but here's one question we probably aren't going to argue about: neither you or I (or almost anyone else) is Warren Buffett."

Rob Strong:

"What I've been saying! (The bit about the impossibility of outguessing the market, that is.)"

Dave Wanczyk:

"I still think someone like me--who's minorly knowledgeable--could probably do better at investing than a dog could. I read this whole article. Please give me a treat."

Rob Strong:

"You know a lot more about roulette than a dog does, but neither of you can calculate the ball's trajectory on the fly. In the meantime, ten thousand millionaires wake up at 5:00 am every day and do nothing but look at balls. "

Dave Wanczyk:

"On the roulette analogy:

Dogs don't know any numbers. So I have a much better chance to win at Roulette than a dog. Just as I could probably make more money by investing in Apple than a dog could if he stepped on a button that indicated Taco Bell or Acer or Enron. He might step on Berkshire Hathaway. Good dog.

(This image will only appear on this blog when I am explicitly discussing canine-gambling).

The millionaires can't guess Roulette's results either. They have more balls perhaps. But unless the house always loses, or always wins, there's still a reason to know marginally more than not.

Entertaining but confusing analogy.

Meanwhile, many people know more about everything than I do, and though you make a provocative and useful point, I think it's hasty to say that I can't be somewhat successful by getting an edge on most people.

If the fix is in, it's in. Assuming the market's not fixed, I'd like to offer another analogy:

1) Adam Schecter [sic] knows much more about football than I do. (Aside: He's also an unbearable ass). But unless there's a deep conspiracy, he doesn't always predict the outcome. 2) I know more about football than my mom. 3) Adam Schecter will predict that the Packers will win. So will I. The Packers will win. 4) My mom believes the Bears are good because the last time she heard about them--1986--they were winning the Super Bowl.

So, if we all put our money in to a bookie, I do well on this bet. Companies are not sports, of course. Things are baked in that I don't know about that favor the Schecters. But, again, unless you're willing to say that the stock market is a total cheat, knowing more always helps.

An effective analogy you might employ: say I attempt to beat Gary Kasparov at chess. It doesn't matter how much I learn. He's going to beat me every time.

However, when I invest, I'm not always playing against G.K. Chessterton (there it is Homer, the cleverest thing you've ever said, and only Rob was around to hear it). I may be investing with Gary Kasparov. So, if I learn The Amazon Gambit, for instance, we will both defeat the investor who's still caught up on The Snackwell's Defense.

The fact that I may be making money at the expense of others is a separate concern. Believe me, I have considered withdrawing my funds on account of the recent Occupy (un)pleasantness. However, I also don't know enough to ultimately decry our brand of capitalism.

Enjoyable discourse."

Rob Strong:

"I love this discussion.

Why does the dog need to recognize numbers at all? He could bet red (or 33) all night and statistically tie every strategy you would devise to beat him.

[Note from Wanczyk: See a forum on dogs in casinos here].

As regards your football analogy: picking the winner of a football game is like picking the winner of, say, global profits. It's just a fact that one company will have the most profits in a given year, and while your mom might have great affection for Chevrolet, people who are paid to know about stocks will know with a high degree of certainty that Exxon will make more profits this year. Your mom uncontroversially loses this wager.

But investing in the stock market is more like wagering on the point spread. You mom picks the Bears for historical reasons, or even based on the color of their jerseys, and she'll win her bet about half the time. Adam Schefter [not sic], with all his expertise, loses his point-spread bets about half the time (I assume). Nobody beats the spread (in the long run), because like the price of a publicly traded stock, it is a product of the hive mind, the Market. In both cases, experts spend their waking hours devoted to figuring out the correct price (or spread), and if the Market disagrees with them, the price/spread will tend to correct towards the "true" value."

[Note from Wanczyk: Rob seems to be putting his faith in experts and in the hive mind. Do the experts beat the hive mind? Schefter doesn't beat the spread].

Dave Wanczyk:

"We have come to a very useful analogy. I think it's still possible, however, to have some sense of what the hive mind will do by knowing more about the hive mind and the hive mind's(') foci.

Say the spread on the Packers-Bears is 10 points in the Packers' favor. Everyone knows the Packers are good. But I've noticed that they will be particularly good against the Bears' passing defense. I assume that most others haven't noticed this, or haven't noticed it enough.

Similarly, Apple is set to sell many IPads. That has helped determine the price of Apple stock. But I believe the Indian economy won't be as bad as the hive mind thinks, so I predict, because of my knowledge, that even more IPads will be sold in India, and the stock will outperform.

I won't beat the spread every time. Apple won't sell more IPads every time.

But that's why they play the game."

Rob Strong:

"But here's the thing: most others have noticed these things about iPads and India, because it's their job to do that. You might happen to be right on any individual bet, but over the course of a year, you will not be right more often than the South Asia Consumer Tech Markets analyst at Goldman Sachs, or the one at Merrill Lynch, or Credit Suisse, and the three dozen at whatever the big Indian bank is.

You might flip 100 coins this year, and get 53 heads, and think that you're really good at flipping coins and that you've earned a 6-head return on your coin flippery. This is a false inference. Next year you will flip 46 heads, and you will blame the Greek public sector for your woes, and you will also be wrong then.

The people who constitute the hive mind also have people who are paid to know about how the hive mind thinks. And those people have computers that respond to hive-movements faster than you can click "confirm trade". "

There's no free lunch, there's no hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk, and there is no slack in the stock market left for non-expert individuals to pick up. (The slack was picked up at 9:30:01 AM by a computer in suburban Connecticut). Any gains from specific trades should be attributed to good fortune and a generally-rising market, no matter what story someone tells himself about how he outsmarted the world."

Dave Wanczyk:

[Then proceeded to offer further analogies about surfing, carnival-barkers, chess (again), and, finally, ITunes. Suggested that he had both won and lost the argument. Realized, as it got dark outside the Athens Public Library, that he spent his day this way instead of analyzing Pork Belly Futures. Rejoiced].

Postales del Fin de Mundo

2011-12-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

On Monday, Zokeler, Megan and I had an End of the World Dinner. We weren't influenced by Mayans or Nostradamus or Y2K12, but by a coincidence of alcohol. Seeking the evening's spirits, I saw La Fin Du Monde, a Quebecois beer Megan likes, over at Village Bakery, and then we remembered that we'd previously had a wine called Postales del Fin de Mundo, Postcards from the End of the World.

I asked the cashier what she thought "end of the world food" could be and that conversation got me started. We had a brick of frozen smoked bacon left over from Zokeler's last visit that I wanted to get rid of, and I figured saffron, the spice that once caused "The Saffron War," should be in an apocalyptic meal. Typing in "Smoked Bacon AND Saffron," I found a recipe from the restaurant Per Se (check the headline in the link to see that this was an auspicious stumbling-upon).

After a couple hours and a half-dozen explosions, we ate Lobster Corn Chowder (with pollock, the middle class man's lobster, substituting for the clawed thing--even if the world was ending, I didn't see any reason not to save 16 bucks). The soup was pretty delicious, an A, but nothing to send a postcard from the end of the world home about, per se.

We woke up the next day, thankfully, and ate even more smoked bacon. And that diligence, I think, fully justifies this posted card.

Zany Weather Report

2011-12-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

Zany accu-weather Meteorologist Joe Plicka here to tell you that it's 64 degrees and sunny in Athens. Appalachia'll be dreaming of a muddy Christmas. That's it from here. From mine to yours, Happy Holidays.

This is Newschannel True: Count on the Truth.

Money Matters

2011-12-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

Dr. True's Soup and Read's film reviewer, JK Zokeler, and I are in the midst of a project to watch all of the Best Picture Oscar-winners that neither of us has seen. These are:

All Quiet on the Western Front (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Ben Hur (1959), Patton (1970), Dances with Wolves (1990).

Each time he visits, we tick one of them off the chronological list. This year we managed to consume Wings, The Broadway Melody and Cimarron, the first three award winners (1928-1930). It's been fascinating to see the change in film-making techniques that occurred during this time. Wings, a movie about WWI pilots, is silent and jumpy, but has a functional plot. The Broadway Melody, camcorder-ish-ly amateur, has nothing to recommend it, but it does include, as you'd expect, lavish musical numbers that must have blown the folks away back in Hoover-times. And Cimarron is both a talkie and a technically astute, if terribly flawed picture that has an impressive stage-coach action scene.

Watching all of these is a chore, a history lesson. They proceed. We feel like we're finishing our homework.

Exponential improvement came in a movie like It Happened One Night, during which there's no hint of silent-era over-acting or technical growing pains. And it seems like movies made after 1934 or so, even though they can be culturally laughable and somewhat foreign have at least a tenuous connection to what we now recognize as coherent visual storytelling.

All of that is to say that during Cimarron, which has been mostly discredited because of its casual racism, we had time for some other discussions. So while the actors blithely overran Cherokee territory to get their hands on prime property, J.K. mentioned that he'd just bought a new bed, and I was curious what he did with the old one. He'd gotten rid of it and I suggested that it could have been donated. He agreed but wondered whether much good--altruistic or practical--comes out of passing along our outworn things, especially items as personal as that.

"I'm not sure that anything you get for free works out in the long-run," he said, in as many words. We'd previously agreed that giving away used stuff can be iffy. Sometimes one man's trash is trash.

But before he'd even finished his talk about long-runs, I countered that my washer and dryer had been attained for exactly zero dollars and that they have been a constant blessing. As the actors laughed patronizingly at their poor, black servant, I thought I had won the argument.

But last night Megan was drying some slippers and our hand-me-down, we-beat-the-system dryer vociferously broke. Estimates suggest it will cost nearly $200 to fix, precisely the amount of the modest raise I secured yesterday on the phone while the actors railed against inter-marriage and its deleterious effect on proper society.

Must all of what I too-confidently profess be undermined by sneering, expensive coincidence? Can't I once outsmart the kind of conventional wisdom Zokeler was repeating? Was there really a joke about watermelons in Cimarron?

(I believe this is our model.)

The dryer, and the effects of my thriftiness, got me thinking about how often I pat myself on the back for beating the money-game, getting a good deal on hummus, skimping on a plane ticket, delaying the purchase of a car and counting that delay as slowly-accruing savings. For me, and maybe for most people, knowing the rules of this game and playing the game well are more than just a hobby. This game becomes an identity. The savings of 40 cents is so marginally important to our well-being, and yet we talk about it because those savings mean we're winning, constantly grinding out the tough yards in our pitched battle against, what, caring a little less about money? (This goes only for the people for whom, like me, 40 cents really doesn't matter. I cop to my lite-elitism on this matter).

But as much as I don't want to be a person who greedily saves on secondhand junk-appliances, I don't want to greedily give up on the idea of making-do, don't want to let my standard of living run away with itself so much that I look cheap-stuff in the mouth and buy spanking-new because I've been duped into believing that's the only proper path.

That I'm always somewhere on this aggravating continuum means that I've lost, doesn't it? That thinking about the proper value of stuff is my real pastime?

The answer may come in one hour when Tri-State Appliances (which states?) arrives at my apartment and determines for me how good an American Consumer (or Resister) I am. Will the repair be cheap? If so, I've won. Something.

Enough to rent Grand Hotel maybe. Though Grand Red Roof Inn would probably be a better deal. It doesn't really matter. I'll talk through both of them.

____________________

UPDATE: It was Tri-County not Tri-State. But they couldn't tell me which counties. Meanwhile, $106.69! Free Dryers for everyone!

Curiously, both Mikes who fixed the dryer are in a band called Station Break Psycho Blues Band, and will be appearing at Abrio's in Athens with Conan O'Brien's trumpeter, in March.

Cinema Interlude

2011-12-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

I watched A. Hitchcock's spooky-funny "Shadow of a Doubt" the other day and have a good solid crush on its star, Teresa Wright (1918-2005).

Wikipedia (which I donated to yesterday, and for which I encourage your monetary support) has this tremendous nugget on T. Wright:

"[Samuel] Goldwyn immediately hired the young actress for the role of Bette Davis' daughter in the 1941 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes," signing her to a five-year Hollywood contract with MGM. Asserting her seriousness as an actress, Wright insisted her contract contain unique clauses by Hollywood standards:

'The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.'"

A(n) hilarious, imaginative list from a no-nonsense woman who seems worthy of my anachronistic flutter.

English Interlude

2011-12-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

I'm finishing up my select-an-author-from-a-hat project today, which means I'll have finally completed the Norton Anthology (Volume F). In a strange stroke, the last piece I picked out is the first story in the book, "On the Western Circuit" by Thomas Hardy. So, in order to complete my study of the 20th Century British canon, I'll be reading a story from 1891 later this afternoon.

But since it's Friday and since I plan to lightly tipple tonight, I thought I'd pass along some lines from A.E. Housman's "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff," an encomium (and criticism) of booze. In it, he's comparing the effect of poetry to the effect of drinking and identifies proper times for both:

"[. . .] Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

_____

Housman also ends "The Chestnut Cast His Flambeaux" with this solid stanza:

"The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

Will do, Alfred Edward, sir.

Iceland

2011-12-15T14:13:00.001-08:00

My friend's daughter is doing a high school project on Iceland, and when she told a group of folks about it the other day, we all stammered off our "facts" about the island nation in the Atlantic Ocean whose capital is Reyka-something-vek-spelled-who-knows-how. All of us made fun of our lack of Iceland-knowledge by spouting off about pretend national heroes, fake imports, fantastical international skirmishes, the Icelandic space program, Bjork.

And then I blurted, with exaggerated pompousness, "You know, Iceland has a population of 343,000." Everyone stared. I stared at myself. What had I just done?

"How--Wait, do you know that?" they asked.

"Yes."

Silence.

I'd derailed the "we know nothing" joke to make the "I know ridiculous things" joke.

I like that joke better, and I think I made fun of myself sufficiently afterward, but I see where I might have curtailed the fun.

Here now could follow an essay on my slight discomfort with group-joking, my obsession with population figures, my desire to journey to Iceland, which--like Wisconsin, Oregon, New Zealand, Mauritius, and Belgium--is pleasantly under the radar. There'd also be a place in that lengthy composition to discuss the untraceability of what's eventually gotten trapped in our brains like so many Icelandic prisoners (there are about 104 of them). About how and from where we've gleaned our mental dust.

But I don't really know anything about that stuff.

English Interlude - Ford Madox Ford

2011-12-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I taught a class called "Love/War" in which I tried to look with my students at the love stories within war novels. I picked the wrong books, though, so we mostly watched movies with that mix: "Cabaret" being the one I remember most.

The following passage from Ford's A Man Could Stand Up--, a 1926 novel set at the end of WWI, could have qualified the book for that class.

What's excellent about this series of Ford novels (Parade's End, it's called) is that I'm never sure if I'm supposed to respect the main character, who's also a strong influence on the narration. So, I find myself nodding my head and then wondering whether the book is actually criticizing this straightforward, brave, intelligent, stuffy, emotionally-stunted statistician-turned-captain.

A little set-up. Tietjens (whose name I have great difficulty pronouncing in my head) has an awful wife and a lovely young friend named Valentine. The wife's main goal is to destroy and humiliate him, while Valentine is completely on his level, a complementary intellect and temperament. While Tietjens is away in France, he mostly ignores his longing for Valentine, but when he's (shell) shocked--and sometimes when he's not--she flits into his mind:

"The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood--for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You have to wait together--for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained. . .and exhausted. So that. . .
That in effect was love."

See what I mean? I'm pretty sure there's something deeply incorrect about this vision of love. Then again, Tietjens is all about moderation, patience, communication, and there's no immediate sense that we're supposed to dislike him.

He just wants someone to understand (I mean that sentence in both ways). It reminds me of a line about Mr. Ramsay in Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

"It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken into the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life [. . .]."

Why am I so stirred by needy, icy (selfish in Mr. Ramsay's case) Brits from the first quarter of the 20th century? The above would suggest that I want someone to understand me and be understood by me, but that's not necessarily a deep concern--Megan already gets and laughs at my half-asleep improvisations; I mostly understand and laugh at hers; neither of us seems trapped in an, ahem, modernist jailhouse of the self with the inadequacy of language as our bars and unceasing isolation as our faceless warden.

But I guess that's the fear.

Built Like a Brick Idiom

2011-12-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was eating lunch with a friend who said an early car of his had been "built like a brick-shithouse." Obviously, I knew this meant it was built solidly, but "brickhouse," thanks to Lionel Richie, also inexplicably means sexy (I get the "built solidly" part of being good-looking, but it's no compliment to be compared to an outhouse).

So, I wondered, did "Brick Shithouse" originally mean strong, sexy, neither, both?

I posited that the phrase probably came from World War I, when outhouses might have been built stronger to resist shrapnel; but also that "brick shithouse" might have become colorful, memorable language because a permanent structure like that in a war zone could have become an symbol of absurdity. Therefore, I wondered if "built like a brick shithouse" actually meant built unnecessarily or disproportionately.

But the phrase has been evolving for awhile and things are less clear than that. Some history, then a theory.

The ur-reference to "Brick Shithouse" (to be henceforth called B.S.) comes from 1922. Jim Tully, "a vagabond, pugilist, and American writer" from Ohio--this is an epitaph I'd enjoy having, if not earning--had his character, a boxer named Emmett Lawler, say, "Every time I fight him my hands are swollen for a week. He's built like a brick schoolhouse."

Tully, an odd literary figure known for writing about the early-Hollywood scene, was a master of hard-boiled American idiom, but it seems unlikely that he coined the metaphorical brick line.

Here's the tremendous(ly sexist) dedication in Tully's Emmett Lawler.

Even if Tully did coin it, "brick schoolhouse" clearly refers to a man here, a solid, probably unattractive man.

Tully again used a variation, "built like a brick barn," in a 1936 novel, Bruiser, but the Canadian writer, Earle Birney employed the genuine article in his book, Turvey: a Military Picaresque. (aside: Birney's most famous poem is called "David" and is widely anthologized in Canada). In the following, we can see some solid World War II lingo and then the B.S. insult:

Once used to refer to a strong man, brick buildings are here used to refer to ugly, perhaps mannish women. But Turvey is the main character and we learn elsewhere that he likes plump ladies, so Boggs's fat jokes are probably meant to seem jerky. Either way, somewhere between 1948 and 1977, Brickhouse further evolved.

So here's my theory. The brick metaphor had been percolating for awhile. Then came the Great Depression. As I've learned today, the Works Progress Administration "trained an entire workforce" of folks to build up and repair outhouses to a higher standard during that time (thanks to the authors of Outhouse for the scoop).

Jokes about government waste aside, many people worked to construct stronger privys in the 30s, which now had to have concrete foundations. My guess is that don't-tread-on-me types would have seen this as an unnecessary improvement and an intrusion (Keep your hands off my toilet paper!). Disproportionately-built outhouses, then, might have become tantamount to showiness and monstrosity.

When soldiers from all over the country (and the continent) got together for the war--and when they felt like cursing--they might have thought back to those unnatural shithouses. The women they were with in France, instead of being yellow roses of Texas, might have seemed out-of-place to them, unpleasant, overly-strong, like that damn government-issue brick shithouse. Later, though, as the soldiers thought back to their war-time glories, maybe these Helens seemed ideal.

And that's how a Brickhouse can be a man, a beast, a beauty, and a cliche that, like an outhouse itself, is both useful and a little uncomfortable.

This is a stretch, I admit, but no less likely than any of the other improbable journeys this bizarre idiom must have taken to become what it is.

Christmas Illustrated

2011-12-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

My family's epic and enviable thoughtfulness at Christmas puts me in a perennial funk on all December 11ths. It's too early to be decisive with a central gift, and too late to patch together an iMovie chronicling my father's life, or quilt my mom a monogrammed steering wheel cover using cloth from my old baby blanket, or secure for my brother that walk-on part on Game of Thrones he really wants, or construct a bust of my sister out of the ruins of a barn-fire (as an EMT in Western Mass, she has an odd attraction to agricultural pyrotechnics).

I'm pressured to do these things for my family because I know they will come up with sentimental treasures for me, or might. It's a sometimes-productive pressure brought on by my mom's 2003 idea that we should have a new gift-tradition, "Make-a-present." But I can't really compete. They're all just too crafty.

"No one needs anything. I don't need anything. Cancel it!" I said to Megan last night, way past my bedtime, and grinching. "I should just buy everyone mustard."

Or, I could construct something touching out of mustard. No. Abort.

***

When I was probably 15, I attempted my second thoughtful gift (the first had been meant for my parents a few years before--it was a mass of clay and twigs purporting to be our house, and my sister and I slapped it together on Christmas at 3am in one of our first bonding sessions--it was awful, the house was).

That second gift was going to be a slam-dunk, though, at least I thought so. But it really sprung from the foggy-headed desperation of a late-night December 11th.

Me and Stephen love sports, I figured, particularly the Red Sox. So, hoping to produce a meaningful, interest-based, personal, hug-inducing, memory-clinching, kudos-generating, Christ-delighting whopper of a gift, I took out the tape and got going.

Yes, I would make a poster of nostalgia.

First, I gathered all of the pertinent Sports Illustrateds I could--he kept them in a dusty closet, in order. 1987 to 1997, nicely preserved. Larry Bird, Mo Vaughn--no Irving Fryar? C'mon--. There were a half-dozen Clemens's and, brilliantly, a new Pedro Martinez cover (Cheryl Tiegs also made her residence in that closet, but I was on a mission, so she didn't intrigue me).

Pedro'd just been traded and his picture, with the word "Amazing" emblazoned in white, would make an Amazing gift when taped to other images of the same theme. This was a lock!

As I constructed, I got a little pastiche-happy. Instead of taping entire covers, I started scissoring-in curves to make an athletic mosaic out of our shared heroes. Then I'd emphasize certain words, like "Memories" (writing "BeSt GiFt EVer" with ransom-note cut-outs might have been more subtle).

When I was finished, I had a 24X36 inch masterpiece of crap--ugly tape overlaps, ripped edges, sticky address labels still adorning Nomar's guns. And, of course, I'd tarnished the jewels of my brother's hard-won memorabilia collection, leaving coverless magazines naked in my wake.

But I didn't realize then that the images--like those New England teams they depicted--would come up short in the end. I knew, Christmas morning, that my poster hadn't thrilled him as much as I'd predicted, but that was a customary Christmas let-down, and because he was kind (or because my parents were), we hung it on our basement wall anyway.

My mistake--rather, my regret--grew incrementally for about five years, and each time I'd come home from college, clamber down the basement stairs, and see the poster in all its inglory, I felt more and more how boneheaded a present it had been. An anti-present really, to take things he liked and alchemize them into something he probably didn't.

Maybe the thought had counted, but around Christmas, burdensomely practical as I can be, I've often tried to take shortcuts to thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is on my to-do list and I want to check it off.

In rushing to seem thoughtful in 1997, I'd forgotten to be thoughtful. And that's maybe part of the anxiety of December 11ths. Unsure of my ability to create memories, I exaggerate so that my effort itself will be memorable. Sometimes that results in embarrassments on par with Super Bowl XX (an image of which was omitted from poster), and sometimes it causes light fraternal dismay.

But I'm making up for that this year. Stephen's getting something really good. It's going to be--I mean, it's going to cause great surprise or wonder, be startlingly impressive; astonishing, astounding, stunning, staggering. As soon as I think of it.

______________

UPDATE from Dec. 28th. My Father sends along this amusing article. "Oh! the torment of finding a suitable male present."

Meanwhile, in response to this post, he constructed a tiny box for me made out of an old tree that fell during Hurricane Irene. Just as I suspected he would!

English Interlude - in Partial Defense of Jewel

2011-12-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

In her song "Kiss the Flame," the singer Jewel took some liberties with a particular word, "casualty," in the phrase "with such casualty." This malapropism led Kurt Loder to respond, curtly, "'Casualty' doesn't mean that." He suggested that Jewel might have meant "casualness," which, though it is a word, is about as poetic as "propriety" or "associative" or "malapropism."

MTV Shows

I found some slight vindication for the lovely Jewel yesterday morning. Who will sa-a-ave your literary reputation, Jewel? Surprisingly, Thomas Hardy will. In his poem, "Hap," he writes about his anger at the force he sees controlling the universe. Why can't that force just be straight with him? Why can't life be purely rough instead of pock-marked by what he sees as distorting joys?:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: 'Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!'

Then would I beat it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

These last two lines could mean "Would that these purblind had. . ." Then the message would be I wish chance/fate/God/"These-purblind-doomsters" had doled out joy in as many parts as pain. But I think he's really lamenting joy itself because joy continues to fool him into something--comfort--that is illusory.

Meanwhile, my hands are small, I know, but they're large enough to type the never-before-realized Hardy-Kilcher connection. So, "casualty" almost always refers to the dead or wounded of war, but both poets use it differently here, Hardy to refer to chance and Jewel to refer to a casual nature.

Before we get carried away, I should say that Hardy has history on his side while Jewel only has her yodelly voice. Around 1500, the writer J.O. Halliwell (related to Geri Halliwell?--the late-90s music connections continue) wrote, "I have seyn men bothe ryse and falle, hyt ys but caswelte!"

Thinking about it this way, I see that "casualty" as it's commonly used is a strangely archaic , Ecclesiastean euphemism. Shakespeare used it as a pun to mean both chance and injury--"Augward casualties, bound me in seruitude"--but when we say There were four casualities, are we still saying there were four victims of circumstance? And isn't that an odd way to think about war deaths, especially, considering that those circumstances have been imposed?

Is Jewel similarly anti-war? Unsure. She does sing for the troops with such casualty, as pictured below.

And she would be glad to know that, though she has much less history on her side, there is a reference in the Oxford English Dictionary that would have helped her in her Loder-skirmish. In 1886, a magazine referred to a place as "Casualty corner," and it's possible that they intended that to mean both Bad-Fortune Corner and Congregating/Hanging-Out Corner: "A Cas'alty Corner is a feature of every district of outcast London, is to be found wherever the poor of the great city most do congregate."

Casualty Corner also refers to a spot in France, within The Sausage Valley, during World War I. The Sausage Valley was so-called because Germans flew sausage-resembling zeppelins near the valley in order to survey, probably not with casualty.

As we ultimately evaluate Jewel in the context of "Hap," I say she should get some criticism; but I also defend the poetic license, even for someone who probably deserves to have hers suspended. She could, after all, very well be equating casualness with leaving it up to fate:

There are nightmares on the sidewalk
There are jokes on TV
There are people selling thoughtlessness
With such casualty.

Well, maybe that's a stretch. But my real problem is with the next line:

Oh where for art thou, Romeo?
Where've all the brave men gone?
Show me one man who knows his own heart
With him I shall belong.

Where for? I think it's wherefore, your Jewelness. And that means "Why are you Romeo?" not "Where are you Romeo?" Loder focused on the wrong literary mishap. Wherefore, Kurt? (Also, where are you, Kurt?)

But Jewel is pretty great anyway. At least Thomas Hardy thought so:

"Love is long-suffering, brave,
Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel."

_____________________________

UPDATE:

Incredible coincidence, as Bobby Moynihan plays an English Professor with a very specific interest in last night's SNL (which I missed):

Over-Watching

2011-12-08T14:43:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a project lately to write down all of the movies I've ever seen, a lark that's taken about six hours up to now, spread over 12 or so days. I've been greatly aided by Wikipedia, which lists, by year, most, if not all of the movies I'm likely to have witnessed.

Some of the statistics I've gathered:

15: Number of movies released in 2011 that I've watched (all of them in the theater). Best so far: The Muppets, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life, Captain America.

47: Number of movies from my most prolific year, 2001, though that includes movies released in that year that I've since watched on video. 2001 was my freshman-sophomore year at Holy Cross and I went to the Kimball Theater movie every Wednesday at 1pm in what I called (pathetically) my only leisure time. Best: Waking Life, Wet Hot American Summer. Worst: Say It Isn't So.

I've seen 89 movies with R. Strong, including, in one day: Remember the Titans, Chocolat, Shadow of the Vampire, The House of Mirth, Billy Elliot, and Enemy at the Gates, the film from which the concept, "Crazyrussianwarsex" derives. I have seen 0 movies with Glen, pictured in the background.

7: Number of movies from 1981 and 1983, the low end so far (my study goes back to 1980 at this point). I've seen 8 from my birth year, 1982, including E.T., which my brother had just seen when I was born, leading him to declare that I looked like E.T. and that he wanted to go to McDonald's. Best: The Return of the Jedi (1983).

302: Number of movies I've seen in the theater, approximately, from 1987 to 2011. 25 years. 12 per year. 1 per month. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, the average ticket during that time cost $5.42 ($3.91 in 1987 to about $8 in 2011). My attendance, then, probably ran about $1,635.75, and, assuming each movie was about 100 minutes, I've spent a little over 21 days in the theater. If I'd spent a month, my cinematic rent would have run about $2,400.

3: Number of movies I've been to in the theater twice. They are Big Daddy, Mean Girls, and Meet the Parents. I went to Big Daddy twice because I twice tried to sneak into American Pie, in 1999, and twice failed. Though it seems I'd seen R-rated movies before that (Jerry Maguire on a New Year's Eve), Greenfield Cinemas had a real hang-up about American Pie, as did a movie theater in Atlanta that I later attended with my friends Dan Tirrell and Dave Goodman. They were both 17. I was a week or two short. Big Daddy it was.

I saw Mean Girls for the second time during a strange limbo, after Megan and I started dating but before I was her boyfriend. That period of time was 28 days. During that time, I saw You Can Count on Me, The Rookie, and Mean Girls, twice. No reason to believe that was indicative of any bitterness, since there was none.

I saw Meet the Parents twice during a strange limbo, after my first girlfriend and I stopped dating but before I believed it. That period of time was between 28 days and 1 year. That year, when I had very little leisure, I saw 47 movies. That 28 days, I saw Meet the Parents twice, and Dan Tirrell was there again for the second. Big Daddy and Meet the Parents may have been the only two movies I saw with Dan Tirrell. So, if I'm romantically unsure, and if Dan Tirrell is around, I might see Cowboys and Aliens in the theater again. Otherwise, no way.

816: Number of movies I've seen, approximate, that were released between 1980 and 2011. That total depends on whether or not I've seen Species, Mimic, both, or neither.

In scanning, I suspect that of these 816 I've seen The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, Spaceballs, and Wet Hot American Summer more than 10 times each. Short Circuit may take the ultimate cake. We had it on video back when I only went to school for half a day (Pre-School and Kindergarten, 1986-1988), and I feel like I watched it pretty much every morning. Unless I have a particular memory on a strange, glitchy loop, which is always possible.

Short Circuit was a Tri-Star production. I really enjoyed the flying Unicorn (redundant?).

The most troubling thing about this list, besides the fact that I've created it, is that I have a sneaking suspicion that the first movie I ever saw in public was Ernest Goes to Camp.

I'd love to add more to this, but I'm seeing Margin Call in 20 minutes.

Over-Thinking

2011-12-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

What is the difference between over-thinking and sufficient thinking? Having been wrongly accused of the former, I'll use the latter to answer the question and offer a rebuttal.

The case is this: Rob S. (no, that's too obvious, let's call him R. Strong) believes I over-think my aversion to Facebook (a website on which I may or may not have a nebulous, negligible presence). He writes, "You are a classic over-thinker, and you are over-thinking this 1,000%." I, of course, believe I sufficiently think about my aversion and then follow that thinking by maintaining and strengthening my aversion.

First, we both agree that under-thinking is a scourge. Those who under-think their own country will be given to jingoism. Those who under-think advertisements will be driven further into impulse purchases, including holiday Lexi, over which purchases they have decreasing control. Those who under-think the food they eat will continue to consume dangerous amounts of orange, leading to degraded health.

Those who under-think about their partners will likely become boorish towards them. And those who under-think about their own lives and time, who are unexamined, will behave in ways they don't understand for reasons they don't understand, confusing themselves and others along the way, and playing out the clock as they engage in activities they don't want to engage in.

Because I have committed myself to battling ignorance and because I'd prefer not to be a jingoistic, boorish purveyor of confusion--with Cheetos powder festooning my cheeks--I am whole-brainedly against under-thinking and bristle whenever I hear the phrase, "You're over-thinking" or "You're thinking too much."

"No matter the scourge of under-thinking (which you know I agree with you concerning)," writes Strong, "the remedy to that is not over-thinking; it is sufficient thinking." More on that later.

Now, the negatives of under-thinking having been amply laid out--and amply apparent in our droopy-eyelidded poleis--let's look at the negatives of so-called over-thinking.

Over-thinking takes longer. Is that it? If so, I'll gulp that medicine any day of the week.

But that's not quite it. One can be said to be over-thinking if one spends too much time thinking about something that is not complex. 'Why does cheese taste good?' may not require an hour. 'Should I buy this dish soap or that one?' can almost never warrant more than a few minutes, environmental impact aside. Over-complicating is to be criticized because it takes us into the same muddle as under-thinking--the amount of time and energy spent considering an issue is not commensurate to the topic, and that effort, or lack of, leaves us confused.

But if something is complex, and if its effects on the whole of our contemporary society seem to be complex, is over-thinking that thing even possible? I would say the threshold is high and that it would take a truly enormous amount of thought to become an intellectual-extremist.

Certainly, we can't be completely consumed with one topic--Facebook, for instance--because that will lead to under-thinking other topics, and proportion is key. But why shouldn't we be able to mentally chew on a powerful, consuming entity that, to my mind, has been all-too-readily accepted as a dominant mode of communication--and a dominant mode of being if my experience with teenagers in the public library yesterday can be allowed to show me anything--by all-too-many people who have ceded their critical thinking skills in its bluish glow?

Why shouldn't a website that seems, I emphasize seems, to encourage inauthenticity and false intimacy and that may insidiously enable isolation be worthy of a couple minutes, or hours, of my analysis?

Socrates said about rhetoricians and dictators that they are "the least powerful members of their communities, because they almost never do what they want, rather than what they think it's best for them to do." Those in power don't really have power if they do things they don't want to do.

So why shouldn't it justify some of my inner discussion when people I respect seem to be swallowed into an online activity more than they would otherwise like, when they're sapped of power and time, and when they act unconsciously to continue that sapping activity, admitting that they've been swallowed, magnetized, etherized, enveloped by something they don't want to do? (Note: this is not Strong's professed experience, but it is an experience I've heard professed).

(A few moments of sufficient[?] thinking on the benefits of Facebook, which benefits include in-touch-ability, networking, efficient sharing of information, crowd-wrangling, and the encouragement of non-digital society (questionable). Those benefits may also include harmless, distracting fun, and the website may allow the shy to be more socially comfortable, the voiceless to be more politically active, and so on. It may let us stay more connected to our past acquaintances as well, and therefore to our past selves.

Additionally, if there used to be French salons and bowling leagues, and those were eventually replaced by postmodern, home-bound alienation, couldn't Facebook be said to be a reconstituted salon and/or bowling league in which ideas are shared, countered, and revised, and bowling balls are bowled? Yes. And the movement from Public-Square Life before Television to Overly Private, Withdrawn Life with Television to Reinvented Social Engagement after Television, via and post-Facebook is an interesting one. Possibly we've gained and regained. But there have been losses, mostly ignored, and those who talk about those losses--for one, the fact that my 18-year-old students seem less and less able to have actual, unstunted conversations and feel sad about that--are vigorously shouted down as over-thinkers.

I vigorously shout up!)

On thinking: Descartes believed it made him human. I don't recall any Cartesian worries about over-cogito-ing.

Hamlet thought, "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Is my over-thinking actually giving something value it doesn't inherently have? No. Hamlet is way too stoic for me here, morally relativist, adolescent even. It's a tempting way of being--solipsism--but isn't it better to believe, "There are good and bad and thinking makes them clear?" Though that's not iambic (or is it--I'd want to over-scan it), and though my clarity idea may be philosophically-flawed, it seems practical and necessary to wrestle ethically with the major forces we encounter and ask whether they are good, bad, neutral. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" seems closer to the truth, and because of this multitude in heaven and earth, I prefer to over- and to sufficiently think than to risk under-thinking.

T.E. Hulme said: "I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect's curves--flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can't bear the idea of that 'approximately'. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind." I prefer, though I know I have oodles of rotten wood in this brain, to be an artist-carpenter of over-thinking rather than give in to unmeasured approximations.

(When hanging pictures, however, speed is to be valued, and though a level is sometimes useful, I prefer to wing it).

Meanwhile, isn't what is taken to be over-thinking actually just a willingness to express what one thinks? No one looks at me staring into space and says, "You're over-thinking." But when I say, "Here's why J.J. Abrams is tiresome, in three parts," my company counters that I'm over-thinking. No. I'm over-saying maybe. I'm misjudging possibly. But I'm probably not over-thinking.

It's the case that my thinking is either mis-expressed or my company doesn't want to muster the energy to delve into the issue I've chosen. So, "You're overthinking" must mean, "I've judged that your topic doesn't require as much of my energy as you think it does."

Which leads us to the difference between sufficient thinking and over-thinking. It is subjective. One man's over-thinking is another man's sufficient thinking. Nothing is over- or sufficient but thinking makes it so. (Wait. . .Okay, no, that construction works here better than it does for Hamlet because he's positing an amoral world and I'm just saying that we each have to judge what's a sufficient amount of study for each of us, and that the only two options are over- and sufficient.)

When this charge of excessive mulling--"You're over-thinking"--is leveled by Jamie Samuelson--a made-up, genderless, vapid person I sometimes meet in a coffee shop--well, I don't suffer that kindly. When it's leveled by the prodigious thinker, R. Strong, I'm given pause. Is he right?

In this case, it has been leveled by a person who's often known as an over-thinker himself. (Full disclosure: I admit that even I said, "You're over-thinking" to JK Zokeler a year ago when he questioned whether a Jeff Bridges' comic monologue was funny or not. In some cases, it seems that we do just have to accept a premise, especially in comedy, but JK Zokeler had the same reaction to me that I'm having to R., so I'm not sure yet--except to say that that particular sketch seemed inconsequential enough--and that was what made it funny--to let slide without too much criticism, but I could be wrong).

So, now that I've thought about all of this--sufficient thinking, Facebook, Jeff Bridges, bowling (these last two go nicely together)--here's the flesh of the cow. My friendship with Rob is largely based on thinking about things in a way that non-Us's regularly deem to be over-thinking. So when he says, "You're overthinking" it is somewhat like Megan telling me, "You know, you're a bit too married." Now, I haven't been hurt by this at all, just prodded to more thinking, so that's great.

But I also wonder whether my arguments about Facebook with Rob are particularly vexing to me because the most consistent, vocal, in-my-literal-face friend I have continues to argue for a mode of friendship--status updating and homogeneous glibbery--that is wholly different from the one we most heartily enjoy.

If friendship is eggs and Facebook friendship is Tabasco, then bring it to my table please, and promptly. But if Facebook friendship has the potential to be Egg-beaters, as I suspect it does, then I will continue to say "No Thank You."

Floating

2011-12-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

My eyes are going--and it feels like fast--so much so that I'm drifting in highway lanes when I switch focus between my ever-weakened left and o'erstrained right; I'm royally squinting whenever I've had fewer than four cups of tea; and I'm entertaining, finally, the prospect of a life with pesky glasses and the pesky shift in identity those will bring about.

The newest insult has been the floaties. As I read, head tilted weirdly to counteract e'er-weakened left, a tiny little eye-mote bounces jauntily over each syllable as though my brain is teaching itself how to sound-out words again. This floating feature of fatigue has become much more common, and it's got half a mind--my floaty does--to organize into a colony of floaties (also known as floatators).

To taunt me, this new group will no doubt begin spelling out the number 30.

Last time I had an eye appointment, the doctor found a freckle in my right eye. I thought I'd been sun-screening my retina properly, but maybe I should have been using a higher SPF. As it is, my multiplying floaties are making me wonder if that sunny freckle-island is breaking up into mole atolls.

So while I'm trying to contemplate the deep complexities of British poetry, I'm forced to think concurrently about freckle-projection, brain trickery, eye blotching, and, very occasionally, I've been known to consider an imaginary young girl, dressed in an over-sized fairy dress, conjuring a tiny insect into my field of vision with her awful wand while softly singing, "Hey ho, Watch the fly, Hey ho, You're going to die."

This image is by Victorian fairy-painter Richard Dadd who, in an improbable verbal coincidence, murdered his father.

British Poetry + Increasingly Magnified Ocular Freckle = Odd Daydreams.

When I do die, I want to make sure there is some reading material in there with me. And some burrowing tool. I'd also like my Ohio University sweatshirt. Some smelling salts (just in case I'm still alive). Raisins. A Ham radio. Two golden chocolate coins for Charon.

And by next year, I'll have added glasses to that list, glasses with quarter-hipster frames and enough wideness to de-emphasize the huge size of my aging face.

English Interlude

2011-12-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

Today in compulsory reading I've drawn Samuel Beckett's Endgame, but I also did a Ted Hughes poem, which is more excerptable.

I don't necessarily like Ted Hughes poems, and the fact that he is connected to Sylvia Plath and her suicide makes him feel like he's a steely, cruel, freezing-rain kind of presence. But this poem about Plath and Daffodils, called "Daffodils," is warmer, and though the surface message--stop and smell the daffodils--is familiar, I think he's really talking about the naive feeling that we'll be able to accomplish something over and over again, that we'll keep repeating good times, and have, in a term I coined the other day, Wednesdays that are Neverendsdays.

The plot of the poem is this: Hughes and Plath are picking daffodils (a classic and parodied British poetry trope--This response is written by a guy named David Martin, not me). But instead of musing about their beauty or engaging in other Romantic drifts, Hughes and Plath sell them:

"[. . .] Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads--still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.

Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera--
Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.

Never guessed they were a last blessing
So we sold them [. . .]

On Paying My Debts

2011-12-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

In my ongoing need to repay debts my creditors have most likely forgotten about--and might I hasten to say that I hope God is this kind of creditor--I'm still trying to read books that I'd blown off in high school.

Unfinished books cause one minute of anxiety for: (every year they're not finished) X (the number of hundreds of pages in the book) X (1 + the percentage of the book finished). Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim is the pinnacle of what I'm calling the Anxiety of the Unfinished. Festering for 12 years. 300 pages. And I'd nearly completed it when I was asked to leave my senior year English Class on account of conduct unbecoming a preppy: I ventriloquized my teacher in a creative writing assignment, and since I'd wrongly convinced myself that I couldn't ever hurt anyone--being mostly inconsequential and good-natured--I failed to see how sharp I'd been.

C'est l'adolescence.

At that point, I never read anything I didn't have to, so I didn't finish Lord Jim, and, until yesterday, it remained nothing but a bookshelf-straining taunter, dog-eared up to the end, contemptible, contemptuous.

Lord Jim. 12 X 3 X 1.95 = 70.2 minutes of anxiety (plus at least two extra hours because of the circumstances of my chagrin). And I didn't know what was happening in it anyway! So, I was unmotivated to go back in, and yet after I'd spent a full few hours of light to moderate anxiety thinking involuntarily about its tiny, annotated arial, its baffling story-within-a-story, and its troubling imperial undertones, I finally took my medicine.

Because I've had it with saying "eventually," especially when it comes to small tasks. For too long I said I was going to re-read Lord Jim without any intention of actually doing so, and I finally figured out that this pose is useless.

I call it the Mom-in-the-Attic Conundrum, after my mom's consistent declaration that she will finally empty the attic when summer rolls around. Now, my mom is not a dishonest person. Maybe she believes she will clean out the attic each June 21st. (Maybe she's hinting that I should help her; meanwhile, if I say, especially in this context, that I will help her, I'll have to follow-through, so I'll hedge).

Anyway, I found myself falling too often into that pattern of anticipated achievement followed by prolonged procrastination followed by ultimate abandoning.

Now, I've swung around to the opposite extreme in some ways. Last summer, I told an old friend at a wedding that I would definitely see him the next time I was in Washington; his girlfriend looked at me with the "I know you're full of crap" eyes--we'd mostly fallen out of touch, and my banter was of a recognizable wedding genre: blustery bonhomie.

But I took her look as a deep challenge. I'm not the kind of person who fair-weather promises only to normal-weather back out. I sought him out in D.C. and we ate Ethiopian food. Because I will not be called a fibber. And because I love cardamom.

Then two weeks ago, after one beer too many at a poker game, I said that I would do an eating challenge with two other guys--the kind of empty-boast-bluff that used to sit in my stomach like a rock. But having boasted, I needed to carry out the deed; and the carrying-out-of-the-deed then sat in my stomach like a rock, but a nourishing rock of truth (and pork).

Lord Jim I also consumed. And so I've paid my debt to high school, as I paid my debt to college when I read The Adventures of Augie March, as I paid my debt to Central One Credit Union after I bought too many unread books, as I'll eventually pay my debt to my mom by buying her a lighthouse--which will not have an attic.

And then on to God (no anxiety equation), who isn't easy to re-read, keeps my credit score hidden, and has really weird, unliftable urns in his attic.

Heat

2011-12-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

This morning at midnight, Megan and I officially made it through November without turning on our heat--due in some part to unseasonable warmth and in some part to a recognition that our tiny future-pod of an apartment somehow gets up to 75 degrees even when it's chilly outside.

There are a lot of people to thank. First, my loving family. And all the folks at CAA, my agent, my scheduler. The wonderful designers of this airtight people-holder, which surrounds the two of our 98.6 degree bodies with a low volume of cooler air and has no window-leakage (not an industry term).

Thanks to our 95-year old downstairs neighbor who undoubtedly ups her heat at the first sign of a fear-mongery local news weather report. My father, who instilled in me an aversion to Thermostat-cranking. The good folks at Twinnings tea, who've marketed a warm beverage so delicious that we're compelled to turn on our stove every couple hours. Jimmy Carter. And Russell Athletic, which keeps me in hoodies.

Now the question is, How stubborn will I be? This morning, it had gotten down to 62 in here. There was a frost outside that had crystalized some spiderwebs on our deck, leading me to comment on "the frozen spiderweb of my heart." (I promised Megan as she left for work that I would not write that poem today, but the webs were awesome).

The short of it is that, Appalachian Warming aside, it's about to get butt-cold around here.

But I don't want to give in easily. So I think I'll turn on the heat when it gets below 59. That'll be the equivalent temperature of my old Grosvenor Street House, which, though it would rub its feet together, just couldn't figure out how to get warm.

Syd was a good roommate, if a little noisy.

In the winters of '06-'07 and '07-'08 (not '32), though the "heat" was pumping and the radiator smelled chocolate-y, I customarily slept in my dockworker's coat and orange winter hat, lovingly crocheted by my sister.

These sleepytime necessities combined with my scraggly beard to make me feel like kind of a tough-guy, and I enjoyed that, but Megan can't grow a good beard and doesn't have an orange hat, so we'll have to make the switch soon.

Next challenge, a December without hot water! No? January without Internet? Probably not. February without Walnuts? March without music? April without chard? C'mon, guys, let's do it! No-sandwich May? Baseball-free June?

July without arbitrarily-imposed restrictions adopted for the sake of providing some whimsical, possibly-deranged structure to my life? Never!

Contrails

2011-11-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

Among the obvious falsehoods I've taken to be truth--this: when I was in fifth grade or so, around the time I started getting homework assignments that might take more than an hour, and around the time I started working past my bedtime to finish those assignments, I believed that any human problem could be solved by staying up all night.

I distinctly remember pondering this and deciding that the scientists at NASA must, with concentration and caffeine, design all of their rockets at around 3am, a magical time of creativity I'd never consciously known. Failing that, I decided that even if they didn't design their rockets in schematic-strewn somnambulant sessions, they certainly could.

Staying up into the wee hours and beyond was the ultimate dedication, and I think my faith in the all-nighter was akin to my faith in America's inherent problem-solving abilities. There were people staying up all night--I would soon be one--and there were people making world-altering (and correct) decisions--I would be one of those too--who succeeded through acts of will and sleep deprivation. That was all.

Maybe I picked this up from my brother, who, at 17, was embarking on his all-nighter era. A prolific procrastinator, he'd been known to write 25-page term papers during just a few late-night hours, accompanied by Letterman and, later in the evening, by a mustard sandwich. As I fell asleep and he set off to work, my confidence that we would both be awake-and-okay at 7am was unshakable. He'd polish off an A-paper; I'd get my rest; Cheerios for everyone!

Thus, if I stayed up all night, I told myself, I could surely finish the 63 pages of reading I'd put off on the first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. (Before I zonked out at 10pm, 40 pages short, I might have learned that she had a glass eye, and I mightn't've, I can't quite remember).

Glass eye or no, my Blackwell failure only served to reinforce my idea about all-nighters. Sure, I hadn't tried hard enough, but if I ever did try hard, and if I ever worked through the witching hour and all the way to the finish line, dawn, I'd succeed.

This sort of idea is still a tempting fallacy. Someday, when I've expended all of my effort, done my very-stretched-best, then, yes, on that fair day my pumpkins will turn to carriages (I still tell myself that it wouldn't be that hard to write a novel in a month, or even over night, if someone was threatening me with death or aggressive tickling).

Incidentally, I also remember half-days from school (Wednesdays) seeming like periods of time during which the greatest things could be accomplished. One Wednesday, my friend Cheese and I vowed to complete the most difficult task we could think of. We would beat the video game Destiny of an Emperor (was there such a thing as Beating a Game before Nintendo? Did one beat Badminton, or Solitaire? Did the idea of Beating a Game change my generation's conception of fun? I, certainly, seem more drawn to the accomplishment of leisure than the diversion of it).

Though we reached the final battle, it was not our destiny to Beat the Game. I remember feeling disillusioned about half-days after that; they weren't afternoons of invincibility after all, even if I drank four cokes.

I had four cokes the first time I stayed up all night too, at the Sophomore Lock-in, a slumber party of sorts at my high school's gym. I didn't reverse any universal catastrophes that night, but I did watch Beverley Hills Cop and I did hit five straight 3-pointers as morning came on--a first and last for me.

It was quite something, and though the all-night experience lost some of its imagined luster, it did still seem exceptional, a feeling enhanced by out-of-body fatigue and the sense that those four hours between 1:30 and 5:30 were stolen, were never meant to have been a part of my life at all, sneaked.

2. When Mark McGuire hit his 62nd homerun, I switched channels all night to watch high-lights of the low line-drive over the left field wall.

McGwire's 62nd HR from David Levine on Vimeo.

Stupid Cardinals.

3. When the 2000 election got called and recalled and I kept declaring to my college hallmates, "I'm not going to sleep until there's a president." (As an aside, I don't remember much college-fervor for either candidate on campus, and that seems strange to me, as though that year is way, way in the past, back when it might have still been possible to avoid the forceful inanity which now demands a response).

4. Various scattered daybreaks which evade my memory and me, suns-under-the-clouds; but which I also know--from their small, residual warmths--to have existed.

5. Two all-night drives, one with Rob and Riley, one with Kaufmann. Saw the morning in the rearview.

6. And then there was a night rehearsing a play with Megan, after which rehearsal I tried to design the most glorious rocketship by asking her out, thought I'd failed, and learned that, though I couldn't do anything overnight, I could get big projects going full steam.

Meanwhile, I seem now to over-realize the limits of a day. At age 11, I felt infinity + 1 was a reasonable concept to be reasonably attained. I would do everything in life, and maybe I would do all of it in one, charmed, moonlit stretch. Wednesdays were Neverendsdays. 2am was a clock-stopped playground of achievement and productive mischief.

But as small tasks (like taking care of myself) expand to fill most of my time, and squandering fills the rest, I have to remind foot-dragging me to just start, just build the propulsion system. Figure out the insulation. Brainstorm the anti-gravity boots, though they'll eventually fail--those stupid boots, stupid sketches, stupid words I use to describe those stupid boots!--even if that failure takes more than an overnight.

I try to coax myself to keep imagining--even as they fade out--and keep designing--even as they sputter--my contrails.

English Interlude

2011-11-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's reading-draw brought me to some more D.H. Lawrence, specifically his essay "Why the Novel Matters." The gist is this:

"To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be a dead man in life."

Lawrence believed, maybe grandiosely, that novels give us a chance to "develop an instinct for life."

But in all this he stressed the fluctuations of the self and of the best characters:

"We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.

Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of to-morrow will have nothing to do with my tears of a year ago. If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself staggered in her inertia by my changing that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I might as well love the pepper pot."

Lawrence painting of a man kissing his non-pepper-pot

"In all this change, I maintain a certain integrity. But woe betide me if I try to put my finger on it. If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!--then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern. Which is no good."

I support that Lawrence points out the dangers of rigidity, but I think there are equal dangers in believing oneself to be totally fluid. We sense ourselves to be consistent, and that means something. I also like his idea that we construct public personalities that then become burdens. This contributes to my aversion to Facebook, since I know I would too-carefully craft myself.

Meanwhile, I read the quoted passage to Megan, always-changing, and she said, "Isn't Robert Downey Jr.'s girlfriend in Iron Man named Pepper Pots?" Yes, indeed.

Additionally, the line "a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post" reminded me of two lyrics: "She sits alone by lamp-post," and "Hello, lamp-post, whatchya knowin', I've come to watch your flowers growin'."

Clearly, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. I constantly try to organize those parts, and I constantly fail--in mostly pleasant ways.

Two Stories

2011-11-29T12:37:00.000-08:00

I heard two very different stories this past Saturday, both of which could be fairly termed "grotesque," and I don't quite mean that negatively.

First, The Trans-Siberian Orchestra--a bizarre cultural agglomerate of hair metal, Christmas, and Symphonic Rock--packaged a nice kernel of seasonal joy in some of the more garish wrapping paper I've ever had the luck to observe. The result was a strange piece of Xmas theater, mostly plotless.

TSO, FYI, plays a musical style that no mainstream grandmother likes for 11 months of the year and every mainstream grandmother loves in December. And while the band's Christmas mash-ups are pretty impressive, the rock-opera affectations that accompany those songs--consisting of spoken word narration, soundclips of Martin Luther King, prop-dragons, a gratuitous mention of Darfur, hydraulic lifts, spouting fire (hydraulic lifts spouting fire), an image of Condeleezza Rice, allusions to an angel drinking whiskey, sexy liturgical dancers, a guy dressed as a hobo, more fire, Winston Churchill, subliminal feti, and inexorable lasering--had me scratching my head.

It wasn't the underlying message that befuddled me; I love Christmas, and I even love weirdness. It was the fact that there was a feeling in the arena that this story made sense; that, somehow, the commercialized fever-dream had something to do with the spirit. Again, many of the songs are quite inspired, and I'm not necessarily criticizing the mix of silly and spiritual, Goddy and gaudy. I think what I responded to was that I was being told to feel a certain way--graced--but wasn't really being given the hints as to how or why.

Instead of loving Christmas more, I left thinking that maybe there was something about the audacity of hair metal that I could get behind. Those headbanging, hair-flippers knew they were being ridiculous up there, and they seemed to be having fun. It was only when they nudged me toward feeling something they hadn't earned that I got wary (Martin Luther King? Really?).

But then the Gladys in row 16 banged her head right along with them, her perm awash in pyrotechnic, and I tapped my feet too. On the whole, a fun time with family.

***

The next story has no moral and made no claim to ultimate truth. It was told to me a couple hours after the TSO concert. There was no flashiness. Winston Churchill made no appearance. It was quietly grotesque.

My friend Dave--a somewhat bizarre personal agglomerate of Joaquin Phoenix, Gumby, and an Elk--told Megan and me about a recent morning when he and his girlfriend were hurrying out of the house.

As they backed out of their driveway, they spotted a deer curled out on the side of the road. Instead of lightly gasping and muttering something about the "poor creature," the two of them had an idea. It seems they'd been interested in a hunting license already, interested in harvesting, in true woodsy style, some venison (Dave's girlfriend grew up a hunter/gatherer of sorts in one of the remoter enclaves of Alaska).

The deer had been dragged to the side of the road by the driver who'd hit her, and Dave and his girlfriend weren't sure what the protocol was here. They had no need for damaged doe, and they'd heard something about New York's regulation of roadkill. But they thought that if they cut into the deer and it was still warm, they might be able to make use of it.

As Dave's girlfriend approached with her pocket knife, she hesitated, he hesitated, and the deer, which had been knocked hard by an oncoming truck, lifted its head and looked at them.

"That must have been horrifying," I said, not because of the shock, but because what they'd considered a possible lucky break was now an ethical quandary.

"And I was running late," Dave said.

They decided to euthanize the deer, but just before they did, their neighbor--a local cop it turns out--approached and asked if they needed a tag for it. I found this part of the story darkly--I repeat, darkly--farcical. In a moment of natural beauty and sadness, delays kept arising, the way they tend to in conscience-testing times.

They did want a tag, they said, and, yes, they did want the compassionate arm of the law to handle the poor creature, which they would treat well and value through the winter, and share.

That's how I came to hear a true, grotesque story. And that's how tonight's supper came to my table.

Spring Literary Festival

2011-11-29T09:14:00.000-08:00

May 9th through May 11th, 2012, Ohio University welcomes Denise Duhamel, Terrance Hayes, Amy Hempel, Richard Rodriguez, and Susan Orlean to the Spring Literary Festival.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books are Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). A bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me), translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David Gonzalez, came out in 2008 with Bartleby Editores (Madrid.) Her work has been anthologized widely, including several issues of The Best American Poetry. (Bio courtesy of the author).

A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is a professor at Florida International
University in Miami. William D. Waltz, in Rain Taxi, writes "As I read her work...I feel like I'm taking a sneak peek at the future: Duhamel hints at a poetry that transcends irony and alienation. There's plenty of both here, but she's busy working them over...pushing so hard that the next step may be beyond what is known."

***

One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. (Bio courtesy of Blue Flower Arts).

His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Lighthead, his most innovative collection, investigates how we construct experience, presenting “the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time.” In Muscular Music, Hayes takes reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In Wind in a Box he explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality with the unifying motif being the struggle for freedom within containment. In Hip Logic, Hayes confronts racism, sexism, religion, family structure, and stereotypes with overwhelming imagery.

Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase, very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. He writes, "There are recurring explorations of identity and culture in my work and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the forms in which I voice them. I aspire to a poetic style that resists style. In my newest work I continue to be guided by my interests in people: in the ways community enriches the nuances of individuality; the ways individuality enriches the nuances of community."

A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.

***

Amy Hempel (more information to follow).

***

Richard Rodriguez, one of America’s most important essayists and a master of the “personal essay,” writes about the intersection of his personal life with some of the great vexing issues of America. (Bio courtesy of Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau).

Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrant parents, grew up in Sacramento, California. He was an undergraduate at Stanford University. He went on to spend two years in a religious studies program at Columbia. He then studied English Renaissance literature at the Warburg Institute in London and was a doctoral candidate at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1982, he published an intellectual autobiography, “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.” Widely celebrated and criticized, this book is today read in many American high schools and colleges. A memoir of a “scholarship boy”, “Hunger” remains controversial for its skepticism regarding bilingual education and affirmative action.

In 1992, Rodriguez published “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father,” a "philosophical travel book," concerned with the moral landscape separating "Protestant America" and "Catholic Mexico." “Days of Obligation” was a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1993.

In 2002, Rodriguez published “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.” In a series of essays concerned with topics as varied as the cleaning of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cubism, and Broadway musicals, Rodriguez undermines America’s black and white notion of race and proposes the color brown for understanding the future (and past) of the Americas.

Rodriguez is currently working on two new books, one that deals with the 'Desert Religions' (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and their role in the 21st century, and the other about beauty.

As a journalist, Richard Rodriguez worked for over two decades for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco; he has also been a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. He currently works for New American Media in San Francisco.

Many Americans probably recognize him from his television appearances on PBS. For more than ten years he has appeared as an essayist on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer”. His televised essays on American life were honored in 1997 with a George Peabody Award.

In 1993, Richard Rodriguez was given the Frankel Medal (now renamed “The National Humanities Medal”), the highest honor the federal government gives to recognize work done in the humanities.

***

As one of the most creative literary journalists of today, Susan Orlean is the author of the best-selling book, The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Oscar-winning movie, Adaptation. (bio courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

Her latest work, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend tells the story of Rin Tin Tin's journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. From the moment in 1918 when Corporal Lee Duncan discovers Rin Tin Tin on a World War I battlefield, he recognizes something in the pup that he needs to share with the world. Rin Tin Tin's improbable introduction to Hollywood leads to the dog's first blockbuster film and over time, the many radio programs, movies, and television shows that follow. The canine hero's legacy is cemented by Duncan and a small group of others who devote their lives to keeping him and his descendants alive.

At its heart, Rin Tin Tin is a poignant exploration of the enduring bond between humans and animals. But it is also a richly textured history of 20th century entertainment and entrepreneurship and the changing role of dogs in the American family and society. Almost ten years in the making, Orlean's first original book since The Orchid Thief is a tour de force of history, human interest, and masterful storytelling - something she shares with audiences in her multimedia presentations on the subject.

Orlean became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. Orlean has written dozens of "Talk of the Town," "Profiles” and "Reporter at Large" articles, as well as a series of American popular culture columns, called "Popular Chronicles." The "Chronicles" thus far have included subjects such as an article on taxidermy, umbrella inventors, designer Bill Blass, Harlem high school basketball star Felipe Lopez, the friends and neighbors of Tonya Harding, and D.J. Red Alert, a hip-hop radio star in New York.

Prior to joining The New Yorker, Orlean was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also at Vogue, where she wrote about numerous figures in both the music and fashion industries. She has also contributed to Esquire, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Orlean has written several books, including, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Ordinary People, Red Sox and Blue Fish, Saturday Night, Lazy Little Loafers, and The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida.

Orlean teaches creative writing at NYU and has been a writer-in-residence at several universities. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She lives in upstate New York and Los Angeles with her husband and son.

English Interlude, ctd. (plus)

2011-11-28T16:46:00.000-08:00

Since last we spoke--over Welsh rarebit and Darjeeling--I read poems by Thom Gunn that I liked and a play by Harold Pinter--The Dumb Waiter--that I did not.

(Aside: a scene from Pinter's Betrayal was among my first exercises in Basic Acting, in 2000. As a freshman, I had to act with a senior named Joanna as we discussed our various infidelities--we were supposed to kiss during the scene, but I'd only kissed one person at the time, so I resisted--until the final, when I gave her a little peck on the side-lip to earn my A.

The Pit, at Holy Cross. Site of many stirrings.

Oddly-structured, Betrayal moves from 1977 backwards in time and is somewhat groundbreaking, or curtain-breaking, or clock-reordering. Yes, it was a clock-reordering triumph.

Inspired by that achrnological movement, I might have first mentioned the Patrick Marber play, Closer, a scene from which I performed as a junior, in 2002. In Closer, I had to discuss various infidelities and perversities with my friend Sara, after having rehearsed with my girlfriend at the time.

All of this was terribly unpleasant--asking these folks if they'd cheated on me and such--and I remember that in the performance of the scene, I forgot one line: "I love you." Which seems somewhat poetic.

Had I shouted for a hint as I stammered onstage, there might have been an awkward moment with the prompter).

Meanwhile, today I'm back to reading my old friend D.H., Mr. Lawrence if you're nasty. He would have relished the above theatricality, enamored of and enabled by Freud.

What a badass!

But I don't want to quote from his poem, "Snake"; better to include a bit from "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is":

"Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean englishman, outside?
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new

demand on his understanding

and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his

intelligence,

a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own."

***

Lawrence isn't pulling punches, by any means, and it's interesting to compare this poem with a book I'm reading, No More Parades, in which Ford Madox Ford also writes pugilistically, aiming to split the stiff-upper-lip of the English, which he seems to believe disqualified many of them from emotional maturity. (By the way, FMF had real gall--he was born Ford Hermann Huefer and somehow dubbed himself Ford Madox Ford, the former sounding too German; for the remainder of this post, therefore, I shall be known as Dave Walter Dave).

This idea about uprightness hindering emotional flexibility seems to have been very important for the British in the wake of World War I (many war poems from the time lampoon the gentlemanly warrior, sipping his tea while the shrapnel flies). It's also curious to note that Lawrence's poem, written just months before his death, was published the year of the stock market crash, 1929, when the undeserved, well-heeled life described above might have seemed particularly odious and particularly parasitic to a coal miner's son.

Himself suspicious of his own lack of emotional pliability and his own nouveau-upper-class tastes--such as anthologized British Literature and Darjeeling tea--Dave Walter Dave is happy to consider this poem, particularly on Cyber Monday.

May I continue to be suspicious of over-hawked Audi's, continue to eschew being "quite the thing." And may I never turn into a mushroom of conspicuous confumption (Dave Walter Dave has coined this word, for conforming consumption, and hereby trademarks it).

--DWD, Athens, Ohio

English Interlude

2011-11-24T06:34:00.000-08:00

For the next 26 days, Wisconsin of the mind. . .

This morning, I looked at "The Metaphysical Poets," an essay from 1921 by T.S. Eliot. Here's a good passage about poets that also works, I think, as a description of the Montaignean essayist (essayer sounds less insider maybe):

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

Dusty

2011-11-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

In January, I started a crying journal, not as therapy, and not out of need. I just got curious one day about my own tearing-up because, although I'm pretty steady about most things, I can, in the words of Rob Strong, "get dusty" from time to time. And I thought if I logged those moments, I'd have a calendar of my--what?--lapses.

It'd be a funny-sad kinda journal: Pixar movie, church hymn, Fannie Mae commercial, general depression, general elation, general downbeatedness, guilt, Pixar movie. And at the end of the year, I'd write a funny-sad essay, with dates and stats, about the way I let my emotions get manipulated, about real and periodic sadness, about unexpected, ambivalent joy and overwhelmedness (this is a five syllable word; please read it as such).

The Pixar movie list above is an approximation of the first month's entries--once every four days, a little welling.

Then I forgot about the crying journal, maybe because I suddenly dried up, maybe because I'd gotten too conscious of my own dustiness: since I was paying close attention to the groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness, said groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness wasn't coming out of its hole anymore.

(You know the old adage: a watched groundhog of ambivalent overwhelmedness never boils. Or is it that the watched pot calls the kettle a racist? I can't remember. Either way, I'd mostly stopped tearing up.)

Anyway, I bring up this journal because I would have had to make three entries in it today, if it still existed. And they would have provided me just the material I would have wanted for that longer essay about emotional manipulation and the like. Because they were weird/typical moments.

First: the new Muppet Movie.
Second: Modern Family.
Third: Reading the sad, reflective words of the sister of a friend of mine.

So, at about 3pm, Kermit The Frog had me dusting all over my shirt collar. Why? Are the emotional machinations of the Muppets so complex, or original, or close-to-home? Maybe. But I think kids' movies slay me because I have a blind spot for simple emotions now, for innocent messages about loneliness or bravery. Thinking I'm beyond that stuff, I get walloped.

Also, cartoons and, in this case, puppets are just enough unreal to do something a little extra to me. If I see a person in a sympathetic situation, I put up all my defenses: don't feel too much, this person could hurt you. Watch out, you're being manipulated.

Plus, I'm still analyzing. Is this a realistic depiction of devastation? I may think. Does Richard Dreyfus deserve the Oscar?

A puppet is abstracted enough to let me wallow. I'm not in the position either to withdraw from a real person or comfort a real person, and so maybe I'm allowed to relate to the cartoon. Somehow, real person + dramatic situation = unreal; while fake frog + dramatic situation = precisely my emotional level.

For the emotionally-calloused (stunted?), The Muppet Movie is a safe place for a little sniffle. And has there been a movie in the last three years that's been sadder than Toy Story 3? I honestly had to stifle an audible sob in the theater. How can that be? My ideas are evolving on this point.

***

Modern Family, meanwhile, has purely conditioned me to tear up. It's done so with structure and with music. At the twenty-eighth minute of every episode, there's a lesson, often having to do with husbands and wives, with taking things for granted, with seeing beyond one's own needs--in other words, Modern Family is cuttin' onions. And when W.G. Snuffy Walden plays his little theme, I remember hearing that theme from last week, and we're off to the water park--I've been eroded by the cruel pattern of a viola.

Coincidentally, Kermit the Frog singing "Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me" was the first perp of the day, and Jay Pritchett talking about "dreamers and realists" was the second. I'm a softy for dreams today, and somehow made to snot all over myself when considering the co-existence of idealism and reality, of puppets and real people, especially when there's a soundtrack behind that co-existence.

D.H. Lawrence, the most famous writer named David, put this experience nicely in his poem, "Piano": "In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song / Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong."

Elsewhere in the poem, he writes, "The glamour / Of childish days is upon me," which also sounds like an explanation for my Kermit-Krying, my Buzz Light Year bawling. The simplified goodness of a kids' movie and my normal jadedness co-mingle in the graduated cylinder of mine heart to produce a chemical bubbling over--an electron of emotion breaking away in the reaction. "My manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance. I weep like a child for the past," writes Lawrence.

(The only other poem of his that I know is about Tortoise coitus, so let's not think he was a sentimental push-over).

And then I have to wonder why those two pop-culture heartstring-pullers--Kermie and Dunphy--can find themselves in the same league as the last journal-able offense, when I had the eye-twinge while reading my friend's sister's holiday letter: in the last few months, she's had just about all the species of grief and is still able to write an affecting Thanksgiving message about gratitude.

We know this pattern. It's derivative, maybe, but it's not at all worn out. How many times have I been trapped into blubbering as I hear about that crusty, old sailor--perseverance? How many more?

You shouldn't be able to feel that way, that brave, I think. I couldn't do that in your situation. You're strong, I'm weak, so strong, and Fozzy's hilarious, and I love my wife, so Damn you W.G. Snuffy Walden--or I hurt her--, but either way I'm glad you're sort of okay, still a dreamer, yet Happy Thanksgiving--in spite of myself.

English Interlude

2011-11-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

For the next 27 days or so. . . Milwaukee. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today, I'm reading poems by Louis MacNeice (a contemporary of Auden's). I'd previously convinced myself this person's name was Louise, so I've learned the gender of a major poet before breakfast, at least.

Here're two sections from his poem, "The Sunlight on the Garden," written in a very peculiar form. Sestina-ish, I think.

"The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon

[. . .]

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden."

A cynic's love poem? Or a skeptic's? Or a Bogart's? Whatever way, it works for me this morning as I recover from a cross-northeast, 15-hour drive that was marked by torrential rain and Megan-fancy.

Boss Hog

2011-11-21T16:48:00.000-08:00

I began my training with a pot pie.

Last night in Portsmouth, Ohio, a couple hours from home, plus a biscuit and whipped butter. I figured a 9:30 dinner would satisfy, enough of everything to pull me through a morning without Honey Bunches of Oats, a mid-morning without apples, a late morning without granola bars, and a midday without ham sandwich.

I denied myself those daily treats in preparation for The Boss Hog Challenge, a savory pile of meat offered by Kiser's Barbeque in Athens. In order to defeat this challenge, and win election into the Kiser's Hall of Fame, here is what I had to consume:

Two Half Pound Angus Burgers
3 pieces of bacon
4 oz of cheese
1/2 pound of chopped pork
Lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles - 4 oz of sauce--all on a couple buns.

And

One pound of french fries, all within 30 minutes.

For most of the day, I felt mystical. Though I used to intentionally and unintentionally fast--for semi-religious and semi-absentminded reasons, respectively--I'm now on a regimented schedule that has me Pavlovian for cereal at 7:16am. So, missing a meal felt weird. I was equal parts woozy and on edge, growing less and less patient with the remaining work I had to do, and more and more pumped for game-time.

Joe and I pushed it back to two, so that we could get really hungry. This felt foolish, a mockery of real hunger, and we decided we'd donate some money afterwards (we haven't yet, but we'll figure out a way to make up for our gluttony).

I felt the same way today that I remember feeling when I had a play to do at night, when I couldn't really focus on anything else the rest of the day. Boss Hog beckoned. I had to go on stage. It had reordered my day.

Please stand-by for a moment of postmodernism as I compare my eating challenge to the poems of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in a Smörgåsbord-mixing of low and high culture.

She has a poem called "Clochard" which, to me, describes the feeling of a singular day better than just about anything else. Here she's talking about a guy dozing in public, underneath a cathedral:

"He sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams,
his thick beard swarming toward the sun

The grey chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,
hellephants, hippopotoads, croakadilloes, rhinocerberuses,
behemammoths, and demonopods,
that omnibestial Gothic allegro vivace)
unpetrify

and examine him with a curiosity
they never turn on me or you."

The word "unpetrify" is the one I've remembered for awhile and the one that got me out of my chair to scour my Polish poetry section (one book) tonight. She's saying that there are certain people, events, phenomena that reorder the world such that even the stone creatures on a cathedral seem to be altered, to take notice.

This is a ridiculously lofty way to talk about an eating challenge, but it's a good way to describe the misguided feeling of importance the eating challenge gave me, the feeling, as I said, of a singular day--to wit, the strip mall parking lot, the Used Chevy Dealership, the cineplexes and the duplexes and the stoplights seemed to unpetrify and take notice--that's Dave Wanczyk, they said, and he's about to do something stupid.

But before that stupid thing, still waiting in my apartment, I peed my pants a little while zipping up.

In a rush to get out the door to meet Joe, in a rush of excitement, a rush. So there I was, about to demand the attention of the whole inorganic world, and I had to change my jeans, trip over my shoes, misplace my keys--

But off I was at last. We sat--Joe, James, Zach, and I--for 20 minutes, uttering thinly-disguised boldnesses, as men will do. We were scared of the food-pile.

I felt pressure. I've wanted to do an eating challenge since Man Vs. Food came out a couple years ago, and maybe before that. I pride myself on my pigging abilities and on accepting the rules of arbitrary games (Megan and I are trying to get through November without turning the heat on, just cuz). So, I was pacing a little bit, maintaining my stone-face, the main defense I have against the creepy-crawly, bangy-boomy terrors of the world--and the world's voluminous pork.

***

We'd been in Portsmouth, Megan and I, because she was talking to Ohio teachers about good ways to educate minds, and I was talking to myself about taming my stomach. Could I meet my limits and say rudely to my limits, Excuse me, but I have a previous engagement with sauce?

Could I make this eating challenge not so much a measure of manhood as a measure of strength in the face of fry? Megan was on my side. She knew what this meant to me. She had tea at Bob Evans.

***

So flashing forward again to Kiser's. Finally, I saw the sled-ful of food I was set to decimate: 9-inch tall sandwich, acre of potato.

And this is where the story gets hard to tell, because I actually did it, I won, despite the disgusting size of the challenge (and I mean disgusting as it originated--from Latin dis (expressing reversal) + gustus 'taste.') That is, afterward, I was quite concerned that I was about to reverse everything that I'd just tasted, if you take my meaning--and please do. I'm tired and meat-heavy, and I need you to understand without me putting forward too much effort.

My secret to eating: I didn't chew. And, on the first bite, I purposefully got a lot of sauce in my mustache so that I'd feel properly primal. Add to that my aversion to leftover food, my Polish eat-more heritage, and my occasional ability to ignore future pain. . .

17 minutes and the food was all in my upper-gullet, where it still happily(?) resides, churning and churning in the widening gyre.

But I'd done it. I tried to take it in stride, act like I'd been there before. I'm not even impressed with myself, that's how boss I am. I'd made top ten of all time (no one's going to challenge the nine minute record).

I'd gotten a couple claps from some of Southern Ohio's Barbeque fans. I'd accepted kudos from my co-competitors, claimed my free t-shirt, had my picture taken for the wall--I'm sure I'll look my bloaty best.

And when I got home, it was raining, I'd lately urinated on myself, I'd lately eaten an anvil of animal, and I found that I was locked out of my house.

"Boss Hog's Revenge," Zach called it. Yes. And it's the revenge--worth it--that keeps on exacting.

English Interlude, ctd.

2011-11-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

For the next 29 days or so. . .Something about Milwaukee. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today I read seven poems by W.H. Auden (that's Wystan Hugh to his parents. . .see earlier note for related joke).

This morning, I thought it was strange that I'd picked Auden twice already, but Megan assured me the odds were not as against it as I'd figured. 30 slips of paper. I get Auden, who's in there twice, twice in the first six days. And twice in the last three. Calculation please?

Here are some of my favorite lines anywhere, from the poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" (I think Time is talking, but whatever):

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

English Interlude

2011-11-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

For the next 29 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Yesterday I read two poems and an essay by W.H. Auden (that's Wystan Hugh to his parents, and Wysty Baby to his Karaoke buddies -- 1907-1973).

Auden is maybe my favorite poet. I love "September 1, 1939," and "The Shield of Achilles," which seems to me like a post-war companion piece, is actually terrifying as WHA imagines "An unintelligible multitude, / A million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign.

And then,

"Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place;
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief."

In "In Praise of Limestone," which is extremely dense, he includes this good line: "The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, / Having nothing to hide."

The essay "Poetry as Memorable Speech" encapsulates for me why I like this fellow so much. He writes, "The test of a poet is the frequency and diversity of the occasions on which we remember his poetry." I tend to remember him, often.

He continues,

"A great many people dislike the idea of poetry as they dislike over-earnest people, because they imagine it is always worrying about the eternal verities.
Those [. . .] who try to put poetry on a pedestal only succeed in putting it on the shelf. Poetry is no better and no worse than human nature; it is profound and shallow, sophisticated and naive, dull and witty, bawdy and chaste in turn" (2440).

***

Today, I read some Jean Rhys stories, both of which were better than the novels of her I've read--Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. The most memorable line--thanks Auden--was from the perspective of an immigrant in London who thought to herself, "I think that sleeping is better than no matter what else."

I, too, am tired. And over-earnest. But a little tea should fix both.

Batatas

2011-11-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

Let me just tear down the curtain. I have two topics today and it's my goal to unite them. Those topics are football and sweet potatoes.

Footballs and sweet potatoes are essentially the same shape, but I don't think that will do to bring them together in any coherent way.

I tend to like both of these entities, but when the only thing a topic has in common with another topic is Me, that usually spells doom for the resulting composition.

There is some internet fact to be found that could probably lead me to a meshy (and messy) essay (meshay) during which I imagine (along with you readers) that Earnest Byner ate sweet potatoes the day of "The Fumble," and that those two things are inexorably linked in American Lore.

This potential post might take a little too long, though, and would be too cute by half a yard.

It wasn't that hard: "Earnest Byner, the Ravens' director of player development, purchased the turkeys.
Mars Supermarkets donated the side dishes, including cranberries, stuffing and sweet potatoes" (Baltimore Sun, 2001).

But, don't worry, I've got it. I can address football and sweet potatoes--together--by looking at the constantly surprising detours conversations take--I'm thinking of a specific conversation I had today that just happened to touch on both SPs and FB. And I can address both topics by asking What makes a thing a thing? In other words, What makes football football? and What makes a sweet potato a sweet potato?

Context: For lunch, the committee for the Propagation of Anglophilia (otherwise known as me and two other teachers who are leading a British Literature class) met for Bangers and Mash, American Style. That is, we all had a sausage dip (such a thing exists, 14-year olds; I understand your grinning). And some of us had fries.

I had sweet potato fries.

Just as in any conversation, an angel passed by at the seven-minute mark.

(As you will see in the latter link, this conversational phenomenon--the idea that groups pause after a certain amount of time no matter the raucousness--has (dubious, but intriguing) evolutionary roots: "It has been postulated that this seemingly impromptu onset [. . .] dates back to pre-historic man, [who was] hardwired [. . .] to listen for the approach of dangerous animals."

Dustin, Matt, and I, having ordered burgers, may have been listening for the approach of delicious animals).

At this preternatural pause in the conversation, Dustin asked me, "Do you like sweet potatoes?"

Now, here's something that's long-preoccupied me. Not sweet potatoes, but the conversational ability to say relatively thankless things. When "Do you like sweet potatoes?" and similar questions cross the minds of most-people--maybe even me--most-people dismiss those questions.

That's not suitable conversation-kindling, we think. Not spark(l)ing enough. Maybe even too personal somehow. He'll think I'm dumb for asking.

I didn't grow up in a family that excelled at chatter of this kind, but now I value it highly. I remind myself that sometimes it's my duty, even when all that's available is a mundane question or a conventional remark or even something that makes me sound a little ridiculous, to keep the conversational beach ball in the air, lest it fall onto the baseball field of timidity and be deflated by the vindictive groundskeeper of awkwardness.

Do you like sweet potatoes? is just as good a place to start as anywhere else, and it led somewhere relatively thrilling.

I said that I did like sweet potatoes--I give the sweet potato a B+; Dustin said that he didn't like them, too mushy (not much in this exchange, admittedly). But then Matt contended, "Sweet potatoes aren't really tuber enough to be potato, nor are they squash enough to be squash." He's not a fan.

Again, this is the sort of Yoda-ish thing I usually say, and it just as usually leads folks to check their watches. But, in my opinion, this kind of declaration is the rich-orange-buttery-brownsugary flesh of the best discussions!

The only problem is that we don't have readily-canned responses to unconventionally interesting statements about sweet potatoes. So, uncannily interesting people, when they make said statements about sweet potatoes, are often left feeling like they've broken some social rule.

But this line of potato-thought must be followed to its roots, and so I, undaunted, asked, "Now, what exactly is a tuber?" Matt readily responded. And, because of Dustin's opening entreaty we were allowed to get to this morsel:

"Matt, are you arguing this afternoon that the sweet potato isn't a potato at all?"

"I think that is what I'm arguing," Matt said. We had defeated the passing angel through a sheer act of collective, yammering will. We had talked about potatoes for eight minutes.

And Matt was onto something, according to Wikipedia: "Although it is sometimes called a yam in North America, the sweet potato is not in the yam family, nor is it closely related to the common potato [. . .] but the name which stayed was the indigenous Taino name of 'batata'. This name was later transmuted to the similar name for a different vegetable, the ordinary potato, causing confusion from which it never recovered."

So sweet potatoes aren't potatoes. Matt was right. And he was right about their tuberousness, too. I'd thought wrongly that all tubers were potatoes, as all squares are rectangles; but sweet potatoes, which are not potatoes, are sometimes referred to as uber-tubers nonetheless. And as for the claim that SPs are squashy, well, there is such a thing as a Sweet Potato Squash.

So, what makes a sweet potato a sweet potato? I guess I'm still not sure, but I know what a sweet potato isn't, and I know they're hard to get really crispy.

When I was halfway through my french-fried batatas, we turned our attention to football--from Tubers to Tebows--and we decided the increase in concussions in the NFL is unsettling. We came up with four policy proposals to limit injury:

1. If a player is guilty of an egregious hit, he should be ejected, and his team should have to play defense with 10 players for the rest of the game.

2. Players should not be allowed to wear masks, and would therefore not lead with their heads.

3. Kickoffs should be throw-offs from the 50-yard line so that Special Teams collisions won't be as intense.

4. Offensive and Defensive Linemen should have to start plays standing up so that they hit each other with less force. No more three-point stances.

Radically, I put forth the idea that tackling should only be legal on first down and that second and third down should be played as flag football, encouraging more passing, and discouraging physical aggression.

"What you're describing is football that wouldn't really be football," Matt said.

And now we were back in sweet-potato-land. Is the sweet potato a potato or a tuber or a squash? Two of those three? None of those three? Is football the strategic advancement of a ball toward a goal-line or is it just collisions?

To save ourselves, and future generations of football players, from headaches, we should just agree that it's about the strategy (plus a dash of hitting) and adopt the suggestions put forth in my controversial conversational white paper.

Incidentally, sweet potatoes can save us from headaches, too. They also make an exemplary meal for wide receivers, and if you do happen to take a hard hit over the middle, Earnest Byner, they're wonderful for bringing down the swelling.

English Interlude

2011-11-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

For the next 30 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading every day from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (20th Century). There are 30 slips of paper in my old (I should say aged so it doesn't sound like I have an Old Milwaukee hat) Milwaukee Brewers hat; each slip has a name of a writer. . .and so on and so forth. (See earlier note).

Today I read the surprisingly great WWI poems of Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), having read the surprisingly great WWII poems of Keith Douglas and Charles Causley yesterday. I say surprisingly great because the topic itself usually overwhelms this kind of poem, and, 65-95 years on, they seem pretty well-worn and (understandably) maudlin.

But these poems are very specific and represent, according to the anthology, the working class, grunt infantry perspective as opposed to the better-known, and pretty good poems of Wilfred Owen, which are from an officer's perspective.

Here's a memorable description of a rat in a trench, from Rosenberg's poem "Break of Day in the Trenches."

"Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life [. . .]"

And now for my daily draw: W.H. Auden. Looks like I'm headed back to WWII.

Ham

2011-11-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

"Why don't you marry it?"

That's what my first grade enemies used to ask me when I said, "I love ham," in the cafeteria at Federal Street South Elementary School. Every boy in my class was named either Kyle or Josh, and they all seemed to believe that ham was stupid and that love meant marriage (also, that pegging me with a red rubber ball at the red brick wall was the tops).

Now, let me be honest. If I ever did marry a lunchmeat, I'd choose, without reservations, to be pronounced man-and-ham. It's the superior coldcut: salty enough to be familiar; pink enough to seem exotically highbrow.

And I think ham would really get me, you know? Like, we'd make a connection and figure out this crazy-thing-called-life----together. And anyway, I always go for just-under-the-radar attachments. None of that trendy stuff for this guy. I didn't love the prom queen. I don't love turkey. I'm a ham guy.

Quick pause for today's ham-handed half-fact: some people apparently prefer ham that comes from the left leg of a pig--the sinister side--reasoning that a pig scratches itself with its right leg, making that meat tougher. I've always heard, though, that the more an animal's muscle is used, the tastier it is. Not only am I a ham guy, then. I'm a right-legged ham guy, all the way.

So why don't I marry the right leg of a ham?

Maybe I will. What do you think of that, Josh? (That always seemed to shut 'em up).

But besides all of the above, I'm really more interested in why these Kyles taunted ham so hard, or, really, why they taunted love so hard. Let's think about "Why don't you marry it?" as a logical retort, shall we?

The comeback--remember when having a good comeback was pretty much the most important thing, and remember that you probably haven't thought about comebacks for most of the rest of your life?--is obviously meant to insult. You love something? Gross. Then why don't you marry it?

Maybe I was being subtly shamed for having a feeling about anything. Anyway, their mild bullying seemed a little loaded, like they were teasing me for being a sissy, like they were hamophobic.

But if I can be so bold, it seems like these Joshes really had a problem with linguistic inauthenticity, like they were calling me on my pigshit.

Dear sir, I say, I question your so-called "love" for this pork product (they'd make air quotes with their fish-sticky hands). I believe you to be exaggerating, and it stands to reason that if you "loved" ham as you claim, you'd most certainly want to marry it. Since you don't, I presume, want to marry it--ham--you must not "love" it. I'll thank you to be more precise with your diction. Point for me, what?

First of all, that's clearly a fallacy, Kyle. You love your mom and, even though you're a momma's boy, you don't want to marry her. So, it's clear that one can love someone or something without that love leading to marriage. Second, what you don't understand, Josh, is that, like the many and splendoured varieties of ham, there, too, are many and splendoured varieties of love, and that "love," in this particular cafeteria milieu, is metonymic for "strong preference." I, then, have a strong preference for ham.

Why couldn't I have thought of that then? "Strong preference" would have been a great comeback.

But if I had a "strong preference" for ham then why, they might have countered, wouldn't I marry it?

Touche. (Those Kyles had me at every turn).

Luckily, even though my feelings were always a tiny bit hurt by their ham-slams, I had my sandwich to soothe me. One slice, on white bread, American Cheese and Animal Crackers.

And I did, in the end, marry a ham.

The best revenge is living well, and revenge is a dish best served coldcut. So pardon me while I enjoy my second ham sandwich of the day.

And, in summation: bite me, Josh.

English Interlude

2011-11-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

For the next 30 days or so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading every day from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (20th Century). There are 30 slips of paper in my old Milwaukee Brewers hat, each one with a name of a writer. I pick; I read. And I thought I'd chronicle that reading here in the form of snippets of text, perhaps related to my own blogposts.

Nov. 15th reading:

"Vergissmeinnicht," by Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. (*means "Forget me not")
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Tennis Lessons

2011-11-15T07:33:00.000-08:00

This fall, I've had a Tennissance.

I've played more in the last two months than I have in the last ten years, and some of the matches have put me back in touch with the eleven-year old me, in short red and yellow shorts (c'mon mom, really?!), who picked up (and promptly broke) his first real, non-hand-me-down racket in the early nineties.

Thanks to my brother, I was pretty good for my age; he'd spent a couple summers beating up on me on our street-court (which had a crack for a net and fire hydrant baselines). And so when I met Mr. Kells, heroic Mr. Kells, I could hold my own, at least when it came to hitting the ball. Finer facets of the game were beyond my grasp, as we'll see.

I had my first lesson (fancy-schmancy, I know) with my friend Cheese (short for "Cheesehead"--origin, mostly unknown). We met Mr. Kells, a 71 year-old-retiree who looked a little like a slim George Kennedy, at his house. On his backyard court, he taught me how to hit with top-spin while Cheese stood idly by thinking about video games and chilling (he works for Google now, so his distant mind was in the right place).

The history channel was new then and I remember that Mr. Kells always had it on before and after the lesson, if it wasn't Wimbledon time. Now I know why. He'd been a P.O.W. in World War II and his interest persisted.

At the time, I didn't know that. He was just the guy who provided my tennis lessons and Sprite once a week during the summer. And, in fact, I didn't know about Mr. Kells's history until today when I searched online for a picture of him. Just this past Friday, a first-person article was published detailing his experience in the European theater. I haven't spoken to him in fifteen years, but his voice was recognizable:

"The squad of Germans (about eight to ten people) were shooting away from our hole, they knew exactly where we were, but the bullets were glancing off the road," Mr. Kells told the writer, Elise Forbes Tripp. "They deliberately avoided killing us right then: they were trying to tell us, We've got you pinned down."

I heard all of this in the sing-songy clip I remembered him using to teach young kids how to serve. "Pronate, now. That's it." And I thought back to a time when I wrongly assumed I could put this old guy on his heels with a well-struck backhand.

***

From that first lesson with Mr. Kells, I was pretty much a brat. I launched tennis balls over his back fence; I shuffled my feet when it came time to gather up the Wilson 4's and Penn 2's; and, most unforgivably, I smashed my racket almost every time I missed a shot, groaning like the little McEnroe I was. Love-15.

It's safe to say that I was a pretty mild-mannered kid, but I'd always had a temper about sports. And there was something about tennis that seemed unbearably more aggravating than any other game. Especially when I kept losing to Mr. Kells, who, to me, seemed like a beatable older man. Love-30.

Tennis was the first thing I was any good at, besides state capitals. The first thing I succeeded at by myself, and when a game went right, I felt miraculous control, like a wizard. That I was looping pathetic moon-balls over a net to a septuagenarian in even shorter shorts than I wore didn't take away from the fact that playing made me feel huge. I could imagine my beautiful shot, and then imagine it into reality. 15-30.

Andre Agassi was telling me in camera commercials of the time that image was everything, and so I acted all cool and attitude-y. I strode around like a punk (in really clean whites), secretly happy behind the compulsory pissed-off sneering of the Serious Player. 30 All.

Hitting a nice volley felt like timing a punchline correctly. I'd win a point; or, people would laugh. Either way, I'd feel superior, pleasantly contemptuous. I wouldn't smile. Gentlemen don't acknowledge exertion. 40-30.

Let's be clear. I wasn't great at tennis, but I was alright, and I think I can guess that the arrogance I felt is what a lot of players feel. "It seems impossible to succeed at what I've just so easily triumphed at. Harrumph, harrumph, What of it?"

Which makes failing at tennis all the worse. The hard task made easy is complete joy. The hard task that's suddenly difficult again--because the pixie dust that made it possible has abruptly blown away--is excruciating. Tennis felt so much like showing off--still requires so much unearned, and for me unnatural swagger--that when it went wrong I was exposed. Deuce. Ad-out. Game. Set. Match. Loss.

***

"We got out [of our foxhole], put our hands up, we walked up this little knoll where they were above us," Mr. Kells told the interviewer. And it's odd for me to hear it because I associate him with perfect flowers and a nice tennis court, with everything safe, Sprite-like, in control.

"They had complete control. We're now in the hands of the Germans and our troops are shooting furiously at the Germans and us."

***

Though I was improving my brattyness, sometimes after Mr. Kells beat me (he was 42-0 all-time), I'd slam my racket, especially if I'd felt I had him on the run.

I mangled a Dunlop and felt pretty terrible when I got a new one for Christmas later in the year--my parents' gift was shamingly kind, and though it might seem like they were rewarding me for my bad behavior, I got the message. They were going to keep giving; but they were going to point out that they shouldn't have to.

"Everyone knows what happened to your last one, so. . .," they'd say. I did. I'd lost it, the racket, because I'd lost it, the temper. It wouldn't happen again.

***

Mr. Kells, who's 89 now, was the subject of my college application essay. I imagine I wrote about the Respect I had for him--he was a great old guy and we had fun together. I think I said he taught me Lessons (vague, college-application Lessons), showed me how to Persevere (vague, pampered Perseverance). That he was like another Grandfather. That he'd shown me what it meant to be a Good, Charitable person.

I knew what words to capitalize in order to woo a Catholic school's admissions committee.

What I didn't mention, and what I should have, is that he had patience with me, but only up to a point, and that he broke me of my terrible temper, not by yelling, but only by telling me that he no longer wanted to play together if I kept acting that way. "Your racket didn't do anything to you," he'd say, still sing-songy.

Now, when I play tennis I hit shots that I have no business hitting--cross-court masterpieces that someone with a dearth of athletic talent like me shouldn't even attempt; and I hit shots that belong on the blooper reel, too--horrible episodes of botchery during which I threaten my own testicular health, and the dignity of the game.

My opponents will have noticed that I--somewhat bizarrely, compulsively--stare at my racket after both. They might think I'm worshiping it, or blaming it. Nope.

I'm just trying to remind myself that the feeling of control--the addictive tennis emotion--and the feeling of helplessness--the unavoidable tennis affliction--get doled out in equal measure. And, as Mr. Kells has taught me in a couple different ways, they probably always will.

English Interlude

2011-11-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Snakes

2011-11-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

Today, a new category of day: balmy-November.

It's seventy-five degrees in Athens and the wind seems to be blowing in off of some sea. Has West Virginia become an ocean? Are the mountaineer-sailors shouting “Land Ho” as they float westward past The Omelette Shoppe on Old Sea Route 50 in Parkersburg?

I'm telling you for serious now, for serious, that I can almost smell a body of saltwater and its fishy, tasty death. Columbus, I think, is overwhelmed with oysters.

So, of course, I'm November-sweaty, a new category of sweaty. And thinking, involuntarily, of the word “oleaginous.”

I'm not even sure I know what “oleaginous” means, but its five syllables seem to be actively oozing out of my brain and onto my now-enwettened forehead. (Blast you, Kentucky-Sea air! How are you both oceanic and thick?)

Oily, it means. “Oleaginous” does. From Latin, as most good words are. From French, too, naturally. It's a gross sounding word that both literally and figuratively means slick.

It's hard not to be oleaginous while pronouncing “oleaginous.” I feel like kind of a slimeball just writing it. Same feeling I get when I use the word “epitome,” or “obsequious” (which my really smart boss would be glad to know is actually synonymous with “oleaginous”).

And it's even hard to pronounce “oleaginous” without also pronouncing some spittle with it.

Old Timey Snake Oil Salesmen bring the two definitions of the word together, but I'm not really sure what Old Timey Snake Oil Salesmen were either, truthfully. Snake Oil Salesmen had some physical oil, I guess, and were thought to be slick in their selling of it—flim-flam artists, grifters, gafflers, hustle junkies.

When I was sitting a few minutes ago, overcome by oleagineity and mysterious toe pain, my mind—swell con-man itself—drifted to Snake Oil. What was it? Could it soothe my Itchy Toe? And who was its purveyor, that archetypal liar?

Also, shouldn't the Snake Oil Salesman have come up with a better name for his product? I think if I were attempting to peddle fake medicine to frontiersfolk, I might've called it something much more soothing than snake oil, even if it actually was the oil of a snake. And it was. At least in China, originally. Because the Chinese Water Snake's oils are thought to have anti-inflammatory properties.

Snake fat was also big in ancient Egyptian medicine, maybe Greek too, and it was mixed with “the fats of lion, hippopotamus, crocodile, tomcat, and Nubian ibex into a homogeneous mass believed to cause bald men to grow hair.” So, if snake guts really put hair on a bald King Tut, then I can see why its sellers wouldn't have been ashamed to call themselves what they were. Snake Oil Salesman has a better ring than Nubian Ibex Oil Salesman, after all.

But in America, “Snake Oil” was often made of beef fat.

So, my question still remains. You decide to become a grifter. You get yourself a product. And in a fit of ad-wizardry, you name it Snake Oil? Not Stallion Salve, or Gizmo Juice, or God's Tears, or any other combination of nonsense words that would sound perfectly reassuring to your average Deadwood resident. Not Brahm's Balm or Willard's Wonder Water. Nope, just Snake Oil.

One word, snake, that since Eden itself has meant treachery + a second word, oil, that, especially in the heyday of quack medicine in the early 20th Century, would have brought to mind risky speculation. Sign me up for ten bottles! This toe is getting worse!

But Snake Oil Salesmen, at least some of them, seemed to have believed in their own product and would not have appreciated the derogatory term we now use.

“As I was thought a great deal of by the medicine man,” recalled S.O.S. Clark Stanley in an 1897 book, “he gave me the secret of making the Snake Oil Medicine, which is now named Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.” Back then, Clark Stanley's medicine was used for “Rheumatism, Neuralgia, Sciatica, Lame Back, Contracted Muscles, Sprains, Swellings, Frost Bites, Chilblains, Bruises, Sore Throat, Bites of Animals, Insects and Reptiles.” (No word on whether it cured Viper's Dance or Scrivener's Palsy or Itchy Toe or Siriasis, but my toe still hurts and it's still 75 degrees in Athens, in case you were wondering).

Back to Stanley. Having learned from the Indians, he set up snake-shop in Beverly, Mass, toured the country with a snake-killing show, and eventually added red pepper flakes and turpentine to his concoction. Somewhere along the line, even though he'd trusted in those Indian wise men and their original blend, his stuff got less snake and more fake.

For peddling snake oil that ultimately didn't have any snake oil in it, he was fined $20 (about $425.70 in today's dollars, or about 851 bottles in today's Stanley's Snake Oil Liniments. But if a sucker is born every minute, he would have needed only 14 hours to make his money back, so that's good for him).

A sucker is born every minute. Someone is selling a “new” Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment sign on Ebay; that does not seem like a safe buy, and yet I'm intrigued.

I don't know the last time I was really fooled badly, so I might go for it. I used to have a reputation for gullibility in middle school, I know, but I don't recall being out-and-out scammed since then, to any large degree at least. I'm pretty often worried, though, that someone's puttin' one over on me (a phrase which doesn't have an immediately discernible origin, if the internet is to be believed). And even now, trying to remember the last big prank I endured, I'm pretty sure that since I can't tell who the sucker at the table is, it must be me.

So I ask myself on most days, How am I being duped? By the culture, by commercials? What are my blind spots? What snake oil have I bought without even realizing the cost?

And usually my mind wanders to those places when I'm reading something about the way Ancient or British folk drank the kool-aid of their own ridiculous ideologies, accepting some pre-ordained oppression or another. I can't be much different.

But the other day, the mind-wandering and the reading came together nicely. I was looking into some required Plato and daydreaming about how I might be getting screwed by the world; and then Socrates said that he knows he's the wisest man around only because he's the only one who's realized he doesn't know anything.

Maybe I've been fooled into believing I can think my way out of all of this. That's how they've gotten me. That's my blindspot (some snake oils are said to cure dry eyes, but not blindness).

Turns out, Socrates used to call his rivals, The Sophists, Snake Oil Salesmen of The Soul. That's a sophisticated line (wait, strike that). Anyway, there's some argument about whether those Sophists knew they were selling spiritual sputum to their audience or whether they, too, bought into their own brand of rhetoric, of oleagiosity. They thought they could talk their way out of anything, think their way around logic. But were they right? Maybe.

And if you believe that, I've got some ocean-front property in Appalachia to sell you.

Eastern New Mexico

2011-10-18T15:10:00.001-07:00

I've always imagined that New Mexico would be the place I'd go if everyone I know finally tells me what they really think of me. If I run out of options and need some mystical desert-grotto-state in which to nurse myself back to personhood, or slip my way out of it. If the bomb goes off, proverbially or literally. (Ironic, maybe, since that's where the bomb did go off.)

New Mexico and Morocco. The "co" must hit me a certain way, ultimately.

I was there once, in Albuquerque and out. Like so few things (pork loin, being one), it lived up to my anticipation. It has this mountain that looks like the future, and, as Liz Lemon says, "I want to go there."

New Mexico is, in the grand fiefdom of my Pretend, where my brain finally shifts from pleasantly anxious to numbly humming; where I'll switch off, all else fails.

Today I saw a posting for a teaching position at Eastern New Mexico University. I kept it on my list just in case I wake up tomorrow and everyone I love is vanished.

ENMU (not to be confused with Northern South Dakota State or Southwestern Oklahoma or Central Hawaii Tech) has this thing called the "Golden Library." I think everyone needs a "Golden Library," a dream of last resort.

In this post-Davocalyptic future, I'd change my name and raise a greyhound. My library carrel would allow greyhounds, Eastern New Mexico being partial to them.

Writer's Harvest, 2011!

2011-09-14T07:55:00.001-07:00

This year's Writer's Harvest will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 11th.

2011-08-29T11:43:00.001-07:00

Poet Adrienne Su will visit Athens in February.

2011-08-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Novelist Porter Shreve will visit Athens in January.

2011-08-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

Nonfiction writer Ander Monson will visit Athens October 26th to October 28th.

Some Lit Fest Photos

2011-05-24T10:32:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Fred Viebahn, I'm glad to share these images from Lit Fest 2011.

Spring Lit Fest

2011-03-11T06:55:00.001-08:00

May 4th - 6th, Ohio University's Department in Creative Writing will present the 25th Annual Spring Literary Festival, featuring: Rosellen Brown, Rita Dove, Debra Marquart, Padgett Powell, and Tobias Wolff.

Some December Reading

2010-12-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'd started this book ten years ago, and though it was short, I couldn't finish it because I don't normally like the sea (or space) in fiction. More importantly, it was falling apart in my hands. Up to page 80 of my used copy was flaking away like a dry piece of fish (again, not a huge fan of the sea, in pagination). I discarded it.

Unfinished books cause one minute of anxiety for: (every year they're not finished) X (the number of hundreds of pages in the book) X (1 + the percentage of the book finished). A High Wind in Jamaica sat unfinished for 10 years. There are 200 pages. I had finished 10 percent of it.

So, 10 X 2 X 1.10 = 22. The book had caused me 22 minutes of anxiety, spread out in at least 98 different mind-bursts over the last ten years. Nine times a year, for 15 seconds each--and so a life passes--I remembered my small failure. Not much, but worth allaying.

Meanwhile, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim is the pinnacle of what I'm calling the Anxiety of the Unfinished. Festering for 12 years. 400 pages. And I'd nearly completed it when I was asked to leave my senior year English Class on account of conduct unbecoming a preppy

At that point, I never read anything I didn't have to, so it remains nothing but a shelf-straining taunter, dog-eared up to the end, contemptible, contemptuous.

Lord Jim. Also about the sea. 12 X 4 X 1.95 = 93.6 minutes of anxiety (plus 7 minutes today). And I didn't know what was happening in it anyway! So, I'm unmotivated to go back in, and yet I know I will eventually, maybe after I've spent a full two hours of light anxiety thinking involuntarily about its tiny, annotated arial, its baffling story-within-a-story, and its troubling imperial undertones.

But, Lord Jim aside, A High Wind in Jamaica was the shortest remaining on the Modern Library 100, and I figured I could plow it in a couple hours, so it was low-hanging fruit (frutti di mare). Despite diminished expectations, I liked it very much.

It features children and pirates, but not silly caricatures of either. Hughes writes things like "One couldn't know the mind of a child" too often, but he does seem to understand the zaniness, seriousness, and preoccupation of his British-Jamaican characters as they're stolen away by rather kindly marauders.

I never really knew who the main character was, and the plot sometimes goes adrift, but the book taught me plenty about kid-mind (some sections are very much like Elizabeth Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room," in fact).

There're also: an unbeatable earthquake scene and omnipresent British mannerisms, so on a scale from "Dub" to "Brick," I give it a "Jolly."

View all my reviews

Poetry Residency

2010-11-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

Poet Mark Cox will visit OU on January 25th and will read from his work at 7:30pm in Galbreath Chapel.

Nonfiction Residency

2010-11-11T05:54:00.000-08:00

Nonfictionist and Poet Rebecca McClanahan will visit OU on February 24th and will read from her work at 7:30pm in Galbreath Chapel.

Fiction Residency

2010-10-08T09:25:00.001-07:00

Fiction Writer Rob Roberge will visit OU on October 21st and will read from his work at 7:30pm in Galbreath Chapel.

Writers Harvest Update: this year's event raised $1111 for the Southeastern Ohio Food Bank!

Writers Harvest

2010-09-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

I'm organizing Ohio University's Writers Harvest, which benefits Second Harvest Foodbank in Southeastern Ohio.

The event is Oct. 6th, and it will be held at 7:30 in the Baker Center Theater.

Teaser

2010-03-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

Where did I go? Marrakesh? Nope. Nowhere. Back in December, I didn't write for three days, so I thought I had to make up for it by posting something great (read: explosive! lyrical!); and then, after awhile (two weeks, two months), that level of exponentially growing "great" (life-changing, prophetic, kinda cute) seemed beyond my abilities.

It was like the way that, after some time, a call to an out-of-touch friend needs to be an hour and a half to make up for the lapse, but we convince ourselves that friend isn't, ultimately, worth the 90 minutes. Instead, it's two episodes of Magnum P.I. and a sleeve of saltines, right before bed, all washed down with a jug of V-8. (Please imagine Tom Selleck slo-motion chugging tomato juice: and the resultant mustache residue).

After Selleck (or, let's be honest, Dorothy Zbornak), I'd sign on to this here venue late at night, but I'd think, well, I haven't really stretched my online-writing gluts and lats and maximi in awhile, so I'll need to start slow. Of course, I wouldn't start at all, literary fatty that I am.

This post, though, is that slow walk around the block, sentence-wise. I hope I haven't pulled any important muscles.

Soon, expect the return of your vigorous, attentive friend, Dr. True.

Tragicomic topics to include: cereal, self-cooling pillows, Delta Airlines, voles, the actor Tom Selleck (check), highway medians, faith, proper manners during a barbeque, and "Please, Mr. Postman" by The Marvelettes.

Fortunate Sons

2009-12-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

I've had a poem published at the online journal, Shaking Like a Mountain. It's more of a summer poem really, but I hope you will head over to their site and read it: I'd like to reach 300 views by the new year!

Thanks and have a fun holiday.

Love,
David

Object Lesson

2009-12-22T11:05:00.000-08:00

My personification of inanimate objects, and the emotions I then feel toward those objects, takes up more of my energy than it should. When I was a kid, I felt terribly sorry for boardgames that got left on the shelf, often for years at a time. I would play them by myself just so they didn't think I was angry at them.

As a teenager, I named my car, my TV, an my baseball bat. These were pleading, loving relationships, all of which involved soft caresses. My biggest fight, though, was with that television, which still stares at me now, ten years after I bought it. I've even placed him on probation for months at a time, canceling cable as a punishment for his blizzards. And yet, as Homer Simpson put it, the TV remains "my teacher, mother, secret lover."

Lately, I've directed most of my personal scorn at kitchen wares. As a newlywed, I have a glut of pots, and I rail against their pot-lids the way cranks rail against immigrants. I doubt their usefulness, mutter to myself about how much space they take up, grumble about their clamorous, pot-lid culture.

In a pinch, Luigi--the saucepot topper--does make my life easier with his abilities and I smile at his panache. He's one of the good ones, that Luigi.

With these mild frustrations in mind, I was surprised last night that I couldn't muster any anger at my vegetable peeler. Even after he swallowed a cashew-sized swath of my left middle finger, I felt no animosity whatsoever. As a sat in my recliner, Donald--wrapped in gauze and ice and with my arm over my head--I was at peace.

"I put your nemesis in the dishrack," Megan said. "So be careful."

"No," I corrected, like a holy man forgiving his assailant. "He knew not what he did."

Maybe it's the Christmas season that has me in a merciful mood, but I even felt positive feelings for Virgil, as I like to call him.

This strange favoring of something that cuts recalled certain relationships in which I've actually liked people more after they've slighted me. They've shown their fallibility and, maybe more importantly, they now owe me.

So, in some illogical reach of my brain, I expect to return from my Christmas vacation to a bounty of freshly peeled food, to Virgil standing on the counter looking sheepishly at me. He'll hope that, once again, we can be peel pals, and I'll say, "I'd like that, friend."

And I'll be thankful for the time he's saved me; I'll finally have a chance to give that sonuvabitch can-opener of mine a real talking-to.

UuU

2009-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

My pesky curiosity brought me face to face with a strange blackhole yesterday when I wikipedia-ed Wikipedia. I wanted to know what the first entry of the online encyclopedia had been. I ventured that in the beginning there was God, or, since the site came from computer nerds, maybe Apple.

Where do you start when you want to compile everything?

I've become interested in the origins of the encyclopedia recently because its pages feature a request for donations; and so I've been sporadically considering how much they started with at first and what bit of info got them going.

Usually I think donations that don't fill a stomach or kill a tumor are strangely a-ethical, but I pondered whether I should send Wikipedia a five-spot. It's slowly replaced ESPN as my trivial opiate of choice, after all, and I have respect for its project of democratizing knowledge (even though that project has been roundly criticized. When I look up dogs, for instance, I'm told that the species with the shortest lifespan is the Dogue de Bordeaux--5.2 years. On the page of that particular dogue, however, a second citizen-editor had told me that they live, mostly sans complications, for 8-10 years. Oh well. C'est la vie).

Whether it's wholly correct or not, I like that I can follow the thoughts of Wikipedia's strange brain from Ytzhak Rabin to Albert Schweitzer to The Gabonese Republic to a map of population density to Earth to Outer Space to Paradise Lost to Star Trek to Star Wars to Turner and Hooch to the Dogue de Bordeaux, as I did today. Mind in the clouds, nose on the ground.

Plus, I would never want the encyclopedia to be overcome by ads such that when I check the origin of the phrase "Head-over-heels," as I did recently, I suddenly feel a compulsion to buy some Dr. Scholl's.

***

When I started out as an English teacher in 2004, we all used to laugh at the student who would quote from Wikipedia, and our bosses derided it as unreliable. There's something to this, I suppose. Students should still learn to look for the most authoritative sources even if that means checking out a book. And yet, part of a strong English education has to do with being able to suss out the truth of things, being able to distinguish fact from opinion. I know I've read falsehood and spin on Wikipedia; I mostly filter it out. It's far from invalid because of the discrepancies.

David Foster Wallace said that being educated "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

Taking his advice, I've decided that his Wikipedia page is insufficient and that you might like to go here instead. Then again, you might like to ignore me and the rest of this post, which would also be in the spirit.

Meanwhile, I'm still thinking about what Wikipedia's worth to me. Would I pay a dollar a week? A dollar a month? If I knew everyone was willing to pay 1 cent a day, would I join in? I need to read up on Game Theory.

And I realize that I haven't answered my initial question about Wikipedia's first article. And so I realize that my unrealizing is a perfect way to talk about Wikipedia's main fault: it almost always forces me to lose my focus. I didn't need any assistance with that in the first place, and then along came the easy-accessibility-of-trivial-facts: I was like an infant staring at hyperlinked keys.

***

Sometimes I get to the end of the day (especially recently, since I've been on break from school) and I can't really pinpoint any accomplishment I've made or experience I've had. Suddenly it's dark, and I've learned a few things about Gabon.

The machinery of distraction that I've set up for myself keeps me from thinking about serious things for the extended period of time they deserve, keeps me from being devoted to a task or a new skill, keeps me from the dedicated leisure that allows many of my friends to happily wallow in movies and music.

Sometimes I get to the end of the day and I feel hosed.

Dogs, it's thought, sense that they can run away from pain and so, when achy or nearing death, will circle and circle as if their hurt is a place.

I'm no retriever, and I've got no serious grievance, but my mental-flitting seems to be coming from the same K-9 instinct. Maybe if I can read enough news or compile enough facts or hop quickly enough from one thing to the next (one of my generation's notable skills), I'll somehow also be able to scatter away from myself.

Maybe.

The first page added to Wikipedia was "UuU," a list of countries that included our fair States.

"Wiki" comes from a Hawaiian word meaning "Quick."

For a time, many dogs in Gabon contracted the Ebola virus but did not appear to be symptomatic.

There is no information immediately available on the way dogs sense their topography of pain.

Theatah Stories - Encore

2009-12-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

Dramatic truth be told, my theatre career, such as it was, coincided with my career as an actively single man. I was in plays from February 2000 to May 2004; I was a pre-Megan dater for precisely the same period.

During that time I suffered from sporadic attachments I convinced myself were very deep. Like a lot of people, I had a fling-instinct combined with an endemic sentimentality that made me treat every romantic caprice as a very serious matter.

I remember, for instance, Margaret's name popping up on my computer screen one summer evening. I had a reaction to it and, in the confines of my parents' nothing-happening basement, figured the female-inspired flush had to mean 'meant-to-be.'

I wrote to her, right then. Some trite line. Two minutes prior, I'd been perfectly unaware of my feelings. Now they were so urgent and rich. I'm ashamed that I declared myself electronically; but I'm frequently glad that I don't have to date and break-up in the cell-phone era, when that kind of knee-jerk romantic-ish-ness seems almost inevitable.

Back then, though, I just needed something to happen, always. And I worked to make mostly fake things--plays and hasty love--feel true. It worked, I guess. For a year or so, I gave florid speeches to audiences and to Margaret, trying to win them into my imaginary worlds.

Eventually, she went away to study in Europe and I kept playing repressed gay men onstage. We dated from afar--sometimes happily, sometimes passive-aggressively. But I wasn't going to be able to forgive her one thing: during my era of great-narcissism (is it over?), she withdrew some of her attention from me.

***

While Margaret was away, I 1) noticed Megan, 2) did nothing untoward.

When Margaret came back, I 1) was fired from my position as her boyfriend, 2) was cast opposite Megan in a silly play called Noises Off.

This next story begins with my pants around my ankles.

I should say before I continue with it, though, that, at the time, Megan and I spoke to each other only in averted glances.

But she already drew my constant attention. . .

. . .Like the smell of curry (though she smells nothing like curry).

Like a “don't-open-until-Christmas” package on December 22nd.

Like someone else's karaoke rendition of a favorite song--say, “Brown Eyed Girl”--that's both pleasant and flustering.

Like a bee in the room, like a bear.

Like a dark window during a horror movie.

Like a deer, or a dare.

Like the last stair on the staircase. Is it really there? I step: my legs buckle.

Such was my world-reordering awareness of SHE: said awareness a murk of non-stop anticipation, novelty, and fear; of beauty-lust and adrenaline; of doubt and knee-tingle.

(Our earliest extant picture)

So my pants were off and we were onstage rehearsing for the big show.

The play, a British farce filled to the gills with slapstick, called for me to sit on a prop-cactus and for her to pull the prop-needles out of my behind. This stage direction, as you might imagine, resulted in precarious perspiration for me.

Nothing else can be said about the placement of my stanky ass vis-a-vis her sweet face besides the simple fact that I was truly mortified. This was, after all, someone I was coming to care for deeply (not just fleetingly). I tried to play it cool, but of course I had to wear costume-room-underpants that weren't washed between rehearsals. And of course the director had to see the scene again, one last time, from another angle.

I assumed the position: my life was an abyss!

After that level of embarrassment, why not just ask her out? Well, I kinda-sorta had, which had gotten kinda-sorta no response, but things were a wee-ish complicated, as they tend to be; suffice it to say, I felt rejected and she didn't even know I'd applied.

Things carried on thusly. I had the distinct lower-hand. I don't want to overstate my romantic anti-heroism, but it was pretty substantial at that point. People were even starting to root for me, as if I was some pitiful movie character. (My brother told me not to let my inner Cusack stand in the rain.)

I bucked up. And began a campaign of being great to everyone she knew. If I could get enough of a buzz going, I thought, she'd have to date me! But we got our signals crossed again when I asked her out for coffee (she said yes, but we never went). I'd never been one to take a hint, but it was dawning on me that I might have to move on.

Until, hallelujah, one more show came around the bend just a few weeks before graduation. A Dream Play was more of an experimental venture. She played a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Jesus. For my role, I had to learn to write backwards (college theatre can't be parodied). At different points in the show I had to give Alice/Jesus/Megan a piggy-back ride, strike amorous tableaux with her, and hold her hand while I told her, "You are the hope of the world."

It was cruel. But we had gotten to what I thought was grudging respect, at least. We even had an intuitive friendship, though we still barely spoke.

The night before the show, we had a dress rehearsal until 4 o'clock in the morning. It was tiring and giddy. We were both asked to stay and help decorate a pillar with toilet paper. It was a ridiculous request and we felt loopy under the psychedelic lights. We conspired to escape together; we'd paid our dues.

Outside, there was a light late-spring rain and the sound of a couple bullfrogs, a light-orange haze from the city of Worcester, a light taste of something honey-ish and thick. I felt possessed, calm, conclusive. She still had on an angel's eyeliner, or an Alice's.

By the college's chapel, I slowed my walk to slow her walk, said "Hey," said "I've written you a letter," said "but I probably won't finish it before showtime," said "It just says, 'You're great,'" said "But you probably already knew I thought that."

I stopped.

Everything was eaves-dropping.

Her half-smile told me, "That's so sweet," which, as any guy knows, can be either good or bad. But the victory was in the declaration. We said, "Well, G'night," and took our solitary ways.

The next day I told her, sheepishly, that she was the hope of the world again. The lights changed and the show ended. I assumed that was that for us: but, thanks to her, there turned out to be an encore, one we didn't expect, one that's still going.

Neither of us has been in a play since that strange dream. We're done with that scene, at least for now. I am still working on her letter, though, and I'm nowhere near finished.

Theatah Stories - Act III

2009-12-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

I'd caught the bug.

Though I'd still yet to perform in front of more than 38 people, I knew I wanted to be in more plays--as many as possible, quantity over quality. I'm not sure I even really liked to act that much; it was more the hyper-charged atmosphere that attracted me, the feeling of community and a collective goal.

Standing around backstage for eight hours trading ribald stories with co-stars (though I was more of a co-quark, really) is probably the least difficult way to feel productive, so it was perfect for me, who likes little resistance. I could convince myself that all of it was educational, that practicing spit-takes while dressed in purple tights was my ticket to cum laude.

And there was a lot of waiting around once I broke into school plays. I didn't have any lines that first year, but I still spent most of my time in ludicrous situations being asked to emote, mime, and/or swordfight in the background.

In one critique of my performance, I was told, "David, I'm not sure what you're doing with that broom." My only purpose in that show was to sweep, and I was failing. But learning, too. Things like: stagehands love the singer Meatloaf, unequivocally and all of them; Chekhov wasn't just a character on Star Trek; and purple tights can tend to chafe during emotionally-mimed swashbuckling.

I decided to take my new-found wisdom to the director's chair. There may be nothing more arrogant than calling oneself a director, especially when that title comes with no real skill attached. Yours Truly wasn't One to think lowly of Himself, though. If the Little Rascals could put on a show with only an afternoon's prep (and in a barn no less), I could put one on with a month to spare.

The show was called The Taxi Cabaret, and it badly taxed my leadership skills. I needed six people who were willing to work very hard for basically no reason. I nearly cast an actress named Megan--whose talents had recently caught my eye--as a young woman considering marriage, but we weren't nearly ready to play that scene together yet. (More on plays and that young lady as the situation develops).

I dropped $250 on this play to get the rights and tried to start rehearsals wherever I could--my dorm, the laundry room, the library steps, over the phone. As soon as I'd scraped together a full cast--with promises of stardom or promises of future regrets if. . .--someone would drop out. I felt like a kid at recess slowly realizing his made-up game wasn't catching on.

Adding to the difficulty was the fact that Taxi Cabaret was a musical and I didn't know how to read music. For awhile we rehearsed with a CD. I'd tell people to move certain ways, basically on a whim--whatever I felt like coming up with at the time. I was in over my head.

Two days before the show--we'd gotten a room with a spot-light and everything!--I suffered another defection. My friend Will had gotten a date for the night of the opening performance and couldn't do his part. I frantically called Dr. True's Soup and Read's vice-treasurer (emeritus) and State Photographer, Rob Strong: he'd performed in the same play only a few months before and I hoped he could fill in last-minute.

The next day, I found someone who could play the piano. A small detail. We had 18 hours or so to go.

When another cast member told me he'd be late, I had to shift Rob over and take a part myself. There were two songs I'd have to wing.

The late-guy did end up getting there, the piano started, I had to play a gay stockbroker, and we were off!

Yes, my character slowly realizes he's gay as the show progresses. For some reason, I found myself playing gay guys quite often. In this one, I had a song where I told my dad about my new-found orientation. My own dad was, of course, in the audience. Could be it was one of those moments of parenthood when you ask yourself (I figure there are these) How exactly did I get to this point? And How did he? This sense of wonder might have been made more acute by the fact that I was dressed as Fred Flintstone.

(Notice my loafers)

I sang:

With a spear in hand I fear I'm ineffectual.
But I might just be the world's first homo (. . .) sapien
who's an intellectual!

I love misdirection rhymes! I love feminine rhymes!

***

I found a real feminine presence I rhymed with not long afterwards. That discovery, unlike my last sentence, was a fantastic transition for me.

We started hanging out--Megan and me--during a show called For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls. She was the Belle. I was her perverted, mentally-challenged son, Perry. Inauspicious, you say? At least I wasn't a gay caveman opposite her man-phobic spinster, but this was not a good portent.

A better one came later in the year when Megan replaced another woman in "A Chorus Line," which I'd been stumbling my way through for a few months. We found ourselves next to each other every day. I had to wear these shorts:

(My legs have never looked better. I was also playing a gay man in this show. Megan played, in her words, "The Ugly One." We were both cast against type: Megan because of her acting strength, me because. . .listen, I just don't know).

We got to chatting. I'd mumble inaudible jokes to her out of the corner of my mouth. She'd keep dancing correctly. It was a solid exchange really. But by the end of "A Chorus Line," she was the only cast member I didn't feel a real connection to. This was the perfect romantic comedy set-up.

We did the show, maybe said "good job" to each other.

But, even then, she had the butterflies in my stomach doing kick-lines.

We took our bows.

Theatah Stories - Act II

2009-12-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned, my stage debut in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat didn't go smoothly. The stakes are pretty low in community theatre, though, and tall, left-footed men trying to step-ball-change and sashay are catnip to local stage-groupies (75 year old women), so I had fun.

My big moment came in the second act. In some performances, I'd said my line--"Napthali"--at the proper time and at others I hadn't; either way, the success of my night always depended on that second act chance.

Having betrayed Joseph, the eleven brothers are wandering through the desert, starved. It was my job to stagger toward the front of the stage--famished, fainting--and fall in a crowd-pleasing heap.

Now, the pratfall is a subtle art and the master of it must proceed placidly and with empty-mind. In preparation, I studied the great tumblers--Chaplin, Van Dyke, Ritter.

(John Ritter as Jack, ahem, Tripper)

Their gracelessness had such a grace!

I considered the Buckle-knee fall, the Damsel-in-Distress, the Banana Slip, the Face-Plant, and the Kansas City Kollapse.

Technically, a pratfall should include falling on the arse since 'prat' means 'buttock.' (See 17th Century British Poet Thomas Dekker's line: "by the Salamon, No Gentry Mort hath Prats like thine.").

'Prat' can also mean 'fool,' though, as in British playwright Melvyn Bragg's line: "He had been looking for the exact word to describe David and now he found it: prat."

Whether mine was an idiot fall or a butt fall, I knew it needed to be a great fall. On the last night of the show, I went for it, spinning on one foot before landing square on my back--a direct hit from noggin to coccyx.

Napthali advances downstage right. He looks very hungry. Lights up on Napthali. He rolls his eyes back in his head and collapses. Actor playing Napthali knocks himself temporarily unconscious. Exit (temporarily) actor playing Natphali.

Lights out.

I imagine my fall got a response, but I'd muddled my hearing, blurred my vision, and lost my wind with the effort. It was an ecstatic feeling, though. And probably the only time I actually did the Method Acting thing, embodying what my character was supposed to feel.

I survived and made it out for my final bow. At the cast party, the guy who played Joseph told me I had quite a stage presence. That was almost definitely a back-handed compliment seeing as how I'd drawn some unwanted attention with my errors, but I took it at face-value and felt my first post-show-glow. I'd made it! I was praiseworthy!

Maybe.

One of the strange things about performance--even on a small-scale--is that people tend to judge your actual character while they're watching you. If I'm a bad painter, it stops at that--I don't have the gift. Bad actors, though, are often considered faulty people somehow, people with little access to truth and humanity.

Think of your response to a terrible high school basketball player versus your response to a terrible high school actor. In the first, there's a head-shake and a smile probably. He's gangly; he can't help it.

In the second, I'll bet you feel some kind of shame (and some kind of anger that this gangly kid has made you feel that way). You may criticize him afterwards. While you'd never say, "What makes that guy think he can hit a free throw?" you might very well say, "What makes him think he can act?"

Sensing that pressure, I'd always been frightened of going onstage. But since I liked my second act moment so much I knew I had to confront the fear. After Joseph I became a double-major in college: Theatre because I'd knocked myself out that one time; English because I'd been head-over-heels for Sally. Both cosmic pratfalls, really.

When I began sophomore year at Holy Cross, though, I was still caught up in community theatre instead of my new acting classes. I'd been cast as a cowboy in a production of Bus Stop, a play about travelers converging during a snowy Kansas night. At the time, the role seemed big enough to warrant a commute from college back home--a 90-minute drive.

(I rehearsed in this get-up in various church basements and sometimes had to lower my voice during the nightly rosary)

My small-potatoes stage "success" also gave me misplaced confidence; I started dating a friend of mine, Margaret, assuming that with enough rehearsal our relationship would be a hit. Though we had some good scenes, that assumption was hasty. Regardless of our future second act problems, though, Margaret and I were off to a solid start that Fall of 2001.

Trouble was, my cowboy character in Bus Stop, Beau Dekker (no relation to British poet Thomas Dekker), had to plant a huge kiss on a chanteuse named Cherry. In the film version of the play from the 50s, Cherry was played by Marilyn Monroe. I couldn't get over the fact that I'd be smooching a proxy-Monroe! I worried that this was cheating, though, finally figuring it wasn't as long as I didn't enjoy the lip-wranglin'.

My co-star Josie, a pretty young mother, said I was doing alright with the kiss but that maybe I could use a little more practicing. She was aware of my new quarter-girlfriend and said this with a wink, but I was shaken. So, I tried to use the logic on Margaret.

"I don't want Josie to be the person I've kissed last," I said to her. "Plus, I need to rehearse." (I puckered). This wasn't a smooth way to upgrade from hand-holding and I didn't get the run-through I was looking for.

But I needed to do something.

So, on my highway journeys home to Josie "Marilyn Monroe" Collins--in the empty-sky days following September 11th--I'd try out different lip configurations, desperate for a little practice any way I could get it.

By the time the show went on, I was run-down by national trauma and by the juggling of two women; for a time, I thought I actually was a cowboy. I remember pacing around backstage talking to myself about chuck wagons and cattle drives. I was going a little bit crazy. But I was glad to be able to act out, to have the chance to kiss the woman I liked (sorta), and at a peaceful middle-American bus stop.

It was good, old-fashioned escapism. Plus, I got to fall again when a drunken sheriff flattened me with a right hook to the pretend jaw. I went with the Face-Plant.

Theatah Stories

2009-12-04T06:53:00.000-08:00

From the time I was in fifth grade and played The Narrator in a production of James and the Giant Peach (a role originated by Brando), I wanted to be in plays. My acting career, though, had a few notable false starts.

In middle school, I croaked through an audition for L'il Abner and was one out of, well, one students who wasn't at least made an alternate. (Perhaps my membership in AV club made Mrs. Schneider feel less guilty for cutting me--at least I'd be working the lights).

After a few years of singing lessons and the re-summoning of my crushed, post-Abner courage, I had a two-line solo at a spring concert in high school. My pseudo-debut.

"Maria," I shouted, beginning the song of the same name during my choir's medley of West Side Story songs. Nevermind that I was no Gangland Romeo: I gave it my all. "The most beautiful sound I've ev-ah hea-hd. Ma- Reeeeee- A."

My character was a street-tough from ethnic New York, longing to bed this new bodacious woman he'd met; I, however, sounded like a British castrati singing to his nursemaid.

(Fine, so maybe he sounded like that, too.)

About the same time as my mellifluous "Maria," I tried out for a play mainly in order to hang out with a girl I liked, Dana (I just met a girl named. . .). Even though she was the star-actress in school, she decided not to try-out and, of course, this was the one play I got into.

It seemed I'd be spending another winter cruelly un-girled.

When I think about high school, I'm amazed by how many of my decisions came about in this feminine-induced fashion. Because of them, I tried out for plays, played certain sports, bathed more thoroughly.

In fact, sometimes I think I study English because of the particular cuteness of one girl, Sally.

Warning: I am about to examine my life-path and trace who-I-am-now back to a series of arbitrary decisions I made when I was 16. This will have the worn-out tone of "What if that hadn't happened exactly the way it happened? Where would I be now?"

This sort of logic can almost always be refuted and, unless people have deep knowledge of String Theory, belongs only in vague conversations with the recently redeemed or with fate-obsessed adherents of E-harmony. But I can't help myself. I like the tracing; I like the hunt for my origins--probably because of something that happened to me when I was 8.

So, I was standing outside my Sophomore year English class, which I didn't love, and I saw Sally drinking from the water fountain. Her bookbag was huge for her, which was cute; her last name was styled onto it in huge block letters, which was cute. She was super-cute, which was cute.

Thus began a two-year, mostly-unspoken crush. I knew very little about Sally, but I could glean, mostly from hearsay during choir, that she liked to write and got great grades. Going into senior year, then, I was ready to make my push for her. Would I ask her on a date or get her a card or even say hello? No. I would sign up for as many English classes as possible. I begged into the honors class I thought she'd be in and added a Shakespeare seminar for good measure.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero declares,

O God of love! I know he doth deserve
As much as may be yielded to a man

Yes, I thought. Indeed I didth! And yet Sally was in neither of my classes. It turned out she belonged to a secret cabal of English scholars to which I couldn't pretend. They would be studying in England in March; I, un-girled, would be reading dozens of books to scrape by in the double course-load.

That first day of school was bleak, but there have been collateral benefits.

Since then, I've looked back on that moment at the water fountain and those romantic enrollments as the reason I've gone on to study English. Taking the two classes convinced me I was a word-guy, that I liked arguing, interpreting, complicating, bloviating, and being in college for 10 years to learn how to do those things.

And I do like them. So I can only thank my lucky stars that Sally wasn't an Astronomy person. I've never really enjoyed Space, but I might have gone there (twice) for cute bangs.

After the initial disappointment of senior year and Sally, I moved on to Dana. In high school, I was serially-serious about girls and never really without a love-interest. That same attraction to melodrama also led me to try out for the school-play, notably called Compulsion.

I was to portray the stodgy older brother of Big-Man-on-Campus, Trey Stewart, in the Depression-era show. I practiced for months for my big line.

During a party scene, I was supposed to say, derisively, "Russian Jews."

During that time, I could be seen around school mumbling, trying out different inflections.

Russian Jews? Russian Jews! Russian Jews?!?!

Three days before the play, though, Trey, 16, decided to go for a few beers at the local bowling alley. He was suspended and, without its star, the show did not go on.

I had to wait another year and a half before I had lines again, this time in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I'd gone to the theater that summer hoping for an ushering job, but the director had me audition by singing "Happy Birthday."

For the part of Napthali, one of the twelve brothers, it was down to me and a woman named Melody Stankiewicz. Despite my gender advantage and the fact that Melody's extreme vibrato made her head shake like a can of paint in a mixer, she scored the role.

When a better part opened up for her, though, I was their man. Happy Birthday to me!

Opening night arrived. During the first song, I was supposed to jump out from behind a Pyramid and introduce myself: "Napthali!"

I could be seen around the theatre mumbling.

Napthali. NAPTHALI!

Just as I heard my cue, though, I tripped on a styrofoam camel and swallowed my one and only line. I'd done plays to feel like a more exciting person, to be noticed a little bit, but, when my time in the lights finally came, I couldn't even say my own name.

As far as theatre success went, it felt--woe was me--like I just couldn't get over the initial hump.

Plants and Plickas

2009-12-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

Dr. True's Soup and Read's Accu-weather Meteorologist Joe Plicka and his wife Emily gave Megan and me a tremendous wedding present: our first Christmas tree--a 5'6" Douglas Fir. We picked it out (along with many other Yuletide trimmings courtesy of the P's) and put it up tonight.

And under your tree tomorrow? The triumphant return, after a three day hiatus, of my circumlocutions and silliness, covered in tinsel, and with a dash of the serio- thrown in, as always. Shake it to see what's inside. Rip a corner of the paper slowly to prolong the excitement.

My Black Planet

2009-11-30T19:20:00.001-08:00

Pre-Script: I am white.

About a year ago, I subscribed to BlackPlanet, a social network website for African-Americans. I was doing a (perhaps patronizing) project on the site's discourse community (unnecessary academic term alert--see David Foster Wallace's defense of it here).

Now that you've read the Foster Wallace essay, it's four hours later than it was when you started mine, so let's update you.

I subscribed, la-de-da, project, low-de-doh.

So, as I was saying, I'd set out to study what kind of chat goes on at this Facebook-esque site that's the fourth most traveled of its kind. I was ready to pose, to chat with whomever about whatever.

Embarking on what could be considered an act of anthropological aggression (if not cyber-blackface), I had all of my typical guilt. Was I invading? Was I making exotic a simple social interaction? Had the internet allowed me to do this without me having to own up to the implications?

As with most things in my life, I worried about the BlackPlanet experiment about 6% too much. After I signed on--with the screenname Shameless82 (a description of me coupled with my birthyear)--I had a few casual chats about chili, my engagement, and certain R-rated activities apparently enjoyed by black and white alike.

I did not instigate these conversations, but I won't claim that I'm above them.

It was a learning experience to be enmeshed in a cyber- and cultural vernacular and, more importantly, to be self-conscious--even in a relatively anonymous forum--of my own race. But the project got done and I moved beyond it to the next compulsory social-experiment.

Or so I thought. As it happens, though, BlackPlanet is still a part of my life. As with other networking sites, it's nearly impossible to disengage from it, and so, after a few attempts, I gave up.

Forevermore, I will receive four alerts a day to both of my email addresses about the African-American Zeitgeist and the African-American dating scene. In the last week alone, I've seen alerts titled "Nine Reasons Why Beyonce Shouldn't Have Kids," "Did Chris Brown Call Jay-Z a 'Cornball' on Twitter," and the ever-flattering "You've Received a Friend Invite."

I currently have 72 emails from the site.

Getting them, glancing at them, deleting them has become a comforting ritual. And it's amazing to see how much interest I can attract; an inactive member of the community with a fake name, no profile, and no picture to speak of, I've received hundreds of friend-invitations.

It could be that lonely people, seeing nothing in someone, like what they see.

Oh, pardon, I've just received word: someone on BlackPlanet looked at me. I can't wait to see who.

I have to say, the BlackPlaneters are all so much nicer than those uppity folks on SeniorPeopleMeet. I got kicked out of that place in seconds. And those oldsters never invite me to be friends either, even when I invite them.

Trip

2009-11-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

I arose at 5:43am in Greenfield, Mass and arrived--on the drive--in Athens, Ohio at 8:23pm.

This morning, my parents had somehow gotten up before Megan and me and had toasted bagels ready to help send us off, with topping options (a spread of spreads?). They made tea and coffee. There was a yogurt selection. And a to-go snack bag (all of it healthy).

They set the table, got us ready, and came outside for a group hug--gold blue light drip-dyeing into the wee-hour sky.

When we got back here to Ohio, Megan and I bolted a box of Chinese, read our conflicting fortunes, and wondered what it was about our apartment that smelled different.

In one place, there's a wreath on the window. In the next, there's a take-out menu hanging from the doorknob.

Today, a day of day-apart spaces, not at all the same, both home.

Lesson

2009-11-28T19:18:00.001-08:00

I took a shortcut back from the movie theater today and remembered that the road--half an hour from my parents' house--was the first I'd ever driven on.

The lesson happened in the Spring, with my dad. Off to the right, the Connecticut River, swollen with what used to be winter.

We pulled over, switched seats. My sister, fearful in back, protested mildly.

I drove like a movie character, rocking the wheel back and forth, trying to stay precisely in the middle of my lane. It's a very curvy road, one I've since taken in order to feel like a race-car driver: I cut the corners of the yellow line, accelerate over bumps and down hills (in my family, we call the feeling you get from such a maneuver a "tickle in the toodle," but I've also heard it referred to as a "Thank you ma'am").

Back then, though, I was tentative. I shifted in my seat and swerved slowly.

"Pick a way and just drive," my dad said.

On some level, I didn't want to be able to do that, to master this thing I'd always looked at with a sense of anticipation, this ability that separated the men from the boys. I think I wanted the pedals to be complex or something.

In order to feel like I was piloting the car, I fiddled, to my dad's dismay, with the dashboard (hazard lights) and then the radio (Phil Collins).

I wanted to earn the freedom that came with driving a car by having the learning process be very difficult. Not just P to R to N to D and go. I ten-and-twoed the wheel and held my breath.

I think I've always been a person who's looked for a sea change, something big to surprise me out of how I understand the world. And I expect too much from milestones. I want to believe that the benchmarks we set up--like learning to drive--actually represent a movement from one period to another, emotionally.

When I took over the car that day, I wanted the adventure to make me feel different. Not that I felt all that bad; I just figured there was some powerful experience out there I'd been getting ready for, revving up to.

I eventually straightened out, drove quickly amidst the scattered shadow of newly-grown leaves, past cows chewing wet cud, through Chevys up on blocks--on both sides of the road--being rebuilt from the inside out.

"There ya go," my dad said. I pulled over, put it into neutral. It felt good, but, truth be told, I'd expected there to be more to the shifting than there was.

Pie Fest

2009-11-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

Today is the 16th annual Pie Fest, a Wanczyk/Miller family tradition that began the year my grandpa died as a way to honor him with our gorging. At first, we celebrated the fest on his birthday, December 26th, but the eating-event migrated to the day after Thanksgiving, where it's remained for the last decade.

We usually have about 20 pies, and I like to name mine carefully. When I moved from New England to the Rust Belt, I came back with "O-pie-o." Another year, I had "Pa-pie-ya," with the corresponding main ingredient. This year, Megan and I have collaborated on "Pie Do" in commemoration of our slice of marital bliss.

We have tarts, crumbles, crisps, puddings, and pot-pies. The ratio of sweet to savory is carefully maintained: 5 to 1.

Each year, my cousin Katelyn and I are Grand Marshalls of the pastries table and look over the offerings with our keen pie-eyes. Here is the progression of those moments.

(Troubling Hair; delicious pie)

(Covered the hair; troubling beard [perhaps Amish])

(Customary)

(Pies on the table, pies on the wall)

(More of the delicious same)

(Almost normal-looking)

(Not at all normal-looking; post eye-exam, pre pie-exam)

(Note the left picture on the wall. We love ourselves)

The fact that you read this piessay means you are perpetually-invited to Pie Fest. Now I'm off to make my official offering.

Grace and Turnip

2009-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

As "The New Guy," I was asked to say Grace at Sheehan Thanksgiving dinner today. I delivered some boilerplate and then said we were all grateful to be here with family. (I almost said "friends," too, but remembered that little piece of gold on my finger; I guess I'm in.)

I stammered a bit and thought of the all-time best grace-giver, my friend Dave Grover, who can carry on without seeming either self-righteous or irreverent. This is notable because Grace is a strange moment--it's like a little speech, but on behalf of everyone. It can't be too specific or it seems like the gathered are being left out of a private conversation with God; but if it's too general, the Grace-giver is teased for repeating old standbys, for lacking feeling.

And then there's the question of archaisms. Dost thou use such language over turkey? Dost thou over manwich?

When I was in middle school our daily blessing was, "God bless this food to our use and our lives to thy loving service." I pulled that one out today to get the ball rolling, but what of the 'thy?' I suppose it's appropriate to add a little Puritan flavor to this particular feast. But I'd started with 'umm' and then moved on to my usual extemporaneousness: no thees there. How best to mix the heavy and the heartfelt?

Again, there's the need for gravitas, but how much? At a dinner with strict and not-so-strict Catholics, I didn't want to go over- or underboard.

Once, at a Thanksgiving during a time I was struggling, I'd dropped a scripture bomb: "I hope we can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." I've always liked that one, and it seems to be good for remembering (without being a total downer) those who aren't lucky enough to have four kinds of savory tubers on this special day; but I felt like I'd gone too far, like I'd been grandiloquent in front of the embarrassed turnip.

Today, I wanted to strike a similar note, though. Because we've got a sick family member over in these parts and only two moments of collective prayer left to go for this calendar year.

Some things must be remembered to the Big Thy Upstairs.

But I'm not really the one to comment on family business: I'm merely the interloper, the in-law. So I asked for blessings where they're especially needed and even where they're not. (Yeah, that wasn't so bad). My heart beat quickly all the way through my second helping (and then started beating quickly because of it!) But I'd given a B+ performance. And the benediction was delivered, hopefully to some good use.

I like to think we don't care over in these parts if the Grace comes stumbling and improvised, as long as it comes soon.

Thanksgiving Eve

2009-11-25T14:31:00.000-08:00

I took part in the wonderful American tradition of the multi-state, headed-home-for-Thanksgiving road trip today.

I heard the president pardon the turkey while listening to radio news over-intently--with millions of others--for the East Coast traffic reports.

View Larger Map

I shotgunned a fast-food egg while discussing the suspicious origin of the moniker "English Muffin," as many have before.

I suffered from heartburn (see fast-food egg), an acute case of ultra-stuffed pockets, heel-itis, GPS hate, eye-death, brain-stall, restless leg, and restless spouse (see traffic).

Out there on the roads today we all felt (all 33 million of us) some strange civic unity (positive), and we all--over-tired and bumper-to-bumper--wondered if the true point of Thanksgiving is to consider the derivative nature of human experience (negative), an experience which--bleared by rained-on headlights--seems easy to be ungrateful for.

Headed in the same direction, at 1 mph, with everyone else and his uncle (on the way to his other uncle's house) makes us feel, maybe, like we're out of control of our own lives. In fact, the 19th century writer Charles Lamb--in his essay "New Year's Eve"--went further (even though he lived pre-traffic jam):

"Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore."

I've always thought that was a wonderful description for why some of us get so upset about trifles--we shortcut from slight annoyance straight toward that eternal no-right-on-red.

But, lo, the traffic jam ends. And whatsoever doesn't thwart me--homecomings, well-timed cups of tea, the cessation of spousestration--puts me in mind of what I have to be thankful about: marriage, family, and the La Quinta Inn of Harrisburg P-A (our half-way stop).

But let's see if I feel this good on Sunday, at hour fourteen, at a red light, Ohio-bound and bleary.

Bolt

2009-11-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

Last night, our friend's daughter, Ruby, invited Megan and me to her fifth birthday party, which will be in March. She told us that there'll be millions of kids there and then looked around the room, saw her mom and dad and me and Megan, and counted to four.

"A million kids and four parents," she said.

This was an advance for Ruby. A few months ago, she said to Megan about the kids' movie Bolt, "You shouldn't watch it until you're a mommy. It's pretty scary." I'm not allowed to see it either, it turns out. This led Megan to think that Ruby considered us contemporaries of hers, and that, since we didn't have kids, we, too, must be four years old.

Suddenly, we've aged at least two decades in her eyes and her declaration was a big moment for me personally. I've been called a "man" before by little kids, but this was the first time I've been considered daddy-material.

When I got married in August and declared in church that I was willing to be such a dad, it should have hit home, but it didn't really. That seemed official, spiritual, theoretical. Plus, I still feel in many ways like a kid, and dads are not, in my experience, kids. In fact, I'm not sure my own father ever was one. I imagine he came out of the womb looking something like this:

(Doctors were amazed by the pre-natal spectacles he'd developed)

Still, I'm trying to grow into the idea of myself as a pop by slowly learning what kinds of foods are dangerous for little ones, how many times a day they defecate, whether they can be safely held upside-down during leap year, and so on.

And I've been trying to imagine what I'll feel if I find out I'm about to have a kiddo. I think I'll bust out with a rendition of "Down on the Corner" by Creedence. It's a pretty happy tune. And I'd like my child to learn rhythm early in life. Maybe then I'd set up a game of cribbage and loudly go over the rules; I want my kid to be good at board games, after all, and this could be a solid start.

As long as he/she's healthy (and awesome at puns).

After the high-fives and hugs, though, after Megan's gone to sleep, I'll put myself on trial for the next 8 hours, 8 months. I have a lot of verve to pass on, but a lot of neuroses, too. Can I temper that stuff so that Wanczyk Jr. doesn't (for instance) chomp on his fingernails like they're ears of corn?

Basically, I'd like to carefully hone what this little person will inherit from me. And though that's probably out of my control, I'm glad I have a little time. For now, I can be me without having, toddling around, a be-diapered mirror in which I see myself.

I would really like to see Bolt someday pretty soon, though. I think I'm going to love it. But I'll bet it's even scarier than Ruby says.

Vindication

2009-11-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

Show-Stoppers

2009-11-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a premise for an old-timey showtune: emotions are primary colors.

There are some basic emotions--like red, yellow, and blue--that mix to form the rest.

Love and hate are on the palette, and melancholy too. Love mixes with hate to form envy; melancholy with hate to form shame; and different amounts of love-paint and melancholy-tint come together to create just about every other sensation on the spectrum.

The song might go something like this:

You've got me feeling all yella-green
and ev'ry color that makes me live.
You're all kinds-a shades I've never seen.
And in my heart. . .you're. . .Roy. . .G. . .Biv.

(Verse two rhymes "Schenectady" with "Tweedle-dee-dee," naturally).

This is all to say that I sometimes feel an emotion, when watching a great performance, that I'd like to dub "Gene Kelly Green." It's somewhere far-east of envy, but it's not quite unadulterated love.

See, Gene Kelly is my all-time favorite performer. Whenever I see him tap-dance, croon, and pick-up ladies in 1950s Paris, I feel uplifted. But I wish, for a small second, that I could be just as much of a show-stopper.

(Pardon the lyrics of this song, which may be--somehow--worse than those recorded above!)

I don't feel jealous--I'm always smiling--but I do feel nostalgic, almost, admiring what and how much people can be.

I felt Gene Kelly Green last weekend watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Saturday Night Live. To my great consternation, I can't show you what incited that feeling because the online video has been confiscated; but suffice it to say it's the only thing that has ever made me give my television set a standing ovation.

Here's hoping I can scrawl something down someday that gets me out of my own chair. Right now, I'm stuck, as usual, spinning my roller-skate wheels, trying to come up with a jazzier ending.

A Bite-sized Memoriam

2009-11-22T14:46:00.000-08:00

Today, Megan and I had an impromptu lunch with our downstairs neighbor, a 91-year-old widow whom we call Mrs. DeLott. (As for her first name, we don't know it. We've heard her called Coletta, Helen, and, just now, Lovey.)

Today, Megan and I had an impromptu lunch with Lovey DeLott and her friend Ruth. We'd brought Lovey/Coletta (noir-ish, either way) some cookies to say 'Happy Thanksgiving,' and she insisted us in, offering sweet-old-lady sandwiches made on bite-sized rolls (you know the ones).

We talked about potato salad, Connecticut, her husband--"that sweet man"--and a new brand of food-container we all love (Snapperware). The conversation was delightful. It was friendly and predicated on roast beef--my second favorite kind of conversation, really, only bested by ones riddled with wordplay and electrified by Trivial Pursuit.

And there was something nice, today, about speaking louder than I normally would. Oftentimes that can be hard with the elderly, but this afternoon I liked being resonant!

Lovey (that's Mrs. Lovey, to me) had laid out too much food for her and Ruth, and so when Megan and I came in, she immediately wanted us to help them with it. I obliged, as I always do when presented with such a lucky task. My own grandmother thought I was the family Hoover and consistently tested the limits of my stomach's capacity with kielbasa and homemade pickles. I loved when she gave me the excuse to make gluttony a virtue.

"Eat all of that for me, David," Mrs. Lovey said, pointing to four coldcuts (rolled in the sweet-old-lady way) and a slice of sharp cheddar. My grandma used to say the same sort of thing to me. Making me eat was her way of knowing she'd cared for me. She could see that care, kindly prepared, disappear off the plate and into my maw.

I knew it meant something to her to see me clean my plate, twice. And I felt the same way today with another 91-year old widow who wanted to care for me--"Eat, eat"--and wasn't quite sure how else to do it.

The Fight

2009-11-21T15:40:00.000-08:00

Amanda Spituvnik leered at me as this kid named Josh held me against some bricks by the foursquare court. (I've found that I don't always get along with Joshes, Jeffs, and Jareds.)

“Why did you kick me?” Josh demanded. See, he'd tackled me right after class got out and I'd nudged him with my foot to get him off of me. My fighting back had brought on what I've since dubbed The Foursquare Fight.

Sometimes kids went down to the CVS parking lot to figure this sort of thing out. But I was on the Geography Team and my mom picked me up from school, so I didn't think much about settling scores.

Then this. Amanda Spituvnik leered at me. She must have been 5'8” in the fifth grade. I hated her.

“Why did you kick me?” Josh demanded again.

“I didn't.”

“I didn't,” Amanda parroted in a high voice that was, I suppose, making fun of the fact that my balls hadn't yet dropped. She was Vice-Principal Mrs. Spituvnik's daughter and had convinced everyone she was a good-kid.

Even though she must have looked like a good, little girl at the time, in my mind she's still one-part Courteney Cox, one-part Leona Helmsley, one-part fully-adult insolence.

And so it's important that I repeat her full name. Bullying will out! Recompense shall be mine, Amanda Spituvnik. Note: some names have been changed.

“Do you wanna fight?” (Josh may have been “dating” A. Spituvnik, and they made a formidable team. He had orange-peel hair and wore Ricky Rudd t-shirts.)

“No.”

“No,” she repeated Spituvnikly and spitefully. She is a terrible, terrible person. She is wearing red. Was, I suppose.

I'm realizing now that some things about my personality and my actions--the “I supposes,” the Geography, the complete innocence surrounding body parts (jokes thereof and pertaining to), the fact that during recess football I always picked Matt Kelvis instead of Chad Funderwald (a hard-nosed, 3'11” Josh-sympathizer), my blushing crush on fellow goody-two-shoes and floutist Laura Westbrook (a rival of The Spituvnik's for prime brunette)--probably brought this hassling on.

And so now it had come to pass. Josh jerked me away from the brick and wrestled me around. His Starter jacket added bulk but not agility.

Meanwhile, my backpack, with ruler and colored pencils, gave me some key armor. I held my own!

First, some pre-bout background:

Earlier in the day--during a lesson led by the awkwardly beautiful Miss Auchy, our student teacher and the only person I've ever known who went to Franklin Pierce College (“We Polked you in 1844, we shall Pierce you in 1852”)--Josh had shouted to the class, “What David, you want to kiss Miss Auchy?”

I may have hinted that, yes, but Josh's tactlessness was way out of line. I shot him a fighting glance. That led, I think, to his post-class tackle of me, to my kick, to the bricks, to The Spituvnik.

Josh and I fought 2 rounds, 7 seconds each.

He grabbed my bagstraps and jacket.

My attempt to seize his slippery-puff coat eventually succeeded.

He'd gained a distinct advantage.

We drove each others' shoulders like steering wheels, at ten and two.

The Spituvnik's disembodied head circled mine.

It mocked me and my Laura-like. "Who do you love more? Laura or Miss Auchy," taunted the head.

Josh kicked my left calf and my red sweatpants offered no protection.

Round two.

We re-engaged and he swung.

I lost my balance trying to deliver a defensive response, but held fast to his jacket--Charlotte Hornets.

He jerked me back up.

I thought about what I'd learned from football and went for his legs, unsuccessfully.

He struck me in the ribs.

“Trip him,” Spituvnik directed with a sadistic calm.

He released, and leg-whipped, and the leg-whip landed. End of round two.

With my arms ferris-wheeling, I fell, as if from an inner-tube, into some dirty snow. I walked away wounded toward Union St., which I'd always misread as Onion, toward my mom's salt-caked minivan, which had newly arrived.

“Just. . . walk. . . away,” Amanda said, quoting the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) mantra we'd learned that day from a kind policeman. She, I'd decided, was mean.

This was my only fight. I'd had strong competition--a toughie and his goading girlfriend. I didn't do very well.

There was a bright spot, though. I may have inadvertently broken Josh's nose with my backwards-flailing-combination: he missed school the next two days. But it's possible he was just suspended. Had a teacher seen the fracas? Had The Spituvnik ratted on her fighter to save her own skin? Was Josh merely a victim of her deceitful plea-bargaining with her mother, the vice-principal?

Probably. Either way, I didn't tattle, which means more on the schoolyard than it should. Josh and I had a tense friendship after that.

I think we considered the donnybrook a draw. My final record: 0-0-1. No KO's.

***

When I was 12, a sixth grade Jeff, with orange-peel hair and a Guns 'n Roses t-shirt, lifted my heavy backpack over my head until I had to run forward. Then, dropping it, he whip-lashed me out of wanting dinner that day. No one ever stripped me of my undefeated status, though.

And the floutist, L. Westbrook, ended up liking me for a short time--or so a phone call she placed from a slumber party would have me believe.

So, even though that pre-adolescent romance also ended in a draw, eat it Spituvnik.