July 2008 Archives

Last night I saw more ants than ever, and noticed in myself a weary resignation about it. I've become like the French during the Occupation—the invaders are firmly in control, and there's really not much a sane person can do about it. You wait them out. You hate them, but they'll be gone eventually. I'm at exactly the point that the Parisians must have been the first time they saw German soldiers strolling in the Bois de Boulogne or driving through the Place de la Concorde and realized, with a quiet little shock, that the sight had become familiar and unremarkable.

And sure, another part of me is like the Résistance—I'll keep fighting where and how I can. But just for pride's sake, and not with the idea that I can win. What I plan to do is hold out. And in a matter of weeks, the autumn frosts will come, like the armada sailing toward Normandy that June morning long ago. And I'll be like one of the victorious survivors, riding into a liberated Paris perched on a tank, wearing the requisite black turtleneck and beret, a light machine gun slung jauntily across one shoulder. That's right, you bastardly invaders, sleep tight. Fall is coming. Heh heh heh heh heh.

Remember Rumsfeld's known knowns and all that? I'd like to suggest that there are also known grossnesses and unknown grossnesses. For instance, nobody wants a tick on their naughty bits—we all understand that. But I once got one on my lower right eyelid. Brrrrr!!!!

I had a moment like that today. I complain a lot about the ants here—yes, I've taken steps, and spread so much insecticide around that it would have been simpler to use one of those Agent Orange choppers left over from Vietnam. To no avail, of course. The ants are out and about most days, some more than others, and I don't know what combination of factors is encouraging to an ant but that combination is present today. Zillions of them, and I went into the bathroom and there were like five or six on the bristles of my toothbrush. I'm sorry, but that creeped me out. That's just not where you want to see a swarm of insects.

So I knocked them off into the sink and started the hot water up. They just floated, the little bastards, so I remembered an old science trick they would use to teach kids about surface tension. The teacher would carefully drop a sewing needle in a beaker of water, and it would float—or, more precisely, be held up by the surface tension. Stick a corner of a bar of soap in the water, the surface tension goes poof, and the needle sinks.

I remembered this seemingly useless fact today. Ants floating, swirling about merrily? Heh heh heh—I been to skool, you little bums! Grab the soap, hold it under the faucet, and zoink! The ants are now awash. Open the drain, and they're circling away to oblivion. That's called the Coriolis effect, which we'll talk about some other time.  Whoops! I was wrong about that. Stupid know-it-all Wikipedia!

My buddies uptown at the library are often called upon to help people—sometimes people of the older persuasion—to do stuff online. So I thought I'd offer this lolcat I saw today as a screensaver for the monitors there:

more cat pictures

I haven't been writing much lately because life seems quite intent on taking me down a few pegs and I wasn't all that stratospheric in terms of pegs to begin with. This diminishes a writer's output. My main man Calvin Trillin said it best in his book Remembering Denny:

I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is
even more important than it is in writing-—tightrope walking comes immediately to mind—but it's a difficult for me to think of anybody producing much
writing if his confidence is completely shot. In order to take a crack
at the third or fourth draft, you have to hold on to an almost insane
belief—insane in that you can't think of any rational evidence to
support it—that what you're working on, by now stupefyingly boring to
you, will be of interest or value to others.

Of course, there's an easy temporary solution: When your confidence flags, just quote other, better writers on the subject of confidence. Quotes from those other, better writers about confidence and its droopier phases are thick on the ground, fortunately. Here's Jonathan Swift, from Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift:

In Pope, I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh, I wish it mine:
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, "Pox take him, and his wit!"

So there you have it. If Jonathan Swift can feel inferior, then my own feelings of inferiority (occasional, at least) put me in pretty good company. I'm confident sure that very soon I'll be back to tightrope walking over the nine parts of speech with suavity and grace. Until then, there's plenty of quotes where those two came from.

I was tired yesterday and today I suppose that I heard something I liked—in 8 1/2, maybe, that was the only thing I watched yesterday—and getting up and writing it on the notepad in the kitchen I usually use to make my grocery list. Then I promptly forgot having written it, since I forget everything. And then today I go down to write the words "razor blades" on the pad, and what's written there?

"What do the spirits say?"
"They say you're free, but you have to learn to choose."

Now that's a strange thing to read where you only expected to see a list of groceries you need. I guess I'll watch 8 1/2 again. It's probably in there. But what if it isn't? Curiouser and curiouser!

The heat broke last night, lots of thunderstorms, but it's still quite muggy, and I'm worried I'll develop some sort of rot, like a cheese. And it occurred to me that although In general I deplore the use of nouns as verbs, I'd be very glad to use "summer" as a verb if I were talking about myself. As in, "I'm summering in Martha's Vineyard." 

Now, I'm not complaining, but if you asked me what I had to complain about if I were of a mind to, and I ticked off everything that's not entirely comfortable in my life right now, you might agree that it's been a rich tapestry lately. Like, I'm watching 8 1/2 last night, and I can't help being haunted by Mastroianni's eyes—for his character, Guidi Anselmi, work, love, life as a whole has become a game he's weary to the bone with. I can't say I'm quite there yet, but I'm as close to the Guido end of the Perky-Jaded Continuum as I've been in a while.

But then on the other hand, as I'm taking out the trash this morning I notice a few stray honeysuckle flowers, and remembered that I've been struck by their delicacy and wanted to photograph them. And you know what? I actually thought they were beautiful, reminiscent of orchids, really. Of course they're not as big as orchids. But all that means is that you have to look a little closer.

Yesterday I spend the midday hours in what to me was a new kind of swimming pool. I got an invitation to this farm where they'd taken a swimming pool and rigged it so that the cold waters of a headwater spring creek flowed through it. The rain falls on the uplands, soaks down into the limestone, then percolates up into streams at a constant temperature of 55 degrees F. or so, winter and summer, and this being summer that's pretty refreshing. Trout live in these little streams because trout need cold water, and this water laughs off heat waves. And yesterday, so did I. You'd float about, surrounded by real, live stream water (midge larvae would float by occasionally, just like on the regular stream), looking around you at the farmhouse and barn, the lawn and flowerbeds, the fences and pastures, the swaying trees, the clouds passing in the blue sky. The sun hammered down as it has for days, but who cared? I was floating in water that was just about exactly the temperature of a perfectly chilled Chablis. The enervation caused by the heat dissolved and swirled away downstream, and that cold leached down into me and gave me a profound sense of refreshment. There's an old English phrase for people who are self-possessed in the face of danger: "cool as a trout." I wasn't in any danger yesterday, but I was cool as a trout anyway, and it was quite a pleasure.

    Controversy Over a Calendar of Mormon Men

So I'm in the library finishing up a project, and I hear the doorbell go off. It's the first three notes of a major scale, then the first note again, do, re, mi, do if you're down with solfeggio. And suddenly my mind is flung in an opposite direction from what I'm doing, as if it were a jai alai ball—those notes are the second phrase in a famous aria that is now playing in my head, and it's one of those damnable deals where I either don't know or can't remember the name of it.

To these library folks I'm sort of a town character and they know me, so I get up to look for the director, who I figure might know the aria if I whistle it to her. It's famous, probably by Puccini, from the general sound of it, and I'm optimistic she'll know. But she's not in her office. Hmm! Then I realize one of the circulation people is a music student on break from college. Nope, she doesn't know it. Another kid who works there happens to walk in, and she's a very knowledgeable person but no luck here either.

And now a woman is leaning across the circulation counter from the other direction. Her son might know, she says. He's over in the music section of the library right now. She leads me over, and a kid of about 12 or so is there, flaming red hair, and I whistle the piece to him. He doesn't look at me; he just leans in and mumbles to his mother.

"But do you know it?" she asks. "Yes," he mumbles to her in a rasping whisper, "but I'm very nervous." Something's up; I look away and gaze at the books on the shelf near me, trying to be less obtrusive, but it doesn't help, so I drift away out of the racks and go to another part of the library. The mother will find me if the kid tells her, and after a minute she does. She's got a name of an opera that turns out to be Giani Schicchi; from there it's a moment's work to find that the aria is O mio babbino caro. The woman mentions in passing that the kid is autistic, and I smile and shrug with what I hope is a kind of sympathetic nonchalance. Some people call every form of mental handicap a "difference," as in "differently abled," and sometimes that's a pathetic euphemism. But there are types of autism in which it's really true; people can be extraordinary able in some ways, but they deal with other people and react to certain stimuli very, very differently from the average person. Nobody would wish for their child to be autistic, not in any of its forms, and I was feeling that, standing there by the catalog terminal. But how many boys that age could have listened to a melody and placed the opera it came from? I couldn't begin to guess. It was strange, the randomness of it, how my little niggling question had been answered by this extraordinary kid and the mother who was a sort of ambassador between him and the world and had been dealing with this profound situation every day of his life. Very, strange, the circumstances that fell into place, to answer my little question.

If you've read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, you know that "Busy, busy, busy" is what devout Bokononists are required to say when they're struck by the complexity of the world. So I said it to myself. And went home, and found Kiri Te Kanawa singing the aria. It was easy, once I knew the name. So listen.

One of my pet peeves—and if you don't air a pet peeve now and then, you're not really blogging—is when people say the Fifties were conformist. Just like that, they say it. Everyone conformed and was bored and Ike's face smiled like a full moon over the decade and nothing of interest happened. My guess is that the people who say this derive their knowledge of history and the arts from Nick at Nite. So as a public service, I'm going to start a series of examples of not-entirely-conformism from that much- and wrongly maligned decade. Example the first:

First of all, let me fix everyone with a steely squint and say, with a dangerous edge in my voice, that when I was very very young—got that? Is that clear?—I read something in a magazine called LIFE about two twins who'd been separated at birth and lived lives far apart from each other. In middle age they encountered each other again, and there were amazing parallels: They had similar jobs, similar-looking wives, and they had both been moved to construct a little white bench around a tree in their yards. I was willing to imagine that identical twins might want to work similar jobs and marry similar women. But how in the hell, I asked myself, do genes know about little benches around trees? If you can have a genetically determined predisposition to build a little bench around a tree, then what isn't determined? Do we have free will in anything? It was disturbing.

And since then, as gene research went on, there's been a steady drumbeat of news about how this is determined by genes and that is determined by genes. Or if not genes, pheromones. Love, beauty, art—it's all coldly chemical. Check back with us some time next week and we'll know exactly why.  We'll explain why you love Sally and not Sue, why you enjoy football but not baseball, why you like the smell of pine woods but not the scent of lilac on a summer evening. Do you like Brahms? Bocce? Fabergé eggs? We'll tell you why. It's genetic. Everything is genetic.

I tried not to think about it. I liked and clung to the idea that we're free to love what our unique individual selves want to love. So I was cheered to read David Brooks saying this morning that actually we're not that close after all to cracking the code and creating a unified field theory of why people do things based on their genes. So you can feel free to, well, feel free. If you love a certain person, or a certain landscape, or a certain piece of music, maybe it isn't because of your genes. Maybe it'll always, as far as we know, be just because. I kind of like that idea.

Woke up early, and decided that although I had virtuously bought yogurt and granola yesterday to have a healthy breakfast, I didn't want yogurt and granola, goddamnit, I wanted a baguette. I call myself a "recovering Francophile" these days, which means I can appreciate the French (and their Canadian descendants) with my eyes open to the possibility of their human imperfection. That said, it must be admitted that a good baguette is a pretty tasty form of bread, with its crackly crust and soft, stretchy core. You take your baguette, slice it open like a trout, and fill it up with butter and orange marmalade, have it with coffee, and life is good.

And luckily with our new little gourmet place uptown, you can have a baguette whenever you want. I'm walking up a hill toward the main street (the local expression for the business district is "uptown," because it literally is up) and a tandem bicycle slowly follows. The man and woman on it are spinning their feet, because even though it's not that steep of a hill, they're way down in what's called "granny gear." If I'd walked a little faster, I could have beaten them up the hill. I smiled at them—there's something irrepressibly cheerful about a bicycle built for two, as the song goes—and they smiled back. "We don't climb hills very well," the woman said. "We're better going down them," said the man.

So of course I'm whistling "Daisy Bell" as I turn into the shop, and stroll tunefully up to the baguette bin, and the song dies on my lips—the bin is empty. They come out around 10 a.m., the young woman behind the counter says, her eyes full of sympathy. Was it so much to ask, I thought? Just a baguette? But as so often happens, the solution was right at hand—there, on the counter, was a row of croissants. In a moment I'd handed over my $2.65 and was on my way out with a waxed-paper bag and my little croissant. It's the same difference, really—just as Continental and even more delectable, since a proper croissant is like shortbread, in that it's an excuse for spending a few moments going nuts on butter. And I decided to make a photo Clotilde-style of the thing, with her trademark insanely shallow depth of focus, before I snarfed the thing up in three bites like a dog. I may have the yogurt and granola tomorrow, if I'm feeling virtuous, but that doesn't come naturally to me. I'd rather have something good to eat.

People who get tired of my complaining about the heat tell me to just turn on my window units, as if it were that simple. It's actually one of those dire lifeboat choices, at least at night, because the window unit is noisy enough to drown out the clock radio. I'm not kidding—I literally didn't hear the radio come on one morning, but that was OK, because I never was able to sleep anyway.

So last night I'm lying in a sheen of sweat, thinking about Streetcar. Some movies are sweatier than others, and Streetcar is certainly one of them. (I think the guys on "Cheers" were arguing about this once, and Cool Hand Luke was deemed the winner.) Since I couldn't sleep anyway—it was either going to be too hot, or too noisy—I got up, took the book off the shelf, and checked to see if the sweat was added by Hollywood. No, I found, there are lots of references to being hot in Streetcar. I'm sure it was meant to be a Dionysian/Apollonian thing, but I got to wondering if there weren't more references to being hot in Streetcar than there are in The Inferno. Then morning arrived with the question uninvestigated. But it's going to be a long summer, so I'll check on that one of these nights and get back to you.

A quote flashed through my mind today, after reading James Lileks taking Garrison Keillor to task for something or other. Mr. Keillor has a tendency to pontificate about George Bush—it's a common failing, but a failing still—and Lileks has a tendency to freak out whenever he hears what he considers to be typically liberal muzzy thinking. It's a pity: When both of these guys do what they're good at, they're well worth reading, but hearing them bicker over this by-now very depressing and unenlightening subject just didn't do it for me. I knew the quote I wanted, but first I heard the elephantine chuffing and snorting of the trash truck, and had to run out to the curb. Then I came back and got the book Franny and Zooey down from the bookshelf. Zooey is the youngest son, now grown, in a family of precocious children who had once all appeared on a radio show about brainy youngsters called "It's A Wise Child." He's an actor, bitter and uncompromising about the banality of his field, and preoccupied with a spiritual crisis is younger sister is experiencing. His mother, also concerned (they all live together) has been having a long conversation with him, to which he's reacting with surface annoyance—in part because he's trying all the time to wash and get dressed, and she won't leave the bathroom—and suppressed love. In the end, she leaves, just as he's putting on his second shoe:

Mrs. Glass watched him pull it on. She didn't stay for the tying of the lace, however. Instead, she left the room. But slowly. Moving with a certain uncharacteristic heaviness—a drag, actually—that distracted Zooey. He looked up and over at her with considerable attention. "I just don't know any more what happened to all you children," Mrs. Glass said vaguely, without turning around. She stopped at one of the towel bars and straightened a washcloth. "In the old radio days, when you were all little and all, you all used to be so—smart and happy and—just lovely. Morning, noon, and night." She bent over and picked up from the tiled floor what appeared to be a long, mysteriously blondish human hair. She made a slight detour with it over to the wastebasket, saying, "I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy." Her back was toward Zooey as she moved again toward the door. "At least," she said, "you all used to be so sweet and loving to each other it was a joy to see." She opened the door, shaking her head. "Just a joy," she said firmly, and closed the door behind her.

Zooey, looking over at the closed door, inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. "Some exit lines you give yourself, buddy," he called after her—but only when he must have been sure that his voice wouldn't really reach her down the hall.

Well, Lileks and Keillor are both smart as whips and know a lot, but when they stoop to this sort of thing it makes me feel an uncharacteristic heaviness myself. I wish Keillor could watch a young girl play baseball without thinking, King Charles' head style, about the current occupant. And I wish Lileks could acknowledge that Keillor is a millionaire for a reason. And I wish they both had used their bully pulpits to do what they're better at, instead of lashing at each other with tired-out opinions, the way clowns hit each with rubber chickens. Which I suppose is my opinion, but I'm sticking to it. If you're looking for amusement and instruction on the Web today, I wish you good hunting. The day is young, at least in my own time zone.

Again, it's not hot, but amazingly close and sticky. For the whatevereth morning in a row, I'm seeing this:

And I'm dutifully browsing The New York Times's website. And getting a little bored, actually. Evidently we're distracted by technology, and losing our ability to focus—an extremely able journalist has written a book saying so. Aha! Maureen Dowd makes passing note of celebrity divorces and then passes along marriage advice from some priest about how you basically shouldn't marry a jerk. Fair enough. (I'm not bothering to link to that one.) Then the Pulitzer-winner Russell Baker has a piece disinterred from 1990 about how he doesn't like fireworks. Well, fine, Russ. You don't like fireworks, you don't like fireworks.

I don't know. I'm waiting for someone to surprise and delight me, to say something I don't know, to be something other than a master of the bleedin' obvious. I used to observe the ritual, going out for fresh bread and the paper making coffee and spreading marmalade and disassembling the Sunday Times. But I don't remember leaping up from the table and saying, "Aha! Now I have the missing piece of information for which I was searching!" What I remember was more a kind of placid sabbatical leisure, a recognition that Sunday morning was a time of contemplation, even for complacent agnostics like myself. The coffee was like wine, the marmaladed baguette a wafer, the various sections you opened up in sequence a sort of ritual passage through a secular service at the end of which you felt vaguely refreshed, caught up, ready for the week ahead.

I really don't remember information nuggets having much to do with it at all. So I'm going to do an experiment: I'll put the computer to sleep, go downstairs, make another cup of coffee, spread some marmalade, and go out on the porch. Perhaps if I sit there, just eating and drinking and thinking quietly to myself, this Sunday morning will unfold itself slowly, like a flower. I think that's really what I want.

It's not hot, just 70 F., but overcast and very humid. I feel like the whole world is covered with a thin layer of mildew, rotting and congealing, sinking in on itself like yesterday's leftover salad. Which is a dramatic way of saying a cup of coffee, then shower and shave might be in order. I went to bed fairly early last night but the neighborhood stayed up—lots of fireworks going off all around, until midnight or 1 a.m. I was more impressed than annoyed—the interesting fireworks, the kind that fly or explode, aren't available legally, so when they're going off all around you have the comforting sense of living among a bunch of fairly enterprising people. And nobody set my house on fire. Personally I observed the day by grilling burgers, steaming corn, and drinking beer. Then, to be even more American, I sat on my ass and watched a DVD. Usually I insist on watching fireworks, but I was fireworked out from three weeks ago.

If you're not into words, skip this, but I just noticed James Fallows, one of the best journalists and smartest users of English on the planet, use a phrase I kind of hate: "in specific." (It's in the fifth line here.) I've never read anything about this but I assume it's a back-formation or parallel to "in general." This might be useful except we already have a couple of better ways to go here: saying "in particular," or saying "to be specific."

Just one of my pet peeves, like saying "squash" when you mean "quash." When I hear that an investigation has been quashed, I imagine adults using some form of bullying chicanery to end it because the fear what will be revealed. When I hear an investigation has been squashed, I imagine some big fat person sitting on and crushing it, like a hat. The image is ridiculous. So if we take the ideal of an open democracy seriously—and yesterday was the Fourth of July here in the good old U.S. of A., then we should at least quash, and not squash, investigations we find inconvenient.

Yesterday I had the interesting experience for a writer of seeing a book that I've written on sale in a store for the first time. It's kind of a kick. Of course, it was on sale in a historical society gift shop, not in a bookstore or a rack of mass market bestsellers at the airport shop where they also sell Dramamine and cell phone rechargers and so forth. But hey, it's something. It's not a real book, after all, it's a—hmm, got to be discreet—anity-vay ess-pray kind of book. When it came out, someone said I was now a published author and I said, "Well, I'm a printed author, at least." Still, seeing it on a rack is fun.

Kind of took me back to the time, a few weeks into my first days as a newspaper guy, when I was first doing township meeting articles. I'd gone to a meeting the night before and written it up, and it was in the hometown newspaper the next day. I was in town and saw a guy walking along with a paper under his arm, and suddenly realized that every single paper bought that day had my little story in it. Every single one! It was on porches, under arms, it was just everywhere. You get jaded about that after 20 years in publishing, but then you have some new wrinkle and it all comes back. No biggie in the scheme of things, I know that for sure. But still fun.

OK, I'm always asking people where the good contemporary fiction is. (Besides Jhumpa Lahiri.) There must be some, right? The problem is, the systems for publicizing it have broken down. Jessa Crispin, the founder of the literature-oriented website Bookslut, scolds the publishers for not using the Web effectively, and I think she's got a point.

Of course, there's another problem: Much of the literary establishment seems fairly uninterested in engaging the reader with a good story. But there must a few out there doing it right, surely? Writers producing well-written yarns that engage your intellect but keep you turning the page and give you a certain emotional payoff at the end and leave you wanting more and waiting for the next book? So I'm with Bookslut on this one. I ought to know what's good out there. But I don't.

Lord, it's a beautiful summer evening, actually late afternoon, and I have no complaints. Sitting on my front porch, tapping on the laptop, admiring the way the breeze tosses the leaves of the trees about in my neighborhood. And lately I've been working on a story that made me remember my first days of working in journalism, when I discovered, with a fierce and exultant joy, that I loved the business. What's not to love? You go to the most interesting places and talk to the most interesting people.

I mean, f'rinstance, I've been working on a story about a few of the houses that will be featured in a tour of historic or otherwise significant homes in my area. They're supposed to be interesting, nay, they're required to be interesting, being interesting is the sine qua non of this deal. And they usually are. The other day I went to a bed and breakfast that's based in a 1720s log home, and the owner has sprinkled these nifty sculptures around the grounds. Way off, past the swimming pool she converted to a koi pond, is this sculpture of a young girl lying the grass, reading. How cool is that? And I also went to a very nice house owned by a guy who is, among lots of other interesting characteristics, a collector, and one of the things he collects is historic military uniforms. He took me up to his office, opens some closet doors, and whoosh, there they all are. He's showing me a few, and one of them, he casually mentions, was Stalin's. "OK," I say, "Josef Stalin wore this?" "Yes," he said. So I'm standing there, looking at this jacket and hat worn by one of the most important people in 20th century history. And getting paid to do it. I can think of worse ways to make a buck.