How To Like It

That's the Declaration of Independence, Champ

2009-11-05T20:51:00.002-05:00

Happy Birthday, Katie

2009-10-27T12:56:00.003-04:00

Today would have been Katie's 33rd birthday.

Katie was a seeker. In the truest sense of word, she explored the limits of her own world and of the world around her. One form that this seeking took was a fascination, especially in the last year of her life, with Buddhism and spirituality. She was especially taken with the monomyth writings of Joseph Campbell, who begins his wonderful Power Of Myth video series of interviews with PBS's Bill Moyers, with the quote below. I think it sums up how many of us feel about Katie, as well as the path before us:

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

Here's the first part of the first installment of that video:

Watch Joseph Campbell - Power of Myth in Faith & Spirituality | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Post about "Katie Ghazals" at the Hayden's Ferry Review blog

2009-10-20T13:00:00.004-04:00

Several pieces from "Katie Ghazals" appear in the forthcoming issue of Hayden's Ferry Review.

In advance of their appearance, I wrote an essay about the creative process of writing through and about grief. That essay went up today at HFR's blog.

If you get a chance, please check it out!

Lake County News-Sun Article about Katie and KMF

2009-10-13T13:27:00.002-04:00

So wonderful to see the press taking an interest in KMF, Katie's life and work, and the upcoming Fun Run & Walk. You can read Lake County New-Sun reporter Beth Kramer's excellent story about all three here.

Antioch, IL H.S. Newspaper Article About Katie

2009-10-04T16:52:00.001-04:00

Katie's high school newspaper, The Antioch Tom Tom, has published an article about her life, KMF, and the upcoming fun run race. While some of the details are inaccurate, in general this is a lovely article.

Wedding Photos!

2009-08-23T20:08:00.000-04:00

Wedding Photos

Wedding Photos #2

New Poem

2009-08-20T00:43:00.006-04:00

I posted last year the eulogy I wrote for my grandma, Louise Evans. It says many of the good things I'm thinking about today. This year, I thought I'd write her a poem.

Sawbuck

No clothesline held my weight when I was small.
I learned to swing from a metal T
we bent slightly the afternoon I couldn’t do pull-ups.

It takes nine long steps to cross the backyard
and stay just wide of wet snouts poking through the fence
next door. Always,

someone I love has understood better how to care
for the living things around me. In the kitchen, frozen bacon fat

loosens the skin of salted onions and fresh beans.
A fryer chicken defrosts in the sink.
A freezer full of meat and butter seals itself against the summer heat

of another city, a different state,
small and improbable as a hummingbird boring the wood
of a cellar I’ll never again open from within.

Why I Support Something That Doesn't Yet Exist, or, Me And Obamacare

2009-08-17T16:18:00.007-04:00

I have been surprised by the crude language and lies being put forth to attack "Obamacare," the as-yet unnamed and undefined amalgam of no less than five separate bills in the House and Senate that may or may not ultimately provide universal health coverage to most Americans, depending on what it looks like when it comes out of committee and gets voted on, with or without various amendments that may further water it down, if it gets voted on before next year's mid-term elections.

Whatever is currently happening in American politics, America itself is not poised on the precipice of great reform. Health care in America is not going to substantially change any time soon. But you wouldn't know that from watching television:

or reading various newspaper accounts of Obama's "dishonest," "judgment"-ridden program menacing America with roving "death panels" managing euthanistic, abortion-happy "death lists."

Excepting the New York Times' excellent work uncovering the outrageous and opportunistic roots of said "death panels," I've felt frustrated with the national reaction to the wild spectrum of anti-Obama rhetoric informing this "debate."

First, President Obama has not written any bill. His office supports no individual plan. Instead, Obama has set out a series of broad principles that he'd like to see Congress enact, however it best sees fit.

As has been widely reported, Obama learned a lesson from watching President Clinton fail to pass universal health care, and has instead requested that Congress create, debate, revise, and vote on its own variety of bills. Various bills still exist in various stages throughout Congress; there has been no formal vote on one bill in both houses of Congress. When the various current proposals eventually reach the intra-Congress committee, there will be further debate, revision, creation, and voting, after which one (or more) bill(s) will reach both floors of Congress, where there will be further debate and, finally, a vote.

In other words, Congress is doing its job as the legislative branch of our government. It is writing bills.

And Obama is sitting back, offering advice, working behind the scenes. He will eventually either sign or veto whatever bill does reach him, if one does at all.

Presidents and their staffs no doubt work the backroom scene, cajoling and glad-handing with the intention of influencing the various legislative acts. So do lobbyists. There are currently 6 health-care-specific lobbyists for every 1 member of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Think about that for a second: 6 to 1. For each state, that's one basketball team per Senate pair. For New York, that's an entire NBA conference of lobbyists working House members.

Americans should be concerned that so much corporate lobbying influence will dilute the final bills that come out of the Congress.

Instead, it seems, somehow, the outrage is directed at the Congressional members who, it is often implied, hate freedom and conspire in secret to somehow take away government health care coverage from some by extending it to all Americans:

or who conspire to empower Nazis:

or who look to hurt the elderly while giving young girls free abortions:

or who look to deny health care to Americans who need it:

or who want to kill any and all of the above:

To whom is this misinformation and fearmongering helpful? How does it add constructively to the important national debate that we should be having?

I should practice what I preach, right? Okay, here goes:

I'm 32 years old. I was born with bicuspid aortic stenosis. That means that my aortic valve doesn't work properly. Instead of three healthy valve flaps, it has two imperfect ones. Over time, that valve continues to narrow and work less well. As it does so, the aorta compensates by swelling in size. As the valve narrows and the aorta swells, my heart will work less well. Eventually, I'll have to have open heart surgery, at least once in my life (depending on the longevity of the artificial valve they put in to replace the original, and the little sleeve of fabric they use to reinforce my aorta).

Since birth, I have seen a cardiologist at least annually, often semi-annually. Last week, I visited my cardiologist, Dr. Hunt, a rock star Stanford Cardiology doctor who's one of the best in her field. I feel incredibly lucky to have Dr. Hunt currently overseeing my care. I get to see Dr. Hunt because I work at Stanford and I have HMO health insurance through Stanford, for which I pay about $300/month. I bring my records since childhood. She orders some tests, interprets them, and we talk about my long-term prognosis (so far, so good). My condition requires biannual check-ups with expensive tests that include echocardiograms and stress test echos. In the past, with health care that required me to pay 10% of my visits, the bill ran $800-$1,400 as my portion per visit. Expensive stuff.

I cannot get individual health care in America. Likewise, I can't get individual life insurance. I don't quality for either, because I have a pre-existing condition. That I was born with. I didn't develop it and I can't control its progression. All the same, call Blue Cross, Anthem, Kaiser, et al, ask for a health insurance policy and then say, "oh by the way, I have congenital aortic stenosis." No dice.

I'm well-educated and I'm good at finding jobs with group health coverage. When I needed to take some personal time two years ago, I was able to pay for COBRA coverage to extend the time until I got back on my feet.

The things that bugs me, personally, is that I can't imagine what someone in my situation, who doesn't work at Stanford, and/or who doesn't have health care coverage, and/or who has poor coverage, would do. Probably get really sick and then either die or cost a city hospital millions in lost expenses to do dangerous, end-of-life surgery from which s/he may not recover. That someone can be born in America with a condition that requires so much attention, and not be able to get it because s/he can't afford it, strikes me as unfair and short-sighted.

Regular check-ups are expensive, time-intensive, and require meticulous follow-up. Open-heart surgery is very complicated and expensive. It requires a lot of recovery time and follow-up, as well as medications and regular check-ups to make sure everything is working okay, and continues to work okay. And, ideally, you want someone really good at heart surgery to, you know, cut open your chest and tinker with your heart.

I believe in the potential of my country to solve problems, from work programs to social security to veterans' benefits to institutional care for the long-term unwell. Health care costs are a short-term problem, and in the long-term so is the staggering absence of a health care safety net for those who need it most. Having many uninsured Americans who do not treat small problems leads to many uninsured Americans who must treat big problems. It's like the story of the guy who busts his arm, doesn't get it fixed, eats lots of Advil, damages his liver, and ends up in the hospital looking for a donor, a surgeon, a nutritionist, and a welfare officer. All on the government dime. Small problems, left untreated, get big.

Let's have a real debate about real issues. I'm a big Obama fan, and I trust my president to make good decisions as the chief executive. At the same time, I appreciate and understand that others may not. So, let's hash out the issues, rather than score cheap political points:

And let's not get mired down in the muck of hypothetically intellectualizing the real issues we face today, so much so that we grind to a halt and get nothing done. In the words of a great American president, FDR, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

David Axelrod Counters the Lies and Rumors About Obama's Much-Needed Healthcare Reform

2009-08-13T13:48:00.001-04:00

The following is from an email from White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod:

Dear Friend,

This is probably one of the longest emails I've ever sent, but it could be the most important.

Across the country we are seeing vigorous debate about health insurance reform. Unfortunately, some of the old tactics we know so well are back -- even the viral emails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies and distortions.

As President Obama said at the town hall in New Hampshire, "where we do disagree, let's disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that's actually been proposed."

So let's start a chain email of our own. At the end of my email, you'll find a lot of information about health insurance reform, distilled into 8 ways reform provides security and stability to those with or without coverage, 8 common myths about reform and 8 reasons we need health insurance reform now.

Right now, someone you know probably has a question about reform that could be answered by what's below. So what are you waiting for? Forward this email.

Thanks,
David

David Axelrod
Senior Adviser to the President

P.S. We launched whitehouse.gov/realitycheck this week to knock down the rumors and lies that are floating around the internet. You can find the information below, and much more, there. For example, we've just added a video of Nancy-Ann DeParle from our Health Reform Office tackling a viral email head on. Check it out:

8 ways reform provides security and stability to those with or without coverage

1.Ends Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions: Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

2.Ends Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays: Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

3.Ends Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care: Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

4.Ends Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill: Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

5.Ends Gender Discrimination: Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

6.Ends Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage: Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

7.Extends Coverage for Young Adults: Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.
Guarantees Insurance Renewal: Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won't be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

Learn more and get details: whitehouse.gov/health-insurance-consumer-protections

8 common myths about health insurance reform

1.Reform will stop "rationing" - not increase it: It's a myth that reform will mean a "government takeover" of health care or lead to "rationing." To the contrary, reform will forbid many forms of rationing that are currently being used by insurance companies.

2.We can't afford reform: It's the status quo we can't afford. It's a myth that reform will bust the budget. To the contrary, the President has identified ways to pay for the vast majority of the up-front costs by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse within existing government health programs; ending big subsidies to insurance companies; and increasing efficiency with such steps as coordinating care and streamlining paperwork. In the long term, reform can help bring down costs that will otherwise lead to a fiscal crisis.

3.Reform would encourage "euthanasia": It does not. It's a malicious myth that reform would encourage or even require euthanasia for seniors. For seniors who want to consult with their family and physicians about end-of life decisions, reform will help to cover these voluntary, private consultations for those who want help with these personal and difficult family decisions.

4.Vets' health care is safe and sound: It's a myth that health insurance reform will affect veterans' access to the care they get now. To the contrary, the President's budget significantly expands coverage under the VA, extending care to 500,000 more veterans who were previously excluded. The VA Healthcare system will continue to be available for all eligible veterans.

5.Reform will benefit small business - not burden it: It's a myth that health insurance reform will hurt small businesses. To the contrary, reform will ease the burdens on small businesses, provide tax credits to help them pay for employee coverage and help level the playing field with big firms who pay much less to cover their employees on average.

6.Your Medicare is safe, and stronger with reform: It's myth that Health Insurance Reform would be financed by cutting Medicare benefits. To the contrary, reform will improve the long-term financial health of Medicare, ensure better coordination, eliminate waste and unnecessary subsidies to insurance companies, and help to close the Medicare "doughnut" hole to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors.

7.You can keep your own insurance: It's myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors. To the contrary, reform will expand your choices, not eliminate them.

8.No, government will not do anything with your bank account: It is an absurd myth that government will be in charge of your bank accounts. Health insurance reform will simplify administration, making it easier and more convenient for you to pay bills in a method that you choose. Just like paying a phone bill or a utility bill, you can pay by traditional check, or by a direct electronic payment. And forms will be standardized so they will be easier to understand. The choice is up to you - and the same rules of privacy will apply as they do for all other electronic payments that people make.

Learn more and get details:
whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/faq
whitehouse.gov/realitycheck

8 Reasons We Need Health Insurance Reform Now

1.Coverage Denied to Millions: A recent national survey estimated that 12.6 million non-elderly adults - 36 percent of those who tried to purchase health insurance directly from an insurance company in the individual insurance market - were in fact discriminated against because of a pre-existing condition in the previous three years or dropped from coverage when they became seriously ill. Learn more:
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/denied_coverage/index.html

2.Less Care for More Costs: With each passing year, Americans are paying more for health care coverage. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have nearly doubled since 2000, a rate three times faster than wages. In 2008, the average premium for a family plan purchased through an employer was $12,680, nearly the annual earnings of a full-time minimum wage job. Americans pay more than ever for health insurance, but get less coverage. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/hiddencosts/index.html

3.Roadblocks to Care for Women: Women's reproductive health requires more regular contact with health care providers, including yearly pap smears, mammograms, and obstetric care. Women are also more likely to report fair or poor health than men (9.5% versus 9.0%). While rates of chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure are similar to men, women are twice as likely to suffer from headaches and are more likely to experience joint, back or neck pain. These chronic conditions often require regular and frequent treatment and follow-up care. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/women/index.html

4.Hard Times in the Heartland: Throughout rural America, there are nearly 50 million people who face challenges in accessing health care. The past several decades have consistently shown higher rates of poverty, mortality, uninsurance, and limited access to a primary health care provider in rural areas. With the recent economic downturn, there is potential for an increase in many of the health disparities and access concerns that are already elevated in rural communities. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/hardtimes

5.Small Businesses Struggle to Provide Health Coverage: Nearly one-third of the uninsured - 13 million people - are employees of firms with less than 100 workers. From 2000 to 2007, the proportion of non-elderly Americans covered by employer-based health insurance fell from 66% to 61%. Much of this decline stems from small business. The percentage of small businesses offering coverage dropped from 68% to 59%, while large firms held stable at 99%. About a third of such workers in firms with fewer than 50 employees obtain insurance through a spouse. Learn more:
http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/helpbottomline

6.The Tragedies are Personal: Half of all personal bankruptcies are at least partly the result of medical expenses. The typical elderly couple may have to save nearly $300,000 to pay for health costs not covered by Medicare alone. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/inaction

7.Diminishing Access to Care: From 2000 to 2007, the proportion of non-elderly Americans covered by employer-based health insurance fell from 66% to 61%. An estimated 87 million people - one in every three Americans under the age of 65 - were uninsured at some point in 2007 and 2008. More than 80% of the uninsured are in working families. Learn more: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/inaction/diminishing/index.html

8.The Trends are Troubling: Without reform, health care costs will continue to skyrocket unabated, putting unbearable strain on families, businesses, and state and federal government budgets. Perhaps the most visible sign of the need for health care reform is the 46 million Americans currently without health insurance - projections suggest that this number will rise to about 72 million in 2040 in the absence of reform.

Learn more: www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/CEA_Health_Care_Report.pdf

Lucy

2009-08-04T16:56:00.006-04:00

In the fall of 2002, Katie called me from work to say that a co-worker was looking to give away two kittens and did I want her to bring one home? We had been talking pets for a few months and while my loyalties at the time leaned dog, the practicality and self-sufficiency of cats made them a better choice for our urban Chicago Uptown digs. Actually, Katie suggested we get the apartment ready and she bring home a kitten two days later but I was undeterred: bring both home at the end of your workday (on the orange line "El," from the end of the line all the way north to red-line Montrose) and I'll make sure they come home to a cat-ready apartment! I took the bus to Petco and bought cat litter, two litter boxes, cat food, cat climbing toys, cat treats, cat nip, food and water dishes, a play toy that consisted of a long wand with a furry thing at the end, and little furry round things filled with catnip. I took a cab home.

Katie arrived home with tiny kittens in a big white pillow case. They were no bigger than the palms of our hands (here's a 2002 photo of our holding the kitties, upon their arrival). One was wiry, aggressive, and loud. Assuming she was a boy, we named her "Chet" after Chet Atkins, one of our favorite country-western guys. The other was quiet, reserved, larger, and covered in incredibly soft white fur. We named her "Lucy" in honor of Lucinda Williams, whose Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was a staple of our CD playlist that summer.

Chet and Lucy were a big part of our lives for the next five years. They moved with us from Chicago to Miami, and on to Romania. We went through the many stages of animal care, from delousing to fixing to litter box location, to some play (they were, after all, cats) to brushing to let-us-be-cats-and-you-know-more-or-less-leave-us-alone. Truth be told, they were easy kittens. Lucy, in particular, had a kind of Ben "Big Baby" Davis quality: big and athletic, she could clear an easy four feet leaping into the air after said dangly cat toy. She took the lead batting at and hiding catnip-filled mice. Lucy was a quiet alpha cat who suffered no grief from Chet. Every few weeks Chet would test, unsuccessfully, the natural order, trying to claim Lucy's favorite spot in Chicago on top of the computer monitor, under the desk lamp; in front of the big sliding glass door in Miami; on top of the yellow leather chair in Romania. Lucy didn't like to be picked up or pet all that much, and unlike Chet she never let anyone put her on her back. But she would sidle up to the bed and sleep near my head, or stretch out under the lamp while I wrote in Indy, resting the pads of her feet against my arm. Lucy was affectionate on her own terms, which I always respected. The last few months, she got in the habit of waking us up in the mornings to go turn on the tub faucet, so that she could drink from it (a habit that followed her to every apartment where she lived). Then, she would return to the bed and climb up on top of my chest and sit there, purring, while I slept.

I wonder, now, if her climbing up on my chest was comforting to her because she had internal pain. Or, worse, if she was doing her best to communicate, in "cat", to us that something was wrong. However it developed, Lucy died of liver failure last Sunday. Cait and I came home to find her nearly-catatonic, unwilling to move too much, and the wonderful, sympathetic Dr. Wong at San Francisco Veterinary Specialists confirmed confirmed our worst fears. Dr. Wong was kind to give us as much time as we wanted to say goodbye; I've said this a few times in emails to friends and family, but it surprised me how much I had to say to Lucy, how much I wanted to communicate as best, and probably ineffectively, as I could. Cait and I cried a bunch. The vet let me hold Lucy as she died, which meant a lot to me.

For me, pet eulogies have always ranked up there with paeans to old cars and invocations of fertility deities at dinnertime. Truth is, Lucy was one of my best friends. I really miss her. I'm shocked that she's not sleeping on the red chair in the next room, or wandering in to mew and get a quick chin scratch. Lucy lived with me in five cities, on two continents, for seven years. In that time, she was a great comfort in all sorts of situations. Just knowing she was there, and would be there, gave a kind of continuity to a life that featured some unexpected transitions. More than that, I liked Lucy. She was easygoing, friendly, independent. She made cute noises when she yawned. Most of the time, she looked at me with this kind of "Really, what?" look on her face. If a stranger came over, or if there was a storm, she'd hide under the bed or in Cait's closet, in a shoebox. Unlike Chet, she didn't give Cait a hard time when she moved in and she made immediate friends with Cait's sister, Jilly.

I've been listening to Death Cab for Cutie's "Scientist Studies" a lot these last two days. Especially, the first two lines get me: "What ghosts exist behind these attic walls? There's got to be a simpler explanation." Strangely, Chet seems generally unfazed by Lucy's absence, though I think in the long haul, it's going to be a transition for her. So, keep both of my kitties in your thoughts. And, here's a poor recording of what otherwise sounds like a great live version of the song (drunken setting aside):

Check Out My New Blog!

2009-07-30T17:42:00.004-04:00

If you're interested, I've started writing another, different kind of blog for a new news website, The Faster Times.

In theory, I use professional wrestling as a lens to consider contemporary political and cultural issues. Of course, as Homer Simpson once noted, in theory, Communism works--in theory--but if you're interested all the same, check it out:

http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/

And, of course, check back here for new How To Like It posts!

June 23rd

2009-06-23T15:53:00.004-04:00

Today is the second anniversary of Katie's death, the day when many people lost the central person in their lives. Today is a day for grieving the absence of a beautiful and unique person who inspired friends, family, and colleagues to love themselves, to believe in themselves, to do good work in the world, and to not take life too seriously. Katie was a fair and kind person, and her certainty about the world around her made her a natural leader wherever she went. After her death, so many referred to her as a best friend and as a mentor. Katie also had as clear a sense of the fragility of living as anyone I have ever met. In regular back-and-forth conversations about life, death, and the afterlife, she spoke in certain terms about life offering no guarantees and certainties, how this lack of certainty made life beautiful to her. The scope of Katie's impact in the world, and then of her violent death, alternately mended and tore apart great swaths of our lives' fabric. I can think of, first, no greater tribute, nor, second, of something with which it is so difficult to make peace.

For me, today is also the day that I watched Katie die, and that I was unable to stop her from dying. When I remember publicly June 23rd, 2007, I remember a beautiful day, a ridiculously difficult hike, a magical mountaintop hostel that sold Cokes, and then a short hike across the ridge back from dinner under a beautiful and clear sky. When I remember the day privately, I remember a great deal more. I do not mean to bear the martyr's sack-cloth and walk about the public square wailing and gnashing my teeth, but Katie's death was violent and senseless, and this, still, makes me feel great anger and despair about the indiscriminate potential of the natural world.

Robert Kennedy often spoke of the "inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the suffering of our fellows." Katie liked to joke that she joined the Peace Corps because she got stuck under a mall speaker playing, on repeat, John Lennon's "Happy XMas (War Is Over)". And yet, from her early life-guarding and camp counseling, to the Peace Corps, to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, to FIU's Public Health school, to her AIDS/HIV and family violence work for IOCC in Romania, Katie consistently chose to work with people in need. It is a part of Katie that we work to keep alive in the world, internationally and locally, through The Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF).

There is an imperfection to the world that makes it hard to live in, from our knowing that whatever joins us does not always keep us together, to our understanding that gestures which become repetitive struggle to feel fresh and vivid. Katie was a real person, and I do my best to remember her as living flesh and blood, full of humanity. I am fortunate to know that she is a spirit in my life, and to believe that her love is a guiding presence in my life, guarding and keeping me, accountable to no human comprehension, only that other imperfect idea that frustrates me so, faith.

Katie would be uncomfortable with so much tribute. I think she would resent that anyone's focus be so backward-looking. Another way to say this is that it's easiest for me to think of Katie, most days, saying about this blog and my writing about our life together, "If you have to do it, do it, just don't think you're doing it for me." If I harden the delivery (and I don't think I do), I've got the message just about right. Katie lived a sometimes difficult life without expectation of restitution or coming glory. She lived, very well, in the present. So it makes sense that, to honor Katie, we live without making her or her death a crutch, that we at least intend to live a beautiful and rich life, and that we be grateful for or make peace with, the life we lead.

I'll close with one of the songs that Katie loved, which reminds me of her, Susan Werner's "Barbed-Wire Boys."

Chapter 5 (vii-ix) and Chapter 6 (i-vii)

2009-06-12T20:23:00.002-04:00

If our construction of the afterlife is structured by our experience of the mortal world, then we, as readers, can forgive Elliott his certainty that heaven bears out certain "class distinctions" of serpahim, cherubim, archangels, and angels. Picking up on Marcus's comment, to see Larry's generous substitution of invitations as generating sympathy for, and pathos towards, Elliott, I'll add that Elliott has a consistent worldview of how things are, and should be, and so is pretty threatened when that worldview doesn't play out. Heaven may prove a mixed bag, indeed, so here's hoping the crossing over, at least, goes smoothly.

I feel a good deal of ambivalence, however about this passage from 5.9:

"An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already."

I like that Maugham suggests the reader might skip Chapter 6, "since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry," and how he immediately adds, "...except for this conversation, I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book."

Isabel and Gray inherit most of Elliot's fortune, and in doing so, seal off again the hermetic seal that is their world. Their daughters are attractive and curious, and so seem set upon Isabel's path, and it is there that Maugham loses interest in their story for the chapter. Instead, by chance, he meets Larry, they have dinner, and over the course of an evening, Larry fills in the backstory and explains, with great reference, the philosophy he's been undertaking. Seduced by Larry's openness and charm, Maugham reveals much of his own thinking about the world, religion, and cultures; for a character we've understood mostly through tone, to this point, it's a welcome opening up.

I don't know the best way to parse this part of the novel, except to point out passages that I particularly like. So, here goes:

"I'd known that men had been killed by the hundred thousand, but I hadn't seen them killed. It didn't mean very much to me. Then I saw a dead man with my own eyes. The sight filled me with shame...because that boy, he was only three or four years older than me, who'd had such energy and daring, who a moment before had had so much vitality, who'd been so good, was now just mangled flesh that looked as if it had never been alive." (Larry, explaining his reaction to the death of Patsy)

"'Our wise old Church,' he said then, 'has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you." (Father Ensheim, appealing to Larry to join his monastery, after leaving Bonn)

"'A god that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?'" (Larry, starting to discuss Hinduism with Maugham)

"'But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in their distress for comfort and encouragement.'

'It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship--myself?...The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self."

(Larry and Maugham, discussion Hinduism)

Chapter 5, i-vi (The Razor's Edge)

2009-06-05T14:41:00.008-04:00

NOTE: The following blog post references, tastefully, sexual situations that happen in the chapter. Reader, be warned! :)

Sophie arrives to Paris, engages our attention, and then disappears, all within the first six sub-sections of Chapter 5. What we later learn of her, I'll leave aside for now, but simply put, our gang of four find her in a ratty Parisian nightclub, doped up, drunk, and in the company of unsavory, swarthy men, and a few pages later she is struggling to stay clean while engaged to Larry, whom she eventually leaves a few pages after that when she falls off the wagon. So much plot unfolds throughout Chapter 5. That plot is difficult to discuss in too much detail, because so much later information in the book changes our perception of these events. For now, I'll stick to some broader observation:

1. I have read The Razor's Edge, I think, four times before this undertaking, and this is the first time I feel like I've really noticed how sexually-charged the first half of Chapter 5 is, from Sophie's exotic Paris underworld scene, where

"Men danced with podgy boys with made-up eyes; gaunt, hard-featured women danced with fat women with dyed hair; men danced with women...with a solemn intensity in which there was something horrible."

to Isabel's backseat orgasm, driving back to Paris from Chartres, while staring at Larry's tanned arm hair:

"Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made he hideous and frightening. it horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick. She was unconscious of my presence; she was conscious of nothing but the hand, lying along the rim so negligently, that filled her with frantic desire. Then as it were a spasm twitched across her face, she gave a shudder and shutting her eyes sank back into the corner of the car.

'Give me a cigarette,' she said in a voice I hardly recognized, it was so raucous.

I got one out of my case and lit it for her. She smoked it greedily."

a scene which ends with Isabel cornering Gray such that Maugham says, "I guessed that he would have a passionate bedfellow that night, but would never know to what prickings of conscience he owed her ardor." What a funny, deliberate and showy noun: prickings!

2. Sophie MacDonald emerges as a walking trainwreck of a woman, ruined emotionally at about the same time that Gray's father changes his investing strategies (enabling future ruin), Larry sets off for "the East," Isabel's mother gets diabetes, and Elliot moves to the coast. All four characters' fates are intertwined at about the same starting point.

3. Unlike Isabel and Gray's retreat to Europe, where they maintain appearances, Sophie's reaction to catastrophe is not to closedown shop and perpetuate her former life, but rather to undertake the self-cure through drug and alcohol abuse, and lots of sleeping around. So, Sophie immediately seems sympathetic and honest in a way that Isabel and Gray seem caught up in appearances, though, of course, frantically-desireful Isabel is really the one at fault beside feckless, impotent Gray--whose whole body achieves less wife-ly carnal effect than Larry's shiny wrist--who happily and fatly dawdles along for the ride.

4. Isabel resents Sophie for her violation of social mores, and finds in her an easy straw-man to bat down again and again. And yet, Isabel insists that Maugham take all of them on a "tour of the tough joints" that he knows. So, if are we to think that Isabel knows she'll find some easy humor at these bars, then does it follow that she expects Sophie to turn up?

5. The collapse of Sophie's hermetic world of husband and child, at the very least, makes us sympathetic to any and all horrible following behavior. And yet, Sophie asks for no sympathy. She's resigned to wander from coast to coast, living off her small inheritance. She doesn't turn to an Uncle Elliot to fix things. In this way, she's clearly aligned with Larry, who's also content to wander from place to place, and accept circumstances more or less as they present themselves--a distinction that, romantic rivalries aside, must drive Isabel up the wall.

6. I like this quote from Maugham, "There was a time when the black sheep of the family was sent from my country to America; now apparently he's sent from your country to Europe."

7. Interesting also that Maugham frames Sophie's husband's death in terms of heaven and hell. This makes a Christ-like reading of Larry all the more readable in their interaction. Unfortunately, his desire to rehabilitate her away from the sins of alcohol feels beside the point: the drinking isn't the problem so much as the thing that leads to the drinking which, if left unaddressed, only, perhaps fatally, exacerbates the latter. I wonder if this reflects 1940s-era thinking about alcohol abuse, or if it's a deliberate plot choice for Maugham.

8. Of course, it turns out, Sophie is a poet!

9. Pride emerges as a kind of marker for the novel in this chapter: Larry's healing powers with regards to Sophie; Isabel's certainty of her claim on Larry's virginity; Elliot's belief that his existence is vital and necessary to the world; Isabel's certainty that women who go "to pieces...can never get back." Again, Maugham uses a throwaway scene--his conversation with Isabel following Larry's engagement to Sophie--to reinforce his thinking here, and to make more explicit her Mary Magdalen-Christ dynamic with Larry:

"The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. jesus fell. The devil laughed til his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer."

10. Maugham has the final world on Isabel ("Come off it, Isabel. You gave [Larry] up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat."), but, as we know, Isabel is not a woman to lose at much of anything, at least not on her own terms.

Chapter 4 (The Razor's Edge)

2009-05-31T11:58:00.007-04:00

"I asked myself if she thought she'd answered my question. I changed the conversation."

"On the contrary I think you're an excellent mother. You see that they're well and happy. You watch over their diet and take care that their bowels act regularly."

"It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."

"'My poor friend,' I said to him. 'Whether you love me or not isn't of the smallest consequence. What is of consequence is that you have no talent.'"

"'Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I've ever met who's completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in.'"

--Ch.4, The Razor's Edge

So, Suzanne Rouvier is not who I was thinking of when I listed my five "main characters" in my first entry about this book. In fact, I was thinking of Sophie MacDonald. But first, Bosley Crowther.

In his 1946 NYTimes review of the original movie adaptation of The Razor's Edge, Crowther notes that, while the movie falls well short of capturing a "spiritual quality [that] exceeds its reach," he suspects the eventual Oscar-winning feature (Best Actress, Anne Baxter as said Sophie) will no doubt "appeal to a great many people who are sentimentally inclined to its vague philosophy." I have not yet seen that movie adaptation, but I have no doubt that Larry's migraine-erasing Alexander-the-Great coin trick must figure prominently in said quasi-theology. So, too, Larry's physical transformation, from slenderly studio to tanned, bearded, threadbare ascetic smacks, at least a little, of that weird, great Dos Equis adman, "The Most Interesting Man in the World." Excepting that, here, Larry drinks neither beer nor champagne (he drinks tea), his learning five languages, swimming regularly, graduating from an ashram, and returning to Paris having invested wisely in government bonds--and so, rich, to boot--all speaks of a man not quite of his time but nonetheless impressive. I wish, just a little, that Maugham had invested Larry with at least one quality that he might not readily share with the 1970s-era Alan Alda. Larry is an embodiment of one masculine ideal, which is more than we can say for paunchy, effeminate, emotive, feckless, poor, doting, unemployed Gray Maturin, whose crippling headaches--can't we just be done with it and call them "spells"?!--render him thoroughly eunuched. Allusions to a former temper abound, but it is only through Larry's intervention that Gray commences (after some crying) along the road to recovery.

I'm being hard on Larry. He's a captivating presence in this chapter: thoroughly decent, unassuming, and charitable. If Elliot's generosity is more and more permanent, catholic, and Catholic, Larry's is fleeting and localized. He's a sort of on-call revivalist, who expels demons 100% at a moment's notice. Larry's response to his fellow airmen's death is to find ways to be generous without requiring compensation; practicing a unique intelligence, in chapter 4, Larry is all effect. How he got to this place, we'll learn later, but the outcome is impressive to both readers and his friends. I particularly like his exchange here with Isabel regarding why he has not come directly to the Maturin apartment ("I thought if I was going to do it at all, I'd better do the thing in style"), where he arrives finally cleanly-shaved, dressed to the nines, dapper, handsome and wanting nothing. Larry is like that science fiction character who spelunks into the alien moon, seemingly lost for dead, then shows up several years later on the next planet with all the answers. Who is this guy and how did he figure it all out?

Isabel is beautiful, slender, established, and resigned to being Gray's husband. Seemingly gone is any reluctance about Larry, who she clearly still loves. I admire here Isabel's sense of persevering and trying to put a good face on things. As quoted above, if she can't be a doting, affectionate mother (a role she acknowledges Gray plays to a "t"), she can train them well, attend to their palates and bowels, and expect good manners. The moment in the opening scene of chapter 4, where Isabel eats no sweets herself but instead saves her portion for her children, speaks volumes for me about the sacrifices she has made in the intervening years from chapter 3 (as does her general slimming down). Her attention to fashion and custom seems lonely, to me, and her compromises and sacrifices, no doubt deeply felt, remain private. While she retains a good $3,000 annually to live in, she chooses to remain with her husband and family. If her decision seems conventional and framed within the situation of many women of her era, the choices she makes to be there feel human and honest. Unlike Larry, she's completely engaged in her moment (if dramatically).

How nice to close with Suzanne Rouvier who, besides our narrator, is the only person in the novel to witness Larry's war story. While Isabel wonders about Larry's potential virginity (if he didn't lose it to her, he must not have lost it to anyone), Suzanne wanders into Larry's bedroom. Unconstrained by her own expectations about polite and proper behavior, Suzanne takes even typhoid in stride. Unlike Isabel, there is no sense of self-pity or sacrifice in her muse-ish wanderings. Isabel is grateful for Larry, which sort of has me wondering, how come we get still so little of Larry's life? Doesn't the guy buy bread? Get a haircut? Even his daily life feels choreographed for effect. No one knows where he lives. Walking on the street, he dashes away. He swims so that Suzanne can admire his swimming. He makes love so that Suzanne can admire his detached passion. Some part of this, if not all of it, is due to how Maugham tells his story. Yet, the more admirable Larry gets, the less human he seems, not tending toward the transcendent but rather the archetypal. The troubling thing about archetypes is, the more encompassing and representative they become, the less specific and individualized. Again, I know "what's next," so I won't say too much, except that if we don't soon see even just the hint of rough angle in Larry, and/or articulation of the ideas contained in all his wanderings, translations, and dramatic monlogues, he'll be stuck doing magic coin tricks in our imaginations long after our sentimental inclination wanders to the next installment of Chicken Soup For The Mystic Soul.

Chapter 3 (The Razor's Edge)

2009-05-22T15:11:00.004-04:00

"But that was only one side of him and it was the other side that made him so interesting to me. I couldn't reconcile the two."--Larry, on Kosti, in ch.3 of The Razor's Edge.

Chapter 3 is full of splits, dichotomies, parallels, or whichever literary term means it happens here, then there, kind of different, but basically the same. Refreshingly, these splits don't neatly reconcile themselves, nor are they set into stark, moralistic opposition. Maugham uses Chapter 3 to further tease out the groundwork for ideas that, we suspect, will make for good cultivation down the road. For me, this chapter is a lot like a really good mid-season episode of "Lost"--lots of questions, things that don't make much sense along, and that sense that, eventually, things will get tied together meaningfully, unexpectedly, if I just keep with it. Anyway, on to those splits--

First, we get a bunch of interesting perspectives on the origin and nature of titles. Count Elliot's donations to the Church inspires the Pope to restore to Elliot a noble blood line that did not, before, exist. Kosti, well-read, passionate, and bright, claims that he has been usurped of his nobility (as a cavalry officer) after a failed assassination attempt on the Soviet-supported dictator in Poland, Jozef Pilsudski, though in reality, Kosti ran the tables at the officers' club in Warsaw and was forced to flee under cover of night. The widow Ellie's condescension toward Frau Becker, and her persistent exploitation of her husband's memory as war veteran, suggests either a kind of unsettled resignation to circumstances or a happily large-fished attitude toward a very small pond. That Ellie and Larry have taken such divergent paths post-war and post-trauma nicely gives us reason to admire Larry as he leaves Kosti and sets out for Bonn (a story line we'll pick up later in the book). Having suffered a breakdown, professionally discredited after the crash, Gray is taken care of by Isabel; together, they accept Elliot's polite and subtle offer to live in Paris at his expense, installed at the generosity of a now-noble patron. Mrs. Bradley death, bittersweet and ironic, comes after her witnessing the loss of her daughter's social position and fortune.

Like Kosti, Elliot takes on a mentee who, in a few weeks achieves what it takes the mentor a lifetime to build and sustain. Dissatisfaction enters as a prominent quality of life; Elliot, ever the dandy, nonetheless tires of Paris and finds his place there safe but unspectacular. Like Larry, he commences a withdrawal to new climes, where, also like Larry, he begins "the most splendid period of [his] life," living well and holding court as never before while "effecting a very satisfactory working arrangement between God and Mammon." Ironically, it is Elliot's generosity that saves the Maturins; his social position requires that he act generously, but still the narrator offers unqualified praise for this save. Gradually, we get a sense of Larry less as dilettante, more as eager, uncertain apprentice. He's looking for something, but what, and where? Better keep moving East. Likewise, Larry's being seduced by Ellie, thinking it Frau Becker, gives a kind of public/private perspective on grief and human need, as we are reminded, again of Larry's own post-traumatic situation. For all ten years of Chapter 3, Larry is set out on a course of discovery that far exceeds its initial curiosity about the world, the world's classic literature, and his desire to loaf.

Chapter 3 unsettles a bit my idea of reading this book as central to no one character, and at least somewhat allegorical in its characters more or less getting, in the end, what they say they want. We'll have to see if this reading holds out. Our younger generation of characters seem to be settling into their adult paths easily; 80-odd years later, Larry seems like a find stand-in for a graduate student, while Gray and Isabel, pre-Depression, seem ready for the suburbs. Elliot turns 65 and decorates his life with the finery of later-age accomplishment, while initiating a seemingly extra-societal turn toward religious faith. Larry's work in the mines seems nicely to capture some of the ambivalence of early 20th-century manual labor; if Larry goes to the mine with romantic ideas of the virtues of labor, he nonetheless leaves the shaft for the car almost as soon as he arrives (and the mine for the farm, then the city, not too long after). I wish that Maugham would, in this chapter, set out some more detail about the Maturin marriage, that it wasn't set out in such broad strokes (wedding-babies-breakdown-Paris). I miss Isabel, and would like some commentary on more than the size of her body.

Chapter 2 (The Razor's Edge)

2009-05-14T20:12:00.002-04:00

"The measure of your holiness is proportionate to the goodness of your will."--Jan van Ruysbroek.

To say that a character in a novel is only a stand-in for the reader, especially a narrator, is to start, a little tired, along that dangerous, razor's-edge-style interweaving of construction and content, yet what to make of our narrator in this chapter, as he constructs most everything from memory, save his last exchange with Isabel? And the strange intersections in the narrator, of insider and outsider. He has enough social cachet to warrant attention from Elliot, but is aloof enough to earn Larry's confidences regarding his lunches (he does, in fact, eat them) home (Montparnasse), and reading schedules. He is a globetrotter to China, and also a careful observer of the Luxembourg, where he finds everything unchanged since his youth. Plot-wise, he also foregrounds the permanent impermanence of things--the transient nature of existence, if you will--which sort of folds in neatly alongside his general absence from the specific events of the first half of the chapter ("and again I have to eke out my knowledge of what passed during the few weeks they spent there").

Larry and, for that matter, fascination-with-Larry (those eyes! that drawn and skinny face!), continues to attract the attention of everyone, yet I can't help but admire and want to argue that there is no "main" character/protagonist in this book, that while our admiring eyes may focus on Larry as he does and does not appear, that this is actually a book about Isabel, Elliot, Larry, Gray, and, eventually, Suzanne, and how the choices they make reflect the way they want to live. This is way reductive, but, in this chapter, we learn of Isabel's diabetes, no doubt the result of many years of habitual over-eating and drinking. Elliot loses a step keeping up with the Chicago crowd, but glosses over these absences with his still-formidable graces; how long can a grand man stay at the top? Larry loses weight, learns French and Greek and Latin, reads a bunch (Spinoza, The Odyssey, the Flemish mystic Ruysbroek [just a guy Larry knew in college], Des Cartes), and loses Isabel for the pursuit of low-budget self-realization. Isabel loses Larry for want of a proper wedding, social position, proper baby budgets, family pressure, and stubbornness. Or is it Larry's stubborn expectation that's ridiculous--that Isabel fall in line in a way that he never would, as he continues to refuse Elliot's generosity, frustrate Louisa's ambitions to marry Isabel, loaf, read, decline to return to the United States, loaf and read more, and then more?

Yet--and this is one of the reasons I like this book so much-everyone seems to be getting what they believe they want. Larry plows through several semesters' worth of close reading the Big Thinkers. Mrs. Bradley feasts and converses with the best (albeit on Elliot's dime) all summer. Elliot remains a nucleus of social exchange and interaction. Isabel, no longer engaged, is charmed by a Rumanian [sic] prince...and yet, she is also completely unmoored as to whether she should follow her heart or Larry's, a moment nicely rendered in this exchange between Isabel and the narrator from a dog-eared page of my copy of the book:

"And yet at the bottom of my heart I've got an uneasy feeling that if I were better, if I were more disinterested, more unselfish, nobler, I'd marry Larry and lead his life. If I only loved him enough I'd think the world well lost."

"You might put it the other way about. If he loved you enough he wouldn't have hesitated to do what you want."

Isabel's uncertainty and self-doubt humanize her in a way that Larry, for me, remains too far removed from the world. Yes, Isabel is precocious, exacting, demanding--but she also doubts herself, which humanizes her while Larry, dancing and loafing his way through nights away from the library, continues to seem just enough of a clueless, well, schmuck. Okay, I'm being a tad combative. Looking at this thing differently, we can say that Isabel and Larry are both rigid and certain in their pursuit of outcomes (Larry's life of loafing, Isabel's industrious insouciance) that seem to have no clear processes. How to get Larry to love Isabel and come home? How to convince Isabel that they can travel the world on $3,000 a year? If the other would just take orders a little more easily, wouldn't it all be so grand?

And yet, our narrator gets it right at the end of the chapter. Love isn't a good sailor and it does indeed languish on sea voyages. Seemingly freed from initial constraints, we're well-positioned to watch, by virtue of our narrator's coming gap in years, the seeds and fruits of self-intensive scrapping and self-actualizing.

Chapter 1 (The Razor's Edge)

2009-05-08T10:50:00.007-04:00

"His soul? It may be that he's a little frightened of himself. It may be that he has no confidence in the authenticity of the vision that he dimly perceives in his mind."

Did anyone else feel like reading chapter 1 was a study in appearances and presentations? I sometimes forget how different the movie and book versions are, and that really comes out for me whenever I read this first chapter. Larry Darrell (ascetic, loaf-y) is one of five main characters in the book that we first encounter in this chapter in striking, full detail, that nonetheless draws out particular characteristics to watch for: Elliot Templeton (elegant, mannered), Gray Maturin (hale, big), Isabel Bradley (fat, bright), and the young woman at the Bradley dinner party who sits with the narrator, who we later know to be Suzanne Rouvier (awkward, frail). I get the feeling that Maugham wants us to understand something about each person's character in these elaborate explanations of their physical appearance, which he weaves throughout the chapter. Especially, the attention to Isabel's being slightly overweight in her youth, an indication of her being both beautiful and indulged ("She was comely though on the fat side," then "Isabel was looking very pretty; she was dressed in white silk, with a long, hobbled skirt that concealed her fat legs") seems important to me.

I was also struck by how piecemeal the narrative is. Maugham himself is supposedly telling the story, although in doing so he admits to taking considerable poetic license to imagine and fill-in the gaps. Similarly, rarely is an event in the novel recalled directly. For example, we hear from Maugham Isabel's retelling of Larry's desire to loaf, and Maugham's translation of Suzanne's recollection of Larry's story of Patsy's death. This telling of things from at least one remove sets up nicely, for me, Maugham's later interweaving of spiritual texts from around the world, all of which are presented in translation to English, often cited from recollection, by another character, as told by Larry. While taking religious texts out of their cultural and historical contexts can be problematic (e.g., Noah did have a boat!), here it allows the reader to practice, from the beginning, interacting with Larry's cumulative and spongey mind, which spends a great deal of the novel absorbing, processing, and sharing with others essential ideas about meaning and life from the places he travels, especially South Asia. I feel like this is the first time, reading the novel, that I really notice just how subtly retold stories factor into the novel.

Did anyone else feel like there is kind of an early "grouping" of characters being set out here? Not just the romantic stuff, but that Elliot and Larry seem to live according to well-articulated values, while the rest of the characters in the chapter seem pretty reactive and fashionable in their attitudes and behaviors? Of course, Elliot is a "man of the world," but he observes and is made subservient to the rigorous details of social life, manners, and custom. So, he finds himself uncomfortable in the world away from his French home, a lack of comfort that actually sets in motion the events of this novel, in his invitation to the narrator to visit the Bradleys. Similarly, Larry seems drawn to a strict, as-yet unarticulated (or not-yet understood) sense of values and thinking about the world, which reigns him in and causes him to get up early after a night of late partying and go the library to read. On the other hand, the Bradleys, the older women that Elliot fleeces in France, Gray, Suzanne, and Isabel seem content to mark out their own places in society, accepting this fashion (Larry needs a job!), rejecting that fashion (Mr. Bradley's painting is awful!). So, the novel seems to be setting a kind of preference/admiration for people who create and then live by strict ethical and social codes.

I know what's going to "happen next," so I won't venture any predictions at this point. I have been watching the television show, Deadwood, and I am amazed when I read works from or about the era before antibiotics, how unremarkable and acceptable sudden death seemed to the generations of people who learned to live with it. Patsy's death at the end of chapter 1 hits you like a trainwreck, and yet Patsy gives a laugh and declares that he's "jiggered." Remarkable to me also is how senseless and "normal" his death seems, here. A kind of anti-Platoon-era-Oliver-Stone restraint informs strong feelings in this book against war, which are observed primarily in how the war changes the men who experience it. Larry's odd and admirable desire to "loaf" is born of a reckoning with human fragility and mortality. So, Maugham establishes in this chapter a pretty easy-to-accept motive for Larry's later, eventual globetrotting and self-education, which the narrator makes a nice nod to by ending the chapter by leaving Chicago for San Francisco, then the "Far East."

Reading Together The Razor's Edge

2009-04-27T11:37:00.004-04:00

In the next eight weeks, I am going to read again one of my favorite books, which I associate closely with Katie, W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. It is the story of several friends' attempts to find enlightenment and meaning in life by following different paths through the 1920s and 1930s. The central character (as imagined in the 1984 film adaptation starring Bill Murray) is Lawrence "Larry" Darrell, a socialite drifter whose tragic experiences during World War I lead him on a reclusive path across the world, while reading much of what we might now find in translation in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Here is a link about Maugham's life and here is a brief summary of the novel's plot. The title of the novel comes from Isherwood's translation of The Upanishads, by way of an interesting story:

"The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;

thus the wise say the Path to salvation is hard."

--"Katha-Upanishad" (Chapter 3, Verse 14, 1.iii.14)

If you'd like to read along with me, I will be reading roughly a chapter a week, and writing some commentary each Friday. I'd love to hear what other people think of this book, its plot, characters, and thinking, though I guess I'm not really looking for treatises on Maugham's shortcomings as a novelist, thinker, etc. (mostly positive stuff, here). The book is unusually organized with few chapters and many sub-chapters. Roughly, I will try to read and respond to the following sections by the following dates:

Friday, May 8 - Chapters 1

Friday, May 15 - Chapter 2

Friday, May 22 - Chapter 3

Friday, May 29 - Chapter 4

Friday, June 5 - Chapter 5 (i-viii)

Friday, June 12 - Chapter 5 (viii-ix) and Chapter 6 (i-vii)

Friday, June 19 - Chapter 6 (vii-viii) and Chapter 7

Hope to hear from, and read with, any of you who are interested to do so!

The Promised Land

2009-04-14T14:18:00.009-04:00

I have arrived finally to the Bruce Springsteen party, with all the full affection, admiration, and exaltation of someone who wants to make up for lost time. I come by my enthusiasm honestly (if unremarkably). Like everyone else I grew up on the Greatest Hits. But only later, at FIU, did I learn the finer points of Boss Apocrypha from (Miami) Mike Creeden, whose steel-trap mind can parse the legend and the man better even than Fred Schruers or Jon Landau. I stood two weeks ago with my buddy Joe (and his gal, Justine) at the San Jose Pavilion and watched the kickoff show of the Working on a Dream Tour, which went on for three-and-a-half heartstoppin', pants-droppin', Earth-shockin', hard-rockin', booty shakin', earthquakin', love-makin', Viagra-takin', history-makin', legendary hours of E Street Band exceptionality. In addition to having perhaps the best back catalogue this side of The Beatles, Springsteen does one thing better than anyone else working in the arts today: the man plays his heart out, and what he plays is meticulous, sincere, passionate, diverse, and incredibly well-orchestrated. Not a moment of the gospel-tent-show mania goes off with a hitch. A Springsteen live show rattles something deep inside the chest. It creates a sense of communion with strangers, a feeling of optimism about the world and its inhabitants, it embodies age-old ideals that feel fresh and reborn in Springsteen's songs. For someone who has lived most of his life by the mantra, "it'll never sound better than it does in the studio," a live Springsteen show embodies that quasi-religious, transformative feeling long made dormant by our ironic and self-first age: Hope.

In the current issue of The Paris Review, Kay Ryan gives an interview the likes of which I've rarely seen on the contemporary American poetry scene. Ryan is a deeply talented and impressive poet, whose frank lines are mirrored in the perspective she offers about poetry in the discussion. (I paraphrase) Did you crave success? Oh yes, desperately. Do you write every day? No. I sometimes take long periods of time off from writing to shingle my roof. Do you enjoy poetry readings? I enjoy reading my own poems out loud. I don't enjoy hearing other people read their poems. (Me again here:) There's something of a contradiction in contemporary poetry, I think, in that poets are expected to be both encyclopedically-informed scholars and also detached bards whose minds are kept clear to perceive, record, and transform the world around them. Ryan's answers are too well-informed to not have a good portion of the former, but she also has kept things well enough in order to do the latter. A poet recently pointed out that the advent of psychotherapy in the early 20th century created a new field for poetic thought. No longer was the mind just a vehicle for receiving the divine will of nature; now, the thing itself was worthy of scrutiny, could be calibrated, and in doing so the act of perceiving became a subject to explore. There is a kind of inward turn in contemporary poetry that makes sense, but that seems to sometimes exclude ideas about consensus and community. No wonder, I guess, that even the poets sometimes find catharsis in rock arenas.

Cait and I went to a nearby wine bar last Friday, sat down with our wedding to-do list, and over the course of a few hours (and a few glasses of wine), made an organized first run through everything that needs to get done before the July 11th wedding. Off the list, now, are the bounce house, taco truck, and Barack Obama cut-out that was to stand-in as one of the groomsmen. New to the list are things like hiring a real photographer, cleaning up the fish pond, and figuring out who will watch the cats during the honeymoon. Fun holdovers about which we're still excited, that continue to make the cut, include the candy table, a Western swing band, and Cait-family-planned catering, flowers, cakes, monogrammed stickers, and gardens. Two other good details: Cait's nephew who calls us "The Marriagers" has firmly committed to wearing his Superman costume while serving as part of the "flower herd" but worries he might throw the flowers really hard at people. And, our friend Eric has written the first song of what looks to be an excellent revival of the Peace Corps musical spectacular tradition.

I have been listening on iTunes download to the audiobook of "Live From New York," the oral (and uncensored) history of Saturday Night Live, which was published a few years back. It's fascinating to hear how the show came together and what it did to change television. But more interesting to me is the sense that no one on the show had any real idea, until after the fact, that SNL was a success, save its creator, who either made a huge gamble or understood something no one else did (probably a mix of both). After the first show, before seeing any ratings returns, etc., Lorne Michaels walked up to a colleague and simply announced, "Well, I guess it's a hit," and then acted on the assumption that it was a hit until it became one several shows later. There seems to be, there, something of a historical pattern. I have been listening regularly to the How Stuff Works podcasts--Stuff You Missed In History Class and Stuff You Should Know--for the last few months. While they may never usurp my favorite podcasts (NPR: It's All Politics, Slate Political Gabfest, Diane Rehm Show Friday News Roundup, NPR: Only A Game), it seems that more than a smattering of historical and cultural moments follow this same kind of logic: why the Spanish-American War began; how Ponzi schemes work; what the Special Forces do; and, how the USA and USSR have historically negotiated arms reductions.

Springsteen's The Rising is an album I have listened to repeatedly in the last five years, as a source of strength in difficult times. Especially, "Lonesome Day" always gives me a sense that I can handle what I need to handle, that fear and failure are only one part of being alive. Mike Creeden burned The Rising for Katie and me, and we used to listen to it driving up to my folks' place in Stuart. Or, we'd listen to the first three songs. I remember that Katie used to insist on changing the album after that, saying that listening to the album (which she liked) just flat-out exhausted her. Considering how many key changes, power chords, and frank assessments occupy that album, it makes sense to take it in in small doses. Springsteen wrote The Rising as an album-length response to the epic loss of the September 11th attacks, and there's something both unique to that moment about the album, as well as something more universal. Like Jack Gilbert, Springsteen seems to have honed his craft with an eye toward the "big" ideas that are excluded from much writing and music today, and so it makes sense that he wrote powerful, balm-like stuff for an occasion of national tragedy and collective mourning.

There are two Springsteen classics that I can't stop listening to, both from the 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town (I have it on good authority from both Miami Mike and Joe that "Darkness..." is perhaps Springsteen's best album), "Promised Land" and "Badlands." Both are optimistic, full-hearted anthems about enduring hard situations and finding in them hope. I'm making the hour-long drive to campus three times a week this quarter, and often find myself alternating repeats of each song with excerpts from the SNL book. The experience makes for a strange intertwining of late 1970s-era underdog stories. There's this frequently-told story (that I first heard from Mike) in which Springsteen was approached to make an appearance in a documentary film about nuclear proliferation in the early 80s and he refused, saying he wished that the film looked more like Scorcese's Mean Streets. I wonder sometimes if, among so much prosperity, we've inured ourselves to the kind of tensions that permit the flourishing of writing and the arts. Given the economic ambiguity of these times, I also wonder if there isn't on our own horizon some inevitable creative fracturing that will release new creative energy. If so, here's hoping that poetry starts to sell out some arenas. Short of that, here's hoping the E Street Band keeps bringing to town its revivalist rock shows, long after our current hard times have (we hope) passed on.

Kayla's Visit

2009-04-07T02:24:00.006-04:00

Kayla Yearout, my niece and blogger extraordinaire, came out west from Wisconsin for a visit last weekend. Traveling by herself, braving 4+ hour plane rides, the harsh San Francisco winter, and the profound contrasts of sunny California, Kayla took it all in stride and we had a great time in the Bay Area, visiting Stanford, Dolores Park, the Metreon Theater, the farmer's market at the Ferry Building, Union Square, Chinatown, North Beach, Crissy Field, and last but certainly not least, the community gardens behind my building and Faye's espresso and video store, where we bought the Sunday NY Times before sending Kayla back home for the last week of school before spring break. It was a whirlwind, wonderful weekend, and I'm posting some of the photos from our visit together below.

The Kamp Klutz Award

2009-03-31T20:34:00.003-04:00

In the seventh grade, I went to Boy Scout Camp and won the "Kamp Klutz Award" (Art merit badge). It was a one-time award created by the head nurse to acknowledge my general lack of skills in nature. My first day there, I broke a finger after an awkward fall (Bugling). Two days later, I sliced through another finger on the same hand while whittling a kind of pointy square (Wood Carving). All week (Water Sports), I had to wrap my injured hand in a big plastic bag, which was then taped at the wrist and which, despite these precautions, I had to hold high above the water-line to prevent infection or a bad-set (Medicine). At the end of camp, the various Boy Scout awards were given out--"best camper," "most manly," etc.--and then the nurse came forward to present a two-by-four with five tongue depressors stuck into the wood (Humor), one wrapped in gauze and the other splinted (Emergency Preparedness), which I remember accepting with a smile (Photography), because I didn’t want to be rude and not find the joke funny (Personal Management).

This weekend, Cait and I went camping with some friends at Butano State Park. It was my first time camping since the Kamp Klutz experience, and my first as an adult. I had spent a fair amount of time these last few weeks talking with the Chicago doc about going back into nature, the thought of which generally freaked me out (Cait picked a site free of bears, which helped considerably). In the end, I was surprised by how ordinary the experience was; mostly, I worried that, not having camped before, I would mis-set the tent poles or collect water from the wrong place. Here, again, I pretty much deferred to Cait, who did most of the heavy lifting. Driving back to the city, we went over my pro/con list of the general camping experience, which went something like, pro: making fire, going for a long hike, eating s'mores, sleeping in a tent, and con: sleeping on the ground, peeing in the middle of the night, mud. Which means, I think, that we’ll go camping again.

This weekend, there was a fair amount of incidental gallows humor about bears, dying in the woods, wrong turns, lions, tigers, etc., which makes sense. Hiking and camping are activities that take place in the messy exact intersection of human encroachment and natural habitats. The bear is definitely a kind of talisman for California, and I’m not just cribbing the Chicago doc when I say that it makes sense that, historically, Californians have made their peace with bears through the manipulation of symbols. Negotiating the social/public spaces around bears and bear conversations isn’t any more unusual than the social/public space around camping and, for that matter, nature. I don’t know if it’s therapy, or time, or being loved by Cait and so having someone right there as I do these things again, but areas in life that felt sort of roped-off after Katie’s death feel open again. Sometimes I feel guilty about enjoying those things, but I don’t feel afraid.

Recently, I’ve noticed that I tell stories from my life with Katie in the first-person singular (“when I lived in Miami” or, “I got these cats five years ago in Chicago”). I don’t do this to omit Katie from my life, but rather because being widowed seems such a huge trump card to drop into the middle of an anecdote. Saying instead, “When my wife who died tragically and I were living in Miami, I ate a lot of Cuban food” or “My wife who I was dating at the time but is now dead got these cats five years ago from a co-worker brought them home” seems messy, while saying “My first wife” seems to invite speculation or further discussion that, eventually, leads to more awkward phrasing and explaining. Being widowed in such unusual circumstances, I think, only sort of magnifies this effect, and I don't feel like it's my place to insist that information onto other people. Still, I feel weird about not mentioning Katie in those moments. Recently, a socially-lubricated graduate student started giving me advice about being marriage, and a friend stepped in to change the subject. My general reaction was to feel bad for the friend--he was trying so hard to turn things around--until, sure enough, the subject changed.

Last month, KMF gave out this year’s Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships to two graduate students. Among more than 250 applicants, we found two exceptional candidates who will do good work. That we were able to give out two larger, national scholarships versus last year’s more modest, FIU-only scholarship bodes well for the future. I’m proud of how KMF is growing, and that so many smart, caring people are working really hard to make it a success. It’s also pretty great that so many people, nationwide, working in public health now associate Katie’s name with a great opportunity to pursue their own ambitions and dreams across the globe. Calling this year’s two recipients was a wonderful, if bittersweet experience; Anamarie had warned me that it might be so (she’d called all of the finalists to confirm their eligibility). I was especially touched by how one of the recipients spoke extensively about how Katie’s story inspired her, that she felt a connection to Katie when reading about her on the KMF website.

Things in my life seem to be settling into new and positive patterns. I don’t know what it means to want KMF to be the primary channel of how I publicly honor Katie’s presence in my life, anymore than I know how to manage hiking, camping, negotiating conversations about bears or marriage, or deciding the right way to talk about aspects of our life together. So much seems to depend on action and doing things conscientiously, rather than trying to work them out in advance. Baseball season begins next week, and with it commences much prognostication that seems to favor my beloved Cubs. I have no idea how the season will actually work out, though I think we stand a good chance. I like that old baseball adage: every team wins 54 and loses 54, so it’s the other 54 games you have to worry about.

"I'm pregnant, Jason."

2009-03-09T16:24:00.028-04:00

This week's episode of Friday Night Lights (which you can watch online here) showcases everything I love about that show: great writing, exceptional acting, so much heart and so much ambiguity and subterfuge that looks to work out messily. Beloved by many, many, many (I could keep going) critics, this season is maybe the strongest yet. Friday Night Lights is the sort of show that you have to watch from Season 1 to really get everything out of it, and yet, if more people don't start watching now, it's headed off the air. So, a few things I think you'd like regardless of when you pick it up. There is no better-realized, more nuanced marriage on television than that of Coach and Principal Taylor. As Slate (also obsessed with the show) points out, a fun parlor game is to decide which of your friends is Joe McCoy (smarmy, pushy, self-serving) and which is Eric Taylor (team-player, passionate, straightforward). Wherever he goes, at least once an episode, Coach Taylor gives one hell of a rousing, motivational speech. Give it four minutes of your time and watch two clips below, from the pilot--a scene where Coach Taylor leads an on-field prayer after his star QB Jason Street is paralyzed on-field, then the subsequent hospital visit--and tell me you're not a little hooked. Trust me: it only gets better.

I broke out my Kosuke Fukudome t-shirt this morning, and wore it while running errands. In 23 days, the twice-defending N.L. Central Champion Chicago Cubs will begin their 101st campaign to win a World Series. Seven months of baseball heaven commences, enhanced considerably by Comcast, which carries WGN-Chicago, the channel that televises many of those Cubs games. Arriving out west last fall, I fell pretty far off the baseball radar. My lack of attention at such a critical point in the season no doubt contributed in a major way to yet another Cubs decline and I don't intend to let my team down again. Having addressed the major flaws from last season, the Cubs are well-positioned to roll off the first-ever perfect season in baseball. Short of that, I'll enjoy every last victory punctuated with a big dose of Steve Goodman.

I decided recently to withdraw from consideration some of the poems that I sent out last fall. I'm at a crossroads with a few of the months poems that I originally posted on this blog. They are important, powerful, and meaningful poems for me. However, I've also started to feel some ambivalence about the sharpness of thinking in those poems. There is an immediacy and intimacy in those poems, but also a kind of haziness about what grief means or adds up to. (Disclaimer: the couple of poems that I know are good, about whose quality I feel certain, are still going out.) I am constantly editing these poems, adding stuff in, taking stuff out, reordering the lines, and I'm not sure what they add up to. It's a startling moment, creatively, to think that something that made complete sense in one context now feels insufficient. For me, the most frustrating poems are the ghazals, which I completely love, but which have come back now from some good magazines with the exact same comments: these are strong, beautiful, sad, powerful, but ultimately don't work so well as a group. So, the next step is to revise the batch, and I have no idea how to start thinking about doing that. I want the ghazals to find a home in the world, I want them to be what they are, and I want them to be as good as they can be. And, I'm not sure I can do all three of those things right now.

This morning, the editors at 14 Hills asked, in response to my email requesting they withdraw from consideration poems that I sent last September, "Dear John, What was the name of the poem you submitted? Cheers, The Editors." I am taking this at face value as a legitimate inability to locate my submission, as opposed to, say, general incompetence, or an indifference or hostility to my work (their guidelines ask you to send such an email in the event that poems are published elsewhere). It is an interesting thing to send poems out into the ether of the publishing world, and to hope that, eventually, they return with some definitive word of their worth (e.g., "We love these and can't wait to publish them!"). To a poet, few things are so heartbreaking as receiving from a literary magazine or journal a form rejection notice 9-14 months after posting them. Still, stranger things have happened. Four years ago, Epicenter accepted for publication the only "topical" poem I had written to date, about Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey, and the Iraq War, and only recently acknowledged, tactfully, well, actually, we lost your poem and forgot to publish it.

There is a kind of resilient optimism to living after a tragedy that confuses me. Instead of waiting for it all to fall apart, I feel alive and vibrant in the moment. Cait recently started a job and I can't wait for her to get home. I still turn (imaginary) hand-stands thinking about getting (and having) a Stegner. I meet Josh at the coffee shop and I'm excited to have a new good friend. I watch movie trailers for the summer blockbusters, confident that the new Terminator movie can be the best yet. In The Art of Possibility, a fantastic book, the authors sketch out two models of living, one based on abundance and the other on scarcity. In the former, life is full of inexhaustible potential whose manifestations we can't possibly encompass. In the latter, there is only so much to go around and if you don't lock down yours, someone else will take it away. Scarcity is seductive because it suggests a kind of injury in things that's hard to deny, while abundance is somewhat scary, because how else do you appreciate things, if not in comparison and exclusion to most everything else? Still, neither inures one entirely to that jerk in the Audi passing everyone in the bus lane.

It feels like two sides of the same coin: either an encompassing ease with or willed ignorance to the fragility of this world. It's like that scene from Annie Hall, in which the adolescent Alvy Singer tells the oblivious Dr. Flicker that he's depressed because the universe is expanding, only to have his mother chastise him, "You're in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" At the end of last night's Friday Night Lights, Riggins and Street ride in a cab from NYC to a New Jersey suburb, where Street hopes to win back his girlfriend and kid. Role-playing his speech over and over, Riggins interrupts Street with, "I'm pregnant, Jason," explaining, hey, you have to be prepared if she throws you a curveball. The moment is funny and breaks the tension of the scene, and also sort of plays up the absurdity of being overly invested in controlling too many aspects of one thing. Of course, Street succeeds, just as, of course, Street is the actor Scott Porter leaving Friday Night Lights for a big movie career. As a viewer and fan, I lose interest in Street once he leaves the world of the Dillon Panthers, but his life goes on with its complexity, boredom, successes, failures, whether I witness them each week or not.

Watch more Friday Night Lights videos on AOL Video

My Heroes Haven’t Always Been Wrestlers

2009-02-17T22:49:00.009-05:00

I learned to love good country music (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson) from my dad, I learned to love good bad country music (Tim McGraw, David Allan Coe) on my own, and I filled in much of the space in-between listening to country with Katie. Katie loved Randy Travis and Dolly Parton, could do without Tracy Byrd, had a soft spot for Trace Adkins. The first time I visited her site in Rangpur, we walked from the bus depot to her home and got to talking about our favorite concerts. Katie’s favorite was a Garth Brooks show she’d seen in college: you couldn’t miss that he loved making his fans happy. I remember she said that his last of four encores was an acoustic set of Billy Joel covers. I thought then, and still do now, that Garth Brooks, even with his over-sized belt buckles and ten-gallon hats, never quite looked the part. One common aw-shucks moment among Peace Corps volunteers is how you meet people from other parts of the U.S.—and are therein introduced to tastes—you’d never otherwise encounter on your own and, well, there weren’t too many Garth Brooks fans in Evanston.

Cait and I love this Toby Keith and Willie Nelson duet, “Beer For My Horses,” a post-9/11 pre-Global-War-on-Terror anthem for vigilante justice. All last year, I liked to think of it as a good Obama campaign song (“We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces”), and listening to it successive times, I appreciated the sheer kitsch factor, the naivete and us-them bravado that’s just nowhere on the national radar these days. I first played it for Cait while driving across Utah late one night last summer. We were both tired, so I made this playlist of up-tempo, catchy country songs. I remember how we couldn’t stop listening to Keith’s songs, and how I had to admit to myself that some of them were pretty good for their awfulness. Country music values intense self-awareness in a way that’s very attractive to poets, and few recording artists are as willing to poke fun at themselves as cleverly and frequently as Keith does: check out the Poe-inspired ending to his video for “A Little Too Late,” his other Willie duet, “I’ll Never Smoke Weed with Willie Again,” or the just very excellent chorus of “As Good As I Once Was.”

George Saunders gave a craft talk at Stanford a couple of weeks ago, where he said that one of the important decisions he made early on was to make peace with the things he liked least about his writing—that, rather than trying to get them out of his writing, he embraced them as something that made his writing distinct. For me, distinguishing "draft" level work from "finished" work involves a lot of intuition and trusting that what I've written works on the page, even when I don't fully understand what I'm doing. Just as, on a personal level, gut-level decisions seems to involve less "fire in the belly" and more guessing well and then backing up the guess, to see how far you can follow it. Of course, it helps to touch base along the way with good people who get what you're trying to get at. The Chicago doc calls this having "good mirrors" in daily life. During the first season of Dr. Katz, Ray Romano did this bit about talking to his wife after waking up from a long night of intense dreams. Did we have chicken for dinner last night? Okay, that happened. And did the boogey-man capture me afterwards and force me to drive his spaceship? Okay, that was the dream.

I continue to receive no reply to my essay query to The Believer, in which I propose writing a literary survey of professional wrestling biographies. My general argument is that professional wrestling is the only form of entertainment where the audience knows it’s watching a staged event but interacts with the performance as though it’s real (you might say that Vince McMahon is our contemporary Brecht). In my initial, informal research two examples really drive this point home: 1. in 1990, when the character Sergeant Slaughter turned “heel” (bad guy) to join The Iron Sheik as an anti-American tag-team, the WWF had to cancel a series of events near military bases in the south because of death threats sent by snipers who promised to be waiting rooftop for Slaughter as he passed by; and 2. in 1997, when Hulk Hogan dramatically turned heel as “Hollywood Hulk Hogan”, the crowd became so outraged that it threw everything it could into the ring and one fan jumped over the security rail and ran full-tilt into the ring and at Hogan leaving a perplexed fellow wrestler, the 7-foot-tall Kevin Nash, to pick up and hold off the ground and in the air said flailing fan. None of the wrestlers could safely leave the ring until a huge security escort could arrive to the arena and escort them out. Meanwhile, for seven minutes, Hogan ran from turnbuckle to turnbuckle taunting the crowd on, laughing and screaming at them—even under threat to his well-being, he figured the only thing worse than getting hurt by some flying projectile would be breaking character and ruining the plot line.

The problem with country-and-western music comes, like any art form, I guess, when it take itself too seriously. Songwriters become cowboys in trucks that are tanks while jilted lovers howl like shot dogs, and the next thing you know someone is singing Lee Greenwood at karaoke night. The cowboy is made vulnerable by exposure, habitation, and desensitization. Corruption or decrepitude is inevitable, as is a successor. Professional wrestlers blow out knees, bash in heads, age, fall apart, forget themselves—no one stays a heel or hero too long—yet, invariably, they break storyline to wrestle another day. Redemption is the order of the day. Hollywood Hogan wrestled the next decade to great villainy and vitriol, but in the end, the Hulkster dug out his yellow-and-red tights in truly dramatic fashion: in the end, who wouldn’t rather be loved?

I’m surprised, encouraged, pleased by the easygoing nature of most of the writers I met last week at the AWP conference in Chicago. While there is certainly no lack of mousse-pointed hipsters sporting Dickies or Juicy Couture, talking about modes of discourse, the slipperiness of contingent being, and George Herbert, many other writerly folks just as eagerly chatted about movies, sports, travel, beer, etc., in other words, played against the expectations you fix in your mind when you think, “writer.” One fun night found us up in Lakeview, at Carol’s Pub, Chicago’s original honky tonk, taping dollar bills on the duct tape next to the bar, requesting “Pancho and Lefty,” which I’ve heard at Carol’s six of the last eight New Years. As I said my goodbyes, it was snowing outside and everything was really still, so I turned on Garth Brooks on the iPod and walked a while down Clark, then Southport, past the Music Box Theater, where “The Wrestler” was playing, to Belmont, where I hired a cab to take me back to my brother’s house for the night.

Lasers

2009-01-10T18:02:00.028-05:00

The first song I played for Cait as we drove through Yellowstone last August was Harry Chapin's "I Wanna Learn A Love Song." Chapin holds a special place in my heart for his unabashed ardor, his activism, and for how he sort of collapses many of his songs mid-way through to think big about politics, relationships, and culture. I like how one of his biographers describes his songwriting process: "He loved to create division in the picture, then let you draw your own conclusions." I also like what his daughter said about his legacy, years later, "We all got louder after my dad died." Chapin is a singer-songwriter whose embrace of sentiment and risks of sentimentality still win big for me, despite my usual appreciation for the understated and ironic. His earnestness is sort of the Nehru jacket of contemporary American music: it looks weird when the rest of us try it on, but damned if it doesn't fit him perfectly.

Cait later told me that, as we drove the Grand Loop Mile, playing song after song on the iPod, she wondered, half-joking, how quickly she could get me to marry her. Which is great, because I was sitting there wondering why I was already thinking about marriage three days into our first road trip together. It turns out that, however you quantify it--the nine years that we've known each other, the nine months since I asked Jeff and Sheila what it might mean that I might have a crush on an old friend, the six months into our courtship--the answer, that day, was "about four months." On December 30th, as we arrived to Chicago from Indy, I sent Cait out on a scavenger hunt across the city: the Kopi Cafe, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Bookworks, Wrigley Field, Potbelly's--the works! Making a big loop across the north side of the city, Cait met most of my people and saw many of my favorite places. At the end, leaving my sister and her fiance at Chicago's famous Bean, she walked north up Michigan Avenue, followed step-by-step text-message instructions down to the Chicago River riverwalk, and found me at a bench, where, after waiting out a couple of passers-by, I proposed and she said yes.

This morning, Cait made banana muffins. We'd bought a huge bunch last week, to help combat the stomach flu I brought with me from Chicago, and while I was feeling better, the bananas were all turning a disturbing brown. We've finally set-up most of our apartment--unpacked the boxes, moved some furniture around, thoroughly terrorized the cats--and life is kind of assuming a normal order of things. We keep our favorite CDs in the basket next to the radio in the kitchen, and as she mixed the dough, Cait put on The Dixie Chicks' Fly album, the song "Cowboy Take Me Away," I was here, at my desk in the next room, writing, when it occurred to me, kind of oddly, that I owned that radio because Katie's dad bought it for Katie and me as a wedding gift, and that I first heard the Dixie Chicks while dating Katie, who used to play them on those rare afternoons when she'd had enough Wilco, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, and Ken Rudin. And I just sort of smiled. Natalie Maines's lyrics can be, at times, a bit rhyme challenged ("She traveled the road as a child / Wide-eyed and grinning she never tired"), but I love her voice, and I like how willingly she continues to speak her mind publicly, make mistakes openly, all the while realizing excellent country music. It's like my friend Marcus pointed out recently on his blog: in our hyper-exposed all-online culture, why are we so willingly boring and inauthentic?

I've gotten in the habit, recently, of using the word "lasers" to explain how complicated things work. As in, "When they get rid of the old space shuttle model, what are they going to replace it with?" ("Lasers.") or "How do they detail ice sculptures?" ("Lasers.") It's a nice catch-all that hints at both the incredibly complicated processes of daily life ("How do they fit all of that deodorant into one stick?") and the overwhelming feeling sometimes that, no matter how well you explain them, certain things (black holes, microprocessors, lasers) will never really make all that much practical sense. It reminds me of a recent Slate Political Gabfest I was listening to, in which someone said that explaining Chicago politics was like listening to Stephen Hawking explain how black holes work: even when someone speaks clearly and is completely understood, twenty minutes later it's impossible to re-tell it to someone else.

There's advice all over the web for widows and widowers who are planning to remarry, from the incredibly corny to pages that seem to have been find/replaced from "spouse" to "widow/er". I haven't made much use of it, but I do find it amusing. Pretty much all of these pages seem to start with "it's okay to be happy again" and end with "so buy a smaller ring/dress" and in the middle offer weirdly-specialized recommendations for invitation wordings and dress colors. It seems like everyone takes stock and works out what works best for them; in other words, marrying again as a widow/er follows pretty much the blueprint for all other human activity. Still, it's made me glad to have spent as much time as I have recently talking to the Chicago doc, working stuff on an individual level, step-by-step. I don't know how people do it away from the couch.

While writing this entry, one of the younger members of my extended family called and asked what I was doing. When I said, "Oh, writing a blog entry about Cait, Katie, getting married again, life in general," she insisted that, really, I should write separate entries for Cait and Katie, that it might be rude to talk about them both. When I explained that I thought I should keep them together because they are both important parts of my life, she said, "Well, I guess you know what you're doing," in a not-entirely convinced manner. I've thought recently about ending this blog, because it's changed so much from its original purpose. Exclusively memorializing Katie has given way to trying to give a view of how Katie remains an important part of my life, as it expands and changes to include other people, a growing KMF, new locations, and now, a new marriage. I remain somewhat terrified that someone who has read the blog for a long while will eventually (and, worse, anonymously) post something to the effect of, who do you think you are and why are you sharing all of this stuff about you in a space that used to be kept reverent for Katie?

That said, I also know that I'm something of a worrier by nature. An overwhelming, Obama-worthy majority of family and friends have been and continue to be incredibly happy for Cait and me. As I've said before, she is an amazing, loving, warm, bright, sparkly and beautiful woman and I can't wait to start this new chapter of our life together. I know that, after Katie's death, some part of me is taking a leap of faith, on a bunch of levels: to love again, to plan a life with someone in a sometimes fragile world, to hope for the best when the best doesn't always work out, just as Cait is taking a leap of faith that we can handle the usual stuff together, even in the face of some unusual circumstances together.

I have that wrong--it's not a leap of faith. I think the thing I'm really trying to explain is how love works, for me at least, that what I'm really trying to get at is how there can possibly be enough love in the world, that I could love Cait now, have loved Katie when she was alive, and still keep her memory and love in my life. It's a calculation that requires listing many, many factors on both sides of the equal sign and still accepting that it works out evenly, that the sum of everything is whole, beautiful, and worthy of embracing together. If the language of that gets a bit abstract and complicated, I can offer two equally baffling, yet strangely reassuring takes on my situation: love, and, of course, lasers.