tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22114481682237210772024-03-13T08:40:05.827-04:00How To Like ItNothing is More Honorable than a Grateful Heart.--SenecaJohn W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.comBlogger164125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-89892220176446378882017-04-10T02:00:00.003-04:002017-04-10T02:01:07.090-04:00Final Post <div class="MsoNormal">
So, the end. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve kept this blog as a record of the last ten years. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I started writing posts here to make sense of the initial
experience of grief: <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/kathryn-i-evans.html">memorials</a>,
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-poem.html">poems</a>, <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/spice-night-by-catherine-bowman.html">photos</a>,
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/12/wedding-song.html">fragments</a>,
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/09/katies-meadow.html">memories</a>,
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/10/katies-birthday.html">the
occasional call for a shared moment</a>, <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/painting-by-chloe-laplante.html">other</a>
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/08/newsphotos-of-romanian-services.html">and</a>
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/online-tributes-to-katie-and-3-by-john.html">more
memorials</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What continued after that first year or so of writing was <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2008/09/bear-country_16.html">a record of
what grief</a>, and <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2008/10/34-hours.html">more</a> and <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2008/11/elegy-patience-optimism.html">more
often</a>, <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2009/04/promised-land.html">guilt</a>,
<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2009/04/reading-together-razors-edge.html">felt
like</a>. <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2016/02/old-sins-cast-long-shadows.html">Feels
like</a>. And, surprisingly, wonderfully, even undeservedly, <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-sheriff-good-walter-great-wheels.html">happiness</a>.
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One thing I never wanted, which continues to feel deeply
offensive and entirely wrong, was to make some crude suggestion of cause and
effect. Things do happen in a certain order. But Katie did not die so that I
could have a life I love now. I do not have a life I love now because Katie
died. <o:p></o:p></div>
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For a while, I have felt my foot dragging a little when I think
about writing new posts here. More than anything, that feels like a sign. This
is an important year, ten years since Katie died, thirteen years since we got
married. There can only be so many distinctions, and so much looking back at
our life, fixed in place very powerfully to her favorite songs, books, movies,
and places, my memories of our life together, before I run out of things to
say, or worse, begin to repeat myself. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So I’ll stop posting here. Thank you so much for reading my
posts. At times, it has felt like a lifeline to know that what I was writing
here was being read.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I do think that I <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2009/01/lasers.html">got louder after Katie
died</a>. At least, I hope that is the case. Life is very short, whatever shape
it makes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fW0vjZiu_rw" width="560"></iframe><o:p></o:p></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-62291555974435573582016-10-20T12:59:00.001-04:002016-10-20T12:59:35.205-04:00Trailer for New Book!<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Should-Still-Wish-Memoir-American/dp/0803295227/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VtRp4Fo417E/WAj3bCRS6kI/AAAAAAAAAkU/BHXLUkZLsh4glIdQ75YvXLouGqneE5ZcgCLcB/s200/Should%2BI%2BStill%2BWish%2Bcover.jpg" title="Should I Still Wish: A Memoir by John W. Evans" width="129" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Should-Still-Wish-Memoir-American/dp/0803295227/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><br /></a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The book trailer for </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Should I Still </i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Wish: A Memoir</i> is here! </span><a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Should-I-Still-Wish,677262.aspx" style="font-family: inherit;">“A profoundly moving memoir of love’s recovery.”</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Thanks to </span><a href="http://www.pauldonatelli.com/" style="font-family: inherit;">Paul Donatelli</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> for making this beautiful video. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Pre-order now (pub date is 1/1/17):</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Amazon: </span><a href="https://amzn.com/0803295227">https://amzn.com/0803295227</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">UNP: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hrzcnrv">http://tinyurl.com/hrzcnrv</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Barnes and Noble: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/zxfq38l">http://tinyurl.com/zxfq38l</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Follow the book:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Goodreads: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/zasqddf">http://tinyurl.com/zasqddf</a></span><br />
NetGalley: <span style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><a href="http://tinyurl.com/gwwv4tb">http://tinyurl.com/gwwv4tb</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gp5Z-Bqokc8" width="560"></iframe></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And if you didn't get a chance to check out the amazing work that <a href="http://www.pauldonatelli.com/">Paul</a> did on the trailer for <i><a href="http://a.co/c8fubBN">Young Widower: A Memoir</a> </i>(University of Nebraska Press, 2014), you can see it here:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cL41qraERmk" width="560"></iframe></span></div>
John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-42730546289804996922016-09-30T19:31:00.000-04:002016-09-30T19:37:07.337-04:00Recent Posts from Elsewhere<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the leadup to <a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Should-I-Still-Wish,677262.aspx">the 1/1/17 release of my new memoir, <i>Should I Still Wish</i></a> (University of Nebraska Press, available now for pre-order), I've been writing longer posts in a couple of other places. Here's a preview with links to each:</span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>1. <a href="https://unpblog.com/2016/09/29/from-the-desk-of-john-w-evans-patton-oswalts-conan-appearance/">Patton Oswald's Appearance on Conan O'Brien</a>: </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The University of Nebraska Press Blog / September 26, 2016 / 1,292 words</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">...Oswalt has spent the week before
Mother’s Day making a thoughtful time for his six-year-old daughter, one that
allows her to sidestep with extended family, more or less, the holiday. And
yet, for reasons beyond his control, the plan falls short. The ticket agent laments.
What a beautiful figure she makes for the unpredictable nature of grief and the
many masks it wears, how it speaks with understanding while impolitely forcing its
way into too many conversations and experiences, hiding both everywhere and in
plain sight. In Oswalt’s telling, like a witch in a fairy tale, grief offers
unpalatable truths. Even her candy is “made from pine bark and ink.” We may
guard vigilantly against grief, Oswalt seems to suggest, but grief is clever
and unrelenting. It is closer than we think.</span></i></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>2. <a href="http://www.missourireview.com/tmr-blog/2016/06/contributors-on-craft-john-w-evans-on-family-stories-and-secrets/">On Family Stories and Secrets</a>:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Contributors on Craft Series / The Missouri Review / June 15, 2016 / 1,306 words </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Certain family stories seem to have no beginning. My great-grandmother’s love of professional wrestling is one such story in my extended family. It was curated over the years to include a cooler of beer (that, in subsequent tellings, grew warm and cheap), an easy chair (floral-patterned, with a lever and swing hinge), and, in the pre-cable days of local broadcasts, a television with magical receptivity for broadcasting the squared circle day and night. With each retelling, Granny’s wrestling passion became a caricature, and eventually, a euphemism. Whatever else the news, one often said, “Yep, still watching wrestling.” Or so I imagined. I heard these stories second and third hand, after her death, and to this day, I can’t quite say who told them to me, or when, or why.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><span style="color: red;"><b>3. <a href="https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/16/the-art-of-words-what-jfk-can-teach-us-about-speech-writing/">What JFK Can Teach Us About Speech Writing</a>: </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Art of Words Series / Microsoft Blogs / September 16, 2016 / 1,012 words</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>As a congressman and senator, and later as the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy kept a coconut on his desk. The coconut was old and dried. Etched across its husk was a simple message: “11 Alive. Need Small Boat.” “11” was a designation for Kennedy’s patrol boat, which he commanded in the Pacific during World War II. One night, after the patrol boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, killing two of his crewmembers, Kennedy had risked life and limb to take his crew to safety on a nearby island, where, lacking pen and paper, Kennedy had improvised a distress signal, the coconut. Kennedy eventually flagged down a local fishing boat and gave them a coconut, which they took to a nearby Allied naval base. For his cunning and valor, Kennedy received the Navy Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart, two distinguished war decorations. But what Kennedy displayed for the rest of his life was the coconut.</i></span></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-43851848330142357472016-02-05T03:19:00.001-05:002016-02-05T03:34:15.118-05:00Old Sins Cast Long Shadows<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="http://www.alexievich.info/indexEN.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">Svetlana
Alexievich’s</span></a> <i>Voices From
Chernobyl </i>is <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/svetlana-alexievich-nobel-winner-voice-from-chernobyl-review/"><span style="color: windowtext;">a marvelous and tragic book</span></a>. It is also an
exceptional one, of form—Alexievich’s curates the book, as she does most of her
work, in what she calls a “genre
of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents”—and by
orientation. <i>Voices From Chernobyl</i> is a continuing study of consolation and
sequence at and beyond the human scale, unpredictable in its humanity but also
(especially for those in power) its immediate consequence. As Sergei Gurin
notes in his testimony:</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">People who’ve been through that kind of
humiliation together, or who’ve seen what people can be like, at the bottom,
run from one another. There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I
understood that I don’t really want to talk about. About the fact, for example,
that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people
don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around.
People aren’t heroes.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">In the book, there
are heroes, the many heroic individual who race to the scene (words of national
admiration—heroes, victory, sacrifice—are often shorthand for impending illness
and early death), but also, those many who speak now of <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx"><span style="color: windowtext;">the Chernobyl nuclear disaster</span></a>, recount the
devastating effects of its <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/chernobyl_nuclear_accident_1986/index.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">initial denial by the Soviet government</span></a>, name
the politicos who denied and exploited it, and give witness to the continuing, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/facing-facts-at-chernobyl/"><span style="color: windowtext;">decades-long poisoning that follows it</span></a> in
the region, especially Belarus. Always, the human perspective comes forward.
The interest to deny and “move on,” whether political or national or personal,
is denied at every turn. Memory is lived with, rather than past. In this way, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voices From Chernobyl </i>is a moral and democratic
work, willing a perspective—arbitrary, individual, vulnerable to memory and
time and bias, felt and continuous—that un-writes, with each recounting, the
oppressiveness of a single (national, official, historical) narrative. We are,
as Alexievich notes in her postscript, at a debt to these people who have prematurely
fixed their relationship with death and time. </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: AustinNewsTextWeb-Roman;">"These people had already seen what for everyone
else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future."</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I have not so
actively read a book in years. I was showing Cait my copy this evening, and the
progression of my notations is positively manic, beginning with a periodic
single line that becomes underlining passages, then double-underlining and writing
in the margins, making all kinds of symbols to distinguish one passage within
another, one form of admiration against the next, a shorthand I’m still not
sure I really understand. Surely, this was part of Alexievich’s design, the
accumulation of testimonials, their impact and effect. Still, I feel at a loss
to describe exactly how I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enjoyed </i>this
book. I did enjoy reading it. I felt very alive while reading it. The book is
full of feeling, and with each account made, an overwhelming sense of the
ephemeral is twinned with some magnificent intrusion of the natural world. The
forests turn, in the days after the accident, yellow, then orange. An abundance
of cows and chickens are seized and eaten by bandits returning to the city. Rusting,
radioactive hulks are unearthed from mass graves and deep pits, scavenged and
sold across the region. Alexievich has said that she is interested in <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">what happens to the human being, what happens to it in our time. How does
man behave and react. How much of the biological man is in him, how much of the
man of his time, how much man of the man.</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Nowhere in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voices From Chernobyl </i>is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>suffering ornamented. Suffering is
never secondary to anything except, perhaps, feeling. But the natural world,
modified and, with some 48,000-odd years of inhabitation to follow and certain
to be neglected in large swaths, persists in spite of a human sense of
consequence, much less the individual. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">There is a Danish
proverb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Old sins cast long shadows</i>. I
came across it while watching an episode of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06jkk8f"><span style="color: windowtext;">River</span></a>
</i>on Netflix. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">River </i>is the sort of
excellent BBC show that I am less and less interested to watch. Beautifully
shot, very well written and acted, full of unpredictable twists that elegantly
resolve across scenes, episodes, and seasons, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">River </i>suggests a kind of familiarity to the crime drama that feels
strangely lifeless. Stellan Skaarsgard is terrific in the lead, as a police
detective who lives between the worlds of the living and the dead. His
partner—his best friend and confidante—is recently murdered. He works to piece
his life together and solve her murder. He is a brilliant mess. At the end of
the second episode, I thought, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Okay, I
sort of know where this is going, right? Big twist. Revelation. Someone is
either not dead or really dead. The external will gradually become the
internal, or vice versa. Life will go on but it really won’t. </i>Was I so
wrong? I have no idea.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I can’t
emphasize how essentially <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good </i>the
show was, and how disinterested I was in its excellence. I don’t think it's a
disinterest in the show, so much as a dread at whatever horrible final
twist—the excellent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bbcamerica.com/shows/broadchurch">Broadchurch</a>, </i>the
pretty-good-until-the-end <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bbcamerica.com/shows/london-spy">London Spy</a></i>, the
thoroughly okay <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0295tcf/episodes/guide">The Fall</a></i>—will
finally release our hero from his suffering. What is there to live with,
finally, that will not inevitably come <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">next</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">A couple of weeks
ago, Bruce Springsteen gave out <a href="http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/01/bruce-springsteen-offers-free-download-of-chicago-river-show/"><span style="color: windowtext;">a free download of his recent Chicago live show</span></a>.
It was a gesture to his New York fans. Winter Storm Jonas had postponed the
Madison Square Garden show of his tour in support of the 30<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-river-19841212"><span style="color: windowtext;">The River</span></a> </i>and the wonderful
bells-and-whistles box set reissue, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Ties-That-Bind-Collection/dp/B016EAZ6GC"><span style="color: windowtext;">The Ties That Bind</span></a>. </i>So, The Boss offered
all of his fans a fantastic consolation prize. It’s a terrific live show and
recording, and of course, amazing that <a href="http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/2015/media/182638/_original/1421959763/1035x842-023_BRUCE-Insert.JPG">The
E Street Band</a> is more or less at it still, and so well, all these years
later. I liked it so well that I downloaded much of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The River </i>that I hadn’t really listened in a while, which led me to
this terrific 1980 (Tempe, Arizona) live version of “Out in the Street”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Bruce is skinny.
Little Steven is really skinny! Clarence Clemons is dapper, in full force. The
tone on his tenor is unbelievable. The song is up-tempo compared with the
Chicago version. The vocals have a bigger range. The arrangement is so tight:
fast. It’s hard to believe that this is the same song as the Chicago concert. It
sounds like the original that it is. The new version sounds almost like a
cover. Both sound wonderful. YouTube is well populated with great Springsteen
tunes from across the years but those prime middle years feel distinctly
uncurated and live, (sorry to use this word) visceral. Near the end of <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-river-19841212#ixzz3zFYQ63i2"><span style="color: windowtext;">his 1980 review in Rolling Stone</span></a> rock
journalist Paul Nelson says this about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
River</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: FreightTextProBook-Regular;">While most of The River
runs wide and deep, there are a few problems. Ever since he started
conceptualizing and thinking in terms of trilogies, Springsteen has lost some
of his naturalness and seemed more than a bit self-conscious about being an
artist. At times, you think he's closed off his casualness altogether, that he
can't bear the idea of playing around with a phrase when he could be
underlining it instead. Will we never hear the spring and summer of "Wild
Billy's Circus Story," "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),"
"Thunder Road" and "Born to Run" again? Must even the
brightest days now be touched by autumnal tones and winter light? Bruce
Springsteen isn't an old man yet. Isn't it odd that he's trying so hard to
adopt the visions of one?</span></i></blockquote>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">That last line
reminds me of the end of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/05/books/updike-self.html?pagewanted=all"><span style="color: windowtext;">Denis Donohue’s 1989 review of John Updike’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Self-Consciousness </i>in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the New York Times</i></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">''Suffering and I,'' Mr. Updike concludes,
''have had a basically glancing, flirtatious acquaintanceship.'' I see no harm
in that, no reason why those flirtations should not continue. I trust they
will. Mr. Updike writes, in ''Self-Consciousness,'' as if he had nothing to
look forward to but sunset and the western porch: ''Between now and the grave
lies a long slide of forestallment, a slew of dutiful, dutifully paid-for
maintenance routines in which dermatological makeshift joins periodontal work
and prostate examinations on the crowded appointment calendar of dwindling
days.''</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Meanwhile I note that he is four years
younger than I am.</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">A few weeks before
he died, Cait and I saw Clarence Clemons getting out of a car in Marin. He was
using crutches, or a cane, I think. I remember that he was moving really
slowly. I said to Cait, “Hey, that’s Clarence Clemons!” and she had no idea who
he was, and by the time I explained it, he was smiling and talking with
someone, and we didn’t really want to interrupt him, so we kept walking.
Clemons is 38 in the above video. Which is to say, he is my age. It’s hard to
think that there is anything more representative of this time in life than
sitting here, writing a blog post, listening to Sam snore loudly in the
bedroom, the baby waking and crying, Cait grading papers, Walt finally gone to
sleep after some epic Minecraft-related page-turning. Sure, yes, there is an
eagerness in my attentiveness. It feels a bit too on the nose, a warmness to
the kitchen (autumnal?) light and wistfulness for Bruce Springsteen that is maybe
quasi-elegiac in its anticipation, or worse pre-nostalgic, a sure symptom of what
the Chicago doc calls an unease with happiness, or perhaps even a wariness for what
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Billings"><span style="color: windowtext;">Josh
Billings</span></a> notes is “</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">the
only difference between the poor and the rich…the poor suffer misery, while the
rich have to enjoy it.” Better, I think, to try to leave such happiness alone,
rather than topple it with acknowledgments and testimonials and evaluations, to
<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246916"><span style="color: windowtext;">“just
for this evening”</span></a> let it alone, a line I curated right out of Mary
Szybist’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incarnadine</i>, a collection
that begins with an epigraph from Simone Weil’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gravity-Grace-Simone-Weil/dp/0803298005"><span style="color: windowtext;">Gravity and Grace</span></a>:</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The mysteries of faith are degraded if they
are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they
should be an object of contemplation.</span></i></blockquote>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Walt loves the
1980s television game show, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Press Your
Luck</i>. We watch it most nights. I turned it on in a moment
of desperation a couple of weeks ago, when Walt and Sam were home sick, and I
haven’t heard the end of it since. His enthusiasm and our watching have led me
down any number of internet rabbit holes, the least fascinating of which might
be my extensive knowledge of the life of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tomarken">Peter Tomarken</a>, the
creator and host of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Press Your Luck</i>.
What Walt loves, of course, are the whammies. Before every episode begins I
have to reassure him that we are cheering for the whammies, we want the
whammies to win, even if we like one of the contestants, which isn’t really the
point of the show, we want to see more whammies. Walt loves the Tarzan whammy
the best. The Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper whammies are beyond him. I love
that this is one way to spend time with him now that’s new, a way to share what
I know will one day become his sense of humor, a concept I associate frequently
with leisure and silliness, as opposed to the gallows, the satirical, the ironic, and feel
fortunate to do so. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-82553784441616966202015-11-04T13:04:00.001-05:002015-11-04T22:15:19.909-05:00The Non-Sleepy Exhaustion <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2699128/">The Leftovers</a></i> is a show to
watch and wonder why and how one enjoys television. Alternately reviewed as <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/29749-the-leftovers-may-be-the-bleakest-series-to-ever-hit-tv-but-thats-not-necessarily-a">the
bleakest show on television</a>, <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/29749-the-leftovers-may-be-the-bleakest-series-to-ever-hit-tv-but-thats-not-necessarily-a">the
most brutal</a>, and even, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/10/the_leftovers_season_2_from_damon_lindelof_on_hbo_reviewed.html">television
S&M</a>, <i>The Leftovers </i>is now
rightly <a href="http://www.hitfix.com/tv/the-leftovers/recaps">earning
recognition as</a> <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/gut-reaction">the best show</a>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/arts/television/the-leftovers-season-2-episode-5-review.html">on
television</a>. The second season, it turns out, is even better than the first. Yes, The Leftovers is a show to be enjoyed. There is dark humor and plenty
of puzzle: blackouts, ghosts, chain-smoking occultists dressed
head-to-toe in white, murky histories, sane fathers, and even, in a strange
throwaway moment this season, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Appleton">Cousin Larry</a> from
Perfect Strangers. Cousin Larry, of course, is one of the non-leftovers, that
2% of the world that one day went missing and never came back. Three years later
the leftovers still struggle to make sense of their absence, to grieve and hope
and wonder, and essentially, to plod along in the world, alternately terrified
and liberated, depending on the person, the day of the week, the place, the
efforts of said occultists to never let anyone ever forget that part of the world
disappeared and has never come back. It is to the show’s great credit that the
event--<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118977/leftovers-turns-religion-entertainment">Rapture</a>? <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/1/9418335/hbo-the-leftovers-review-season-two">scientific phenomenon</a>? <a href="http://www.pajiba.com/miscellaneous/the-leftovers-great-perfect-strangers-conspiracy.php">hoax</a>?--is taken as fact, documented but never explained. The periodic
flashbacks to the particular day of the disappearance are less contrived and
more fluid in their structure and sequencing than <a href="http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Flash-forward/Theories">Lost’s similar
then-now schism</a> (<a href="http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/damon-lindelof-i-was-really-depressed-writing-leftovers-season-1">Damon
Lindelof</a> created both shows). We learned <i>what</i> happened without ever skewing toward some <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlhcVW-k_5M">ah-ha! <span style="font-style: normal;">why</span></a></i>. Here’s hoping that Lindelof, et
al, continue to let that mystery be, which seems possible, even likely, since
the current season’s credits newly run to Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be,” a new
recording of the old classic that previously closed down the series finale of <i>Northern Exposure</i>.<br />
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<span style="color: #10131a;">The
persistent knock on </span><i style="color: #10131a;">The Leftovers</i><span style="color: #10131a;"> is
that it is </span><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/07/stick-with-the-leftovers" style="color: #10131a;">exhausting
and too dark</a><span style="color: #10131a;">. Indeed, the show is set in shades of bleakness. But that
bleakness rewards its viewing with some mighty moments of catharsis and, if not
quite hope, then allegorical uncertainty. Watching The Leftovers is to experience e.e. cumming's famous beach visit, that <i><a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/maggie-and-milly-and-molly-and-may">whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it's always ourselves we find in the sea</a>.</i> I like </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/gut-reaction" style="color: #10131a;">what Emily
Nussbaum said about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leftovers</i></a><span style="color: #10131a;">,
that it is, in essence, a show about “grief and terror…</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Adobe Caslon Pro";"> [that] captures the
disorientation of grief in a way that is provocative and rare for television.”
I would add that the show also gives a realistic sense of how people live with
loss, in that complicated range of choices that distinguish a middle ground of
simultaneously living with and after. My favorite characters on The Leftovers struggle to do it well. I can’t think of the word for it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grace </i>seems high-handed, vaguely sacred.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Withstanding, </i>a little too
self-congratulatory. Perhaps what I admire is the honesty of watching
characters who live practically with grief, <a href="http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm">rolling the rock each time a little
further up the hill</a>. Certainly, they are not models of past-purging
self-help, though in a clever twist, a whole cottage industry of counseling,
insurance, life-like replicas, and pseudoscience thrives in the three-years-later world of the
show.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #10131a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Exhaustion is a key talking point among
friends these days. With the kids stuck up on the play structure, or a babysitter safely
installed at home, we wear our exhaustion with honor, alternately lamenting the
bad exhaustion—kid is sick (<i>again</i><i>!</i>), second and third dinners of (what else?) noodles,
where can one possibly plant a succulent in the yard that it doesn’t get unearthed a few
hours later by tiny hands—and glorying in the good exhaustion. How many cute
photographs can one take of a Halloween pumpkin? Have we shown you the numbers chart? Did we tell you about the time
our son brought over the Kit-Kat to share with Mom because he had given me
his box of Dots to Dad and didn’t want her to feel left out? What empathy! Such sweet boys. Hard to believe he is the same boy who refuses to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">touch any part of the Chipotle brown rice
that has already touched the cilantro</i>, or caterwauls to the heavens the predictable and shocking arrival of bedtime. How else should we account for the burst of color in our monotonous and delicious mounds of salted, whole grain
goodness? I suppose what strikes me in such moments is the boy's failsafe-seeming
action of living explicitly in two modes. One moment, humane exemplar. The
next, rice catastrophic. There seems little middle ground, which makes life
intense and vibrant, and prone to enormous inflections of emotion. All healthy,
normal, yes, of course. And so vivid!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #10131a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I’ve
been listening to <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/surf/id998076113">Surf</a>
on a near constant loop the last couple of days. I know very little about <a href="http://chanceraps.com/">Chance the Rapper</a>, much less <a href="http://www.donnietrumpet.com/">Donnie Trumpet</a> or <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/chance-the-rappers-social-experiment-drops-free-surf-album-20150529">The
Social Experiment</a>, any of whose name I suspect could be a giant put-on; that, as
soon as I publish this post I’ll get a few emails to the effect of, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh, wow, you really fell for that one, eh?</i>
I only found my way to Chance (another fear: his fans call him something
familiar, and writing “Chance” is the equivalent of that time in college I tried
to impress a stranger by insisting, oh yes, I was absolutely familiar with the
work of ANN-IE DI-FRAHNK-OH) because a few of my students recommended the album. Ask
an honest question. I love especially “Sunday Candy,” a song about familial
love, in particular a grandmother’s unwavering “president of my fan club”
affections, with lovely shades of the ecstatic and spiritual alongside the grand-paternal:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #10131a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">“Let
the Mystery Be” was the song that Amanda sang at Katie and I’s wedding. I’ve <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=loKYAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=%22john+prine%22+%22iris+dement%22+%22chicago+symphony+orchestra%22&source=bl&ots=UXnee92H1q&sig=wAmdmKVsTeDCMSiFuo52hDfNsbU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBGoVChMIzJ2S0JD2yAIVB8ljCh3N1AVG#v=onepage&q=%22john%20prine%22%20%22iris%20dement%22%20%22chicago%20symphony%20orchestra%22&f=false">written
elsewhere about going to see</a> John Prine and Iris DeMent at the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra in 2002. I think of that song still as particularly “Katie,” one she loved, whose worldview suited hers, and whose elegant guitar accompaniment she instantly recognized. It made her smile. "Let the Mystery Be" is a song I find myself
listening to around the time of her birthday, and again, in June. I don’t mean
to put a particularly dramatic marker in the ground for the song, by the way.
Much of my affection for it was diminished in those weeks and months after
Katie died, if only that listening to it became at least as much a memory of grieving
as it was of so many wonderful evenings. When I hear the song at the start of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leftovers</i>, I feel as though some
cosmic force in the universe has twinned the wonderful and awful in an
incredibly convenient and personal way: that I can hear the song, watch for all
the disappeared faces and bodies in the credits, and recognize that strange mix
of resignation and rawness that is sometimes thinking about one life while
living in the next. I mentioned to a friend recently that it was Katie’s
birthday, what would have been the start of her fortieth year (just to be
clear, she would have turned 39 this past October 27), and my friend asked
whether I thought about Katie still. Pretty much every day, I said. Was I
supposed to say something else, I wondered? This is my life. That was, too. She's right at
the heart of all of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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I won’t admire particular moments from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leftovers</i>, if only to avoid spoilers for what turns out to be a
very nuanced and well-developed plot. I do hope that you’ll watch it, and then
tell everyone you know what great taste I have. Seriously, I really do thing its worth the
investment of time and frustration, even bleakness. When I think of shows that I absolutely love—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nbc.com/friday-night-lights">Friday Night Lights</a>,
<a href="http://www.westwingepguide.com/">The West Wing</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q14rHLvMco">Lost</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJo1rqNGCeI">The Office</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412253/">Veronica Mars</a></i>—I think of
some unspoken and satisfied expectation that each satisfies, to make me <span style="color: #10131a; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">think and feel some excess
of what I think I know about the world, my life, the people I love, all of our regrets,
hopes, failures, ambitions, etc. Like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lost</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leftovers </i>presents infinite
variations on an impossible proposition. We live with <i>or</i> we live after. We live with <i>and </i>we live after. There
is no moral or ethical aspect to the proposition, or even, consistency to when
or where it is well-applied or ignored. But the choice shapes us. Whenever I
watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leftovers</i>, I’m left feeling
engaged and alive, if pretty exhausted. I suppose the exhaustion is a fair indication
of my own vitality. The life I return to from the week’s latest episode is
recognizable and beautiful, precious and fleeting, and marked fairly by the absurdity that is loving
anything, much less loving it well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">It would be a mistake to say that happiness
necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the
feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is
well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and
limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted.
It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and
a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must
be settled among men. </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">(<a href="http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm">Camus, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Myth of Sisyphus</i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">)</i><o:p></o:p></span></blockquote>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-38379562537173026132015-04-25T13:11:00.000-04:002015-04-26T02:09:31.649-04:00The Very Tiny Universe Corner<div class="MsoNormal">
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We’ve been watching a lot of Star Wars recently, and talking
about Star Wars, and posing all manner of Jedi investigations into hypothetical
Star-Wars related scenarios. Was <a href="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ahsoka_Tano">Ahsoka Tano</a> alive when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFO4kUdX7q4">Darth Vader saved Luke</a>?
If Yoda always has a green light saber, and Luke builds a green light saber when
he becomes a Jedi, why does Obi-Wan have a blue one? Will Leia <a href="http://cdn2.nerdapproved.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/jedi-how-it-should-have-ended.jpg?bbba63">become
a Jedi ghost</a> when she dies? I would say that Walt drives the interest,
except that Sam is just as into it, and really, our plunge
began with a set of knock-off Lego figures we ordered in a fit of desperation
last fall, to bribe Walt during toilet training. The bribes worked. Our very
tiny universe corner of characters expanded to include Kashyyyk troopers, alien oboists, subsets of subsets of Clone Troopers, and of course, <a href="http://amzn.com/0756622387">their origin stories and back stories, complete with annotations and fold-out inset illustrations</a>. The young readers section of the
local library has roughly six thousand Star Wars-related titles, all of which
arrive into our home mangled and drawn across, with pages taped together, that is,
when the books are there at all. Most of the time, they are checked out, on
reserve, out with the book mobile. And yet, we always check. However full our wheeled cart with other picture
books and board books we stoop to the low shelf of Easy Reader Fiction (J E LEGO,
J E STAR WARS), full of new hope.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I know more about Star Wars than I ever meant to. But I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of Star Wars. This all
became painfully clear as I toggled through the magnificent
and idiosyncratic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.starwarsminute.com/">Star Wars Minute <span style="font-style: normal;">podcast</span></a></i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars
Minute </i>is just that: a Star Wars movie watched a minute at a time, with
following commentary of ten to forty minutes by two mega-fan hosts talking with
guests. The guests include Daily Show writers, New Yorker cartoonists, foppish
literary types, tenured scientists, comedians, even <a href="http://www.dorktower.com/">the guy who draws Dork Tower</a>. Which is to
say, a whole lot of people who know a lot about Star Wars, in the way that I think
I know a lot about growing corn in a planter box, or professional wrestling, or
building a pretty decent X-Wing fighter out of spare parts from <a href="http://calandroclan.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/P1080563.jpg">the Lego
bin under the sofa</a>. A lot of knowledge for everyday life, but much less than what might begin to pass as professional knowledge in the larger vocational world (or
barring that, the world of amateur podcasting). Much as I love Star Wars, I can't begin to imagine loving it that much.<o:p></o:p><br />
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A few weeks ago, at the rehearsal dinner for my friend Ben’s
wedding, I sat next to a therapist. He was an uncle from Los Angeles. His
practice was cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the model my therapist in
Chicago uses, and so we got to talking pretty easily about his work. He had
given a talk at a conference that week, in which he asked all of the assembled
therapists to rank themselves by percentile. He knew from giving that talk
previously that very few would say they were in the top 1%, 5%, even 10%. The therapists were too self-aware and polite to judge themselves
so favorably. But he also knew that the majority would say they were somewhere
around 70%: better than maybe two out of three other therapists in the room,
which didn’t really work either. They couldn’t all be better than average. But
how then to account for the inevitability of ever being merely an average therapist?
Was it narcissism? Were they perhaps too good at reframing their own narratives
to correct <span style="color: #1c1c1c; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743408/">"errors in
thinking such as overgeneralizing, magnifying negatives, minimizing positives
and catastrophizi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">ng”?</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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I really appreciate Adam Strassberg’s <a href="http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/16/guest-opinion-keep-calm-and-parent-on">op-ed
in the Palo Alto online newspaper</a>, about parenting after the most recent
suicides at Paly and Gunn. Beyond his practical tone, caution, and optimism, I
was struck by what he said about <a href="http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/regrmean.php">regression to the mean</a>, as it applies to
parenting and expectation:<o:p></o:p></div>
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“the ‘more’ <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">of a quality any parent possesses, the less likely their child will
equal or exceed them in that quality. If you are very good at mathematics, your
child is unlikely to be as good or better than you. If you are a great
musician, maybe they will manage to be a mediocre musician. If you are a
polyglot, they may stammer in English alone. And then there is that most
damnable anxiety: If you attended an Ivy league college, your child is unlikely
to attend an Ivy league college.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">It reminded me of
the study in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://amzn.com/0374533555">Thinking Fast and Slow</a></i>, where Daniel
Kahneman describes working with the Israeli Air Force. The data showed, time
and again, that rewards for improved performance worked better than the
punishment of mistakes. Nonsense, the flight instructors insisted. Disciplining
cadets for bad execution led to better attempts the next time, while praise
invariably led to complacency, and a mistake in the near term. However Kahneman
explained that poor performance was typically followed by improvement, as
excellent performance was followed by a drop-off, the idea that performance
followed first regression to the mean, rather than the intensive influences of
the teachers, was a pedagogical bridge too far. What role did the instructors play in such inevitabilities? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Our goal, when we
started swim lessons, was to get Walt water-safe by the start of summer. With
three boys under the age of five, we wanted to arrive to the various swimming
pools and cabin-home visits with at least one hearty swimmer. Walt is nearly
there. He flits and floats with the best of them, kicking his legs mightily,
lurching under the water and popping his head up to turn the goggles inside-out
and look up from the step. I have a few hundred videos of the sequence on my phone. Walt loves his
teacher. He knows his schedule inside and out, and he likes to ask, every
day, whether it’s a swim lesson day. Really, Sam is our natural
swimmer. From the first moment we lowered him into the water, he squealed and
poked his way across the pool, albeit in our arms. But Sam is only two years old. Walt showed no interest
until suddenly, one day, he did, and since swim lessons start at age three, he
became our designated dog paddler. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">There’s a
fantastic moment in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Empire Strikes
Back </i>when Han Solo tries to jump the Millenium Falcon into light speed,
only to find that the hyperdrive is broken. The deflector shields are failing.
The star destroyer is only a good hit or two away from destroying it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It’s not fair, </i>Han says, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It’s not my fault!</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" scrolling="no" src="http://www.starwars.com/embed/4e34bb470096f2965cfc607b" width="560"></iframe><br /><a href="http://www.starwars.com/video/it-s-not-my-fault">It's Not My
Fault on Disney Video</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">This is maybe Han’s
finest moment. He puts the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Falcon </i>into
attack position, steering the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Falcon </i>into
the enemy’s blind spot, where it seems to disappear. There is a nice moment of
camp as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Falcon </i>passes over the
bridge of the enormous enemy ship. The captain and his first mate duck. I
didn’t remember that detail until I heard it on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars Minute </i>podcast, and the video shows it clearly. For all
of Han’s bravado, he’s a pretty decent pilot. Despite the enormous ship and all
of its technology, his implacable calm at having to visit Darth Vadar to deliver
the bad news, Captain Needa loses the smaller ship. He is probably a good pilot,
too, but he is most certainly toast. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">I know that I
harbor an unhelpful pessimism, bordering on cynicism, to think that fighter
pilots will improve only with positive reinforcement. I trust that the data
shows what it shows. I’d like to live in a world where constant
encouragement forms the bedrock of real learning. But I know it isn’t true. Or,
I suspect it isn’t, at least not without risking that worse form of
discouragement, benign neglect, by which every encouragement becomes an excuse
for just not thinking too hard. Of course, I'm biased. I do my best work when I am writing in the
shadow of some impending failure, however imagined. I don’t really want my boys
to grow up with that kind of doubt but I also worry that they might never push
themselves very hard to do anything well without it. What I like about cognitive behavioral therapy is how there is a through-line to everything. Every behavior follows some
precedent. Every context is interrelated. Like the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars </i>expanded<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>universe
encompassing every licensed and unlicensed manner of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_expanded_universe">books, comic
books, video games, toys, and other assorted media</a> beyond the original
movies, there is seemingly no way forward that does not also require
simultaneously doubling back to check for consistency and logic while also
altering the narrative to conform better to the present moment. Which is to
say, the </span>explaining itself
becomes a kind of creative sense-making: entirely democratic, and also, full of
irresolvable contradictions.</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Wouldn’t it be great, </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">a friend with no kids said the other day, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if you could harness all that Star Wars-related
learning and put it to use learning something important?</i> I smiled
and nodded, but of course, I didn’t really agree. Learning doesn’t work that
way. At this age, what matters, I think, is that the boys develop a
curiosity about anything and then pursue that curiosity on their own:
imagine it, think about it, read about it, talk about it.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>What really matters is that the boys are well. We’re
all pretty happy. I'd like to think we’ve slotted naturally into the elite
stanine of parenting, as I’m sure my children are exceptional, our household a
veritable hothouse of thriving children, my sensitive husbanding a perfect gift
to my lovely wife. I know better. I’ve seen us tottering around the kitchen,
putting dinner together while starting yet another episode of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lego Star Wars</i>: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Yoda
Chronicles</i>. Surely, we could work harder. Chess lessons. Language classes.
Tai Chi. Who knows really now how we are falling short. </span>Every Friday, as Walt and I walk the
half mile to swim lessons, I tell the stories of the first trilogy of movies, skipping the
torture parts and minimizing the Ewoks, drawing out the Leia-Han kiss, which Walt
loves. I can hang in for a few rounds of questions, though I’m at a loss to say
whether Luke ever gets married, how Obi-Wan flies around the universe to advise
other Jedi, when Han and Leia have their babies. Not even the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars Minute </i>hosts know those answers. That part of the story
hasn’t been written yet, at least not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solo_family#Jaina_Solo">officially</a>.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" scrolling="no" src="http://www.starwars.com/embed/513dd545a76aadd9679b47c4" width="560"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-force-awakens-official-teaser-2">Star Wars: The Force Awakens Official Teaser #2 on Disney Video</a></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-75966203844374404662015-04-04T03:44:00.002-04:002015-04-04T03:52:03.322-04:00My TedX TalkLast February, I was so pleased to participate in the TEDx conference at Palo Alto High School. Here is the talk that I gave there, "The Things We Don't Mean to Prepare For."<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g0ecgkfIqTk" width="480"></iframe>John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-87030067098137925332015-01-14T16:08:00.001-05:002015-01-18T01:28:34.310-05:00There Is Only One of Everything<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Last
fall, I decided that all of the super hero theme songs were in my iTunes
collection. They had been there all along. I was sick of toggling
over to YouTube at red lights and in parking lots, only to burn through cellular data searching for the anthems of Spider-Man (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o29VoxtsFk">vintage 60s</a>), Green
Lantern (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8A7ttvGiI">cheap CGI reboot</a>),
Wonder Woman (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx2JdJhAL94">poorly
aging 70s show of my youth</a>). And then, always: was the Bluetooth synched, were we in range, was the song so popular it had some ad click-through that
terrified Baby and brother with some decibel-busting plywood <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwLSVJTCWc">pitch</a>. Already, the pantheon was expanding faster than I could keep
ahead of it. Our home celebrated <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my_YiEl_5qE">bit player crossovers at Marvel
and DC Comics</a>, off-market <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y3QZ_R26Nc">Tinker Bells</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bxxPfKXMB8">the green fish on
roller-skates with the British accent</a>. And I didn’t really know. Did Ice Man
even have a theme song? No, Daddy, one <i>with words</i>. <i>It's not a theme
song if it doesn't have words. </i>So, now, Ice Man has a theme
song. Performed by Kenny Loggins, of that
oh-so-permanent-making flash of nostalgia by which the back catalogue slowly fills with Cyndi Lauper (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIb6AZdTr-A">FireStar!</a>), Paul Simon live
at the iTunes Festival (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVk3SQ8kUUA">Falcon!</a>),
and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbQgaHZOFZ0">Mr. Caddy Shack
himself</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/siwpn14IE7E" width="420"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>What are
the Danger Zows? </i>Walt
asked yesterday on the way to preschool.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I turned down
the Loggins. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Well, </i>I said, <i>it's where you go when you fly
in a really fast airplane.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He thought
about this for a moment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>You mean
Florida?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My parents
live in Florida. I could see where this might end up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Not Florida,
exactly, </i>I said. <i>It's
more like where army planes go</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He liked that
answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>To fight
bad guys? </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Sure, </i>I said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they used to</i>.<i> There aren't a lot of bad guys left who fly
planes as fast as ours.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>What about
Lex Luthor?</i> he
asked, <i>or maybe Wonder Woman. Her jet is invisible.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>What about
Elsa? </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I asked. Walt hates Elsa. He loves Elsa. I’m pretty sure Elsa keeps
Walt awake late at night, wondering about her freezing power and pretty hair.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>No, not
Elsa! </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Walt said. Then, after a few seconds. <i>Can we listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0MK7qz13bU">“Let It Go”</a>?<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've tried mixing in a few non-tights, semi-animated options. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B18lG9mETIs">"I Thought I Saw Your
Face Today"</a> was a hit for a while, then the Mary Poppins soundtrack,
"Everything is Awesome," <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cFm2a5vykc">"Nice To Be With
You."</a> A couple of weekends ago, Cait asked me to download
"Midnight Train to Georgia." <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
one by the old blues guy</i>, she said, and there was something like 300
versions on iTunes, mostly vintage and adult contemporary and karaoke versions,
even a live cover by the Indigo Girls cover, but none by an old blues guy. Did
she mean the Indigo Girls cover? Because I had my own, complicated, Elsa-like
feelings about the Indigo Girls. So, we settled on the Gladys Knight version,
and after a few listens, Walt started getting the "Woo Hoo!" in time
with the chorus, and then he started asking questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are
they going to buy a minivan when they get to Georgia? <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are they
going to drive a car to the train station? <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i>Why is the mommy singing the song and the daddy isn't?</i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are one of
them your friends?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v78-ftcqpNw" width="420"></iframe></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s a
great Tom Hanks interview from a couple of years ago over at <a href="http://www.nerdist.com/pepisode/nerdist-podcast-tom-hanks/">The Nerdist</a>.
At one point, talking about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORKyyHBy6JQ">Busom Bodies</a>, he joking
refers to the 1980s as, “you know, that time in America when <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/1980s-ugliest-decade_n_4179811.html">nothing
good happened</a>.” It’s funny how much has aged poorly since that seeming
golden age of my synth-rock, anti-Communist, pro-aerosol youth. Not just Kenny
Loggins, with the hoop, hair gel, and white T. I had forgotten until a friend
reminded me recently that there was a stretch of years where <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_acraOFMAKs">Randy Macho Man Savage’s
whole gimmick was to threaten to beat his wife. </a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tried to put on He-Man for the boys, as an alternative to <a href="http://www.lego.com/en-us/ninjago">the snake-fighting Lego ninjas</a>, and we didn’t make
it much past the credits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7yeA7a0uS3A" width="420"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dick Van Dyke
and Julie Andrews have aged marvelously. Walt and Sammy don't deny it. We sit on the sofa and clap along to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk">“Step in Time,”</a> while the
boys bounce on the cushions and kick furiously:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4I-b_GJ4ltk" width="420"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, I’m
always waiting for one of them to fall, and fall into the other, or splay and
bonk head-first into the table, floor, wall, hutch. Who am I to deny them the
manic pleasures of childhood? The guy who will take them to the ER, I guess, though so far (knock on wood), we're all intact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Chuck
Klosterman had a nice thought recently about </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1065073/" style="font-family: inherit;">“Boyhood,”</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that, in scene after
scene, it plays against our movie-going expectation that dangerous situations
will always end in violence. Year after year, Mason’s friends make
skateboard ramps, careen in cars, handle guns, intoxicate themselves, and everyone
is fine. Time passes. Before you know it, Mason is off to college. I have a
year still before Walt is as old as Mason in the first shot of the movie, and
since I watched it, I’ve had a kind of helpless wonder at how exceptionally hard
it is to acknowledge happiness and trust it. There is a great poem from
Margaret Atwood’s 1974 collection, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You
Are Happy</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, that I’ll paste below. I remember reading it first as an
undergraduate and loving it as a love poem, though now it inflects all these
great secondary readings about stability, pleasure, and of course, bittersweet loneliness.</span><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is only one of everything, of course, and</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> if you’re a super-hero, then you’re lucky to get a theme song at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There Is Only One of Everything (<a href="http://margaretatwood.ca/">Margaret Atwood</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Not a tree but
the tree<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">we saw, it
will never exist, split by the wind and bending down<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">like that
again. What will push out of the earth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">later, making
it summer, will not be<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">grass, leaves,
repetition, there will<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">have to be
other words. When my<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">eyes close language
vanishes. The cat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">with the
divided face, half black half orange<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">nests in my
scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">fingers curved
around the cup, impossible<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">to duplicate
these flavours. The table<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">and freak
plates glow softly, consuming themselves,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I look out at
you and you occur<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">in this winter
kitchen, random as trees or sentences,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">entering me,
fading like them, in time you will disappear<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">but the way
you dance by yourself<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">on the tile
floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">so delighted,
spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">sticking up
from your head, it's your surprised<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">body, pleasure
I like. I can even say it,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">though only
once and it won't<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">last: I want
this. I want<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xG-9x94CC68/VLbbwUo31EI/AAAAAAAAAhI/A-JqmFj8pyg/s1600/Boyhood-Post-12-Years-of-Mason.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xG-9x94CC68/VLbbwUo31EI/AAAAAAAAAhI/A-JqmFj8pyg/s1600/Boyhood-Post-12-Years-of-Mason.png" height="237" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-59709222928720071112014-11-13T18:33:00.002-05:002014-11-17T16:23:18.040-05:00Vast, Encompassing Circle<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It's a strange thing to worry about writing with a newborn in the house. The baby sleeps, his brothers race and cavort, suffer and secret off into their room for secret fun. In the tub last night, Walt held out a plastic yellow cup to Sam, whispered, "Mug," and both broke into hysterics. This happened at least eight times in a row. Toward the end, Sam picked up a plastic brick and whacked it at Walt's head, which often signals the end to such fun. Except Walt didn't flinch. He offered the mug faster. Sam whacked harder. They both kept laughing. Being the oldest, Walt is easier to get out of the tub. We offer the new shiny carrot: bubblegum-flavored mouthwash. Still, Walt is heartbroken to leave the bath when Sam gets to stay a little longer. Sam is thrilled to stretch out in the tub, more than half its length now. Sam has a lower boiling point but he recovers from his heartaches faster. Such is the lot in life of the middle child toddler, I guess. I still don't think of Sam as the middle child, since only five weeks ago he was the younger boy and Walt was the older. Walt is older still, but of course, now he's the oldest. Now, Monty is the baby. He gets his own bath and bedtime, and hours upon hours of being held by the people who love him, which these last two weeks has included my parents visiting from Florida, showing up first thing in the morning to get us an extra hour of sleep, fold laundry, hang curtains, make meals, help with the preschool drop-offs and pick-ups. Cait and I have even gone out on a couple of afternoon dates. Tomorrow, we're off to JC Penny's to take a family portrait. Then it's back to the trenches, the wonderful pleasant trenches, to keep our heads down and the boys amused--stories, games, drawing, backyard LARP-ing--and at night, if the baby is sleeping and the boys are sleeping and Cait is sleeping, if there is any time leftover, I'm sitting down to try to work piecemeal through something that can become the next poem, essay, book. Which is its own kind of romantic worry, that there will be more time, but also, that such time is worth saving outside of the present moment, before it races past memory and into imagination; when, whatever else we feel, we feel very needed and alive. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.38399887084961px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Poem Written in A Copy of Beowulf</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.38399887084961px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
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<h1 class="quoteText" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">At various times, I have asked myself what reasons<br />moved me to study, while my night came down,<br />without particular hope of satisfaction,<br />the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.<br /><br />Used up by the years, my memory<br />loses its grip on words that I have vainly<br />repeated and repeated. My life in the same way<br />weaves and unweaves its weary history.<br /><br />Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul<br />has some secret, sufficient way of knowing<br />that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing<br />circle can take in all, can accomplish all.<br /><br />Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,<br />the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.</span></h1>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">― </span><a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140902-the-20th-centurys-best-writer">Jorge Luis Borges</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-53080580456161570502014-09-18T17:01:00.001-04:002014-09-18T17:05:17.988-04:00Purge #3<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Things
are going. They are nearly gone. That corner where we kept <a href="http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/cms/wp-content/uploads/nespresso-inissia-2014-announcement-04-450x199.jpg">the
shiny appliance boxes</a> in case the machines broke or we needed to return
them? Clean and papered over. The snap-in child seat strollers? Pushed to one
side and wheeled, ended to end, beside the makeshift tool box, Christmas
decorations, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/KQED/posts/10151364208126191">emergency
earthquake kit</a>. A new steel shelf is up and ready to store still more dry
goods, paper products, and pounds upon pounds of diapers and nut butters. Never
mind we are a five-minute drive from several supermarkets and one conspicuous
wholesaler, or that we have done this twice before. The garage is our off-site
bunker. We’re ready to unleash the baby swing, <a href="http://i.walmartimages.com/i/p/00/04/74/06/09/0004740609110_500X500.jpg">neglect-o-pod</a>,
co-sleeper, and <a href="http://www.diapers.com/p/fisher-price-bouncer-rainforest-9322?site=CA&sku=FS-120&utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc_D&utm_campaign=GooglePLA&utm_content=%7Badtype%7D&ca_sku=FS-120&ca_gpa=%7Badtype%7D&ca_kw=%7Bkeyword%7D&CAWELAID=1338727958&kpid=FS-120">bouncer</a>.
In the meantime, several boxes of books can be bought for two or three dollars
on Amazon. Find Cait's seller page. Look for the poetry books I bought in
graduate school, and then schlepped to Romania, Indiana, and San Francisco, the
baby books with purple and red page borders, the copy of <i>Infinite Jest </i>I
bought to read before the last baby arrived, the companion guide to <i>Infinite
Jest </i>I eventually read instead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.timeout.com/chicago">TimeOut Chicago</a> ran last week a list
of gone-but-not-forgotten theater companies in Chicago. I had to check that my
beloved <a href="http://stagelefttheatre.com/">StageLeft</a>
was still there, in the building down the street from the old apartment. Katie
and I saw <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Person_of_Szechwan">The Good Person of Szechuan</a>, there, and a
couple of hometown musicals, but the one that knocked our socks off was <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mrs-mackenzies-beginners-guide-to-the-blues/Content?oid=907937">Mrs. Mackenzie's Beginner's Guide to the Blues</a>,
about a high school teacher who has an affair with her ambitious, if cynical
student, to whom she later outgrows her usefulness. This was April, 2002. The
play was heartbreaking, especially the Clapton-esque fan favorite that the boy
became, riffing onstage, at the very end: all skill and no heart. The <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-03/entertainment/0506030235_1_troupe-chicago-shakespeare-theater-off-loop">Famous Door</a>, however, is long gone. A few
weeks after “Mackenzie’s….” Katie and I took in their all-day,
one-hundred-roles adaptation of <a href="http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-cider-house-rules/Content?oid=911040">Cider House Rules</a>. We had never seen anything
like it. We became members there, too, though even the manager warned there
probably wouldn't be a next season. The theather that housed company is now a
gym. The neighborhood that houses the gym has turned over a few of its
landmarks: the Turkish restaurant with the mat seats, the pet store, the used-record
shop with the Specials poster in the window.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Last
March, when the <a href="http://johnwevans.com/press/">books</a> came out, I paid the discount
author's rate to buy two boxes filled to the brim with each: poetry in one box,
memoir in the other. The boxes are gone now. The books are gone, too. I've sold
them at readings and given them to friends. I donated <a href="http://encore.mountainview.gov/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1475545__S%28young%20widower%20evans%29__Orightresult__X2?lang=eng&suite=cobalt">one copy to the local library</a> and sent
another to a man in Kentucky, who wrote to say that he'd just gone through
something similar. Last week, I bought a used copy of the memoir from
Amazon.Com for fifteen cents. I was curious who was selling the book so soon
after it came out. The copy was in pristine shape, unsigned; hardly opened.
Whoever purged that copy did so quickly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Cait
and I’s lesson plans are set (more or less) two and three weeks out. We've fixed the closet
door and kitchen drawer, the bath mats, grill grate, dishwasher valve, and
socket. We have a new rice cooker, new car seat, new computer cables, new
diaper rash ointment and dozens of AA and AAA batteries. The tubs of baby
clothes, sorted by size, are stacked by the garage door. I brought in a couple
of the baby toys that Walt spotted when we were putting away bikes the other
afternoon. I plugged in the batteries and, as he flicked the different
switches, various Sesame Street characters took turns popping through doors and
singing their songs. I knew all the songs and could imitate the voices pretty
well, which thrilled Walt. Sam was thrilled, too. Across the room, for a few
beautiful minutes, he had <a href="http://www.neoape.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LEGO-Superheroes1.jpg">the
whole burgeoning LEGO empire</a> to himself, though of course he eventually
toddled over, climbed up onto the sofa, and worked <a href="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bwldBMn04LY/maxresdefault.jpg">poor Cookie Monster</a>
until the orange cookie finally refused to pop back up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Walt
was twenty-one months the day that Sam arrived. I remember a whole spring of
sepia-toned afternoons, gardens in full bloom, and long walks around the block
with my only boy. I remember reading a few of the sibling books and going for
long runs through the neighborhood, listening to music on my phone, certain
Cait would call any minute to say the labor had begun the new baby was on his
way. Of course, she never did. Sam came into this world right on time, and a
few days later, we were mapping out our afternoons and evenings, me with Walt
and Cait with Sam, our routines suddenly simultaneous and escalating and two-fold,
like birds arriving to the duck pond where Walt and I used to take crackers and
stale bread to kill the morning, or Gremlins breeding in darkness. The reality
of two kinds under two years of age set in. We were off to the races.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now,
of course, those exhausted mornings chasing one boy out the door while holding
the other in my arms, warming up some milk, have matured into busy afternoons
at the park, quick trips in the car, long plane flights when the boys travel
well and we know enough to (usually) stay ahead of their distractions and
(sometimes) make it into a game. Our Gremlins are furry and cute again. The
afternoons are again sepia-toned. Sam and Walt can scoot their balance-bikes
through the neighborhood and I’d like to think, because we’ve done this before,
I’ll do a better job of enjoying the first few weeks of Three-Pete’s life. Probably,
I should know better. All those easy routines and comforts of becoming a family
that fall apart, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWc8dUl7Xfo">Jenga</a>-like,
with missed sleep, spiked fevers, or cantankerous siblings, may compound
exponentially; what more than a few friends have described as dropping out of <a href="http://www.basketballtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/15a07__dukedefense3.jpg">man-to-man</a>
into a <a href="http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/defense/graphics/2-3%20zone-SkipTop.gif">zone
coverage</a>. Then, we’ll emerge out of our fog. Walt is already four. Sam is
two. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hKSXqefccg">Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy making other plans.</a></i> Our new plan is nearly complete. I’m
glad we’ve made one, regardless of whether it will prove to be of any use. For
now, at least, we have the clean floors, tidy shelves, and stockpiles of food
to sustain these next few weeks of waiting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_hKSXqefccg" width="420"></iframe></span><o:p></o:p></div>
John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-58432002408418455172014-08-18T14:41:00.004-04:002014-08-18T14:59:29.642-04:00Let’s Stop Asking Ourselves to be Fine<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Last week</span>,
I called my friend Eric to talk about <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-williams-parkinson-20140815-story.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">Robin Williams’s death</span></a>. For fifteen years,
now, Eric and I have talked about movies. He always has something interesting to
say about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477139/"><span style="color: windowtext;">the movies I like</span></a>, and he makes good
recommendations of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203119/"><span style="color: windowtext;">the ones I haven’t seen</span></a>. This all started
as Peace Corps trainees, when we used to walk across Mymensingh together,
running down the catalog of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125664/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">great movies we’d
both seen and loved</a>. I can still picture the route in my mind pretty well,
most of the way, though <a href="http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/40985333.jpg">photos</a>
don’t really do the route justice. As we talked, it turned out that Eric and I
had both listened to <a href="http://www.spin.com/articles/marc-maron-wtf-tribute-robin-williams/"><span style="color: windowtext;">Marc Maron’s reposted 2010 interview with Robin
Williams</span></a>. Eric had watched <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at3CjaZ68Cc"><span style="color: windowtext;">the
1998 Hollywood Squares episode that Whoopi Goldberg posted in memoriam</span></a>.
I paraphrased some of <a href="http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/b-s-report-reflecting-upon-robin-williams-with-chris-connelly/"><span style="color: windowtext;">Chris Connelly’s eloquent remembrance</span></a>. I
was happy to hear Eric’s voice, and to think we both had something interesting
to say about someone neither of us knew. I’ve spent more time than I would have
expected sorting through the noise around Robin William’s death, listening (to
paraphrase the Chicago doc) for some kind of signal, frustrated by the bland consensus
(he was a flawed genius who died before his time; he was a sick man who loved
to entertain people) and my own very small sense of touchstone (in middle
school, I wore out my parents’ VHS copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Good
Morning, Vietnam </i>trying to memorize <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erf2iFHG44M">the disc jockey parts</a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">; World’s Greatest Dad </i>[see below] is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robin-williams-most-underrated-roles-2014-8">surprisingly
good</a>). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is the essence of that noise that gathers so quickly around
an unexpected public death? I think it has something to do with candor. We do
not want the people around us to die. We certainly hope they will not die
unexpectedly. But more than that, we want to know that the people we know and love, and even,
the people we admire, are well and will be well, more or less, in the long-term. That they might not be well becomes a kind of uncertainty that does
not follow entirely from good wishes and warm feelings. The un-well are not
always polite. They seem, sometimes, unpredictable. And what would it mean for a chronic illness to persist, what with <a href="http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/mental-health-medications/">all
the various pills of all shapes, sizes, and colors</a>; a <a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1">clinically-trialed
forgetting pill</a>; those <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/scanning/">colorful
and elaborate scans on late-night PBS</a> of cranial electrochemistry; the <a href="http://www.emdr.com/general-information/what-is-emdr.html">seeming
advances in therapeutic treatment</a>? No matter than a century or so ago the
shape and size of the cranium clearly indicated character and mental ability,
whose ills <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/cocaine">cocaine</a>
alleviated. We want treatments to fix, fully and well. The persistent natures
of chronic and complicated feelings—despair, neglect, vulnerability,
self-destructiveness—and situations—grief, disease, neglect—remind us too much
of our own humanity, which, by its very nature, is provisional and vulnerable. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the louder moments of consensus following Robin
Williams’s death has been the well-meaning suggestion that friends and family
members suffering from clinical depression should ask for help. Jimmy Kimmel
said it like this: <a href="https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/498975016046702592"><span style="color: windowtext;">if you’re sad, please tell someone</span></a>. As
though someone in the middle (or, worse, at the end) of a profound depression,
to the point of being suicidal, might pause their illness long enough to
recognize and understand it, poke their head out of the shell, and then speak
of their illness to a neighbor, a sibling, someone sitting across from them on
the northbound El. Never mind, for a moment, the remarkable similarity to <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something"><span style="color: windowtext;">those post-9/11 NYC subway ads about terrorists</span></a>.
What responsibility exactly are we undertaking with such recognition? What
should the informed person exactly do: call a friend, their doctor, a hotline, the
police? How is the recognition of real helplessness a symptom of sanity? I’m
thinking of the beginning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catch-22</i>:
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“There was only one catch and that was
Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of
dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr
was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he
did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would
be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had
to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't
want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute
simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">"That's some catch, that Catch-22,"
he observed.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">"It's the best there is," Doc
Daneeka agreed.”</span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Robin Williams acted well and often, and seeing him from the
distance of a career, he behaved publicly with a grace and kindness—a sanity—that
made his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqdSagycCWc">public
appearances</a>, however zany, feel like great performances. Recognizably
manic: human. And yet, like most ticket buyers, I stopped expecting very much
from his acting. Then, I stopped buying tickets to his movies. I agreed he was very
good in the beginning, and that something then sort of fizzled out once I
recognized his tricks. <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723409/Amazon-sales-Robin-Williams-movies-spike-following-actors-death.html">Like
most of America, apparently</a>, Cait and I re-watched <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165/"><span style="color: windowtext;">Dead
Poet’s Society</span></a> last week, a movie that I swore at some point I’d
never watch again. It had settled in my mind as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQU3EphIpMY"><span style="color: windowtext;">Hollywood
bunk about creativity</span></a>; a movie that, as a teenager, seemed liberating,
and then fizzled out into something not so good. After his death, the movie came
instantly to mind to remember him, suddenly iconic and signature. The movie
itself is still uneven. But something in that movie is good, and it comes
forward with more clarity the few times Williams is on-screen. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Really, the later-period Robin Williams gem is <a href="http://www.avclub.com/review/worlds-greatest-dad-31967"><span style="color: windowtext;">World’s Greatest Dad</span></a>. Williams is terrific
in it, largely because his performance in the movie seems distinctly un-Robin
Williams. With none of the usual tricks, he inhabits that most inarticulate
quality of grief—ambivalence—without doing much of anything I recognize as
acting. Reading about Williams’s life, I kept thinking of that paragraph toward
the end of Scott Russell Sanders’s essay about his father’s alcoholism, <a href="http://courses.jmsc.hku.hk/jmsc6025spring2013/files/2012/01/Scott-Sanders-Under-the-Influence.pdf"><span style="color: windowtext;">Under the Influence</span></a>, in which Sanders
passes through an intervening eighteen years of sobriety, to the back-end of
the time during which his father drank himself to death. During his interview
with Marc Maron, Williams talked about his twenty years of sobriety, and then
the moment of a hotel mini-bar, and the following years of struggle, which
seem, in the accounts of his death, some part of a stalled and ultimately failing
effort, the gun in the first act, the broken promise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What did Robin Williams ever promise me that I felt
entitled to hold him personally to account? I didn’t know the man. Like so much
feeling, my reaction falls along an incriminating and messy spectrum of
contradiction and irresolution, the ebb and flow of meaning and fact. To quote
the fantastic opening of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/24solomon.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">Andrew Solomon’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression</i></span></a>:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Depression is the flaw in love. To be
creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and
depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's
self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection…In
depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the
meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in
this loveless state is insignificance.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s an awful thing to feel loveless, to despair, to neglect
what we know better than to take for granted. But when we rush to comfort people
who truly suffer with bland sentiments of “it gets better,” and “ask for help,”
etc., I think we patronize them a bit. In such moments, we’re really speaking
to ourselves. We are assuring ourselves that there is an end to suffering, and
a clear path to that ending. And yet, we know that suffering follows no clear
path to its end, if it ends at all. In place of sympathy, perhaps, we might try
honesty, and barring that, simple consideration:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At the time [Emily
Post] undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American
households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at
home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively,
with its aftermath. When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California,
you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family
is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keep or in any
other way demand the attention of the family. In the end Emily Post’s 1922
etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way
of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I
read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for
those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger
congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat</i>. (<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781400043149">The Year of Magical Thinking</a>)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Public figures are easy to imagine. We don’t know them at
all. We’re happy marking them to a place and time in our life, a performance in
a movie, a haircut, a grace of the body, that asks them forever to, always, please,
just stand in place. As movies, as in life. We look for one thing until we’re
sure we see it, after which, we miss all the rest. Most of the explanations we
make after a death are about ourselves: what we fear still, the mistakes we do
not mean to make again in our lives, the cautions we relive or wish someone had
made to us, how we suffered our own cataclysmic loss. Which is how I think it
should be. The initial reaction is the public part. The private part is all the
rest. At first, we’re lucky to think we can make any sense at all, with
spouses, family members, strangers, even good friends, at that moment when the
beautiful life, however flawed, is suddenly gone, and our memory of that life
fills with clues, which are useless now for how they make sense.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0asL5VaWzM0" width="560"></iframe><o:p></o:p></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-90072332114008347792014-05-12T00:36:00.000-04:002014-05-12T21:09:41.717-04:00Writing Process Blog Tour<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My friend, the <a href="http://mpnye.com/">author</a> and <a href="http://www.missourireview.com/archives/about/">editor</a> Michael Nye, tagged me in a blog tour author Q&A. If you haven't already read his thoughtful entry, you can find it <a href="http://mpnye.com/blog/on-my-writing-process/">here</a>. My part here is to answer the four questions that Michael sent me, and then "tag" another author, link you in her direction, and the thread continues. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">1. What am I working on?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am making very slow and careful edits on a draft of a new memoir, <i>Forgetting</i>, which measures grief against transformation in a continuing life. I am also writing new poems, several about professional wrestlers. What interests me about wrestlers is how their bodies define, sustain, and, sometimes, fail them, often suddenly, against their best intentions, and with terrible consequences. In this way, I think the poems make a natural analog to <i>Forgetting</i>, as well as my first two books, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Young-Widower-Memoir-Literary-Nonfiction/dp/0803249527/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><i>Young Widower: A Memoir</i></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0985529245/ref=cm_sw_su_dp"><i>The Consolations: Poems</i></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I take to heart what a teacher once said about writing, that the subject matter may change but the subjects do not. Formally, my memoirs don’t have arcs, consolations, analogous discourses, or literary truths distinct from literal ones. I try to follow Louise Gluck’s advice about poetry: the music follows when the writing is good. I tend to write poems for the people I love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>3. Why do I write what I do?</b><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I write to close the gap between consensus and experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">4. How does my writing process work?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I start with a question that interests me. Then, I write like hell to finish a first draft of a book—poetry or memoir—that answers the question in every way I can think to do so. Over the next few years, I go back and edit, research, shape, gut, add whole new sections or pieces, etc. The first writing is manic, intensive, optimistic, abstruse, and full of many, many placeholders for things I know I’ll say better when I revise. The slow editing that follows feels very high-stakes and immensely satisfying. I’ll take chapters out and paste them into separate files, which I’ll then revise across 60 or 70 successive drafts, each one time-stamped and saved separately, just in case I lose something I love or need to retrace my steps back to a wrong turn. I keep open books I admire around me when I’m writing. They put a chip on my shoulder, in the best of ways. In the writing phase, I’ll plug into my headphones and listen to a single album over and over. I edit in silence. I do my best writing late at night, after everyone is asleep. The last two books I wrote, when they were finished, I ended up needing a stronger eyeglass prescription. It’s hard on the eyes to write on a computer at night.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I've tagged the poet <a href="http://www.chloehonum.com/CHLOE_HONUM/HOME.html">Chloe Honum</a> to go next. </span></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-70137465598672306802014-03-26T03:38:00.002-04:002014-03-26T03:38:42.800-04:00Atlases Often, I think, I'll be happier if I wake up in the morning and see I've written a blog post the previous night. Whatever I say, however I'm aware of it, the writing will mean I've continued something that has held considerable meaning for me these last seven and a half years, and at times, has conveyed the center of that meaning, and its making. I'm hopeful also to revive a distinct habit of sense-making. The last year or so, I've been hard at work on a new memoir, to which I've devoted the majority of my free time, and all of my writing time. Like this post, I don't know that the book will amount to anything beyond my conviction to write it, and a certainty, bordering equally at times on arrogance and stubbornness, that having finished the writing will matter to the world and to me, and make a worthwhile account of the thing that interests me. Overreach, at least, is full of feeling.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478304/"><i>The Tree of Life</i></a> is a beautiful movie. It keeps coming to mind. Last week, saying goodbye after dinner with friends, our younger son disappeared from sight. It turns out he had gone on a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYfKHVdmjzQ">walkabout</a>, though of course, we had no idea. We ran from room to room, out to the garden, shouting his name, and when that didn't work, Cait went in one direction down the street while I went in the other. It was terrifying: near dusk, our semi-busy road, and our toddling twenty-one month old, wordless but extremely agile, somewhere close by and nowhere in sight. A car stopped and the driver asked me who I was missing, and I said my son, and I asked her to drive slowly if she was going toward our house, but she was turning into an apartment complex. And what if I'd missed him already; if, in my haste, I'd passed him down some alley or behind some bushes, a few turns in this direction or that. And how beautiful, my friend's voice, calling out my name to relay the news. Cait had found him a hundred yards or so down the road, giggling, toddling, running toward the bridge that crossed the ditch to the major intersection near his favorite park. He knew the way. Cait brought him home. In the living room, I squeezed him wildly. Cait did it, too. His older brother climbed into my arms, and smiled nervously. What was going on? He didn't get it. He wanted in. Then, it was bath time. We used food coloring to dye the bath blue. We added bubbles. The moment was passed and we had caught a break. What else was there to say about it?<br />
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No doubt, as our older friends all insist, this is a magical parenting time, for which one day in the not-too-distant future we will pine. I can't believe it. I'm sure it's the case. And yet, something in this intensely personal experience is familiar, family to family. There is a pattern, and within that pattern, direction, a series of recognizable and articulated constants and shapes. The Chicago doc recommended recently Andrew Solomon's terrific nonfiction account/history of depression, <i>The Noonday Demon</i>. Solomon is a beautiful writer, one of the best I've read in recent memory. His <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/24solomon.html">vine metaphor for depression, in the first chapter</a> alone, is worth the price of admission. But what I admire, especially, is the range of research and the distillation of case histories, statistics, theories, evolving schools of thought, neuroscience, and lyric attention into a thoughtful ethnography. The book is subtitled, <i>An Atlas of Depression.</i> I like that idea of charting out a shared space, alternately authoritative and practical, a reference and a useful tool. There was a time when I wrote this blog that every thought seemed worthy of disclosure, and without consequence; that the best ideas required no distinction from the least clear. Then, writing was a clear act of cultivation, gathering as quickly as I might reap. The trick now, I think, is to distinguish the borders and not spend too much time in the middle, well-charted spaces. I'd hate to repeat myself, or worse, make a habit of doing so.<br />
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I'll close with a minor atlas of recent discoveries, who are at the center of my attention these days. Solomon's book, <a href="http://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/january-2013-chloe-honum.html">Chloe Honum's terrific poems</a>, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9XEkDquXao">country artist Jamey Johnson singing a George Jones medley</a>, <a href="http://www.blurb.com/b/5147347-770">Andrew Stanbridge's photographs of 770</a>, <i>The Tree of Life. </i>I like <i>The Tree of Life </i>for how it addresses inheritance in that seeming contradiction of intense subjectivity and absolute desolation (right down to the infamous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkUBECRoAwM">17-minute Big Bang/dinosaur sequence</a>) that is the loss of a loved one. The whole movie resonates with feeling, in all directions. I suppose it came to mind again in that hair-trigger space of calamity and benign neglect that was looking for our son on the block, but it has stayed with me since, and filled me with a great deal of sympathy for how much ranges well beyond control. And yet, it's useful to have an atlas. There is a great deal of agency in precedent. The trick, I suppose, is to not praise too broadly; to narrow and winnow admiration to the most deserving places. With that in mind, here's my last entry, from <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5252820/UA-Fanthorpe.html">the English poet, U.A. Fanthorpe</a>:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a kind of love
called maintenance, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which stores the WD40 and
knows when to use it;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which checks the
insurance, and doesn’t forget <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The milkman; which
remembers to plant bulbs;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which answers letters;
which knows the way <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The money goes, which
deals with dentists<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And Road Fund Tax and
meeting trains, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And postcards to the
lonely; which upholds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The permanently rickety
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Structures of living;
which is Atlas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And maintenance is the
sensible side of love, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which knows what time and
weather are doing <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To my brickwork;
insulates my faulty wiring; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Laughs at my dryrotten
jokes; remembers <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">My need for gloss and
grouting; which keeps <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">My suspect edifice
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As Atlas did the sky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">--U.A. Fanthorpe
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pvQZfLavWfU" width="560"></iframe>John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-65672480983711977062014-01-10T21:31:00.002-05:002014-01-10T21:37:51.308-05:00Sidney "Zait" Raffel<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As part
of a collaboration to remember my grandfather-in-law, Sidney “Zait" Raffel, I
wrote the short piece below. Cait and I had the good fortune to live in Zait’s
home during the first three years of our life as a family. Like many, I sure do
miss him. The <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?n=sidney-raffel&pid=168996671">official
obituary ran today in the Los Angeles Times</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-----<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sidney
“Zait” Raffel, MD, ScD, one of the best and last of a great generation, died on
Friday, December 27. He was 102 years old.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
Baltimore native, he came west to California on a Roosevelt Foundation
Fellowship in 1935, and never went back. He told everyone who asked that, on
his first day in Los Angeles, he came outside to a cool summer evening and fell
in love with the state. He froze on the ride north to San Francisco, but warmed
to the place soon enough to settle in, marry his best friend’s girlfriend,
raise their five daughters, and move in 1955 to the Stanford University campus.
His beloved “770,” at the top of the hill, became the family home to four
generations of Raffel daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. For
half a century, with Yvonne, the great love of his life and first public health
nurse to work at Stanford, they presided over a loving, warm, and raucous crowd
of friends and family members. Sidney and Yvonne threw fantastic parties
year-round, including the annual Thanksgiving celebration, and thirteen family
weddings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Zait
was a gifted student, educator, and teacher, and he wasn’t shy to let you know
it. </span>He graduated from high school at the age of 15, Johns Hopkins
University at 18 (B.A.) and 21 (Sc.D.), and Stanford University, where he
joined the faculty at 23, studied medicine, and graduated, already a professor,
at 31, with a M.D. During World War II, he trained doctors and nurses. He
served as Chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology from 1951 until his
retirement in 1976. From 1964-1965, he was acting Dean of the Medical School,
during which he named Pasteur Drive and Welch Road, and oversaw the building of
the (then) new medical complex. He wrote the comprehensive textbook in his
field, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Immunity</i>, first published in
1953, with a second edition in 1961, the year he received a Fulbright
Fellowship and took his family to Europe. He contributed extensive research to
Stanford’s effort to discover the polio vaccine. His great professional regret
was that Jonas Salk’s team beat his own to finding it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Few matched Zait for his quick wit, fondness for a good joke
(and, often, pun), love of dark beer (the warmer, the better), and his affection
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walker, Texas Ranger </i>(the best
show on television). Upon his retirement in 1976, Zait took up painting.
Visitors to 770 marveled at his watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches, many
of which lined the walls. Zait’s favorite subject was his beloved Yvonne
(“Ami”), and his daughters, Linda, Gail, Polly, Cynthia, and Emily. He would
paint them on large and small canvasses alike, working from photographs of
their many international journeys. Zait and Ami trotted the globe together,
from Salzburg to Egypt, Iran, Israel, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and her
native British Columbia. On the lazy Susan in the middle of his kitchen table,
until the day he died, he kept a small oil painting of Ami standing in front of
her family’s homestead. Every February, he painted her into a valentine and
wrote her a short, funny poem. After she passed, in 2001, he recreated these
cards and mailed them to his large, beloved family.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Until a few months ago, he rode his stationary bike at least
a mile every day. He worked in his basement woodshop, building ingenious, if
idiosyncratic, contraptions that quickly earned knowing eye-rolls from the
family. Most famous was “The Barbecue Bullet,” a garden-to-porch
pulley-and-bucket system for delivering meat to the grill that almost
decapitated his son-in-law. Others included his compost-bin-on-bicycle-wheels,
dual-back-scratcher-lotion-applicator, and jello-mold-light-fixtures. Zait
never found a broken chair or appliance to which he could not affix an
el-bracket, chunk of foam, or piece of Velcro. He had a particular talent for
gorilla glue, and little talent, but great gusto, for homemade picture framing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Zait
took great pride in his daughters and their families; his grandchildren; and,
his great-grandchildren. They all loved him back. One of my favorite memories
was of watching him whirl Walt around the house on his walker, and later, Sam
and he doing exercises together in his room. Zait maintained close friendships
and mentorships with many of his former students, who visited regularly. This
past Christmas, he was in great spirits, and much of his family was with him on
the day he died. </span>He will be sorely missed by the many whose lives he
touched, always for the better. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UtsycaYM124/UtCt1LTde9I/AAAAAAAAAfE/7Afv7EpMPOQ/s1600/1415554_10152163661294341_1374370995_o-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UtsycaYM124/UtCt1LTde9I/AAAAAAAAAfE/7Afv7EpMPOQ/s1600/1415554_10152163661294341_1374370995_o-2.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>(Sidney "Zait" Raffel, 102 years old, with Sam, 18 months, on Christmas Eve 2013.)</i></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-13584139138291711012013-11-11T04:32:00.001-05:002013-11-11T04:32:52.181-05:00I've Been WaitingI am working diligently to make the annual mix CD for my siblings. For the last decade, I've compiled it year-end, then sent it along. When I bought the computer before this one, I began tracking everything via playlists on iTunes. That makes a comprehensive list going back to 2008. I know there are, deep in the subconscious of this computer's hard drive, lists of the first few mixes from other hard drives, but to find them requires a spell of names and songs I can't quite summon. Better to visit my sister-in-law, Sheila, in Chicago, and look through her flip-case with each bulk-metal chic sphere under my hand-decorated sleeves. I know that one year I made a Wilco-and-Willie-Nelson CD, and the year before that included at least a few tracks from <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/matthew-sweet-discusses-and-performs-ive-been-wait,65517/">Matthew Sweet</a>'s <i>Girlfriend</i>. I used to walk around Belmont Street in Chicago in November, waiting to meet Katie for dinner, freezing, listening to "I've Been Waiting" and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFJFPD8UtK0">"Winona,"</a> over and over. They were my two favorite tracks on the album, and the black foam of the headphones was like wearing cheap earmuffs. Probably, now, I would say I like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZybI2eiMocQ">"I Wanted to Tell You"</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPjzdFCVBA">"Evangeline"</a> better. I don't know whether that's process-of-elimination--having listened to and loved the first few tracks best, I've moved on to love the rest--or a maturity of taste and aesthetic. "I Wanted To Tell You" almost made this year's cut, except going back to the album, and Matthew Sweet generally, feels like too much retread.<br />
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There is something beautiful about Chicago in November, especially when it is recalled from the temperate distance of November in Northern California. No hands jammed in gloves deep in heavy wool jackets, here. I posted a photo of Walt to Facebook the other day, and he was wearing my stocking cap and scarf. Meghan wrote to ask if those were indeed the ones I wore compulsively in Chicago, and then again in Romania, when she and Dave visited. I am a creature of habit. I like the few things I like a great deal. There was a brief time when I wore thin neoprene bands across my ears, the better to go running or layer with other thermo-sartorial adaptations, but the wool hat, which I grabbed from a goodwill box at my parent's house the year I left for the Peace Corps, is the one I've carried everywhere and kept. I do miss walking across the city, alone or with Katie or with a good friend, a couple of miles to some wonderful cafe, say the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/kopi-travelers-cafe-chicago">Kopi</a> or the <a href="http://www.heartlandcafe.com/">Heartland</a>, and settling into a booth, and for those first few, precious moments, taking nothing off, letting instead the heat seep through the breathable fabrics to dry the sweat and circulate some feeling to the extremities. It's a purposeful form of suffering, entirely self-induced, but I'm not sure it's to be avoided.<br />
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Cait and I have gotten in the habit of taking a date night here and there, leaving the boys with a babysitter for a three hour stretch of early evening--long enough that if we come back and Walt's still awake, the night is not entirely lost--and walking to downtown Mountain View for dinner at <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/shezan-mountain-view">the Pakistani Restaurant with the amazing samosas</a>. I've eaten Indian food across the Midwest and long stretches of Eastern Europe, but this is by far the best. It's such a treasure to wander through the neighborhoods, walking at a pace that never has to slow to match a three-year-old. It's how we used to walk across San Francisco, the whole city every few nights, but that's probably just how I remember it. And if it sounds wistful, or passively ambivalent about the unrelenting pace of raising babies, then I can only say I love our life all the more for these little sojourns away from it. Like Disneyland or outer space, or Chicago in November, spending time away there gets lonely too quickly to like it for too long.<br />
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One song I've listened to all year is "I'm So Happy" by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salteens">The Salteens</a>. The band recorded it for Yo Gabba Gabba, and as soon as Walt heard it, the song became a select favorite. To give a sense of what that kind of commitment means in our household, I had to eventually record the song onto a CD for Cait, so that whenever she did the daycare pick-ups, she could have it at the ready to play on repeat, along with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqegkP92xcI">the theme from "Fireman Sam."</a> Fourteen months on, Walt still wears the fireman get-up everyday. I love that he's so comfortable in his skin, and around us, to keep at it. A friend explained the other day that what happens is, one day, dinosaurs arrive to the Duplo fire stations. The next day, the fireman and dinosaurs play together, but really, the writing is on the wall. Fast forward a few weeks, and the station is now fully inhabited, the fireman stuck at the bottom of the toy bin, rescuing no one. For a while, it looked like police officers were coming to visit, but the pancake breakfast came and went. The stack of fire helmets in the closet lived to fight another day. I like that Walt has a passion. I don't know what he'll make of it next. I'm not too worried, though. The other day, I tried to explain that, if he wanted, he could take a nap. He just looked at me and shook his head. <i>Fireman no take naps,</i> he said. That night, like every night he doesn't nap, he went out like a light and slept right through to the morning.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9JwE08N-heY" width="560"></iframe>John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-17729249906370084572013-10-16T13:39:00.000-04:002013-10-17T00:46:18.599-04:00Mailer Redux<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I’ve <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2013/03/mailer.html">written in past
posts</a> that I would like to take the best parts of Norman Mailer's work and forget
the rest. Certainly, Mailer himself made <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Time-Modern-Library-Paperbacks/dp/0375754911">no
such distinctions</a>:</div>
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<i>Most of my books over
the years have had more bad reviews and good reviews. I’m the only major writer
in America who has had more bad reviews than good reviews over the course of
his writing life, so that gives me a certain pride, a feel that, you know, they
keep taking their best shot and they can’t do a goddamn thing, they’re not
gonna stop me. You get a little vain about it that way. But the bad thing about
having a tough ego is you become less percipient. Ego is a shell, essentially,
and so you start to close off experience from yourself. The ideal would be to
have a light, flexible ego that’s there, that can concentrate into a given
place to protect you when the going gets tough, but then it doesn’t cut off too
much. At my worst, I often feel like a turtle. I just pull my head in and let
it rattle off the shell. But of course, I’m not seeing a damn thing except my
own darkness at that point.</i> (<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16217369">Fresh Air
interview</a>, 1991)</div>
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The “rest” of what I don’t like about Mailer might be that rattling of the shell, or perhaps less flattering for its
resilience, his vanity for fashion. I'm thinking, for example, of the cheap and personal shots in "Evaluations...," the hyperbolic launch sequence in <i>Of A Fire on the Moon</i>, and any of the ridiculous press conferences in which he broadly antagonized feminists. The worst of Mailer contains a style that defers first to reaction; however sharp the accusations, or reflexive the barbs, they justify himself rather than his arguments. But that worst is never free
of self-consciousness. Mailer's going-by-wits always, eventually turns himself under the
lens as mercilessly as his opponents (real and imagined), which leads to some of <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer">the best and most heartfelt literary apologies of the 20th century</a>. Many can apologize so well as they err.<br />
<br />
Rarely was the ego so
unremarkably kempt between periods of brilliance as Mailer’s. When the
confidence flagged, he simply went at all comers. Gore Vidal famously called it
Mailer’s “metamorphosis,” and knew the best way to defeat its seriousness and
indignation was to dismiss him: <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve been re-reading <i>Advertisements</i>,
and between the public corrections, the literary overreaches, and the essential,
self-pitying vanity, something resists that great myth of public modesty so close
to my Midwestern heart. I think this is how I easily miss the best part of
Mailer, what Hitchens called that willingness to risk embarrassment which made
him forgivable to ex-wives and rivals, and allowed him to sit down to write or
give an interview only to revise great portions of perspectives he held even a
few weeks prior. Mailer was always correcting, and I think the essence of that
mutability is Mailer’s willing partisanship. When politics failed him, or when
he failed himself, he tacked in new directions. In this way, his subject,
across so many projects, never changed. Mailer risked himself to write, look,
and feel courageous—and we should all be so stubborn and ugly in our
vulnerability—but cowardice was his project, the physical body’s reluctance to
courage.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mailer and critics alike never quite knew what to do with
his incessant <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/mar/03/stuttering-giant/?pagination=false">going
after Hemingway</a>—Bloom <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/mar/03/stuttering-giant/?pagination=false">applied
his anxiety of influence</a>, Mailer suggested Hemingway hadn’t tried hard
enough to change the world—by which he envied the prose and public style, while
faulting the self-consciousness, or what Mailer describes less charitably as
“cowardice,” that stunted his later work (From <i>Advertisements, </i>writing about <i>The
Old Man and The Sea</i>: “A work of affirmation must contain its moments of
despair—specifically, there must be a bad moment when the old man Santiago is
tempted to cut the line and let the big fish go. Hemingway avoided the problem
by never letting the old man be seriously tempted.”). I like what Clive James
says about Fitzgerald’s advantage over Hemingway, that Fitzgerald could write
weakness without losing his confidence: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>In </i>The Sun Also
Rises, <i>Hemingway could imagine himself as
an emasculated man, but he could never imagine himself as a weak one, and the
idea of a strong man weakened by an emotional dependency was not within his
imaginative compass. It might well have been within his life, but that would
have been the very reason, for him, it was not something he cared to imagine. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Like Hemingway, Mailer is reflexively first himself, even
the inventions and semi-inventions of <i>Armies
of the Night, The Fight, Executioner’s Song</i>, etc. But like Fitzgerald, and
unlike Hemingway, Mailer could suffer the lost confidence. Most often, he did
so by putting down the pen, putting on a sportcoat, and wandering in front of
the television monitors. He knew how to find himself there, and he was his
public self until the private self got to writing again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Also like Fitzgerald,
Mailer played himself carelessly, alternately parodying his best and worst incarnations
of the politician, journalist, writer, and finally, literary lion. Mailer’s
very willingness to play that range meant he commanded an audience while never
quite sounding like himself (as opposed to, say, <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dei-j4tWI0A">Bob Roberts<span style="font-style: normal;">-era Gore Vidal</span></a></i>, whose best lines,
whatever he said, were master classes in tone and rhetoric). He didn’t become
mannered. His advertisements were for a self, and the self stood alone and in
opposition. I hear in Mailer’s critique of his time a confidence against the
tribe, that what is most oppressive to the creative mind is first a fidelity to
those factions who mean to embarrass the heretic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, at the end of his life, Mailer tucked such turns
neatly away. He argued that there were no ideas worth dying for, and like his
later critiques of Hemingway, he turned his attention away from a world he no
longer meant to change, to <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/jul/17/the-white-man-unburdened/?pagination=false">one
he too easily critiqued in the margins</a>. Consider how gamely and charmingly
he meets early Oprah to talk about “winning at love” and his “notorious pass”:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Still, there were last fires. In his critique of Communism
at the beginning of 1980, I hear something measured and ironic in how he repeats
“Russians,” with a certain insistence to redress, in near-satire, the reflexive
ideologies of faith, nationalism, and commerce he suggests they oppose: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>It is my belief that
the Russians—and I don’t like them at all—it is my belief that the Russians
would never dare to take us over, because if they took us over, we would
destroy them. Their mentality simply couldn’t sit on top of our mentality. It
would be too volcanic for them. I think they would give us a wide berth. The
safety of Communism, the health of Communism, is to have confrontation all of
the time, is to be in a showdown with us. Their strength comes from the fact
they have a huge enemy, us. And so they keep everyone in line over in Russia.
If they didn’t have a huge enemy, what would they do? They would have to face
their people and say, “Here are the dull products we make for you. Here are the
oppressive measures we lay upon you. Here are the stupidities we try to put
into your heads.” We save them by trying to be their opponent, their enemy.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Whether it followed his meaning or not, Mailer has no
contempt for the listening crowd. He is talking past it. Later Mailer is used
to being misunderstood, and comfortable with the caricature. He suspects, I
think, the joke will eventually tell itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-61341046762740551192013-10-04T02:43:00.001-04:002013-10-16T00:04:17.221-04:00Fear And Writing<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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This week, I’ve been reviewing the final proofs of <a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Young-Widower,675829.aspx">the memoir</a>: a rare typo here, one last-last edit, there, before it all heads to press. It's a good process, a kind of forced reckoning with the near past; what Norman Mailer called <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer">the lasting enemy of vanity</a> coupled with <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer">the need to exhale, just exhale</a>. Talking out yet another round of writerly angst with Cait, I decided that the manuscript, unpublished, has become something of a <a href="http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Horcrux">horcrux</a>. Not the immortal-magic-wizarding part, but the object of fear and worry that feeds on negative feeling to strengthen itself. My meal with <a href="http://www.theoi.com/Titan/Kirke.html">Circe</a>, the one <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk4Ntcq5uNg">precious ring</a>, another <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eAQWllCHHU">portrait of Dorian Gray</a>. The envelope has not <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKCJxsO1jt8">rattled at me</a>, at least not yet. I'm surprised to like as much as I do the intoxication of fear, the sense of stakes, and the ever-delayed reckoning that its continuing engagement delays.</div>
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<a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-photos-of-katie-circa-7th8th-grade.html">A little more than six years ago</a>, I needed to make this
blog’s record. It was both a public and private time, and the writing here became the hinge. Perhaps my turning so directly then to <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4219/the-art-of-fiction-no-43-john-updike">fear</a> was an aggressive
suppression, a thumping of those persistent and sometimes too-fast
<a href="http://youtu.be/D0n8N98mpes">whac-a-moles</a>—guilt, regret, and grief—that popped up so eagerly, grinning
madly, daring me not to play. I’d like to say that how and why I wrote after
Katie’s death was different from how and why I wrote before it, but that
wouldn’t be true, and it certainly wouldn’t be honest. I knew I had found a
subject matter that scared me at a different scale and register. <a href="http://www.missourireview.com/archives/bbarticle/elegy-and-narrative/">I needed to write out that fear</a>. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Fear of failure
was nothing compared with fear of death, which paled significantly in
comparison with those things I could not control remembering or not
remembering. They scared me the most.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Certainly, the
writing improved. And yet, I can’t see the point of being
a writer who only takes on a subject matter to plumb it always, first, for vulnerabilities. What gets left out? In the everyday, there is a certain loss of traction
that follows the best turning away. On the page (or the computer screen), the turning away is the traction. More and more, I think, what
I’ve placed in the hypothetical space of fear, to argue and reason with, to
harangue and work into shape, is risking a certain stunt; the failure to
renew or continue to evolve. Eventually, fear might become itself the posture, a place from which I could begin to consider anything
else, but I doubt it. Fear is provisional. It waits to change me, however I feel about it, whether I see it
coming or not, wherever I vigilantly crouch, certain, to borrow a line from <a href="http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/howtolikeit.html">the poem</a>, as whatever comes next.<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
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<o:p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/D0n8N98mpes" width="420"></iframe></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-35363482198892337752013-08-14T00:15:00.004-04:002013-08-14T00:15:45.632-04:00New Sheriff, Good Walter, Great WheelsI realized this morning that I still had <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I'm_with_You">the Canadian arena rock power ballad, "When I'm With You,"</a> in my iTunes library. I set the Shuffle feature to play only songs that I have not listened to since I imported, five years ago, upon arrival to the Bay Area, all of my music from my old computer into a new, sleek MacBook (which, thanks to Time Machine, updated two years later to an even shinier MacBook Pro). There were about six hundred songs total. I listened to six or seven. When I do get time to write now, I try to listen to new music, which, as the gods of electronic music permit, is often now my very oldest. In 2003, I sat up every night one week in Chicago importing all of my CDs into an early version of iTunes. Since, I've <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/03/tech/web/bruce-willis-itunes">rented the digital rights to music I might never actually own</a>. In the day to day, I'm never really aware of the distinction. With a little time, I suppose, we forget everything.<br />
<br />
Thanks to that right combination of child care, naps, rest, downtime from teaching and grading, organized toy bins, clean kitchens and sanitized miniature potties (we are toilet training) by which I don't feel either the neglectful husband-father-partner or the zombi-fied life slouch, the time I make to write arrives with great relish and an overly confident conviction that to write is to live, or to at least feel alive, in exclusion of nearly everything else by which I more practically measure the vitality of a life: marriage, family, groceries, solvency. Call it faith, or perhaps, force of habit. If writing once felt like traveling to an exotic country, it feels now like living in another culture, one where I know the language and customs, but can't quite follow recipes. One day, I'll learn. It's not unlike listening over and over to a crescendo-loving Canadian arena rock power ballad: start small, build, accumulate, and repeat. To sustain such optimism is a positively ecstatic prospect, whatever the outcome.<br />
<br />
"When I'm With You" was first released in the United States, in 1989, four years after Sheriff released its last album and broke up. I was twelve years old. The deejay played the song at my first school dance. We stood, like any near-adolescent Catholics, in small groups, yearning desperately and indiscriminately, and despising our impure hearts. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I'm_with_You">Sheriff had recorded the song in 1983, then cut a few more records</a>, and finally disbanded. And here's a nice moment of revenge and counter-revenge: when the song did finally top the U.S. charts, the singer and lead guitarist tried to get the band back together, but the other members hated them so much for breaking up the band that they refused to reunite or subsequently license the name to new members. So, the singer and guitarist formed a different band, Alias, which recorded a year later a different #1 hit, the equally Canadian and power ballad-y <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjhrGPFaQoQ">"More Than Words Can Say."</a> "More Than Words Can Say" was played on live radio more than a million times. What, I wondered, more than words, might say, "need"--poetry?--but I do remember that we had other dances, where the dancing was more closely monitored. We were advised to, literally, keep the Holy Spirit between us.<br />
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What I felt sympathetic for then, as now, about Sheriff, was that the band gave up on success before it should have, and then couldn't really find a way to enjoy it once it arrived. Writing feels this way, most of the time. It is lost on me which poems or essays a friend or editor or stranger will like, much less when or how those poems and essays will arrive into other lives. I used to see this as a failure of character: myopic, a significant failure. If I wasn't the predictive authority on my own accomplishment, who would be? Now, I'm more skeptical that playing both sides of the board isn't a bit like cheating. Who can be so attuned to how and why they do anything, without self-consciously shaping the act to conform to the intention? Sheriff must have thought they saw the path forward, without each other, and by either standard--they should have stayed together, they would do better on their own--they were right. <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_is_other_people">L'enfer, c'est les autres.</a></i> Perhaps, we would all do well to embrace a <a href="http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/26499965550">househusband period</a>.<br />
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After Katie's death, I thought that surely I understood how fleeting and temporary is happiness, how unstable is vitality, how malevolent the universe around me means to be. Instead, the terms of happiness became broader. They came to feel more complicated by significance, and not entirely my own. That these early years of straining in both directions to feed, water, clean, and house the children, and play with, read to, and love them, will resolve soon enough into sequence and nostalgia, seems impossible. But then, I've written the last six years toward a broad project about marriage, death, continuity, feeling, loss, and absence, arriving to few obvious conclusions while hoping still to understand something about my life, either then or now. I imagine that if I didn't write, I'd be less neurotic, and probably less sensitive. To live is to write? Well, that sounds fine. I'll write, either way. Maybe it's also true that I'm a better person, or at least a more useful one to the people around me, when I'm changing a diaper while Cait is at work, than I am when I hole up in the closet and insist that no one bother me for the next few hours.<br />
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I'm curious how "Breaking Bad" will end. I don't really like the show--it's no Friday Night Lights, West Wing, Lost--but I get that it's first-rate television: great acting, writing, directing, and production, and fantastic cold opens. In every podcast I listen to, and periodical I follow, the show is lauded in much in the same broad way that watching "The Wire" and celebrating its moral ambiguity was the <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=humblebrag">humblebrag</a> gesture of 2008. Which is to say, like "The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Seinfeld," "Hill Street Blues," "Mash," "All in the Family," "The Bob Newhart Show," or "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" before it (I can't develop the sequence any further without cheating), "Breaking Bad" is officially now our semi-generational trope. To say "Breaking Bad" is to conjure simultaneously: the voyeuristic pleasures of watching someone else do bad things; a curiosity about chemistry; an admiration for Bryan Cranston's, et al, devotion to craft and humble development; even <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M6yoeOglNw">a postmodern meditation on the nature of pop culture itself</a>.<br />
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From the <a href="http://www.amctv.com/breaking-bad/videos/10-baddest-the-bathtub">bathtub scene</a> onward, I haven't liked the essential conceit of "Breaking Bad," which is to bring everyone to consequence or justice except for the main character. Because the show can't continue without Walter White, I don't see how he will be caught until the very end, when of course, we'll either cheer to see the moral scales finally balanced or cheer its resolution not to follow the rules. Isn't that a rather obvious manipulation of pretty pat terms? In the meantime, Walter engages an increasingly absurd skill set: the training of a geologist, the street smarts of a crime lord, the duplicity of a psychopath, the growl of Lee Marvin, the acuity of the director of OMB, and Einstein's command of the laws of space and time. Clearly, <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions">I'm in the minority of opinion</a>. Who knows where <a href="http://www.imdb.com/list/DsQ9oXXwRH4/">opinion will eventually settle</a>. When you make the rules of the universe in which your characters operate, it's hardly a surprise that you never (or at least, wait until the very end to) <a href="http://chelseabauch.tumblr.com/post/17808122762/in-writing-you-must-kill-your">kill your darlings</a>. Good Walter or Bad Walter will emerge victorious. The screen will go dark. And, you know, better Walter White than me.<br />
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<br />John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-63900923277721263172013-06-18T19:18:00.003-04:002013-06-18T19:22:22.634-04:00Two Books in 2014<br />
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I'm thrilled to share some good news. My poetry book manuscript, <i>The Consolations</i>, was recently chosen by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Father-Dirt-Mihaela-Moscaliuc/dp/1882295781">Mihaela Moscaliuc</a> for the 2013 Trio Award. It will be published in March 2014 by <a href="http://www.triohousepress.org/">Trio House Press</a>. </div>
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So, <i>The Consolations </i>will come out at the same time as my prose memoir, <i>Young Widower </i>(University of Nebraska Press), which last fall won the <a href="http://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2012/12/17/john-w-evans-wins-river-teeth-book-prize" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">River Teeth Book Prize</a>. </div>
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Trio House made a nice announcement today on its website:</div>
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<a href="http://www.triohousepress.org/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.triohousepress.org</a></div>
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You can follow things a bit at my still-under-construction author website: <a href="http://www.johnwevans.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.johnwevans.com</a>.</div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-160470820425077612013-05-05T10:54:00.003-04:002013-05-10T02:55:00.482-04:00Rooting For PlotlinesWalt has a keen sense of certain rituals. When we go to the fire station, he always wears his red plastic fire hat and blue rubber boots. He knows to cup his hands around his face and lean against the glass, but not to knock on the door or yell. He looks patiently at all of the trucks for some sign of movement: a displaced hose, maybe, or fire jackets on the floor next to the engine. If the firemen are out, we will walk around the building to the golf carts in the back, where he will pretend to drive them for a while, and then come back to check one last time. Rare is the afternoon we don't find someone on shift either coming or going, who stops and waves, opens the door, and lets Walt in to walk around the truck, then climb up into the driver's seat and ring the bell. I have on my phone a series of photographs, mostly in focus, that make in the last year or so a near motion-capture of displaced time. Walt's face thins and lengthens from toddler into boy. He sits higher on the chair now, turns the wheel, makes the fire engine noise ("woo-woo!" and not "ee-nah, ee-nah," the sound of the ambulance), and asks the fireman a series of questions to which he already knows the answer, which is how Walt started the conversation yesterday afternoon.<br />
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"What this do?" <i>That's the button that turns the mirror. </i>(Smiling, pointing up) "What it do?" <i>Those are the switches that make the hoses go. </i>(Turning the wheel) "What this do?" <i>Well, that turns the big tires down here where your daddy is standing. </i>"Yeah, it turns the wheels, which makes the bus [sic] go, so the fire man goes to the fire, and he roll out the hoses, and get the axes, and smashes the glass, and let out poisonous gases, and put on the masks for the gases and go find 'Help! Help!' for the man on the room who is trapped!" <i>(Pause, to me) Yeah, that's like the best explanation of what we do that I've ever heard by a kid under five. (to Walt) You really know your stuff, big guy. </i>(Smiling) "Now I see axes?"<br />
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I recently read Roland Barthes's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Camera-Lucida-Reflections-Roland-Barthes/dp/0374521344">Camera Lucida</a>. </i>His formula for how a photograph initiates an emotional reaction in the person looking at it, independent or even in spite of the photographer's intention, makes a lot of sense to me. To Barthes, the selective power of certain images to make a disruption ("punctum") is characterized by feeling and scope. The feeling itself is instantaneous and vivd, but also fleeting and impossible to will with subsequent viewings. Instead, the logic goes, we scrutinize the photograph to locate the disruption: to will ourselves toward its location after the fact. We make a ritual of finding the place in order to better remember it, and with time, perhaps even understand it. Barthes makes a whole separate, and subordinate, category ("stadium") for the polite attention of the spectator to the photographer's intention, which he characterizes as stable, common, and unremarkable. Which is to say, unworthy of consideration excerpt perhaps to the photographer him/herself.<br />
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A week or so after I moved to Indiana, I walked with one of Katie's nieces to the drugstore. It was hot and late in the day. We walked west through subdivisions and office parks. The industrial air conditioner in the drugstore, upon arrival, was positively glacial. We passed a row of greeting cards, and all the birthday greetings--balloons, smiling monkeys, big script--were iridescent in the fluorescent light. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72AVXpeo_ZI">A country song Katie had liked</a> was playing over the loudspeakers. I had just started this blog, for which friends were emailing <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-photos-of-katie-circa-7th8th-grade.html">pictures of Katie</a>. There was this photograph of Katie and her mom on Key Biscayne in Miami, a candid, with the ocean behind them, and when I looked at it in a certain way, for a split second, I could remember every part of loving Katie, in such clear detail, until I couldn't handle the feeling. I became hysterical: floor, wailing, carpet, fists. Ed and Beth heard me from the kitchen and I remember them running in to ask if I was okay. I remember grabbing for a bottle of Afrin--<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSZOWggCa-E">Afrin</a>!--on the counter to try to open things up a little so that I could breath, which I did, and after a while I was fine and the feeling--the bewilderment, the shock--passed. I was calm, stunned. I looked at the photo again, and toggled through the rest of the series. Nothing.<br />
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Willie Nelson's "Valentine" was Katie and I's wedding song. On Thursday, May 8th, it will be nine years ago that we danced to it under tea lights in the loft of a barn in Hobart, Indiana. It was our good luck to catch the apple trees in blossom that weekend, which leant even more bucolic Midwestern authenticity and charm to a day filled with tractor rides, homemade cookies, and, well, barn lofts. Katie hated Valentine's Day, so it was a kind of joke between us to choose the song. The humor tempered some of the built-in sincerity of the day, and carved out within it a private space that was entirely ours. I don't remember the dance very well, or the song; only that we chose it and were happy with it. We were coordinating so many details that day, all of which seemed either to go well or not go well. I was thinking about that song the other day, and found the video below. I didn't realize Willie wrote the song for his son, or that he saw it as essentially a children's song until everyone started taking it so seriously, at which point it became a staple in his live shows, where he plays it unironically to this day.<br />
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I'm going to miss the American version of "The Office," which concludes its nine-season run next Thursday. It is the last show I remember watching about which I cared more than my own life. I was highly suspect of the show at first. I had loved the UK version and I worried my affection for the one might betray my fidelity to the other. Then, I was bored and lonely, grieving, and easily overwhelmed. I had a lot of time on my hands. I loved "The Office" almost instantly. I watched the first three seasons in a couple of weeks, right up until the season 3 finale, and it was so good, Pam's speech (which <a href="http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html">I blogged about a few years ago</a>) and Jim's coming back from New York, and Ryan's promotion, and Michael's self-defeating power grab; everyone with the chance to be so happy. Of course, then, I was cheering for plot lines, in spite of myself and, also, in spite of what I knew writing, art, and television, much less life, could be. Which meant that <i>how </i>I watched television changed that year, in a way I'm not sure it's changed back since. Then, I allowed television every kind of indulgence so long as it reassured me that the moral order of convention was not entirely gone from my life: marriage, but also comeuppances, modesty, and continuity. Certain truths, within a spectrum.<br />
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I don't have a lot of specific memories of watching television with Katie, but I do remember watching the British "Office" that first year in Miami, on a DVD from Netflix, late at night in the early winter, with all the doors and windows that faced the water open on our first high-rise apartment. The room was, for once, aired out, cool and dry and dark. We were on break from graduate school. Probably, it was around the time of our trip to Key Biscayne. We watched the season right through to the end, to the bittersweet finale in which David was fired, Gareth was promoted, and Tim tried and failed to win Dawn. What a train wreck, I remember thinking. The stakes were so low for these people so, surely, they deserved some consolation. At the very least, I deserved the chance to watch them be, finally, <i>happy</i>. But then, the British "Office," right to the end, <i>didn't </i>soft-peddle it resolutions at the expense of a certain humanity. The series <i>was </i>resolved, on its own terms, to <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/10/25/041025crte_television">perfection</a>. What came next in the Christmas special was something else entirely, a postscript, to which the rules didn't apply. I remember Katie and I agreeing that there was no logic to such happiness that did not also contradict the pathos that made the show feel real. It was a fake happy ending, not a real one, and we were sure we knew the difference.<br />
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In one of his <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177773">Lannan Foundation interviews</a>, Robert Hass says that it is wrong to have an elegiac attitude toward reality. He means the realm of language, but it's an interesting take on television, which is maybe the most elegiac form of popular entertainment. It fixes a contemporary moment into a near-past, and when a show succeeds, it draws out the gap between present and near-past until the viewers feel safely nostalgic for the moment, and seek constantly its restoration. How easily, in the televised life, sentiment becomes sentimental. Liberal expansiveness becomes conservative nostalgia. The colorful friend becomes the caricature that sells all the better the real suffering of the hero. Perhaps the most glaring aspect of a show's continuing success is how it restores the asynchronous moment <i>within</i> the fluid past. Characters die off or marry. Businesses boom and bust. All the while, circumstances stay in constant flux; they change, without really changing. How American, the Soviets used to say, that American jazz can fix so many creative expressions into the monotonous and repetitive structures of the key and chord. How jazz-like, our ensemble-driven, multi-narrative, single-camera contemporary television show.<br />
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My life is not on any screen I'm watching, which is what makes photographing Walt at the fire station so challenging. Even when I get him right, I can only express that success in the broadest terms to anyone else, a picture of something they'd want to see, with the effect of making unremarkable and indistinct the boy I know and love in this fixed, fleeting moment. I feel this way when I write about Katie. It is a kind of un-reality to feel exempt from one's sense of failure; from the certainty I, or we, might have, with time, done certain things better. I have written about Katie for the last six years, and I am trying each time to find a way into and through something that seems to have no clear beginning or end. Even now, I'm fairly certain that what I am describing is not a television show about an office, but instead, a memory, my memory, colored and tempered by my own sense of feeling and need for sense. It would be too neat to say that when we were 26 and watching "The Office" in Miami, I was desperate for those hypothetical occasions that life has since rushed in to tonic with real ones. I didn't know that could happen, then. After Katie died, I couldn't imagine what any continuation of a life would look like. I could not imagine ever being remarried. But, of course, I am remarried. Life has continued, and I do love it. I am rooting for certain outcomes, and keeping whichever memories, however they seem to fit into whatever I know of a life, whatever they might mean, because it is what I know how to do.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zQPpfaLDGY4" width="420"></iframe>John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-35896938315009056862013-04-07T22:37:00.001-04:002013-04-09T06:10:55.671-04:00Seize the DayMy friend Ben is visiting Chicago this week. We both lived there for three years, more or less, after college and the Peace Corps. Ben is now one of the only Western journalists in the Middle East who speaks fluent Arabic, a feat he undertook deliberately in Cairo, after he left Chicago. <a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/ben_hubbard/">Salon has dedicated a page to his reporting</a>, which it republishes on a regular basis, <a href="https://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_rn=8&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=vsPgb21T1PPMkT2JS26BNg&cp=9&gs_id=y&xhr=t&q=ben+hubbard&es_nrs=true&pf=p&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=ben+hubba&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44770516,d.cGE&fp=6091a4a53dea6a35&biw=1390&bih=697">as does much of the web.</a> But then, Ben was always a writer. A few years ago, just after I arrived to the Bay Area, we met in Chicago and spent a valedictory week bowling, drinking, walking the lakefront, going to a Cubs games, hanging out at the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/kopi-travelers-cafe-chicago">Kopi Cafe</a>, the <a href="http://hopleaf.com/">Hopleaf</a>, <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/carols-pub-chicago">Carol's Pub</a>. We saw half <a href="http://youtu.be/lybo2JQc2zM">a Harmony Korine movie at the Music Box</a> one afternoon, and walked around Evanston the next. To us, Chicago had become a prelude: our old, temporary hometown. Then, I remembered Chicago as the place where Katie and I made a life before we married, where my nephews were born and we all played cards in the kitchen instead of getting a babysitter. I taught middle school social studies during the day. Ben tutored high school students for standardized tests. We started a writer's group, and when that collapsed, we corralled friends and partners into a book club that also petered out after a few meetings. The authors we admired were guideposts to a certain kind of future, we were certain of it, we had only to unlock the key and pace ourselves in certain directions.<br />
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I am in bed today, sick with the flu. Mostly, I've slept. I watched some television, though the more I stared at the laptop screen, the more my eyes, head, arms, legs, fingers hurt. I've read some of the magazines and books on my nightstand. Mostly, I've laid in bed, nodding off, listening to Cait and the boys upstairs, feeling terribly guilty for getting sick in the first place. This room is so quiet for the excuse of lying very still in it. Still, what an unfair disruption to a family life to spend all day in bed. A little while ago, I took a handful of Tylenols and Advils, in the hopes of standing up, showering, and eating something. The achiness is not so bad, at least, though I am fairly light-headed going back and forth.<br />
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One of the books I keep picking up and not reading is <i><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11494.Humboldt_s_Gift">Humboldt's Gift</a></i>, Saul Bellow's wonderful 1975 novel about Chicago, which the book jacket tells me is also <a href="http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/collectedstories/writing/write_schwartz_1.html">a roman a clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz</a>. Ben gave me this book for Christmas a few years ago, along with Roberto Bolano's <i>The Savage Detectives </i>(I gave him, I think, Tim O'Brien's <i>The Things They Carried </i>and Joan Didion's <i>The Year of Magical Thinking</i>).<i> </i>I have read <i>Humboldt's Gift </i>in starts and stops ever since. Now, I have about 100 pages left. There is a terrific introductory essay at the beginning of the edition I own, by Jeffrey Eugenides, that I read to re-orient myself every time I pick it back up. I like what he says here:<br />
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<i>"A phrase that might also describe Bellow's chief and lasting achievement: he elevated language and, by doing so, reversed the spirit's atrophy. That's what reading Bellow feels like. What makes Bellow's prose better than just about anyone else's is that it is touched, in every clause, by enlightenment. Every clause glows with its own aura. Even the verbs are doing holy work....Almost alone in his generation, Saul Bellow maintained a connection to the vatic role poets had in earlier ages. He did this in a modern, twentieth-century way, tentatively, probingly, with self-humor and a large measure of dubiety, but not outright rejection."</i><br />
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Like all the great American cities, Chicago is easy to love from a distance. It is big, crude, friendly, expansive, and self-sustaining. It doesn't need our affection, which only increases its allure. Chicago might be over-run with beer gardens in the summer, or boarded up and barely open on a Monday night in January, but the city itself presses out along the Lake and continues in both directions all year, for as far as the eye can see, toward the many neighborhoods that accumulate at its edges. It is the city's worst-kept secret that Chicago has no good restaurants in the Loop, where the conventions and hoteliers keep visitors in ballrooms and top-floor steakhouses, watching that skyline light up and not move. Chicago is a static city, which is its great advantage in every season: it generates tremendous stores of energy while keeping very still.<br />
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How lucky, sometimes, to transform anything and remember it differently. I don't take much time to miss Chicago and I hardly write about it. But then, I'm not sure I marshall my affections and interests so deliberately. I do miss seeing Ben so regularly. Tonight, I'll neither write nor read, opting instead to run a rash of litmus tests at the hypothetical morning. How high is my fever? Will it break soon? Am I hungry? In pain? If there is a unreasonable limit to reasonably good health, it is the utter neurosis of waiting for an illness to end, and the way the mind alternates reason and distraction as it tries to push through. I'm hoping that by keeping low today I can hedge some of tomorrow's exhaustion (and contagion), get up with the boys in the morning, and be again a reasonable husband, father, and teacher. I like those roles very much and I don't like not being able to do them well. Now is precisely the kind of moment that will seem remarkable until it passes, this all-consuming flu-bout I'm unlikely to either romanticize or miss.<br />
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<br />John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-24332794109432519762013-03-13T03:07:00.004-04:002013-03-15T15:47:22.276-04:00Mailer<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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My senior year in college, I
read Norman Mailer's selected prose collection, <i><span style="color: #0000e9;"><a href="http://amzn.com/0375754911">Time of Our
Time</a>.</span></i> I was a young writer and a history major, who admired Mailer's precocity, then iconoclasm. If I could avoid any of the vulnerability,
risk, and failure that marked that course's middle space, so much the better. I
admired and skimmed, re-read and skipped my way through more than 1,000 pages: excerpts, half-stories, partial interviews, long chapters. Even the page count was aggressive and self-aggrandizing. It suggested Mailer had written so much so well that he could not help but select some of all of it. Mailer edited the book himself and signed every edition in the
first printing, an effort he explained later required
ice and towels to complete. To the end, Mailer made his everyday
actions dramatic and heroic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I
bought <i>Time of Our Time</i> after listening to Mailer’s interview that summer on <i>Weekend Edition</i>. Driving
students from the summer camp in rural North Carolina where I taught literature
classes to the regional airport a little more than an hour away, I would catch
NPR crossing the valley. The students sat glumly in their seats, uneager to go
home. It always left me a little sad to start them on their way. Leaving
the airport, I would roll down the windows, coasting the long downhills, then gunning it
across the dip to get up speed for the climb. Scott Simon and Norman Mailer’s
chat was vintage public radio: leisurely, measured, conversational. The
anecdotes of Mailer's life—bankrupted mayoral candidate, apologetic wife
stabber, witness of Lowell at the peace march, enemy of Vidal on television,
inheritor of Capote in the jail cell—seemed peacefully at odds with the fair
and rational man narrating the launch of Apollo 11 from Merritt lsland,
Florida. His "gargantuan idea" was that human beings might not yet
destroy themselves if they shot themselves further and further into space. Then Mailer refuted, as though
by rote, the familiar criticisms. His voice was elegant and rich, just
patrician; marbled a little with fat. I imagined his was the voice of high
letters, at the end of a writing life: washed in acid, smooth, certain.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The mark of the mediocre mind is to seek precedent</i>. Mailer said it to give a
context for what he felt were unfair criticisms of his talent, but I took it as
indictment: to mimic anyone's creative process would only diminish my own
talent, however modest, and its eventual achievement. Still, that fall, I devoted
myself to reading selectively a narrow, avuncular Mailer. In essays,
interviews, and books, I skipped the parts--sexist this, drunken that--that made me uncomfortable. It was
an amateur mistake. I admired the author, so I audited the work. I expected Mailer to be as implacable and generous as the ego that compelled him to write. I hoped such
ambition and talent might mean that, like all hard work, prosperity and reward
inevitably followed. How else to account for process?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The Fight </i>is Mailer's account of "The Rumble in the Jungle," the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that took place in Zaire, 1974, and its surrounding circumstances. While it is not Mailer's best book--its excesses are at times decidedly ignorant by today's standards--it is still one of my favorites by him. A lesser moment in the book--Mailer's careful qualification of
his mile split when considering a 3am training job with Ali--fascinates me:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i> “There was no question of keeping up with Muhammad. His
conscience, however (now on the good side of journalism), was telling him that
the better his own condition, the more he would be able to discern about Ali’s.
What a pity he had not been jogging since the summer. Up in Maine he had done
two miles every other day, but jogging was one discipline he could not
maintain. At five feet eight inches and one hundred and seventy pounds, Norman
was simply too heavy to enjoy running. He could jog at a reasonable
gait—fifteen minutes for two miles was good time for him—and if he pushed, he
could jog three miles, conceivably four, but he hated it. Jogging disturbed the
character of one’s day. He did not feel refreshed afterward but overstimulated
and irritable. The truth of jogging was it only felt good when he stopped. And
he would remind himself that with the exception of Erich Segal and George
Dilder, he had never heard of a writer who liked to run—who wanted the
brilliance of the mind discharged through the ankles?” (</i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Norman-Mailer/dp/0375700382">The Fight<i>, Vintage 1975</i></a><i>)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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The
passage is vintage Mailer--excessive, charming, vulnerable, and yet somehow, entirely serious--as is the seeming aside of his very fast jogging mile.
It makes the training with Ali a contest, and by proxy to other writers, a
contrast. In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/ali-mailer.html">a
remarkable review</a> following its publication, Michael Wood admired <i>The Fight </i>for what he called “the carelessness of Mailer’s
eloquence, the sense that it just came along as a means of saying what he had
to say.” Indeed, Mailer's "good time" situates him as a natural athlete; it suggests Mailer might easily best Ali on their job, were his heart really in it. Throughout his career, Mailer spoke in pugilistic metaphors, boxed
semi-professionally, and until middle age, challenged enemies to step into the
ring with him. Wood calls it “walking parapets.” The threat is as literary as
Mailer’s poor conditioning—in a world of non-fighters (writers), the amateur
throws a vicious right hook—and more than a little self-conscious. Mailer
cannot keep a training regimen, but of course, <i>what serious writer really runs</i>? From which might follow, <i>what serious writer doesn’t box?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Nowhere
in <i>The Fight</i> does Mailer make Ali so
exceptional outside of the ring as he does in his fantastic interviews for the
1996 documentary, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Kings">When
We Were Kings</a></i>. In <i>Kings, </i>Mailer’s compliments are deferential and
reticent, paying due without simplifying the tribute. It’s a neat trick: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Mt49nFKEIs8" width="560"></iframe><o:p></o:p></div>
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Of
course, the documentary was made when Mailer was looking back decades, at a
moment whose history he had helped write. For Mailer, after the movie, Ali,
Foreman, Zaire, Mobutu, even Plimpton have ceased to move and no longer (if
they ever) fight back. When he wrote and published it, <i>The Fight </i>was high literary journalism. Now, <i>The Fight</i> is the testament of a reverent interloper who seems lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Mailer’s luck
is to articulate in every register his own wonder and suspicion, until both
terminate in the description of Ali’s shocking underdog victory over Foreman. I love
that word: <i>interloper</i>. To admit, from the outset, that we make no substantial claim to write, allows us the time and space we need to synchronize witness with understanding. Mailer’s skill at
and knowledge of boxing is amateur, just enough to inform the writing. His affection
for, and writing about, it is entirely his own. </div>
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<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/11/19/071119ta_talk_menand">By most accounts</a>, Mailer mellowed with age. He continued to make a practice of correcting all critiques, defending to the end his least well-received books and ideas. Which is to say, he knew himself and his work well enough to take on all comers. Perhaps the arguments repeated themselves in narrow and obvious combinations; he saw them coming. Or maybe, in the end, they weren't thrown with all that much effort. I have good copies of his books that I admire--<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Executioners-Song-Norman-Mailer/dp/0375700811">The Executioner's Song</a>, <a href="http://amzn.com/0312265050">The Naked and the Dead</a>, The Fight, <a href="http://amzn.com/0394620194">Of A Fire on the Moon</a></i>--but I wouldn't know many of the rest. My own "selected" project is shallower and narrower than I might have once liked it to be, though for different reasons than I first expected. I enjoy Mailer's <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16217369">late-period interviews about boxing, literature, and himself.</a> I genuinely admire those books I admire. And where it suits my interest to do so, which is much of the rest of the time, I forgive, and even forget, their author.</div>
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<!--EndFragment-->John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-6684081290359936662013-01-29T18:39:00.003-05:002013-01-30T11:07:58.953-05:00SmoothI am fully present in my world. This morning, even the radio was singing it. "You've got the music inside you--don't let go!" a man grunted earnestly from a <a href="http://www.kfog.com/">radio station</a> up the Peninsula and across the Bay. Had we met? Would we ever meet? Transcribing them just now, I had the lyrics wrong. I had to look them up. I remembered him singing, "You can do it! The music is inside you!" but when I checked the station's website playlist against a <a href="http://youtu.be/cPAEFnVZVOs">YouTube video of the song</a>, I made my corrections. What he meant he sang over and over, screaming, in falsetto, in deep reverb, in fragments of words and sentences, in full garble-rock parody mode, until the song itself dissolved into delay and feedback. Maybe the song needed to be a certain length, or he had only written the choruses. Maybe I was meant to be fixed by the choruses because the hook was so good no one really cared about the words around it. The hypnotic quality of the song was undeniable. It said nothing else for any length of time. Did it even matter what else he was telling me? It was the end of the world unless I held onto the music.<br />
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My first year as a Peace Corps volunteer, in Bangladesh, the office staff from the capital would sometimes stop in to say hello, passing through on the major highway from the North. I remember once hearing <a href="http://youtu.be/MXp413NynFk">Santana's "Smooth,"</a> muffled and from a distance. I was sitting in my cement room, trying to write poems by hand, which never worked. Usually, I just wrote out lines from poems I admired, then went back and tried to change enough of the words until the rest felt like my own. I felt terribly guilty. I had no idea this was how many students of poetry tried to become young poets. The working title of the poem I wrote unsuccessfully all summer was "Etude for the Map-Makers." The poem I cribbed was <a href="http://jeremygregg.com/quotes/lost-in-translation-by-james-merrill-poem/">James Merrill's "Lost in Translation."</a> I don't read German, but I had the footnotes from the <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/9780393968200/Norton-Anthology-Poetry-Paperback-0393968200/plp">powder blue Norton Anthology of Poetry</a> I had slugged across oceans. I was doing my best to turn the widowed French nanny into a reticent professor of astronomy who loved baseball--it was that kind of poem--when a car door clicked opened, Santana played a few licks, Rob Thomas liberated from inside an SUV sang his flat vibrat; looking down from my window I watched the assistant director step out of his glacial mobile palace and into the monsoon heat, his sunglasses instantly fogged. Santana makes anyone's arrival instantly memorable, though probably I was just thrilled at the distraction, a small part of my country instantly conjured to make the day distinct and memorable. I was that kind of American abroad. <br />
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I thought at the time that "Smooth" was a pretty corny song. Now I don't know. I certainly don't seek it out, it's not on my iPhone, friends don't bust out late-90s Santana albums at barbecues, playdates, and weddings. But writing this, I have listened to "Smooth" three or four times in a row, and it seems to be the sort of song one has to listen to a few more times to get out of the system. Anyway, our destination was some roadside restaurant recommended by the bus drivers. I rode in that enormous white Land Rover chilled to 60-odd degrees for a good hour. I liked it. I sat on a leather seat and looked out tinted windows, as we crossed the <a href="http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9400000/bangladesh-bangabandhu-bridge-bangladesh-9418468-600-459.jpg">Bangabandhu (roughly: International Friendship) Bridge</a> over the Jamuna River, past towns and food stalls, rickshaws, motor taxis, and row after row of tire stores on either side of the bridge, next to the bus depots. How quickly out there had become in here. From which vantage did I really mean to be looking in or out was still something else I stole from James Merrill, and probably also Robert Frost, at least until the assistant director slapped me on the arm, smiled, and said, "Hey, now isn't this <i>wild</i>! I mean, does Santana know how to rock or <i>what</i>?!"<br />
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My nieces recommended Cait and I watch <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981677/">"Pitch Perfect"</a> last night. About five minutes in, Cait looked over at me and said, "I love absolutely everything about this movie!" I liked it, too, but I also kept thinking, "Wait, so <i>that's</i> a thing now?" Meaning, A Capella is a thing now? Mash-up mixes are a thing now? Vomit jokes are a thing now? How exceptionally hard everyone seemed to be working in the movie to have a good time; in that cinematic/montage-y, harmless and friendly, making-an-old-thing-new way, the ideals of friendship and shared purpose cleared all obstacles. Had I ever enjoyed anything in college so un-ironically as the students of Barden University enjoyed harmonizing? Could anything be enjoyed without such complication anywhere except onscreen? Whither now, slacker ethos? Though I'm sure someone asked the same things about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085549/">Flashdance</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087277/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Footloose</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087277/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">House Party</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/">Armageddon</a>.<br />
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I am ambivalent about the asynchronous tendencies of our contemporary age. They seem derivative, and more than a little resigned, where I might hope we would be, well, hopeful and innovative, perhaps even a little uncertain. Or, at least, a little less aggregated and codified. I think the dissension here is from broad nostalgia: not feeling constantly somewhere and someplace else, however comforting the impulse. When I first came back to the United States from Bangladesh, the Blockbuster video store was stacked wall to wall with copies of the movie, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240515/">Freddy Got Fingered</a>. I enjoyed my ironic disdain: <i>So this is what I had missed in two years away.</i> Once, briefly, <a href="http://tomgreen.com/">Tom Green</a> was a very big thing. According to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240515/">IMDB</a>, Freddy is an unemployed cartoonist who moves back in with his parents, then accuses them of sexual abuse when they insist he gets a job. Probably I'll get this wrong, but let me guess that Freddy recants, gets the girl, moves out of the house, and writes a bestseller graphic novel about the whole experience.<br />
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A little more than a month ago, I found out that my memoir, <i>Young Widower</i>, won <a href="http://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2012/12/17/john-w-evans-wins-river-teeth-book-prize">the River Teeth Book Prize</a> and will be published in 2014 by <a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/catalog/CategoryInfo.aspx?cid=152">the University of Nebraska Press</a>. It's exciting news. I'm looking forward to sharing the book and seeing it in print. I'm not really sure what having a book published will be like. I've done my best to watch the people around me doing it. One of the great and humbling things about working where I do is seeing so many talented writers have success. It's hard, I guess, to get a sense of scale about expectations in a bull market. More to the point, it's sort of mind-boggling to approach what seems like the first significant marker of a writing life. Everything that was one hypothetical is becoming both linear and tangible; I will hold the book in my hands, on or around its publication date, when people will read it, at which point it will sit on bookshelves and library racks with other books. Then, it's what to write next, and how. I always imagined my first book would be a collection of poems. I never imagined I would have the occasion to write the memoir I did. The shape of my own writing life has not changed very much in the last fifteen or so years, even as the life that sustains it seems distinct, even fragmented away from any sense of a sequence. But those lives sustain each other, which I suppose is a kind of fortune; certainly, at times like this, an occasion for gratitude.<br />
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<br />John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-69512863926188194282012-12-18T02:35:00.002-05:002012-12-18T02:35:35.562-05:00Empathy, Not Outrage<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the wake of the Newtown murders, I need to believe my sons will be safe at school. This is the minimum of what I expect from my free society. I have that expectation because my sons cannot yet protect themselves in the public spaces where they learn how to understand and love their neighbor. They need those spaces to complement the worldview we try to instill in them, to learn diversity but also to test our indoctrinations against the world they will one day inherit. I expect my boys to attend public school in the United States, that great egalitarian social institution where they will learn something about how to become neighbors, friends, colleagues, confidantes, and enemies. At home, with my wife and our families, we will teach them how to become adults and men.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I understand that a school is a place where magnificent violence can happen between students, or between a teacher and a student, even habitually and secretively, over a long period of time, between predators and victims, bullies and the bullied. I taught for three years in a public elementary school in Chicago, where students were subjected to periodic body searches and, every now and again, they walked into school through metal detectors. The point was to contain the potential for violence between students because they were not yet mature enough to always make good choices about feelings, actions, and consequences. At that school, we had no contingency plan for a grown man who might walk into the school wearing combat gear, firing an assault rifle and handguns into roomfuls of children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I fear the pattern I see emerging in our society to become a new norm: random and sporadic violence without consequence or response. A man at a university kills his peers. A man at a theater murders strangers. A man at a rally shoots a Congresswoman in the head. These are acts of terror committed by someone else’s boys.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I cannot say what happens in someone else’s head when he shoots a stranger. But the fact that it keeps happening, and with increasing frequency, means that something we do not approve of and cannot contain thrives. It is equal parts arrogant and pointless to speculate beyond that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I can help to control how these circumstances are mended. And here, I think, is a point of consensus. A society agrees to grant, and then recognize the rights of its members, who suffer various penalties when they choose, individually or collectively, to deny those rights to each other. No right can be greater than our right to nurture, protect, and socialize our children. Schools must be safe public spaces for children to negotiate their relationships with the world, each other, and adults. We have an obligation as a society to make and keep those spaces safe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Being an adult means sometimes feeling unsafe and vulnerable: to disease, to other people, to the natural world, to society. As a society, we contain that fear. Our children should not be forced to face their inherent vulnerability before they are mature enough to understand it and make choices for or against it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a parenting book I admire, I am encouraged to help my sons express their terrifying and extreme emotions in reasonable terms by using “you wish” phrases. It sounds like you wish you could keep playing with that toy rather than share it with your friend. The most basic acknowledgment of anyone’s wish is an expression of empathy, and empathy diffuses anger, hatred, fear, and suffering.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a time that requires extreme empathy. Whatever conversation begins or continues, let’s work to improve it. Whomever the vested interests and constituents, our talking to each other must not devolve into minor arguments about policy, health, lobbies, and tactics. Our circumstances are not beyond repair. Not yet, at least. We require some measure of restitution. Let’s start instead by saying, over and over, what we wish for each other, then listen to each other and hear whatever rings true in our hearts. I wish that our society will again become one in which our children are safe in public, in our schools and classrooms, from the particular violence of unreasonable adults. I wish that this tragedy will exist in words we only say once.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2211448168223721077.post-87859564776593411372012-11-12T19:28:00.001-05:002012-11-12T19:49:51.646-05:00Nixonian<div>
All the <a href="http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/55244691-90/election-gop-needs-party.html.csp">post-election hand-wringing about the uncertain future of the GOP</a> seems, to me, a tad premature, just as, right up until he won the thing, the rumors of Obama's demise were clearly exaggerated. <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html">According to pretty much every wonk and pollster except Nate Silver</a>, I woke up Tuesday morning to a nation dominated by rich and powerful white rural populist conservatives who looked finally to sway the electorate against Obama. I went to bed Tuesday night an important part of <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/11/07/3905741/obama-win-signals-new-democratic.html">a new and powerful governing coalition dominated by women, minorities, and academic elites</a>, that also, <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/the-real-real-america/">with the curve of history and progress</a>, looks <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/forward/">forward</a>. The party of the large tent is apparently become the party of <a href="http://news.sky.com/story/1008166/republican-rape-remark-candidates-defeated">sexists, bigots, homophobes, and prudes</a>, while my <a href="http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/odumbo-the-great-spendocrat-the-epa-and-how-anti-american-and-anti-farming-this-regime-is-workin/question-2101175/">Spendocrats</a> are newly the party of <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109818/obama-wins-four-more-years-mandate-agenda-validation-obamacare">pragmatic solutions to immigration solutions, deficit reduction, and the gradual expansion of human rights to all citizens</a>. The new narrative says Obama is not Carter, Obamacare is generous and fixed, the Tea Party is feckless fringe, Boehner-Obama is the new <a href="http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/frenemies-a-love-story/">Reagan-O'Neill</a>. Whereas 2008 seemed to have so many implications for progress and reform, they say, it was really <i>this </i>election that ratified that promise and made it, at least in legislative terms, pretty longstanding. <a href="http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/palin-tea-party.jpg">The age of children has ended</a>. <a href="http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/06/18/Obama_Boehner_golf_t116926283_620x350.jpg">The era of adults</a> can finally begin. </div>
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I have not been able to shake the sense of a missed opportunity during this election. In the end, I know I voted as much against one candidate as for another. <i>Something </i>about Mitt Romney bugged me--his wealth and unrelenting sense of entitlement pitched as a kind of work ethic--until it terrified me to imagine him as commander-in-chief. Saturday Night Live got this right when, asked why he was running at all if he was willing to say anything to anyone, the caricature of Romney quickly replied, "I have no idea." So, Romney was a lousy candidate. But I also felt very strong feelings about very prescribed and impersonal candidacies. Which meant either I had a very keen sense of Romney, or I bought into a caricature because it was so well-drawn. Put in slightly different terms, <a href="http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/07/president-obama-first-lady-michelle-obama.jpg">to see a Tweeted photograph of Barack Obama hugging Michelle Obama</a> just after his reelection, and to assign authenticity and warmth, cheering on the palpable relief both seem to feel after winning, is to believe on some level I am a proxy to a personal moment. But I know the moment is not personal. It cannot be. I am looking at a campaign photograph.</div>
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To paraphrase Barack Obama, who paraphrased Dick Cheney four years before that, elections have consequences. A republic elects its representation. A democracy yields to consensus. I voted for Obama because I thought TARP worked, the economy was turning around, student loans were cheaper and expanded to more recipients, the auto bailout seemed like a savvy move in retrospect, Obamacare made a bunch of reforms I agreed with, troops were withdrawn from Iraq and scheduled for same in Afghanistan, CAFE standards were doubled in the reasonably near term, and Obama appointed two women to the Supreme Court including the Court's first Hispanic. I see near-term strides for marriage equality, which I support. </div>
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More than that, I believe national elections are directional. Consider that nine years ago, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/world/rose-garden-same-sex-marriage-bush-backs-bid-block-gays-marrying.html">President Bush called a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce that a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman</a> was a key part of his re-election campaign, and eventually, his party's platform:</div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/04gay.html?_r=0">The GOP ran same-sex marriage bans as state amendments in 11 states.</a> However the issue boosted conservative turnout, only Oregon and Michigan voted to approve the bans with less than 60% of their electorate's support. Voters across the spectrum, including Democrats and liberals, approved those bans. Even four years ago, Proposition Eight was a new California state law. However profitable its advocacy--and I do think there is a significant fundraising advantage to being progressive on the issue--it is shocking to me that anyone would oppose the equal right to marry. And here is what seems to me the missed opportunity I mentioned earlier. Social issues, so now the advantage of the Democrats, yielded in this election to economic and political ones. I would like a candidate to appeal well in excess of fear to my moral sense. Obama had the advantage here, but he did not push it outright. And I'm not sure that doing so would have been expedient--would not have backfired and painted him as a caricature of "liberal" to alienate independents--which says that, however certain I am of the long-term liberal trend on social issues, we might be as precariously balanced, left to right, as ever before.</div>
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In a sense, we've been here <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Will-t.html?pagewanted=all">before</a>. An aloof, unlikeable, and ideologically uncentered Republican is trumped by a <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama">singularly gifted, if vain President</a> who runs a flawless campaign. We cheer his aggressiveness for standing up finally to the rich and crafty right. In decisively losing an election he might have won, the New York Times declares the GOP candidate has "ruined his party for a long time to come." The soul-searching, for all, must now begin: how and why the GOP misunderstood the electorate so profoundly, and also, what to do with all these old white men. For his part, the President assures us these are hopeful times of long-needed reform. If Obama does not quite suggest they are "the most hopeful times since Christ was born," nevertheless substantial issues seem finally about to be solved with great liberal solutions embraced by a vast majority of Americans, and checked by a new coalition of voters who look to vote blue for generations to come. Sure, the analogy might go, there are vexing foreign policy concerns, born of a deeply flawed approach to fighting insurgents in a faraway place, but the President's severe tendency to moral judgment, coupled with his street-dog political style, means he must know something we don't know. Surely, we think, the quality of his long-term rationale exceeds that of his obvious, short-term mistakes. </div>
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We forget 1964 was both the cusp of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society">Great Society</a> and that moment just before those programs were underfunded, then mostly hollowed out, as the nation readied itself to vote, in another landslide, for Nixon. I admire Nixon, and after him Bush and W. Bush, for what I hope I will one day admire in Romney. How each is rehabilitated, after the fact of politics, and proves helpful to the people who succeed him. I think only Clinton could so well understand Nixon to eulogize him so eloquently, just as only Clinton could rehabilitate him in his time to make him seem both relevant and useful to the electorate. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/23/obituaries/37th-president-richard-nixon-81-dies-master-politics-undone-watergate.html">Nixon's legacy</a> is now the EPA, reaching out to China, and finding bipartisan solutions toward American prosperity. And, as Clinton notes, writing, memoirs and books, but especially letters to his successors. Apparently, no one advised Clinton on Russia like Nixon. Which is to say that history doesn't work so well in the microwave. Its instant narratives turn out overcooked and undernourishing. We are moving forward, yes. Where else should we go?</div>
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John W. Evanshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05559990935099298745noreply@blogger.com0