August 2008 Archives

A friend remarked the other day that everyone is busy these days; there's no point in even saying it. And it's true of most people outside an institution—they've got a lot to do.

But I think it's at least partly a perception thing. My dad, for instance. Once I was watching him watering his garden. He was filling up a large cooking pot at an outside tap (my parents have their own way of doing things) and then walking around a high concrete patio and down a slope to his garden. It was a large garden, and he was doing this over and over again.

I watched him, analyzing the situation like a management consultant. "Why don't you get a hose," I said, "and attach it to the tap, run it around the patio, and just water the garden that way?"

"I don't have time," he snapped, "to buy a hose."

I had a fact to offer in the debate that I believed was a strong counterargument. "Dad," I said, "you're retired. I think you have time to buy a hose."

So there you are. He wasn't really as busy as he thought he was; he just needed to slow down and take stock of the situation. Maybe we all should? Just sayin'.

It's not the money quote, but it's the part that stopped me today in John Dickerson's piece on Hillary's plea for unity and how it won't work.

The Clinton supporters I've been talking to are a stubborn lot. They don't find her as persuasive as they once did because they think she's supporting Obama only to keep her political future alive.

I mean, my theory is that she's supporting Obama for a) the sake of party unity, b) so that the Republican doesn't win, and c) because we live in what is supposed to function more or less as a democracy in which voters decide things. But these people say no, when she supports Obama she's cynical and wrong. I have to admit it—there's a certain fascination, morbid but certain all the same, to be found in people who are completely, totally, 180 degrees wrong. Human nature, I suppose. There's nowt so queer as folk, is there?

In a couple of different contexts recently I've had discussions with people about having too many interests and spreading myself too thin. And it came to me that being an omnivore is good—it means you can eat anything, which is handy—but what doesn't work out is trying to eat everything.

It's August in only the strictest sense: If you look at the calendar, you'll see that the biggest word on the page with today's date on it is the word "August." But really, it's early fall, before the first frosts, when the nights are cool. It's 5:49 a.m., dark and even a little chilly. You can feel the wheels turning, the celestial clock-gears clicking along as the seasons have their quarterly changing of the guard. The crickets and katydids are singing, but in my mind they sound subdued, pensive, aware that things are not what they were.

The crickets may not rejoice to feel the coolness, but I do—I congratulate myself for having survived another summer. I seem to recall writing some weeks back that it was so hot and humid that I felt I could be carved into slices, like a soft cheese, but I don't feel that way now.

OK, the back still hurts a little bit, so I'll get up now and walk around with my coffee cup.

I have wrenched my back, which is only a problem if I try to sit, stand, or lie down. Anyone who has developed a new gun for shooting rhinoceroses with an anesthetic dart is welcome to try it on me.

The ants are back, with a vengeance, running all around the kitchen in what I sincerely hope is a kind of last hurrah before the cold weather starts. Last night I saw one running along the edge of the range with a large white crumb in its teeny little mandibles, and I felt roughly the sort of outrage you feel watching television coverage of some sort of civil unrest and seeing a youth run out of a looted department store with a television he clearly did not pay for. That's not your crumb, I thought, it's my crumb! Where are you going with my crumb? I don't want the crumb, I'd have thrown it out anyway, but it's just brazen of the ant to run away with it right in front of me.

So I got the insecticide and sprayed it along the doorway where they seemed to be coming in from outside, sprayed it with the heartless efficiency of a Prussian general ordering a wave of mustard-gas shells dropped onto the Allied lines. Destroy the enemy without mercy! I'm afraid that this long battle has transformed my view of ants—I've dehumanized them, you might say. War is like that.

I was reading an e-mail from someone and questioned an assertion, started debating the point with the other person in my head, and lost the debate. I really do wonder about myself sometimes. 

I say "Ugh!" I've a bug that is depressing me
Kerri Strug would say "Ugh!" if the victim were she.
She'd be deperkified, it would drain her of glee
Which is why I say "Ugh" since it's happened to me.

Just in case you're underappreciating me—a widespread problem in the world today—I'd like to point out that this is written in strict anapestic tetrameter, baby, just like the Master. Boo-Yah!

James Fallows, always worth paying attention to, has a good post today about how American media focus on gold medals, as if getting a silver medal in the frickin' Olympics is a great misfortune and if an athlete they focus on gets one then our hearts should go out to that person in his or her time of trouble and sorrow. Of course this is nuts. But you can see that it comes out of a type of sports coverage that's essentially storytelling. So let's do it ourselves and see how it works.

Let's imagine an athlete—we'll call her Tyler McCardell, 19 years old, from Grand Junction, Colorado. She grew up in a modest house in the foothills of the Rockies, and from the time she was a toddler she was fascinated with—oh, I don't know—throwing the javelin, say. Nuts for the javelin, was Tyler. We see a picture of her, black and white and grainy, which is strange because it was taken in 1994, showing a toddler with curls and a huge grin and her first kid-sized javelin. The pictures continue through school and into college, growing ever more modern in format. Now we're at her kitchen table. Mom, brother, sister, dog. But no Dad. We see still pictures of him too. Which means, of course, that he's dead. Of, um, cancer. He held on until the day it was announced that Tyler would be on the Olympic javelin squad. But he'll never see her in the Olympics. And Tyler's eyes fill up.

Stories need conflict, and the conflict here is that the McCardells are sad because they not only lost Dad, he won't get to see Tyler compete. But he can be memorialized, right? Sure—but there's only one way, when we're talking about TV and the Olympics. Tyler must win the gold. She'll win it for Dad. Silver just doesn't make it a story. Which is why I don't watch the Olympics. I don't really want to listen to the soap-opera part, and I don't really care if one person who happens to be from my country swims across a pool two hundredths of a second faster than a person from some other country. Watching people swim quickly is just not a priority for me.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but it's my blog and I'm just going to fearlessly say it—I think winning a silver medal in the Olympics is nothing to be ashamed of. A person might even feel a little bit proud about it. But I have lots of wacky notions, so you have to consider the source here.

I say often that I typically don't comment on the media circus—I say it every time I do comment on the media circus, actually—but I think I have a comment on the John Edwards thing that hasn't been made yet. Which is that I don't know Rielle Hunter—also known as Lisa Hunter, Lisa Jo Hunter, and Rielle Jaya James Druck—and she may be the most sensible, judicious person on the planet. But to my discerning eye, she seems like one of the world's biggest airheads. She's a rich kid who became an actress and documentary filmmaker, which pretty much says it all right there. (A former girlfriend used to say of such people, "I smell a trust fund.") But there's more—she's been featured by more than one Gen X novelist as the character Alison Poole, at one point described as an "ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old." I'm not sure what Mr. McInerny means by "ostensibly jaded," but at any rate, you get the idea—this is not the kind of woman who's going to cross the prairies with you and help build a new nation. She's an airhead, dude.

 And if you're a man with any common sense, if you're a man who's offering himself as a person with enough intelligence and judgment to lead the United States of America, then you damn well ought to have enough sense to a) identify an airhead when you see one and b) above all, not sleep with her and c) especially not sleep with her if you are married.

It just doesn't make sense. Here you are, an intelligent, commanding, successful, handsome guy, and you've thought it over and read the brochures and you've decided yes, I'm going to have an affair. Fine! But have an affair with someone nice and sensible. That's all I'm saying. No airheads. Otherwise you're the subject of a million standup jokes and you're facing articles of impeachment and things just go to hell overnight. Got it? It's easy—consider the likely consequences of your actions, if you're so darn smart. And then back away from the airhead.

The Perseid meteor shower was happening the other night, so I took a minute or so to watch the sky. I didn't see anything, but that's the Perseids—you'll see them every few minutes, so it's usually necessary to be out watching most of the evening.

Years ago, that was easier, because every summer a bunch of college friends would go up to Cape Cod for a week. One of us had made good financially, and she had a summer house on the Cape, right on an estuary off Buzzards Bay. We'd sit out of an evening, eating and then drinking wine well into the night. And every few minutes, a meteor would make a razor-slice of light across the blackness. Once one friend pointed out a satellite to me—a dot like any star, but scuttling through the stationary ones like a frightened insect—not going fast, but as fast as it could anyway.

All the friends had kids, and for that and other reasons we've drifted apart. Now we see each other once a year or so. What can you do? I have other friends I see more often. And I still get out and see the meteors when I can. It's nice just knowing they're there, too. I spent this other night quietly at home, and before bedtime I was reading a new book. I laid it on my chest for a moment, listening to the chorusing crickets and katydids outside, watching the cat who was curled up on the bed with me, and thought about how there was a layer of meteors happening miles above us, momentary lights in the sky, spread across us like a blanket.

When the police asked Philippe Petit why he strung a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers and danced back and forth on it for 45 minutes, he told them, "There is no 'why.'" But the documentary I saw yesterday, "Man on Wire," has a lot of fun explaining the how—it's very much a fun caper flick—and winds up with a moving sense of the purposeless poetry of the thing. Petit himself is a fascinating character, and as the film goes on you get a sense of awe not just at the act itself but at the six years of obsessive planning and work involved in pulling it off. And you believe Petit when he talks about the moment of hesitation before he stepped off the roof and onto the wire, a quarter-mile over the concrete below. "Death is very close," he says.

But the part that's even more moving is when his friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, a key helper in the project, talks about the moment when Petit became acclimated and relaxed, and started smiling and enjoying himself. Blondeau's eyes fill, and his voice cracks. Petit's then-girlfriend Annie Allix, who was watching from the ground, is similarly emotional, remembering it more than three decades afterward. I came away thinking that for Petit, the act was personal, particular, the outcome of one person's obsession. Who else in the world would ever have thought of such a thing, much less have done it? But for Blondeau, Allix, and the rest of us awed spectators, the walk that morning said something about human beings in general. When someone accomplishes a daring feat—climbing Everest for the first time, or flying solo across the Atlantic—don't we all, including my own timid self, feel somehow a little enlarged, a little raised up as well? But that morning in 1974 was something special—superhuman determination and concentration, yes, but in the service of wit and charm, whimsy and grace. People do awful things in  this world, but my god, some of us do wonderful things too, and I really can't think of anything more artistically wonderful than what Philippe Petit did that morning. Death was close, but life and art and beauty were even closer. Go see the film; it'll do you good.

For a long time now I've been speaking and writing articles in favor of being a locavore—of eating foods produced locally. It's simple common sense that there's no reason for people in Pennsylvania to eat a carrot that was put on a truck in Florida and driven a thousand miles north when a locally grown carrot is fresher and just as unsatisfying. (Ha ha just kidding I happen to love carrots.)

So yesterday I decided that maybe for once I'd actually practice what I've been so loudly preaching and have dinner with foods bought only from the local farmer's market. I would walk up there, and the only fossil energy involved would be my own, since I'm rapidly becoming a fossil myself. So anyway, up I go, and after some judicious browsing I bought a quart of string beans.

Against the string beans I can say no word. They were fresh, tasty, good. But the main course was a problem. The only meat you can buy at the farmer's market is sold by these Amish people, and I had a problem with it before. They sell you a chicken leg and thigh for four bucks, and as you can see the birds they use seem to be especially bred for smallness.

They sell a lot of it, though; they have this huge broiler deal, black and smoky, that's going all afternoon, just full of tons of birds, like an avian Auschwitz.* And people lined up to get it; maybe my fellow shoppers were are all avid locavores themselves and approve of the idea of small chickens, since you can transport more of them with every gallon of gas. At any rate, if I wanted a main course that had expired and gone to meet its maker, which I did, this was the only option. And yes, the beans were fine. But the chicken, in addition to small, had been cooked to the precise degree of underdoneness I remembered from last time. The tendons and ligaments kept trying to hold back a portion of the meat, like tax collectors, and the skin was unappealingly flabby. I began to understand why there was never a blooming of Amish restaurants in the trendier city neighborhoods during the '80s. But in addition to undercooked chicken, they sell ones that are either uncooked or cooked to what the Amish consider rare, and I'll try those next. I suppose that it's the same old thing—if you want something done right, including its degree of doneness, you have to do it yourself.



* And don't get your knickers in a twist—I'm a member of the tribe, and I'm allowed to make such jokes. And after all, there's a precedent: Zero Mostel is famous for having remarked of Rumanian-Jewish food that "It's killed more Jews than Hitler."

For the most part I'm averting my eyes sorrowfully from the whole silly John Edwards-Rielle Hunter brouhaha, but I have to make note of today's Times article and its lede:

Former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said Friday that he had an affair in 2006 with a woman who was not his wife. But he denied that he was the father of her baby, who was born in February, about a month after Mr. Edwards dropped out of the race for president.

I hate to quibble over trifles but the word "affair" inflexibly denotes a relationship with a person you are not married to. That's just what an affair is. It works the other way too—you simply cannot have an affair with a woman who is your wife. I'm just sayin'.

Just this morning on National Public Radio they were talking about Osama's driver having been subjected to "harsh interrogation techniques that some consider torture." The New York Times described the techniques as "coercive." I haven't been able to establish the nature of the harshness or coercion, but I want to say this as someone who once tried to report the news honestly: If we're talking about waterboarding here, it's torture. It's torture! Not maybe torture, not possibly torture, not torture in the view of some. Every description of this "technique" points out that its victims feel like they're dying. It reduces them to blind panic. Nobody can endure it for more than a matter of seconds. And I want to tell you goddamned cowardly editors that when so-called interrogators make people feel like they're dying, that's torture. If you can't see that simple truth and have the courage to say so then you don't deserve to be in a position of public trust—a trust that is rapidly and rightly diminishing. I've been ashamed of journalism as a whole for something like twenty years now, but never more ashamed than I am about this.

Update: Found in the Christian Science Monitor that the techniques included sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. The latter would not be considered torture in common parlance. Sleep deprivation is pretty agonizing, according to people who've been subjected to it. In this regard, the word "coercive" may be appropriate. May.

Personally, it's persuasive to me that the best experts on interrogation say that inflicting any form of discomfort on a person only motivates them to tell you what you want to hear. And the use of any of this stuff is just a little too Orwellian for me to countenance. One-Twenty-Oh-Nine, baby, and let's hope we can undo some of the damage starting the next day.

Naturally we find it pleasant and instructive to consider that life is a matter of ups and downs when the ups and downs are happening to other people. You can prove this for yourself at any supermarket checkout line. But when your own life is in a down phase, as mine is a little bit lately, it can make you broody and that will show up in your blog if you have one and friends have remarked on this. One remark made to me was "Cheer up!"

So I decided it would be pleasant and instructive to read about Mark Twain's ups and downs as recorded in his less-celebrated but wonderful book, Roughing It.He loses his job as a reporter:

For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at "slinking." I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed.

But eventually he meets a fellow tramp, they get to talking, and Twain discovers that not only is his companion in misery a fellow out-of-work reporter, he's a fine person nevertheless:

This mendicant Blucher -- I call him that for convenience -- was a splendid creature. He was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a crown.

Isn't that nice? Blucher had problems, but Blucher was still Blucher. So although I've lately caught a bouquet of setbacks, although I've on occasion slunk away from cheerfulness and light, I still have my own portion of hope, pluck and philosophy, and I'm sure that a few ups will come my way before long. The medieval folks called this "Fortune's Wheel;" statisticians call it regression toward the mean; me, I just call it life. Thanks for visiting, gotta do some stuff now. And come back; I've got some wonderful newspaper stuff Twain did that's not widely published but that you'll love, swear to God. Later!

You don't typically encounter gospel-style singers named Adolf, so I was surprised to find that this one could really rock the house:

A: Because I will not write that your quarter-sawn white oak flooring has a hand-rubbed tongue oil finish.

OK, just the quickest of posts, because in a minute I'm going to go down to the piano and practice. And I'm not going to practice with some distant, end-of-the-rainbow goal of reaching some knowable point where I'm finally, certifiably, good at playing the piano. I'm going downstairs and playing just to be a little better today than I was yesterday. So here I go ...